Into the Crater
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A01=Earl J. Hess
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Ambrose Burnside
Army of the Potomac
Artillery
Author_Earl J. Hess
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Battle of the Crater
Bayonet
Bridgehead
Bushrod Johnson
Category1=Non-Fiction
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Category=NHWF
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Cavalry
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Henry Pleasants
Infantry
Language_English
Musket
Officer (armed forces)
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Parapet
Plank road
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Regiment
Skirmisher
softlaunch
Troop
United States Colored Troops
William Mahone
Product details
- ISBN 9781570039225
- Weight: 646g
- Dimensions: 162 x 235mm
- Publication Date: 01 Oct 2010
- Publisher: University of South Carolina Press
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Hardback
- Language: English
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The battle of the Crater on July 30, 1864, was the defining event in the 292-day campaign around Petersburg, Virginia, in the Civil War and one of the most famous engagements in American military history. Although the bloody combat of that ""horrid pit"" has been recently revisited as the centerpiece of the novel and film versions of Charles Frazier's Cold Mountain, the battle has yet to receive a definitive historical study. Distinguished Civil War historian Earl J. Hess fills that gap in the literature of the Civil War with Into the Crater. The Crater was central in Ulysses S. Grant's third offensive at Petersburg and required digging of a five-hundred-foot mine shaft under enemy lines and detonating of four tons of gunpowder to destroy a Confederate battery emplacement. The resulting infantry attack through the breach in Robert E. Lee's line failed terribly, costing Grant nearly four thousand troops, among them many black soldiers fighting in their first battle. The outnumbered defenders of the breach saved Confederate Petersburg and inspired their comrades with renewed hope in the lengthening campaign to possess this important rail center. In this narrative account of the Crater and its aftermath, Hess identifies the most reliable evidence to be found in hundreds of published and unpublished eyewitness accounts, official reports, and historic photographs. Archaeological studies and field research on the ground itself, now preserved within the Petersburg National Battlefield, complement the archival and published sources. Hess re-creates the battle in lively prose saturated with the sights and sounds of combat at the Crater in moment-by-moment descriptions that bring modern readers into the chaos of close range combat. Hess discusses field fortifications as well as the leadership of Union generals Grant, George Meade, and Ambrose Burnside, and of Confederate generals Lee, P. G. T. Beauregard, and A. P. Hill. He also chronicles the atrocities committed against captured black soldiers, both in the heat of battle and afterward, and the efforts of some Confederate officers to halt this vicious conduct. With fresh insights, adroit research in all manner of sources, and previously unpublished photographs and field maps, Hess takes readers into the Crater once more so that we might better understand the magnitude of this historical event, which Grant deemed ""the saddest affair I have witnessed in the War.
Earl J. Hess is Stewart W. McClelland Chair in History at Lincoln Memorial University in Harrogate, Tennessee. He is author or editor of nine other books, including Field Armies and Fortifications in the Civil War: The Eastern Campaigns, 1861-1864 (from the University of North Carolina Press).
