Throw Courage into a Hole
July 30, 1864: The Battle of the Crater, Siege of Petersburg
William Terdoslavich
The Battle of the Crater stands as a monument to incompetence. Never have so few screwed up so much for so many. A shortcut to win the war found its grave in a raw hole, lined with the bodies of soldiers who paid with their lives for the mistakes of their generals.
In war, the general leads and the soldier bleeds. That requires a compact between the two. The soldier will risk his life obeying an order in battle, but the general must back that order with a good plan and the leadership that ensures good execution. Victory justifies the sacrifice the soldier makes.
At the Crater, the generals did not lead, but the soldiers bled anyway.
I Have a Good Idea
From the beginning of May to the end of June 1864, the Army of the Potomac was either fighting every day or marching every night, sometimes both in the same twenty-four hours. Battles were fought against General Robert E. Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia at the Wilderness, Spotsylvania Court House, North Anna, Totopotomoy, and Cold Harbor. The War Department tallied about 40,000 casualties—6,586 killed, 26,047 wounded, and 6,626 missing. In early June, Lieutenant General Ulysses S. Grant crossed his army over the James River and began marching on Petersburg, Virginia, hoping to cut the rail lines that fed the Confederate capital of Richmond to the north.
Grant’s movement was an added problem for Confederate General P.G.T. Beauregard, whose scant forces had already bottled up a secondary attack by Major General Ben Butler, whose “Army of the James” was trying to take the back-door route to Richmond. With some reinforcements from Lee, Beauregard extended his line south to cover Petersburg, defending it for a week against Grant’s persistent attacks. With both armies entrenched, the struggle was beginning to resemble World War I, long before that war ever happened. Frontal assault was the quickest way to lose.
And so it was in late June that Lieutenant Colonel Henry Pleasants, commander of the 48th Pennsylvania, had a good idea. Before the war, Pleasants worked as an engineer managing a tunnel project. Now he commanded a regiment made up of former coal miners from Schuylkill County, Pennsylvania. Why not dig a tunnel to reach underneath the Confederate line, pack the end full of gunpowder, and blow it up? The Union Army could push through the gap, take Petersburg, cut the rail line supplying Richmond and Lee’s army, and maybe win the war in 1864.
Pleasants put his thoughts to paper and sent the missive to his division commander, Brigadier General Robert Potter, who in turn relayed the note to his corps commander, Major General Ambrose Burnside. Within a few days, both men met with Burnside, who signed off on the project. In turn, Burnside told Major General George Gordon Meade, who exercised tactical control of the Army of the Potomac. (Strategic direction belonged to Grant, who commanded from “the tent next door” to Meade’s.)
Aside from Meade’s surly consent, the project got zero support from army command. Pleasants’s men started digging the tunnel from his regiment’s position, just 130 yards east of the Confederate earthworks. Used cracker boxes were fashioned into handbarrows to haul out dirt, which was disposed in a nearby ravine. Pick handles were shortened to make the tools useful in tight spaces. An abandoned sawmill behind Union lines was put back into service to cut roof timbers for the five-foot-high tunnel. Requisitions for special gear to triangulate the tunnel’s course went unanswered. Burnside managed to scrounge a theodolite from a friend in Washington, D.C., to make do.
It took four weeks for the ex-miners to dig down twenty feet, then west for another 510 feet, terminating under a Confederate redoubt. Then a lateral gallery seventy-five-feet long was dug out, crossing the T on the end of the tunnel. Eight chambers were cut into the gallery to accommodate 320 kegs of gunpowder, each keg weighing twenty-five pounds. Pleasants asked for 560 kegs, but Meade cut the requisition. No reason was given.
Planning for Success
By July 26, Burnside outlined his plan of attack. The mine would be exploded at dawn, with a division ready to rush through the newly blown breach. Engineers would be posted at the head of each attacking column to clear obstructions. Attacks would be made elsewhere against the Confederate line to pin forces that could be shifted to cover the breach.
Burnside tasked his corps’ fourth division, under the command of Brigadier General Edward Ferrero, to train for the attack. Ferrero’s division was made up of freed slaves but had never fought before. He drilled his men to advance in narrow columns, then to fan out left and right once past the expected crater.
Now things began to go wrong.
On July 29, just twelve hours before the attack, Meade ordered Burnside to use a different division. Meade reasoned that an unseasoned division would not be able to execute the mission. If the unit took heavy losses, it would look like white generals using black troops for cannon fodder. Worse, the Confederate Army did not take “colored troops” prisoner. But the black troops were the only ones who were trained to exploit the breach.
Now it was Burnside’s turn to make a mistake.
He had three other divisions to choose from, commanded by Brigadier Generals Potter, Orlando Willcox, and James Ledlie. Did Burnside choose a lead unit? No. He had his three remaining division commanders draw straws! Ledlie, who commanded the weakest division, drew the short straw.
