"Better get the barrels of that glass rifled, so they'll carry

That night a private in the VI Corps wrote to his parents: "If there is ever again any rejoicing in the world it will be

3 Secondhand Clothes

Life began with the darkness. All day long the men out In front huddled close to the ground, dust in their teeth, a glaring sun pressing on their shoulders. To peer over the rim of earth that lay between the firing line and the enemy was to ask for a bullet, and it was almost certain death to try to go to the rear for any reason at all—to have a wound dressed, to get food, to fill a canteen with muddy warm water, or to attend to a call of nature. Death was everywhere, its unspeakable scent in every breath men drew, the ugly whine of it keening through the air over the flat whack of the sharpshooter's rifle. On distant elevations, obscure in the quivering haze, there were the guns, cleverly sited, and the gunners were prompt to fire at anything that moved. From one end of the army to the other, men endured heat and thirst and nameless discomforts and waited for night.

At night the front came alive. Along the lines men took the shovels and picks and axes which details brought out to them and worked to make their trenches deep and strong. Where there were trees, they cut them down, put the slashed branches out in front for an abatis, and used the logs to make the breastworks solid. They dug their trenches deep, so that a man could stand erect in them without being shot, and they cut zig-zag alleyways through the earth back toward the rear, so that they might go to and from the front without being killed.

Being very human, the soldiers on both sides often dug their trenches so deep that while they offered almost perfect protection against enemy fire they were quite useless for fighting purposes. In each army it was found that there were long stretches of trench in which a man could not possibly point his musket toward the enemy, and from both blue and gray headquarters orders went out to front-line commanders warning that there must always be fire steps on which riflemen could stand to shoot their foes.¹

Along much of the line the trenches were so close that the men could hear their enemies chatting together. In many places the lines were not far enough apart to give the pickets proper room, and in these places there was constant skirmishing all the way around the clock. Even where there was a decent distance, the lines were seldom quiet. Half a dozen shots from the skirmish lines could bring great rolling salvos from the guns, so that at times it sounded as if an immense battle were rocking back and forth over the desolate bottomlands. Most of this cannonading did no great harm, for the men in the deep trenches were well protected against missiles fired with relatively flat trajectory, and fuses were so imperfect that even the best gunners could rarely explode a shell directly over a trench. To get around this difficulty the artillerists brought up coehorn mortars—squat little jugs of iron that rested on flat wooden bases and pointed up toward the sky, which could toss shells in a high arc so that they might fall into a distant slit in the earth. At night the fuses from these shells traced sputtering red patterns across the sky.²

The infantry hated the mortars, regarding them, as one veteran said, as "a contemptible scheme to make a soldier's life wretched." The weapons were usually out of sight behind a bank of earth, and when they were fired the men in the trenches could neither hear the report nor see the flash and puff of smoke. They had no warning: nothing but the hissing spark that rose deliberately, seemed to hang in the air high overhead, and then fell to earth to explode. Even more than the mortars, however, the soldiers hated sharpshooters. They had a feeling that sharpshooters never really affected the course of a battle: they were sheer malignant nuisances, taking unfair advantages and killing men who might just as well have remained alive. One artillerist wrote that the sharpshooters would "sneak around trees or lurk behind stumps" and from this shelter "murder a few men," and he burst out with the most indignant complaint of all: "There was an unwritten code of honor among the infantry that forbade the shooting of men while attending to the imperative calls of nature, and these sharpshooting brutes were constantly violating that rule. I hated sharpshooters, both Confederate and Union, and I was always glad to see them killed." ³

So much of the killing these days seemed to be meaningless. In a great battle men died to take or defend some particular point, and it could be seen that there was some reason for their deaths. But there were so many deaths that affected the outcome of the war not a particle—deaths that had nothing to do with the progress of the campaign or with the great struggle for union and freedom but that simply happened, doing no one any good. There was one day when a Federal battery took position in the yard of a farmhouse and began to duel with a Confederate battery a mile away. The firing grew hot, and the people who lived in the farmhouse huddled inside in desperate fear; and presently a poor colored servant in the house, driven beside herself with terror, sprang up in a lunatic frenzy, scooped up a shovelful of live coals from the hearth, ran to the doorway, and threw the glowing coals out in a wild swing. The coals landed in an open limber chest, which blew up with a mighty crash. Two or three gunners were killed outright, two or three more were blinded forever, the woman was quite unhurt—and there were more names for the casualty lists, testifying to nothing except that war was a madman's business.⁴

