that the hours you may fix upon for this will be agreeable to me, and
the same privilege will be extended to such parties as you may wish to
send out on the same duty without further application.

U. S. GRANT, Lieut.-General.


Lee acceded to this; but delays in transmitting the correspondence
brought it to the 7th of June--forty-eight hours after it commenced
--before parties were got out to collect the men left upon the field.
In the meantime all but two of the wounded had died. And I wrote to
Lee:


COLD HARBOR, VA., June 7, 1864. 10.30 A.M.

GEN. R. E. LEE, Commanding Army of N. Va.

I regret that your note of seven P.M. yesterday should have been
received at the nearest corps headquarters, to where it was delivered,
after the hour which had been given for the removal of the dead and
wounded had expired; 10.45 P.M. was the hour at which it was received at
corps headquarters, and between eleven and twelve it reached my
headquarters. As a consequence, it was not understood by the troops of
this army that there was a cessation of hostilities for the purpose of
collecting the dead and wounded, and none were collected. Two officers
and six men of the 8th and 25th North Carolina Regts., who were out in
search of the bodies of officers of their respective regiments, were
captured and brought into our lines, owing to this want of
understanding. I regret this, but will state that as soon as I learned