The Civil War: A Narrative: Volume 3: Red River to Appomattox (105 page)

Early that month, after the failure of his probe for the Weldon Railroad in late June, Grant asked Meade how he felt about undertaking a new offensive against Lee’s center or around his flank. Faced as he was with the loss of Wright, whose corps was being detached just then to counter Early’s drive on Washington, Meade replied that he was doubtful about the result of either a flank or a frontal effort, citing “the facility with which the enemy can interpose to check an onward movement.” However, lest his chief suppose that he was altogether without aggressive instincts or intentions — which, in point of fact, he very nearly was by now — Meade did let fall that he had in progress a work designed to permit a thrust, not through or around, but
under
the Confederate intrenchments. Burnside was digging a mine.

The proposal had come from a regimental commander, Lieutenant Colonel Henry Pleasants, whose 48th Pennsylvania was made up largely of volunteers from the anthracite fields of Schuylkill County, one of whom he happened to hear remark, while peering through a firing slit at a rebel bastion some 150 uphill yards across the way: “We could blow that damned fort out of existence if we could run a mine shaft under it.” Formerly a civil engineer engaged in railroad tunneling, Pleasants liked the notion and took a sketch of it to his division commander, Brigadier General Robert Potter, who passed it along to corps. Burnside told Pleasants to start digging, then went himself to Meade for approval and assistance. He got Meade’s nod, apparently because the work at least would keep some bored men busy for a time, but not his help, his staff having advised that the project was impractical from the engineering point of view. No such tunnel could exceed 400 feet in length, the experts said, that being the limit at which fresh air could be provided without ventilation shafts, and this one was projected to extend for
more than 500 feet from the gallery entrance to the powder chamber at its end.

Pleasants had been hard at work since June 25, the day Burnside told him to start burrowing into the steep west bank of an abandoned railway cut, directly in rear of his picket line and well hidden from enemy lookouts. By assigning his men to shifts so that the digging went forward round the clock, he managed to complete the tunnel within a month — though his miners later claimed they could have done the job in less than half that time, if they had been given the proper tools. Not that Pleasants hadn’t done his best in that regard. Denied any issue of special implements, such as picks, he contrived his own with the help of regimental blacksmiths, converted hardtack boxes into barrows for moving dirt, took over a wrecked sawmill to cut timbers and planks for shoring up the gallery walls and roof, and even borrowed a theodolite, all the way from Washington, when Meade’s engineers declined to lend him one of theirs. Technical problems he solved in much the same improvisatory fashion, including some which these same close-fisted experts defined as prohibitive; ventilation, for example. Just inside the entrance he installed an airtight canvas door and beneath it ran a square wooden pipe along the floor of the shaft to the diggers at the end, extending it as they progressed. A fireplace near the sealed door sent heated air up its brush-masked chimney, creating a draft that drew the stale air from the far end of the tunnel and pulled in fresh air through the pipe, whose mouth was beyond the door. Working in the comparative comfort of a gallery five feet high, four feet wide at the bottom and two feet at the top — they had sweated and strained and wheezed and shivered through longer hours, with considerably less headroom and under far worse breathing conditions, back home in the Pennsylvania coal fields — the miners completed 511 feet of shaft by July 17.

This put them directly under the rebel outwork, whose defenders they could hear walking about, twenty feet above their heads, apparently unmindful of the malevolent, mole-like activity some half-dozen yards below the ground they stood on. Next day the soldier miners began digging laterally, right and left, to provide a powder chamber, 75 feet long, under the enemy bastion and the trenches on both flanks. By July 23 the pick and shovel work was done. After a four-day rest, Pleasants brought in 320 kegs of black powder, weighing 25 pounds each, and distributed this gritty four-ton mass among eight connected magazines, sandbagged to direct the explosion upward. When his requisition for insulated wire and a galvanic battery did not come through, he got hold of two fifty-foot fuzes, spliced them together, then secured one end to the monster charge and ran the other back down the gallery as far as it would reach; after which he replaced the earth of the final forty feet of tunnel, firmly tamped to provide a certain backstop.
That was on July 28. All that remained was to put a match to the fuze, and get out before the boom.

