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.
