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No Quarter: The Battle of the Crater, 1864
In this richly researched and dramatic work of military history, eminent historian Richard Slotkin recounts one of the Civil War’s most pivotal the Battle of the Crater on July 30, 1864. At first glance, the Union’s plan seemed 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 Potomac’s embrace of emancipation. At stake was the chance to drive General Robert E. Lee’s Army of North Virginia away from the defense of the Confederate capital of Richmond–and 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 Rebels–and 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 re-creates in human scale an event epic in scope and mind-boggling 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 War–particularly the racial tensions on both sides of the struggle–Richard Slotkin brings to readers a fresh perspective on perhaps the most consequential period in American history.
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 Rebels–and 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 re-creates in human scale an event epic in scope and mind-boggling 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 War–particularly the racial tensions on both sides of the struggle–Richard Slotkin brings to readers a fresh perspective on perhaps the most consequential period in American history.
432 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 2009
8 people are currently reading
199 people want to read
About the author
Richard Slotkin
21 books63 followersRichard Slotkin is an American cultural critic, historian, and novelist. He is Olin Professor of English and American Studies Emeritus at Wesleyan University, where he was instrumental in establishing the American Studies and Film Studies programs. His work explores the mythology of the American frontier and its influence on national identity. His trilogy—Regeneration Through Violence, Fatal Environment, and Gunfighter Nation—is widely regarded as a seminal analysis of the frontier myth in American culture. Slotkin has also written historical novels, including Abe: A Novel of the Young Lincoln and The Crater: A Novel of the Civil War. His contributions to scholarship and literature have earned him numerous accolades, including the Albert J. Beveridge Award and multiple National Book Award nominations.
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Displaying 1 - 26 of 26 reviews
August 26, 2016
This book is hard on the nerves. Its action is the slow dreadful unfolding of an intricate disaster--Ulysses 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 70,000 men and got Grant renamed “The Butcher.” The armies stalemated at the town of Petersburg, Virginia, and suffered the subterranean burrowing, lice-infested filth and nerve-shredding 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 4,500 fresh black troops--northern freedmen and southern fugitive slaves--was 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 war-winning 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 division--chosen 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 harm’s way.
In the predawn hours of July 30, 1864, the mine was fired, a 100 foot 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 just-the-tip 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 Ledlie’s men, who were now being sucked into the sheer-sided 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 sardine-crammed crater. Some white Union troops trapped in the crater then began their own same-side 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 front-line Rebel troops, to be stripped of their uniforms, robbed and casually gunned down by rear-echelon ones.
As in his last book Lost Battalions, Slotkin here situates the story of a military unit and its engagements in the era’s landscape of social and political forces. The 4th Division, United States Colored Troops, was recruited from the masses of a despised minority, and its performance and indeed very existence in the nation’s 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 mid-nineteenth 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:
Lincoln’s 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 wouldn’t 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 other’s 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 shoulder-to-shoulder 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 race--not abstractions, often family members--and were aware that they would be summarily massacred if they ever surrendered, and so would neither give nor expect quarter. The 4th 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.
It begins after Grant has bashed Robert E. Lee back into Virginia during a meatgrinding spring campaign that cost the Union armies 70,000 men and got Grant renamed “The Butcher.” The armies stalemated at the town of Petersburg, Virginia, and suffered the subterranean burrowing, lice-infested filth and nerve-shredding 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 4,500 fresh black troops--northern freedmen and southern fugitive slaves--was 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 war-winning 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 division--chosen 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 harm’s way.
In the predawn hours of July 30, 1864, the mine was fired, a 100 foot 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 just-the-tip 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 Ledlie’s men, who were now being sucked into the sheer-sided 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 sardine-crammed crater. Some white Union troops trapped in the crater then began their own same-side 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 front-line Rebel troops, to be stripped of their uniforms, robbed and casually gunned down by rear-echelon ones.
As in his last book Lost Battalions, Slotkin here situates the story of a military unit and its engagements in the era’s landscape of social and political forces. The 4th Division, United States Colored Troops, was recruited from the masses of a despised minority, and its performance and indeed very existence in the nation’s 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 mid-nineteenth 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 people’s human experience, a necessary consequence of a people’s political existence…the wars of the American nation were widely seen as tests of national spirit and virtue, ordeals that purified and regenerated people and state.
Lincoln’s 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 wouldn’t 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 other’s 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 shoulder-to-shoulder 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 race--not abstractions, often family members--and were aware that they would be summarily massacred if they ever surrendered, and so would neither give nor expect quarter. The 4th 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.
April 18, 2021
Excellent book on one of the ACW's most interesting (To me) battles.
December 17, 2016
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 bloody-minded 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.
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 bloody-minded 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.
January 13, 2014
The Battle of the Crater in 1864 near 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 mid-19th 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 famous 3-volume 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's 1980 novel The Crater, one of the finest novels about the Civil War I know.
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 famous 3-volume 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's 1980 novel The Crater, one of the finest novels about the Civil War I know.
September 23, 2021
A decent blow by blow account of the battle, and well written to boot. However, the analysis at the end is a bit light and the bibliography is fairly short. As such this is a good book for beginners but not a definitive account by any means.
June 14, 2018
This is a gripping tale of a battle few know about from the civil war.
