The colored boys had been under arms since dawn, and as far as they knew their original assignment was unchanged: charge straight across the place where the mine had exploded and take the high ground that overlooked Petersburg. Top authorities had said that they must not lead the charge lest they be sacrificed; now, with the battle lost beyond recall, they were being sent in for a job that was not even as good as a forlorn hope. They got into the covered way, struggled up to the front line, scrambled over the parapet and ran forward with a cheer. By now the Confederate defense was able to lay heavy fire on the ground between the Union trench and the crater, so that getting forward was costly. As the men advanced General Ferrero dropped off in the same bombproof that housed General Ledlie and borrowed a swig of his jug of rum, leaving his brigadiers to direct the fight.²³

It was impossible to go through the crater, because it was full of white troops. The colonel of the leading regiment saw this difficulty and led the command off to the right. By this time most of Potter's men had been shoved out of the trenches they had seized, and the colored regiment found itself running along between the Rebel abatis and a trenchful of Southern infantry—so close to the trench that some of the men were bayoneted as they ran, and those who were shot bore powder burns from the flash of Rebel muskets. As soon as the tail of the regiment had cleared the crater the colonel gave the order: "By the left flank-march!" followed by "Charge!" and the men sprang into the trench, using bayonet and clubbed musket, taking prisoners and a stand of colors. A regimental officer had to intervene to keep the men from killing their prisoners.²⁴

In the captured trench the colored troops re-formed for a further advance. It was not easy, because the trench was full of dead and wounded men of both armies, and from in front and from the right the Confederates were laying down a blistering fire. A colonel tried to organize a charge, but when he went over the parapet he could not get more than fifty men to follow him, and the hostile fire quickly knocked them back. Then, while officers were trying to figure out what to do next, a runner came up with a message from General Ferrero: "If you have not already done so, you will immediately proceed to take the crest in your front"—which may have sounded like a reasonable order to a man safely tucked away in a dugout far behind the front.²⁵

Well, they tried. First the officers leaped up on the parapet, waving their swords and shouting, and most of these were shot before they took another step. Then a scattering of soldiers followed them—200 men, perhaps, from three regiments—and a thin little cheer went up, and the ragged line ran forward. They got almost to the hidden ravine where the Confederates were waiting, and the Rebels came out with a countercharge, and for a moment there was vicious combat rocking back and forth in the open. Then the charge broke, and the colored men came running back, most of their officers gone, regimental and company organizations wholly mixed up, furious Southern infantry on their heels. Such white troops as were on the ground were caught up in this retreat, and in another moment a disorganized mass of black and white soldiers in blue uniforms was running desperately for cover, diving into the trenches and rifle pits or streaming for the deep haven of the crater.

In the captured trenches there was a dreadful crush of men. An officer wrote afterward that people were packed so tightly that he literally could not raise his arms from his side. The Confederates had followed close, and they poked rifles over the edge of the trench and fired into the huddle at three-foot range. Some of them jumped down in with bayonets, and men began to surrender, and the soldiers remembered hearing the Confederates crying: "Take the white man—kill the nigger!" There was a blind flurry of bitter fighting in the maze of trenches and rifle pits and dugouts, and eventually the whole section of captured trench was lost and the Union survivors got into the crater and prepared to hang on as long as they could.²⁶

It was all over now, except for the killing. Grant had recognized failure and had told Meade to get the men back and call the whole operation off, and Meade had passed the word on to Burnside, but Burnside still thought that the attack somehow could be reorganized and made successful, and no recall was sounded. Hundreds of Union soldiers were jammed into the crater, most of them down at the bottom where they could do no fighting whatever. Men up along the rim were standing on a slope so steep that after a man fired his rifle he had to turn around, dig in with his heels, and brace his shoulders against the dirt in order to reload.²⁷

Confederate mortars had the range and they were dropping shell into the crater on a helpless target that they could not miss; men who got out alive remembered a horrible debris of severed limbs and heads flying through the air after each shell exploded. The sun was high in the sky now and it beat down with unrelenting heat, terribly magnified in this steaming pit, and thirst seemed to be a worse foe than Confederate infantry. A Rebel countercharge came to the very edge of the crater, and Negroes lined the rim and fired and drove the attackers back, and the noise and the heat and the exploding shell beat on men's brains and dazed them so that nothing was remembered very clearly afterward.

