CWL on No Quarter: The Battle of the Crater, 1864

No Quarter: The Battle of the Crater, 1864 , Richard Slotkin, Random House, 2009, 410 pp., maps, index, notes, bibliography, $28.00.

Richard Slotkin's account of the July 30 1864 battle is remarkably wide in its context and deep in it details. Strategy, tactics, and personalities are used to frame this kaleidoscopic portrait of brutality. The Battle of the Crater was a terrifically bloody and brutal fight on a nauseatingly hot day at Petersburg Virginia. After two and a half months of the Overland Campaign, the siege of Petersburg began. Within six weeks of the start of the siege the 511 foot tunnel with a double cassion of eight tons of gun powder was under the Confederate line at Elliot's Salient. The tunnel was dug, built and loaded by the Irish miners in the 48th Pennsylvania Infantry preparation by the troops of the Federal Ninth Corps, the Federals exploded a 511 foot long tunnel that travels from the Federal picket line to beneath a Rebel salient.

Slotkin states the purpose of writing No Quarter: The Battle of the Crater 1864 "is to give the reader a clear and accurate account of the strategic setting and the battle action as it developed by hour by hours, and to show how the culture and politics of the place and time shaped the way the soldiers fought and the meanings they saw in their experience of war". Slotin does precisely that. Keeping a steady and suspenseful narrative pace, crisply setting the personalities into the story, and revealing the mindset of the characters regarding race, war exhaustion, the 1864 Rebel and Union elections, and desertion. For the most part this is a soldiers' story but Slotkin judicially handles politics, politicians and political attitudes to reveal the culture in which the soldiers fought and sacrificed.

The author has captured episodes that are memorable. In the 1st Michigan Sharpshooters were trained scouts and crack shots from the Chippewa, Ottawa as well as other tribes. They appear several times briefly throughout the book. Slotkin offers a final glimpse of them in the Crater. They are huddled with their shirts over the heads and plaintively chanting their tribe's death songs.

The possibility and perception of atrocities against blacks is addressed by Slotkin. The Crater was fought in the shadow of the awareness of the 1864 tragedies at Fort Pillow, Poison Springs and Saltville. The 25th North Carolina's war record is covered including their first encounter against black Federal soldiers, freedmen and white Southern collaborators during the 1864 Plymouth, North Carolina campaign. The North Carolina's had a different response towards each group. The violent response varied toward each group with the black the degree of violence meted out. The regiment's second encounter with black Federals is at the Crater. Going into battle the USCT brigades were told that as the Confederates gave no quarter to black troops
they would give no quarter during this battle. The unspoken words by the USCT captains was the no quarter would be given to the Southerners during this day of battle. The blood gets deep in the Crater and in the entrenchments beyond it.

Slotkin describes the tedium of trench warfare and the unexpected brutality of death by mortar round, by sharpshooter or by dysentery. Colonel Pleasant of the 48th Pennsylvania, architect of the tunnel, Brigadier General Ferraro, commander of the USCT Division, Major General Burnside, commander of the Ninth Corps, and Major General Meade, commander of the Army of the Potomac among the many Federals are well described and fully presented. Major General Mahone, Brigadier Generals Ransom, Weisger and Sanders, General Lee have succinct and well craft portraits.

Within the chapter 'Preparation for Battle' the reader is able to locate 15 decisions that caused the attack to fail at the Crater. The tactical objective was to seize Cemetery Hill and cut control the Jerusalem Plank Road. Slotkin is not forceful in describing these harbingers of failure but he allows the reader to think through the conditions and choice made and not made. The author is well practiced in the art of narration and as a story No Quarter: The Battle of the Crater 1864 is extremely well paced and even suspenseful. Slotkin drive carries the story past the battle to the truce and into the Court of Inquiry. Readers of traditional battle studies will find issues not generally encountered. Provocative issues are addressed by Slotkin. Soldiers' opinions on race and politics, their hearth and homes, and slavery and freedom.

A few quibbles: CWL likes maps. There are four that cover the Overland Campaign, the siege and the battle. More maps would have been helpful, especially those showing the maze and labyrinth of Rebel earthworks behind Elliott's Salient. Also, a brief discussion of newspaper illustrations and photographs depicting the battle would have been enjoyable. Coverage of The Crater in historical memory would have been welcomed also. Slotkin does offer material on the post-battle newspaper coverage and the court of inquiry (August 6-September 9, 1864). An order of battle for the Federal Ninth Corps and those Rebel troops brigades would have been convenient.

Text by CWL.
Middle and Bottom Images: The entrance to the mine. Photography by Civil War Librarian.

Forthcoming---Richard Slotkin's No Quarter Well Reviewed

No Quarter: The Battle of the Crater, 1864, Richard Slotkin, Random House Publishing, 432 pp., $28.00. July 30, 2009.

