v1.1.3 / chapter 75 of 93 / 01 sep 11 / greg goebel / public domain
* While Grant's army dug in before Petersburg and tried to recuperate from the battles of May and June 1864, Jubal Early led a force into Maryland to threaten Washington DC. The Confederates actually made it to the outskirts of the city before Federal reinforcements arrived and forced them to withdraw. However, Early and his troops remained in the region to harass and taunt the Federals.
Back in Petersburg, a Union officer, Lieutenant Colonel Henry Pleasants of Burnside's IX Corps, came up with a scheme to dig a mine under the Confederate line and blast a hole through rebel defenses. Pleasants went forward with the mine under Burnside's sponsorship, completed it, and used it to devastating effect, but failures of leadership ensured that it was wasted effort. It was another great disappointment and the end of Ambrose Burnside's military career.
* As the summer arrived in earnest around Petersburg, Virginia, both Grant's and Lee's armies were heavily dug in along 5 miles (8 kilometers) of zigzag trenches. The weather was very hot and movements of armies had generally destroyed the vegetation, resulting in a thick layer of dust everywhere. The place stank and both sides kept up a wasting fire, with sharpshooters and mortars killing soldiers every day.
The men were worn-down by the life in the trenches. They didn't dare show themselves for an instant. Sharpshooters kept a fixed bead on enemy rifle slits, so that a soldier incautious enough to stick up his face might get a bullet in it. Life was dreary and dull. A few Pennsylvania soldiers got to shooting ramrods at the enemy; they rarely hit anything, but it was fun to listen to the bizarre sounds the ramrods made as they spun and tumbled. Boredom is often the lot of a soldier and they may do very strange things to keep themselves amused.
The Army of the Potomac wasn't going anywhere for a while, giving Grant time to take stock of all that had happened since the beginning of May. This necessarily led him to consider the command arrangements around and under him, and he wasn't happy with what he saw.
There was of course the eternal problem of General Benjamin Butler, a military bumbler who was just too powerful to be removed. Grant tried to kick him upstairs to Fort Monroe so that Baldy Smith, who had returned with his XVIII Corps to Butler's command, could take over. Butler was too powerful to be simply ordered around and turned the arrangement down. He liked playing general, even if he had little talent for it. With elections coming up in the fall, Lincoln had good reasons to think that Butler was less a nuisance as a general than as a politician.
In the meantime, Butler and Smith were back to quarreling again. One of them had to go, and since Butler wasn't budging, there was only one other choice. It wasn't that painful of a choice, either, since Grant had completely lost faith in Smith after the fiasco in front of Petersburg, and so Smith was relieved of command on 19 July, to be sent to the rear in New York. He was replaced in command of XVIII Corps by Major General Edward Ord, who had fought under Grant at Vicksburg and had been in temporary command of Baltimore. Of course Smith complained bitterly, even going so far as to later claim that he had been sacked because Butler had got Grant roaring drunk and had used the incident as blackmail. Butler might have got Grant drunk, but Grant hadn't needed to be blackmailed to fire Smith.
Meade was similarly dissatisfied with Warren, who had been almost criminally tardy in front of Petersburg and who was showing particular signs of battle fatigue. The balance between Warren's faults and virtues had been shifting heavily towards the faults since the beginning of the exhausting spring campaign, and now he seemed always to be in either a raging tantrum or a don't-give-a-damn sulk. One of his fellow officers commented that Warren "has a screw loose, and is not quite accountable for all his freaks." Meade wanted to sack Warren, but the differences between the two men were finally smoothed over.
Meade himself remained in a hideous temper. Charles Dana, that energetic reporter and informal spy for Stanton, reported to the War Secretary: "I do not think he has a friend in the whole army. No man, no matter what his business or his service, approaches him without being insulted in one way or another, and his own staff officers do not dare speak to him unless first spoken to, for fear of either sneers or curses." From privates to generals, nobody had kind words for Meade. Relations between Grant and Meade were strained, Grant himself having accepted the widespread opinion that Meade's handling of the fight in front of Petersburg had been inept. Grant considered sending Meade off to command forces in the Shenandoah Valley and replacing him with Hancock, who had returned again to command late in June. But that wouldn't do, either: Hancock's wound refused to heal, and he really shouldn't have been in the field at all. He was far less effective than he had been, and was even quarreling with old friends like John Gibbon over fussy matters.
In short, everybody and everything was torn up and worn down, and the wearing-down went from top to bottom. Many units were no longer capable of real combat action. The 150th Pennsylvania included an unusual element known as "Company Q", which was entirely composed of officers who had been broken in rank for cowardice and were now obligated to serve in the ranks as infantry. The men of company Q, given a chance to redeem themselves, fought with distinction, and many of them regained their commissions.
Even in this dreary environment, there were flashes of black humor. The 24th Michigan had a company that had been cut down through the spring fighting to a sergeant and a private. One observer commented that "it afforded amusement to witness the evolutions of this little company." It was less funny to realize the company was the last remnant of a fighting unit that was now mostly ghosts, but such a sentiment was too obvious for belaboring: the ranks were heavy with ghosts.