February 28, 2023
You know a book on difficult history does a good job when it makes you mad. While there is no guarantee the original plan for the attack after the mine detonation would have succeeded, it was almost like Union Army leadership did everything to hamstring its possible success. Swapping out the USCT division that had been training for this assault at the last minute and then Burnsides' decision to draw straws to see who would lead the assault. The lack of planning to have ladders or sandbags ready. And just how out of touch Meade and Burnsides were the entire day. The author does not gloss over the massacre of Black POWs, but also points out the challenges Black soldiers faced from both sides during the battle. The battle was a missed opportunity in so many ways. The author does a wonderful job recreating the chaos of the battle inside the crater as best he can and I appreciated the included maps.
March 20, 2025
I really enjoyed reading Richard Slotkin's account. He explained the course of the battle and stepped back to look at the broader issues and its implications to Grant's strategy and reconstruction. I appreciated the depth of his reporting on the role and significance of the USCT.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
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September 17, 2019Yipes! I am glad that I wasn't there. Everybody a loser in this one...
January 5, 2022
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.
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.
December 18, 2022
Although this seems to be a detailed account of an important part of the Petersburg Campaign, I found it hard to still attentive while reading it.
November 6, 2023
Extremely detailed account of the battle of the Crater 1864. Especially interesting is the first use of black soldiers and how it affects the battle
May 10, 2016
This book sets out to clarify some of the many myths surrounding the Battle of the Crater during the Petersburg campaign of the American Civil War. As such, it is tremendously informative and well-researched.
Basically the battle was a failure of leadership on many levels, ranging from low levels all the way up to generals Grant and Meade, who both share in the strategic decisions which helped make the battle plan fail. Some of the most egregious errors fall on the shoulders of General Burnside, though, who could have done much more to help it succeed, but seems to have quietly let things fall apart.
This is a powerful and depressing story, on many levels, as lives were wasted and the worst elements of human nature came to the fore.
Basically the battle was a failure of leadership on many levels, ranging from low levels all the way up to generals Grant and Meade, who both share in the strategic decisions which helped make the battle plan fail. Some of the most egregious errors fall on the shoulders of General Burnside, though, who could have done much more to help it succeed, but seems to have quietly let things fall apart.
This is a powerful and depressing story, on many levels, as lives were wasted and the worst elements of human nature came to the fore.
December 8, 2012
A story of the battle of the Crater a small part of Grant’s siege of Petersburg. It follows the digging of the shaft by former coal miners to blow a hole in the Confederate lines the training of US Colored Troopers to spearhead the attack and the subsequent changing of them to fulfill political ends. It follows the battle which starts as a potential huge Union victory and ends with a Confederate victory and the unwanted killing of troops by bothh sides specifically black troops by Confederates. It covers the mainly inept Generalship on the Union side and covers the subsequent court of inquiry and the Congressional hearings after the war.
May 14, 2013
Mr. Slotkin does a masterful job in detailing the actual fighting at the Battle of the Crater and an even better job placing it in the context of the political and racial climate that existed in the country at that time. Very detailed but worth occasionally slogging through some of the more confusing troop movements.
The author concludes the book with the almost hard to believe fact that of all the monuments erected in and around Petersburg commemorating the fighting at the Crater not a single one is dedicated to any of the black soldiers who fought there.
The author concludes the book with the almost hard to believe fact that of all the monuments erected in and around Petersburg commemorating the fighting at the Crater not a single one is dedicated to any of the black soldiers who fought there.
August 17, 2012
This is a well-researched 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.
January 8, 2016
An awesome story of the history of blacks in the Union Army and a tragedy that set back the status of black soldiers for generations to come. As usual, the politicians and powers that be made one stupid decision after another and it was the men on the ground who paid the ultimate price for it, both black and white. Amazing story and well told. Check it out.
Listened to the unabridged audiobook on Audible.com.
Listened to the unabridged audiobook on Audible.com.
November 5, 2009
I didn't enjoy Mister Slotkin's novel but oh my this non-fiction was good. I love the incorporation of social history into a straight up play by play of the battle. The discussion of racism and classism in this book was stellar. The dismissal of the USCT to the winning of the war remains disgraceful.
July 15, 2011
Excellent examination of one of the less-known incidents of the Civil War, the "battle of the crater" during the siege of Petersburg. Very good both from the military strategy standpoint and in examining the personal and cultural significance of the battle. Highly recommended.
January 11, 2013
Very well told, engaging and illuminating . . . One comes away feeling shame for the atrocities that were committed and for the racism that fostered them. And yet I now feel great respect for the Black troops who fought for honor and country.
June 7, 2013
A great listen. Dion Graham delivered a wonderful performance. The only thing I felt was missing from Richard Slotkin's work is the fallout to Burnside, Meade, Warren and Leadlie, but I suppose that's several other books. Still, one more chapter on the fallout of this battle would have been nice.
April 6, 2015
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.
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.
June 5, 2010
More maps, please.
January 9, 2011
One book to cover one battle of the Civil War. Well-written, so not boring, it covers this battle in incredible detail from every possible angle.
May 29, 2013
A very interesting book on a Civil War battle that is often forgotten.
May 11, 2010
Snooze. Great idea, boring book
Displaying 1 - 26 of 26 reviews