by Bruce Catton
Meanwhile, the Confederates were rapidly coming to. On the right and left, regiments were being formed so that they could fire on the flanks of the attacking column. Between the crater and the ridge there was a shallow ravine—luckily, from the Southern viewpoint, it was out of reach of the Federal cannon—and an alert Confederate general put troops in it, and the fire from these men was beginning to be very heavy. The golden half hour in which the ridge could have been taken effortlessly was gone forever, and any advance that was made now would be made only after a hard fight.
After Potter’s and Willcox’s men had moved out into the empty trenches they began to go forward. The going was very bad. The ground beyond the trenches was a labyrinth of bombproofs, rifle pits, covered ways, and support trenches, and in many places the advance was a hoptoad business of jumping into a hole in the ground, scrambling out on the other side, jumping into another hole, and then repeating the scramble. The rising tempo of Confederate musketry did not make this kind of progress any easier.
Worse yet, Rebel artillery was coming into action, with power. A quarter of a mile north of the crater there was a four-gun battery, and the Southern gunners who had decamped when the mine was blown up came back to these guns and trained them on the Yankees who were trying to advance from the captured trenches. Federal artillery pounded this battery mercilessly, but it was well protected by solid earthen traverses and, although the shell dug up the ground all about until it looked as if the whole area had been plowed, the guns remained in action, putting canister right down the flank of the Federal battle line. On the other side of the crater the story was somewhat the same, with a battery posted so as to enfilade the Federal line from the left. This battery also drew a storm of fire, but there was one gun that could not be silenced and it kept firing canister at deadly close range.
Up on the ridge west of the crater the Rebels put sixteen guns in line. The Federal gunners swept the ridge with overwhelming fire, but the Jerusalem Plank Road was sunken and offered a natural gun pit, and although ten of the sixteen guns were wrecked, the six that remained could not be subdued. In addition, the Confederates had mortars tucked away in hollow ground beyond the crater, and these began to toss shell into the dense jam of Federal soldiers.19
Minute by minute the situation grew worse. Potter’s men gained ground on the right of the crater, but they were under a killing fire and their battle line was slowly pressed back. Mixed elements from half a dozen different commands crawled forward a few dozen yards from the crater itself in a valiant attempt to reach and silence the guns on the ridge, but the Rebels had a good second line in operation now and there were not enough men in this attack to break it. On the left of the crater Willcox’s men could do nothing but cower in the captured trench and keep up an ineffective musketry fire.
Meade had been right: if the attack was to succeed at all it would succeed in the first rush. The first rush had failed, and the failure was both incredible and irretrievable. What could have been done easily at five o’clock had become a matter of great difficulty by six o’clock and by seven it had become virtually impossible. The fight now was just one more dreary repetition of the old attempt to capture entrenched positions. Most of the men in the attacking forces knew it perfectly well, and they hugged the ground. To all intents and purposes the battle was already lost.
But the high command did not know it. Both corps and army headquarters were helpless. Burnside’s command post was a quarter of a mile behind the front and Meade’s was half a mile behind that, and the fight was out of their hands. An officer might be sent forward to get news. He would spend five or ten minutes jostling forward along the covered way, and take his look around, and then spend another five or ten minutes getting back. By the time his report had been assimilated and orders had been started forward the situation would have changed completely—above all other battles, this one was fluid and every minute counted—and the new orders would be worse than useless.20
Burnside might well have been up at the crater himself—Grant said later that if he had commanded a corps in a fight like this, that was where he would have been21—but Burnside was a headquarters operator, and this was Fredericksburg all over again: reports coming in out of a blinding fog, orders going forward into the fog, nothing that was ordered having any relation to reality, the men who wrote the orders never once seeing the place where the orders were to be executed or the people who were to execute them; and all Burnside could do was to tell all and sundry to attack and keep on attacking. Meade might have gone forward, but he had announced beforehand that he could be reached at IX Corps headquarters and it seemed to him now that it would only cause more confusion if he left that spot. So he communicated with Burnside by telegraph, and he told Warren and Ord to get their own troops moving to help the attack; and nothing that happened up around the tangle of crater and captured trenches and broken earth was in the least as the officers in the rear thought it was.
Warren went to talk to Burnside about where the V Corps ought to go in, and Burnside suggested that he go forward and take a look, and Warren did so, and when he got back he and Burnside discussed the situation in some detail, after which Warren went over to his own headquarters and ordered Ayres’s division forward.
Ord tried to advance, but the way was jammed with IX Corps troops and hardly more than a handful of his men were able to move. At 7:20 Burnside sent a wire to Meade saying that he was doing everything possible to push his men forward to the crest but that it was very hard work, and Meade lost his temper and sent an angry wire asking him what on earth was going on and snapping: “I wish to know the truth and desire an immediate answer.” Then Burnside lost his temper and wired Meade that Meade had been “unofficer-like and ungentlemanly”; and up in front the Confederates stitched together a semicircle of fire around the attacking troops and the advance came to a hopeless standstill.22
At precisely which moment orders went down to the bottom of the ravine from corps headquarters telling Ferrero’s division of colored troops to advance and seize the crest.
