The Damned of Petersburg Read online

  Straightening his sword belt to go out, Ledlie paused and looked at him imploringly.

  “Really think that mine is going to work?”

  TWO

  Four a.m., July 30, 1864

  Entrance to the Union mine

  Colonel Henry Pleasants looked down from his perch on the earthworks.

  “Let them wait,” he said.

  All of them. In their thousands. Sweating in the darkness, in the never-abated heat. Ledlie’s division had deployed just behind the forward line, the massed soldiers slowly taking form as the night retreated. And the three divisions ordered to follow stood packed in the covered ways or squeezed together down in the ravine at Pleasants’ back. Waiting. And waiting. Ten thousand men at the ready, with more filling in behind and additional corps alerted to support. All waiting, the generals doubtless impatient, quarrels suspended as they watched their timepieces. Pleasants sensed them all fidgeting, fearing, praying, and growing more worried about the great scheme by the minute.

  Let them wait. He meant to do things right.

  “Look you, Colonel,” Reese whispered, trying him one more time, “the light will have its way and the Johnnies will see.”

  Pleasants considered the man down in the trench. The night had paled enough to detail his face, and his dirty shirt shone. Harry Reese. Tall for a Welshman, redheaded by daylight. With shoulders that spanned the gallery of a mine, almost too big a fellow to work underground. But Reese was the perfect beast to serve as a sergeant, rough but fair.

  “Not yet,” Pleasants said.

  He gazed up the slope, past the clustered shadows slowly becoming men, to the Reb entrenchments just atop the ridge. The outlines of the opposing earthworks showed black against the ruins of the night.

  “Damned fuse,” Douty muttered. Another man with mining in his blood, stripped to his undergarment from the waist up, Lieutenant Douty’s whisper reeked of hate.

  Yes, the “damned fuse.” Pleasants had requested the reliable sort of fuse he knew from the anthracite fields. Just as he had asked for a new theodolite, which Meade’s chief engineer had failed to provide. His men had not even been issued the requisitioned miners’ pickaxes, but had filed down their too-large Army tools. And the fuse, old-fashioned and crude, was delivered late in ten-foot strips that had to be bound together. To a length passing five hundred feet. Leaving over fifty splices where a fuse could fizzle.

  And fizzled it had. Burnside had ordered the mine blown at three thirty. Pleasants had lit the fuse at three fifteen.

  And nothing happened.

  Now it was after four.

  Reese and Douty had volunteered to reenter the mine at once. But Pleasants had refused his men permission. As he continued to refuse them now. With the entire Ninth Corps gathered around him, waiting to go forward, striving still to be quiet but growing restless. And with all the rest of the Army of the Potomac and Army of the James cocking their ears for the blast that refused to come.

  The darkness grew ever thinner.

  Reese and Douty had as much heart stuck in that mine as he did. More, perhaps, for Reese had been his tireless foreman, a skilled man ready to show what he could do and unusually bitter toward the Rebs. For his part, Pleasants wanted to prove that he had been right and the Army’s pompous engineers dead wrong when they insisted the mine he conceived was impossible, rolling their eyes and claiming it could not be ventilated. Men, those were, who had briefly studied the use of mines in a classroom at West Point, while he had been down in the darkness year after year, down in that netherworld between daylight and firedamp, that deathly, deadly place, an anthracite mine.

  Because of that experience, because of the horrors he had witnessed before the war taught other men the grotesquerie of wounds and Death’s resourcefulness, he had seen mutilations down the pits to make hard men vomit, wounds suffered not for a cause but for a pittance.

  So Henry Pleasants knew what happened when a fuse appeared to have gone out and men rushed into the mine to reignite it. Only to have the fuse leap back to life and blow them to shreds. Or bury them alive.

  A bad fuse was a widow-maker. And his 48th Pennsylvania had widows enough.

  This would be a day of deaths, he knew. But he would not sacrifice Douty and Reese unnecessarily, not after all they’d given to get this far. Call it stubbornness, Pleasants thought, or call it what you will. But the pit-head rule was to wait one hour before permitting reentry. And he meant to wait that hour.

