The Battle of The Crater, with EIGHT Tour Stops!: Petersburg Video Tour

hi welcome as we cover one of the most famous things if not the most famous thing at petersburg we're going to talk about the crater but maybe in a way that you haven't heard before by making a bunch of quick stops by way of reminder this is the third offensive at petersburg this is late july 1864 and this particular attack the crater is coupled with another battle you've probably heard of called first deep bottom so grant is attacking north of the james river and south of the james river and we're going to focus on that to the south let's cut it over to will green thanks gary we're standing uh on the main union line just behind us is the outline of the 14 gun battery sometimes called fort morton which would serve as ambrose burnside's command post during the fighting at the battle of the crater and here is the best place to get a great view of the battlefield from the union perspective we're looking over my shoulder you're looking to the west and you see the ruins of the kitchen of the taylor house spring garden plantation over here to my left rear down in the bottom you see a line of brush down here that marks the bed of the norfolk and petersburg railroad and just behind just beyond the railroad you see a bluff and that bluff is the bank of poor or taylor's creek which is going to be our next stop that's going to be the place where the union deploys for their major attack in the distance on the high ground where you see the cops of trees is the piggrims or eliot's salient a strong point on the third and final confederate battle line that will be the target of the mining operation that will result in the explosion creating the crater we're standing down here in the area that represents the advanced union position at the battle of the crater this area would be called the horseshoe because it was a semi-circular shaped formation composed of mostly robert potter's division of the union ninth core and this is the the position from which a lot of the jump off for the attack at the crater would occur now lots of people who go to the crater and look over at the union line say how in the world could the federals get this close to the confederates without being seen and shot well if you look at this bluff that defines the left bank of a little tributary of the appomattox river called poor or taylor's creek lots of the union soldiers refer to it in their letters as poo creek but it because that's the accent of the virginians it was paul creek but this is the this is the terrain feature that shields the federals from view of the confederates and as we look behind us you can see the distance between where we stand now at the advanced union position and where we were at our last stop on the main union line in the intermediate ground you might be able to make out the flat area that is about halfway between where we stand and the high ground where you see the chimney ruins that's the bed of the norfolk and petersburg railroad and you can see that the ground descends from the main union position on the high ground beyond the ruins of the taylor house kitchen which we saw at our last stop then it goes down into the cut of the railroad into this flat area here along poor creek and the bluff there was a picket line for the federals that was on advance of the bluff just a picket line but this is be this is where most of the federal troops would gather for their assaults and the covered ways that we mentioned we saw at one of our stops here one of our videos and the covered way would lead down to this position which was protected from confederate fire so here's where the union ninth core is going to gather prior to the explosion of the mine which we'll talk about at our next stop hold on maybe i can ask doug if we can get a close-up of the creek because this is one cool pooh creek i think this is another example of how the terrain at petersburg is much more complicated than it appears from the park tour road this is a pretty deep stream a pretty deep cut ravine and a very steep bluff we're standing at the reconstructed mouth of the mine that was constructed by elements of the 48th pennsylvania infantry that led to the battle of the crater now that was an offhand remark by one of the soldiers in the 48th pennsylvania which contained about 100 anthracite coal miners and whose commander henry pleasants was a mining engineer this soldier said offhandedly if we could run a shaft under that fort we could blow it to hell well the word got back to colonel pleasance that this comment was made he employed his engineering acumen and said you know that might work he ran the idea up the chain of command burnside was all gung-ho about it now general mead was sort of lukewarm about it he didn't obstruct the effort but he certainly didn't help the effort here but it would be the work of the 48th pennsylvania to construct this mine shaft with the idea of at the end of it to pack it with black powder and explode it to be followed by an attack so as we walk up along this uh pathway that mirrors that parallels the root of the mine shaft we'll talk a little bit about why the union engineering establishment was very skeptical in fact the chief engineer of the union army james duane called the idea claps crap and nonsense and the reason he did that was because he felt that a mine shaft this long could not be properly ventilated it would be 510 feet eight inches from the mouth of the tunnel to the place where the black powder was placed and the longest ventilation of a of a shaft like this without being seen was about 400 feet and so dwayne and the engineering establishment thought this was a stupid idea but pleasants came up with a relatively simple plan for ventilating the shaft and it happened right here this depression in the ground is the remains of a vertical shaft that extended about 20 feet down below the ground here to intersect the mine shaft at the bottom of the shaft here he put a grate and he built a fire then