The colored boys had been under arms since dawn, and as far as they knew their original assignment was unchanged: charge straight across the place where the mine had exploded and take the high ground that overlooked Petersburg. Top authorities had said that they must not lead the charge lest they be sacrificed; now, with the battle lost beyond recall, they were being sent in for a job that was not even as good as a forlorn hope. They got into the covered way, struggled up to the front line, scrambled over the parapet and ran forward with a cheer. By now the Confederate defense was able to lay heavy fire on the ground between the Union trench and the crater, so that getting forward was costly. As the men advanced General Ferrero dropped off in the same bombproof that housed General Ledlie and borrowed a swig of his jug of rum, leaving his brigadiers to direct the fight.23
It was impossible to go through the crater, because it was full of white troops. The colonel of the leading regiment saw this difficulty and led the command off to the right. By this time most of Potter’s men had been shoved out of the trenches they had seized, and the colored regiment found itself running along between the Rebel abatis and a trenchful of Southern infantry—so close to the trench that some of the men were bayoneted as they ran, and those who were shot bore powder burns from the flash of Rebel muskets. As soon as the tail of the regiment had cleared the crater the colonel gave the order: “By the left flank—march!” followed by “Charge!” and the men sprang into the trench, using bayonet and clubbed musket, taking prisoners and a stand of colors. A regimental officer had to intervene to keep the men from killing their prisoners.24
In the captured trench the colored troops re-formed for a further advance. It was not easy, because the trench was full of dead and wounded men of both armies, and from in front and from the right the Confederates were laying down a blistering fire. A colonel tried to organize a charge, but when he went over the parapet he could not get more than fifty men to follow him, an
d the hostile fire quickly knocked them back. Then, while officers were trying to figure out what to do next, a runner came up with a message from General Ferrero: “If you have not already done so, you will immediately proceed to take the crest in your front”—which may have sounded like a reasonable order to a man safely tucked away in a dugout far behind the front.25
Well, they tried. First the officers leaped up on the parapet, waving their swords and shouting, and most of these were shot before they took another step. Then a scattering of soldiers followed them—200 men, perhaps, from three regiments—and a thin little cheer went up, and the ragged line ran forward. They got almost to the hidden ravine where the Confederates were waiting, and the Rebels came out with a countercharge, and for a moment there was vicious combat rocking back and forth in the open. Then the charge broke, and the colored men came running back, most of their officers gone, regimental and company organizations wholly mixed up, furious Southern infantry on their heels. Such white troops as were on the ground were caught up in this retreat, and in another moment a disorganized mass of black and white soldiers in blue uniforms was running desperately for cover, diving into the trenches and rifle pits or streaming for the deep haven of the crater.
In the captured trenches there was a dreadful crush of men. An officer wrote afterward that people were packed in so tightly that he literally could not raise his arms from his side. The Confederates had followed close, and they poked rifles over the edge of the trench and fired into the huddle at three-foot range. Some of them jumped down in with bayonets, and men began to surrender, and the soldiers remembered hearing the Confederates crying: “Take the white man—kill the nigger!” There was a blind flurry of bitter fighting in the maze of trenches and rifle pits and dugouts, and eventually the whole section of captured trench was lost and the Union survivors got into the crater and prepared to hang on as long as they could.26
It was all over now, except for the killing. Grant had recognized failure and had told Meade to get the men back and call the whole operation off, and Meade had passed the word on to Burnside, but Burnside still thought that the attack somehow could be reorganized and made successful, and no recall was sounded. Hundreds of Union soldiers were jammed into the crater, most of them down at the bottom where they could do no fighting whatever. Men up along the rim were standing on a slope so steep that after a man fired his rifle he had to turn around, dig in with his heels, and brace his shoulders against the dirt in order to reload.27
Confederate mortars had the range and they were dropping shell into the crater on a helpless target that they could not miss; men who got out alive remembered a horrible debris of severed limbs and heads flying through the air after each shell exploded. The sun was high in the sky now and it beat down with unrelenting heat, terribly magnified in this steaming pit, and thirst seemed to be a worse foe than Confederate infantry. A Rebel countercharge came to the very edge of the crater, and Negroes lined the rim and fired and drove the attackers back, and the noise and the heat and the exploding shell beat on men’s brains and dazed them so that nothing was remembered very clearly afterward.
