A Stillness at Appomattox (106 page)

When
the
shaft
had
gone
a
couple
of
hundred
feet
into the
hillside,
Pleasants
felt
that
it
was
time
to
make
some
exact
calculations
about
the
spot
where
the
powder
magazine ought
to
go.
(Obviously
he
would
accomplish
nothing
if
he dug
past
the
Rebel
fort
or
stopped
short
of
it.)
So
he
applied to
the
engineers
for
the
instruments
with
which
he
could make
the
necessary
triangulations.
The
engineers
laughed this
off,
and
a
plea
to
Meade's
headquarters
was
lost
in
the shuffle
somewhere,
and
at
last
Burnside—who
seems
to
have been
the
only
important
officer
in
the
army
who
was
disposed
to
be
helpful—wired
to
a
friend
in
Washington
and had
him
send
down
a
theodolite.

Pleasants
had
to
take
this
into
the
front
line
to
make
his observations,
and
of
course
Rebel
snipers
were
apt
to
shoot him
while
he
was
doing
it.
He
got
around
this
by
having half
a
dozen
soldiers
put
their
caps
on
ramrods
and
raise them
just
above
the
parapet.
While
the
sharpshooters
peppered
away
at
these,
hitting
them
quite
regularly
and
no doubt
imagining
that
they
were
hitting
human
heads
inside of
them,
Pleasants
draped
some
burlap
over
his
head
and his
instrument,
got
unobserved
over
the
parapet
level
a
few yards
away,
and
made
his
observations.
⁹

Farther
and
farther
into
the
hillside
went
the
tunnel.
As the
engineers
had
prophesied,
ventilation
was
a
problem,
but
Pleasants
solved
it.
Close
beside
the
tunnel,
at
a
point
just behind
the
main
Federal
trench,
he
dug
a
vertical
shaft whose
lower
end
opened
into
a
little
recess
in
the
tunnel
wall and
whose
upper
end
discharged
unobtrusively
into
a
clump of
bushes.
Then
he
built
a
square
tube
of
boards,
reaching from
the
mouth
of
the
tunnel
all
the
way
to
its
inner
end, and
he
prepared
a
door
by
which
the
outer
end
of
the
tunnel
could
be
sealed
shut,
leaving
the
open
end
of
the
wooden tube
protruding
out
into
the
air.
The
rest
was
simple:
close the
door
and
build
a
fire
in
the
little
recess
at
the
bottom
of the
vertical
shaft.
The
smoke
and
heated
air
went
up
this chimney,
the
resultant
draft
pulled
the
bad
air
out
of
the tunnel,
and
fresh
air
from
the
outside
was
drawn
in
through the
wooden
tube.

On
July
17,
three
weeks
after
the
job
had
been
begun,
the inner
end
of
the
tunnel
was
squarely
beneath
the
Confederate
redoubt,
twenty-odd
feet
underground
and
510
feet
from the
entrance,
and
the
miners
could
hear
Confederate
soldiers tramping
about
overhead.
Pleasants
then
had
his
men
dig
a 75-foot
shaft
running
across
the
end
of
the
tunnel;
a
diagram of
his
work
now
would
look
like
a
capital
T
with
a
very
long shank,
with
the
crossbar
of
the
T
running
along
directly
beneath
the
Confederate
works.
¹⁰

Pleasants
then
reported
that
the
mine
was
ready
for
its charge
of
powder—at
which
point
further
operations
were temporarily
suspended
because
the
Rebels
had
discovered that
the
Yankees
were
digging
a
mine
and
were
sinking shafts
of
their
own
trying
to
find
it.

Confederate
luck
right
here
was
bad.
Their
engineers
misjudged
the
direction
the
tunnel
was
taking,
and
their
countermining
shafts
failed
to
intersect
it.
When
Pleasants
had
his men
stop
working,
the
Rebels
in
underground
listening
posts could
hear
nothing,
and
in
the
end
all
of
their
protective measures
failed.
Meanwhile,
the
Southern
privates
who
were going
about
their
business
directly
above
the
dark
sinister gallery
began
to
treat
the
whole
affair
as
another
camp
rumor,
and
now
and
then
they
would
call
across
and
ask
the Yankees
when
the
big
show
was
going
to
begin.
¹¹

After
a
pause,
with
the
digging
and
timbering
all
finished, Pleasants
went
to
work
to
lay
the
powder
charges.
Burnside wanted
to
use
eight
tons
of
powder,
but
the
army
engineers had
one
good
suggestion
here—the
use
of
explosives
in
quantity
was
a
subject
they
really
knew
something
about—and they
pointed
out
that
a
smaller
charge
would
actually
be more
effective.
In
the
end,
Burnside
settled
for
four
tons, and
Pleasants
had
his
men
build
eight
open-topped
wooden boxes
in
the
lateral
gallery
for
magazines.
The
powder
was delivered
behind
the
lines
in
320
kegs,
each
containing
25 pounds,
and
there
was
day-and-night
work
carrying
these into
the
mine
and
pouring
the
charges
into
the
magazines.