But these dusty crossroads were strategically important if Grant was to attack Richmond, and both Lee and Grant realized it. Also, it was Grant’s last chance to continue his strategy of trying to get between Lee and Richmond—any more flanking movements and Lee would be in the entrenchments around the Confederate Capital where Grant did not want to fight him. As Grant stated: “Richmond was fortified and entrenched so perfectly that one man inside to defend was more than equal to five outside besieging or assaulting.”
It is significant that Lee also did not want to fight in the entrenchments around Richmond. There he would be on the defensive, and in such a position could not possibly destroy Grant’s army. So both commanders were willing for the test.
And what of the lowly foot-soldier, the unsung hero in the ranks, the poor bloody infantryman? Was he ready for the awful test?
Confederate camp. From a contemporary sketch.
To the average soldier, this whole campaign was fast becoming just a series of hazy, indistinct recollections, like the fragments of a half-forgotten dream: Long columns of sweat-soaked soldiers marching over hills and rivers and swamps, across ploughed fields and corn fields, down endless dusty roads through dark, lonely woods; 30 days of marching by night and fighting by day, until it must have seemed to them that the only things left in life were stupefying fatigue, merciless heat, choking dust, smoke and noise, mud and blood.
In the Union ranks many of the men began to find out for the first time what hunger really was. They had moved so fast and so often the ration wagons were left far behind. Hardtack was selling for a dollar apiece—if you could find a seller. And here at Cold Harbor the soldiers wrote their names and regiments on pieces of paper and pinned or sewed them to the inside of their dirty blouses, with the forlorn hope that if and when they were killed someone might take the time to find out who they were.
To Lee’s barefoot, ragged veterans, hunger had been a constant companion for a long time, but at Cold Harbor they approached starvation. A Confederate sergeant recorded in his diary: “When we reached Cold Harbor the command to which I belonged had been marching almost continuously day and night for more than fifty hours without food, and for the first time we knew what actual starvation was.” When scurvy appeared among the men, owing primarily to a lack of fresh vegetables, Lee advised them to eat the roots of the sassafras and wild grape, if they could find any.
In the race for initial possession of the crossroads at Cold Harbor, Lee’s cavalry won by a few hours. But in the afternoon of May 31 Gen. Philip Sheridan’s cavalry drove them out and held the crossroads until relieved by the Federal VI Corps under Gen. Horatio Wright. Most of Sheridan’s troopers were armed with the new Spencer repeating carbine, which made dismounted cavalrymen effective infantry.
The next morning, June 1, Lee threw Gen. Richard Anderson’s corps (Longstreet’s old corps—Longstreet having been wounded in the Wilderness) against the Federal VI Corps in a bold attempt to seize the crossroads and roll up Grant’s left flank before he could reinforce it, but Anderson was repulsed. Grant then moved the XVIII Corps under “Baldy” Smith, which he had borrowed from Butler’s army bottled up on the south side of the James, over to the right of the VI Corps. That afternoon they attacked Anderson, now supported by Gen. Robert Hoke’s division.