Here and there, officers were able to organize details to search among the dead and wounded for cartridges. Some men were ordered to run back to the Union line with a cluster of canteens to get water, and a few of them managed to make the round trip without being killed. More than 200 men dropped unconscious from sheer heat and exhaustion, and a captain in the 45th Pennsylvania wrote: “The loss of life was terrible. There was death below as well as above ground in the crater. It seemed impossible to maintain life from the intense heat of the sun.” He noted that his regiment lost 67 of the 110 men who had gone in.28
Somehow, finally—long after noon—it ended. The men who could do so went back to the Union lines; the others stayed where they were and either died or went off to Confederate prison camps. Burnside continued to insist to Meade that the attack could still succeed, but Ord bluntly told Meade that it was nonsense, and defeat at last was accepted. Through it all, Colonel Pleasants had been standing on the parapet of the fourteen-gun battery where he could watch the proceedings, and he stormed and swore in unregimented fury, telling Burnside that he had “nothing but a damned set of cowards in his brigade commanders”; and one of the men in the 48th Pennsylvania recorded that “Pleasants was awful mad when he saw how things were going on.” 29
Mad Colonel Pleasants might well have been. Never before had the army met so completely ignominious a defeat. Grant summed it up by telling Halleck that it was “the saddest affair I have witnessed in the war,” and he added: “Such an opportunity for carrying fortifications I have never seen and do not expect again to have.” A man in the 36th Massachusetts wrote that this day had been “the saddest in the history of the IX Corps,” and a boy in the 48th Pennsylvania wrote to his sister:
“I expected to write to you of one of the most glorious victories that was ever won by this army, but instead of a victory I have to write about the greatest shame and disgrace that ever happened to us. The people at home may look at it as nothing but a mere defeat, but I look at it as a disgrace to our corps.”30
In the 115th New York, a sergeant blew his top from heat and fatigue, sprang up and cried, “We’ll fight ’em ’till we die, won’t we, boys?” and then dropped unconscious. And in Ferrero’s division it was observed that the colored troops never again sang their song:
We looks like men a’marching on;
We looks like men o’ war.31
As such things went, the great battle of the crater was not, perhaps, unduly expensive. When the butcher’s bill was added up it recorded a loss of 3,798 men, more than a third of them in the colored division. Measured by the standards of the Wilderness and Spotsylvania, this was comparatively mild. Most of the casualties occurred after Grant and Meade had ordered the attack given up, when the men were trying to do nothing more than get back to their own trenches.
Yet the casualty lists did not tell the whole story, which indeed was a good deal more complex than most of the participants were able to understand.
Since May 4 everything that had happened had been part of one continuous battle, a battle three months long, with advance and retreat and triumph and disaster all taking place together, so that words like victory and defeat had lost their meaning. All that had gone before was no more than prelude. The nation itself had been heated to an unimaginable pitch by three years of war and now it had been put on the anvil and the hammer was remorselessly coming down, stroke after clanging stroke, beating a glowing metal into a different shape.
There would be change and the war was bringing it, even though it might be that the war could not bring victory. The war had taken on a new magnitude, and perhaps it was no longer the kind of struggle anybody could win. But it was moving inexorably toward its end, and when it ended many things would end with it, in the South and in the North as well. Some of these were things that ought to end because they shackled men to the past, and some of them were fit to be laid away in the shadowland of dreams that are remembered forever, but in any case they were being brought to an end. After that there could be a new beginning.
CHAPTER FIVE
Away, You Rolling River
1. Special Train for Monocacy Junction
PRIVATE Spink belonged to the 147th Regiment of Ohio National Guard Infantry, and in a modest and wholly innocent way he symbolized what was wrong with the defenses of Washington.
The 147 th was doing a 100-day tour of duty, and it had been sent to Washington to help occupy the defensive lines so that the troops regularly in garrison could go down to fight the Rebels around Petersburg. Presumably Private Spink was a good soldier. He had recently been made acting ordnance sergeant, and with six other privates of the 147th he had been detailed to take charge of a battery of fieldpieces at the eastern end of the Chain Bridge, the farthest upstream of three Potomac River bridges which connected the District of Columbia with Virginia. This bridge had been guarded agains
t Rebel intrusion ever since the early days of the war, and it was a key spot in the capital’s defenses, and Private Spink and his detail cleaned the guns daily and swept the wooden gun platforms, and periodically they took the ammunition out of the magazine and exposed it briefly to the air so that it would not deteriorate. No one made any complaint about the way this duty was performed, but in July of 1864, when a Confederate army came north to menace the capital, it suddenly developed that cleaning the guns and airing the ammunition taxed the abilities of these seven guardsmen to their absolute limit.
Which is to say that not one of the seven knew anything at all about artillery. When an inspecting colonel from General Halleck’s staff came out to look at the defenses he learned that neither Private Spink nor any of the men with him even knew how to load the guns, let alone fire them. This was quite natural, since they had been trained strictly as infantry, but the colonel wondered what they would do if the invading Confederates showed up across the river and tried to march over into the national capital. He asked the nearest officer—a Veteran Reserve Corps lieutenant, who with sixty-three men was responsible for this whole section of the defenses—and the lieutenant had a ready answer. In such case, he said, he would have his men remove the planks of the bridge flooring, and pile them up in a barricade at the Washington end. He would also close the gates which gave access to the bridge. He understood, further, that one of the western piers of the bridge had been mined so that: it could be blown up, but when the inspector looked into it he found that this was not true.
