JULY 30, 1864:
The
Burning of Chambersburg, Pennsylvania:
General
Jubal Early C.S.A. and his troops reached Chambersburg, Pennsylvania. Chambersburg had
been occupied and raided twice before in the war, in October 1862 by Jeb
Stuart, and in June 1863 by Jubal Early himself as part of the run-up to the
Battle of Gettysburg. Today, an angry Early seized whatever could be seized
(including robbing the town’s banks), and deciding that "it was time to
open the eyes of the people of the North to this enormity, by example in the
way of retaliation" for General David Hunter U.S.A.’s destruction of
Lynchburg, VA, he put Chambersburg to the torch. 600 buildings and farms are
burnt, and most of Chambersburg’s citizens were left homeless and destitute. Against orders, a few Confederates tried to
aid the suffering citizens. One Northerner was killed, an elderly African-American.
Five Confederates were shot down by angry citizens.
General Darius Couch U.S.A., who made his Headquarters in
Chambersburg, had evacuated his staff and small garrison of troops upon hearing
of Early’s approach. When Couch learned that the town had been destroyed, he
sent cavalry after Early, and a series of small battles and skirmishes lit up
the Pennsylvania and Maryland countrysides. When photos of destroyed
Chambersburg made the Northern papers there was a cry for vengeance, but it
also seemed that President Abraham Lincoln’s re-election chances utterly went
up in smoke with the town.
The Battle of The Crater:
While
the goddess Kali rode with a flaming torch in Pennsylvania, the goddess Nemesis
walked in Virginia. In June, an
enterprising Union engineer, Lieutenant Colonel Henry Pleasants, a miner in
civilian life, had approached General George Meade with an audacious plan to
construct a tunnel from the Union lines across No-Man’s Land and under the
Confederate defenses at Petersburg. Pleasants’ plan was to pack the tunnel with
explosives, detonate it, and then rush the breach in the Dimmock Line with a
mass of troops, seizing the Confederate emplacements before the stunned
Southerners knew what was happening.
Almost every Civil War historian agrees that Pleasants’ plan bid fair to be a
success, but Meade was unimpressed. For one thing, the longest tunnel yet built
had only been 400 feet long, and the distance to the Confederate lines was over
500 feet. Secondly, Meade was uncertain as to whether explosives could be
successfully detonated at that distance (it would take a 600 foot fuse with a
great number of splices to reach the detonation chamber) or what the result
would be. Meade went to Grant and discussed the plan, which they both decided
to disregard.
In a perfect example, however, of the confusion that defined
the command structure of The Army of The Potomac, General Ambrose Burnside,
Pleasants’ immediate superior, approved the plan. Construction of the tunnel
began on June 25th.
Pleasants’ tunnel was an engineering marvel, especially
considering that he had to build it with catch-as-catch-can materials since the
plan had had no officially approved requisitions for materials. Built fifty
feet underground on an upward slope (to minimize moisture in the tunnel) that
brought it to a level 20 feet below the Confederate position, the tunnel had a
cleverly designed air vent system, and a coal-fired automatic bellows at the
near end to draw air down through the tunnel.
The tunnel was built in the shape of a “T” with the
transverse chamber at the far end. The base of the “T” was 511 feet long and 4
½ feet high, the transverse chamber 80 feet long. After the transverse chamber
was packed floor-to-ceiling and wall to wall with 10,000 pounds of powder and
other explosives, it was sealed off.
Though they ballyhooed it, both Grant and Meade had looked
on the project as “something to keep the men from being idle” during the boring
stretches of inactivity that marked the Siege of Petersburg, but after the
Battle of Deep Bottom, they became more interested in the tunnel. On the
Confederate side, Robert E. Lee had heard rumors of a tunnel, but after a few
half-hearted and unsuccessful attempts at detection, he dismissed the idea as
so much poppycock.
Ambrose Burnside, however, had looked on the tunnel as a way
to salvage his increasingly dented reputation. Burnside had done well in the
early months of the war commanding the land forces that retook much of the
North Carolina coast in early 1862, but since then he had proven to be a hard
luck commander, leading the tragicomic Mud March, the futile Battle of
Burnside’s Bridge during Antietam, the tragic Battle of Fredericksburg as Commanding
General of The Army of The Potomac, and most recently, lost many men in the
Battle of The Wilderness. The tunnel, he hoped, would resuscitate his military
career.
Instead, it ended it. Burnside had trained brigades of
U.S.C.T. who were expected, after the detonation, to move around the circumference of the anticipated blast site. However,
the night before the detonation Burnside, under pressure from Meade, began to
worry that if something went terribly wrong he would be blamed for throwing
away the lives of his African-American men. At the last minute, he decided to
lead the attack with a white Division. Although this was intelligent political
thinking on Burnside’s part, Burnside subsequently proved to be just as inept
as he was thought to be, by assigning the lead force through the expedient of
having his subcommanders draw straws.