Now and then higher authority considered making a new assault. One day a note from II Corps headquarters came up to General Barlow, asking if he thought that the works in his front could be carried. Barlow was one of the few general officers in the army who actively enjoyed a good fight, but this time he advised against an attack, explaining that "the men feel just at present a great horror and dread of attacking earthworks again. ... I think the men are so wearied and worn out by the harassing labors of the past week that they are wanting in the spirit and dash necessary for successful assaults." ⁵

The men had become very war-wise. They knew better than anyone else the impossibility of carrying the Rebel trenches, and as Hancock said, when they were ordered to attack "they went as far as the example of their officers could carry them"—no farther. Officers who could persuade them to do the impossible were becoming scarce. There had been more than a month of fighting, and the best company and regimental officers were getting killed off. The best officers were always going into the most dangerous places, and there had been dangerous places without number in the past month, and the law of averages was working. The famous II Corps had lost noticeably in efficiency, not merely because its best enlisted men had been shot, but also because it was no longer officered as it had been. A brigade which was commanded by a lieutenant colonel, its regiments led by captains, and its companies commanded by junior lieutenants and sergeants, just was not able to do the tilings it had done before. The old leadership was gone.⁶

There were veteran outfits, of course, in which the men more or less led themselves. Yet the enlistments of many of these were about to expire, and the men were becoming very cautious. Every man in the army knew the exact date on which he would be released from service, and as that date drew near he resented being asked to run risks. Members of a Rhode Island battery complained that on their last day of service they were thrown into an exposed position and compelled to keep up an expensive artillery duel, and the battery's historian exploded in anger: "It was clear to everyone's mind that some mean, malignant villain, not worthy of wearing shoulder straps, had got the battery into this dreadful position purposely, for our term of service expired the next day, and we had long range guns, while short range guns were fired a quarter of a mile in our rear, the shells exploding over our heads instead of reaching the enemy's works." ⁷

A week passed after the day of the disastrous assaults, and another week began, and as far as the men could see there was no change; perhaps they were to remain here at Cold Harbor forever, fixed in impregnable trenches that could never be captured and would never be abandoned. The trench system imposed its routine, which was not pleasant. These sandy ditches caught and held all of the sun's heat, so that the scanty supply of water in canteens became hot and distasteful, and the men tried to rig little awnings out of shelter-tent halves and cowered under them, hot and unwashed and eternally thirsty. A New Hampshire soldier predicted that trench life by itself "would soon become more dangerous to the Federal army than rebel bullets," and a Pennsylvanian remembered that what his outfit wanted most in those days was a complete issue of new clothing—what they wore had got beyond washing, and there was no water to wash it in anyway.⁸

When Cutler's division was briefly taken out of the line on June 8 for a short stay in the rear, its commander noted that this was the first day in more than a month in which no man in the division had been reported killed or wounded. One of his colonels wrote that he had had neither an unbroken night's sleep nor a change of clothing since May 5, and another remarked that he was so groggy with fatigue that it was impossible for him to write an intelligent letter to his family: "I can only tell my wife I am alive and well. I am too stupid for any use."

And General Warren, sensitive and high-strung, turned to another officer one day and burst out:

"For thirty days it has been one funeral procession past me, and it is too much!" ⁹

Warren was showing the strain, and both Grant and Meade were noticing it. He had been a good friend of Meade for a long time, and Grant had been favorably impressed by him. When the army crossed the Rapidan, Grant even made a mental note that if anything should happen to Meade, Warren would be a good man to put in command of the army. But somehow he was not bearing up well. Details engrossed him, and he seemed to have a stiff pride which made it hard for him to accept direction and counsel. Worst of all, he was never quite able to get his corps moving promptly. It was felt that he was slow in bringing his men into action the first day at Spotsylvania, and when the attack was made at the Bloody Angle and Warren was supposed to hit the Confederate left there had been a three-hour delay—a costly thing, which led Grant to tell Meade to relieve Warren of his command if he delayed any longer. Meade replied that he was about to do it without orders, but Warren finally got his corps in motion just in time to save his job.¹⁰

As a matter of fact, corps leadership throughout the campaign had been a good deal less than distinguished. Even Hancock seemed uninspired; it may be that the wound he got at Gettysburg, which was still very far from healed, was slowing him up more than anyone realized. John Sedgwick was gone, and Wright was not yet fully tested. He was obviously brave and diligent, but there were signs that he might be stiff and slow. Burnside was no more expert than he had ever been, and his relations with Meade were delicate. His IX Corps had at last formally been made a part of the Army of the Potomac. He ranked Meade, and was touchy about taking orders from him, and Meade was not a tactful person who would try to smooth down his ruffled feathers. Smith had served with Grant at Chattanooga and had won his confidence there, but he was not fitting smoothly into the Army of the Potomac.

