The Battle of Cold Harbor (31 May to 12 June 1864) was fought northeast of Richmond, Virginia. Robert E. Lee's entrenched army repulsed Ulysses S. Grant's attacks, above all the dawn assault of 3 June, which cost the Union about 6,000 men in one morning. It was Lee's last major victory in the field.
Ten miles from Richmond, at a crossroads named after an old tavern, the Overland Campaign reached its most notorious morning. Grant tried to break Lee's army with a frontal assault, and failed.
This page separates what the sources record from the stories that grew around the battle. For the two generals side by side, see Grant vs Lee.
Part of The greatest battles of the Civil War · Before: The Battle of Spotsylvania Court House · Next: The Siege of Petersburg
The Overland Campaign so far
Grant, general-in-chief since March, travelled with Meade's Army of the Potomac. The campaign opened at the Battle of the Wilderness on 5 to 7 May 1864 and ground on at the Battle of Spotsylvania Court House from 8 to 21 May, then at the North Anna and Totopotomoy Creek. Lee stalled Grant each time but could not stop him, and the Union army had already suffered more than 50,000 casualties1. The name of the next objective had nothing to do with the sea: it came from the Old and New Cold Harbor taverns, harbor in the old sense of an inn.
The crossroads at Old Cold Harbor and the fighting of 1 June
On 31 May Philip Sheridan's cavalry seized the crossroads from Fitzhugh Lee's horsemen and infantry of Robert Hoke's division. Early on 1 June a Confederate counterattack by Hoke and Joseph Kershaw was short and uncoordinated, and Sheridan's troopers, armed with Spencer repeating carbines2, beat it back.
Grant ordered an infantry assault for the same afternoon, but William F. "Baldy" Smith's Eighteenth Corps was sent the wrong way and the attack began only at 5 p.m. Horatio Wright's men found a gap of about fifty yards between Hoke and Kershaw2 and broke in, until a counterattack sealed it. The day cost the two armies roughly 4,000 casualties3.
The assault of 3 June
A new attack set for dawn on 2 June was postponed when Winfield Hancock's Second Corps arrived exhausted from a night march, first to 5 p.m. and then to 4:30 a.m. on 3 June. Lee used every hour to build interlocking trenches with overlapping fields of fire, "a maze and labyrinth of works within works," in a Northern journalist's words. Neither Grant nor Meade had personally examined the line, and Smith wrote that the orders showed "the utter absence of any military plan."
At 4:30 a.m. almost 50,000 men of the Second, Sixth and Eighteenth Corps2 went forward through darkness and fog. Swamps and ravines split the columns, and angles in the Confederate works exposed them to crossfire. Francis Barlow's division broke into a salient and took several hundred prisoners and three guns4, but support came too late and it was driven out.
The survivors dug in where they lay with cups, plates and bayonets. Grant wrote that the fighting was "substantially over by half-past seven in the morning4," and at 12:30 p.m., after consulting his corps commanders, he told Meade to suspend the attack.
Seven thousand in twenty minutes? The accounts and the evidence
Popular accounts often say that 7,000 Union soldiers fell in 10 to 30 minutes, and even the American Battlefield Trust's battle summary gives an estimated 7,000 killed or wounded within the first 30 minutes1. In the most detailed study of the battle, Gordon Rhea puts Union losses for the whole of 3 June at about 6,000, roughly 4,500 of them in the three attacking corps5; the Trust's fact sheet also gives about 6,000. Most fell in the first hour. Confederate losses were about 1,500.
The second famous story comes from Grant's aide Horace Porter, who wrote in 1897 that on the eve of the assault soldiers wrote their names and addresses on slips of paper, pinning them to the backs of their coats6 so their bodies could be identified. Rhea notes that nothing in letters, diaries or newspapers of the time confirms it. It may be true, but it rests on one postwar memoir.
The trenches and the truce dispute over the wounded
Until 12 June the armies faced each other from trenches, in places less than 75 yards apart, and the Union wounded of 3 June lay between them. On 5 June Grant proposed that stretcher parties of both sides be allowed to collect them; Lee insisted on a formal request under a flag of truce. Letters crossed and arrived late, and a two-hour truce came only on 7 June. By then, Grant wrote, all but two of the wounded had died4. The American Battlefield Trust suggests Grant was perhaps unwilling to admit defeat; Lee's insistence on procedure cost more time. The men between the lines paid for both.
Grant's regret
Grant rarely second-guessed himself in print. In his Personal Memoirs, written while he was dying of cancer, he wrote: "I have always regretted that the last assault4 at Cold Harbor was ever made." He added that "no advantage whatever was gained to compensate for the heavy loss we sustained," and set it beside his assault at Vicksburg on 22 May 1863.
The Union view
For the Army of the Potomac, Cold Harbor was a bitter lesson about attacking prepared earthworks, and many officers had distrusted the orders before the assault began. Yet from Grant's point of view it was one costly episode in a campaign that never lost its grip on Lee. His army slipped away in good order, crossed the James and threatened Petersburg, the rail junction that fed Richmond, pinning Lee in the siege he had hoped to avoid. Grant's defenders, Rhea among them, argue that the campaign as a whole, not one morning, should be judged.
The Confederate view
For the Army of Northern Virginia, Cold Harbor was a clear defensive victory and, as the National Park Service notes, Lee's last major field victory. Outnumbered by roughly 108,000 to 62,000, his men showed how well entrenched infantry and artillery could hold against a larger army, and Lee, trained as an engineer, supervised the works himself. But the victory did not change the strategic picture. Lee could not follow it with an offensive, and within two weeks his army was tied to the trenches of Richmond and Petersburg, its freedom to maneuver gone.
What followed: across the James to Petersburg
Grant abandoned direct moves on Richmond. On the night of 12 June his army left its trenches, deceived the Confederates for days while it crossed the James River, and by 16 June was in position to threaten Petersburg. The siege of Petersburg lasted until April 1865 and ended a week before Lee's surrender at Appomattox. The National Park Service sees Cold Harbor as the point where the war turned from maneuver to entrenchment.
If you visit
The battlefield is part of Richmond National Battlefield Park, with no entrance fees at any of the park's sites7. The Cold Harbor unit has a visitor center and a tour road past Confederate and Union earthworks; the Union works along the wood line mark the high-water mark of the 3 June attacks. Cold Harbor National Cemetery holds more than 2,000 Union soldiers, over 1,300 of them unknown8, and the Garthright House, a Union field hospital, is a stop on the tour.
Why Cold Harbor still matters
Cold Harbor showed that rifles, artillery and earthworks could make a frontal attack on a prepared line close to hopeless. The real losses were terrible enough without exaggeration, and the plainest testimony came from the general who ordered it. For other anniversaries, see On this day in military history.