he closed the entrance to the mine with an airtight canvas door and he kept the fire burning all the time he then extended a wooden duct or pipe from outside the entrance to the mine as far back as the miners were working and he created a vacuum he created an air circulation system the hot air was expelled from the fire out was is essentially a chimney here and the vacuum created by that disappearing air was filled with air coming in through the duct now this primitive system of air circulation certainly wouldn't have passed osha regulations today but i've read nothing that indicates any of the miners suffered from any kind of suffocation uh at all so this system worked and that the pipe would just be continued as far back as the mine shaft was constructed now will just so we can get it down on record is it your impression that what we're seeing there is a collapsed portion of the original mine that is correct this is the collapsed portion of the original mine after the civil war incidentally gary that this was a commercial operation the family that owned this property the griffin family created a tourist attraction here and they put electric lights in it no this was in the late 19th early 20th century put electric lights in the tunnel and sold tickets and you could walk through the tunnel and go up to the crater and buy souvenirs like skulls of union troops that they had turned into ashtrays and things like that and so they had kept this tunnel open for a number of years after the battle and then it periodically it would just simply collapse when i was a young park ranger here in the 1970s i came up one time to open the park here and saw one of the collapses that had occurred overnight uh in fact it was this one right here uh so uh yes but this is we can easily follow the original tunnel now is there any part of the tunnel the question often comes up is there any part of the tunnel that still exists maybe no one will ever know you're never going to go in there and excavate the collapsed dirt but there might be sections of it that are still in existence but this is the no man's land as we went beyond that chimney if you can pan back doug and see you can see there's the lip of the ravine is right there anybody who puts his head above the lip of that ravine is going to be within easy rifle range of the confederate position which is right here in front of us you can see some of the earthworks that connect with pgrum salient right here in fact when colonel pleasance was laying out the route for the tunnel an easy job if you're an engineer except if somebody is shooting at you he came up here first and he's with a staff officer and the staff officer took one right in the head so the next time that pleasants took a reading he brought three or four of his staff up with him and they stood about 25 or 30 yards away from him and were putting their keppy's on top of their rifles to draw confederate fire colonel pleasants had a burlap sack with eye holes cut in it put dirt on top of the burlap sack popped up took readings with this theodolite and then popped back down and as it turns out he was perfect this that the shaft lined up perfectly with the confederate fort i think my new favorite story of the civil war go ahead continue well okay so we're in the no man's land now that's going to be attacked over by some of the by some of the federal troops now the mining began on june the 25th and by july 17th it was complete burnside had asked for twelve thousand pounds of black powder the army sent him eight thousand pounds and how are that how is that powder brought in well it came in 25 pound cakes and so the ninth core created these yolks like you'd put on a team of oxen that had two little baskets at either end and soldiers from the 48th pennsylvania would put that yolk across their soldier their shoulders with a 25 pound keg in each of the baskets now the shaft was only about four and a half feet tall so they had to bend over carrying 50 pounds of black powder walking through this tunnel that was illuminated by candles they did it in less than 24 hours and they put these 25 pound kegs of black powder they poured them into eight hoppers eight big hoppers the next thing they did was to tamp the tunnel about 90 feet from the actual lateral galleries where the hoppers containing the powder were located they tamped that entrance so that the explosion would go up rather than back out through the tunnel and then they laid multiple redundant fuses now burnside and pleasants had asked for uh special mining fuses that came in long lengths and were waterproof but the army sent him regular army fuses that came in shorter lengths and were not waterproof so pleasants had to splice those select those lengths of fuses together in order to run about 400 feet uh well it wasn't that long i i'd take it back more like 100 feet of fuses and so by the uh evening of june 20 of july 27th the mine was ready to go now an important point to make and i think one that is almost always misconstrued in the literature about the battle of the crater this was never general grant's main intention for the third offensive gary earlier mentioned that as a part of this third offensive there was an operation north of the james river called first deep bottom that's the gambit that grant depended upon to accomplish something in the third offensive this mine of burnsides was an afterthought it was only after the first deep bottom operation failed that grant turned to general meade and said well at least we've drawn lots of confederates across the river so let's go ahead and explode burnside's mind and attack afterwards while the confederates are weak so this was plan b not plan a and oftentimes you'll read that first d bottom was the diversion of course grant will say that after the failure here he will say it's a diversion that is not true this was plan b and the plan that burnside had developed was to allow his black division these rookie troops these are not the same blacks that fought on june 18th on june 