James M. McPherson: Having written an earlier novel and now a deeply researched historical narrative of the Battle of the Crater, Richard Slotkin knows more about this vicious and tragic fight than anyone. Particularly impressive is his ability to place tactical details in the larger military, political and racial context of the Civil War. The analysis of the role of black soldiers in the battle is the best such account anywhere.

Geoffrey Ward: In this harrowing, clear-eyed account of the battle U.S. Grant himself called ‘the saddest affair I have witnessed in this war,’ Richard Slotkin vividly evokes the brutal reality of Civil War combat–and recaptures the crucial role played by race in creating the Battle of the Crater’s special fury.

Publishers Weekly: Three decades after publishing a novel on the Battle of the Crater, Wesleyan professor emeritus Slotkin offers a historical analysis of an event meant as a turning point in the Civil War but remembered instead as one of its greatest failures. Most accounts focus on the slaughter of hundreds of black Union troops; Slotkin takes a broader perspective. The Crater was intended to draw on the Union's strengths, like the mastery of industrial technology, and the physical energies liberated by black emancipation. A regiment of coal miners dug a 500-foot tunnel under a Confederate strong point and packed it with four tons of blasting powder. A division of African-Americans was to exploit the blast to open the way to the Confederate capital, Richmond. The Civil War might have ended by Christmas. Instead, Slotkin describes a fiasco. Jealousy, intransigence, incompetence, and even cowardice among Union generals resulted in a combination massacre and race riot, as white Union and Confederate troops turned on the blacks. Slotkin depicts all this and the army and Congress's subsequent whitewashes with the verve and force that place him among the most distinguished historians of the role of violence in the American experience.

William C. Davis: Perhaps the finest Civil War novel of the past generation (yes, better than The Killer Angels) was Richard Slotkin's The Crater. It combined compelling narrative (which The Killer Angels had) with deep and scholarly research into the subject (which The Killer Angels did not). It may have been a fictional story, but the background context was very accurate indeed. How fortunate it is, then, that Slotkin, who is primarily an historian of the American frontier experience, has decided to follow up the novel with No Quarter: The Battle of the Crater, 1864, which must surely be the best researched and most comprehensive history of the actual event that was backdrop to his novel. On July 30, 1864, forced into a siege around Petersburg, Virginia, in his effort to bring General Robert E. Lee to bay, General U. S. Grant determined upon a daring expedient to try to break the stalemate. The idea of digging a tunnel from one line of defensive works, beneath the intervening no-man’s land to the underside of an opponent’s works, and then setting off an explosion to blow a hole in those defenses, was not a new one. Grant himself had tried it at Vicksburg the year before, and the concept had been around almost as long as gunpowder itself. But there were a host of special circumstances around this tunnel, and the “crater” created by the resultant explosion. Slotkin goes well beyond just the rote military actions to look deep behind the act, examining the attitudes of Americans toward each other in 1864, the political situation faced by Lincoln in the North with an election coming up and a war that seemed endless, and the emergent factor of race in military events. Grant would, for military, political and social reasons, order that a substantial body of black soldiers participate in the assault into the hole in the Confederate works once the explosion created a breach. But he reckoned without what happened next. And what happened next is still controversial. Bungling by inept and simply lazy Union commanders was met by daring and resourceful Confederate defenders. And in an eerie reprise of the slaughter of the black 54th Massachusetts Regiment at Battery Wagner in 1863, down in that huge hole, thousands of black and white Union soldiers found themselves virtually “fish in a barrel” for the shooting. The aftermath, with recriminations and congressional investigations, is almost as dramatic as the July 30 fight itself. Slotkin’s research on the subject is deep and comprehensive, and his judgments mature. The writing is, as always, first class. And his concluding sentence must be one of the most telling and poignant in Civil War literature. It should only be read after reading the rest of the book first.

Text Source: Amazon.com

Author Bio: Richard Slotkin is widely regarded as one of the preeminent cultural critics of our times. A two-time finalist for the National Book Award, he is the author of Lost Battalions, a New York Times Notable Book, and an award-winning trilogy: Regeneration Through Violence, The Fatal Environment, and Gunfighter Nation–as well as three historical novels: The Crater: A Novel, The Return of Henry Starr, and Abe: A Novel of the Young Lincoln. He is the Olin Professor of English and American Studies at Wesleyan University and lives in Middletown, Connecticut. (Text from Random House site)

CWL: Richard Slotkin's The Crater, is one of the best Civil War novels written in the 20th century. (Yes that is a very bold statement but it is true and the list of such novels is very, very short). Slotkin, an historian who has produced outstanding academic work, has written three novels, on others being Abe and The Return of Henry Starr. Now about twenty years after his novel The Crater he offers No Quarter: The Crater, 1864. CWL appreciates both history written for historians and fiction written for a wide range of readers; my undergraduate degrees are in English and history, the masters degree is in U.S. history. I do not tolerate trite or feeble storytelling. CWL hopes to read No Quarter before the end of the year and The Crater again before retirement.