is a wellresearched book about a fascinating Civil War battle: The Battle of the Crater, Having visited the battle site and learning a little about the Union's battle plans that went terribly wrong, I hungered for more detailed information, Slotkin includes great detail that is doled out in an agonizingly slow pace, This is not a quick read, But if you want to read a very thorough book about a lesser known battle, this could be the one for you, A balanced, vivid military and social history of the tragic Battle of the Crater, While the battle is often presented as a chaotic melee where nobody had any real plan in mind, Slotkin suggests that there were some individuals who were thinking clearly.
Slotkin clearly describes how the war affected slavery and the racial prejudices of both sides,
The battle is also infamous for the Confederate massacre of black troops, Slotkin covers this incident in detail, noting that the green USCT soldiers were heard shouting “Remember Fort Pillow” and that some of them may have had the same bloodyminded intentions.
Slotkin also suggests that the Confederates at the Crater had received orders to give no quarter without any specific knowledge of the USCT presence,
Slotkin does a fine job fleshing out the chaos of the battle, but it does make for confusing reading sometimes, But, a great book overall, Good historical read
This book gives an interesting insight into the history of this battle, It's very educational and eye opening, A must read for history buffs, One book to cover one battle of the Civil War, Wellwritten, so not boring, it covers this battle in incredible detail from every possible angle, The Battle of the Crater innear Petersburg, Virginia began when a mine dug beneath Confederate works was exploded to create a breach in their line, followed by an immediate attack of Union forces into the shattered fortifications.
The attack was mismanaged and failed, One of the most interesting elements of the battle as well as the hinge on which much of Slotkin's history swings is that one of the Federal divisions used in the attack was composed of African American soldiers recruited from former slave areas of Maryland and from freed blacks living in the midwest.
This was the first instance of African American soldiers used against the Army of Northern Virginia, The slave culture of the South and the strong feelings of scorn heaped on the Negro of the midth century helped cause some of the most desperate fighting of the war and put into play many situations in which no quarter was given by either side.
In histories such as this, those which cover a particular event, a narrative is already in place for the historian to use, Slotkin is one of our leading Civil War historians, Not only is his analysis of why the details developed as they did comprehensive and convincing, but he's able to tell the story of the battle and the people involved in such an engaging way that the reader will not want to put the book down.
He's able to make the time and place come alive,
Somewhere in Slotkin's impressive oeuvre is the comment that the most important factor in American history is the country's race relations, meaning both Indian and African American.
His famousvolume history of the American frontier tells of our relation to the Indian, His Civil War histories necessarily include analysis of our deep connection to African Americans,
No Quarter is also a fine companion to Slotkin'snovel The Crater, one of the finest novels about the Civil War I know, Excellent book
A very detailed book on the Battle of the Crater, One thing is missing. It is a good Order of Battle, Normally I would not even buy a book like this without one, but it was solid book, In this richly researched and dramatic work of military history, eminent historian Richard Slotkin recounts one of the Civil Wars most pivotal events: the Battle of the Crater on July,.
At first glance, the Unions plan seemed brilliant: A regiment of miners would burrow beneath a Confederate fort, pack the tunnel with explosives, and blow a hole in the enemy lines.
Then a specially trained division of African American infantry would spearhead a powerful assault to exploit the breach created by the explosion, Thus, in one decisive action, the Union would marshal its mastery of technology and resources, as well as demonstrate the superior morale generated by the Army of the Potomacs embrace of emancipation.
At stake was the chance to drive General Robert E, Lees Army of North Virginia away from the defense of the Confederate capital of Richmondand end the war,
The result was something far different, The attack was hamstrung by incompetent leadership and political infighting in the Union command, The massive explosion ripped open an immense crater, which became a death trap for troops that tried to pass through it, Thousands of soldiers on both sides lost their lives in savage trench warfare that prefigured the brutal combat of World War I, But the fighting here was intensified by racial hatred, with cries on both sides of “No quarter!” In a final horror, the battle ended with the massacre of wounded or surrendering Black troops by the Rebelsand by some of their White comrades in arms.
The great attack ended in bloody failure, and the war would be prolonged for another year,
With gripping and unforgettable depictions of battle and detailed character portraits of soldiers and statesmen, No Quarter compellingly recreates in human scale an event epic in scope and mindboggling in its cost of life.
In using the Battle of the Crater as a lens through which to focus the political and social ramifications of the Civil Warparticularly the racial tensions on both sides of the struggleRichard Slotkin brings to readers a fresh perspective on perhaps the most consequential period in American history.
This is a gripping tale of a battle few know about from the civil war, Excellent book on one of the ACW's most interesting To me battles, More maps, please. This book is hard on the nerves, Its action is the slow dreadful unfolding of an intricate disasterUlysses S, Grant called it “the saddest affair I have witnessed in this war”most of whose details speak of breakdown and betrayal,
It begins after Grant has bashed Robert E, Lee back into Virginia during a meatgrinding spring campaign that cost the Union armies,men and got Grant renamed “The Butcher, ” The armies stalemated at the town of Petersburg, Virginia, and suffered the subterranean burrowing, liceinfested filth and nerveshredding neverending shellfire of trench warfare until a Pennsylvania regiment made up of coal miners suggested they dig a tunnel under the Confederate trenches, pack in black powder and blast a big hole.