* Jubal Early's little army, moving up the Shenandoah Valley towards Washington DC, reached Winchester on 2 July. Union General Franz Sigel was in Martinsburg, with about 5,000 men, and there was another Federal force about half that size in Harper's Ferry. Early sent one of his two corps to each of the towns in hope of capturing the Federals and their supplies.
Sigel, who had been given the nickname "the Flying Dutchman", sensibly skedaddled again, quickly consolidating his forces in Harper's Ferry and setting them up in entrenchments on Maryland Heights, burning bridges behind him. For whatever Sigel's other failures, he was the first Union commander in the trap named Harper's Ferry to not simply sit there and wait to be swallowed up. Early arrived at Harper's Ferry on the 4th of July and saw that Sigel's troops were solidly dug in; Early knew he would suffer terribly trying to dislodge the Federals, and he had more important things to do anyway. He left behind a brigade to keep an eye on Sigel and make demonstrations to keep the Federals in place, and then moved the rest of his command northward. They crossed the Potomac on 6 July at Boteler's Ford, not far from the old Sharpsburg battlefield. They were in Frederick, Maryland, on the morning of 9 July, and kept right on moving towards Washington.
Early's cavalry was around and about, raising hell and compounding Yankee bewilderment. One cavalry brigade had gone west to tear up the Baltimore & Ohio Railroad to forestall any movement of Hunter's troops to interfere with the Confederate incursion. A second went to Hagerstown, to demand $200,000 from the local merchants and to burn down the business district if the money wasn't forthcoming. Few rebels felt this was outrageous, since they had seen what Hunter had done during his excursion into Virginia, and by that light they were being restrained. As it turned out, the brigade commander got a bit mixed up and only asked for $20,000, which was promptly paid. He got straightened out by the time he returned to Frederick and demanded the full $200,000, and the balance was paid.
The third brigade was sent to the east to cut telegraph and railroad lines and generally sow confusion. Early had been notified by a sealed correspondence that Confederate agents were planning an operation to free 17,000 rebel prisoners being held at Point Lookout, on the mouth of the Potomac on the Maryland shore, and the brigade was to be nearby on the night of 12 July to provide assistance with the mass breakout.
* With a rebel army bearing down on Washington DC, military and government officials suddenly realized how vulnerable the city was. The defenses were solidly built, but they had been stripped of men to support the great Union spring offensive against Lee. Now all that was available were poorly-trained reservists and War Department clerks. The defenses were also in a state of disrepair, with the brush growing up to such an extent in some places that attackers would have no problem sneaking up to the ramparts undetected.
A major general was so alarmed about the situation that he met with the President and told him: "An enterprising general could take this city." The general added that he had told much the same to Halleck, but Halleck had in effect shrugged and said the problem was Grant's, not his. The general commented to Lincoln that Halleck seemed "very apathetic". The President just nodded and replied: "That's his way. He is always apathetic." Another observer described Halleck's behavior during the crisis as that of a man "in a perfect maze, bewildered, without intelligent decision or self-reliance."
Officials of the Baltimore & Ohio Railroad were distressed by the destruction of their bridges and other property, and sent a request to Navy Secretary Gideon Welles for Navy gunboats to come up from Chesapeake Bay and protect railroad property. The B&O was an important player in the war effort, and so Welles personally went over to the War Department to see what could be done. When he got there, he found that nobody knew where Early was; where he was going; how big his force was. A few days later, on hearing that rebel scouts were nosing around Georgetown, Welles wrote in his diary that "on our part there is neglect, ignorance, folly, imbecility in the last degree."
In reality, on 6 July, even before Early had crossed the Potomac, Grant had dispatched Ricketts' 4,700-man division of Wright's VI Corps, along with 3,000 of Sheridan's cavalrymen. Sheridan was short on healthy horses after his futile expedition west, and if the cavalrymen weren't in a position to ride, they could at least fight as infantry.
On 9 July, faced with obvious panic in Washington, Grant ordered the rest of
VI Corps north. Emory's XIX Corps, en route from New Orleans to Fort Monroe
after their misadventure up the Red River with Banks, was also diverted to
deal with the crisis facing the capitol. Grant wired Halleck:
IF THE PRESIDENT THINKS IT ADVISABLE THAT I SHOULD
GO TO WASHINGTON IN PERSON, I CAN START AN HOUR
AFTER RECEIVING NOTICE, LEAVING EVERYTHING HERE ON
THE DEFENSIVE.
* Ricketts' troops and Sheridan's horseless cavalry landed at Baltimore on 7
July. They were now formally under the jurisdiction of Major General Lew
Wallace, in command of the "Middle Department", consisting of Maryland,
Delaware, and tidewater Virginia. Wallace had ended up in this position by
penalty, since Grant had been displeased with his leadership at Shiloh, and
since that time Wallace had gone from one rear-area command to another.
Halleck, acting on Grant's wishes, was carefully watching Wallace for some
excuse to sack him.
