In a well-coordinated movement, Grant’s army slipped away from the grim experience at Cold Harbor and marched rapidly for the Chickahominy River crossings. A Union soldier writing home from Long Bridge on June 13, 1864, called the stream slow, sluggish, black, and villainously treacherous looking, and judged Long Bridge one of the most gloomy and unpleasant scenes the army had yet met with. Half of the army crossed one-half mile south of here on June 13, while the other two corps used Jones’s Bridge downstream. Once across the Chickahominy, only the James stood between the Union army and the Confederate defenses at Petersburg.