15th this is the ninth core black division they were very anxious to prove themselves as soldiers the three white divisions in burnside's corps were pretty burned out they had taken terrible casualties they were reluctant to attack earthworks and burnside said the the u.s colored troops were eager to go forward but at the 11th hour when burnside got the word that he was going to make this assault and it was going to be the big one general mead came to him and said you cannot use the black troops now up until this point general burnside had done everything right but now he made a big mistake he had three white divisions in his core two of them commanded by competent men one of them commanded by the worst division commander in the union army instead of assigning one of those competent men to lead the assault with his division burnside asked for volunteers none of the white division commanders volunteered for this very difficult task and so burnside said let's leave it up to chance they drew lots and guess who drew the short straw james ledley and the first division of the ninth corps ledly was a coward he was a drunk he was incompetent and he had less than 24 hours to plan this attack that he was now going to lead with his division and to make matters even more complicated instead of following burnside's plan which was to rush around the crater that would be created by the explosion and head for the high ground off to the north and the west that is now occupied by blanford church blanford cemetery that high ground would command the confederate position instead of ordering his men to do that ledly gave orders to his brigade commanders to come up to the crater and stop on either side of the crater so we have a worst division commander in the army leading the assault with orders that are contrary to the to the core commander's wishes so this seems like a formula for disaster and it certainly will be but not for the explosion the time was set for 3 30 in the morning on july 30th if you can imagine all of these union officers back here across on the main ground where you see the ruins of the taylor house chimney in the distance and you imagine them waiting for this explosion to happen and they light the fuses and they wait 3 30 comes nothing happens 3 45 nothing 4 o'clock nothing general grant is rides forward to meade's command post which is back at the shand house area and tells me remarkably even if the thing doesn't explode tell burnside to attack well before that disaster can happen colonel pleasants and a couple of other officers an officer named jacob dowdy and a sergeant named harry reese suspect that what has happened is the fuses have burned out at one of the splices so they take a lot of guts they crawl into the tunnel the bravest men in the union army they crawl into the tunnel and sure enough they discover the fuses have burned out of the spice but they forgot their matches so they went back out they got matches they came back in relit the fuse and at 4 44 am july 30th 1864 one of the most massive explosions ever to be witnessed on the planet occurs here as men cannons soldiers huge blocks of clay go way up into the air seem to be suspended in space and then tumble back down to the earth signaling the time for the union soldiers to make their attack we're standing next to what is left of this crater which was a huge gouge in the ground 125 feet long 130 feet long 75 75 feet wide 25 to 30 feet deep uh it was a sight that no one in the union army or the confederate army had ever seen in about five minutes time the first wave of union soldiers came up they stopped as their orders intended them to do and instead of doing anything offensive they began excavating the wounded confederate soldiers saving them from suffocation and just standing up here gaping at the chaos that had been created by this explosion general mead kept telling burnside send more troops in so then on the next two divisions came up they widened the gap here at the crater but they did not go forward in the and none of the division commanders came forward general ludley who was supposed to lead the attack said that he was ill and sought shelter in a bomb proof a little medical bomb proof backed down by poor creek so he was not up here there was no leaders mead says keep sending more troops in they finally send the black troops in as the fourth wave of attackers here the black troops actually get beyond where you see that monument there they get farther than anybody else but in all the intervening time the confederates have been able to seal off the the flanks of this 500-yard breach could the federals have gone forward and gone up to cemetery hill yes now what would have happened from there i don't know but an opera a real opportunity created by the explosion was squandered by a lack of leadership and chaos a lack of command and control up here and that gave the confederates the chance to respond and we're going to talk about what the confederates do at our next stop we're standing at one of the most important and least visited places on the crater battlefield this is the location where general mahone brought his troops onto the battlefield in preparation for their counter-attacks to regain the lost ground at the battle of the crater now once the explosion had occurred word got back to both generals beauregard and lee that this terrible calamity had taken place along beauregard's lines lee gave orders to general william mahone bypassing his core commander general hill incidentally to bring two of his five brigades from the far right end of the confederate line to a point where they could regain the lost ground at the crater so mahone withdrew his troops small groups at a time not to create attention by the yankees who could see him leaving their area and he brought a brigade of georgians brands wright's old brigade of georgians and his old brigade of virginians now under david wissager on about a two and a half mile securities route to the jerusalem plank road where they crossed