Battle of the Crater: The Tunnel Beneath the Lines
Virginia
On July thirtieth, eighteen sixty-four, Lieutenant Colonel Henry Pleasants had a plan. A mining engineer by trade before the war, Pleasants commanded the Forty-Eighth Pennsylvania Infantry, a regiment drawn largely from the coal country of Schuylkill County. He proposed tunneling beneath the Confederate earthworks at Elliott's Salient, packing the shaft with black powder, and blowing a gap in the line large enough to pour an entire corps through.
His men dug for a month. The finished tunnel ran five hundred eleven feet, extending under the Confederate position with two lateral galleries at the end packed with eight thousand pounds of black powder. A division of United States Colored Troops under General Edward Ferrero trained specifically for the assault, practicing how to bypass the crater the explosion would create and fan out to exploit the breach.
Then the plan unraveled at the top. General George Meade, with Grant's concurrence, ordered Ferrero's Black troops to the rear. The given reason was that if the assault failed, it would appear the Union had sent African American soldiers to their deaths for a desperate gamble. The actual replacement, a division under General James Ledlie, received almost no briefing. Ledlie himself spent the morning of the assault drinking in a bombproof bunker behind the lines.
The explosion detonated at four forty-four in the morning. The blast was so enormous it killed at least two hundred seventy-eight Confederate soldiers instantly and threw cannon into the air. But the attacking Union infantry did exactly what the training was meant to prevent: they poured into the crater itself, a hole thirty feet deep and one hundred seventy feet long, and could not get out. Confederate troops rallied and fired down into the mass of men below.
When Ferrero's Black troops were finally committed, they too were driven into the crater. Many were killed trying to surrender. Their casualties totaled over thirteen hundred. A congressional committee later censured Meade. Grant called it the saddest affair he had witnessed in the war.
