Saturday, 30th.—Pickets all round the front of city being pressed back; continual skirmishing all along the line.
Wednesday, July 30, 2014
30th. Got a sightly position in front of the 18th Corps where all points of interest were in view. Lay till sunrise upon one of the leveled forts. a cannon ball visiting the vicinity frequently. Just at sunrise a cloud of dust and dirt rising suddenly into the air, followed by a distant rumble, gave us warning that the work had commenced. The dust had hardly reached its height when 200 guns opened. The scene was wonderfully grand. We watched for two hours. We couldn’t see the maneuvering of troops. As the fort went up, the 9th Corps went in with a yell, and took the works where the opening was made. The colored troops charged on against the next line and were repulsed with great slaughter. Many regard the whole thing as a failure. Returned to camp. (This refers to one of the most spectacular and unsuccessful events of the war—Burnside’s explosion of a mine under Mahone’s rebel division and forts in front of Petersburg. This “crater” is still a “show” place. 1911. A. B. N.).
July 30th. 1864.
I hear tremendous explosions and repeated volleys of musketry in the direction of the Ninth Corps today. Can it be that Burnside’s mine has been exploded and that our forces now occupy Petersburg?
I see by the papers Secretary Chase has resigned. Mr. Chase is a politician, and is ambitious; he has worked three years, with all his mighty intellect, for the Presidency. In this he failed; he withdraws from the Cabinet to further his own schemes. I may judge him harshly, but I can not forget Fremont.
Can it be really true that my countrymen are despondent at the prospect of another “call” for men? Would they enjoy all the benefits to be derived from this war and share none of its perils? Are their lives too precious to be put in jeopardy? Have they become so degenerate as to make Mammon their idol?
Another appalling blunder has been perpetrated. Part of the Rebel works were blown up yesterday, and an assault was made by the Ninth Corps, which resulted in failure. Their works were carried, but, for want of support, could not be maintained.
July 30th. This morning opens up very hot. Having a rest. Trying to break in my new shoes. A bad job for the feet, which are very sore. Early this afternoon, marching orders received. Confederate cavalry reported to be raiding into Pennsylvania and upper Maryland. Ordered to make a forced march. Fearful hot as we break camp and begin the march. Pushing on over Bolivar Heights down through Harper’s Ferry, over the railroad bridge into Maryland. Many of the boys are dropping out on account of the severe heat, the sun beating down on us, and no air. New shoes, woolen stockings, sore feet, make me about sick, while pushing along. I was obliged to drop out by the roadside. A member of our company, George W. Cross, said he would drop out and stick to me. After the sun went down we pushed along. Came to a brook of good cold water. Gave my feet a good bath, after which I was able to push on. Found the regiment in camp for the night, after making a forced march of sixteen miles. Glad to get my shoes and stockings off for the night and get a little rest.
July 30 — This morning between dawn and sunrise a deep, heavy, thundering roll of sound swept over the country from the direction of Petersburg. I wonder what in the thunder the Yankees have invented now, for, from the way the air trembled and the ground shook, the deep heavy boom was not caused by any common artillery. The thing went loose just as I was getting up out of bed, and I perceptibly felt a wave of air rush past me, not like a wind, but like a roll of compressed air pushing against me, although we are camped about nine miles from Petersburg, and the volcano was not far from the city.
Immediately after the first deep thunder-like roll passed away it was followed by the more familiar sound of a terrific artillery fire, that raged furiously for a while. A heavy crash of musketry also roared and rolled wildly through the morning air across the lowlands of the Appomattox and the quiet fields of Dinwiddie, speaking in unerring tones of blood and thunder, destruction and death.
This afternoon we got news from Petersburg. The strange heavy boom we heard early this morning was caused by the ingenious Yankees springing a mine under a small portion of General Lee’s works a little over a mile from Petersburg. I suppose that General Grant’s object in the burrowing business was to pierce General Lee’s line and make a lodgment within his earthworks; if that was the design, its execution proved to be an utter and costly failure, and the whole scheme was a total miscarriage in its final consummation.
After the explosion the Yankee infantry attempted to charge through the yawning breach, but they were met by our infantry and greeted with a storm of shell from General Lee’s batteries. A regular fierce battle ensued, in which the charging Yankees were shot down by the hundred; from all accounts it was a regular slaughter pen and the crater of their homemade volcano became the threshold of death to hundreds of Union soldiers.
There was one division of colored troops in the charging column, and when they rushed and crowded into the extinct volcano and death trap our infantry slaughtered them fearfully at a wholesale schedule rate. I do not know whether the colored troops were former slaves or not, but I suppose that the survivors are deeply impressed with the striking idea that the road to Freedom’s blissful goal lies through a blasted deadly hole. I do wonder what the gentle, sympathetical and philanthropical Aunt Harriet Beecher Stowe thinks of this sort of emancipation, of striking off the shackle of bondage one day and the next march the dear creatures into a hole and have them shot down by the hundred. Poor Uncle Tom! But the dear old lady ought to be perfectly satisfied and gratified, for the great butchery to-day was the effect of a grand and glorious Yankee invention for transferring the Uncle Toms from slavery and the fields of yellow corn to the blissful realms of freedom, by making angels out of them in bunches of five hundred at a time. I do not pretend to guess what the enemy expected to accomplish by their volcanic fireworks, but the whole affair was a sort of brutal monster, a hybrid between a blunder and a boomerang, for I heard that the Yanks lost about four thousand men in the little experiment, and those that made a permanent lodgment in our line will never need any more lodging. Dust to dust.