under the jerusalem plank road on a tunnel and then fed themselves down into this low ground which was a somewhat improved covered way this was the way that troops for confederates got in and out of p grimsilian right down here now mahone was standing somewhere at the junction of these two ravines as his as his virginians and his georgians virginia's in the lead the georgians following came down the covered way after this long march and then mahon was gesturing to them to take position along this ravine which is about 300 yards or so from the crater if you can see the high ground up off to my front where the trees are located that's where the crater uh is and so mahone is here as the flotsam and jetsam of the casualties from the crater are running back through here and i just have a few words from the participants here that i think are more eloquent than anything i could say mahone said that i sent back to my own front for the virginia and georgia brigades it was plain to be seen that in the event of any reverse these two brigades of my division the head of whose calm had now appeared within 200 yards of the enemy's position the most vital consequences to the very safety of our army would be involved and he was giving all sorts of inspirational talks to these men about how important it was to regain the line the appearance of this infantry was bomb and solace to the artillery blazing away upon the crest just above them wrote one confederate the soldiers passed quickly through the open in single file some acknowledging the sweating cannoneers whose joy at their arrival was palpable to our immense relief we found it was mahone's division in that he was with them remembered major haskell there was no better division and no better commander the terrible struggle however was in store for us wrote john t west of the 61st virginia now as these casualties from the crater were streaming back here they would say ah boys you have hot work ahead when we first set out on our expedition we did not know that we should be called upon to lock horns with negro troops wrote one virginian and that they had charged our works with the exultant cry no quarter the information gained a stranger would have noticed the quickening of the step and each eye burned with a brighter glow and each gun received a more than casual examination to see that it was properly loaded and ready for action one confederate soldier when finding out that there were black troops opposed to them wrote that i never felt more like fighting in my life our comrades had been slaughtered in a most inhumane and brutal manner and black slaves were trampling over their mangled and bleeding forms revenge must have fired every heart and strung every arm with nerves of steel for the herculean task of blood and that would lead to the two confederate counter-attacks at the crater that we'll talk about at our next stop the ravine that's in front of us here is the ravine that mahone used to disguise his virginians and some of the georgians they came up prior to their first attack and again their target would be the high ground that you can see with the green trees up ahead of us that's the location where the union forces had broken through at the crater and these confederates lined up here there would be about 800 of them in this first attack would be hiding in this ravine waiting for orders for general mahone to go forward below ground immediately behind me is the right end of this ravine that general mahone used to hide his virginia brigade and part of his arriving georgia brigade about nine o'clock in the morning he gave the orders for those 800 or so men to make the assault up over the high ground out of the defilade and towards the occupied union position at the crater and you can make out a monument there that is just behind the crater which is going to be more or less the target for this attack now long story short the virginians and the georgians make their assault mostly the virginians they are able to regain a portion of the cat of the captured line to the north or to my right your left of the crater but they are not able to regain the ground of the crater itself the rest of the georgians arrive they make another attack it's kind of a disorganized assault it's piecemeal and it's repulsed and so by late in the morning of july 30th quiet had settled over the battlefield the confederates had regained several hundred yards north of the crater the union survivors still maintained the crater and some of the ground to the south of it mahon realized that he needed more troops in order to redeem all of the lost ground so he had summoned the alabama brigade of general john c c sanders 650 men strong they marched the same way that the virginians and georgians had marched they came out into the ravine that we have seen they laid out there for about an hour in the hot sun some of them fainting because the temperature had reached 100 degrees and then the word came down that they were going to make the attack and general sanders did something that was wonderful battlefield psychology back over here behind us to the west and a little to the south of us was a small white house rented by a family named g g-e-e and in that house remarkably this close to the battlefield was general lee and general beauregard watching the action here sanders of course was aware that the commanding generals were on the scene and he turned and told his men men we need to make this attack and capture the position if we fail general lee has promised to come out personally and lead us on a second attempt will you fail and the idea that they were going to place marsh robert in that kind of mortal jeopardy steeled every one of these alabamans joined by some of the virginians some of the georgians some of the north carolinians that had been routed from the crater all together and perhaps eleven hundred men making this assault and about one o'clock one thirty in the afternoon the alabamans pour out of the ravine go up into the crater and a one of the most