by Bruce Catton
The Army of the Potomac was led to disaster many times, and there is a rather horrible fascination about tracing the steps by which, in each case, it reached that destination. Usually those steps seemed quite reasonable at the time, and they were generally taken with the best intentions in the world, and almost invariably they form a chain of events which might have been broken almost anywhere. So now.
It began with the decision not to put the colored division first. A little later Grant was to admit that this decision was a mistake, but it was made for what seemed excellent reasons. The battle that was coming up was a gamble at best. Nobody could be sure that the mine would actually have the effect Pleasants and Burnside believed it would have. If it did not, the troops that led in the assault would be butchered. If those troops happened to be colored men without combat experience it would immediately be argued that they had been sacrificed callously because no one cared what happened to them. (The argument would be made, incidentally, by some of the most vocal and determined arguers that ever lived, the abolitionists and the radical Republicans.) Neither Grant nor Meade felt that that was a proper risk to take.
But this decision started all of the trouble, because its effect was to deflate Burnside completely. Until now, Burnside had done what a good corps commander ought to do. He had seen merit in an unorthodox plan proposed by a subordinate, he had fought to get the idea approved, and he had supported it when higher authority failed to support it. But from this moment on he was as poor a general as a grown man can be, and both the army and the Union cause as a whole would have been much better off if he had taken to his bed, pulled the covers over his handsome face, and let someone else take charge.
First of all he had to pick another division to lead the attack, and he called in the commanding officers of his three white divisions. These were General Potter, to whom Colonel Pleasants had first suggested the mine, a capable man with a good record; General Orlando B. Willcox, a veteran who had been commanding a division ever since Antietam; and Brigadier General James H. Ledlie, a civil engineer without military training or experience when the war began, who had come into the army as major in a New York heavy artillery regiment and who had only recently risen to division command.
Burnside seems to have been pretty numb when he talked with these three generals. He explained that plans had been changed and one of their divisions would have to lead the attack. He confessed that he could not for the life of him see any reason to prefer one division or one general over the other two. Therefore, said Burnside, why should they not simply draw lots to see which division should go in first? 6
Down under the fabulous whiskers and the kindly dignity, Burnside was a gambler. In the Mexican War he had almost been cashiered because of his weakness for risking everything on the turn of a card. This time he was gambling far beyond his means, and chance played him false. The luck of the draw, when they finally got down to pulling for the short straw, decreed that Ledlie’s division must take the lead.
Why Burnside did not immediately call for a new deal is past understanding. Of all of his divisions Ledlie’s was the weakest, and of all of his generals Ledlie was the most unfit. The whole division had grown notoriously gun-shy during the past month, and one of its two brigades was made up largely of heavy artillery regiments and dismounted cavalry. Although the heavies had turned into first-rate soldiers for the rest of the army, they were not highly regarded in the IX Corps. A few weeks earlier Burnside himself had said of them: “They are worthless. They didn’t enlist to fight and it is unreasonable to expect it of them. In the attack last night I couldn’t find thirty of them.” But chance had put Ledlie’s division in the lead and Burnside let it ride; and chance further decreed that when Ledlie formed his men for the charge it was the weak brigade that was put in front.7
The real trouble, however, was in Ledlie himself.
