Freedom by the Sword - US Army Center Of Military History

Virginia, May–October 1864 365
The crater, not long after Union troops entered Petersburg in April 1865
consult their watches frequently, but Captain Gregg noted that it was 2:00 p.m.
when he left the crater to rejoin the hundred men of his regiment who had been
left behind some nine hours earlier to provide covering fire for the advance.
Not long after that, Confederates swept into the crater, killing or capturing all
the Union soldiers who remained. 60
Casualties, as always, were hard to determine exactly. Ferrero’s division
suffered some thirteen hundred, about 38 percent of the thirty-five hundred casualties
in the IX Corps that day. Almost one-third of the black casualties were
dead, some of them under conditions similar to the killing of wounded and
surrendered men at Fort Pillow nearly four months earlier. The difference this
time was that three Confederate soldiers from different regiments, in private
letters written days after the battle, mentioned the men of Ferrero’s division
shouting “No quarter!” and “Remember Fort Pillow!” The war was becoming
as bloodthirsty as Lieutenant Verplanck had feared that spring. Still, Confederate
deserters two days after the battle told Union officers that they had seen two
hundred or two hundred fifty black prisoners of war at work for the Confederates,
cleaning up the battlefield and unearthing for proper burial corpses that
had been buried by the explosion of the mine. In October, Confederate authori-
60 Ibid., p. 556, and pt. 3, pp. 661–64 (quotation, p. 663).