Next afternoon, with the mine scheduled to be exploded early the following morning, Burnside assembled his division commanders to give them last-minute instructions for the assault that was to be launched through the resultant gap in the rebel works. Of these there were four, though only three of their divisions had done front-line duty so far in the campaign; the fourth, led by Brigadier General Edward Ferrero, was composed of two all-Negro brigades whose service up to now had been confined to guarding trains and rearward installations, largely because of the continuing supposition — despite conflicting evidence, West and East — that black men simply were not up to combat. “Is not a Negro as good as a white man to stop a bullet?” someone asked Sherman about this time, over in Georgia. “Yes; and a sandbag is better,” he replied. Like many eastern generals he believed that former slaves had their uses in war, but not as soldiers. Burnside felt otherwise, and what was more he backed up his contention by directing that Ferrero’s division, which was not only the freshest but was also by now the largest of the four, would lead tomorrow’s predawn charge. By way of preparation, he had had the two brigades spend the past week rehearsing the attack until every member knew just what he was to do, and how; that is, rush promptly forward, as soon as the mine was sprung, and expand the gap so that the other three divisions, coming up behind, could move unopposed across the Jerusalem Plank Road and onto the high ground immediately in rear of the blasted enemy intrenchments, which would give them a clear shot at Petersburg itself.

He was in high spirits, partly because the digging had gone so well and partly because Meade and Grant, catching a measure of his enthusiasm as the tunnel neared completion, had expanded the operation. Not only were Warren’s and Baldy Smith’s corps ordered to stand by for a share in exploiting the breakthrough — which was to be given close-up support by no less than 144 field pieces, mortars, and siege guns: more artillery, pound for pound, than had been massed by either side at Gettysburg — but Grant also sent Hancock’s corps, along with two of Sheridan’s divisions, to create a diversion, and if possible score an accompanying breakthrough, on the far side of the James. Hancock, who had returned to duty the week before, found the Confederates heavily reinforced in front of Richmond: as did Sheridan, who was worsted in a four-hour fight with Hampton on the day the fuze was laid to Pleasants’s mine. Still, the feint served its purpose by drawing large numbers of graybacks away from the intended scene of the main effort, about midway down the five-mile rebel line below the Appomattox. Intelligence reported that five of Lee’s eight infantry divisions were now at Bermuda Hundred or north of the James, leaving Beauregard with only three
divisions, some 18,000 men in all, for the defense of the Petersburg rail hub. Moreover, there still was time for Hancock to return tomorrow — the day of Burnside’s last-minute council of war — to lend still greater weight to the assault that would accompany the blasting of the undermanned enemy works before daylight next morning.

Burnside was happily passing this latest news along to his lieutenants when he was interrupted by a courier from army headquarters, bearing a message that had an effect not unlike the one expected, across the way, when the mine was sprung tomorrow. It contained an order from Meade, approved by Grant, for the assault to be spearheaded not by Ferrero’s well-rehearsed Negroes, but by one of the white divisions. This change, which landed like a bomb in the council chamber, was provoked by racism; racism in reverse. “If we put the colored troops in front and [the attack] should prove a failure,” Grant would testify at the subsequent investigation, “it would then be said, and very properly, that we were shoving those people ahead to get killed because we did not care anything about them.”

Stunned, Burnside tried to get the order rescinded, only to be told that it would stand; Meade was not about to give his Abolitionist critics this chance to bring him down with charges that he had exposed black recruits to slaughter in the forefront of a long-shot operation. By now the scheduled assault was less than twelve hours off, all but four of them hours of darkness, and the ruff-whiskered general, too shaken to decide which of his three unrehearsed white divisions should take the lead, had their commanders draw straws for the assignment. It fell to Brigadier General James H. Ledlie, a former heavy artilleryman, least experienced of the three. Potter and Brigadier General Orlando Willcox would attack in turn, behind Ledlie; Ferrero would bring up the rear.