The army contained a good many poor generals, but it had very few who were ever accused of personal cowardice. Ledlie was one who was so accused. His subordinates knew him as a weakling. In the June 18 attack, while his men fought to carry a Rebel entrenchment, Ledlie had taken to the bottle, and at a climactic moment of the fight he had been stretched out on the ground in a safe place, the world forgetting and by the world forgot. His soldiers knew it and his junior officers knew it, but the IX Corps somehow was the kind of corps in which a thing like that could escape the notice of the commanding general, so Burnside did not know it. Burnside combined the great virtue of being loyal to his underlings with the terrible weakness of being quite unable to tell a good operator from a bad one, and now he was entrusting the supreme assault of the army’s career to a soldier who was taken with palsy whenever it came time to go out where enemy bullets were flying.8
For good or for ill, the day ended and there was a stir all along the line. The secret of the mine had not been too well kept, and there had been gossip about it for days, but most Federals had at last begun to treat it as the Confederates did—as a rumor which someone had probably dreamed up over a jug of commissary whisky—and few people had taken it very seriously. Still, as June 29 drew to a close, there were omens for all to see. Sick men in the field hospitals were sent back to City Point. There was a great riding to and fro of staff officers and couriers, and practically every unit in the corps was being moved from one place to another. Ferrero’s colored troops were brought forward, after dark, and lined up in the bottom of the ravine. They were full of enthusiasm, because in all of the excitement no one had thought to tell them that assignments had been changed, and they still supposed that they were going to lead in the attack. Indeed, they were the only division in the corps which believed that it knew what was going to happen.9
During the night Hancock’s men came back from the north side of the James, and Meade and Grant got up early and went to Burnside’s headquarters, half a mile behind the front—a convenient place, connected with other commands by telegraph, which Meade had designated as temporary headquarters for the army.
Burnside, meanwhile, went forward to a fourteen-gun battery that had been built on a hill a few hundred yards back of the entrance to the mine. The night wore away, silent except for the shuffling of thousands of men moving to their places, and a little after three o’clock in the morning Pleasants sent a man into the mine and shaft to set fire to the fuse.
Back on the hills behind the line the artillerists were ready. They had previously trained their pieces on their targets, and the guns and mortars were all loaded, and from three o’clock on the gunners were standing by, lanyards in hand, ready to fire at the word of command.10 In the trenches, Ledlie’s men were standing up, not knowing what was coming except that they realized they were about to be pushed into a big fight. On the slope behind them, Potter’s and Willcox’s divisions were waiting, similarly tense and ignorant. Back of all of them were Ferrero’s colored men, massed at the bottom of the ravine, expecting at any moment to get the word to go in and capture Petersburg. General Burnside stood in the battery, serene in his ineffable rectitude, conscious that his baggage was packed and that he could take up headquarters in the Rebel city on a moment’s notice.
Half-past three came, with the high command fingering watches and staring off into the dark, and nothing happened. Another half hour went by, and half an hour more on top of that, and the silence was unbroken, except for the occasional discharge of some wakeful picket’s musket. Grant got impatient, and at last he told Meade to have Burnside make his charge regardless: something had gone wrong with the mine, and there was no use waiting any longer.11 In the east the sky was turning gray—and five eighths of Lee’s army was north of the James River, with the full strength of the Army of the Potomac massed to smash through the fraction that was left.
Grant was impatient, and Meade was impatient, and probably even Burnside was getting a little restless; but the man who was really excited was Colonel Pleasants. About the time Grant was saying that the charge had better go ahead without the explosion, Pleasant
s called Sergeant Harry Reese, the mine boss, and told him to go into the tunnel and see what was the matter.
In went Reese, on as nerve-racking an assignment as the war could produce, groping forward all bent over along 400 feet of a dark tunnel, never sure that the solid earth ahead was not going to quake and heave and tumble to bury him forever. He got to the fuse, traced it, and found that the spark had died at a place where one fuse had been spliced to another. He started back to get a new fuse, found Lieutenant Jacob Douty coming in, at Pleasants’s direction, with the material he needed, and he and Douty went back to the splice and made a new connection. Then he lit the spark again, and he and Lieutenant Douty came out of the tunnel as fast as they could travel12—and the sky grew lighter in the east, so that ridges and trees and hillocks became dark shadows outlined against the dying night, and the whole Army of the Potomac stood by gripping its muskets, waiting for nobody knew just what.
Four forty-five: and at last it happened.
