This Hallowed Ground - Bruce Catton [214]
As June began the two armies faced each other not far north of the Chickahominy, and once more a casual road crossing became a place of vast importance; a sun-baked spot on the featureless plain, Cold Harbor, where a second-rate tavern sat by a dusty crossroads; and here Grant massed his troops and made one final attempt to break the Confederate line and pulverize Lee’s army once and for all.
The attempt failed, and the price was high. On June 1, and then on June 3 — after a day in which beaten-out armies tried to catch their breath in murderous heat — the Union army came in with old-fashioned frontal assaults on strong Confederate entrenchments. They had no luck. On June 1 they gained insignificant patches of ground; on June 3 they tried again, lost several thousand men in half an hour of unimaginable fighting, and then settled down to trench warfare, with every mile of line spurting flame and death every hour of the twenty-four, the loathsome odor of unburied bodies always in the air, sharpshooters and cunningly posted batteries forever alert to shoot whenever they saw movement. The Union cause apparently was no nearer victory than it had been before the campaign began.
Never had armies fought like this. For a solid month they had not been out of contact. Every day, somewhere along the lines, there had been action. During this month Union losses had averaged two thousand men every single day. Old formations had been wrecked. Generals had been killed — most notable of these being John Sedgwick, slain by a sharpshooter in the fighting at Spotsylvania Court House — and no soldier had bathed, changed his clothing, or had an unbroken night’s sleep for more than four agonizing weeks. Yet morale, somehow, did not slacken; the men took what they had to take with the matter-of-fact air of old soldiers, and a New Englander in the VI Corps, noting one day that there was continuous firing going on a little way to the right, wrote casually: “I suppose it’s skirmishing, as they don’t call anything a battle now without the whole army is engaged and a loss of some eight or ten thousands.” He added that it was hard to see what would happen to the men if this routine went on much longer — “but this army has been through so much that I don’t know as you can kill them off.4
Elsewhere in Virginia things had gone badly. When the Army of the Potomac crossed the Rapidan, Ben Butler had started to move up the James River from the Norfolk area with an army of thirty thousand men; his way had been fairly open, and a competent soldier might well have gone on, cut the railroads below Richmond, and made victory certain. But Butler, a man of many parts, was in no part a soldier. He let himself be deceived and then defeated by a scratch Confederate army, and while the Army of the Potomac was slugging its weary way down toward Cold Harbor he and his own army managed to get locked up on a peninsula in the James River, thirty miles below Rickmond, known as Bermuda Hundred — theoretically a standing menace to Confederate communications, actually as much out of the war as if they had been transported bodily to South America.
It was the same in the Shenandoah Valley. Franz Sigel had been appointed to lead an army up the Shenandoah Valley, destroying the traditional Confederate granary and avenue of attack and curling in on Richmond, finally, from the west. He had been routed and had been removed from his command, and David Hunter, who took his place, had done very little better — had in fact run into disastrous defeat, at last, near Charlottesville and in panic had fled off into the West Virginia mountains, leaving the Confederacy in better shape as far as the Shenandoah Valley was concerned than it had been in for two years; and neither Butler nor the Sigel-Hunter move had done the Army of the Potomac the slightest bit of good.
Yet it did not matter. The Army of the Potomac had reached and held its objective — continuous contact with Lee’s army, which could no longer make the daring thrusts