The fighting 207Smith 'saw the blood run down |a] little
drain ditch several feet.'
Ledlie's troops dashed forward toward the
breach and gazed in awe at a chasm about
170ft long, 80ft wide, and 30 ft deep
(50m x 25m x 10m). While they stared at
the place known ever since as 'the Crater,'
Confederates behind the gap and on either
side began to rally. Federal reinforcements
pushed into the Crater and beyond, but fire
from either flank limited their penetration.
General Lee pulled Southern reinforcements
from points all around his front to use in
re-establishing his line. For several hours, an
opening blown in the Confederate position
beckoned Federals to lunge through and
capture the city just beyond. Eventually
Burnside received permission to commit the
black division to the fight, but long after the
crucial moment for which those troops had
been trained. The black soldiers simply
added to the chaos in the muddy,
bloody Crater.
As Confederate units closed in, Federals in
the Crater became defenders instead of
attackers. Artillery shells, some of them from
newly deployed high-angle mortars,
exploded above the Crater and flung shards
into its corners. The Confederate charge that
retook the position erupted over the lip of
the Crater and surged through its midst in
hand-to-hand combat that turned the pit
into 'one seething cauldron of struggling,
dying men.' General J. C. C. Sanders of
Alabama, who commanded a brigade at the
scene, wrote that Southern guns 'literally
mowed down the enemy piling up Yankees
and Negroes on each other.' Confederate
artillerist Frank Huger used similar language:
'our men literally butchered them.' A
Massachusetts officer described the crowded
situation inside the Crater as so tight that
'many of those killed were held in a standing
position until jostled to the ground.'
The performance of the black troops
generated considerable controversy. Some
Northerners applauded their efforts; others
damned them. A private from Massachusetts,
writing the next day, called the black soldiers
'cowardly rascals' and declared that they
'didn't get far before they broke and
skedaddled ... one might as well try to stop
the wind.' The Yankee lad expressed a wish
that the newspapermen so fond of extolling
black troops should go into battle with
them. General Sanders, watching from across
the lines, admitted that the black troops
'fight much better than I expected but ...
many of them were shot down by the
[Yankees].' Southerners who had never
fought against freed slaves before relentlessly
fired into the Crater and killed men under
circumstances that would usually have
resulted in captures. 'This day was the jubilee
of fiends in human shape,' a Southerner
wrote, 'and without souls.' A conflict in
which slavery had become a steadily more
significant issue had now reached a point
where former slaves fought directly on the
front line for their freedom and that of
their brothers.
When the last Federal survivor dashed
back to the lines beyond the Crater, an
unusually dramatic battle ended and a
dazzling opportunity had disappeared. The
Union army lost 4,000 men on 30 July; the
Confederates about 1,500. General Grant
removed Burnside and Ledlie from their
commands, and summarized the Crater in
(Public domain) regretful benediction: 'It was the saddest