  Soon, too soon, the Rebs would be able to see all that waited to strike them. Each minute counted, he knew, and the knowing had weight. It did not matter that the troops, once past their own defenses, faced barely a hundred yards of open ground. Even with the Reb battery straight ahead blown to hell, enfilading guns could sweep the slope.

  If, indeed, the Johnnies were blown to hell. Pleasants had reckoned carefully and asked for six tons of powder for the mine’s chambers. Grudgingly, the engineers of the Army of the Potomac had authorized four tons, telling him that their calculations differed.

  Calculations done by men who couldn’t believe he could do what he had done.

  Soon enough, there would be light for a slaughter, a butcher’s light. The light that distinguished men, that marked them as targets.

  In the morning dusk and stubborn heat, Pleasants drew out his watch and brought it close to his face, a gesture he had repeated countless times since the fuse was lit. He struggled to read the slender black hands truly.

  Abruptly, he slid from the parapet, landing flat-footed in the last clear space left amid the mass of soldiers: the roped-off hollow at the head of the mine.

  “All right,” he told Reese and Douty. “Relight the damned thing.”

  Four fifteen a.m.

  Dunn house

  Ninth Corps headquarters

  Grant came in.

  “What’s the matter with the mine?” he asked George Meade, who had shifted to Burnside’s headquarters for the attack.

  To Meade’s relief, Grant didn’t seem much perturbed. One fine thing about Grant was that he rather expected things to go wrong and took setbacks calmly.

  “I don’t know,” Meade admitted. Around him, staff men with little to do for the present sought to appear to be doing a great deal. “I’d guess the fuse has gone out.”

  Grant nodded. “Burnside working on it?” He took out a cigar.

  “I’ve sent two men forward to get a proper answer. Burnside’s at Fourteen Gun Battery. Where he can watch the attack.”

  Lighting his smoke, Grant said, “Think I’ll go forward myself. You stay here, look to the rest of the army. If things prove satisfactory, I want a general attack.”

  Meade nodded.

  Grant puffed, exhaled. “Colored Troops, too, if Burnside thinks he can use them. Let them follow, once the worst is past. Give them some experience.” He smacked his lips around the black cigar. “Just not up front, you were right.”

  Again, Meade nodded. Over four months, he’d learned to read Grant’s speech. For all the lieutenant general’s subdued manner, his utterances had more nuance than a Philadelphia society dinner. Today, Grant’s tone did not invite contradiction.

  A sergeant approached, a rough-cut man feigning respect and not quite bringing it off. He touched two fingers to an eyebrow, glanced at Grant, and told Meade, “General, the telegraph’s up, she’s ready.”

  Meade looked at Grant, then turned—sharply—to General Humphreys, his chief of staff.

  “Humph, send Burnside a message. Ask him what the devil’s holding things up.”

  A man with the eyes of a wolf and a bite to match, Humphreys said, “Already written. They’re sending it right now.”

  Smartly timed, the telegraph key clicked in the depths of the farmhouse.

  “If he doesn’t reply immediately,” Meade said, “send another message. Keep after him.”

  “Don’t need to be told,” Humphreys responded, as gruff as ever. “I’ve known Ambrose Burnside long enough.”


  For a stretch of silence, everyone waited for the promised blast. Grant consumed his cigar at a rate that belied his outward calm.

  Papers rustled. The telegraph tapped again.

  “Tried a mine at Vicksburg,” Grant remarked. “Two, in fact. Hoped this might go better.”

  At first, neither of them had thought much of Burnside’s scheme. But that colonel of his, Pleasants, had been convincing. And of late, after inspecting the progress of the work—and looking hard for flaws, as Meade realized—even Duane, the Army of the Potomac’s chief engineer and a prideful man, had come around to believing in the business. They all had. Despite the prevailing distrust of Ambrose Burnside.

  The man’s notion of leading with U.S. Colored Troops, greener than they were black, had begged catastrophe, practical and political. Letting them follow to consummate a victory was one thing—Grant was right about that—but the abolitionist papers would have made bloody hay out of any appearance of squandering their pet Negroes. They’d gone absolutely mad about the Fort Pillow mess out west.

