fered by black troops, including 219 killed
in action and almost 1,000 wounded, the
worst day for USCT troops in the entire
war. A large number of Union casualties
occurred after Meade and Grant had
ordered a withdrawal, but both comman-
ders were too far from the lines to realize
Burnside had delayed sounding the recall.
Meade had now suffered almost 6,000
casualties for the month with almost noth-
ing to show for it (Lee could take a little
comfort that Confederate casualties were
less than half of Meade’s). Most of the
Confederate dead at the Crater were killed
in the explosion that opened the battle; the
defenders lost 361 men killed, 727
wounded, and 403 missing or captured for
the day. The Confederate victory didn’t
change the strategic situation, which
meant that the siege of Petersburg would
drag on for another eight bloody months.
There was plenty of blame to go around
on the Union side. Meade and his chief
engineer had failed utterly to support
Pleasants’ mining efforts, and Meade and
Grant had changed Burnside’s attack plans
at the last minute for political reasons.
Burnside had failed to issue new and spe-cific attack orders to Ledlie and delayed
sending orders for his corps to retreat. Led-
lie (but not Ferrero, who amazingly was
overlooked in the aftermath) was soon
sent packing, condemned by a court of
inquiry along with Burnside, Willcox, and
Colonel Zenas Bliss, for his part in the mis-
management of what Grant called “the
saddest affair I have witnessed in this war.”
Burnside left on the heels of a violent argu-
ment with Meade, who wanted his corps
commander court-martialed for incompe-
tence. Grant, preferring a quieter proce-
dure (and with the memory of his own
misguided attack at Cold Harbor still fresh
in his mind), sent Burnside home on leave,
summing up the battle as “a stupendous
failure, all due to inefficiency on the part
of the corps commander and the incom-
petency of the division commander who
was sent to lead the assault.”
Resigning from the service, Burnside
returned to Rhode Island, where he
slowly recovered the geniality he had lost
in the course of a calamitous Civil War
career that had required him to occupy
positions he himself had warned he was
unqualified to fill. He found a large mea-
sure of solace in early 1865, when the
Congressional Committee on the Con-
duct of the War exonerated him and con-
demned Meade for changing the plan ofattack at the last minute.
The Petersburg campaign—it wasn’t a
siege in the true sense—encompassed 292
days of combat, maneuver, and trench
warfare between June 15, 1864, and April
3, 1865. After the fiasco at the Crater,
Grant spent the next eight months focus-
ing on severing Petersburg’s many road
and rail connections to the south and west.
He launched a total of nine offensives—
the Battle of the Crater taking place dur-
ing the third—in the campaign, striking
both north and south of the James River.
After six weeks of vicious fighting, the
combat subsided into a prolonged stale-
mate in the trenches before Petersburg and
Richmond that anticipated the gruesome
conditions on the Western Front during
World War I.
Pleasants had remained with Burnside
on the parapet of a 14-gun Union battery
during the battle and watched in horror as
his men’s incredible excavation effort—a
legitimate mining marvel—went for
naught. When things finally went horribly
wrong, he angrily told Burnside that he
had “nothing but a damned set of cowards
in your brigade commanders.” Many of
Pleasants’ surviving troops would have
agreed with the colonel’s assessment. For
thousands of others, of course, it was then
too late to say.ABOVE: Private Louis Martin of Company E,
29th USCT, lost his right arm and left foot
during the Battle of the Crater. BELOW: Newly
rebuilt Confederate lines took advantage of the
giant Crater, prefiguring the grueling trench
warfare of World War I.Q-Spr16 The Crater_Layout 1 1/14/16 12:42 PM Page 33