Looking back on the Cold Harbor assault, a staff man in the VI Corps wrote scornfully that "its management would have shamed a cadet in his first year at West Point."¹¹ Emory Upton went into more detail in a bitter letter to his sister:

"I am disgusted with the generalship displayed. Our men have, in many instances, been foolishly and wantonly sacrificed. Assault after assault has been ordered upon the enemy's entrenchments when they knew nothing about the strength or position of the enemy. Thousands of lives might have been spared by the exercise of a little skill; but, as it is, the courage of the poor men is expected to obviate all difficulties."

Reflecting further on the matter, he wrote a few days later:

"Some of our corps commanders are not fit to be corporals. Lazy and indolent, they will not even ride along their lines; yet, without hesitancy, they will order us to attack the enemy, no matter what their position or numbers. Twenty thousand of our killed and wounded should today be in our ranks." ¹²

Grant was well aware that there were grave shortcomings in command, but they were not too easily identified by a man who was looking down from the top rather than up from underneath. To Grant's tent one day came young Brigadier General James H. Wilson, leader of one of Sheridan's cavalry divisions, earlier in the war a member of Grant's own staff and therefore a man with whom Grant might talk frankly. Wilson was one of the young, fire-eating, just-out-of-West Point officers, like Upton, who studied the older men with the eyes of impatient perfectionist youth. Also, he had served in the Western armies, where Grant had had lieutenants like Sherman and Thomas and McPherson.

In the privacy of his tent, Grant asked the young brigadier:

"Wilson, what is the matter with this army?"

Wilson replied that a good deal was the matter—so much that it would hardly do to go into detail—but he said that he could easily suggest a good remedy. One of Grant's staff officers was Colonel Ely Parker, swarthy and massive and blackhaired, a full-blooded Indian of the Iroquois persuasion. Give Parker, said Wilson, a scalping knife and a tomahawk, fill him full of the worst commissary whisky available, and send him out to bring in the scalps of a number of major generals.

Grant chuckled mildly and asked which ones. That did not really matter much, said Wilson; just tell Parker to attack the first ones he came to and not to quit until he had scalped at least half a dozen. After that Grant would have a better army.¹³

The soldiers themselves were not complaining a great deal. They felt toward their officers about as private soldiers usually do, but there is little to show that Cold Harbor affected that feeling very much. Their complaints were usually like the one voiced by the Michigan private, who inquired grumpily. "Who is putting down this monster rebellion? Is it the officers?" These, he noted, had servants to wait on them, and good food in their baggage wagons, whereas "the poor wearied soldiers who do the fighting" got nothing but dry hardtack to eat and had to sleep in the mud.¹⁴

Clearly enough, the soldiers hated Cold Harbor and the trenches and the dust and the heat, and most of them would have agreed with the New York private who wrote: "A fellow sufferer very truly remarked that we are in a very bad state—the state of Virginia." ¹⁵ Yet there is nothing to show that they had had any especial loss in morale. What the men left in writing shows weariness and a longing to get away from the sound of gunfire for a while, but nothing more.¹⁶ If the generals were clumsy, most of them had always been that way and there was no reason to expect them to be any different. The Army of the Potomac seems to have spent more time talking and thinking about its opposite number, the Army of Northern Virginia, than about its own high command.

Its relationship with the Confederate army was unusual, a queer blend of antagonism and understanding. At times the feeling between the two armies was downright savage. A man in Smith's corps complained bitterly that long after the June 3 attacks had ended, Confederate riflemen amused themselves by shooting at the wounded men between the lines. Sometimes, he said, they even fired at corpses. There was a wounded New Hampshire officer who lay, helpless, twenty yards in front of the Union trenches, and all day long the Confederate sharpshooters kept anyone from going out to help him. One man was killed in the attempt, and after that the Union soldiers tried throwing canteens of water and bags of hardtack out to the wounded man, but nothing effective could be done for him as long as the Rebels could see to shoot. After dark, men dug a shallow trench out to where the officer lay, and after three hours' work they managed to get him back to safety. All of the soldiers in the line set up a cheer when the officer was brought in, and the cheer promptly drew a volley from the Confederate rifle pits.¹⁷

That was one side of the coin. For the other side, there was the fact that the pickets constantly arranged informal truces, meeting between the lines to trade knives, tobacco, newspapers, and other small valuables, and as they traded they talked things over. One of these peaceful meetings, unhappily, broke up in a row. A Confederate asked a Yankee who was going to win the Northern presidential election, and the Yankee said that he reckoned he himself would vote for Old Abe.