A Stillness at Appomattox (104 page)

Early
in
1864
the
regiment
had
gone
back
to
Schuylkill County
to
"veteranize."
The
mine
fields
were
supposed
to be
full
of
strong
Copperhead
sentiment,
with
coal
miners demonstrating
against
the
draft
so
violently
that
troops
had to
be
sent
in
to
keep
order,
but
the
48th
had
no
trouble
getting
recruits
to
fill
its
ranks.
It
mustered
rather
more
than 400
enlisted
men
for
duty
nowadays,
and
about
a
fourth of
these
men
had
been
coal
miners
before
they
enlisted.
³

Coming
from
mining
country
and
having
many
miners, the
48th
knew
a
thing
or
two
about
digging
in
the
earth. One
day
its
commander,
passing
along
the
trench,
came
on a
soldier
who
was
peering
through
the
firing
slit
at
the
Rebel works.
The
man
stepped
down,
turned
to
a
comrade,
and said:
"We
could
blow
that
damned
fort
out
of
existence
if we
could
run
a
mine
shaft
under
it."

The
commanding
officer
was
Lieutenant
Colonel
Henry Pleasants,
and
that
was
talk
he
could
understand
because he
was
a
mining
engineer
himself
and
before
being
a
mining engineer
he
had
done
railroad
construction
work,
and
he had
tunneled
under
obstructions
before
now.
Born
in
the Argentine,
the
son
of
a
Philadelphia
businessman
who
married
a
Spanish
woman
and
spent
many
years
in
South
America,
he
was
thirteen
before
he
was
brought
to
Philadelphia for
a
North
American
education.
Trained
as
a
civil
engineer, he
worked
for
the
Pennsylvania
Railroad
in
the
early
1850s and
he
had
had
a
hand
in
driving
a
4,200-foot
tunnel
through the
Alleghenies.
A
few
years
before
the
war
he
quit
the
railroad
for
coal
mining
and
made
his
home
in
Schuylkill
County. He
was
thirty-one
now—slim,
dapper,
dark,
and
bearded— and
as
he
passed
along
the
trench
he
kept
thinking
about what
the
soldier
had
said.
A
little
later
he
went
down
the ravine
to
a
bombproof
where
the
regimental
officers
lived, and
he
introduced
the
subject
to
them
by
saying
bluntly; "That
God-damned
fort
is
the
only
thing
between
us
and Petersburg,
and
I
have
an
idea
we
can
blow
it
up."
⁴

Not
long
after
this,
Pleasants
passed
the
suggestion
along, more
formally,
to
his
division
commander,
Brigadier
General Robert
Potter,
and
Potter
sent
a
staff
officer
around
to
see what
this
was
all
about.
Pleasants
took
the
man
to
a
place in
the
trench
where
they
could
get
a
good
view
of
the
Rebel fort.
While
they
were
looking
over
the
parapet,
the
staff
man unfortunately
was
hit
in
the
face
by
a
Confederate
bullet, but
after
he
had
been
carried
away
Pleasants
drew
a
rough sketch
of
the
terrain
and
sent
it
to
Potter,
and
a
few
days later
Potter
sent
for
him
and
took
him
back
to
corps
headquarters
to
see
Burnside.

It
was
a
sweltering
hot
night,
and
the
two
officers
found Burnside
sitting
in
his
tent,
coat
off,
bald
head
glistening
in the
candlelight,
a
long
cigar
cocked
up
at
the
side
of
his mouth.
Burnside
put
the
young
colonel
at
his
ease
at
once, and
listened
intently
while
the
plan
was
explained,
mopping beads
of
sweat
off
his
forehead
with
a
big
silk
bandanna while
they
talked.

Modestly
enough,
Pleasants
admitted
getting
his
idea
from a
chance
remark
dropped
by
an
enlisted
man.
He
then
went on
to
explain
how
they
could
begin
a
tunnel
on
a
sheltered spot
on
the
hillside,
forty
or
fifty
yards
behind
their
trench, where
the
Rebels
would
not
be
able
to
see
what
they
were doing.
The
shaft
would
slant
uphill,
which
would
take
care of
the
drainage
problem,
and
although
it
would
probably have
to
be
more
than
500
feet
long,
Pleasants
thought
he could
devise
a
means
of
ventilating
it.

Burnside
liked
the
idea
and
he
said
he
would
take
it
up with
Meade.
Meanwhile,
he
said,
Pleasants
should
go
ahead with
it.
So
the
next
day
Pleasants
organized
his
coal
miners into
details,
led
them
to
a
spot
on
the
protected
side
of
the ravine,
and
put
them
to
work.
Lacking
picks,
they
began
by using
their
bayonets,
and
in
no
time
at
all
they
were
underground.
⁵

Meade
took
very
little
stock
in
the
project,
but
he
felt
that it
was
good
to
keep
the
troops
busy.
Also,
his
engineers
had just
reported
that
"the
new
era
in
field
works
has
so
changed their
character
as
in
fact
to
render
them
almost
as
strong
as permanent
ones,"
and
every
professional
soldier
knew
that the
only
way
to
take
permanent
fortifications
was
through
the long,
ritualized
processes
of
siege
warfare.
⁶
This
involved
an almost
endless
dig-and-fill
routine—an
advance
by
regular
approaches,
in
military
jargon—the
general
object
of
which
was to
inch
one's
own
lines
forward
far
enough
so
that
heavy guns
could
be
mounted
where
they
could
flatten
the
enemy's works
at
short
range.
The
trouble
was
that
the
conditions which
would
make
siege
warfare
successful
simply
did
not exist
here.
Petersburg
was
by
no
means
surrounded,
and
the Federals
did
not
begin
to
have
the
necessary
preponderance of
force.