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Battle of Cold Harbor

The Battle of Cold Harbor was fought during the American Civil War near Mechanicsville, Virginia, from May 31 to June 12, 1864, with the most significant fighting occurring on June 3. It was one of the final battles of Union Lt. Gen. Ulysses S. Grant's Overland Campaign, and is remembered as one of American history's most lopsided battles. Thousands of Union soldiers were killed or wounded in the frontal assault of June 3 against the fortified positions of Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee's army, an event that compounded the image of Grant's apparent disregard for high casualties.

On May 31, as Grant's army once again swung around the right flank of Lee's army, Union cavalry seized the crossroads of Old Cold Harbor, about 10 miles northeast of the Confederate capital of Richmond, Virginia, holding it against Confederate attacks until the Union infantry arrived. Both Grant and Lee, whose armies had suffered enormous casualties in the Overland Campaign, received reinforcements. On the evening of June 1, the Union VI Corps and XVIII Corps arrived and assaulted the Confederate works to the west of the crossroads with some success.

On June 2, the remaining forces of both armies arrived, and the Confederate troops constructed an extensive series of fortifications extending seven miles. At dawn on June 3, three Union corps launched an assault on the Confederate defenses at the southern end of the line. The attack was easily repelled, resulting in significant casualties for the Union forces. Attempts to assault the northern end of the line and to resume the assaults on the southern were unsuccessful. The armies confronted each other on these lines until the night of June 12, when the Army of the Potomac finally disengaged.

Military situation

Grant's Overland Campaign was one of a series of simultaneous offensives the newly appointed general in chief launched against the Confederacy. By late May 1864, only two of these continued to advance: Maj. Gen. William T. Sherman's Atlanta Campaign and the Overland Campaign, in which Grant accompanied and directly supervised the Army of the Potomac and its commander, Maj. Gen. George G. Meade. Grant's campaign objective was not the Confederate capital of Richmond, but the destruction of Lee's army. President Abraham Lincoln had long advocated this strategy for his generals, recognizing that the city would certainly fall after the loss of its principal defensive army. Grant ordered Meade, "Wherever Lee goes, there you will go also." Although he hoped for a quick, decisive battle, Grant was prepared to fight a war of attrition. Both Union and Confederate casualties could be high, but the Union had greater resources to replace lost soldiers and equipment.

On May 5, after Grant's army crossed the Rapidan River and entered the Wilderness of Spotsylvania, it was attacked by Lee's Army of Northern Virginia. Although Lee was outnumbered, about 60,000 to 100,000, his men fought fiercely and the dense foliage provided a terrain advantage. After two days of fighting and almost 29,000 casualties, the results were inconclusive and neither army was able to obtain an advantage. Lee had stopped Grant, but had not turned him back; Grant had not destroyed Lee's army. Under similar circumstances, previous Union commanders had chosen to withdraw behind the Rappahannock, but Grant instead ordered Meade to move around Lee's right flank and seize the important crossroads at Spotsylvania Court House to the southeast, hoping that by interposing his army between Lee and Richmond, he could lure the Confederates into another battle on a more favorable field.

Elements of Lee's army beat the Union army to the critical crossroads of Spotsylvania Court House and began entrenching, a tactic that became increasingly essential for the outnumbered defenders. Meade was dissatisfied with Maj. Gen. Philip Sheridan's Union cavalry's performance and released it from its reconnaissance and screening duties for the main body of the army to pursue and defeat the Confederate cavalry under Maj. Gen. J.E.B. Stuart. Sheridan's men mortally wounded Stuart in the tactically inconclusive Battle of Yellow Tavern (May 11) and then continued their raid toward Richmond, leaving Grant and Meade without the "eyes and ears" of their cavalry.

Near Spotsylvania Court House, fighting occurred on and off from May 8 through May 21, as Grant tried various schemes to break the Confederate line. On May 8, Union Maj. Gens. Gouverneur K. Warren and John Sedgwick unsuccessfully attempted to dislodge the Confederates under Maj. Gen. Richard H. Anderson from Laurel Hill, a position that was blocking them from Spotsylvania Court House. On May 10, Grant ordered attacks across the Confederate line of earthworks, which by now extended over 4 miles (6.5 km), including a prominent salient known as the Mule Shoe. Although the Union troops failed again at Laurel Hill, an innovative assault attempt by Col. Emory Upton against the Mule Shoe showed promise.

Grant used Upton's assault technique on a much larger scale on May 12 when he ordered the 15,000 men of Maj. Gen. Winfield S. Hancock's corps to assault the Mule Shoe. Hancock was initially successful, but the Confederate leadership rallied and repulsed his incursion. Attacks by Maj. Gen. Horatio G. Wright on the western edge of the Mule Shoe, which became known as the "Bloody Angle," involved almost 24 hours of desperate hand-to-hand fighting, some of the most intense of the Civil War. Supporting attacks by Warren and by Maj. Gen. Ambrose Burnside were unsuccessful. In the end, the battle was tactically inconclusive, but with almost 32,000 casualties on both sides, it was the costliest battle of the campaign. Grant planned to end the stalemate by once again shifting around Lee's right flank to the southeast, toward Richmond.

Grant's objective following Spotsylvania was the North Anna River, about 25 mi south. He sent Hancock's Corps ahead of his army, hoping that Lee would attack it, luring him into the open. Lee did not take the bait and beat Grant to the North Anna. On May 23, Warren's V Corps crossed the river at Jericho Mills, fighting off an attack by A.P. Hill's corps, while Hancock's II Corps captured the bridge on the Telegraph Road. Lee then devised a plan, which represented a significant potential threat to Grant: a five-mile (8 km) line that formed an inverted "V" shape with its apex on the river at Ox Ford, the only defensible crossing in the area. By moving south of the river, Lee hoped that Grant would assume that he was retreating, leaving only a token force to prevent a crossing at Ox Ford. If Grant pursued, the pointed wedge of the inverted V would split his army and Lee could concentrate on interior lines to defeat one wing; the other Union wing would have to cross the North Anna twice to support the attacked wing.

The Union Army assaulted the tip of the apex at Ox Ford and the right wing of the V. However, Lee, incapacitated in his tent by diarrhea, could not effect the attack he hoped to make. Grant realized the situation he was faced with and ordered his men to stop advancing and to build earthworks of their own. The Union general remained optimistic and was convinced that Lee had demonstrated the weakness of his army. He wrote to the Army's chief of staff, Maj. Gen. Henry W. Halleck: "Lee's army is really whipped. ... I may be mistaken but I feel that our success over Lee's army is already assured."

As he did after the Wilderness and Spotsylvania, Grant planned another wide swing around Lee's flank, marching east of the Pamunkey River to screen his movements from the Confederates. His army disengaged on May 27 and crossed the river. Lee moved his army swiftly in response, heading for Atlee's Station on the Virginia Central Railroad, a point only 9 miles north of Richmond. There, his men would be well-positioned behind a stream known as Totopotomoy Creek to defend against Grant if he moved against the railroads or Richmond. Lee was not certain of Grant's specific plans, however; if Grant was not intending to cross the Pamunkey in force at Hanovertown, the Union army could outflank him and head directly to Richmond. Lee ordered cavalry under Maj. Gen. Wade Hampton to make a reconnaissance in force, break through the Union cavalry screen, and find the Union infantry.

On May 28, Hampton's troopers encountered Union cavalry under Brig. Gen. David McM. Gregg in the Battle of Haw's Shop. Fighting predominately dismounted and utilizing earthworks for protection, neither side achieved an advantage. The battle was inconclusive, but it was one of the bloodiest cavalry engagements of the war. Hampton held up the Union cavalry for seven hours, prevented it from achieving its reconnaissance objectives, and had provided valuable intelligence to Lee about the disposition of Grant's army.

