The Greatest Civil War Battles: The Battle of Cold Harbor

The Overland Campaign that pitted Robert E. Lee against Ulysses S. Grant is one of the most famous campaigns of the Civil War, and May 1864 witnessed the Civil War’s greatest chess match as Lee skillfully blocked Grant’s attempts to destroy the Army of Northern Virginia only to watch his tenacious opponent keep advancing south toward Richmond. Lee and Grant fought to a standstill in the Wilderness, Spotsylvania, and along the North Anna, inflicting about 30,000 casualties on each other’s armies.

By the time the two armies reached Cold Harbor near the end of May 1864, Grant incorrectly thought that Lee’s army was on the verge of collapse. Though his frontal assaults had failed spectacularly at places like Vicksburg, Grant believed that Lee’s army was on the ropes and could be knocked out with a strong attack. The problem was that Lee’s men were now masterful at quickly constructing defensive fortifications, including earthworks and trenches that made their positions impregnable. While Civil War generals kept employing Napoleonic tactics, Civil War soldiers were building the types of defensive works that would be the harbinger of World War I’s trench warfare. 

On June 3, 1864, sensing he could break Lee’s army, Grant ordered a full out assault at dawn in the hopes of catching the rebels before they could fully entrench. Although the story of Union soldiers pinning their names on the back of their uniforms in anticipation of death at Cold Harbor is apocryphal, the frontal assault on June 3 inflicted thousands of Union casualties in about half an hour. In just minutes, 7,000 Union soldiers were killed or wounded as 30,000 Confederate soldiers successfully held the line against 50,000 Union troops, losing just 1,500 men in the process.