Marching to Cold Harbor: Victory and Failure, 1864 - Hardcover

Maney, R. Wayne

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0942597656 ISBN 13: 9780942597653

Publisher: White Mane Pub, 1994

Synopsis

Marching to Cold Harbor, in the words of the soldiers and their commanders, recounts the journey that foreshadowed the final great battle of the Civil War in the east before the seige of Petersburg. Their maneuvers brought them on June 3 to a crossroads where Grant attacked in three assaults, each greater in strength than Pickett's Charge at Gettysburg. Those tidal waves left more than 7,000 Federal soldiers killed and wounded in less than fifteen minutes. This is the story of Lee's last victory and Grant's costly gambit in his drive to Richmond.

About this title

About the Author:

R. Wayne Maney is a teacher at Thomas Jefferson High School in Alexandria, Virginia.

From Publishers Weekly:

On June 3, 1864, Union troops under Ulysses S. Grant mounted a series of attacks on Confederate entrenchments at Cold Harbor, Va. They were defeated so readily and with such high losses that the campaign subsequently developed into a siege operation. Maney's eloquent description of this disaster is based heavily on quotations from printed and unpublished primary sources. The campaign prefigures the first day on the Somme in 1916: men shot down by the thousands in a matter of minutes by enemies they could barely see. Maney's accounts of the earlier fighting in Wilderness and at the Spotsylvania Court House are so detailed that they distract from the event that is the work's stated focus. The author also seems at times disconcertingly unable to distinguish between a regiment and a brigade. Nevertheless, this is a solid treatment of a battle Civil War historians have largely neglected.

Copyright 1994 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

About this edition

• Publisher: White Mane Pub
• Publication date: 1994
• ISBN 10: 0942597656
• ISBN 13: 9780942597653
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 270