After Grant's infantry had crossed to the south bank of the Pamunkey, Lee saw an opportunity on May 30 to attack Warren's advancing V Corps with his Second Corps, now commanded by Lt. Gen. Jubal Early. Early's divisions under Maj. Gens. Robert E. Rodes and Stephen Dodson Ramseur drove the Union troops back in the Battle of Bethesda Church, but Ramseur's advance was stopped by a fierce stand of infantry and artillery fire. On that same day, a small cavalry engagement at Matadequin Creek (the Battle of Old Church) drove an outnumbered Confederate cavalry brigade to the crossroads of Old Cold Harbor, verifying to Lee that Grant intended to move toward that vital intersection beyond Lee's right flank, attempting to avoid another stalemate on the Totopotomoy Creek line.

Lee received notice that reinforcements were heading Grant's way from Bermuda Hundred. The 16,000 men of Maj. Gen. William F. "Baldy" Smith's XVIII Corps were withdrawn from Maj. Gen. Benjamin Butler's Army of the James at Grant's request, just as Butler was planning a major effort to capture Petersburg. The corps was soon moving down the James River and up the York to the Pamunkey. If Smith moved due west from White House Landing to Old Cold Harbor, 3 mi southeast of Bethesda Church on Grant's left flank, the extended Federal line would be too far south for the Confederate right to contain. Smith's men arrived at White House May 30–31, but for the second time they were ordered further up the Pamunkey to New Castle, and not to the west. One brigade was left behind on guard duty, but instead of the bulk of the corps joining Grant's army early on June 1, it only joined Wright's corps for offensive action about 3 p.m. after a needlessly long and quite exhausting march. Very early on June 1, for the third time, orders went out for Smith to move his command to New Castle. Obviously a mistake, it was either made by General Grant or the member of his staff to whom he gave the order for transmission.

Lee also received reinforcements. Confederate President Jefferson Davis directed Gen. P.G.T. Beauregard to send the division of Maj. Gen. Robert F. Hoke, over 7,000 men, from below the James River. (The first troops of Hoke's division arrived at Old Cold Harbor on May 31, but were unable to prevent the Union cavalry from seizing the intersection.) With these additional troops, and by managing to replace many of his 20,000 casualties to that point in the campaign, Lee's Army of Northern Virginia had 59,000 men to contend with Meade's and Grant's 108,000. But the disparity in numbers was no longer what it had been—Grant's reinforcements were often raw recruits and heavy artillery troops, pulled from the defenses of Washington, D.C., who were relatively inexperienced in infantry tactics, while most of Lee's had been veterans moved from inactive fronts, and who were soon entrenched in impressive fortifications.

Union
Grant's Union forces totaled approximately 108,000 men. They consisted of the Army of the Potomac, under Maj. Gen. George Meade, and the XVIII Corps, on temporary assignment from the Army of the James. The six corps were:
 * II Corps, under Maj. Gen. Winfield Scott Hancock, including the divisions of Maj. Gen. David B. Birney and Brig. Gens. Francis C. Barlow, and John Gibbon.
 * V Corps, under Maj. Gen. Gouverneur K. Warren, including the divisions of Brig. Gens. Charles Griffin, Henry H. Lockwood, and Lysander Cutler. On June 6, the corps was reorganized to the divisions of Griffin, Cutler, and Brig. Gens. Romeyn B. Ayres and Samuel W. Crawford.
 * VI Corps, under Brig. Gen. Horatio Wright, including the divisions of Brig. Gens. David A. Russell, Thomas H. Neill, and James B. Ricketts.
 * IX Corps, under Maj. Gen. Ambrose Burnside, including the divisions of Maj. Gen. Thomas Leonidas Crittenden and Brig. Gens. Robert B. Potter, Orlando B. Willcox, and Edward Ferrero. On June 9, Crittenden was replaced by Brig. Gen. James H. Ledlie.
 * Cavalry Corps, under Maj. Gen. Philip Sheridan, including the divisions of Brig. Gens. Alfred T.A. Torbert, David McM. Gregg, and James H. Wilson.
 * XVIII Corps, under Maj. Gen. William F. "Baldy" Smith, including the divisions of Brig. Gens. William T. H. Brooks, John H. Martindale, and Charles Devens. On June 4, Devens became ill and was replaced by Brig. Gen. Adelbert Ames.

Confederate
Lee's Confederate Army of Northern Virginia comprised about 59,000 men and was organized into four corps and two independent divisions:
 * First Corps, under Lt. Gen. Richard H. Anderson, including the divisions of Maj. Gens. Charles W. Field and George Pickett, and Brig. Gen. Joseph B. Kershaw.
 * Second Corps, under Lt. Gen. Jubal Early, including the divisions of Maj. Gens. Stephen D. Ramseur, John B. Gordon, and Robert E. Rodes.
 * Third Corps, under Lt. Gen. A.P. Hill, including the divisions of Maj. Gens. Henry Heth and Cadmus M. Wilcox, and Brig. Gen. William Mahone.
 * Cavalry Corps, without a commander following the mortal wounding of Maj. Gen. J. E. B. Stuart on May 11, including the divisions of Maj. Gens. Wade Hampton, Fitzhugh Lee, and W.H.F. "Rooney" Lee. (Hampton became the commander of the Cavalry Corps on August 11, 1864.)
 * Breckinridge's Division, commanded by Maj. Gen. John C. Breckinridge.
 * Hoke's Division, commanded by Maj. Gen. Robert F. Hoke.

Location
The battle was fought in central Virginia, in what is now Mechanicsville, over the same ground as the Battle of Gaines's Mill during the Seven Days Battles of 1862. Some accounts refer to the 1862 battle as the First Battle of Cold Harbor, and the 1864 battle as the Second Battle of Cold Harbor. Union soldiers were disturbed to discover skeletal remains from the first battle while entrenching. Cold Harbor was not a port city, despite its name. Rather, it described two rural crossroads named for the Cold Harbor Tavern (owned by the Isaac Burnett family) which provided shelter (harbor) but no hot meals. Old Cold Harbor stood two miles east of Gaines's Mill, and New Cold Harbor a mile southeast. Both were approximately 10 mi northeast of Richmond, capital of the Confederacy. From these crossroads, the Union army was positioned to receive reinforcements sailing up the Pamunkey River, and could attack either the Confederate capital or its Army of Northern Virginia.

May 31
The cavalry forces that had fought at Old Church continued to face each other on May 31. Lee sent a cavalry division under Maj. Gen. Fitzhugh Lee to reinforce Brig. Gen. Matthew Butler and secure the crossroads at Old Cold Harbor. As Union Brig. Gen. Alfred T. A. Torbert increased pressure on the Confederates, Robert E. Lee ordered Anderson's First Corps to shift right from Totopotomoy Creek to support the cavalry. The lead brigade of Hoke's division also reached the crossroads to join Butler and Fitzhugh Lee. At 4 p.m. Torbert and elements of Brig. Gen. David McM. Gregg's cavalry division drove the Confederates from the Old Cold Harbor crossroads and began to dig in. As more of Hoke's and Anderson's men streamed in, Union cavalry commander Maj. Gen. Philip Sheridan became concerned and ordered Torbert to pull back toward Old Church.

Grant continued his interest in Old Cold Harbor and ordered Wright's VI Corps to move in that direction from his right flank on Totopotomoy Creek. He ordered Sheridan to return to the crossroads and secure it "at all hazards." Torbert returned at 1 a.m. and was relieved to find that the Confederates had failed to notice his previous withdrawal.