brutal hand-to-hand encounters of combat that ever stay in the north american continent occurred at the crater the fight lasted for 45 minutes it was characterized by massacres of particularly the black troops who tried to surrender and were shot down or bayoneted and when all of the fighting ended there were very few federal troops left that had not either surrendered or had been killed or wounded just a couple of eyewitness accounts for what was seen up there the slaughter was fearful said captain featherston of the alabama brigade the dead were piled on each other in one part of the fort i counted eight bodies deep a georgia private named paul veterie entered the crater and found the center invisible to the eye owing to the many dead and dying blacks piled upon one another david holt of the 16th mississippi thought that the scene in the crater was the most horrible sight that even old veterans had ever seen exceeding the carnage at spotsylvania's bloody angle and finally a surgeon considered the spectacle unnerving the ditches were almost filled with the dead men had to walk on the dead could not find room for their feet such a sight he informed his sister was never seen before by three o'clock in the afternoon the guns had fallen silent the confederates had regained all of their lost ground they built new trenches behind the crater and would incorporate those defenses into their line for the rest of the campaign at a cost of about 3 800 union casualties and probably 16 or 1700 confederate casualties one of the saddest affairs in the war is what general grant called it following the end of the hostilities at the battle of the crater was what i think is a rather shameful and certainly unnecessary series of events there were a number of wounded union soldiers out here laying out here in the no man's land as the confederates had recaptured their line and general burnside responded to general meade's suggestion that a truce be called in order to retrieve the wounded and to bury the dead now it's a hundred degrees and these guys are laying out in the hot sun all these corpses out here and all these poor wounded fellows well and mead says don't don't make this a formal request see if you can get an informal truce because during the civil war era when you requested a truce that was an admission of defeat so burnside sends forward this informal request it is rejected with the message that if you want a truce you might you need to send it formally omeed swallows his pride writes out a formal request to general lee for a truce general lee then receives this and responds by saying that this portion of the line is in general beauregard's department and you need to contact general beauregard for permission for a truce so this is done beauregard gets this on the late on the day of july 31st now the more than 24 hours have passed with these poor guys out here but beauregard says well it's too late in the day today to undertake the burial and retrieval of wounded we'll do it in the morning so it's not until august 1st that burial cores from the confederate side a lot of black union prisoners and burial corps from the union side comes out armed with shovels and digs long trenches and throws as many as 700 bodies into those trenches the wounded were all fly blown and the dead were maggot eaten so that some of these soldiers had to come and pick up the remains of the dead soldiers on shovels and shovel them in to the graves one fellow said that by the time i was finished i had maggots all the way up to my elbows he said i was so sick i could not stand the stench was unbelievable so when we come out to battlefields like this we have to remember that we talk about tactics we talk about strategy we talk about bravery but as we stand in this hallowed ground right here we're standing above which is no doubt the graves of some of these soldiers that were never recovered out here and when people come up to the crater inevitably they're a little disappointed in what they see they are expecting a much larger scar in the earth than what we have here frankly we're lucky to have what we've got because petersburg national battlefield was not created there was no preserved ground out here until the late 1920s so how many years is that 60 years i guess between the end of the civil war and the time this ground is preserved in the meantime it had become among other things a tourist attraction and then a golf course and when i first came to work here in 1973 this was a favorite place for the local kids to ride their bikes up and down through the crater so it's remarkable that there's really anything left at all as an echo of one of the most tragic events in all of civil war history thanks will we hope you've enjoyed this sort of maybe a different sort of look at the crater than you might be used to i want to say that you know inasmuch will was talking about how battlegrounds are also hallowed grounds and they're cemeteries as well uh you the members of the american battlefield trust have been able to help us preserve more than 2 000 acres at petersburg more than anywhere else save one place brandy station cavalry battlefields are really sprawling and large we have a lot more work to do here among those acres includes some 60 acres in those woods along the railroad not at all far from here so even right around the crater you've been able to help make a difference putting the puzzle pieces together to really make i think petersburg national battlefield park um you know you know one of the premier uh places among all civil war battlefields it surely deserves to be thanks so much for watching coming with us and thanks for supporting us in all of our efforts you

Channel: American Battlefield Trust

Views: 112,278

Keywords: American Battlefield Trust, Civil War Trust, Petersburg Battlefield Tour, The Crater Petersburg Tour, Petersburg Civil War Tour, Petersburg Live, A. Wilson Greene, Will Greene, Garry Adelman

Id: PIlF6ZkDHt8

Length: 36min 21sec (2181 seconds)

Published: Sun May 02 2021