Report From Cold Harbour

[dawna]

Harpers' Weekly
Special Artist and Army Correspondent: James Allen Davis

June 2, 1864, Cold Harbor, Virginia, 8:00 a.m. The refuse of yesterday’s fighting lies scattered everywhere, littering the landscape with a macabre collage of bent bayonets, discarded caps and knapsacks, fragments of muskets and wagons, and the corpses of men and horses which have eluded the colored burial details. There is an eerie silence which permeates the battlefield, where even the birds hesitate to sing their melodious morning airs, as if anticipating a reprise of yesterday’s symphony of death. There is some movement in the camps, with the sounds of horses snorting, the tramp of boots on the way to the sinks and wagons, the clanging of utensils on iron pots, and the low murmur of voices awakening from the peaceful oblivion of sleep. How men can put their minds and bodies at rest after the horrific sights and sounds of yesterday’s events, particularly in the loneliness of retiring without the company of beloved comrades lost in the fighting, still astounds me, even after these three years of War. Perhaps the overwhelming tragedy of the experience precludes the choice of contemplation, giving way to sheer exhaustion at day’s end. What the mind and heart cannot abide today, can be postponed until tomorrow.

Some of the Herald men have been speaking of growing opposition to the War, particularly in the cities and towns of the western states of Ohio, Indiana and Illinois. Those citizens who continue to offer their steadfast and unconditional support to the President find it increasingly difficult to evince their skeptical compatriots of the righteousness of the Administration’s war aims, as the butcher’s bill and financial costs grow ever higher. Army contractors, such as the Mr.

H-------- I met yesterday, are making an even bigger killing than the armies themselves, as they patriotically supply those gallant legions with the equipment necessary to sustain their work of destruction in the South. When this War at last comes to its fitful denouement, these are the men who will run the country, as they erect monuments and fund parades and memorials to our fallen heroes, while the public remains in blissful ignorance of the more nefarious conquest made by the moneychangers at their expense.

There is a stately home facing me from where I now sit, presently being used as a division headquarters, which somehow escaped the recent fighting without a scratch. No bullet or cannonball has touched its gilded gables and ornate balustrades, although around it lie the fragments of trees which bear testimony to the close proximity of the destruction. I should like to think of this home, not as a symbol of the Southron’s continued defiance, but rather as an icon of Columbia herself, retaining her beauty and grandeur amidst the paroxysm of civil war.


Mr. Lincoln proposes to accomplish a feat this fall which is unprecedented in the long annals of human affairs, viz., to hold and win a Presidential election in the midst of a divided populace. Can our republic, which has yet to even reach its centennial, overcome the cynical speculations of the skeptics at home and abroad, who contend that the noble experiment of of democracy cannot survive beyond a few generations?

My own grandfather, who fought with General Washington after emigrating from Ulster, believed he was fighting for a perpetual, and not a transient, republic of free men. For the sake of posterity, I hope and pray that his simple and earnest vision can outlive the gloomy predictions of Copperhead, Confederate, and titled peer. Surely we must win this great struggle if mankind is to rise above the chains of feudalism and emerge into the sunlit future of freedom. JAD

"The true mystery of the world is the visible, not the invisible." ~Oscar Wilde~

[william42]

Hi Dawna: That's a very interesting article. I haven't read enough of Harpers to know if his view of the war was regularly published, or if this piece was more the exception than the rule. He sounds as though he is anti-war, and I imagine after witnessing the slaughter at Cold Harbor it would be difficult for anybody to come away thinking that war is a good thing. I know that after Cold Harbor many folks began to lean against the war because of the heavy casualties there, and IIRC Grant began to be referred to by some, including Mrs. Lincoln, as a "butcher".

What really catches my attention is the authors mention of the army contractors, who were making money off the war, and his disdain for them. In fact, with a few changes made, this article could have probably been published in 1968 in reference to the Vietnam war, except for his last sentence. He ultimately seems to come to the conclusion that the war must be won by the North, and that the new form of government called democracy must endure, a sentiment with which I totally agree.

Thanks for posting the article Dawna.

Terry

[pvt gauss]

Little did Mr. Davis comprehend the pure carnage and sacrifice that would take place on the morning after his colum was written. I wonder if he knew, what the troops knew to be the fact, as they took time to sew thier names into thier uniforms for later identification, that those boys over there wern`t whipped and from the look of things weren`t gonna be. during the night of 6/2/64 there was no camp noise or the like but nothing but silent repose in the knowledge that duty was to be done and would be. Do you think the election, the war weariness of Ohio, Ill ,or anywhere else except in thier own hearts was on there mind, Ithink not. I have stood in the trenches at Cold Harbor and looked across the barely 200yds[150 meters for our canadian friends] of nothing but open, flat land that was to be crossed and wondered, could I have done it? I don`t know, only in the fact that the belief in something has to be so strong that it would make it worth it, thanks to them I did not have to make that decision.

[ole]

Thanks, Dawna, you always come up with something interesting.

[kepple]

thanks dawna that article is very interesting for more on cold harbor get not war but murder it is a good book it puts u in the heart of the fight

[dawna]

Kepple:

Thanks for the suggestion. I'm always looking for good books on Civil War battles, and I'll add Not War But Murder to my list!

Dawna

[samgrant]

Bankerpapaw posted this on the general discussion thread, where I feared it might get lost, so I'm reposting it here:

"I am presently reading Shelby Foote's narrative of the
Civil War.
I knew the casualty rate for the Union army was high at Cold Harbor ,but I didn't know that they suffered 7000 casualties in 8 minutes. Even today with our modern
weapons systems, that would be a hard number of
casualties to grasp."

-

[cash]

Originally Posted by samgrant

Bankerpapaw posted this on the general discussion thread, where I feared it might get lost, so I'm reposting it here:

"I am presently reading Shelby Foote's narrative of the
Civil War.
I knew the casualty rate for the Union army was high at Cold Harbor ,but I didn't know that they suffered 7000 casualties in 8 minutes. Even today with our modern
weapons systems, that would be a hard number of
casualties to grasp."

-

That's a myth. Shelby is wrong. See Gordon C. Rhea's book on Cold Harbor.

Regards,
Cash

[whitworth]

"Army contractors, such as the Mr. H-------- I met yesterday, are making an even bigger killing than the armies themselves, as they patriotically supply those gallant legions with the equipment necessary to sustain their work of destruction in the South."

Wars would no longer be fought in democracies without army contractors. It no longer was the time of small insignificant contractors of the Revolutionary War.
Having spent time in a contractor operated ordnance factory in a later war, production is a necessary ingredient of a modern war, as it was in the Civil War.
The South seceded and failed to understand that the private military contractor would help destroy the Confederacy. One could not have one without the other, an army without a contractor. The army and the contractors were in the same pot of vitals.

The Confederacy could not match the Union contractors that made the arms, the iron for the railroads and the ironclads, the steam engines for the steamers, canned food for the rations, the railroad cars, the steam engines to run the trains, the ammunition, the pontoon boats, the horseshoe making machine, the sewing machines to make the clothing and the combat shoes for the soldiers.

The Civil War made the Weyerhaeuser, the Huntington, the Remington, the Rockefeller, the Carnegie, the Borden, the Marshall Field and the Stillman. Many names still familiar with many Americans, even today.

[gary]

Thank you Dwana for providing this account of Cold Harbor (North American spelling).