flanks into Ledlie’s men while well-placed
artillery raked the ground on all sides of
the pit. An indecipherable labyrinth of
trenches, bombproofs, and covered ways
also helped freeze the first wave of Feder-
als in place. Stunned by the explosion and
the deafening roar that followed when all
the Union batteries opened as one, the
front line of bluecoats scrambled for the
rear through a massive wave of detritus
from the blast and an accompanying cloud
of dust. Ledlie ordered his two brigade
commanders, Brig. Gen. Frank Bartlett
and Colonel Elisha Marshall, to open the
attack, after which Ledlie himself retired
to a nearby bombproof to sit out the bat-
tle, swigging rum from a bottle he had
cadged from his staff physician.
The Federals were wasting precious time;
it took 15 minutes for Marshall and Bartlettto coax their hesitant troops back to their
original positions and send them over the
top. Almost immediately the attack went
awry. In dismay over the last-minute change
in plans, the flustered Burnside had
neglected to have the defensive obstacles
cleared from in front of the Union trenches
to allow easier passage for the attacking
columns. Nor had anything been done to
help the attackers scale their own six-foot-
high trench walls—ladders that were to help
Union soldiers traverse their trenches never
appeared. Improvising quickly by jabbing
their bayonets into the logs above them,
Union attackers climbed their makeshift
stepladders out of the trenches. Creeping
forward in small groups rather than
advancing on a broad front, Ledlie’s men
struggled to scale the trenches and lurched
across the debris-strewn no-man’s-land
toward the Confederate works. Navigating
their own trenches had literally destroyed
the Federal dispositions. Three regiments of
Ledlie’s men, after being ushered through a
hastily improvised 10-foot passageway,
finally arrived at the explosion site.There they were stunned to see the
crown of the salient’s ridge had been
replaced by a high wall of fresh earth,
beyond which yawned a fresh crater 170
feet long, 60 feet wide, and 30 feet deep.
To many Union soldiers, inured to search-
ing for protection when under fire, the
Crater looked like the biggest and safest
foxhole they had ever seen—except that it
wasn’t safe at all. Its steep 30-foot walls
and slippery, sandy white clay made it
nearly impossible to escape once the men
had entered the pit. Instead of moving
around the hole and heading for the high
ground—Cemetery Hill lay just 500 yards
away—Federal soldiers stumbled instead
into the smoking abyss, using it as a vast
rifle pit. A choking pall of dust and smoke
blanketed the area.
Paralyzed by conflicting orders and lack
of leadership, Ledlie’s attackers failed to
either widen the breach, as Ferrero’s troops
had been drilled to do, or push up the slope
toward Cemetery Hill. “Our orders were to
charge immediately after the explosion,”
recalled Union Major Charles F. HoughtonThe gigantic explosion at the Crater (center
right) as seen from the Union works. The explo-
sion was followed by a largely ineffective artillery
barrage. Many soldiers—attackers as well as
defenders—were stunned and paralyzed after the
initial blast.Q-Spr16 The Crater_Layout 1 1/14/16 12:42 PM Page 27