The Battle of the Crater

The idea came from the ranks. The 48th Pennsylvania was full of anthracite miners from Schuylkill County, and one of them, listening to the stalemate at Petersburg, said out loud what a miner would say: we could blow that damned fort out of existence if we could run a mine shaft under it. His colonel, Henry Pleasants, had been a mining engineer before the war.

The army engineers said it was impossible — too long a gallery to ventilate without air shafts, and an air shaft would give the position away. The miners did it anyway, and mostly without help. They improvised picks from straightened army entrenching tools, hauled spoil out in cracker boxes fitted with handles, and solved the ventilation with a fireplace and a wooden duct that pulled stale air out and drew fresh air down the length of the tunnel.

They dug about 510 feet in under a month, running a gallery beneath the Confederate battery with two lateral arms packed with 320 kegs of powder. The engineering worked perfectly. What was done with it afterward was another matter entirely.