The Crater

 Black troops attempt to break out of the Crater.

 Battle Of The Crater

 "Some colored men came into the Crater  and there they found a fate worse than death in the charge . . . It has been positively asserted, that White men [Union] bayoneted Blacks who fell back into the Crater."

  
Twisted Facts and The Crater

Five hundred Union prisoners were taken, and 150 of these prisoners were USCT. Both the black and white wounded prisoners were taken to the Confederate hospital at Poplar Lawn in Petersburg.

 

Senator (General) Wm. Mahone  from the colored citizens of Virginia

A Record of Triumph Unsurpassed in Warfare

"The charge of three brigades of Mahone’s Division is a record of triumph unsurpassed in warfare.”
  

 

Two Hundred Fifty Against Fourteen Thousand

(*Major William S. Grady, Henry's Grady's father) Never Sparta had braver representatives or Thermopylae more courageous defense, yet North Carolina does not note how he died in her cause, or Virginia in her defense.

 *Henry W. Grady was born in Athens in 1850.  His father, Major William S. Grady, bought this house from the Taylor family in 1863 while on furlough from the Confederate Army.  Because renters were living in the house at the time, Major Grady went back to the war without moving his family and was later killed at the Battle of Petersburg in Virginia.  Henry Grady lived here from 1865, while he attended the University of Georgia, until 1868 when he graduated.  He once referred to the house as "an old southern home, with its lofty pillars, and its white pigeons fluttering down through the golden air."  Grady eventually became managing editor of the Atlanta Constitution and was known as an impressive orator.  In December, 1886, he delivered his " New South"

 (My mother had me memorize the short part of his speech above to recite in front of the UDC at the Marshall, Salem during the War, Baptist church in Virginia.)  

speech at the New England Club in New York City, whose members included prominent financial figures J. P. Morgan and Charles Tiffany.  He began his speech with a quote from fellow Georgian, Benjamin H. Hill, "There was a South of slavery and secession; that South is dead . . . a South of union and freedom; that South, thank God, is living, breathing, growing every hour," and his listeners responded with wild applause.  He became a national figure overnight, stressing in his speeches and writings the need for reconciliation and economic development.  At the age of 39, Henry Grady died of pneumonia in Atlanta.

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On the warm morning of 30 July 1864 an enemy artillery barrage accompanied the massive explosion of a mine under Southern lines, followed by a subsequent assault.  The author below relates that “On the Confederate side men quietly sleeping were hurled into eternity, no moment of waking, reflection, or preparation, while their places were filled by the legions of invading [Northern] soldiery.” The surviving American soldiers repelled the enemy, though with heavy losses.

Bernhard Thuersam, Chairman

North Carolina War Between the States Sesquicentennial Commission

"Unsurpassed Valor, Courage and Devotion to Liberty"

www.ncwbts150.com

"The Official Website of the North Carolina WBTS Sesquicentennial"

Impressed Sable Soldiers at the Crater

“Many an old Confederate, who had drawn a nice bead on a Yankee in more than a score of battles and skirmishes, could then swear to his man, and could swear to a bayonet crimsoned when before it had served only to glitter on dress parade.  The victory was with us, but dearly had we paid for it, for every company left more than half of its numbers among the dead or wounded.

Among the Negroes captured and sent back to the lines on Monday morning to assist in burying the dead was one who could scarcely speak English.  But in a conversation with the writer, in broken English, he told me that he was born in the West Indies, came to New York on a Spanish ship, got leave of absence to go on shore, got drunk, and when he recovered consciousness he was well on his way to Virginia, snugly buttoned up in a blue uniform and cooped up with a number of his race similarly conditioned. 

He lamented his fate in piteous tones, mingling English and Spanish in due proportion, and with the most emphatic language he declared that if he ever got out of this scrape the American Negro could work out his freedom without hope or expectation of further help from him.”

(Sgt. Thomas H. Cross, 16^th Virginia Regiment; Philadelphia Weekly Times 5, No. 29, September 10, 1881; New Annals of the Civil War, Cozzins/Girardi, editors, Stackpole Books, 2004,  pp. 392-393)