Cold Harbor: Grant and Lee, May 26-June 3, 1864.  By Gordon C. Rhea. (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2002. Pp. 532. Cloth.) 

Gordon Rhea has skillfully pieced together arguably the best work thus far on the Battle of Cold Harbor. His work covers the deadlock on the North Anna and culminates with Grant’s attack on June 3, 1864. Rhea’s previous works concentrate on the preceding battles of the Overland Campaign leading up to Cold Harbor. The campaign began in May of 1864 with the Battle of the Wilderness, continued with Spotsylvania, preceded with minor actions at North Anna River, and culminated at Cold Harbor. Grant saw little use in capturing Richmond and instead made Lee his primary target. To win the war swiftly Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia would have to be defeated. Rhea received a master’s degree in history from Harvard University and his J.D. degree from Stanford University. He uses a wide variety of sources, which include regimental histories and the Official Records.                                                                                                                           

Rhea sets out to debunk the many myths that pervaded the two armies and the surrounding Overland Campaign. In particular, the Battle of Cold Harbor is often used to display Grant as a “butcher,” and Lee as a great, infallible general. However, Rhea does not believe this is necessarily true and Lost Cause mythology often participated in tainting the facts. In fact, he claims, “the rebel commander should have shared in Grant’s ‘butcher reputation.’” (xii) Throughout the war Lee lost more men than any other general. Furthermore, Lee made mistakes, and he often misjudged Grant’s intentions. At the same time, Lee was exceptional when it came to recovering from the blunders he had committed. He had an uncanny ability to make precise ad hoc decisions under pressure. In the end, Rhea believes that “ Grant and Lee were about as evenly matched in military talent as any two opposing generals ever have been.” (xiii)                                              

The battle began when Grant pulled out from his lines on North Anna River. He attempted to “steal a march on Lee.” However, Lee quickly responded by blocking Grant’s route and setting up his defenses along Totopotomoy Creek. Both generals began to feel each other’s positions. Grant believed Lee’s lines were thin and he decided to attack. On June 3, 1864, Grant sent his men forward. He did not send his troops in all at once but rather in piecemeal fashion with the hope of breaking Lee’s line. Some of the men he had sent in were not veterans, which could explain the high casualty lists for some regiments. Grant was forced to strip the defenses of Washington D.C., and he ordered green troops forward with little experience. Lee’s men were entrenched and their position was impregnable. Many of Grant’s men made it part way and began to entrench themselves for their protection. Rhea also sets out to refute the oftentimes-overstated myth that 7,000 soldiers were killed within an hour of fighting.                                                      

Overall, Rhea’s opus is well written and recommended to anyone interested in the Civil War. He provides a good step-by-step account of the battle. He often brings the battle alive by delving into the personal experiences of soldiers. Also, there is a good analysis of the topographical features in and around Cold Harbor. Furthermore, he provides a very useful appendix, which displays the order of battle for both Union and Confederate armies. On the other hand, a new student of the Civil War might find Cold Harbor to be a little too sophisticated and laborious at times.

Shawn Devaney

Cold Harbor: Grant and Lee, May 26-June 3, 1864.  By Gordon C. Rhea.  (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2002.  Pp. 532.  Cloth.) 

In 1986 Gordon C. Rhea, a practicing attorney with a master’s degree in history from Harvard University, started his multi-volume study of the Overland Campaign, an exceptionally bloody episode of the American Civil War that began when Union soldiers crossed the Rapidan River on 4 May 1864.  For forty-six days, the Union Army of the Potomac under the combined command of Lieutenant General Ulysses Simpson Grant and Major General George Gordon Meade engaged Confederate General Robert Edward Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia in a deadly drive towards Richmond, Virginia, that culminated in a ten-month siege at Petersburg.  During the Overland Campaign, blue and gray clashed in The Wilderness, at Spotsylvania Court House, along the North Anna River, at Cold Harbor, and in countless other minor engagements, suffering massive casualties at each meeting.  Rhea has produced books on each of the major battles of the Overland Campaign, and Cold Harbor: Grant and Lee, May 26-June 3, 1864 stands as the fourth installment in a projected five-volume series.    

