The Crater, 30 July 1864

The battle, stage by stage

1. 25 June – 27 July 1864

   The 48th Pennsylvania's mine

   After the failed assaults of mid-June, the IX Corps' advanced line at Petersburg lay only about 400 feet from Elliott's Salient, a bulge in the Confederate works on the Griffith farm held by Pegram's Petersburg battery and Brig. Gen. Stephen Elliott's South Carolina brigade. Lt. Col. Henry Pleasants of the 48th Pennsylvania, a regiment raised largely from coal miners, proposed tunneling under it. Burnside backed the plan; Meade and his engineers doubted it, but Grant let it go ahead. Digging began on 25 June from a hollow behind the Union picket line, with improvised tools and a fire-draft ventilation shaft. The main gallery, 511 feet long and about 20 feet under the Confederate works, was finished on 17 July, and two lateral galleries were run along under the line. Suspecting a mine, the Confederates dug listening galleries but missed the deeper tunnel. On 23–27 July about four tons of powder were placed and the gallery sandbagged.

2. 28–29 July 1864

   The assault division is changed

   Burnside planned to lead with Brig. Gen. Edward Ferrero's Fourth Division, U.S. Colored Troops, the corps' largest and freshest, whose men had trained for weeks to go around the crater's flanks rather than into it. On 29 July Meade overruled him, fearing, according to the Army's official history, that if the Black division failed the army's leaders would be blamed for sacrificing it; Grant backed Meade. With about twelve hours to change the plan, Burnside had his white division commanders draw lots, and the choice fell on Brig. Gen. James H. Ledlie's First Division, worn down by the Overland Campaign, whose commander did not brief his men on the new task. Meade's orders also told the assault to push for Cemetery Hill, the crest behind the salient, rather than widen the breach. A II Corps expedition north of the James at Deep Bottom had meanwhile drawn part of Lee's army away from Petersburg.

3. 30 July 1864, 3:15–4:45 AM

   The mine is sprung

   In the dark, about 15,000 men of the IX Corps filed into the ravine and trenches in front of Fort Morton, where Burnside took post, and more than 160 guns and mortars stood ready along the line. Pleasants lit the fuse at about 3:15 AM (some accounts say 3:00); when nothing happened, Lt. Jacob Douty and Sgt. Harry Reese crawled into the tunnel, found the fuse had burned out at a splice, and relit it. At about 4:45 the charge went off, throwing earth, guns and men into the air and leaving a crater roughly 170 feet long, 50 to 97 feet wide and 25 to 30 feet deep, by differing contemporary measurements. About 278 Confederates of Pegram's battery and two South Carolina regiments (the 18th and 22nd) were killed, wounded or buried (NPS). The Union guns then opened along the whole front.

4. About 5:00–7:30 AM

   Into the crater

   Ledlie's division started late, clambering over its own parapet in the half-light, and instead of passing around the crater most of Marshall's and Bartlett's men poured down into it, stopping to dig out buried Confederates and gape at the wreck; Ledlie himself stayed in a bombproof behind the Union line. The 2nd Pennsylvania Provisional Heavy Artillery pushed a short way west of the rim. Potter's division followed on the right, Griffin's brigade lodging in the maze of traverses and bombproofs north of the crater, and Willcox's on the left, where Hartranft's men took the works to the south. The Federals held about 150 yards of the line on each side but got no farther. Elliott, wounded while rallying a counterattack, gave way to Col. Fitz McMaster, whose South Carolinians, with Ransom's North Carolinians and Wise's Virginians on the flanks, built barricades and formed a line west of the pit, while guns and mortars on both flanks swept the open ground. Lee ordered Maj. Gen. William Mahone to bring two brigades from the right of the line.

5. About 7:30–8:30 AM

   Ferrero's division goes in

   With the attack stalled, Burnside sent in Ferrero's division, about 4,300 men by the park's count, through a crater and trenches already jammed with men; Ferrero, like Ledlie, stayed behind the lines. Col. Henry G. Thomas, finding 'the crater was already too full', led his brigade around its north side under heavy fire. In their first major battle the USCT regiments got farther than any other Union troops, taking part of the works north of the crater and a number of prisoners and forming to charge west toward Cemetery Hill. North of them, Turner's X Corps men crossed the Poor Creek bottom and fired from the brush below the Confederate works. Meanwhile Mahone's Virginians and Georgians, moving unseen up the Jerusalem Plank Road and east through a covered way, filed into a ravine about 200 yards west of the crater. Confederate accounts say the Black troops went in shouting 'No quarter' and 'Remember Fort Pillow', which Confederates later cited for what followed.

6. About 8:30–10:00 AM

   Mahone's counterattack

   Before the USCT could form, Weisiger's Virginia brigade, about 800 men, many of them from Petersburg, charged out of the ravine with bayonets fixed (the time is given as anywhere from about 9 to 10 AM). In savage hand-to-hand fighting they drove Thomas's and Sigfried's regiments and Potter's men back over the trenches north of the crater, and the fleeing troops broke through Turner's line in the Poor Creek bottom, carrying it back to the picket line. A stone marks roughly the right of Mahone's brigade in the recaptured works. Part of Wright's Georgia brigade, attacking toward the south side of the crater, was stopped. Some Confederates killed Black soldiers who were trying to surrender in this phase too. At about 9:30 Meade ordered the attack halted and Burnside's men withdrawn, but crossing the open ground under fire was nearly impossible, and the order did not reach the men in the crater until about 12:30.

7. About 11:00 AM – 2:00 PM

   The crater retaken; Black soldiers killed

   The rest of Wright's Georgians attacked at about 11 without success. In the early afternoon (about 1 to 1:30 PM by different accounts) Sanders's Alabama brigade, with Georgians and Virginians on its flanks, rushed the crater itself. Thousands of men were packed in the pit, and the fighting there was the most brutal of the siege. Many Federals ran back across the open ground; hundreds were captured, among them Brig. Gen. William F. Bartlett. Confederates killed many Black soldiers after they had surrendered, in the crater and as prisoners were taken to the rear (National Park Service; A. Wilson Greene for the American Battlefield Trust). Historian Bryce Suderow found an unusually high ratio of killed among the USCT, and Kevin Levin estimates upwards of 200 were killed during and especially after the battle; Union accounts say some white Union soldiers joined in. Captured Black soldiers who survived were sent to prisons or claimed by local slaveholders (Levin). By about 2 PM every Union unit was back in its own lines.

8. 31 July – September 1864

   Aftermath and inquiry

   By the next morning the Confederates had taken the crater into a new line of works. Under a truce on 1 August burial parties cleared the dead between the lines. The Union lost about 3,800 men killed, wounded and captured and the Confederates about 1,500, by the National Park Service estimate (5,289 in all). Grant called it 'the saddest affair I have witnessed in the war'. A court of inquiry blamed Burnside, Ledlie, Ferrero, Willcox and Col. Zenas Bliss and cleared Meade; the Joint Committee on the Conduct of the War later put more of the blame on Meade. Burnside went on leave in mid-August and was never recalled, and Ledlie was given no further meaningful command; Mahone was promoted to major general. The siege went on for eight more months.