Wallace, however, was showing more presence of mind than almost everyone else around him. He had grasped the challenge from the instant he had got news of large numbers of Confederates in western Maryland on 2 June. He knew that if Early seized Washington, even temporarily, it would be a disaster for the Union cause, not merely because of the staggering humiliation, but because a large amount of the weapons, stores, and equipment needed to continue the war in Virginia and other regions was stockpiled there. Early would certainly torch everything he couldn't cart off.
Wallace had immediately begin throwing together a scratch force made up of whatever troops he could find -- garrison soldiers, militias, semi-invalids from the hospitals -- and now was in command of 2,300 men at Monocacy Junction, on the road from Frederick to Washington. On hearing by telegraph that initial reinforcements had arrived, Wallace ordered Ricketts to get his men to Monocacy Junction as fast as possible. Sheridan's men, who were also short on weapons, were ordered to help man the Baltimore and Washington defenses. They might not be very effective, but at least it would help calm the panic that had seized the two cities.
Ricketts' division arrived at Monocacy Junction on 8 July, as Early was approaching Frederick. The Federals, about 7,000 strong, were astride the Washington turnpike when Early's force hit them at noon on 9 July. There was hot fighting for a time, the Federals fighting literally as if their homes depended on it, but Early outnumbered Wallace by two to one, and a flank attack finally unhinged the Yankee defense. By 4:00 PM, Wallace's force had been thrown off the battlefield, with almost 1,900 casualties to Early's 700.
* Despite the lopsided outcome, Early was unhappy with the results of the battle at Monocacy Junction. Tactically, it was a clear Confederate victory, but strategically Wallace had achieved his primary goal: slowing down the rebels to allow reinforcements to build up in the rear. In a later generation, his force would have been called a "speed bump". Wallace was relieved of command for a while, but Grant eventually came to his senses, concluding that his defeat had contributed more to the Union cause than most victories and restoring him to command. After the war, Confederate General John B. Gordon, who had directed the flank attack that broke the Federal defense at Monocacy, told Wallace that he was the only man who had ever whipped him.
Early had been perfectly aware from the instant he crossed the Potomac that his expedition was living on borrowed time, and that his little army stood a very good chance of being cut off and swallowed up if he didn't keep an eye on the clock. His prisoners included troops with VI Corps insignia, which told him without having to ask any questions that time was running very short. He might have decided to make a hasty exit then and there, having clearly accomplished his primary objective of forcing Grant to send troops back to Washington, but having come so far he was by no means willing to skedaddle just yet. The battle at Monocacy Junction had cleared the Washington Pike, and so the next morning, 10 July, he put his troops on a fast march towards Washington.
At least he had intended that it be a fast march, but the men were weary, the weather was hot, and there was considerable straggling. They made camp near Rockville that night and moved out again before dawn on 11 July. The men were even more tired that day, and when Early arrived before the Washington defenses at about 1:00 PM, very few of them were in any condition for a fight. The immediate obstacle to the rebel column was a major defensive work named Fort Stevens. Early judged it extremely strong in itself, but thinly manned and vulnerable to a determined assault.
Major General Alexander McCook, assigned to take over the city's defenses until VI Corps could come to the rescue, had grabbed everybody he could and put them in the lines, Quartermaster-General Montgomery Meigs had even put on a field uniform and organized his quartermaster clerks into a brigade, 1,500 strong, to help man the defenses, and Sheridan's troopers had been pulled in from Baltimore, much to the anger of that city's citizens.
There was a total of about 10,000 defenders, spread too thin and most of them not very experienced; Early had a shot at marching into Washington if he could only get his own men to push hard. However, even as Early was inspecting Fort Stevens and considering how best to attack it, his window of opportunity was sliding shut. As he moved up artillery, Wright and the lead elements of the VI Corps were disembarking from steamers docked on the Potomac. The soldiers marched up the avenues to cheers from the citizens, moving up to the fortifications to show the rebels who the boss was, though the columns lost a steady trickle of men who couldn't resist the saloons lining the streets.
That afternoon the VI Corps men filed into the trenches, one of them writing later in a charitable fashion that they found "a rattled lot of defenders, brave enough but with no coherence or organization." The VI Corps soldiers went out to the picket line and traded shots with Early's men until sundown, with the clerks and other rear-area types sincerely distressed at the risk the soldiers were taking by leaving the safety of the fortifications.
* Early had considered a full attack on Fort Stevens for the next morning, but that evening he received intelligence that Washington was receiving reinforcements in the form of two full Federal corps. Obviously there was nothing to be gained from a real push except his own destruction.
Washington's crisis had passed. Oddly, however, even though heavy reinforcements had arrived, the panic among the citizenry actually grew, partly from momentum and partly because communications by wire and rail out of the city had been cut. In the absence of real information, the rumor mill went out of control, with citizens of Confederate sympathy stoking it as best they could and taking great pleasure in the situation.
