Battle of the Crater: Park historian Emmanuel Dabney thinks you should know about these 5 men, three of whom fought with the USCT and two who wore gray

John Elder's painting of the Crater emphasizes the Confederate perspective 

The Battle of the Crater, which occurred 162 years ago today, wasn’t just a significant defeat for Union forces trying to break Confederate siege lines at Petersburg, Va. The debacle is remembered as much for the massacre of scores of U.S. Colored Troops who were surrendering.

Federal soldiers set off a mine on July 30, 1864, under a position held by South Carolinians. Troops rushed into the giant breach but became targets when they massed in an area with little room to maneuver. 

Among them were USCT units who had been encouraged by their white officers to use "Fort Pillow! No Quarter!" as their battle cry. Instead, they received “no quarter” from Rebels.

Petersburg National Battlefield this summer offers daily ranger programming that includes an 11 a.m. tour of the Crater.

I asked Emmanuel Dabney (right), chief of resource management at the park, to name a few soldiers whose actions or memories stand out from fighting at the Crater. He mentioned these five men:

Pvt. Peter Churchwell, 23^rd USCT

Churchwell had the unfortunate distinction of being returned to slavery after his capture at the Crater. He had escaped from Orange County, Va., in 1862. He worked in Washington, D.C., before he enlisted in the 23rd US Colored Troops.

After his capture at the Crater, Churchwell was put to work for several days burying the dead before he was sent to Danville, Va., according to the National Park Service. (At left, USCT soldier in action, Library of Congress)

Churchwell testified later in his life, “I was kept there until Major Reuben Gordon, my old Master, heard I was in prison, and he came there and claimed me as his slave [and] sold me to a Mr. Shedrick Lee, a slave dealer at Richmond, Va., and he sold me to Luke Powell a slave dealer who took me to Wilmington N.C. [and] I was there 8 days working in a shoe shop of Geo. French’s store, [and] then sold to Patrick Murphy who took me on his farm near Raleigh N.C., and worked at making boot [and] shoes for him, [and] he sold them.”

Churchwell escaped in early 1865 and fled to Wilmington, N.C., which had fallen to the Union troops. He lived in Washington, D.C., in his later years, according to the park.

Capt. Robert K. Beecham, 23^rd USCT

Like many other officers, Beecham served in white units early in the Civil War before they were assigned to lead USCT regiments.

Dabney describes the officer’s 1902 memoirs, “As If It Were Glory: Robert Beecham's Civil War from the Iron Brigade to the Black Regiments,” as “amazing.” (Photo, courtesy Wisconsin Historical Society, Unique ID W0139K4) 

Beecham was captured at Gettysburg and then exchanged before joining the 23^rd USCT. He was wounded and captured at the Crater and served eight months in captivity before he escaped and found his way to freedom just before war’s end.

The soldier wrote in this recollections: “The Afro-American came forward cheerfully and volunteered his strength, his brawn, his heart’s blood to save the honor of the flag that to him and his race had been the symbol of every dishonor.”

Pvt. Abraham Tuckson, 23^rd USCT

Abraham Tuckson, who escaped from slavery in Virginia in 1862, was killed at the Crater. His remains were never identified, said Dabney. Hester Tuckson, his widow and mother of their children, was left to remember her departed husband.

In 2011, Eric Mink with the NPS wrote about the couple, who were enslaved in Spotsylvania County.

Abraham, after he fled from enslaver Dr. John R. Taylor, returned to the plantation to retrieve what he felt was rightfully his, including clothing.

“Abraham’s confrontation with Dr. Taylor is an example of a former slave embracing his freedom and sense of independence,” Mink wrote. ”We also learn about a woman whose husband left to fight to maintain his freedom and secure hers, but she remained on the plantation and managed to keep the rest of her family together.”

 

Col. John Cheves Haskell, Confederate artillery battalion

Dabney said the officer commanded an artillery battalion and has a vivid account of stopping at least some of the massacre of surrendered USCTs at the Crater. (Photo: Library of Congress)

Haskell and several other Confederate officers tried to stem the slaughter, but they had little success.

“Our men, who were always made wild by having negroes sent against them … were utterly frenzied with rage. Nothing in the war could have exceeded the horrors that followed. No quarter was given, and for what seemed a long time, fearful butchery was carried on,” Haskell wrote years later in his memoirs.

William A. Day, 49^th North Carolina Infantry

Like Col. Haskell, Day recalled the fury Confederate defenders heaped on the USCT troops, Dabney says. The Black soldiers brought their own anger into the battle, seeking retribution for the massacre at Fort Pillow of African-American troops.

“(Confederates) dashed up to the brink of the ditch, halted a moment as if mapping out their work, fired a rolling volley into the ditch filled with Yankees, the most of them being negroes, at this feet; then turning the butts of their guns, they sprang into the ditch among them,” Day wrote in “Confederate Veteran” magazine.

“The slaughter was terrible. The soldiers were excited, they were reckless; they burst the negroes’ skulls with the butts of their guns like eggshells. The officers tried to prevent it, but they were powerless. It was ‘No quarter for the Rebels’ that morning, and it is no quarter for them now. The fight was soon ended.”