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Cold Harbor: Grant and Lee, May 26-June 3, 1864. By GORDON C. RHEA. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2002. xx, 532 pp. $34.95.
WITH his customary thorough scholarship, perceptive analysis, and lucid writing, Gordon C. Rhea has written another exemplary battle history, the fourth in his five-volume study of Gen. Ulysses S. Grant's Overland campaign in Virginia in 1864. Rhea provides the most detailed examination of this critical battle to date and emerges as a staunch defender of Grant. He directly challenges the old reputation of Grant the "butcher," who used his superior resources to simply hammer away at Gen. Robert E. Lee's Army of Northern Virginia. Instead, Rhea finds Grant using maneuver as well as attack to keep Lee off balance and push closer to Richmond. That a battle occurred at Cold Harbor came by "accident rather than by design" (p. xiv), but once both armies had positioned themselves along a six-mile line by nightfall on 2 June, Grant ordered an all-out assault for the morning of 3 June.
The Cold Harbor phase of the campaign began...