The Sad Tale of the Battle of the Crater
Scene from the Battle of the Crater (Alfred R. Waud)
The other day, I asked the Muscle how the Battle of the Crater got its name. Ever since he took the Open Yale Course on the Civil War,* he’s been reading every book on the syllabus, so I figured he would know.
His answer: A bunch of Union soldiers dug a tunnel under a fort in Virginia and blew it up, hence the crater. They weren’t sure what to do next, so they filed into the hole — where they were summarily shot like fish in a barrel.
The Muscle always makes up crazy stories when he thinks I don’t really want to know the answer.
“Come on, what happened?” I asked.
The general was drunk and thought aliens were attacking with laser-blasters that would form massive craters.
“Seriously.”
All the soldiers were reading a best-selling novel that had just come out the week before, Union and Confederates alike. They wouldn’t fight until they’d all reached the last page. The novel was called The Crater.
I gave up and looked it up on Google. To my surprise, he had told the truth the first time. The Battle of the Crater may not be a one-name conflict like Gettysburg or Antietam, but there’s something darkly compelling about its story.
It reads like the synopsis of a good novel: the suspense of mines and countermines, the battle tactics and race politics, and the sudden plunge from triumph to tragedy with a drunken general at the helm.
The Battle of the Crater may have begun with a suggestion from a Pennsylvania soldier who had been a coal miner. Faced with the problem of taking Petersburg — the southern gateway to the Confederate capitol of Richmond — he wondered why they didn’t just burrow under the fort.
And so they dug for nearly a month, scooping out dirt with cracker boxes and burning fires to keep fresh air moving through the passageway. (Confederates heard noises, but failed to find the mine.) Soldiers planted about 8,000 pounds of gunpowder under the fort. Finally, at 4:45 a.m. on July 30, 1864, they lit the fuse.
The explosion destroyed the fort and killed at least 248 Confederate soldiers. Its force sent 1,700-pound cannons flying into the air.
It was a resounding triumph for the Union — at first. They had experienced soldiers from the United States Colored Troops at ready, but it wasn’t smart politically to send them in first. Instead they sent in other, relatively green troops into the smoke and clamor.
Rather than taking advantage of the enemy’s confusion, the Union soldiers succumbed to it. The plan had been to gather around the crater. Instead, they climbed into it and were shot like the proverbial fish in a barrel or gutted with bayonets. They fired at the helmets that the Confederates dangled over the edge of the crater on sticks, and when they paused to reload, their enemy attacked.
Their general, meanwhile, was holed up in a bomb shelter drinking remedial whiskey. (General James Ledlie would later be court-martialed for failing to lead his troops.) All told, the Union lost more than 4,000 soldiers versus 1,500 or so Confederates. Given the size of the armies, the loss was actually about the same, but what might have been a ready victory became an exhausting nine-month siege.
Tourists began flocking to the battleground shortly after the war ended. At the time, the crater measured at least 170 feet long, 60 to 80 feet wide, and 30 feet deep.
The crater in 2004
In one photograph from the late 1860s, ladies shade themselves with parasols by the crater and men in straw hats strike jaunty poses. In the middle of the crater, so small and fuzzy you’ll probably miss them, lie a skull and a heap of bones. (Was the memento mori supposed to be a highbrow gesture, or was it a touch of morbid humor?)
You can still see signs of the explosion today, although it’s less a crater than a grassy depression in the hillside. The farmland where the soldiers fought has grown thick with pines and all manners of creatures: hawks and lizards, dragonflies and deer.
Visiting last weekend, I thought of Whitman’s grass that grows “from the breasts of young men” and seems to be “the beautiful uncut hair of graves.”
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* The Civil War and Reconstruction Era: 1845-1877, a course by Yale professor David Blight, seems to have been well reviewed in the blogosphere, and an editor at The Atlantic recommends taking it before participating in an online book club devoted to James McPherson’s Battle Cry of Freedom. Read more about the free class at the Open Yale Course site.
** For more information about the battle, check out this detailed article on the National Park Service site.
