>Union wounded laying on the field in the blazing heat after the fighting at Cold Harbor ceased>Grant and Lee have a retarded back-and-forth exchange of letters trying to negotiate a truce to recover the wounded>Grant says can we just pick our guys up any time there's no active battle going on?>Lee: No you have to do it the conventional way I'll set up a two hour truce where we can pick up our wounded>Grant misreads his letter>more back-and-forths>botched communications where some Confederates try to pick up wounded men and Union pickets take them prisoner as they don't know Lee had earlier agreed to a truce>eventually a conventional truce is arranged three days after the battle and there's not many living soldiers left to retrieve at that pointNot one of either general's brighter moments. Grant didn't want to ask for a conventional truce since by military custom this admitted to having lost the battle and Lee kept trying to b8 him into doing exactly that and people died while this autism was going on.
>>18287492The reason Lee probably didn't accept Grant's original proposal is that it made it too easy to gather intelligence on the Confederate lines if soldiers could go out any time they wanted to gather up the wounded. That seems to be the most likely reason for his objection.
>In his memoirs, Grant said that Cold Harbor was one of two assaults he ordered during the war that he wished had not been made (the other was an attack on the Vicksburg lines on May 22, 1863).
The traditional narrative of Cold Harbor is that the AOP lost 7,000 men in 30 minutes but modern research into casualty records indicates that it was more like 3,000.
>Cold Harbor has been much dramatized by history, yet of the three major battles of the Overland Campaign it was the least bloody and also proved to be the last substantiative battlefield victory the Army of Northern Virginia ever won.[3]
>Long after the smoke had cleared on June 3, wounded men groaning in agony continued to lay on the field. Confederate pickets were on alert and ready to shoot at any rescue parties trying to retrieve them; one man in the 12th New Hampshire accused them of firing at corpses and wounded men for amusement. A wounded officer from the 12th lay out there and all day long the Rebel sharpshooters kept anyone from getting to him. One man was killed in the attempt while the others tried throwing canteens and bags of hardtack over to the officer but nothing much could be done until after dark, at which point the soldiers dug a trench in the ground to him and finally got him back into their lines. The other men in the regiment whooped and cheered, which promptly resulted in a burst of rifle fire from the Confederate lines.[9]
>>18287680The 7,000 casualty figure was more like Union losses for the entire battle not just the assault on the ANV lines in the morning.
>>18287685The Overland Campaign has been skewered a lot by Dixietard revisionist history. It's a fantastic campaign to study for its risk/reward maneuvering, decisions, and hard fighting. It was always about retaining the initiative and maintaining constant pressure; it was never only about attrition.
Cold Harbor was a fiasco because of ineffective reconnaissance and poor terrain, and the shameful letter exchange that Grant and Lee did that allowed wounded men to lay on the ground in 90 degree temperatures for three days. To answer the question, why regret Cold Harbor (and Vicksburg) and not other costly assaults? Perhaps it was Grant's postwar soul searching, but that descends into a psychological rabbit hole.
>>18287680What modern studies are those?
>>18287710Gordon Rhea. He analyzed the army returns and found that AOP really only lost 6,000 men the entire battle and about 3,500 during the attack on Lee's trenches. The old 7,000 casualties meme probably came from Dixietards.
both generals are to blame for this fiasco and 19th century military etiquitte holding that the party who asks for a truce to collect their wounded after a battle is conceding defeat
>>18287712One wonders where the 7,000 casualties figure came from. Surely they knew how to count?
>>18287720Data can be compiled from different sources and some parties will use different methods to get the results that fit their agenda. These can include:>counting aggregate army strength rather than PFD, the specific reports used etc>even the original records have variances and sometimes getting an exact head count was difficult>also period newspapers were in love with really dramatized, exaggerated accounts of battles>and finally figures a writer pulled out of his butt to glorify/demonize X or Y generalNo matter what the case, Cold Harbor was a horrible disaster and Grant admitted it.
>>18287685>Wilderness>Meade and Humphreys had a good battle plan, they just didn't expect Lee to react as swiftly as he did so AOP was obliged to give battle>the first day was a tactical stalemate>second day began with a Union attack that nearly carried the day until Longstreet showed up and counterattacked>in the end it was also a stalemate>Spotsylvania>the fighting at the Mule Shoe was nightmarish to be sure but it did break through the Confederate line and essentially annihilated the Stonewall Division, forcing Lee to patch together a new line>the rest of the battle was mainly attempts to flank Lee, none of which really worked but none could be described as "failures"
>>18287703I often imagine how few choices Lee would have had if the Union flank campaigns had done even a decent job. As it was, Grant was the 180 degree opposite of McClellan in that he didn't stop, start firing off accusatory messages blaming everyone of failing/working against him, etc. He adapted and kept going.
>>18287492Those weren't Lee's troops dying from neglect, they were Grant's.
>>18287753Nah more like Lee being an anal retentive about Grant observing all the "formalities" of a truce before he'd accept while men were laying in the hot sun in agony.
>>18287736The AOP moved slower than intended in the Wilderness so they didn't get too far in front of their wagon trains and risk Lee capturing them. Meade and Humphreys generally conducted the battle pretty well.