June 1
Robert E. Lee's plan for June 1 was to use his newly concentrated infantry against the small cavalry forces at Old Cold Harbor. But his subordinates did not coordinate correctly. Anderson did not integrate Hoke's division with his attack plan and left him with the understanding that he was not to assault until the First Corps' attack was well underway, because the Union defenders were disorganized as well. Wright's VI Corps had not moved out until after midnight and was on a 15 mi march. Smith's XVIII Corps, having been mistakenly sent to the wrong location several miles away, did not reach Old Cold Harbor in time to assist Torbert.

Anderson led his attack with the brigade formerly commanded by veteran Brig. Gen. Joseph B. Kershaw, which was now under a less experienced South Carolina politician, Col. Laurence M. Keitt. Keitt's men approached the entrenched cavalry of Brig. Gen. Wesley Merritt. Armed with seven-shot Spencer repeating carbines, Merritt's men delivered heavy fire, mortally wounding Keitt and destroying his brigade's cohesion. Hoke obeyed what he understood to be his orders and did not join in the attack, which was quickly called back by Anderson.

By 9 a.m. Wright's lead elements arrived at the crossroads and began to extend and improve the entrenchments started by the cavalrymen. Although Grant had intended for Wright to attack immediately, his men were exhausted from their long march and they were unsure as to the strength of the enemy. Wright decided to wait until after Smith arrived, which occurred in the afternoon, and the XVIII Corps men began to entrench on the right of the VI Corps. The Union cavalrymen retired to the east.

For the upcoming attack, Meade was concerned that the corps of Wright and Smith would not be sufficient, so he attempted to convince Warren to send reinforcements. He wrote to the V Corps commander, "Generals Wright and Smith will attack this evening. It is very desirable you should join this attack, unless in your judgment it is impracticable." Warren decided to send the division of Brig. Gen. Henry H. Lockwood, which began to march at 6 p.m., but no adequate reconnaissance of the road network had been conducted and Lockwood was not able to reach the impending battle in time to make a difference. Meade was also concerned about his left flank, which was not anchored on the Chickahominy and was potentially threatened by Fitzhugh Lee's cavalry. He ordered Phil Sheridan to send scouting parties into the area, but Sheridan resisted, telling Meade that it would be impossible to move his men before dark.

At 6:30 p.m. the attack that Grant had ordered for the morning finally began. Both Wright's and Smith's corps moved forward. Wright's men made little progress south of the Mechanicsville Road, which connected New and Old Cold Harbor, recoiling from heavy fire. North of the road, Brig. Gen. Emory Upton's brigade of Brig. Gen. David A. Russell's division also encountered heavy fire from Brig. Gen. Thomas L. Clingman's brigade, "A sheet of flame, sudden as lightning, red as blood, and so near that it seemed to singe the men's faces." Although Upton tried to rally his men forward, his brigade fell back to its starting point.

To Upton's right, the brigade of Col. William S. Truex found a gap in the Confederate line, between the brigades of Clingman and Brig. Gen. William T. Wofford, through a swampy, brush-filled ravine. As Truex's men charged through the gap, Clingman swung two regiments around to face them, and Anderson sent in Brig. Gen. Eppa Hunton's brigade from his corps reserve. Truex became surrounded on three sides and was forced to withdraw, although his men brought back hundreds of Georgian prisoners with them.

While action continued on the southern end of the battlefield, the three corps of Hancock, Burnside, and Warren were occupying a 5-mile line that stretched southeast to Bethesda Church, facing the Confederates under A.P. Hill, Breckinridge, and Early. At the border between the IX and V Corps, the division of Maj. Gen. Thomas L. Crittenden, recently transferred from the West following his poor performance in the Battle of Chickamauga, occupied a doglegged position with an angle that was parallel to the Shady Grove Road, separated from the V Corps by a marsh known as Magnolia Swamp. Two divisions of Early's Corps—Maj. Gen. Robert E. Rodes on the left, Maj. Gen. John B. Gordon on the right—used this area as their avenue of approach for an attack that began at 7 p.m. Warren later described this attack as a "feeler", and despite some initial successes, aided by the poor battle management of Crittenden, both Confederate probes were repulsed.

At this same time, Warren's division under Lockwood had become lost wandering on unfamiliar farm roads. Despite having dispatched Lockwood explicitly, the V Corps commander wrote to Meade, "In some unaccountable way, [Lockwood] took his whole division, without my knowing it, away from the left of the line of battle, and turned up the dark 2 miles in my rear, and I have not yet got him back. All this time the firing should have guided him at least. He is too incompetent, and too high rank leaves us no subordinate place for him. I earnestly beg that he may at once be relieved of duty with this army." Meade relieved Lockwood and replaced him with Brig. Gen. Samuel W. Crawford.

By dark, the fighting had petered out on both ends of the line. The Union assault had cost it 2,200 casualties, versus about 1,800 for the Confederates, but some progress had been made. They almost broke the Confederate line, which was now pinned in place with Union entrenchments being dug only yards away. Several of the generals, including Upton and Meade, were furious at Grant for ordering an assault without proper reconnaissance.

June 2

Although the June 1 attacks had been unsuccessful, Meade believed that an attack early on June 2 could succeed if he was able to mass sufficient forces against an appropriate location. He and Grant decided to attack Lee's right flank. Anderson's men had been heavily engaged there on June 1, and it seemed unlikely that they had found the time to build substantial defenses. And if the attack succeeded, Lee's right would be driven back into the Chickahominy River. Meade ordered Hancock's II Corps to shift southeast from Totopotomoy Creek and assume a position to the left of Wright's VI Corps. Once Hancock was in position, Meade would attack on his left from Old Cold Harbor with three Union corps in line, totaling 35,000 men: Hancock's II Corps, Wright's VI Corps, and Baldy Smith's XVIII Corps. Meade also ordered Warren and Burnside to attack Lee's left flank in the morning "at all hazards," convinced that Lee was moving troops from his left to fortify his right.

Hancock's men marched almost all night and arrived too worn-out for an immediate attack that morning. Grant agreed to let the men rest and postponed the attack until 5 p.m., and then again until 4:30 a.m. on June 3. But Grant and Meade did not give specific orders for the attack, leaving it up to the corps commanders to decide where they would hit the Confederate lines and how they would coordinate with each other. No senior commander had reconnoitered the enemy position. Baldy Smith wrote that he was "aghast at the reception of such an order, which proved conclusively the utter absence of any military plan." He told his staff that the whole attack was, "simply an order to slaughter my best troops."

Robert E. Lee took advantage of the Union delays to bolster his defenses. When Hancock departed Totopotomoy Creek, Lee was free to shift Breckenridge's division to his far right flank, where he would once again face Hancock. Breckinridge drove a small Union force off Turkey Hill, which dominated the southern part of the battlefield. Lee also moved troops from A.P. Hill's Third Corps, the divisions of Brig. Gens. William Mahone and Cadmus M. Wilcox, to support Breckinridge, and stationed cavalry under Fitzhugh Lee to guard the army's right flank. The result was a curving line on low ridges, 7 mi long, with the left flank anchored on Totopotomoy Creek, the right on the Chickahominy River, making any flanking moves impossible.

Lee's engineers used their time effectively and constructed the "most ingenious defensive configuration the war had yet witnessed." Barricades of earth and logs were erected. Artillery was posted with converging fields of fire on every avenue of approach, and stakes were driven into the ground to aid gunners' range estimates. A newspaper correspondent wrote that the works were, "Intricate, zig-zagged lines within lines, lines protecting flanks of lines, lines built to enfilade an opposing line, ... [It was] a maze and labyrinth of works within works." Heavy skirmish lines suppressed any ability of the Union to determine the strength or exact positions of the Confederate entrenchments.