Their pleasure was short-lived. Wright wanted to attack, at least to clear the rebels away from the defenses, and in mid-afternoon he sent a division forward. While Wright was running around to coordinate the attack, he ran into Lincoln, and without thinking asked the President if he would like to get up on the parapet and watch the action. Much to Wright's shock, the President, who had a fatalistic indifference to his personal safety, took him up on the offer and ignored Wright's pleas to get back down.
Then one of Wright's staff officers, 23-year-old Captain Oliver Wendell Holmes JR, later Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, called out to the tall civilian standing up in the clear, in a highly visible yellowish linen coat: "Get down, you damn fool, before you get shot!" That got through to the President, probably because being addressed in such a rough fashion had become unfamiliar to him -- Holmes of course hadn't recognized who he was shouting at. Lincoln amiably got down off the parapet and took cover, though he continued to stick his head up every now and then to see what was going on.
* Many of the rebels were extremely apprehensive. Early was still making preparations for a withdrawal that night, and if the Federals pushed hard they would probably bag his entire force. A bit of a sharp fight was still in progress, with Wright losing about 280 men, but darkness put an end to the shooting.
Early pulled out at midnight, sending a courier east to get in touch with the rebel cavalry brigade raising hell around Baltimore to tell them to get back to Confederate lines the best way they could. Early had been notified that the raid on the Point Lookout prison camp had been called off since the Federals had been tipped off, bringing the garrison to full alert and calling in additional gunboats as reinforcements.
Early had a hard-bitten sense of humor. He left Major Kyd Douglas, one of his staff officers, behind with a rearguard of 200 men to cover the withdrawal. Douglas would follow at midnight if all went well; of course, if the Yankees were feeling aggressive and it didn't go well, he was doomed. Early tried to encourage Douglas by calling out to him as he left: "Major, we haven't taken Washington, but we've scared Abe Lincoln like hell!"
The rebels might have been startled to see Lincoln playing tourist on the front lines but Douglas halted, turned around, and replied: "Yes, general, but this afternoon when that Yankee line moved out against us, I think some other people were scared blue as Hell's brimstone."
General Breckinridge, who had been consulting with Early on the withdrawal, smiled and asked his commander: "How 'bout that, general?"
Early chuckled: "That's true, but it won't appear in history!"
* The withdrawal actually went off without any real problems for the Confederates, and even Douglas and his little rearguard got away unscathed. There were some difficulties, however.
Early had been using the Silver Spring mansion of Francis P. Blair, Old Man Blair himself, as his headquarters, and other than making use of Blair's wine cellar and tearing up his bedsheets for bandages, Early had taken care that no harm come to the place, lest such spiteful actions make a bad impression on Marylanders. However, Montgomery Blair's residence, just up the road, was burned to the ground by persons unknown. Early would later learn that his cavalry on the loose in eastern Maryland had torched the house of Maryland Governor A.W. Bedford as well.
There was little Early could do about such lapses in manners, and considering the destruction that Hunter had inflicted on Southerners, he had little reason to get too upset, with many other things to worry about. He marched his men through Rockville the next day, 13 July, turning them towards the Potomac. The following morning, 14 July, his column crossed the river at White's Ford, just upstream from Ball's Bluff. By 16 July Early was back in the Shenandoah Valley, where he could play Stonewall Jackson's old game of baiting the Yankees.
Early's raid hadn't captured Washington, but it had been successful in all reasonable expectations. The rebels had disrupted Federal plans; reduced the pressure on Petersburg; caused panic in Washington; walked off with horses, cattle, plus piles of Federal greenbacks; and given the Confederacy another season to collect a harvest in the Shenandoah Valley. Following the raid, the Union greenback fell to a value of 39 cents relative to hard currency, its lowest value through the war.
The exercise had embarrassed the Union. Foreign papers praised the Confederacy's boldness, while Northern papers grumbled about the bankruptcy of Union strategy. Not only had the Federal spring offensive ground to a bloody halt, but the rebels seemed just as able to perform handsprings and show up where they were not expected as they had in the past. Of course, the raid had done little to change the balance of power, which continued to tilt heavily against the Confederacy. Robert E. Lee had hoped that the withdrawal of Union forces from the Petersburg front would have provoked Grant into a blind, bloody, and futile assault on the rebel defenses, since Grant would have to "use it or lose it", as the modern saying goes. Grant didn't rise to the bait.
Most of the raid's effect was as a propaganda exercise. That might be useful to the South come election day in the North, but the public tends to have a short memory, and any major Federal success in the interim would change night to day immediately.
* For the moment, Early remained a threat. On the morning of 13 July, VI Corps troops had taken off down the road in supposed pursuit of Early. The VI Corps troops had been happy to leave Petersburg and come to the rescue of Washington, but the weather was hot, the roads dusty, the pace was a killing one, and worst of all they were at the mercy of rattled generals in the War Department offices who sent them here and there and back again for two weeks.
There were three other separate commands involved in the "pursuit", such as it was, including Hunter's, whose troops had returned to Harper's Ferry after their roundabout excursion through the mountains. The only overall direction they all had was from Halleck, who was sending out scatterbrained telegrams from his War Department office. That sort of blind wandering around in the face of well-led and aggressive Confederates was asking for trouble. On 17 July, Early's troops bloodied George Crook's soldiers when they became too careless, inflicting several hundred casualties, and on 24 July Early hit them even harder near Kernstown, inflicting about 1,200 casualties on the Yankees and driving Crook and his men north of the Potomac.
