Cold harbor Battle

Battles at Cold Harbor

At 4:30 am on June 3, 1864, 50,000 blue-clad soldiers from three Union corps climbed out of their trenches and advanced in a two-mile-long line through the mist toward the Confederate entrenchments ahead. Pause your cursor on the flag in the picture.

The confident gray soldiers who had stopped the attacks on June 1st could scarcely believe the folly of the Union commanders in sending their men to such obvious slaughter. The Confederates held their fire until the Union soldiers were within lethal range and then mowed down the front ranks with volleys of rifle and canister fire.

"That dreadful storm of lead and iron seemed more like a volcanic blast than a battle", recalled a Union captain. Blue troops from the second line stepped over the dead and wounded, quickly filled the great gaps in the Union front, and continued the charge. It was described by one soldier as "a boiling cauldron from the incessant pattering of shot which raised the dirt in geysers spitting sand."

Summary of Cold Harbor battles.

The Rebel defenders were well protected in their earthworks and suffered little from the federal fire, yet some of them were appalled at the death their murderous volleys were causing in the continuous waves of courageous Union soldiers.

Shocked by the acres of dead and wounded covering the ground in front of the Rebel earthworks all along the line, Confederate Gen. Evander Law said, "I saw the carnage in front of Marye's hill at Fredericksburg and on the 'old railroad cut' which Jackson's men held at the Second Manassas; but nothing to exceed this. It was not war; it was murder."

It was over in half an hour. The stunned attackers recoiled and sought the protective cover of their trenches, having left 7,000 of their comrades lying in the fields. The 30,000 Confederates involved in the attack suffered only 1,500 casualties. My great grandfather, William H. Yarnall, arrived at Cold Harbor as a member of the 2nd Pennsylvania Heavy Artillery on June 5th - two days after the slaughter. He was assigned to recovering the dead and wounded on June 7th. This probably is what prompted him to shoot himself in the hand to get relieved of duty. It was an extremely hot day and the assignment was brutal. The left margin of his discharge document has notations about a self-inflicted wound.

On the right is a picture taken on that battlefield after the end of the Civil War.

Incredibly, Grant ordered another attack. The soldiers all along the line refused to obey. Defiant Capt. T.E. Barker said, "I would not take my regiment in another such charge if Jesus Christ himself ordered it!"

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