As only Burnside’s luck would have it, the short straw was
drawn by the morbidly alcoholic General James H. Ledlie who nearly had his men
slaughtered at the Battle of The North Anna River in May by leading an infantry
charge against cannons.
Ledlie, who was as was his wont, on a blind drunk bender,
neglected to tell the commander of his Division to go around the crater. Ledlie also had no faith in the intelligence of
black troops to follow any but the simplest of orders, and merely sent word that
the U.S.C.T. were to follow his Division. Ledlie then collapsed into his tent
with a fresh bottle and took no further interest in the battle.
The fuse was lit at 3:45 A.M. on this July 30th,
and --- nothing happened. After a long
wait, two iron-nerved volunteers descended into the tunnel to discover that the
fuse had parted at a splice. They lit
the fuse again and ran for their lives.
The blast, when it came at 4:44 A.M., was like nothing
anyone had ever experienced. It was the largest single explosion in North
American history until the Trinity A-bomb test of July 24, 1945. Body parts,
rocks and earth flew in all directions. Two entire Confederate regiments were
instantly vaporized and a battery of men was buried alive. The resulting crater
(still visible) was 170 feet long, 120 feet wide, and 40 feet deep. Church
bells jangled in Petersburg and the roar was heard in Richmond.
The blast stunned the Confederates as planned --- but it
also stunned the Federals who were expecting it. It took a full ten minutes for
Ledlie’s men to advance, and when they did, they advanced by jumping down into the crater, followed by most of the
U.S.C.T. (some U.S.C.T. followed their original orders, and actually entered
the Confederate lines where they engaged in bloody hand-to-hand fighting and
were killed to a man). Historian William Marvel posits that part of the delay
was caused when Federals stopped advancing in order to help dig half-buried
Confederate wounded out of the soil.
Once inside the Crater, the Federal troops discovered that
they could advance no further since the walls of the Crater were too steep. Since
they had jumped into the Crater and were being followed by their fellows, they
literally could do nothing but mill around inside the Crater as it became more densely
packed with trapped troops.
It was at this point, about fifteen minutes after the blast
that the recovered Confederates appeared at the edges of the Crater, and began
firing down upon the Union men within. The Crater became a roiling mass of
desperate men.
Some of the more hysterical Yankees attacked each other. A
number of Union whites killed U.S.C.T., calling up to the Confederates for
mercy. They died anyway.
A few men used the bodies of their dead comrades as ladders to
climb up and out of the Crater, but they were met by men in gray who shot or
bayoneted them and threw their corpses into the Crater.
A few grimly determined Federals did manage to make it to
the lip of the Crater to engage in close-quarter combat. Like the U.S.C.T who
had gone around the Crater, these men were likewise slaughtered.
“It’s like shooting
fish in a barrel!” one of the Rebels exulted. Confederate
General William Mahone C.S.A. called it “a turkey shoot.”
Burnside called off the attack (and any support for the
attack) at 9:30 A.M., while it was still going on. The men being slain in the
Crater had no way of knowing this, nor any way of retreating. All they knew is
that they were dying en masse and far
from help. Although he knew what was happening in the Crater, Burnside,
unwilling to risk more men, did nothing to help the trapped.
The Southerners took few prisoners. Instead, as had become
the grisly Southern custom, they executed all captured U.S.C.T. and their
officers, turning the Crater into a mass grave. Almost 4,000 Union men were lost
in the Battle of The Crater, almost all dead or presumed to be dead. The 1,500
Confederates lost were all but a few killed in the initial blast.
The military fallout from the Battle of The Crater was dire
for Burnside who was censured and sent on leave, never to fight in the war
again. His greatest claim to fame would be his impressive muttonchop whiskers,
called ever after “sideburns.” Ledlie was cashiered in disgrace. Lieutenant
Colonel Pleasants however, was promoted to Brevet Brigadier General.
Ulysses S. Grant wrote:
"It was the
saddest affair I have witnessed in this war . . .”
He also lamented:
“Such an opportunity
for carrying fortifications I have never seen and do not expect again to
have."
Grant later testified on Burnside’s behalf that:
General Burnside
wanted to put his colored division in front, and I believe if he had done so it
would have been a success . . . General
Meade said that if we put the colored troops in front and it should prove a
failure, it would then be said and very properly, that we were shoving these
people ahead to get killed because we did not care anything about them.
On the strength of Grant’s comments, Burnside, the walking
Peter Principle, was exonerated of any wrongdoing, but his reputation, and his career along with it, was
destroyed.
Today, kind time has softened the edges of The Crater, but it
still scars the Virginia landscape, a violent pockmark among the suburban
sprawl of Petersburg.
