By Frank Meloi 

It was the summer of 1864. For the past year the Union army had been playing a deadly game of cat and mouse with the Army of Northern Virginia. Now, the two armies were locked in a stalemate at the strategically important town of Petersburg Virginia. The Confederates occupied a massive line of earthworks which ringed the city for twenty miles. These defenses, seemingly impregnable, took two years to construct.

Having failed to take the city by force, the federal troops dug in before Petersburg and settled in for a long siege. Day after day, for almost two months, they rained Parrot shells & mortar fire into the town & the rebel works. The rebels returned fire, but neither side could dislodge the other. It was the first recorded instance of trench warfare.

During this time, however, a momentous plan was being put into action. It was the brainchild of Union general Ambrose P. Burnside, and called for a 300' tunnel to be dug from the Union trenches to a point directly underneath the rebel works. Gunpowder would then be used to blast a hole in their lines. Burnside immediately set the 48th Pennsylvania Infantry, a regiment composed entirely of coal miners, to work on the tunnel. The 48th Pa. was commanded by Lieutenant Colonel Henry Pleasants, who had been a mining engineer back home.


(A contemporary plan of the Federal tunnel.)

Work on the "mine" continued rapidly until, towards the end of July, the last shovel-full of clay was removed, and the last timber set in place. The work had, surprisingly, gone undetected by the enemy. In the pre-dawn hours of July 30th 1864, 4 tons of powder were placed in a chamber at the end of the tunnel. At approximately 3:30 a.m., the fuse was lit. A Union general describes what happened next:

"An enormous mass sprung into the air. A mass without form or shape, full of red flames, and carried on a bed of lightning flashes, mounted towards heaven with a detonation of thunder. It spread out like a sheaf, like an immense mushroom whose stem seemed to be of fire and its head of smoke. Then everything appeared to break up and fall in a rain of earth mixed with rocks, with beams, timbers, and mangled human bodies."

The blast had torn open an immense crater 250' x 70' and 30' deep. The shock experienced by the surprised Confederates was apparent, as they fell away from the smoking pit in a mass of confusion. The rebel line had been split in two.


(The crater as it appeared in 1865)

Then, in a decision which baffles scholars to this day, Burnside waited nearly an hour to order an assault. This delay had allowed the shock to wear off of the enemy, who quickly re-formed their shattered line. When Burnside finally did attack, he ordered his men into the crater instead of around it. Faced with 30' sheer walls, the Union troops piled on top of one another, with nowhere to go. Confederates lined the rim of the crater pouring musket fire into the trapped Bluecoats, in what one rebel later described as nothing less than a "turkey shoot." Burnside had no choice but to call off the attack. A rebel private later wrote:

"Out of the pit filed as prisoners eleven hundred and one Union troops, and we captured twenty one standards and several thousand of small arms. Over a thousand of the enemy's dead were in and about the breach, and his losses exceeded 4,500 effective troops, while our lines were reestablished just where they were when the battle began."

General Burnside was permenantly removed from command.

The siege of Petersburg would continue for another nine months. Had it not been for the blunderings of an incompetent general, some believe that the war could have been ended early, through the impressive work done by this regiment of Pennsylvania coal miners. Instead, what has come to be known as the "Battle of the Crater (or Mine)" caused a Union soldier to lament, "We should never have wars like this again."

The crater survives to this day, and is part of the Petersburg National Military Park. The Mine has been restored and can also be visited. Here are links
to find out more:

http://www.cvfo.org/locations_military2.htm

http://www.nps.gov/pete/mahan/edintroduction.html