Although they did not know the details of their objectives, the Union soldiers who had survived the frontal assaults at Spotsylvania Court House seemed to be in no doubt as to what they would be up against in the morning. Grant's aide, Lt. Col. Horace Porter, wrote in his memoirs that he saw many men writing their names on papers that they pinned inside their uniforms, so their bodies could be identified. (The accuracy of this story is disputed as Porter is the only source.) One blood-spattered diary from a Union soldier found after the battle included a final entry: "June 3. Cold Harbor. I was killed."

June 3

At 4:30 a.m. on June 3, the three Union corps began to advance through a thick ground fog. Massive fire from the Confederate lines quickly caused heavy casualties and the survivors were pinned down. Although the results varied in different parts of the line, the overall repulse of the Union advance resulted in the most lopsided casualties since the assault on Marye's Heights at the Battle of Fredericksburg in 1862.

The most effective performance of the day was on the Union left flank, where Hancock's corps was able to break through a portion of Breckinridge's front line and drive those defenders out of their entrenchments in hand-to-hand fighting. Several hundred prisoners and four guns were captured. However, nearby Confederate artillery was brought to bear on the entrenchments, turning them into a death trap for the Federals. Breckinridge's reserves counterattacked these men from the division of Brig. Gen. Francis C. Barlow and drove them off. Hancock's other advanced division, under Brig. Gen. John Gibbon, became disordered in swampy ground and could not advance through the heavy Confederate fire, with two brigade commanders (Cols. Peter A. Porter and H. Boyd McKeen) lost as casualties. One of Gibbon's men, complaining of a lack of reconnaissance, wrote, "We felt it was murder, not war, or at best a very serious mistake had been made."

In the center, Wright's corps was pinned down by the heavy fire and made little effort to advance further, still recovering from their costly charge on June 1. The normally aggressive Emory Upton felt that further movement by his division was "impracticable." Confederate defenders in this part of the line were unaware that a serious assault had been made against their position.

On the Union right, Smith's men advanced through unfavorable terrain and were channeled into two ravines. When they emerged in front of the Confederate line, rifle and artillery fire mowed them down. A Union officer wrote, "The men bent down as they pushed forward, as if trying, as they were, to breast a tempest, and the files of men went down like rows of blocks or bricks pushed over by striking against one another." A Confederate described the carnage of double-canister artillery fire as "deadly, bloody work." The artillery fire against Smith's corps was heavier than might have been expected because Warren's V Corps to his right was reluctant to advance and the Confederate gunners in Warren's sector concentrated on Smith's men instead.

The only activity on the northern end of the field was by Burnside's IX Corps, facing Jubal Early. He launched a powerful assault at 6 a.m. that overran the Confederate skirmishers but mistakenly thought he had pierced the first line of earthworks and halted his corps to regroup before moving on, which he planned for that afternoon.

At 7 a.m. Grant advised Meade to vigorously exploit any successful part of the assault. Meade ordered his three corps commanders on the left to assault at once, without regard to the movements of their neighboring corps. But all had had enough. Hancock advised against the move. Smith, calling a repetition of the attack a "wanton waste of life," refused to advance again. Wright's men increased their rifle fire but stayed in place. By 12:30 p.m. Grant conceded that his army was done. He wrote to Meade, "The opinion of the corps commanders not being sanguine of success in case an assault is ordered, you may direct a suspension of further advance for the present." Union soldiers still pinned down before the Confederate lines began entrenching, using cups and bayonets to dig, sometimes including bodies of dead comrades as part of their improvised earthworks.

Meade inexplicably bragged to his wife the next day that he was in command for the assault. But his performance had been poor. Despite orders from Grant that the corps commanders were to examine the ground, their reconnaissance was lax and Meade failed to supervise them adequately, either before or during the attack. He was able to motivate only about 20,000 of his men to attack—the II Corps and parts of the XVIII and IX—failing to achieve the mass he knew he required to succeed. His men paid heavily for the poorly coordinated assault. Estimates of casualties that morning are from 3,000 to 7,000 on the Union side, no more than 1,500 on the Confederate. Grant commented after the war:

"I have always regretted that the last assault at Cold Harbor was ever made. I might say the same thing of the assault of the 22d of May, 1863, at Vicksburg. At Cold Harbor no advantage whatever was gained to compensate for the heavy loss we sustained. Indeed, the advantages other than those of relative losses, were on the Confederate side. Before that, the Army of Northern Virginia seemed to have acquired a wholesome regard for the courage, endurance, and soldierly qualities generally of the Army of the Potomac. They no longer wanted to fight them 'one Confederate to five Yanks.' Indeed, they seemed to have given up any idea of gaining any advantage of their antagonist in the open field. They had come to much prefer breastworks in their front to the Army of the Potomac. This charge seemed to revive their hopes temporarily; but it was of short duration. The effect upon the Army of the Potomac was the reverse. When we reached the James River, however, all effects of the battle of Cold Harbor seemed to have disappeared."

At 11 a.m. on June 3, the Confederate postmaster general, John Henninger Reagan, arrived with a delegation from Richmond. He asked Robert E. Lee, "General, if the enemy breaks your line, what reserve have you?" Lee provided an animated response: "Not a regiment, and that has been my condition ever since the fighting commenced on the Rappahannock. If I shorten my lines to provide a reserve, he will turn me; if I weaken my lines to provide a reserve, he will break them." Modern scholarship has shown Lee had ample reserves unengaged. His comments likely were to persuade Richmond to send more troops.

June 4–12
Grant and Meade launched no more attacks on the Confederate defenses at Cold Harbor. The two opposing armies faced each other for nine days of trench warfare, in some places only yards apart. Sharpshooters worked continuously, killing many. Union artillery bombarded the Confederates with a battery of eight Coehorn mortars; the Confederates responded by depressing the trail of a 24-pound howitzer and lobbing shells over the Union positions. Although there were no more large-scale attacks, casualty figures for the entire battle were twice as large as from the June 3 assault alone.

The trenches were hot, dusty, and miserable, but conditions were worse between the lines, where thousands of wounded Federal soldiers suffered horribly without food, water, or medical assistance. Grant was reluctant to ask for a formal truce that would allow him to recover his wounded because that would be an acknowledgment he had lost the battle. He and Lee traded notes across the lines from June 5 to 7 without coming to an agreement, and when Grant formally requested a two-hour cessation of hostilities, it was too late for most of the unfortunate wounded, who were now bloated corpses. Grant was widely criticized in the Northern press for this lapse of judgment.

On June 4 Grant tightened his lines by moving Burnside's corps behind Matadequin Creek as a reserve and moving Warren leftward to connect with Smith, shortening his lines about 3 mi. On June 6 Early probed Burnside's new position but could not advance through the impassable swamps. Grant realized that, once again in the campaign, he was in a stalemate with Lee and additional assaults were not the answer. He planned three actions to make some headway. First, in the Shenandoah Valley, Maj. Gen. David Hunter was making progress against Confederate forces, and Grant hoped that by interdicting Lee's supplies, the Confederate general would be forced to dispatch reinforcements to the Valley. Second, on June 7 Grant dispatched his cavalry under Sheridan (the divisions of Brig. Gens. David McM. Gregg and Wesley Merritt) to destroy the Virginia Central Railroad near Charlottesville. Third, he planned a stealthy operation to withdraw from Lee's front and move across the James River. Lee reacted to the first two actions as Grant had hoped. He pulled Breckinridge's division from Cold Harbor and sent it toward Lynchburg to parry Hunter. By June 12 he followed this by assigning Jubal Early permanent command of the Second Corps and sending them to the Valley as well. And he sent two of his three cavalry divisions in pursuit of Sheridan, leading to the Battle of Trevilian Station. However, despite anticipating that Grant might shift across the James, Lee was taken by surprise when it occurred. On June 12 the Army of the Potomac finally disengaged to march southeast to cross the James and threaten Petersburg, a crucial rail junction south of Richmond.