Here and there, officers were able to organize details to search among the dead and wounded for cartridges. Some men were ordered to run back to the Union line with a cluster of canteens to get water, and a few of them managed to make the round trip without being killed. More than 200 men dropped unconscious from sheer heat and exhaustion, and a captain in the 45th Pennsylvania wrote: "The loss of life was terrible. There was death below as well as above ground in the crater. It seemed impossible to maintain life from the intense heat of the sun." He noted that his regiment lost 67 of the 110 men who had gone in.²⁸

Somehow, finally—long after noon—it ended. The men who could do so went back to the Union lines; the others stayed where they were and either died or went off to Confederate prison camps. Burnside continued to insist to Meade that the attack could still succeed, but Ord bluntly told Meade that it was nonsense, and defeat at last was accepted. Through it all, Colonel Pleasants had been standing on the parapet of the fourteen-gun battery where he could watch the proceedings, and he stormed and swore in unregimented fury, telling Burnside that he had "nothing but a damned set of cowards in his brigade commanders"; and one of the men in the 48th Pennsylvania recorded that "Pleasants was awful mad when he saw how things were going on." ²⁹

Mad Colonel Pleasants might well have been. Never before had the army met so completely ignominious a defeat. Grant summed it up by telling Halleck that it was "the saddest affair I have witnessed in the war," and he added: "Such an opportunity for carrying fortifications I have never seen and do not expect again to have." A man in the 36th Massachusetts wrote that this day had been "the saddest in the history of the IX Corps," and a boy in the 48th Pennsylvania wrote to his sister:

"I expected to write to you of one of the most glorious victories that was ever won by this army, but instead of a victory I have to write about the greatest shame and disgrace that ever happened to us. The people at home may look at it as nothing but a mere defeat, but I look at it as a disgrace to our corps."³⁰

In the 115th New York, a sergeant blew his top from heat and fatigue, sprang up and cried, "Well fight 'em till we die, won't we, boys?" and then dropped unconscious. And in Fer-rero's division it was observed that the colored troops never again sang their song:

We looks like men a'marching on;

We looks like men o' war.

As such things went, the great battle of the crater was not, perhaps, unduly expensive. When the butcher's bill was added up it recorded a loss of 3,798 men, more than a third of them in the colored division. Measured by the standards of the Wilderness and Spotsylvania, this was comparatively mild. Most of the casualties occurred after Grant and Meade had ordered the attack given up, when the men were trying to do nothing more than get back to their own trenches.

Yet the casualty lists did not tell the whole story, which indeed was a good deal more complex than most of the participants were able to understand.

Since May 4 everything that had happened had been part of one continuous battle, a battle three months long, with advance and retreat and triumph and disaster all taking place together, so that words like victory and defeat had lost their meaning. All that had gone before was no more than prelude. The nation itself had been heated to an unimaginable pitch by three years of war and now it had been put on the anvil and the hammer was remorselessly coming down, stroke after clanging stroke, beating a glowing metal into a different shape.

There would be change and the war was bringing it, even though it might be that the war could not bring victory. The war had taken on a new magnitude, and perhaps it was no longer the kind of struggle anybody could win. But it was moving inexorably toward its end, and when it ended many things would end with it, in the South and in the North as well. Some of these were things that ought to end because they shackled men to the past, and some of them were fit to be laid away in the shadowland of dreams that are remembered forever, but in any case they were being brought to an end. After that there could be a new beginning.

CHAPTER V

Away? You Rolling River

1. Special Train for Monocacy Junction

Private Spink belonged to the 147th Regiment of Ohio National Guard Infantry, and in a modest and wholly innocent way he symbolized what was wrong with the defenses of Washington.