Then, as a response to Hunter's unpleasantries in Virginia, Early sent John McCausland with two cavalry brigades north to Chambersburg, Pennsylvania, where on 30 July the rebels demanded $100,000 in gold or $500,000 in Federal greenbacks, and threatened to torch the place if they didn't get it. The locals were unable to comply, and so they were evacuated before the business district was reduced to ashes.
That put the rattle back into Washington, and VI Corps was ordered to march up the Shenandoah Valley and march back down all over again. Hard marching in pursuit of the enemy was one thing, hard marching in circles was very much another, and VI Corps morale hit rock bottom. However, McCausland's troopers didn't get away unscathed, with Averell's cavalry falling on them near Moorefield, West Virginia, on 7 August, hitting them hard and scattering them. The rebels lost hundreds of cavalrymen and horses.
Lincoln was still disgusted, since the Union Army had fumbled another chance to completely bag another Confederate force well out on a limb in Northern territory. Grant was unhappy as well, writing in his autobiography: "It seemed to be the policy of General Halleck and Secretary Stanton to keep any force sent there in pursuit of the invading army moving right and left so as to keep between the enemy and our capital; and generally speaking they pursued this policy until all knowledge of the whereabouts of the enemy was lost." Grant resolved to put a stop to this game; but easier said than done. In the meantime, Early hovered in the northern end of the Shenandoah Valley, as if daring the Federals to come and get him. Grant was willing to take him up on the dare if he could find the right man to do the job.
* With Grant's army bogged down in front of Petersburg, the men had time on their hands and were coming up with ideas. One of the most forward sections of the trenchworks held by Burnside's IX Corps was under the control of the 48th Pennsylvania Volunteers. They were mostly coal miners, and so their ideas tended towards schemes that involved digging.
Near the end of June, their regimental commander, 31-year-old Lieutenant Colonel Henry Pleasants, was peering through a firing slit at the fortification that held down the Confederate line when one of his soldiers commented: "We could blow that damned fort out of existence if we could run a mine shaft under it!" As was common among volunteer regiments, Pleasants was from the same area as his men, and he was entirely familiar with the details and practice of mining. He'd been trained as a civil engineer and done considerable tunneling work for the railroads before the war. The soldier's remark got him to thinking, and when he returned to the "bombproof" shelter where his officers lived, he told them: "That goddamned fort is the only thing between us and Petersburg, and I have an idea that we can blow it up."
Pleasants passed the idea up to his division commander, Brigadier General Robert Potter, who investigated a bit and thought it a good idea himself. The two men then paid a visit to Ambrose Burnside, the corps commander. Pleasants explained the scheme, and though the tunnel would have to be over 500 feet (150 meters) long, which made the delivery of breathable air to the workers at the end troublesome, he felt that there might be a way to ventilate it.
There were times when Burnside seemed to have the makings of a good general. He told Pleasants and Potter that he would take it up with Meade, and in the meantime told Pleasants to go ahead and get his men started on the tunnel Meade was agreeable to the idea, if only barely. His own engineers thought that ventilating such a long tunnel from its entrance was impossible, and that the Confederates would quickly get wise anyway. However, Meade felt it would give the men something to do, and it was something he could pass up to Grant to show that something was being done. Meade gave his approval, though as it turned out he did little or nothing to provide any help. Oddly, Grant, who had proven at Vicksburg that he was willing to try almost anything to win, showed little interest in the project either. That was all the odder because he really had no other plans available to him at the time.
* Pleasants was already digging, with a sergeant named Harry Reese acting as mine boss. The men dug round the clock and made rapid progress. Although Pleasants found that asking for help or materials from outside IX Corps was a waste of time, he and his people were resourceful. IX Corps gunners who had been blacksmiths modified tools to optimize them for tunneling. When the miners needed timbers to brace the tunnel, they tore down a railroad bridge, and when that source ran out, Pleasants found an abandoned sawmill in the rear, and the men cut their own timbers from local wood. To transport the dirt, they reinforced hardtack boxes with metal hoops from pork barrels, nailed handles to them, and use them to haul the spoils out of the mine and to the rear, where it was disposed of out of sight of the rebels.
The tunnel was 5 feet (150 centimeters) high, 4 feet (120 centimeters) wide at the bottom, and 2.5 feet (75 centimeters) wide at the top. After a week's digging, the miners hit a belt of wet clay that threatened to cave the roof in on them, but they just increased the reinforcements and pushed on. They then hit a layer of marl that turned rock-hard when exposed to air. The material proved handy for making tobacco pipes, but digging through it proved unreasonable, so they finally had to dig above it.
After the tunnel had gone about half way to Confederate lines, Pleasants decided that he needed to determine exactly where it needed to end up so they could place their mine precisely under the fort. The first problem was to get instruments to perform the measurements. Requests up to army headquarters were ignored, but Burnside helpfully wired a friend in Washington DC to send down a theodolite.
