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truepenny
Not War But Murder: Cold Harbor 1864 by Ernest B. FurgursonMy rating: 5 of 5 stars
This book is about Cold Harbor, blow by terrible blow. Furguson (and, yes, it really is spelled with two u's, although if you want to find him on Amazon, you have to spell it Ferguson) is an excellent writer, very thoughtful and interested in reconstructing, as much as is possible, the psychology of the people involved, especially Meade and Grant, to figure out WHY Cold Harbor happened the way it did. Neither Meade nor Grant comes out of it looking terribly good, Meade for letting his wounded amour propre get in the way of doing his job, Grant for NOT PAYING ATTENTION to the effects of his orders.
Grant and Lee both have a certain amount of trouble---Lee not so much here, where all the Confederates were doing was holding a defensive line, but definitely at Gettysburg---wherein they want their generals to do their jobs without being told HOW. They want to be able to say, "Do this," and have their subordinates figure out how to make it happen. Sometimes this works out great (e.g., Lee and Jackson), and then sometimes it really really doesn't, as with Grant and Meade and their major generals at Cold Harbor, where the major generals desperately need someone who can see the big picture to be telling them, not so much what to do, as when to do it. They had no good way of coordinating attacks among themselves, and so they went haphazardly and without supporting each other, and the result of THAT was inevitable defeat.
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