The tunnel was dug out while a new division of,fresh black troopsnorthern freedmen and southern fugitive slaveswas trained to storm the breach at the last minute, though, Grant, fearing political fallout in the event of failure, nixed the black troops, and instead elected to make this potentially warwinning assault through a brilliant series of bluffs, Grant had fooled Lee into weakening this sector with decimated and demoralized white troops.
To make matters worse, the commander of the spearhead divisionchosen by drawing lots!was a General Ledlie, who happened to be one of those broken reeds or secret slackers that organizations unwittingly bet the farm on, a general who responded to the stresses of command by getting blackout drunk during battle, but whose headquarters staff always hushed things up in return for his keeping them out of harms way.
In the predawn hours of July,, the mine was fired, afoot column of flame broke through the earth, and a pretty mushroom cloud climbed the brightening sky.
General Ledlie, criminally negligent, changed the orders he had received, told his men that instead of passing through the gap and charging for the high ground, the key to the battle, all they needed to do was occupy the breach that had been blown and sit tight.
This justthetip arrangement created a massive human traffic jam in the route of attack while Ledlie skulked away to an aid station to beg whiskey from a surgeon while the Confederates shook off their shock, poured in fire from untouched batteries and prepared a devastating counterattack.
The other assaulting divisions, including the black one, piled up behind Ledlies men, who were now being sucked into the sheersided blast crater made by the explosion, a slough of despond for thousands of demoralized men desperate for shelter from the incessant shelling, an evil vortex in the depths of which a leaderless rabble twitched and trembled.
The black division and other white units succeeded in pushing through the human quagmire and restarting the assault, but by then it was too late, the Rebels pounced, routed them, bayoneted and clubbed the black wounded, and pushed all the Union forces back into the now sardinecrammed crater.
Some white Union troops trapped in the crater then began their own sameside race riot, hoping to kill their offensive black “comrades” before the Confederates, many hysterically enraged at encountering blacks on the battlefield, could reach the brim and begin blasting down into the crater in a general massacre.
Despite the rioters best efforts, plenty of black troops remained alive to fight to the death in isolated last stands to be executed or tortured while trying to surrender or, taken prisoner by the frontline Rebel troops, to be stripped of their uniforms, robbed and casually gunned down by rearechelon ones.
As in his last book Lost Battalions, Slotkin here situates the story of a military unit and its engagements in the eras landscape of social and political
forces.
Theth Division, United States Colored Troops, was recruited from the masses of a despised minority, and its performance and indeed very existence in the nations armed service cut to the heart of controversies over black eligibility for full American citizenship.
This book made me appreciate just how revolutionary it was for Lincoln to recruit and arm black troops during the Civil War, In midnineteenth century America, when American men drilled in community militias, when the standing army was tiny and relied in wartime on massive levees of volunteers, bearing arms in defense of the community was, with voting of course, the signifier of male citizenship, of manly participation in American nationality:
Young Americans were taught to think of war as a normal and natural part of a peoples human experience, a necessary consequence of a peoples political existencethe wars of the American nation were widely seen as tests of national spirit and virtue, ordeals that purified and regenerated people and state.
Lincolns admission of blacks to one of the sacred domains of citizenship angered many white Northerners, who were disgusted that the White Republic should require the aid of blacks, in their eyes socially degraded civic nonentities.
Lincoln challenged White Supremacy north and south, as a whole, By making black men soldiers, a state that implied the dignity of voters, jurors, property owners, Lincoln extended his political policy of Emancipation through military means “What are Freedmen without citizenship” and initiated a national revolution that wouldnt be fully completed until a century after his assassination.
Civil Wars are of course the most political, contests of differing visions of nationality, but in the American Civil War, Slotkin shows, even the basic infantry tactics, the ways small units fought that marching up in compact groups and blasting lead into each others faces until one side broke and ran, were politicized, imbued with a sense of the civitas to an intense degree.
States, loyal and rebellious, raised most of the regiments for national service, Men enlisted as communities, served alongside family, friends, neighbors and they elected their officers from that same local pool, Civil War battle presents a blatant, barbaric test of the strength of local social bonds to hold a man in place: you advanced shouldertoshoulder into blasts of rifled musketry and kept coming, and closed the gaps ripped in your line by cannon fire, and kept coming on, all to show that you and yours could take it and carry the field, to show that the compacted unanimous manhood of your community had the moral momentum to overcome the massed fire of the communities whose vision of America you were fighting to destroy.
The stakes were even higher for black troops in the Union Army, They fought to establish their rights, to free enslaved members of the racenot abstractions, often family membersand were aware that they would be summarily massacred if they ever surrendered, and so would neither give nor expect quarter.
Theth Division, IX Corps, United States Colored Troops, went into the Battle of the Crater with the black flag hoisted, in a fight to the death, We talk about “race war” as a figment of apocalyptic futurity, but it seems as though America already had one,
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