Grant’s Grand Assault wayside marker

Cold Harbor • Tour the Battlefield • Monuments & Markers • The Armies

The “Grant’s Grand Assault” wayside marker is at a pulloff on the Cold Harbor Battlefield Auto Tour. (see map below)

The "Grant's Grand Assault" wayside marker on the Cold Harbor battlefield

Looking west from the ‘Grant’s Grand Assault’ wayside marker. At the time of the attack this was open field, exposed to the deadly fire from Confederate breastworks in the distance.

Text from the marker:

Grant’s Grand Assault

“We did not go far, only for six rods [100 feet]… soon… by the lively use of bayonets, frying-pans, tin plates, and cups, we had a temporary protection, and the satisfaction of holding practically all the ground we had been over.”

Oscar Waite,
10th Vermont Infantry

Cold Harbor is best known today for high losses among the attacking Union formations on June 3. The Sixth Corps made a small advance here, but most of the famous carnage occurred elsewhere. A few hundred yards to the north (your right), strongly entrenched Confederates easily smashed an isolated attack by the Eighteenth Corps. A mile to the south (your left) the Second Corps had nothing to show for its heavy losses.

If Grant’s attack had proceeded exactly as planned, it would have been one of the most spectacular and complicated assaults of the war in Virginia. Instead, only three of the Union army’s five infantry corps advanced across a three-mile front. Unconnected with each other, they fought individual battles and suffered separate failures. Lack of coordination among the attackers is considered one of the primary causes of Grant’s defeat on June 3. Union soldiers occupied this line through June 12.

Closeup of the The "Grant's Grand Assault" wayside marker on the Cold Harbor battlefield

Text from the caption to the drawing:

Although combat artist Alfred Waud sketched this scene elsewhere on the Cold Harbor battlefield, the landscape and situation matches the events on this ground during the Union attack on June 3.

Detail map from the Closeup of the The "Grant's Grand Assault" wayside marker on the Cold Harbor battlefield

Location of the marker

The marker is along the west side of Anderson-Wright Drive (which is one way southbound at this point) along the Auto Tour. It is on the west side of the drive after the drive has turned back south, about .075 mile from the Visitor Center.