Both generals were engaged in gamesmanship, Lee trying to cajole Grant into admitting he lost the battle, Grant refusing to admit he lost the battle. Neither come off very good, although Grant is probably more to blame since the wounded men were mostly his.
the attacks at Cold Harbor fucked up because Grant deferred to Meade and let him conduct the battle plan. by the time you get to late summer Grant was issuing more direct orders to AOP and ignoring Meade. this was unfortunate but expected since Grant didn't know Virginia, Lee, the AOP, or its officers that well. he also said as much in his memoirs, things would have gone different if it had been six months later.
>>18287672Give him points for that, a lot of ACW generals including Hood, Joe Johnston, Bragg, McClellan etc never ever owned up to mistakes. Anything that went wrong was always somebody else's fault.
>>18287716Lee was being a stick-in-the-mud and demanding adherence to completely arbitrary rules and he did this for no reason other than to try and get Grant to admit he lost the battle. To be sure most of the wounded were Union but some were Confederate too.
Here's where Lee was a douchebag. He purposely stalled the truce, maybe he got sadistic pleasure from the suffering of the wounded, who knows? Meade was the commander of the AOP, they should have negotiated with him instead. Grant had an entire war to manage and was responsible for armies as far away as Missouri and Arkansas, he was a busy guy.
>>18287492is there any specific reasoning behind the timetable Lee set for the collection of the wounded?
>>18287811My subjective guess is he preferred it to be near evening when it was mostly dark to reduce the chances that the Union stretcher bearers could see the Confederate line and know where everyone was.
Burnside claimed the Confederates did not respect the FoT in his sector and stretcher bearers were shot at anyway.
>>18287825easily explained. Burnside's corps included the division of USCT which the Confederates hated and they were showing the entire corps no mercy whatsoever, down to ignoring the flag of truce to retrieved the wounded.
>>18287804the flag of truce rules for collecting wounded soldiers had been practiced in Europe for hundreds of years and were well known to everyone; they are mentioned in Shakespeare's Henry V.
>>18287585So each side gathers wounded on their end and marches half-way across the field and exchanges them. Wow that was hard.
>After Shiloh, Beauregard sent Grant a note under flag of truce requesting to send burial parties to bury the Confederate dead. Grant replied back that that wasn't necessary and he'd already dispatched burial parties as the weather was warm.>The Confederate dead at Shiloh were poorly handled, most thrown in hastily dug mass graves and some washed down the Tennessee River. Twelve burial trenches were dug, "one containing about 700 bodies" but the locations of only seven are known today.>A Union regiment marching up to the front in Vicksburg thirteen months later passed by the great battlefield and found that one of the burial trenches had had its dirt covering completely washed away by rain, leaving a mass of bleached white skeletons laying in the open.
>>18288355Yankee war crimes general? Utter disrespect for the dead there.
>>18287804>just let our guys roam freely and gather info so our cannons can bracket and slaughter you :3
Lee refusing to negotiate with Meade even though he was the actual army commander was just faggotry.
Napoleon famously said "He whose eyes moisten at the sight of the battlefield will never be a great general." He was right; a successful commander has to view war like playing Call of Duty and not think too hard about all the people he's killed. Grant, Lee, Jackson, Sherman, Sheridan, Forrest, even Lincoln were able to do that, they could detach themselves from the reality of war while McClellan and Joe Johnston could not.
>>18289402>"He whose eyes moisten at the sight of the battlefield will never be a great general."lol>lets his entire army die pointlessly in Russia because je suis le grand sociopath
>After the dust settled at Cold Harbor, Grant had a rather delicate matter to attend to. Philadelphia Enquirer reporter Edward Crapsey had prior to the battle written a dispatch asserting that the Army of the Potomac had nearly been driven in panic in the Wilderness and that Meade wanted to retreat across the Rapidan, but Grant intervened and countermanded him, allowing the army's advance to continue. When Meade learned of this, he was infuriated and called it "a wicked, baseless lie." Crapsey, when pressed, would not say who told him this and claimed it was only camp rumor. Meade had Crapsey drummed out of camp on a mule wearing a placard that said "Libeler of the press." The enlisted men enjoyed the spectacle for reporters were not popular in this army, and Marsena Patrick, the army's curmudgeony provost marshal, wrote that it had been a great pleasure to see Crapsey expelled.>Grant refused to intervene and order him reinstated, adding that the story about Meade ordering a retreat in the Wilderness had been false and without foundation. He was half-apologetic as he'd known Crapsey's family in Illinois and considered them respectable people, but the order to expel him from camp stood.
>Grant had similar troubles with New York Times reporter Edward Swinton, who had been introduced to him prior to the start of the campaign and billed as "not a newspaperman, but a gentleman writer who wishes to write a history of the war after it is over." On the evening of the first day's fight in the Wilderness, Swinton was caught listening in on a conference at army headquarters and expelled from camp. He came back a short time later, attached himself to Burnside, and wrote something he didn't like, so Burnside requested permission to deal with Swinton in a more "drastic" way, which Grant took to mean he wanted Swinton shot.>In the end, Swinton suffered no more punishment than expulsion from camp while the Times sent down a different reporter to cover the Army of the Potomac. Both Crapsey and Swinton eventually returned and continued doing what they did, but the press blacklisted Meade and Burnside forevermore--Sylvanus Cadawaller of the Chicago Times said that the newspapers all had a mutual agreement that Meade was persona non grata and all dispatches about the Army of the Potomac from now on spoke of it as Grant's army and did not mention Meade anywhere ever again.