As they departed to alert their troops, Burnside could find consolation only in reports that the Confederates — two South Carolina regiments, posted in support of the four-gun battery poised above the sealed-off powder chamber — seemed to have abandoned their former suspicion that they were about to be blown skyward. For a time last week they had tried countermining, without success, and when the underground digging stopped, July 23, so did their attempts at intersection. Apparently they too had experts who advised them that such a tunnel was impracticable; with the result that when the sound of picks and shovels stopped, down below, they decided that the Yanks had given up, probably after a disastrous cave-in or mounting losses from asphyxiation.

Eventually the troops were brought up in the darkness, groping their way over unfamiliar terrain to take up assigned positions for the jump-off: Ledlie’s division out front, just in back of the ridge where the pickets were dug in, Potter’s and Willcox’s along the slope of the railway cut, and Ferrero’s along its bottom, aggrieved at having been
shunted to the rear. Elsewhere along the Union line the other corps stood by, including Hancock’s, which had returned from its demonstration beyond the James. Shortly after 3 o’clock Pleasants entered the tunnel to light the fuze. The guns and mortars were laid, ammunition stacked and cannoneers at the ready, lanyards taut. Burnside had his watch out, observing the creep of its hands toward 3.30, the specified time for the springing of the mine. 3.30 finally came; but not the explosion. Half an hour went by, and still the night was black, unsplit by flame. Another half hour ticked past, bringing the first gray hint of dawn to the rearward sky, and though Pleasants had accepted his mine-boss sergeant’s offer to go back into the tunnel and investigate the delay, there still was no blast. Grant, losing patience, considered telling Burnside to forget the explosion and get on with his 15,000-man assault. Daylight grew, much faster now, and the flat eastern rim of earth was tinted rose, anticipating the bulge of the rising sun, by the time the sergeant and a lieutenant who had volunteered to join him — Harry Reese and Jacob Douty were their names — found that the fuze had burned out at the splice. They cut and relit it and scrambled for the tunnel entrance, a long 150 yards away, emerging just before 4.44, when the 8000-pound charge, twenty feet below the rebel works, erupted.

“A slight tremor of the earth for a second, then the rocking as of an earthquake,” an awed captain would recall, “and, with a tremendous blast which rent the sleeping hills beyond, a vast column of earth and smoke shoots upward to a great height, its dark sides flashing out sparks of fire, hangs poised for a moment in mid-air, and then, hurtling down with a roaring sound, showers of stones, broken timbers and blackened human limbs, subsides — the gloomy pall of darkening smoke flushing to an angry crimson as it floats away to meet the morning sun.” Another watcher of that burgeoning man-made cloud of dust and turmoil, a brigadier with Hancock, left an impression he never suspected would be repeated at the dawn of a far deadlier age of warfare, just over eighty years away: “Without form or shape, full of red flames and carried on a bed of lightning flashes, it mounted toward heaven with a detonation of thunder [and] spread out like an immense mushroom whose stem seemed to be of fire and its head of smoke.”

Added to the uproar was the simultaneous crash of many cannon, fired by tense gunners as soon as they saw the ground begin to heave from the overdue explosion. Ledlie’s men, caught thus between two shock waves, looked out and saw the rising mass of earth, torn from the hillside hard ahead, mount up and up until it seemed to hover directly above them, its topmost reaches glittering in the full light of the not-yet-risen sun. As the huge cluster started down, they recovered at least in part from their shock and reacted by breaking in panic for the rear. This was not too serious; their officers got them back in line within ten minutes and started them forward before the dust and smoke had cleared.
But what happened next was serious indeed. In his dismay over the last-minute change in orders, Burnside had neglected to have the defensive tangle of obstacles cleared from in front of the parapets, with the result that the attack formation was broken up as soon as the troops set out. Instead of advancing on a broad front, as intended — a brigade in width, with the second brigade coming up in close support — they went forward through a hastily improvised ten-foot passway that not only delayed their start but also confined them to a meager file of wary individuals who advanced a scant one hundred yards, then stopped in awe of what they saw before them. Where the Confederate fort had stood there now was a monstrous crater, sixty feet across and nearly two hundred feet wide, ranging in depth from ten to thirty feet. All was silent down there on its rubbled floor except for the thin cries of the wounded — who, together with the killed, turned out to number 278 — mangled by the blast and buried to various depths by the debris.