By the time Atlanta surrendered to the Federals, the armies of General Ulysses S Grant and Robert E Lee had been locked in a bloody stalemate at Petersburg for over a month. Grant knew that it was just a matter of time before the Confederate army, worn out from lack of supplies and reinforcements, would collapse, Petersburg would fall and Richmond shortly after, and the war would essentially be over. But Grant was by nature aggressive and prone to attack, and the long dull job of siege warfare held no appeal for him. So he formulated a bold plan to force his way through the Confederate lines and quickly bring the war to an end.
Actually the plan came from Lt Col Henry Pleasants, a regimental commander in General Ambrose Burnside’s Ninth Corps. Pleasants commanded the 48th Pennsylvania Infantry Regiment, which had been recruited from miners in that state’s anthracite coal belt. As the ex-miners studied the Confederate redoubts across from them, they concluded that they should be able to tunnel their way underneath them, plant an explosives charge and destroy the fortresses, opening up a gap in the lines. Pleasants submitted the plan to his superiors, but Burnside’s engineers decided that the required tunnel would be too long and they would not be able to give it sufficient ventilation to allow for safe digging. Pleasants and his miners disagreed and, on June 25, began digging on their own, installing a separate ventilation shaft as they went and shoring up the tunnel with scraps of wood that they were able to scrounge up.
By the last week of July, they were approaching the Confederate lines, 20 feet above them. The tunnel was 586 feet long and ended with a cavity directly underneath a cannon redoubt held by troops from Virginia and South Carolina. On July 28, the miners began packing the chamber with 4 tons of black powder, held in 320 barrels.
Once Burnside saw that the tunnel would successfully reach underneath the Confederate lines, he formed a plan to use it as a surprise prelude to an attack. By packing the tunnel full of black powder, he would trigger an explosion that would destroy the redoubts and blow a huge gap in the enemy position. Burnside would then send Union troops from his Fourth Division, consisting of 4,000 ex-slaves in the United States Colored Troops, through this breach towards a ridge of hills. Once the ridge had been captured, the Federals could move up a number of cannon batteries and begin bombarding the center of Richmond. The African-American troops began rehearsing for the assault about two weeks before the mine was completed.
When the plan was presented to General Grant, he in turn consulted with General George Meade. Meade and Burnside had both previously been Commander in Chief of the Union Army, and both hated each other. While Burnside had seniority and technically outranked him, Meade had been placed in command of the Army of the Potomac by General Grant, and to smooth their ruffled feathers he always gave each of them separate instructions so neither would have to take orders from the other.
Now, the day before the attack was set to launch, Grant and Meade made some last-minute changes to Burnside’s plan. Burnside had intended to use the Fourth Division, which had just arrived and was the freshest body of troops he had available, for the attack. But Meade now argued to Grant that, never having been in combat before, that unit was too inexperienced to lead the planned assault. Meade also made the political argument that placing African-American soldiers at the front of what could be a risky attack might be taken to indicate that the Union Army valued their lives less—he suggested one of the other divisions be placed in the lead instead, with the ex-slaves to follow behind them. When none of Burnside’s other division commanders volunteered to lead the charge (none of them thought the mine tunnel would work), Burnside had them draw straws. The lot fell to General James Ledlie of the First Division. His troops now had less than a day to get ready. The African-American troops, under General Edward Ferrero, would follow them.
An hour before dawn on July 30, the fuse was lit on the explosives. And nothing happened. After a half-hour wait, two ex-miners volunteered to go into the tunnel to see what was wrong: they found that the fuse had gone out. Re-lighting it, they scrambled out and, at 4:44am, over an hour late and just as the morning sky was lightening, the black powder detonated.
It was one of the largest manmade explosions ever made up to that time. The blast ripped a crater that was 170 feet long, 60 feet wide and 30 feet deep. Some 300 Confederate troops, most of them asleep, are estimated to have been killed in the explosion: their body parts were scattered over the area.
