No Quarter

May 4, 2009
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.

June 1, 2009
The offbeat history of a truly explosive Civil War battle.

Historian Slotkin (Lost Battalions: The Great War and the Crisis of American Nationality, 2005, etc.) focuses on a particularly unusual battle, which occurred July 30, 1864. Ulysses S. Grant and his Union forces were determined to seize Petersburg, Va., a heavily fortified, key supply point for the Confederate capital of Richmond, but his soldiers were bogged down in trench warfare against Robert E. Lee's Confederates. To break the stalemate, Henry Pleasants, a Union lieutenant colonel and former mining engineer, proposed that Union soldiers dig a tunnel underneath one of the Confederate forts, pack it with explosives and blow a hole in the Confederate line. Major General Ambrose Burnside supported the plan, but others, including Grant, were less enthusiastic. Consequently, the soldiers tasked with the digging were supplied with inferior equipment and supplies. Nonetheless, the tunnel was completed in a month and packed with 8,000 pounds of gunpowder. A regiment of African-American soldiers had been trained to lead the post-explosion charge, but were replaced at the last minute with an inexperienced white regiment. The blast—the largest manmade explosion to that point—opened a crater, still visible today, more than 130-feet wide and 30-feet deep. Many Union troops marched into the crater instead of around it and were shot in massive numbers. Ultimately, Grant deemed the Battle of the Crater"a stupendous failure." Some 3,800 Union troops were killed, wounded or captured, compared to fewer than 1,500 Confederates. Burnside was relieved of command, and the seemingly endless trench warfare continued as before. Slotkin skillfully portrays the myriad political and strategic elements in play throughout the preparation of the ill-fated siege, as well as the sometimes prickly personalities of the commanders in charge. He's particularly adept at describing the unbridled chaos and brutality, hour by hour, of the battle itself.

In a market glutted with Civil War books, Slotkin delivers a fresh, well-told tale.

(COPYRIGHT (2009) KIRKUS REVIEWS/NIELSEN BUSINESS MEDIA, INC. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.)

June 1, 2009
By 1864, the North and South had settled into a positional war around Richmond and Petersburg, VA, with trenches, cannon, disease, and delay. Gen. Grant decided to try a mine, digging under a portion of the fortifications and cramming the tunnel with explosives. It was the largest explosion ever seen at the timeand led to a crushing Union defeat, with 4500 dead. There have been lots of books about the Crater, but the eminent Slotkin does a respectable job. Civil War history enthusiasts will want this.

Copyright 2009 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

June 1, 2009
By the summer of 1864, Union and Confederate forces faced each other across a series of massive breastworks and trenches outside Petersburg, Virginia, which was a vital rail link, supply center, and gateway to the Union conquest of Richmond. To break this stalemate, a daring Union plan employed Pennsylvania miners to burrow deep underneath Confederate lines and pack the tunnel with several tons of explosives. The detonation was expected to open a huge breach in Confederate lines; Union soldiers would pour into the gap and break the impasse. It was a brilliant plan that should have worked. Instead, it was a tragic failure characterized by negligence, incompetence, and racial animus that ended with the slaughter of mainly black troops who had spearheaded the assault. Slotkin has written an engrossing account filled with heroism as well as deceit, cowardice, and virulent racism on both sides. The hour-by-hour retelling of the actual detonation and assault is both stirring and unsettling, making this is an outstanding addition to Civil War collections.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2009, American Library Association.)