Aftermath
The Battle of Cold Harbor was the final victory won by Lee's army during the war (part of his forces won the Battle of the Crater the following month, during the Siege of Petersburg, but this did not represent a general engagement between the armies), and its most decisive in terms of casualties. The Union army, in attempting the futile assault, lost 10,000 to 13,000 men over twelve days. The battle brought the toll in Union casualties since the beginning of May to a total of more than 52,000, compared to 33,000 for Lee. Although the cost was great, Grant's larger army finished the campaign with lower relative casualties than Lee's.

Estimates vary as to the casualties at Cold Harbor. The following table summarizes estimates from a variety of popular sources:

Some authors (Catton, Esposito, Foote, McPherson, Grimsley) estimate the casualties for the major assault on June 3 and all agree on approximately 7,000 total Union casualties, 1,500 Confederate. Gordon Rhea, considered the preeminent modern historian of Grant's Overland Campaign, has examined casualty lists in detail and has published a contrarian view in his 2002 book, Cold Harbor. For the morning assault on June 3, he can account for only 3,500 to 4,000 Union killed, wounded, and missing, and estimates that for the entire day the Union suffered about 6,000 casualties, compared to Lee's 1,000 to 1,500. Rhea noted that although this was a horrific loss, Grant's main attack on June 3 was dwarfed by Lee's daily losses at Antietam, Chancellorsville, and Pickett's Charge, and is comparable to Malvern Hill.

McPherson states: "In that [Cold Harbor] attack, ordered by Lieutenant General Ulysses S. Grant, fifty thousand Union soldiers suffered seven thousand casualties, most of them in less than half an hour. For this mistake, which he admitted, Grant has been branded a 'butcher' careless of the lives of his men, and Cold Harbor has become a symbol of mule-headed futility.  At Gettysburg, Lee's men also sustained almost seven thousand casualties in the Pickett-Pettigrew assault, most of them also within a half hour.  Yet this attack is perceived as an example of great courage and honor.  This contrast speaks volumes about the comparative images of Grant and Lee, North and South, Union and Confederacy."

The battle caused a rise in anti-war sentiment in the Northern states. Grant became known as the "fumbling butcher" for his poor decisions. It also lowered the morale of his remaining troops. But the campaign had served Grant's purpose—as ill-advised as his attack on Cold Harbor was, Lee had lost the initiative and was forced to devote his attention to the defense of Richmond and Petersburg. He beat Grant to Petersburg, barely, but spent the remainder of the war (save its final week) defending Richmond behind a fortified trench line. Although Southerners realized their situation was desperate, they hoped that Lee's stubborn (and bloody) resistance would have political repercussions by causing Abraham Lincoln to lose the 1864 presidential election to a more peace-friendly candidate. The taking of Atlanta in September dashed these hopes, and the end of the Confederacy was just a matter of time.

Cold Harbor Tavern and Garthright House
During the battle, Burnett's tavern (no longer standing) was used as a hospital. Union soldiers carried away all items of value, except for a crystal compote bowl saved by Mrs. Burnett. The Garthright House was also used as a field hospital, the exterior of which is now preserved.

Battlefield preservation
In 2008, the Civil War Trust (a division of the American Battlefield Trust) placed the Cold Harbor battlefield on its Ten Most Endangered Battlefields list. Development pressure in the Richmond area was so great that only about 300 acre of what was once at least a 7500 acre battlefield are currently preserved as part of the Richmond National Battlefield Park. Hanover County also maintains a small 50 acre park adjacent to the NPS's Cold Harbor holdings. The Trust and its partners have acquired and preserved 280 acres of the battlefield through early 2024.

Memoirs and primary sources

 * Atkinson, Charles Francis. Grant's Campaigns of 1864 and 1865: The Wilderness and Cold Harbor (May 3 – June 3, 1864). The Pall Mall military series. London: H. Rees, 1908..
 * Badeau, Adam. Military History of Ulysses S. Grant (Vol. III). New York: D. Appleton & Co., 1881.
 * Grant, Ulysses S. Personal Memoirs of U. S. Grant. 2 vols. Charles L. Webster & Company, 1885–86. ISBN 0-914427-67-9.
 * Longstreet, James. From Manassas to Appomattox: Memoirs of the Civil War in America. New York: Da Capo Press, 1992. ISBN 0-306-80464-6. First published in 1896 by J. B. Lippincott and Co.
 * Porter, Horace. Campaigning with Grant. New York: Century Co., 1897..
 * U.S. War Department, The War of the Rebellion: a Compilation of the Official Records of the Union and Confederate Armies. Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1880–1901.

title: Battle of Cold Harbor


text:
Washington County, Oregon

Washington County is one of 36 counties in the U.S. state of Oregon and part of the Portland metropolitan area. The 2020 census recorded the population as 600,372, making it the second most populous county in the state and most populous "Washington County" in the United States. Hillsboro is the county seat and largest city, while other major cities include Beaverton, Tigard, Cornelius, Banks, Gaston, Sherwood, North Plains, and Forest Grove, the county's oldest city. Originally named Twality when created in 1843, the Oregon Territorial Legislature renamed it for the nation's first president in 1849 and included the entire northwest corner of Oregon before new counties were created in 1854. The Tualatin River and its drainage basin lie almost entirely within the county, which shares its boundaries with the Tualatin Valley. It is bordered on the west and north by the Northern Oregon Coast Range, on the south by the Chehalem Mountains, and on the north and east by the Tualatin Mountains, or West Hills.

Major roads include sections of Interstate 5 and 205, the Sunset Highway, Oregon Route 217, 47, 10, 6 and 8. Public transportation is primarily operated by TriMet and includes buses, the Westside Express Service commuter rail, and MAX Light Rail. Other transportation includes air travel at Hillsboro Airport, private airfields and heliports, and heavy rail cargo on rail lines.

History

The Provisional Legislature of Oregon created the county as Twality District on July 5, 1843. Twality was one of the original four districts of the Provisional Government of Oregon in Oregon Country along with Clackamas, Champooick (later Marion), and Yamhill counties. Columbia, later known as Hillsboro, was selected as the county seat in 1850. Washington County lost significant portions of its original area when Columbia and Multnomah counties were created in 1854. The county area was increased by 160 acres in 2014 when a section of Multnomah County was attached to Washington. The area was returned to Washington County to allow for property development.

The construction of Canyon Road to Beaverton helped Portland to consolidate its position as the primary port of Oregon, and defeat the rival efforts of settlements such as Oregon City and Milwaukie.

In November 2004, the County and the City of Beaverton agreed to a plan where the city would annex both unincorporated residential neighborhoods as well as high-value areas of land. This would result with Cedar Hills, Garden Home, Raleigh Hills, West Slope being incorporated by 2010, and the communities of Aloha, Bethany, and Cedar Mill at some point after that.

Those plans have since been put on hold after Beaverton attempted to annex Nike, Inc.'s World Headquarters, which would have increased Nike's taxes substantially. Nike successfully lobbied the legislature for a law that would prohibit their annexation for 99 years. Since that decision, annexation plans have been halted, and Washington County started urban planning to provide city-level services to the unincorporated urban areas in the county.

Geography
According to the United States Census Bureau, the county has a total area of 726 sqmi, of which 724 sqmi is land and 2.2 sqmi (0.3%) is water. It is located approximately 20 mi to the west of Portland. The Portland Metro Urban Growth Boundary (UGB) bisects the county. The county's highest point is South Saddle Mountain at 3,464 ft above sea level in the Northern Oregon Coast Range.