The 147th was doing a 100-day tour of duty, and it had been sent to Washington to help occupy the defensive lines so that the troops regularly in garrison could go down to fight the Rebels around Petersburg. Presumably Private Spink was a good soldier. He had recently been made acting ordnance sergeant, and with six other privates of the 147th he had been detailed to take charge of a battery of fieldpieces at the eastern end of the Chain Bridge, the farthest upstream of three Potomac River bridges which connected the District of Columbia with Virginia. This bridge had been guarded against Rebel intrusion ever since the early days of the war, and it was a key spot in the capital's defenses, and Private Spink and his detail cleaned the guns daily and swept the wooden gun platforms, and periodically took the ammunition out of the magazine and exposed it briefly to the air so that it would not deteriorate. No one made any complaint about the way this duty was performed, but in July of 1864, when a Confederate army came north to menace

the capital, it suddenly developed that cleaning the guns and airing the ammunition taxed the abilities of these seven guardsmen to their absolute limit.

Which is to say that not one of the seven knew anything at all about artillery. When the inspecting colonel from General Halleck's staff came out to look at the defenses he learned that neither Private Spink nor any of the men with him even knew how to load the guns, let alone fire them. This was quite natural, since they had been trained strictly as infantry, but the colonel wondered what they would do if the invading Confederates showed up across the river and tried to march over into the national capital. He asked the nearest officer—a Veteran Reserve Corps lieutenant, who with sixty-three men was responsible for this whole section of the defenses—and the lieutenant had a ready answer. In such case, he said, he would have his men remove the planks of the bridge flooring, and pile them up in a barricade at the Washington end. He would also close the gates which gave access to the bridge. He understood, further, that one of the western piers of the bridge had been mined so that it could be blown up, but when the inspector looked into it he found that this was not true.

It would have been unfair to blame any of this on the Reserve lieutenant or the acting ordnance sergeant, since neither man was in any way responsible. But the condition of things in their part of the line was fairly typical of the condition elsewhere. The next bridge downstream, for instance, was Aqueduct Bridge in Georgetown, and it was guarded by two dozen men under a Reserve captain. This man said that if attacked he would close the gates of the bridge at the Georgetown end. He believed there were heavy bars lying around somewhere, although he had never tried them to see whether they would fit the staples in the gate and stockade. The inspector took the trouble to find them and test them. They did fit. Comforted by that much, he went his way.

On the land front, the chief engineer of the Department of Washington reported with military horror that brush was growing all over the approaches to the line, in such quantities that attacking troops could easily get quite close to the parapet under cover. He urged strongly that details be assigned to cut this brush and provide the defense with a clear field of fire. At about the same time a War Department major general who had access to the White House told President Lincoln that the Rebels were really getting close and that "An enterprising general could take the city." He said that when he mentioned all of this to General Halleck he was told that the responsibility was Grant's and not Halleck's. This worried the major general, because Grant was quite busy down in front of Petersburg, and he told the President that Halleck seemed very apathetic. Mr. Lincoln nodded.

"That's his way," he said. "He is always apathetic."¹ It was a bad time for apathy, because the approaching Confederates were under the command of Jubal Early, who was nothing if not enterprising. He had been moving down the Shenandoah Valley ever since General Hunter retreated from the vicinity of Lynchburg, and he had perhaps 15,000 men with him—veteran troops as good as any in the land, their number magnified by panic rumor to practically any figure which a frightened imagination cared to think of.

The Washington defenses were extremely strong if there were men to hold them. Much time and money had been spent on them, beginning 'way back in the McClellan era, and they had been laid out according to the best military standards of the day. From the banks of the Potomac northwest of Chain Bridge, all the way around the city to the Potomac shore opposite Alexandria, the lines ran in a ponderous unbroken horseshoe, with a fort on every hill, trenches connecting the forts, and heavy guns posted to cover all the ground out in front. Over on the Virginia side it was the same, with another semicircle of works running from above Chain Bridge down to the lower edge of Alexandria. No one could approach the city from any direction without running into powerful fortifications. Yet fortifications needed soldiers in order to be effective, and now the soldiers were lacking.

If Grant had risked sometliing by taking the soldiers away, the risk had been carefully calculated. What had thrown the calculations out of gear was the eccentric notion of strategy held by General Hunter.

While the Army of the Potomac remained on the offensive, Lee could not bring his own army up across the border as he had done in 1862 and 1863. The only danger would come from lesser detachments advancing down the Shenandoah Valley, and as long as Hunter and his troops were in the valley that way was barred. As far as the security of Washington was concerned it did not matter much whether Hunter was advancing, retreating, or sitting down. If he and his men were in the Valley, that was enough.