Getting the instrument was troublesome; taking the measurements was downright dangerous, since Pleasants had to expose himself to enemy fire to do it. Since the lines were close at this point and the rebels didn't have much to do except try to pick off careless Yankees, if he stuck his head up he was likely to get a Minie ball in the face. Pleasants had a few of his men put their forage caps on ramrods to stick them up over the trenchline and distract Confederate sharpshooters. In the meantime, he quietly took observations from a different section of the trench, using a burlap cloth as a blind.
The miners continued to dig, and as they approached the Confederate fort, as expected ventilation started to become a problem. Pleasants had his men dig a small vertical shaft just beside the tunnel entrance behind Federal lines. The shaft connected the tunnel to the surface, exiting behind a clump of bushes.
Pleasants then had his men build a door to the tunnel entrance, broken by a long boxy tube made out of boards that went up the length of the tunnel. To obtain ventilation, the miners lit a fire at the bottom of the vertical shaft, causing air to flow upward to the surface. With the door closed, the replacement air had to be drawn in through the tube all the way down the tunnel, creating a draft that allowed the miners digging the tunnel to breathe.
* On 17 July, after three weeks of work, the tunnel was under rebel lines. The miners then dug a crossways gallery 75 feet (23 meters) wide under the fort. By this time the rebels were becoming suspicious. They tried to dig countermines, but failed to find the Federal tunnel. Pleasants ordered the digging to stop until the rebels became complacent again. Rebel engineers didn't believe anyone could build such a long mine either, and old-timers joked to newcomers that they should listen for the sound of the Yankee train running underneath them.
Pleasants then had his men lay the mine charge. Burnside had originally wanted to use eight tons (7.25 tonnes) of black powder, but for once the engineers at army headquarters were helpful, and they convincingly explained that half that charge would actually do a better job. Pleasants' men built eight open-top boxes in the gallery, and then filled them with 320 25-pound (11.3 kilogram) kegs of black powder. Army headquarters had promised to give Pleasants an electrical detonating system but it never showed up, and so he simply spliced together conventional fuze cords. The tunnel was then backfilled for 38 feet (12 meters) back from the gallery. Pleasants could set it off whenever the people in charge gave the word.
* Burnside had been conscientiously preparing his troops to exploit the damage the mine would cause. He assigned one of his four divisions, under Brigadier General Edward Ferrero, who had distinguished himself during the fight for Burnside's Bridge at Antietam, to prepare themselves to lead the attack.
The choice of Ferrero's division to spearhead the assault was motivated by the fact that it was the one that had seen the least fighting since the beginning of May, and not only was it relatively up to strength, the troops were also comparatively fresh and highly motivated. Ferrero's division had 4,300 men, while Burnside's other three divisions had about 3,000 men each, who were badly used up.
The problem was that all the troops in Ferrero's division were black. That wasn't a problem to the troops, who were generally looking forward to leading the charge to prove themselves and settle a score with the slave power. It wasn't much of a problem to Burnside, who was so confident of victory that he ordered his headquarters to be packed up and be ready to move once the mine was set off. However, the complexion of the troops was a problem to almost everyone else. There was a general perception up and down the ranks of the Army of the Potomac that blacks couldn't fight. Such a belief seems odd now, since people all over the world had been killing each other regardless of race, creed, or color since before the beginning of history, and often doing it with great enthusiasm and skill. Certainly, Southerners did not consider the people they had enslaved as inherently harmless, having a deep-seated fear of black legions rising up and slaughtering them in their beds.
Still, when a white officer went to become the colonel of a black regiment, a staff officer told him that "we do not want any nigger soldiers in the Army of the Potomac." His general told him that "I am sorry to have you leave my command, and even more sorry you are going to serve with Negroes. I think it is a disgrace to make soldiers of them."
Despite the widespread bigotry, the leadership of the Army of the Potomac did not interfere with Burnside's plans to use Ferrero's black division, at least for the moment. In fact, Grant had become enthusiastic about the scheme himself. To improve the chances for success, he decided to perform a feint to pull Confederate strength away from there, ordering Hancock to take II Corps across the James, accompanied by Sheridan and his cavalry, to probe the defenses in front of Richmond. The troops were to cross the Appomattox, march in the rear of Butler's lines in Bermuda Hundred, and cross the James on two pontoon bridges set up by Butler at a place called Deep Bottom.
Grant felt that the Confederates would quickly detect the change in Federal dispositions, forcing Lee to shift troops north to block it. Hancock and Sheridan moved out on the evening of 26 July, passing over the Appomattox under the light of a huge bonfire, and by early morning they were marching over the James on Butler's pontoon bridges, joining a detachment Butler had sent to hold down the bridgehead. They all moved up towards a stream known as Bailey's Creek, where they began to run into Confederate resistance.
While Pleasants' men continued to pack kegs of black powder up the shaft. Lee reacted to the threat to Richmond, marching troops north to meet Hancock's threat. By the morning of 29 July, there was sharp fighting in the area around Bailey's Creek, with only 18,000 rebels left behind at Petersburg.