Most of the county is in the Tualatin Valley, formed by the Tualatin Mountains to the east and north, the Chehalem Mountains to the south, and the Northern Oregon Coast Range to the west and north. The Tualatin River, located almost entirely within the county, flows through the Tualatin Plains. The northern and western portions of the county are forested, while the remainder of the county includes urban areas, agricultural lands, and floodplains.

Waterways
The Tualatin River is the main river in Washington County. Henry Hagg Lake, southwest of Forest Grove, is the largest lake. The Willamette River lies to the east, the Columbia River to the northeast, and the Pacific Ocean to the west of the county.

Adjacent counties

 * Clatsop County - northwest
 * Columbia County - north
 * Multnomah County - east
 * Clackamas County - southeast
 * Yamhill County - south
 * Tillamook County - west

Major highways

 * I-5.svg Interstate 5 (freeway)
 * I-205.svg Interstate 205 (freeway)
 * US 26.svg U.S. Route 26 (freeway for part)
 * OR 6.svg Oregon Route 6
 * OR 8.svg Oregon Route 8
 * OR 10.svg Oregon Route 10
 * OR 47.svg Oregon Route 47
 * OR 99W.svg Oregon Route 99W
 * OR 210.svg Oregon Route 210
 * OR 217.svg Oregon Route 217 (freeway)
 * OR 219.svg Oregon Route 219

National protected areas

 * Tualatin River National Wildlife Refuge (part)

2010 census
As of the 2010 census, there were 529,710 people, 200,934 households, and 134,323 families residing in the county. The population density was 731.4 PD/sqmi. There were 212,450 housing units at an average density of 293.3 /sqmi. The racial makeup of the county was 76.6% white, 8.6% Asian, 1.8% black or African American, 0.7% American Indian, 0.5% Pacific islander, 7.5% from other races, and 4.3% from two or more races. Those of Hispanic or Latino origin made up 15.7% of the population. In terms of ancestry, 20.8% were German, 12.4% were English, 12.1% were Irish, and 3.2% were American.

Of the 200,934 households, 36.0% had children under the age of 18 living with them, 52.2% were married couples living together, 10.1% had a female householder with no husband present, 33.2% were non-families, and 25.1% of all households were made up of individuals. The average household size was 2.60 and the average family size was 3.14. The median age was 35.3 years.

The median income for a household in the county was $62,574 and the median income for a family was $76,778. Males had a median income of $54,417 versus $40,254 for females. The per capita income for the county was $30,522. About 6.7% of families and 9.5% of the population were below the poverty line, including 12.5% of those under age 18 and 6.7% of those age 65 or over.

2000 census
As of the 2000 census, there were 445,342 people, 169,162 households, and 114,015 families in the county. The population density was 615 /mi2. There were 178,913 housing units at an average density of 247 /mi2. The racial makeup of the county was 82.19% White, 1.15% Black or African American, 0.65% Native American, 6.68% Asian, 0.30% Pacific Islander, 5.86% from other races, and 3.17% from two or more races. 11.17% of the population were Hispanic or Latino of any race. 17.2% were of German, 9.9% English, 8.2% Irish, and 6.7% American ancestry. 81.7% spoke only English at home, while 9.6% spoke Spanish and 1.2% Vietnamese.

There were 169,162 households, out of which 35.60% had children under the age of 18 living with them, 54.50% were married couples living together, 9.00% had a female householder with no husband present, and 32.60% were non-families. 24.70% of all households were made up of individuals, and 6.70% had someone living alone who was 65 years of age or older. The average household size was 2.61 and the average family size was 3.14.

The county population contained 26.90% under the age of 18, 9.30% from 18 to 24, 34.10% from 25 to 44, 20.90% from 45 to 64, and 8.80% who were 65 years of age or older. The median age was 33 years. For every 100 females, there were 99.10 males. For every 100 females age 18 and over, there were 97.00 males.

The median income for a household in the county was $52,122, and the median income for a family was $61,499. Males had a median income of $43,304 versus $31,074 for females. The per capita income for the county was $24,969. About 4.90% of families and 7.40% of the population were below the poverty line, including 8.30% of those under age 18 and 5.30% of those age 65 or over.

Government
The county is governed by an elected board of five commissioners. The county is divided into four commissioner districts. One commissioner sits for each district, and the fifth commissioner is at-large and is the chair of the board.

Politics
Like all of the Yankee-influenced Willamette Valley and Oregon Coast, Washington County was in its pre-Depression history strongly Republican. After Oregon achieved statehood in 1859, Washington County voted for the Republican presidential nominee in every presidential election from 1860 to 1928, except in the 1912 presidential election when the county supported Progressive Party candidate and former Republican president Theodore Roosevelt. In 1932, Franklin D. Roosevelt became the first-ever Democrat to win the Washington County vote, and he repeated this success in 1936 and 1940. Between 1944 and 1988, Washington County was never won by a Democrat except in Lyndon B. Johnson's landslide victory in 1964. As recently as 1976, Washington County was the second-most Republican county in the state behind Malheur County in southeast Oregon. Gerald Ford's 17,529-vote margin of victory in the county was decisive in narrowly carrying the state of Oregon during that year's presidential election.

Since the 1990s, the increasing drift of the Republican Party nationally towards the South and evangelicalism, along with urbanization, has resulted in a strong shift of Washington County towards the Democratic Party. No Republican presidential candidate has carried Washington County since George H. W. Bush did so in 1988, and in three of the past four presidential elections, Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, and Joe Biden all prevailed the county by over twenty percentage points. The last Republican to win a statewide election in Washington County was Gordon H. Smith in the 2002 Senate contest. In the 2008 Senatorial election, Democrat Jeff Merkley won 48.8 percent of the county's vote (111,367) while Republican incumbent Smith won 46.5 percent (106,114), but no subsequent Republican Senate candidate has won 40 percent of the county's votes. In the 2020 presidential election, Biden hit 65.5% of the county's vote, the highest ever for a Democratic presidential nominee.

Economy
Washington County is centered on a fertile plain that attracted farmers before the first wagon trains. In 1997, orchards covered 8,403 acre of the county's lands and 1,163 acre were devoted to vineyards. Agriculture is still a major industry in Washington County, as are lumber, manufacturing, and food processing.

The development of a large electronics industry during the 1980s and 1990s is the dominating factor of the county economy, and contributing to the creation of Oregon's Silicon Forest. California-based Intel, Oregon's largest private-sector employer, has its largest concentration of employees in the county, mainly in Hillsboro. Other technology companies include Electro Scientific Industries, FEI Company, Qorvo, Tektronix, SolarWorld, Planar Systems, and EPSON.

Nike, one of two Fortune 500 corporations based in Oregon, has its headquarters in Washington County. Until it was acquired by IBM, Sequent Computer Systems was headquartered near Nike. Other companies with headquarters in Washington County include optical instruments manufacturer Leupold & Stevens, Columbia Sportswear, and Reser's Fine Foods.

Census-designated places

 * Aloha
 * Bethany
 * Bull Mountain
 * Cedar Hills
 * Cedar Mill
 * Cherry Grove
 * Dilley
 * Garden Home–Whitford
 * Marlene Village
 * Metzger
 * Oak Hills
 * Raleigh Hills
 * Rockcreek
 * West Haven-Sylvan
 * West Slope

Unincorporated communities

 * Bacona
 * Balm Grove
 * Blooming
 * Bonita
 * Bonny Slope
 * Bradley Corner
 * Buckheaven
 * Buxton
 * Carnation
 * Chehalem
 * Dixie
 * Elmonica
 * Farmington
 * Gales Creek
 * Glencoe
 * Glenwood
 * Hayward
 * Hazeldale
 * Hillside
 * Huber
 * Kansas City
 * Kinton
 * Laurel
 * Laurelwood
 * Manning
 * Middleton
 * Midway
 * Mountaindale
 * Mulloy
 * Norwood
 * Orenco
 * Patton
 * Progress
 * Reedville
 * Roy
 * Scholls
 * Six Corners
 * Somerset West
 * Tanasbourne
 * Thatcher
 * Timber
 * Tobias
 * Verboort
 * Watts
 * West Union
 * Wilkesboro
 * Witch Hazel

Helvetia
Helvetia is a small unincorporated community in Washington County, Oregon. It is located in the Tualatin Valley along U.S. Route 26, 15 minutes west of Portland. It was named by Swiss immigrants to Oregon in the 19th century.