July 30th. [Explosion of the mine.] A regular artillery battle began at 4 P.m. The shell flew thick; were relieved at 10 P.m., marched to our old camp. Burnside blew up a rebel fort, and 500 Rebs and 18 guns were buried.
[August 27,1 Hayes’s command marched fourteen miles down the river road toward Harpers Ferry and camped below Sandy Hook. The next day the Potomac was crossed and a camp was established in the woods near Halltown, Virginia, a good location except that it was “too far from water.” Here the weary soldiers rested two days. Then, Saturday night, July 30, they marched back in the darkness, through dust, heat, and confusion, fourteen miles into Maryland; and Sunday ten miles farther on through Middletown to a wooded camp. Hayes writes: “Men all gone up, played out, etc. Must have time to build up or we can do nothing. Only fifty to one hundred men in a regiment came into camp in a body.”]
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1Based on the sequencing in the book and the date, July 30, cited in the paragraph, August 27 probably should be July 27. – Mike Goad, October 12, 2013
Etowah Bridge, Saturday, July 30. After breakfast, waited to go with Corporal Knapp and O. J. Burnham out after berries. E. F. Hayes and I followed with pails. Walked about five miles to the romantic country seat of Old Cooper. By 9 A. M. we had dishes full of the luscious fruit, upon which we have feasted for the last month. Visited at a house inhabited by an old couple called Williams, formerly of N. C. Very social and friendly, apparently open-hearted and honest, but ignorant, as was shown by the old man asking if Minnesota was a state. A pretty young lady treated us to a drink of good buttermilk which tasted home-like. And we started back. Jerked a load of roasting-corn out of a corn field and returned to camp by 1 P. M. exhausted by the heat which was very severe. Had green corn for dinner and felt better. Thus the time passes.
Saturday, July 30th.
During last night the Second Corps, which had returned from the extreme right of our lines where it had been sent to make a demonstration as a feint, as we were told, came in on our right and rear and lay in a railroad cut with its right resting near the right of the Fifth Corps, and its left extending nearly parallel but slightly diagonally to the rear of that corps. Early in the morning a Regular Army Sergeant named Charles Miller, with two brass twelve-pounders from some Regular battery, reported to me and I placed his section between my Nos. 5 and 6, where there were two platforms and embrasures for lighter guns. As soon as I saw the vast inverted cone of earth, fire and smoke caused by the gigantic explosion, I gave the order “commence firing, No. I fire!” and before the noise of the explosion, or even the trembling of the earth, had reached us, No. 1 had sent a thirty-three pound shell into a two-gun battery facing us, smashing through the parapet and opening the way for a shell from No. 2, which, aimed by Corporal O’Connor as a columbiad for want of a tunnion sight, sent its shell under the muzzle of an old-fashioned barbette gun doing duty as a field-piece, and dismounted it before it could fire a shot in our direction. Nos. 3, 4, 5 and 6 followed in rapid succession, and the order “fire at will” brought on an almost continuous roar. There was a rebel camp in plain sight over near “Fort Damnation,” and when the first shell from my No. 6 dropped among the tents and exploded, it was amusing to see the “Johnnies” turning out in consternation and very few clothes, and skedaddling to cover. Although the platforms in our fort were large and well built, the recoil of these guns was so great that at every discharge, with muzzles depressed and trails in the air, they would run backward and down the inclines leading to the platforms, and to overcome this tendency to roll out of action, I was obliged to have two men on the trail handspike of each gun, and a man on each side to drop an armful of wood, stick by stick, under the wheels to take up as much as was possible of the recoil.
After the firing of troops and artillery immediately in front of the Crater had perceptibly slackened, and it was evident that our charging columns were not being pushed through the enemy’s works as had been planned, and while, having practically completed the work General Warren had given me to do, I was firing slowly and giving my guns an opportunity to cool off, for they were so hot that one could hardly bear his hand on them, General Bartlett, an officer with a wooden leg, who commanded some troops on our right and from his position could see what was going on at the Crater, came into “Fort Hell” and told me that a force of the enemy was forming at a point in the rear of the Crater, with the intention, apparently, of charging our forces which were inextricably mixed up in that fearful excavation, and wanted to know if I could not break up the formation. I could not see the troops of which he spoke, they being concealed from me by a little knoll and some rebel earthworks, but taking his estimate of the distance at fifteen hundred yards, I cut the time-fuses of three or four shells for that range for my Nos. 1 and 2, and gave the guns the requisite elevation, while the General stumped back to his command to note the result of the experiment. In a few moments he sent a staff officer to say that I had the direction and distance very accurately, but that my shells were exploding in the air and a little short. Thereupon I cut the fuses of four or five other shells so as to give them an additional half second of time, and before I had exhausted the new supply, the General sent another staff officer to say that my last shells had dropped right into the bunch and had scattered it like a flock of sheep, and that I needn’t waste any more ammunition on his account.