* The feint had worked perfectly. A third of Hancock's men had already marched back across the James, and the rest would follow when the sun went down. The big attack to break the Petersburg line once and for all was to start at 3:30 AM on 30 July. The entire Army of the Potomac was being massed for the attack, with batteries of guns and mortars built up to support the assault.
Burnside's troops were to be at the front of the charge, dashing through the hole blown in the rebel lines to seize the high ground behind it. However, at the very last minute, Burnside was told by Meade that Ferrero's division was not to be in the lead; Burnside would have to use another of his divisions instead. Burnside, who didn't get along very well with Meade to begin with, objected loudly. It was his biggest division, the men were fresh, they were highly motivated, and they had been specifically trained for the job. Making such a drastic change at the very last moment of a critical operation was preposterous.
Meade's rationale for ordering Burnside not to use his black division was not, at least on the face of it, based on distrust of the fighting capabilities of black soldiers. Meade was more worried that if things went wrong and the black troops were slaughtered, he would be the target of the wrath of the Radical Republicans in Congress, and he rightly feared such a trial. Grant showed up at Meade's tent, and Burnside emotionally appealed to him. The normally sensible Grant was swayed by Meade's arguments, and upheld the order: the black troops must not lead the charge. Grant would have the honesty to later admit this was a blunder; he was entirely aware of Burnside's limitations as a general, and should have realized that complicating matters for him at the very last moment was asking for trouble.
* It was. It was things like this that Burnside demonstrated exactly why he could never be an excellent general. Sending in troops who had not been trained for the task at hand was troublesome enough, but to compound the difficulty he simply had his other three division commanders draw straws to see which one would lead the attack.
The three division commanders included Brigadier General Robert Potter, Pleasants' boss, a competent officer; Brigadier General Orlando B. Willcox, an experienced veteran of many battles; and Brigadier General James H. Ledlie, who won the draw. Ledlie was Burnside's least competent general, who had come into the army at the head of New York heavy artillery volunteer regiment, with no prior military training or experience, and had only recently obtained division command. Worse, he was generally known to be cowardly and an alcoholic; he had proven his ability to bungle things at Hanover Junction. However, Burnside's charitable nature led him to take little notice of the failings of his people until they became too obvious to be ignored.
Ledlie's division was unimpressive as well. It had been chewed up and demoralized in the fighting, and it contained a number of heavy artillery regiments that, unlike their counterparts in the other corps, had not been able to make the transition from garrison duty to effective frontline combat units. Even Burnside, who disliked being unkindly, spoke badly of these regiments, commenting after one fight: "They are worthless. They didn't enlist to fight and it is unreasonable to expect it of them. In the attack last night I couldn't find 30 of them."
Burnside was apparently too depressed over the last-minute change in plans to wonder if he might be making a terrible mistake in entrusting the most critical element in the whole operation to Ledlie and his division. In any case, preparations for the assault went forward, with troops shuffling around in the dark for the next day's fighting. Grant and Meade arrived at Burnside's headquarters where they could keep an eye on things and still have access to telegraph lines, and Burnside went up to a forward battery to provide such direction as he could to the coming fight.
* The clock ticked up to the jump-off hour, 3:30 AM. Pleasants' men had lit the fuze at the designated time, but an hour passed and nothing happened. Pleasants finally decided he could wait no more and ordered Sergeant Harry Reese to crawl up the tunnel and figure out what was wrong. Reese gathered up his courage and went into the tunnel, finding that the fuze had sputtered out at a splice. He went back to get new fuzing, only to meet a Lieutenant Douty coming up the tunnel who Pleasants had ordered to bring in fuzing. The two men fixed the fuze and lit it, then crept back out as fast as they could.
About the time Reese went into the tunnel, Grant was impatiently telling Meade to order the attack anyway. The Confederate lines were understrength and the Federals might have a chance of cracking them without the mine. However, before Meade could get things in motion, at 4:45 AM the mine blew. Those in the rear only heard a "dull, heavy thud." Four tons of a low explosive like black powder was a substantial charge, but it was no "blockbuster" by the standards of modern high-explosive munitions. However, to the men in the front lines the effect was impressive enough. Witnesses spoke of a "noise of great thunders" and a spectacle something like "a waterspout as seen at sea" that threw the barrels of artillery pieces, wreckage of caissons and gun carriages, and men and pieces of men high into the sky to fall over the landscape. A mushroom cloud billowed up into the sky. Federal gunners used the explosion as their cue to unleash one of the most thunderous barrages of the war.
Some of Ledlie's men bolted when the mine went off, and it took about ten minutes to gather them and move forward. Unfortunately, such offensive spirit as they possessed was quickly blunted by the fact that nobody had made bothered to bring in ladders or cut any convenient exit from the earthworks at the front lines, and the heavily-loaded troops found it difficult to get out of the deep trenches. That would seem to have been an obvious consideration and Meade had ordered it done, but somehow the order had been lost. The men managed to improvise, tearing down sandbag walls and even improvising ladders by ramming muskets bayonet-first into the log walls, but they went forward in driblets, their entire unit organization gone.
