War Is All Hell by Edward J. Blum

Author:Edward J. Blum
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press, Inc.
Published: 2021-05-15T00:00:00+00:00

The Crater

When Frederick Douglass encouraged black men to join the Union military in April 1863, he maintained “Once let the black man get upon his person the brass letters U.S., let him get an eagle on his button, and a musket on his shoulder, and bullets in his pocket,” then citizenship would become his. Douglass exclaimed that nothing could stop this change, not even “power on the earth or under the earth.”69 For Douglass, the idea of power “under the earth” referred to the legions of hell. More than one year later, and shortly after the battles of Fort Pillow and Cold Harbor, Americans made a literal hell from “under the earth”: they called it the Crater.

Less than two weeks after the carnage at Cold Harbor, Grant’s army was besieging the city of Petersburg. No stranger to this type of warfare, Grant had successfully taken the key Mississippi River town of Vicksburg after two months’ investment in 1863. Petersburg would be a tougher nut to crack, and Grant was keen to break through the Confederate defenses. Sixty thousand Union soldiers had already been killed, wounded, or captured, or half the Army of the Potomac when it set out in May.

The colonel of a regiment from Pennsylvania’s anthracite coal mining region went to Gen. Ambrose Burnside with a novel proposal: excavate a mine under the rebel line and blow a hole from which men could attack. A successful exploitation of the breach by a division or more could capture Petersburg, then Richmond, and end the war. For just over a month the men of the Forty-eighth Pennsylvania dug their tunnel.70 By the end of July, the mine was ready.

The question of who was to lead the assault remained. As Burnside’s corps received the task, he picked the all-black division led by Edward Ferrero to be specially trained. This included fanning out on both sides of the crater to widen the breach instead of running into—and getting trapped by—the hole. Burnside’s superiors worried that if the green USCT units were defeated, the northern newspapers would have a field day, claiming that the black soldiers were deemed expendable and therefore led to slaughter, that “we were shoving those people ahead to get killed because we did not care about them.” They were also largely untested in battle, which worried General George Meade.71 As a result, the white division of James Ledlie was substituted at the last moment. Although General Ledlie was to lead them as if demons emerging from the depths of hell, he himself struggled with another devil: liquor. His alcoholism had a profound impact on the success of this desperate plan.72

When the mine exploded—blowing sky-high and burying several hundred rebel soldiers—the division went forward, Ledlie was nowhere to be found. Leaderless and improperly trained, the division poured into the crater rather than widening the breach in the rebel line. The eight USCT regiments of Ferrero’s division followed, and in the face of growing rebel resistance, poured into the crater as well. As they reached the Confederate works, they supposedly yelled “No quarter for the d-d rebels.

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