Not War But Murder: Cold Harbor 1864

Dates Covered: 1861 - 1865
ISBN: 0679455175
HH Rating:

Our Take

The battle of Cold Harbor in the late spring of 1864 proved disastrous for the Union. Ulysses S Grant, future president, commented in his memoirs that a particular advance of troops on June 3 was the only attack he regretted, mostly because it cost thousands and thousands of lives. Indeed, following the battle he told his generals, "I regarded it as a stern necessity, and believed that it would bring compensating results; but, as it has proved, no advantages have been gained sufficient to justify the heavy losses suffered."

Ouch. This short, ill-fated campaign to take Richmond, the seat of the Confederacy, is the subject of Ernest B Furgurson's Not War But Murder: Cold Harbor 1864. Grant, as General-in-Chief of the Union Army, was expected to cool his heels in Washington. Instead, he decided to travel with the invading forces. He mounted a campaign to the south to capture Richmond. Lee, short on troops already, worried that the jig was up. However, Grant bumbled in a few places and his troops got utterly mowed down. The campaign that might have ended the war instead cost thousands of lives.

Furgurson's depth of research and scouring of diaries is quite astonishing, and as such he is in a fine position to provide scores of quirky, and occasionally damning, anecdotes. Noting that whiskey was rationed to Northern troops, Confederates suspected that such measures were required to stir the Yankee's souls to fight: "the Yankees had plenty whiskey aboard, some of them were staggering along and nearly fell over," wrote an officer. Grant, in a spat over protocol with General Lee, let injured soldiers languish for three days on the battlefield before sending troops out to rescue them. A Union surgeon found powder burns on the foot wound of a soldier, indicating the guy had shot himself. In disgust, the surgeon knocked him out with chloroform and sawed the guy's leg off.

These sort of human interactions make war fascinating, and Furgurson reports many of them with aplomb. Indeed, the personality clashes between Grant and Union Army big cheese Major General George Mead, spurred on by what Meade perceived as slights against his person by the Northern press, might fill a small volume on their own. Furgurson treats these episodes thoroughly, as he does with the day-to-day mechanics of the battle. He appears to have checked every source regarding troop rosters; in a footnote he remarks that a prisoner of war captured by the North who gave his name as "Captain James Bellew" was possibly misrepresenting his rank to his captors, as "the author has been unable to find a Captain James Bellew in any Confederate artillery unit."

The book jacket here describes Furgurson as an "analyst of the war", and it's not kidding. For every little bit of humanity that Furgurson is able to contribute to this story, he spends an awful lot of time describing troop actions. This book has no less than thirteen maps describing movements of groups of soldiers; by the battle's climax it begins to look like somebody let John Madden into the room with a handful of Crayolas. See To appreciate this aspect of the book, one might have to actually wander around Cold Harbor and its environs (now Cold Harbor National Cemetery) and poke through the little maps to figure out who was going where and when and what it meant. If one's into that sort of thing, that is. We're certainly not. We want to hear more stories about disgruntled physicians crippling whiny soldiers.

That's not to say this book isn't worth reading. To understand the lopsidedness of the defeat (nearly thirteen thousand Union casualties to perhaps fifteen hundred Confederates) and wade through the personalities contributing to it is an interesting exercise. Furgurson's research is exemplary. It's just that it can also be tedious.

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