No, this story is not made up. This really happened.
Ledlie had already failed to lead in battle when Petersburg was first assaulted in mid-June, staying in the rear to get drunk while his staff covered up this failure from Burnside. Now Ledlie was given his specific orders by Burnside—advance his division through the breach and take a hill four hundred yards behind the Confederate front line. The remaining three divisions in Burnside’s corps would follow, while a reserve corps waited to the rear, ready to add its weight to the attack.
Achieving Failure
After midnight, Ledlie’s division and the rest of Burnside’s corps were ready. At 3:15 A.M., Pleasants lit the fuse. Thirty minutes ticked by. Nothing happened. The fuse might be lit. Or it might not. Did it go out?
At 4 A.M., Pleasants ordered Sergeant Henry Reese, a former mine boss, and Lieutenant Jacob Douty to go into the tunnel and find out what went wrong—and hopefully not get blown up unexpectedly. The two men found the fuse had gone out at a splicing point. They respliced the fuse, lit it, and got the hell out of the tunnel very quickly.
At 4:45 A.M., four tons of gunpowder exploded in the mine’s gallery. Earthworks, men, and cannon were sent skyward in a slow, roaring blast, followed by a cloud of smoke and dust. Clods of dirt, stones, bodies, and wrecked cannon fell back to earth. The explosion vaporized the Confederate position, killing about 300 men. Once bloodied by battle, an ordinary crater became a proper noun. “The Crater” measured 60 feet wide, 170 feet long, and 30 feet deep. All who saw its violent birth were shocked and awed.
The troops in Ledlie’s division finally regained enough composure to move forward without command. At that moment, 110 Union guns and 55 mortars opened fire to support the attack. Burnside’s inattention to detail was showing results. He had neglected to order anyone to clear paths for the attackers through the abatis (felled trees with sharpened branches pointing outward). Soldiers going over the tops of their trenches had to work their way through the tangle before they could rush the breach.
And where was Ledlie? Huddled in a bunker, getting drunk. Without a leader, his division could not fight as a single unit. Reaching the crater twenty minutes after the explosion, Ledlie’s men marched into the Crater. And they could not easily march up its steep slopes to get out.
Willcox’s and Potter’s divisions marched toward the breach. Each general was ordered to march around the hole, but still more men marched into the Crater to shelter from the increasing Confederate gunfire coming from a ravine to the west and the objective hill. Cannon fire now poured in from the flanks.
By 7 A.M., Ferrero’s division of black troops marched forward, ordered to take the hill behind the Crater. Ferrero peeled off from the assault and joined Ledlie in his bunker. (Intoxication is the better part of valor?) Another leaderless division was going into the fight as an unclenched hand instead of a fist. Three black regiments made it past the Crater to attack the small ravine halfway to the objective hill, which the Confederates were using as an improvised trench. The Union troops could not carry the position and fell back, pursued by an angry enemy that was not going to take any of them prisoners.
At 9:30 A.M., Meade ordered Burnside to pull his units out. Soldiers in the middle of a battle can’t disengage easily, facing attacks by Major General William Mahone’s division at 11 A.M. and again at noon. Union fire slackened as men ran out of ammunition. Many tried to retreat, some being gunned down as they fled, while those that remained in the Crater were shot like fish in a barrel. The Crater had turned from a shelter into a trap.
Bury the Dead, Bury the Blame
By 1 P.M., it was all over. The Crater was littered with Union dead, some with smashed faces from being clubbed to death by Confederate musket butts. Union casualties were close to 3,000 (504 killed, 1,881 wounded, and 1,413 missing), with one-third of them coming from Ferrero’s division, thanks to the Confederate policy of not taking black troops prisoner. Confederate losses numbered about 1,500. (An incomplete return showed 361 dead, 727 wounded, and 403 missing, with losses from other units unaccounted.)
Grant’s disappointment was palpable. “A stupendous failure . . . all due to the inefficiency on the part of the corps commander and the incompetency of the division commander who was sent to lead the assault.” Grant had a right to be bitter. In 1862, incompetence in command could be explained by inexperience. But by 1864, defeat should have weeded out all the deadbeats from command.
Removals were in order. Ledlie went on sick leave and was never given a command again. Ferrero was transferred to Butler’s two-corps “Army of the James.” Burnside would later be relieved of corps command, his reputation further tarnished by an army court of inquiry. It’s a wonder he was not relieved earlier for his failures at Antietam, Fredericksburg, and Spotsylvania. Meade and Grant stayed in their respective commands. No one faced a court-martial.
Meanwhile, the Civil War went on for another nine months.
The generals continued to lead.
The soldiers continued to bleed.