The Meaning of Cold Harbor

When I was in seventh grade, I remember the teacher having written on the chalkboard an enormous chart of battles of the Civil War. Among the columns were:

• The location of the battle;
• The date of the battle;
• The respective Union and Confederate commanders;
• The Union and Confederate casualties.

I know there were other columns in the chart, but I don’t recall exactly what they were. One item that I know was not on the chart was the relationship between the battle and the campaign in which it was fought.

We were required to transcribe all this into our notebooks. I liked military history as much as anyone, but it seemed pointless busywork to me. There was no integration of any of this data into a more meaningful understanding of what was going on in the war.

As I have aged, I have learned that it is really hard to provide integration of facts into a student’s knowledge that rises above busywork and conveys insight. Where do you even start? Not all the kids in the seventh grade classroom even have the cognitive maturity to receive the insight if you deliver it to us. Many of the kids are just doing school. Others just are not ready yet. Just because the delivery system wants to impart specific material at a given grade level doesn’t mean that all children at that grade level are ready to process it.

Similarly, when I was a high school sophomore, our American Literature class included readings from Winesburg, Ohio by Sherwood Anderson. Ten years later, more mature and experienced, prepared to really comprehend what Anderson was saying, I went back and read it again.

One would really like a classroom study of the Civil War to impart some meaning to all that data, to allow a student to understand the answers to questions such as:

• What went wrong at the battle of Cold Harbor?
• Why did it go wrong?
• What did Grant learn from the experience?
• How did that set Grant apart from other contemporary commanders who had battlefield failures (such as Braxton Bragg)?

I am not sure if it is even possible to reliably deliver that kind of meaning to a classroom full of kids who are maturing at different rates and at various degrees of readiness to even comprehend the issues that would elevate the data my teacher was writing on the chalkboard into meaning and insight.