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published and unpublished eyewitness accounts, official reports, and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