To the men who were waiting in the front line it seemed to occur in slow motion: first a long, deep rumble, like summer thunder rolling along a faraway horizon, then a swaying and swelling of the ground up ahead, with the solid earth rising to form a rounded hill, everything seeming very gradual and leisurely. Then the rounded hill broke apart, and a prodigious spout of flame and black smoke went up toward the sky, and the air was full of enormous clods of earth as big as houses, of brass cannon and detached artillery wheels, of wrecked caissons and fluttering tents and weirdly tumbling human bodies; and there was a crash “like the noise of great thunders,” followed by other, lesser explosions, and all of the landscape along the firing line had turned into dust and smoke and flying debris, choking and blinding men and threatening to engulf Burnside’s whole army corps.
Different men saw it and felt it in different ways. A soldier in the 36th Massachusetts wrote that “we witnessed a volcano and experienced an earthquake,” yet an officer in Ferrero’s division, standing not a third of a mile away from the explosion, recalled it as “a dull, heavy thud, not at all startling … a heavy, smothered sound, not nearly so distinct as a musket shot.” A man in Pleasants’s own 48th Pennsylvania remembered it as “a magnificent spectacle,” and another soldier recalled that a bronze cannon was tossed nearly over to the Union line. To one man the whole thing looked like “a waterspout as seen at sea,” another felt it as “a heavy shaking of the earth, with a rumbling, muffled sound,” and to men in Hancock’s corps, waiting behind the artillery, it seemed that the solid earth went up “like an enormous whirlwind.” 13
The gunners had been waiting a long time, and some of them had their eyes fixed on the Confederate redoubt, and they jerked their lanyards as soon as they saw the ground begin to rise, so that the crash of their own guns rocked the air before the sound of the explosion reached them. There was a tremendous concussion from the artillery, with more guns being fired than the Union army had fired in the great artillery duel at Gettysburg. An overwhelming cloud of white smoke from the guns went tumbling down into the ravine and overflowed the farther crest to mix with the hanging black dust and smoke from the mine, so that all along the Yankee line the air was dark as midnight, lit by brief stabbing flames as the shell began to go off.14
The troops which had been waiting to make the charge saw a hillside fly up in their faces, and it looked as if the mass of earth was going to fall on them, so that many men turned and ran, and it was five or ten minutes before the officers could get them reformed. Then the order for the charge was sounded and Ledlie’s division started to make its attack—at which crucial moment the soldiers realized that nobody had prepared the way for them, so that the kind of charge which everybody had counted on was completely impossible.
In Meade’s orders there had been a provision for leveling the parapet so that a line of battle could swing up out of the trench and go forward in fighting formation, but this assignment had dropped out of sight somewhere between “I ordered it done” and “Nobody told me to do it.” Nothing whatever had been done. The leading brigade was standing in the bottom of an eight-foot ditch, and men who were loaded down with muskets and cartridge boxes and haversacks just could not scale the wall.
One officer, aware that time was a-wasting, had a squad improvise a ladder by jabbing bayonets into the log wall and holding the outer ends while their comrades climbed up and over. In another place, men tore down sandbags and piled them into a clumsy sort of stairway. Finally, with an additional ten minutes lost, a straggling line of men got up out of the trench and began to run forward by twos and threes—a thin trickle of wholly disorganized men, rather than the connected wave of a line of battle.15
Stumbling up the slope through dust and smoke, these men got to the place where the Confederate redoubt had been and found themselves peering down into a great smoking crater.
One hundred and seventy feet of the Confederate line had been blown up. In its place there was a huge chasm, 60 feet across and 30 feet deep. All around this crater, balanced on its rim and tumbled over the ground on every side, were big hunks of solid clay, broken timbers, dismounted guns, and lesser wreckage of every kind. Down at the bottom there was more of the same, including many human bodies. Some Southerners, still living, had been buried to their waists, some had only their heads above the earth. Others had been buried head downward, their legs protruding into the air. As the men of Ledlie’s leading brigade came up they paused, stupefied by the sight; then they slid and scrambled down into the crater and began to uproot the buried Confederates. An officer got one squad together to dig out a couple of half-buried cannon.