The reality television series Little People, Big World is set on Roloff Farms in Helvetia, making the location a popular tourist attraction. The Helvetia area is only a few miles from both the Intel and Nike headquarters campuses. It consists of heritage farms and million dollar estate properties. The area is part of Tualatin Valley Fire and Rescue's service area.

The Holcomb Creek Trestle, the longest wooden railroad bridge currently in use in the United States, is located in the Helvetia area.

license: Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/

title: Washington County, Oregon


text:
Guanxi

Guanxi is a term used in Chinese culture to describe an individual's social network of mutually beneficial personal and business relationships. The character guan, 关, means “closed” and "caring" while the character xi 系 means “system” and together the term refers to a closed caring system of relationships that is somewhat analogous to the term old boy's network in the West. In Western media, the pinyin romanization guanxi is more widely used than common translations such as "connections" or "relationships" because those terms do not capture the significance of a person's guanxi to most personal and business dealings in China. Unlike in the West, guanxi relationships are almost never established purely through formal meetings but must also include spending time to get to know each other during tea sessions, dinner banquets, or other personal meetings. Essentially, guanxi requires a personal bond before any business relationship can develop. As a result, guanxi relationships are often more tightly bound than relationships in Western personal social networks. Guanxi has a major influence on the management of businesses based in mainland China, Hong Kong, and those owned by Overseas Chinese people in Southeast Asia (the bamboo network).

Guanxi and guanxi networks are grounded in Confucian doctrine about the proper structure of family, hierarchical, and friendly relationships in a community, including the need for implicit mutual commitments, reciprocity, and trust.

Guanxi has 3 sub-dimensions sometimes abbreviated as GRX which stands for ganqing, a measure of the emotional attachment in a relationship, renqing (人情 rénqíng/jen-ch'ing), the moral obligation to maintain a relationship with reciprocal exchange of favors, and xinren, or the amount of interpersonal trust. Guanxi is also related to the idea of "face" (面子, miànzi/mien-tzu), which refers to social status, propriety, prestige, or a combination of all three. Other related concepts include wulun, the five cardinal types of relationships, which supports the idea of a long term, developing relationship between a business and its client, and yi-ren and ren, which respectively support reciprocity and empathy.

History
The guanxi system developed in imperial, dynastic China. Historically, China lacked a strong rule of law and the government did not hold every citizen subject to the law. As a result, the law did not provide the same legal protection as it did in the West. Chinese people developed guanxi along with the concept of face and personal reputation to help ensure trust between each other in business and personal matters. Today, the power of guanxi resides primarily within the Chinese Communist Party (CCP).

In a personal context
At its most basic, guanxi describes a personal connection between two people in which one is able to prevail upon another to perform a favor or service, or be prevailed upon, that is, one's standing with another. The two people need not be of equal social status. Guanxi can also be used to describe a network of contacts, which an individual can call upon when something needs to be done, and through which he or she can exert influence on behalf of another.

Guanxi also refers to the benefits gained from social connections and usually extends from extended family, school friends, workmates and members of standard clubs or organizations. It is customary for Chinese people to cultivate an intricate web of guanxi relationships, which may expand in a huge number of directions, and includes lifelong relationships. Staying in contact with members of your network is not necessary to bind reciprocal obligations. Reciprocal favors are the key factor to maintaining one's guanxi web. At the same time failure to reciprocate is considered an unforgivable offense (that is, the more one asks of someone, the more one owes them). Guanxi can perpetuate a never-ending cycle of favors.

The term is not generally used to describe interpersonal relationships within a family, although guanxi obligations can sometimes be described in terms of an extended family. Essentially, familial relations are the core of one's interpersonal relations, while the various non-familial interpersonal relations are modifications or extensions of the familial relations. Chinese culture's emphasis on familial relations informs guanxi as well, making it such that both familial relations and non-familial interpersonal relations are grounded by similar behavioral norms. An individual may view and interact with other individuals in a way that is similar to their viewing of and interactions with family members; through guanxi, a relationship between two friends can be likened by each friend to being a pseudo elder sibling–younger sibling relationship, with each friend acting accordingly based on that relationship (the friend who sees himself as the "younger sibling" will show more deference to the friend who is the "older sibling"). Guanxi is also based in concepts like loyalty, dedication, reciprocity, and trust, which help to develop non-familial interpersonal relations, while mirroring the concept of filial piety, which is used to ground familial relations.

Ultimately, the relationships formed by guanxi are personal and not transferable.

In a business context
In China, a country where business relations are highly socially embedded, guanxi plays a central role in the shaping and development of day-to-day business transactions by allowing inter-business relationships and relationships between businesses and the government to grow as individuals representing these organizations work with one another. Specifically, in a business context, guanxi occurs through individual interactions first before being applied on a corporate level (e.g., one member of a business may perform a favor for a member of another business because they have interpersonal ties, which helps to facilitate the relationship between the two businesses involved in this interaction). Guanxi also acts as an essential informal governance mechanism, helping leverage Chinese organizations on social and economic platforms. In places in China where institutions, like the structuring of local governments and government policies, may make business interactions less efficient to facilitate, guanxi can serve as a way for businesses to circumvent such institutions by having their members cultivate their interpersonal ties.

Thus, guanxi is important in two domains: social ties with managers of suppliers, buyers, competitors, and other business intermediaries; and social ties with government officials at various national government-regulated agencies. Given its extensive influential power in the shaping of business operations, many see guanxi as a crucial source of social capital and strategic tool for business success. Thanks to a good knowledge of guanxi, companies obtain secret information, increase their knowledge about precise government regulations, and receive privileged access to stocks and resources. Knowing this, some economists have warned that Western countries and others that trade regularly with China should improve their "cultural competency" in regards to practices such as guanxi. In doing so, such countries can avoid financial fallout caused by a lack of awareness regarding the way practices like guanxi operate.

The nature of guanxi, however, can also form the basis of patron–client relations. As a result, it creates challenges for businesses whose members are obligated to repay favors to members of other businesses when they cannot sufficiently do so. In following these obligations, businesses may also be forced to act in ways detrimental to their future, and start to over-rely on each other. Members within a business may also start to more frequently discuss information that all members knew prior, rather than try and discuss information only known by select members. If the ties fail between two businesses within an overall network built through guanxi, the other ties comprising the overall network have a chance of failing as well. A guanxi network may also violate bureaucratic norms, leading to corporate corruption.

Note that the aforementioned organizational flaws guanxi creates can be diminished by having more efficient institutions (like open market systems that are regulated by formal organizational procedures while promoting competition and innovation) in place to help facilitate business interactions more effectually.

In East Asian societies, the boundary between business and social lives can sometimes be ambiguous as people tend to rely heavily on their closer relations and friends. This can result in nepotism in the workforce being created through guanxi, as it is common for authoritative figures to draw from family and close ties to fill employment opportunities, instead of assessing talent and suitability. This practice often prevents the most suitably qualified person being employed for the position. However, guanxi only becomes nepotism when individuals start to value their interpersonal relationships as ways to accomplish their goals over the relationships themselves. When interpersonal relationships are seen in this light, then, it is usually the case that individuals are not viewing their cultivation of prospective business relationships without bias. In addition, guanxi and nepotism are distinct in that the former is inherently a social transaction (considering the emphasis on the actual act of building relationships) and not purely based in financial transactions, while the latter is explicitly based in financial transactions and has a higher chance of resulting in legal consequences. However, cronyism is less obvious and can lead to low risk sycophancy and empire-building bureaucracy within the internal politics of an organisation.

