Cold Harbor

As I shared some time back, our conference rooms at ForeRunner are named after historical events. I chose the names to remind me of what I felt to be important lessons. Leadership of a company, or any other group of people, is a daunting task. Since there are so many opportunities to lose one's self in the fog, I felt it necessary to remind myself of certain basic themes I felt important if I was to become the manager I wanted to be. One of those ways was to name our conference rooms as reminders of what I needed to remember.

And so we have a conference room named Cold Harbor. I admit one of the reasons for the selection is simply the name. The dissonance of the name appeals to that melancholy which is such a large part of me. But it was really the events that transpired there some 145 years ago that drew me to name it so.

Early June of 1864. US Grant, the future president of the United States has assumed supreme command of the Union Army and has been hammering Robert E. Lee's Army of Northern Virginia for a long month. Beginning at the Wilderness, and following at Spotsylvania, Yellow Tavern, North Anna and many more, the two armies have slammed into each other with a sustained fury. The Rebels, under Lee, have always been heavily outnumbered, usually by 2 or 3 to 1, but have consistently defeated Grant and his army. Grant is seeking to break through Lee's army to capture Richmond, the Confederate capital.

Grant's army has sustained heavy casualties. He has already lost nearly as many men as Lee had at the beginning of this campaign, yet the industrial might of the North continues to supply him with inexhaustible supplies of fresh men and equipment. Yet Lee and his men continue to defeat him again and again. The roads between the front and Washington DC are jammed with both ambulances hauling the wounded back and columns of fresh faced reinforcements coming down to be thrown into the meat grinder that is the front. The Northern newspapers are screaming in large headlines at the horrific losses of men and treasure. Now the maneuvering armies confront one another once more near a small town called Cold Harbor, directly north of Richmond. The Rebels get the first and dig in, throwing up walls of tree branches and earth walls.

For two days the Union Army probes the Rebel defensive line, learning just how strong this line is. In late afternoon of the second day, Grant orders a massive assault for the next morning. The men in the Union lines are no fools, even though they know this is to be a fool's errand. An atmosphere of doom pervades the Union ranks. Over the past two days they have tramped through fields containing long unburied bodies, now skeletons, dead soldiers from a battle fought here two years before, Gaines Mill. They have seen the impregnable defence lines they face.

That night, many of the Union soldiers write their names on slips of paper that they pin to the back of their uniform. This is so that they can be identified when their bodies are carried from the battlefield the next day. In fact this is the origin of the dog tags our soldiers wear today. And so the next morning, they obey their orders and move forward in their long lines. Unbelieving rebels behind their walls watch the foolish advance. The guns fire and it is soon over. Union soldiers in their thousands lie dead and wounded before the walls of the Rebel line. In a final insult, for two days Grant refuses to request a truce so that he can pick up his dead and wounded, as he does not want to admit that he has again lost the battle. The wounded moan and cry for water, often dying on the ground between the two lines during the two day wait. The dead do what comes naturally in the summer heat, contributing to the horror of the scene.

Accepting the gift of leadership entails responsibility. The decisions that managers and leaders make have consequences. But the immediate consequences of those decisions are often escaped by those that make them. As the organization becomes larger and more impersonal, this becomes more and more the case. Whereas US Grant became President of the United States, with his portrait on the $ 50 bill. It was Private John Doe who felt the fear of the march into flashing guns and the pain when that metal tore his body apart.

While it may not seem fair, it is the way of the world. Some must lead and some must follow, if we are all to prosper. Yet it behooves those who lead to respect and care for those who follow. We who lead are ever in danger of belief in our press clippings. We are ever in danger of being captured by our emotions. Leadership has consequences. If we want to be good leaders; even more importantly, if we want to be decent people, we will remember that.