Nothing could be seen very clearly, for smoke and dust still filled the air. To the rear the Federal guns kept up a furious bombardment, and there was no return fire. For 200 yards on each side of the crater the Confederate trenches were empty, the men who had inhabited them having taken to their heels when the mine blew up. Here and there a few stout souls began to fire their muskets into the haze about the crater, but half an hour would pass before their fire would have any appreciable effect.
Colonel Pleasants’s little plan could not possibly have been more successful. Right in the middle of the impregnable Confederate chain of defenses it had created a gap 500 yards wide, and all the DC Corps had to do was march through and take the ridge. It would need to move briskly, because the gap was not going to stay open very long, but at five o’clock on this morning of July 30 decisive victory was less than half an undefended mile away.
But the one thing which Burnside’s corps could not do that morning was to move briskly.
While one of Ledlie’s brigades was getting down into the crater and acting partly like a rescue squad, partly like a salvage party, and partly like a group of sight-seers, his other brigade came dribbling out of the Federal trenches to support it. Those engineer parties which were to have cleared the way for the attacking columns had not materialized, and so the only gap in the abatis and chevaux-de-frise was right in front of the crater, where the earth thrown out by the explosion had buried the entanglements. This second brigade thus came forward through a funnel which led it straight toward the crater, and since the men were not coming up in regular formation—getting over the parapet was still a matter of every man for himself—and since nobody in particular was shooting at them, the men trotted up to the rim to have a look. While stray officers were urging everyone to continue the advance, most of the men slid down to the bottom of the crater, and presently almost all of Ledlie’s division was jammed in there, a confused and aimless mob wholly out of control.
Not a vestige of military organization remained. Officers could not find their men and men could not find their officers, and there was a good deal of rather aimless activity. Along the farther rim of the crater, some industrious souls were trying to prepare a defensive line. The officer who had been digging up the buried cannon was putting men to work to horse them up to the rim where they could be fired—a difficult job, since the final feet of the crater wall
were practically vertical—and he had other details hunting about to find the Rebel gunners’ magazine. Half-entombed Confederates were still being dug up, and a few files of dazed prisoners were being sent to the rear. A few officers were yelling themselves hoarse, trying to get the men to climb up out of the crater and go on with the attack, but hardly anyone was paying any attention to them.16
This, of course, was the kind of situations which generals in charge of infantry divisions had been created to unscramble. Now was the moment for the division commander to take charge, restore order, pull the men out of the pit, form a coherent line of battle, and make his attack. But General Ledlie, who commanded this division, was snugly tucked away in a bombproof 400 yards behind the line, plying himself with rum borrowed from a brigade surgeon. From first to last he never saw the explosion, the soldiers, the crater, or the charge. Now and then reports would come back to him, and he would dispatch a runner with the order that everyone must move forward to the crest of the ridge. Beyond that he did nothing and was capable of doing nothing.17 And General Burnside, back in the fourteen-gun battery, serenely unaware that anything was wrong, was busily ordering fresh troops forward.
The fresh troops were Potter’s and Willcox’s divisions. Time would have been saved if these troops had been lined up in brigade front just behind the front-line trench, but it was held that troops moving forward to the front ought to go up through the covered way—after all, that was what the thing had been built for—and so two infantry divisions were sent up a winding ditch that was wide enough for no more than two or three men abreast, colliding with stragglers, walking wounded, couriers, and other persons, and in due time they got into the front-line trench and scrambled up sandbag stairways, bayonet ladders, and what-not and went forward through the gap toward the crater. Their officers steered them off to the right and left, so that the empty Confederate trenches adjoining the crater could be possessed, and very slowly and with much confusion a trickle of Federal troops began to come up into line on each side of Ledlie’s disorganized division.18