Virginia Vignettes

The Battle of the Crater was the result of an unusual attempt, on the part of Union forces, at breaking Confederate defenses in front of Petersburg, Virginia, during the Civil War. For several weeks, Pennsylvania miners in Union general Ambrose E. Burnside’s Ninth Corps worked at digging a long tunnel, packed the terminus with explosives, and then on the morning of July 30, 1864, blew it up. In the words of a Maine soldier, the sky was filled with “Earth, stones, timbers, arms, legs, guns unlimbered and bodies unlimbed.” Burnside had initially planned to send a fresh division of black troops into the breach, but his superiors, Ulysses S. Grant and George G. Meade, ruled against it. That role-literally via a short straw-went to the division led by James H. Ledlie, a hard-drinking general who spent the day well behind the lines as his white soldiers, against orders, piled into the explosion’s deep crater rather than go around it. Unable to escape, and followed by Burnside’s other three divisions, they turned into what one New Hampshire soldier described as “a mass of worms crawling over each other”-easy targets for Confederates. The battle was a Union disaster.

Further Reading:

Michael A. Cavanaugh and William Marvel, The Petersburg Campaign: The Battle of the Crater, “The Horrid Pit,” June 25-August 6, 1864 (1989)

This Vignette Provided By

Brendan Wolfe, associate editor of Encyclopedia Virginia