Interpreting Sacred Ground: The Rhetoric of National Civil War Parks and Battlefields

5. “The Waters Ran Red”: Savage Interpretations of War at Cold Harbor Visitor Center

5 “The Waters Ran Red” Savage Interpretations of War at Cold HarborVisitor Center The number of battlefield deaths rose significantly in the bloody spring of 1864, as Lt. Gen. Ulysses S. Grant, Lincoln’s choice as newly appointed general-in-chief of the Union armies, attempted an aggressive and coordinated strategy to destroy the dwindling Rebel forces and the Confederacy ’s will to fight. Responding to President Lincoln’s frustration at the “procrastination on the part of [earlier] commanders,” Grant forged a coordinated plan to prevent Confederates from shifting their smaller defenses to emerging problem areas. Grant would advance with Gen. George Meade, leader of the Army of the Potomac, in an attempt to pin Robert E. Lee’s Army of Northern virginia against the Confederate capital of Richmond; Maj. Gen. William Sherman would defeat Gen. Joseph E. Johnston’s army and capture Atlanta; Cavalry Corps leader Philip Sheridan would cut off Lee’s food supply and destroy civilian infrastructure in virginia; and Maj. Gen. Nathaniel P. Banks was sent to capture Mobile, Alabama.1 Grant believed that the best way to defeat the smaller but tenacious Confederate army was to demoralize the South’s capacity for warfare by destroying its armies and war resources. By ravaging homes and property , burning crops, consuming supplies, and disrupting rail lines, the Union army would, the reasoning went, cripple the South economically and psychologically, while subjecting the Confederacy to an unrelenting war of attrition that would bring an end to the unpredictably prolonged conflict. The war’s escalating toll on private citizens was matched on the battlefield by staggeringly high numbers of dead and wounded. The battles fought between Lee and Grant at the Wilderness, Spotsylvania Court House, and Cold Harbor in less than a month’s time in May and June Cold Harbor Visitor Center / 133 1864 would result in the loss of over fifty thousand Union men and thirtytwo thousand Confederates. As Harry Stout gloomily calculates, the figures represent “nearly half of the total federal casualties for the entire three years prior. Shiloh, Antietam, Gettysburg, and Chickamauga had served as mere dress rehearsals for spring 1864.”2 In this chapter I examine how,if at all,reconciliationist and emancipationist commemorative traditions are used to interpret the final stages of a hard and destructive war that many Americans would prefer to forget. I have selected Cold Harbor as the subject of this chapter because it typifies the hard, bitter total war fought in 1864–65. Additionally, defensive fortifications, trench warfare, and the prominence of the sharpshooter at Cold Harbor pose challenges to the heroic frame invoked by reconciliationist memory to interpret and commemorate battle. Ultimately, I argue, reconciliationist and emancipationist public memories fail to achieve interpretive dominance at Cold Harbor, giving way to more savage interpretations of the battle that mark the landscape as a fixed, static place of struggle and death. After briefly summarizing Cold Harbor and the events leading up to this brutal confrontation that are part of the overland Campaign, I analyze the wayside markers that adorn the one-mile walking trail at Cold Harbor visitor Center. The overland Campaign While earlier Union commanders had been roundly criticized in Northern papers for their hesitation and timidity in deference to Robert E. Lee, General Grant seemed determined to remain on the offensive, bolstered by the knowledge that his army could sustain heavy losses as long as they remained proportionate to Lee’s smaller, diminishing army. As virginia officer Charles Minor Blackford sardonically put it: “In one respect has his [Grant’s] campaign been a success: to kill and wound so many of his men required a loss on our part at least one-fourth of his, and he is a hundred times better able to stand it.”3 At this point in the war, increasingly sophisticated defensive fortifications made offensive assaults riskier and more deadly. After his heavy losses at Gettysburg, Lee fought mostly a defensive war, and his seasoned veterans acted like trained military engineers, taking advantage of every undulation in often dense, tree-lined landscapes to create zigzagging 134 / Violence and Memory breastworks across a wide field of fire protected by trenches, hidden artillery emplacements, and abatis of spiked trees that concealed the Confederates from their Union attackers and complicated their reconnaissance efforts.4 Lieut.Col.Theodore Lyman,General Meade’s staff officer, noted the speed and skill with which Confederates constructed their earthworks: “It is...