The Horrid Pit: The Battle of the Crater, The Civil War's Cruelest Mission (review)

Judged by Gen. Ulysses S. Grant "the saddest affair I have witnessed in the War," the July 30, 1864, Battle of the Crater was quite possibly the worst Union disaster of the Civil War. By the summer of 1864 the fighting in northern Virginia had devolved into static trench warfare around Richmond and its sister city, Petersburg, twenty-three miles to the south. Both Grant and the Confederate commander, Gen. Robert E. Lee viewed Petersburg, a major transportation hub, as the key to the Confederate capital's survival. Protected by a massive series of earthen forts, the city seemed virtually impregnable, yet Lt. Col. Henry Pleasants, commander of a regiment of former Pennsylvania coal miners devised a scheme to break the stalemate. Pleasants convinced Ninth Corps commander Gen. Ambrose Burnside that his men could tunnel under the Confederate positions and detonate a huge mine. In theory, the resulting gap in the fortifications would have allowed Federal troops to storm the city and thus quickly end the war.

Pleasants's plan was sound and, under better circumstances, could quite possibly have succeeded. Unfortunately, Burnside's superiors, Gen. George Meade and Grant, had little confidence in his abilities and, although giving their reluctant approval for the project, had apparently forgotten about it. The news that Pleasants had indeed completed the 586-foot tunnel and packed the mine with four tons of powder thus caught both generals by surprise. Forced to move quickly owing to the mine's vulnerability, Grant and Meade threw the responsibility of the project back on the unfortunate Burnside. Unable to cope, Burnside then resorted to choosing the regimental commander to lead the assault by lot. The incompetence of that commander, the alcoholic Gen. James Leslie, sealed the fate of the resulting Battle of the Crater. Lacking leadership, thousands of both white and black Union troops, rather than attack around the mine's pit as originally planned, crowded into the crater itself only to be trapped and slaughtered by the Confederate defenders.

A court of inquiry convened to examine the causes of the debacle less than a week afterward, and numerous treatments of the event have been published since the war. The latest, The Horrid Pit: The Battle of the Crater, The Civil War's Cruelest Mission, by Alan Axelrod is a lively retelling of the action and is sure to appeal to the general Civil War reader. Axelrod, author of such previous works as The Complete Idiot's Guide to the Civil War (2003), easily intersperses accounts from the official inquiries into the action with his own fluid prose. Although well-written and balanced in its treatment, Axelrod's scholarship is more dependent on secondary sources than earlier meticulously researched works such as Michael A. Cavanaugh and William Marvel's The Battle of the Crater, "The Horrid Pit" (1989).