In a political context
For relationship-based networks such as guanxi, reputation plays an important role in shaping interpersonal and political relations. As a result, the government is still the most important stakeholder, despite China's recent efforts to minimise government involvement. Key government officials wield the authority to choose political associates and allies, approve projects, allocate resources, and distribute finances. Thus, it is especially crucial for international companies to develop harmonious personal relationships with government officials. In addition to holding major legislative power, the Chinese government owns vital resources including land, banks, and major media networks and wields major influence over other stakeholders. Thus, it is important to maintain good relations with the central government in order for a business to maintain guanxi. However, the issue of guanxi as a form of government corruption has been raised into question over the recent years. This is often the case when businesspeople interpret guanxi 's reciprocal obligations as unethical gift-giving in exchange for government approval. The line drawn between ethical and unethical reciprocal obligation is unclear, but China is currently looking into understanding the structural problems inherent in the guanxi system.

In a diasporic context
Guanxi can be used as a school of thought that influences how ethnic Chinese think of and view society. The Chinese in the diaspora are more likely to adhere and connect to the group of people with shared background. Moreover, diasporic communities might possess ties with individuals in their home country. Guanxi allows the diaspora to maintain their networks and foster close relations with people in their home country and form a subethnic enclave within society. Guanxi could also influence how the diaspora assimilates into the host country, and how the diaspora deals with racism in society. Groups that could be studied are Chinese-Americans, Chinese-Indonesians who have faced prejudice in their host countries. Marred by the LA massacre in 1871, Saigu in 1992, the Japanese American internment during World War II, and the idea of the "Hindu Invasion", the Asian Americans already in the United States faced discrimination from the wider American society. They had to find solutions based on trial and error, looking for legal, political, and social ways to find their place in society.

Ethical concerns
In recent years, the ethical consequences of guanxi have been brought into question. While guanxi can bring benefits to people directly within the guanxi network, it also has the potential to bring harm to individuals, societies and nations when misused or abused. For example, mutual reciprocal obligation is a major component of guanxi. However, the specific date, time and method are often unspecified. Thus, guanxi can be ethically questionable when one party takes advantage of others' personal favors, without seeking to reciprocate. A common example of unethical reciprocal obligation involves the abuse of business-government relations. In 2013, an official of the CCP criticized government officials for using public funds of over 10,000 yuan for banquets. This totals to approximately 48 billion dollars worth of banquets per year. Guanxi may also allow for interpersonal obligations to take precedence over civic duties.

Guanxi is a neutral word, but the use or practice of guanxi can range from 'benign, neutral, to questionable and corrupt'. In mainland China, terms like guanxi practice or la guanxi are used to refer to bribery and corruption. Guanxi practice is commonly employed by favour seekers to seek corrupt benefits from power-holders. Guanxi offers an efficient information transmission channel to help guanxi members to identify potential and trustworthy partners; it also offers safe and secret platform for illegal transactions. Guanxi norms help buyers and sellers of corrupt benefits justify and rationalize their acts. Li's Performing Bribery in China (2011) as well as Wang's The buying and selling of military positions (2016) supply essential analyses on how guanxi practice works in corrupt exchanges.

This question is especially critical in cross-cultural business partnerships, when Western firms and auditors are operating within Confucian cultures. Western-based managers must exercise caution in determining whether or not their Chinese colleagues and business partners are in fact practicing guanxi. Caution and extra guidance should be taken to ensure that conflict does not occur as a result of misunderstood cultural agreements.

Other studies argue that guanxi is not in fact unethical, but is rather wrongly accused of an act thought unethical in the eyes of those unacquainted with it and Chinese culture. Just as how the Western juridical system is the image of the Western ethical attitudes, it can be said that the Eastern legal system functions similarly so. Also, while Westerners might misunderstand guanxi as a form of corruption, the Chinese recognize guanxi as a subset of renqing, which likens the maintenance of interpersonal relationships to a moral obligation. As such, any relevant actions taken to maintain such relationships are recognized as working within ethical constraints.

The term guanxixue (关系学, the 'art' or 'knowledge' of guanxi) is also used to specifically refer to the manipulation and corruption brought about by a selfish and sometimes illegal utilization of guanxi. In turn, guanxixue distinguishes unethical usage of guanxi from the term guanxi itself. Although many Chinese lament the strong importance of guanxi in their culture because of the unethical use that arises through it, they still consider guanxi as a Chinese element that should not be denied.

Similar concepts in other cultures
Sociologists have linked guanxi with the concept of social capital (it has been described as a Gemeinschaft value structure), and it has been exhaustively described in Western studies of Chinese economic and political behavior.
 * Blat in Russian culture
 * Shurobadzhanashtina in Bulgarian society
 * Wasta in Middle Eastern culture
 * Sociolismo in Cuban culture
 * Old boy network in Anglo-Saxon and Finnish culture
 * Dignitas in ancient Roman culture
 * Ksharim (literally 'connections') in Israeli culture. Protektsia (from the word 'Protection') is the use of ksharim for personal gain or helping another, also known in slang as 'Vitamin P'.
 * Enchufe (literally 'plug in' – compare English 'hook up') in Spain, meaning to 'plug' friends or acquaintances 'into' a job or position.
 * Compadrazgo in Latin American culture
 * Padrino System in the Philippines (basically "godfather" or patron), also known locally as "kapit" (Filipino word for "to hang on," "to hook on.")

Western vs. Eastern social business relations
The four dimensions for a successful business networking comprise: trust, bonding, mutual relationship, and empathy. Nevertheless, the points of view in which these dimensions are understood and consolidated into business tasks are extensively disparate in the East vs the West.

From the Western point of view, trust is treated as shared unwavering quality, constancy, and correspondence. Instead, from the Eastern point of view, trust is additionally synonymous with obligation, where guanxi is required to be kept up through persistent long haul affiliation and connection. The Chinese system of wulun (the basic norms of guanxi) supports the Eastern attitude, emphasizing that one's fulfillment of one's responsibilities in a given role ensures the smooth functioning of Chinese society. Correspondence is likewise a measurement which is substantially more stressed in the East than in the West. As per Confucianism, every individual is urged to wind up a yi-ren (exemplary individual) and compensate some help with altogether more than one has gotten. In conclusion, compassion is a measurement that is exceedingly implanted in Eastern business bonds, the significance for dealers and clients to see each other's needs is extremely important. The Confucian understanding of ren, which also equates to "Do not do to others as one does not want others to do to him", stresses the importance for sellers and customers to understand each other's needs.

Cross-cultural differences in its usage also distinguish Western relationship marketing from Chinese guanxi. Unlike Western relationship marketing, where networking plays a more surface-level impersonal role in shaping larger business relations, guanxi plays a much more central and personal role in shaping social business relations. Chinese culture borrows much of its practices from Confucianism, which emphasizes collectivism and long-term personal relations. Likewise, guanxi functions within Chinese culture and directly reflects the values and behaviors expressed in Chinese business relations. For example, reciprocal obligation plays an intricate role in maintaining harmonious business relations. It is expected that both sides not only stay friendly with each other, but also reciprocate a favor given by the other party. Western relationship marketing, on the other hand, is much more formally constructed, in which no social obligation and further exchanges of favors are expected. Thus, long-term personal relations are more emphasized in Chinese guanxi practice than in Western relationship marketing.

title: Guanxi