Burnside’s troops poured into the gap. But things went wrong almost immediately. The orders given to the First Division men were unclear, and many of them, rather than running around the rim of the Crater towards the ridge beyond, instead assumed that their goal was to capture the Crater itself, and they climbed down inside. The confusion was increased by the fact that neither General Ledlie nor General Ferrero were there: they were both in a tent back at headquarters, sharing a bottle of rum.
Once Burnside and Meade realized that the attack had stalled, they traded angry telegraph messages accusing each other of messing up the plan. After an hour, the other supporting troops, including the African-American Fourth Division, were sent in to try to capture the ridge. But by this time the Confederates had recovered from the shock of the explosion and had begun to re-form their defensive lines. The attacking Federals were driven back, and many of them now too sought shelter inside the Crater.
As the Union troops crowded into the hole, they probably thought it was a safe position, akin to a giant foxhole. In reality, it was a deathtrap. The sides of the Crater were steep and loose, and once in, most troops found that they couldn’t climb back out. At about 9:30am, it became apparent that the attack had failed, and Burnside was ordered to withdraw. Instead he delayed, arguing first that he should make another assault, and then that he should wait for dark to pull his troops back under cover.
By 2pm, the remaining Confederates in the area were able to move right up to the edge of the Crater and fire unimpeded down into the mass of Federals trapped inside. Then a force of Southerners entered the Crater itself, and fierce hand to hand fighting broke out. It became a slaughter. The African-American troops became the special target of the Confederates. Many were killed as they tried to retreat, and even after the trapped Federals inside the crater surrendered, the former slaves were summarily executed. The Union troops suffered almost 4000 casualties—about half of which were from the African-American division, and most of these inflicted after the surrender. One of the Confederate officers present, General Edward Porter Alexander, later reported, “Some of the Negro prisoners who were originally allowed to surrender … were afterward shot by others, and there was, without doubt, a great deal of unnecessary killing of them.”
The slaughter had been so great that General Grant launched an official court of inquiry into the disaster. Most of the blame fell on Ledlie, Ferrero, and Burnside for their lack of leadership during the attack, but the ultimate cause of the fiasco, the investigation concluded, was Meade’s decision to change the plan less than a day before the attack. Burnside and Ledlie were placed on indefinite leave, in effect relieved of command. Burnside resigned from the Army shortly later.
Grant bemoaned the failure of what had been his best chance to break the stalemate and move upon Richmond to end the war. “Such an opportunity for carrying fortifications I have never seen,” he reported to the War Department, “and do not expect again to have.”
The siege of Petersburg would drag on for another eight months. After the failure at the Crater, President Lincoln encouraged Grant with a telegram which read, “I have seen your dispatch expressing your unwillingness to break your hold where you are. Neither am I willing. Hold on with a bulldog grip, and chew and choke as much as possible.” A few weeks later, Grant launched assaults towards Deep Bottom and the Weldon Railroad, seizing and destroying a portion of track near the Globe Tavern. By the end of August the Federals had occupied the Reams Station. In September the Confederates managed to raid a Union supply depot and capture 2500 head of cattle. But Lee knew that his supply situation was critical—just one railroad line remained unbroken.
For the next several months, Grant systematically tightened his noose around Petersburg, while raids and counter-raids steadily drained Lee’s army of irreplaceable manpower. On March 25, 1865, Lee made a last desperate assault at Fort Stedman to try to break out, and failed. Grant countered with an attack of his own at Five Forks on April 1, which broke through the Confederate lines at Boydton Plank Road.
Lee pulled his entire army back into Petersburg and, with his supply routes gone, the Confederates abandoned both Petersburg and Richmond. As Grant’s troops entered the two cities, Lee fled towards the supply station at nearby Appomattox Courthouse, hoping to reorganize his troops and head south to join together with General Joseph Johnston’s army in North Carolina.
Today, the Crater is a part of the Petersburg National Battlefield Park and is a stop on the park’s driving tour.