In Cold Harbor, Rhea presents a well-researched revisionist account of the battle of Cold Harbor.  Asserting that the “Cold Harbor in these pages differs sharply from the Cold Harbor of popular lore,” Rhea begins his reassessment of the battle with Grant’s decision to maneuver around Lee’s impregnable entrenchments along the North Anna River in late May (p. xiii).  Rhea does not accept the traditional paradigm of “Grant the Butcher,” and he takes issue with the notion that Grant “was fond of attacking earthworks, averse to maneuver, and unmoved at the prospect of massive casualties” (p. xi).  Rather, Rhea presents Grant as a skillful strategist who sought to maneuver around Lee until an opportunity presented itself for attack.  Unfortunately for Grant, subordinate commanders like Meade, who Grant entrusted to handle the minutiae of the army and who did not share in Grant’s aggressive vision, bungled many of his plans.     

Rhea does not let Grant get away completely unscathed.  He criticizes the general for underestimating the morale of his opponent and for missing a number of opportunities to crush the enemy.  For example, on the second day of the battle at Cold Harbor, Grant missed a chance to roll up Lee’s right flank before the Confederate general anchored it to the Chickahominy River, an opening that would have presented itself had Grant or Meade made full use of the cavalry under Philip Henry Sheridan to reconnoiter the field.  Moreover, Grant’s decision to postpone his “army-wide attack” until the morning of 3 June gave the Confederates “twelve more hours to perfect their earthworks.  The delay would prove fatal to Union fortunes on the Cold Harbor front” (pp. 287, 291).  While Rhea does well to dispel the myth of Grant as “an unthinking automaton shoveling bodies into the maw of Lee’s earthworks,” he is quick and right to portray the general as a fallible human being (p. xiii).

 Rhea also criticizes the generalship of Lee, who is often glorified despite the reality that he “lost more soldiers than any other Civil War general” (p. xii).  Lee, too, is human, and according to Rhea, he “fell considerably short of the infallible icon” (p. xii).  Rhea’s primary criticism of Lee deals with historians’ long-held belief that the general possessed an uncanny ability to predict the movements of his opponents.  According to Rhea, “Lee was unsure or plainly wrong about Grant’s intentions” during much of the Overland Campaign (p. xii).  Despite the criticism, Rhea ultimately illustrates, at least in the case of Cold Harbor, that every time Grant maneuvered or prepared to attack, Lee was always there waiting and well entrenched despite his own illness and the fatigue of his troops.  Although Rhea’s intention is to illustrate that “Grant and Lee were about as evenly matched in military talent as any two opposing generals have ever been,” Lee actually comes off looking like the better of the two (p. xiii).  Despite being outnumbered and bedridden during the operations along the North Anna River, Lee provided the “guiding hand” that was conspicuously absent from the Army of the Potomac and took advantage of the intelligence he received to counter Grant’s every move (p. 234).     

In his final stroke of revision, Rhea recasts the infamous attack that took place at 4:30 A.M. on 3 June 1864.  He argues that the planned assault along the entire Union line did not occur, and the “popular image of a massive Union onslaught at Cold Harbor belongs more to the dustbin of Civil War mythology than to real history” (p. 359).  According to Rhea, the attack was actually piecemeal, a result of more ineptness in the “dysfunctional family” that was the Army of the Potomac (p. 319).  He dismisses the traditional casualty figures that put Union losses at 7,000 in the first hour of combat and concludes that Grant’s casualties probably did not exceed 3,500 during the mismanaged assault.  Still trying to cast Grant’s performance at Cold Harbor in a positive light, Rhea excuses the casualty lists Grant tallied up because the general sensed a chance to end the war.

 Cold Harbor presents provocative arguments that are certain to foster debate among Civil War historians.  It is clear from the level of research that Rhea is immersed in his subject, and his skill as a storyteller brings the events of Cold Harbor to life.  Unfortunately, Rhea does not explore the battle’s social and political ramifications.  He does, however, assure readers that the final book in the series “attempts to place the Overland campaign in a broader context,” so avid historians and buffs will just have to wait for its release to read Rhea’s conclusions (p. xiv).     

Jason Mann Frawley

Texas Christian University