That cost them another ten minutes, but they encountered no effective resistance. The mine had created a crater 60 feet (18 meters) wide and 30 feet (9 meters) deep, and outlying parts of the Confederate defenses had been blown away or buried. Such Confederates as were still in the area were in shock and in no condition to fight. Surprisingly, there were still rebels alive in the crater, some of them half buried, and the Federals dug them out and sent them back as prisoners. In fact, the Union troops arriving in the crater were involved in a wide range of activities, such as scavenging parts of Confederate guns or setting up a defensive line around the edge of the crater; the one thing they were not doing was moving forward to take the high ground in front of them.
Few of the men had been given any instructions on what they were to do, and they were now so disorganized that it was impossible to sort them out and get them to do anything practical. The crater filled up with what amounted to an armed but unaggressive mob. General Ledlie was unconcerned; in fact, he wasn't even there, having taken up a comfortable position in a bombproof well behind Union lines, where he was enjoying some run he had obtained from a surgeon. Every now and then he'd send a runner forward to tell the men to attack towards the high ground, and go back to his rum.
Burnside, assuming all was well, sent the divisions of Potter and Willcox. However, the troops were ordered to move up to the line through the trenches instead of simply making a fast dash in the open, and their movement was slow and disorganized. Once they did get out in front of the lines, they were to advance along either side of the crater to ensure that the gap stayed open.
By this time, the Confederates were starting to recover, and the Federals were suffering from increasingly heavy rifle and cannon fire. Union artillery did their best to silence the Confederate guns, but they could not get them all, and those that survived were beginning to inflict serious injury on the Federals packed into the crater and its surroundings. The Confederates were building up a defense faster than the Federals could build up an attack, and most of the experienced Union soldiers in the front lines were beginning to realize the battle was lost.
Burnside was in the rear, at the artillery battery, and had no real idea of what was going on. He just kept sending forward orders to keep on attacking. Meade was even further in the rear at IX Corps headquarters, and kept prodding Burnside with unhelpful telegraph messages that eventually degenerated into an emptyheaded quarrel.
Warren, after speaking to Burnside, tried to send a division forward, but they quickly ended up bogged down in the traffic jam behind the crater with everyone else. And then the order went down from Burnside to Ferrero to send his black troops in.
Nobody had told the black soldiers about the change in plans and they were puzzled as to why they were moving forward so late. They went forward enthusiastically, though without General Ferrero, who decided to visit General Ledlie in his bombproof and share his rum. The black troops couldn't advance through the crater, which was packed with white troops, and moved to one side, seizing a trenchline full of Confederates after a bitter fight. The soldiers knew perfectly well that the rebels were inclined to kill black Union prisoners, and one of the colonels in charge of the black troops had restrain his soldiers from immediately murdering the few rebels they captured.
The black troops tried to organize an assault from the trench, but the confusion was extraordinary, even by the standards of battles. A message came up from General Ferrero to take the high ground. They tried, but it was hopeless. They could not attack with any weight, and the Confederates countercharged, breaking what little Union offensive spirit that remained and packing the Federals back into the crater.
* Grant realized that the battle was lost and had the makings of another disaster. He told Burnside to sound the recall, but Burnside now became obstinate and wanted to press ahead anyway. By this time, the rebels were dropping mortar shells into the crater to blast Union soldiers apart, and throwing infantry charges at the crater. The battle didn't finally fizzle out until about noon, when all the Federals who hadn't made their escape had either been shot or captured.
About 4,000 Federals were lost in fight, with the Confederates losing about a third as many men. The bulk of the Union casualties occurred after Grant ordered the recall. Ferrero's black soldiers, whose well-being had been the basis for the last-minute change in plans, lost a third of their people, with at least a few shot down while trying to surrender. Colonel Pleasants was with Burnside at the battery, and a witness reported with considerable understatement that Pleasants was "awful mad". The fiasco was apparent from the bottom to the top, with one soldier calling it "a disgrace to our corps", and Grant telling Halleck: "It was the saddest affair I have witnessed in the war. Such an opportunity for carrying fortifications I have never seen and do not expect again to have."
There followed a confrontation between Burnside and Meade that was so loud and enraged that an observer said "went far toward confirming one's belief in the wealth and flexibility of the English language as a medium of personal dispute." Burnside, Ledlie, and Ferrero all went before a board of inquiry. Ledlie and Ferrero were both censured by the board. Ledlie soon took sick leave, an act that one of his officers called "a heavy loss to the enemy." Meade had actually wanted Burnside court-martialed, but Grant, knowing Burnside's limitations and likely reflecting that Burnside had been as much sinned against by his superiors -- including both Meade and Grant himself -- as a sinner, sent him home on leave. Burnside was replaced in command of IX Corps by his chief of staff, Major General John G. Parke, who had fought under Grant in the Vicksburg campaign. Burnside soon resigned from the army, now out of the war for good.