Not very long after this incident, General Warren came into the fort, and seeing that with the one hundred and ninety-six rounds which my battery had fired that morning we had leveled many yards of the enemy’s breastworks in our front, and had dismounted or silenced every gun in front of his corps except one which did not bear our way, the extremely heavy traverse of which defied all our efforts, inquired whether I had seen any large body of troops in those breastworks or their vicinity, and upon my telling him that there seemed to be nothing but a heavy picket line in front of us, he called one of his staff officers and sent him to General Meade with the request, as I understood it, that he be permitted to attack with his corps, by swinging it, by brigade or division, to the right, and passing through the breach in the enemy’s works with a brigade or division front. After a while the officer returned and reported that General Meade declined to grant General Warren’s request.
Some time afterwards General Hancock came into the Fort in company with General Warren, and after some conversation the two officers sent a united request, in substance, that Warren be permitted to make the move which he had himself suggested earlier in the day, and that Han-cock’s corps should swing into the lines vacated by Warren’s corps, so that if Warren was successful Hancock could follow him up, while if Warren was unsuccessful he could fall back on Hancock. This united request was also refused, and the staff officer reported that General Meade had said that those officers knew the plan of operations for the day and that it would be adhered to, and, in substance, that when he desired those corps to move he would give the necessary orders. I do not pretend to have quoted the language accurately, but I know that the message from General Meade as reported was somewhat brusque and emphatic, and that General Hancock indulged in some terse and vigorous English. I cannot give the exact hour of the day when either of the requests above mentioned was sent to General Meade, for I had been up all night and took little note of time, but I know that the firing had practically ceased on both sides, and that it was not until some hours afterwards that the main body of the enemy’s troops, which had been lured off to their left a day or two before by Hancock’s corps, came filing back into such of their works in our front as still remained and afforded them shelter. I shall always feel that had the request of General Warren been granted this morning, when a wide door had been opened in his front and there was but a small force to dispute his passage through, Lee’s right would have been pierced, Petersburg been taken and the war ended.
The picket lines in front of “Fort Hell” were very near together,—not more than fifteen or twenty yards apart, I should think. The men on these lines were usually relieved in the night time, and each occupied a little “gopher hole,” from which, through an aperture between rocks and logs arranged for his protection, he would occasionally take a shot at some exposed adversary. During our cannonade one of these chaps on the rebel line had given us some trouble by firing through the embrasures and splintering the spokes of the wheels of our gun carriages, but he was a bad marksman and injured none of the men, though he chipped a piece out of the buckle of my sword belt and gave me a little pain in the center for a moment. I could not depress any of the guns enough to reach him, even if the game had been worth the candle, but determining to quiet him, I placed two infantry soldiers on either side of an embrasure, where they were hidden by the sand bags which formed the crest of the works, with instructions to locate the point where the fellow’s musket came through, and then one of them to return his fire and the other to wait a few seconds until he might be expected to be peeping through for an observation, and then fire. Finding after a few failures that the man had evidently gotten on to the scheme, I placed a third infantry man a short distance from one of the others, and this arrangement seemed to be quite outside of the picket’s calculations, for after the third man had fired but once we heard nothing more from that “gopher hole.”
Along towards night confidence seemed to be in a measure restored between the picket lines in our front, the men frequently hailing each other and carrying on more or less conversation, and the “Johnnies” taunting our men with the inquiry, “Why didn’t you ‘Yanks’ take these works to-day? There wasn’t a hundred men in them.” Private Short-sleeves of my company, actually slipped out through an embrasure and went over to the picket line and exchanged a quantity of hardtack for several plugs of very black and repulsive-looking tobacco.
by John Beauchamp Jones
JULY 30TH. —Clear and hot.
Dispatches from Bragg, atMontgomery, .of yesterday, give no accounts of more fighting, although the press dispatches, etc. did mention four of our generals who have been wounded.
There is a revival of murmurs against the President. He will persist in keeping Bragg in command, that is “of the armies in the field,” though he does not lead any of them, and Gen. Pemberton really has command of all the batteries defendingRichmond. The raiders are cutting theGeorgia andAlabama Road since Bragg went South, and we have lost four pieces of artillery near this city a few days ago. ILL LUCK is indefensible!
To-day the enemy sprung a mine atPetersburg, but were repulsed in the attempt to rush in. This is all we know of it yet. Again it is rumored that the major parts of both armies are on this side of the river. This I believe, and I think that unless there be a battle immediately, Grant’s intention is to abandon the “siege” ofRichmond at the earliest practicable moment.
The local troops are back again. The President directed the Secretary of War to inform Gen. Ewell that he misapprehended the character of these troops. They were only for special and temporary service, having also civil duties to perform, and desired them to be sent back in twenty-four, or at most, forty-eight hours. Gen. E. writes that he will employ them exclusively hereafter in the city fortifications, and only in times of extreme peril. And he says there was peril on Thursday, the enemy’s cavalry being between our infantry and the city, and it will not do to rely always on his want of enterprise.
