Reaching the Tottapotomoi, General Grant found his opponent in a strong position behind that sluggish water-course, prepared to dispute the road to Richmond; and it now became necessary to force the passage in his front, or, by another flank march, move still farther to the left, and endeavor to cross the Chickahominy somewhere in the vicinity of Cold Harbor.  This last operation was determined upon by General Grant, and, sending his cavalry toward Cold Harbor, he moved rapidly in the same direction with his infantry.  This movement was discovered at once by Lee; he sent Longstreet’s corps forward, and, when the Federal army arrived, the Southern forces were drawn up in their front, between them and Richmond, thus barring, for the fourth time in the campaign, the road to the capital.

During these movements, nearly continuous fighting had taken place between the opposing columns, which clung to each other, as it were, each shaping its march more or less by that of the other.  At last they had reached the ground upon which the obstinate struggle of June, 1862, had taken place, and it now became necessary for General Grant either to form some new plan of campaign, or, by throwing his whole army, in one great mass, against his adversary, break through all obstacles, cross the Chickahominy, and seize upon Richmond.  This was now resolved upon.

Heavy fighting took place on June 2d, near Bethesda Church and at other points, while the armies were coming into position; but this was felt to be but the preface to the greater struggle which General Lee now clearly divined.  It came without loss of time.  On the morning of the 3d of June, soon after daylight, General Grant threw his whole army straightforward against Lee’s front—­all along his line.  The conflict which followed was one of those bloody grapples, rather than battles, which, discarding all manoeuvring or brain-work in the commanders, depend for the result upon the brute strength of the forces engaged.  The action did not last half an hour, and, in that time, the Federal loss was thirteen thousand men.  When General Lee sent a messenger to A.P.  Hill, asking the result of the assault on his part of the line, Hill took the officer with him in front of his works, and, pointing to the dead bodies which were literally lying upon each other, said:  “Tell General Lee it is the same all along my front.”

The Federal army had, indeed, sustained a blow so heavy, that even the constant mind and fixed resolution of General Grant and the Federal authorities seem to have been shaken.  The war seemed hopeless to many persons in the North after the frightful bloodshed of this thirty minutes at Cold Harbor, of which fact there is sufficient proof.  “So gloomy,” says a Northern historian,[1] “was the military outlook after the action on the Chickahominy, and to such a degree, by consequence, had the moral spring of the public mind become relaxed, that there was at this time great danger of a collapse of the war.