  Still no explosion. Perhaps nobody would go in at all. Perhaps it would be just another of Burnside’s infamous failures. Meade thought it criminal that the fellow remained in command of a corps. But politics ruled.

  Teddy Lyman delivered tin cups of coffee. Meade was enormously fond of his volunteer aide, a sound Bostonian. The coffee, on the other hand, was foul.

  “The mine may still go up,” Meade told Grant, warring to keep the nerves out of his voice. “Even Duane’s convinced it’s been properly done.” He gestured at the oilcloth windows. “Concerned about the light, though. It has to blow soon. Or we’ll have to call it off.”

  Grant’s face hardened. It was a phenomenon Meade had seen again and again since May. Grant’s features didn’t alter, except for the faintest tightening of the eyebrows. But his flesh seemed to turn to stone and his eyes to glass.

  “I want the attack to go forward,” he said. “Whether the mine blows or not.”

  Four twenty a.m.

  Head of the mine

  Snapper Reese burst from the mouth of the mine.

  Gulping fresh air, he said, “She hardly burned forty feet in, sir. Powder we laid in the trough might as well have been pissed on. Didn’t get past the third buggering splice.”

  Pleasants got smell close to the man, restraining himself from gripping the sergeant’s arm. “Can you relight it? Is the fuse itself dry enough?”

  Reese nodded: Yes. “I need twine. And a knife, a good knife.” He didn’t wait on further words but scrambled for the scraps that remained from assembling the fuse the evening before.

  Pleasants turned to his nearest soldiers, the handful that had not yet been dispersed for provost duty. In thanks for their month of labor, the men of the 48th had been relieved from the attacking force, while he himself would serve as a special aide to General Potter, his division commander, for the day.

  “A knife. Damn it, who has a sharp knife? Or a bayonet, a sharp one?”

  The men knew what Pleasants was like when he was angry. A knife appeared promptly in a dirty paw.

  Reese had stepped back beside Pleasants. He seized the knife and scuttled into the gallery.

  Around them, the army rustled.

  Damn it all, Pleasants thought. Forty feet! That meant almost five hundred feet and fifty splices to go. That came out to roughly fourteen minutes. If there wasn’t another break.

  It was already light enough to see fear in faces.

  Four thirty-five a.m.

  Fourteen Gun Battery, Ninth Corps

  Frightful weather. A fellow sweated himself right through his woolens. Frightful. Burnside wiped his forehead with a handkerchief.

  Major Van Buren approached him. Again.

  “Sir, it’s another message from General Humphreys.”

  Humphreys, Meade. Meade, Humphreys. Mightn’t they leave him alone to see this through? No one liked a delay, but Pleasants would fix it. Surely he would. Pleasants. Fine fellow. Mercurial, though, mercurial. That was the word. Fine engineer, though. Brilliant. Burnside hadn’t seen fit to pester the fellow, but now Meade was on him, as Grant would be on Meade. Wretched business, command. Fredericksburg. Ghosts.

  A man had to know his limits, Burnside decided, that was the thing.

  “Shall I reply, sir?” Van Buren asked.

  “Not yet, not yet.” Burnside peered into the predawn twilight. Able to see his men by the dark thousands, mere silhouettes still, but visible, too visible. Packed in like tinned oysters, like oysters in a great tin. Down the covered ways and into the creekbed, then spread across the opposing slope on their bellies. Crowding almost to the Rebel entrenchments. Waiting, waiting.

  He didn’t want to be a bother to Pleasants, but …

  Turning to an aide, Burnside said, “Pell, do go down and see what the problem is. With my compliments to Colonel Pleasants.”

  It was only a delay, no more, the Ninth Corps commander assured himself. The rest was bound to go splendidly. It had to, he’d staked his all on it.

  Major General Ambrose Burnside, commander of the Ninth Union Corps, Army of the Potomac, fully intended to eat his dinner in Petersburg.

  Then they’d see.

  Four thirty-five a.m.

  50th Pennsylvania Veteran Volunteer Infantry

  “Mine’s a bust,” Levi Eckert said, disgusted but not disappointed. “And to hell with all that, too.”

