The Most Well Preserved "Covered Way" on a Civil War Battlefield: Petersburg Video Tour!

here i am standing not far from the tour road that you can probably see in the background here at petersburg i'm not that far from the taylor ruins um a couple hundred yards off in that direction and another four or 500 yards past that will be of course the famous crater so we're right along the tour road and yet you can see that we are standing in works right now i guess we're in a trench right now no wait i think we're in a redoubt right now no wait i think we're in some sort of a lunette right now no wait it's not any of those things and let's go over to will green to help explain what in the world we're in thanks gary we're standing in in my experience the finest preserved covered way in the on the american civil war landscape and as we as we walk you can see what we talk about in a covered way now i'll give a little context for why this feature existed why it was built and then we'll talk about what's left of it and what its purpose was this all has to do with the fighting that concluded on june the 18th the last of the union attacks on june 18th was were executed by the union ninth corps who attacked a strong position on the third confederate line known as pigrams or elliot salient the future location of the explosion of the mine that created the crater those union troops got close to pigram's salient but they did not capture it but they were as far advanced as any of the union troops and they were down in defile they were out of view although they were only 150 yards from the confederate line and they held that advanced position in order to get troops from the main union position which is about on the latitude we're standing on now which is to say about 250 to 300 yards east of the advanced union position they had to get troops supplies ammunition food exchange units and so forth from the advanced union line back to the main union line all of which is within easy cannon range and in some places easy a musket range rifle range from the confederates so if you're going to be moving men and material back and forth across 300 yards of the landscape and you're within range of the enemy how are you going to accomplish that without taking terrible casualties the answer in civil war engineering was to create a covered way i think a lot of people have a misunderstanding when they read a term about a covered way they think it's some kind of a of a tunnel that has got a cover on top of it but no all it is is a deep trench deep enough in the ground so that a man standing erect cannot be seen by the enemy and in most cases it has to zigzag so that there is not a straight line from the enemy fire to the covered way that could be shot straight down to get everybody who is marching in it so what we're going to see as we take a a little walk is a portion of this preserved covered way with the traditional classic zigzags in it that are presented to the confederate front now off to my left is where gary is now standing he's standing with his back to the confederate line so the confederate fire would be coming from gary's back towards this position so you want the high bank of the covered way to be facing the confederates and you want it to be deep enough so that men moving through here could not easily be seen by the enemy which is on high ground and so as we move we're not going to a straight line towards a confederate we're going to be moving around these various zigzags each time you go around the zigzag you've got another blockage another trench that blocks you from the competitors here we are we're making this bend and you can easily see the next bank in this covered way and you see that this way the enemy could put a cannon there and command only some small portion of the covered way so a cannon straight up ahead of us that somehow knew it was here might be able to command this section but not the section we are just in nor after it curves up here here's another zigzag of course here we go and this this covered way continues all the way to the bed of the old norfolk and petersburg railroad we won't walk any farther than that and if you come out to visit petersburg battlefield this is not a formal trail it's very there's lots of obstructions in it there's places you can trip and fall so if you decide to come down and look at it you're going to need to be very careful and of course need to be mindful of not tramping on the earthworks out here because this is a unique feature now did it have any role in the battle of the crater absolutely it did and we'll talk a little bit more in another video about the battle of the crater but there would be waves of union assaults against the crater the last wave would be the division of edward ferrero which was that were the two brigades of united states colored troops who originally had been tapped by general burnside to lead the attack but for political and practical reasons generals mead and grant vetoed that plan at the last minute and told general burnside to select a white division to make the assault so the blacks would be the last of the union divisions of the ninth corps to be ordered to go forward to the crater and where were they while they were waiting to get those orders i don't know will tell us right here in this covered way there were two covered ways that led to the advanced union position one of them is just a faint echo in the ground it's hardly worth showing you it's so faint but the other one is the one we're standing in right now and as you're as i'm standing here now i can think about what those black troops must have been contemplating as they were waiting and hearing all of the chaos and the fire and the screaming and the explosions of cannons and rifles that were taking place just four or five hundred yards off to our uh off to our west and our north waiting for the orders to make the attack themselves and when those that word came uh sometime around 7 30 in the morning on july 30th 1864 these troops would be moving through this covered way this serpentine they'd make this serpentine march to the covered way they'd get out of the covered way into the advanced union position and then they made their final charge yelling no quarter remember fort pillow and that would lead to one of the most tragic episodes of the american civil war and what i can't get past again we do this all the time we come out to battlefield so do you most of you watching have the ability to go out to battlefields but will just told the story and here they were they were here okay we can't go back in time but we can stand where they stood and we can picture it and we could look over the edge of the parapet the edge of the covered way the way that doug just did and imagine that they'd have seen the crater explosion and with that uh maybe i'll just ask doug to look down the trench and you could imagine what this might have looked like on july 30th 1864. you

Channel: American Battlefield Trust

Views: 37,513

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

Id: PlfpmbgEr3k

Length: 8min 38sec (518 seconds)

Published: Sun May 02 2021