By the morning of June 2, General Robert E. Lee had concentrated his Confederate Army of Northern Virginia in front of New Cold Harbor, just east of the Confederate capital of Richmond. The forces of Lieutenant-General A.P. Hill and Major-General John C. Breckinridge had moved south to join the troops under Lieutenant-General Richard Anderson and Major-General Robert F. Hoke. Lieutenant-General Jubal Early’s Second Corps remained in the northern sector of the defense line.
General-in-Chief Ulysses S. Grant, the overall Federal commander, planned for Major-General George G. Meade’s Army of the Potomac to launch an all-out attack. The army was positioned as follows:
- -Major-General Ambrose E. Burnside’s Ninth Corps held the right (north) flank near Bethesda Church facing Early’s Confederates.
- -Major-General Gouverneur Warren’s Fifth Corps was on Burnside’s left (south), also facing Early.
- -Major-General William F. “Baldy” Smith’s Eighteenth Corps was on Warren’s left facing Anderson.
- -Major-General Horatio G. Wright’s Sixth Corps was on Smith’s left mainly facing Hoke and Breckinridge.
- -Major-General Winfield Scott Hancock’s Second Corps was moving up to extend the Federal left to face Breckinridge and Hill.
Warren received orders to shift to his left (south) to link with Smith’s corps, while Burnside was to fall back in reserve by Bethesda Church. Skirmishing occurred when Early’s men conducted a reconnaissance in force to determine where Burnside’s troops were going. However, Lee remained mainly focused on his right (south), around Cold Harbor.
Meade informed Smith that it was “quite important to dislodge and, if possible, rout him before he can entrench himself.” But the Confederates were already dug in, and their defenses were getting stronger by the minute. The Army of the Potomac had always outnumbered the Army of Northern Virginia, but the Confederates had become experts at using their smaller numbers to outrace and defend against their more cumbersome foe.
Hancock’s advance elements did not begin arriving at the crossroads until around 6:30 a.m., and by this time most of his men were spent. One of Meade’s aides wrote about the grueling nature of night marches and the toll they would take on the men, adding, “Our men no longer have the bodily strength they had a month before; indeed, why they are alive I don’t see.”
Both Federals and Confederates had been continuously marching and fighting for almost a month, inflicting a combined 70,000 casualties on each other. Captain Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. (a future Supreme Court justice), later wrote, “Many a man has gone crazy since this campaign began from the terrible pressure on mind & body.” Navy Secretary Gideon Welles wrote in his diary:
“There is intense anxiety in relation to the Army of the Potomac. Great confidence is felt in Grant, but the immense slaughter of our brave men chills and sickens us all. The hospitals are crowded with the thousands of mutilated and dying heroes who have poured out their blood for the Union cause. Lee has returned to the vicinity of Richmond, overpowered by numbers, beaten but hardly defeated.”
The Federal assault was originally scheduled for early morning, but oppressive heat and rampant fatigue made this impossible. A heavy afternoon rain cooled temperatures somewhat, and Grant ordered the assault to begin at 5 p.m. But the Federals still were not ready. Baldy Smith reported that he still did not have almost half of his 16,000 men in position, and “An attack by me would be simply preposterous.” This prompted Grant to write Meade:
“In view of the want of preparation for an attack this evening, and the heat and want of energy among the men from moving during the night last night, I think it advisable to postpone assault until early tomorrow morning. All changes of position already ordered should be completed today and a good night’s rest given the men preparatory to an assault at, say, 4:30 in the morning.”
Meade passed Grant’s directive along, adding: “Corps commanders will employ the interim in making examination of the ground in their fronts and perfecting their arrangements for the assault.” During this time, the Confederates in front of New Cold Harbor were building the strongest defensive works of the war. Some makeshift forts had walls five feet high, and artillery covered every approach.
Lieutenant-Colonel Horace Porter of Grant’s staff later wrote that he walked through the camps on the rainy night of the 2nd, and, “I noticed that many of the soldiers had taken off their coats and seemed to be engaged in sewing up rents in them.” But Porter soon “found that the men were calmly writing their names and home addresses on slips of paper and pinning them on their backs of their coats, so that their bodies might be recognized and their fate made known to their families at home.”
Bibliography
- Angle, Paul M., A Pictorial History of the Civil War Years. New York: Doubleday, 1967.
- Catton, Bruce, The American Heritage Picture History of the Civil War. New York: American Heritage Publishing Co., 1960.
- Catton, Bruce, The Army of the Potomac: A Stillness at Appomattox. Garden City, NY: Doubleday & Co., Inc., 1953.
- Catton, Bruce, Grant Takes Command. Open Road Media, Kindle Edition, 2015.
- Foote, Shelby, The Civil War, A Narrative: Red River to Appomattox. New York: Vintage Civil War Library, Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group (Kindle Edition), 2011.
- Freeman, Douglas Southall, Lee. Scribner, (Kindle Edition), 2008.
- Long, E.B. with Long, Barbara, The Civil War Day by Day. New York: Da Capo Press, Inc., 1971.
- McPherson, James M., Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era. Oxford History of the United States Book 6, Oxford University Press (Kindle Edition), 1988.
- Rhodes, James Ford, History of the Civil War, 1861-1865. New York: The MacMillan Company (Kindle Edition, Reservoir House, 2016), 1917.
- Welles, Gideon, Diary of Gideon Welles Volumes I & II. Kindle Edition. Abridged, Annotated.
- Wert, Jeffry D. (Patricia L. Faust ed.), Historical Times Illustrated Encyclopedia of the Civil War. New York: Harper & Row, 1986.