  Lieutenant Charles Brown withheld his judgment. The truth was that he was no more enthusiastic about the attack than Levi, but he felt a certain kinship with the men of the 48th, the miners from back home, even if most hailed from north of the mountain. He hated to see other Schuylkill County men fail.

  “Just another damned bust,” Levi continued.

  In a low voice, Brown told him, “Sergeant Eckert, shut up.”

  Did feel like a bust, though. Levi was right. If the mine was going to go up at all, even the worst of the generals must see it had to blow before dawn. Before the Rebs woke up to themselves and readied a warm reception.

  Wouldn’t be long before the sky took color now. And the sun would strike that far slope where the first troops lay. Going forward would be as mad as those assaults back in June, when so many had died for nothing.

  One of the newer privates turned and bent over, vomiting into a connecting trench. Other men leapt aside to avoid the splash. Filthy as they all were, a fellow still felt disgust at certain things.

  One blessing was that his regiment and the rest of the brigade had been held a good ways back, near the big battery. With Ledlie’s bunch in the lead and Potter’s boys ahead, too, the 50th Pennsylvania wouldn’t face the worst of it. Even if the mine went up, their day might come to nothing but a long wait, lucky as those coons mustered to the rear.

  Levi had been right about that, too. The U.S. Colored Troops would go in last, if they went in at all. And white men resented it. How could a fellow not? When Ethiops were coddled while white men died?

  Birds. Calling up the sun. Weren’t as many as there should have been. Most had fled a time back, dislodged by the general ruckus of the war that had come to visit.

  Some of the men whispered prayers in the spooking light. Brown knew he needed to read more of the Bible, and he did try. Frances would be so pleased, if he took on the sayings and had them handy. Anyway, it couldn’t hurt to figure his way through the strangeness of the Lord. Brown wondered time and again over how what was written down could be so different from what Christian men went preaching. Lately, he had read in Judges about a woman’s wicked misuse by a mob while her husband hid. He had never heard that preached on, not one word, but Brown could not imagine behaving that way, were any man to lay a finger on Frances. But, then, he never understood about the meek inheriting the earth, either. In his experience, the meek didn’t fare too well.

  As tense as anyone now, he slapped at a fly. What had gone wrong this time? Would the attack be canceled? A man just wanted to know.<
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  And a leader had to know. Or pretend to. So much of leading men, he had learned, was fakery.

  “Verdammt noch mal,” First Sergeant Losch complained.

  Yes, Brown thought. Damn it all.

  And the peculiar stench that lay on the land like a blanket. The thousands of men waiting to attack had taken on a queer smell, a reek that differed from their routine stink, like piss and ashes packed up in your nostrils.

  Over by the big battery, officers came and went. No one had told Brown or his men exactly when the attack was meant to begin, but something had gone wrong, there was no doubt. Old soldiers knew.

  Maybe Levi was right and it was a bust. And he wouldn’t mind that a bit.

  Don’t think like that, he warned himself. You’re an officer now. Don’t think like that.

  Brown wasn’t afraid. He’d stopped being afraid a fair time back. But when he’d stopped being afraid, when he’d lost that sour-stomach dread, he’d lost the passion for a good fight, too. Now he just did his duty, no less and no more.

  He reached inside his blouse and scratched. Hoping he hadn’t picked up the camp itch again.

  “Why don’t they do something?” Billy Tyson called, too loudly.

  Brown turned on them all, more disturbed than he’d realized. Perhaps fearful, after all.

  “I don’t want to hear another word out of one man in this company.”

  The ground began to rumble.

  Four forty-four a.m.

  Head of the mine

  Pleasants looked down at his pocket watch and realized his hand was shaking. He snapped the case shut again and sucked in air.

  Up the slope, in light that grew paler each moment, Reb sentinels stood atop their fortifications, braving the risk of bullets as they sought to make out what was happening. Something was wrong, they felt it. But the curve of the hill worked against them, hiding the blue waves about to rush toward them.

  A bit more light and they’d spot the foremost ranks, though. And probably see the divisions massed to the rear, their numbers too many to fit in the covered ways.