Part 87 (2/2)

And now in the supreme hour of gathering darkness came the last act of the tragedy--the arming of the Northern blacks and the training of their hands to slay a superior race.

In the first year of the war Lincoln had firmly refused the prayer of Thomas Wentworth Higginson that he be allowed to arm and drill the Black Legions of the North. Later the pressure could not be resisted. The daily murder of the flower of the race had lowered its morale. It had lowered the value set on racial trait and character. The Cavalier and Puritan, with a thousand years of inspiring history throbbing in their veins, had become mere cannon fodder. The cry for men and still more men was endless. And this cry must be heard, or the war would end.

Men of the white breed were clasping hands at last across the lines under the friendly cover of the night. They spoke softly through their tears of home and loved ones. The tumult and the shout had pa.s.sed. The jeer and taunt, blind pa.s.sion and sordid hate lay buried in the long, deep graves of a hundred fields of blood.

Grant's new plan of campaign resulted in the deadlock of Petersburg.

The two armies now lay behind thirty-five miles of deep trenches with a stretch of volcano-torn, desolate earth between them.

The Black Legions were ma.s.sed for a dramatic ending of the war. Grant, Meade, and Burnside had developed a plan. Hundreds of sappers and miners burrowed under the sh.e.l.l-torn ground for months, digging a tunnel under Lee's fortress immediately before Petersburg.

The tunnel was not complete before Lee's ears had caught the sound. A counter tunnel was hastily begun but Grant's men had reached the spot under the center of Elliot's salient before the Confederates could intercept them.

Grant skillfully threw a division of his army on the north side of the James and made a fierce frontal attack on Richmond while he gathered the flower of his army, sixty-five thousand men with his Black Legions, before the tunnel that would open the way into Petersburg.

Lee was not misled by the a.s.sault on Richmond. But it was absolutely necessary to meet it, or the Capital would have fallen. He was compelled, in the face of the threatened explosion and a.s.sault, to divide his forces and weaken his lines before the tunnel.

His men were on the ground beyond the James to intercept the column moving toward Richmond. When the a.s.sault failed, Hanc.o.c.k and Sheridan immediately recrossed the river to take part in the capture of Petersburg and witness the end of the Confederacy.

The tons of powder were stored under the fort and the fuse set. The Black battalions stood ready to lead the attack and enter Petersburg first.

At the final council of war, the plan was changed. A division of New Englanders, the sons of Puritan fathers and mothers, were set to this grim task and the negroes were ordered to follow.

High words had been used at the Council. The whole problem of race and racial values was put to the test of the science of anthropology and of mathematics. The fuse would be set before daylight. The charge must be made in darkness with hundreds of great guns flaming, shrieking, shaking the earth. The negro could not be trusted to lead in this work. He had followed white officers in the daylight and under their inspiration had fought bravely. But he was afraid of the dark. It was useless to mince matters. The council faced the issue. He could not stand the terrors of the night in such a charge.

The decision was an ominous one for the future of America--ominous because merciless in its scientific logic. The same power which had given the white man his mastery of science and progress in the centuries of human history gave him the mastery of his brain and nerves in the dark. For a thousand years superst.i.tion had been trained out of his brain fiber. He could hold a firing line day or night. The darkness was his friend, not his enemy.

The New Englanders were pushed forward for the attack. The grim preparations were hurried. The pioneers were marshaled with axes and entrenching tools. A train pulled in from City Point with crowds of extra surgeons, their amputating tables and bandages ready. The wagons were loaded with picks and shovels to bury the dead quickly in the scorching heat of July.

The men waited in impatience for the explosion. It had been set for two o'clock. For two hours they stood listening. Their hearts were beating high at first. The delay took the soul out of them. They were angry, weary, cursing, complaining.

The fuse had gone out. Another had to be trained and set. As the Maine regiments gripped their muskets waiting for the explosion of the mine, a negro preacher in the second line behind them was haranguing the Black Battalions. His drooning, voodoo voice rang through the woods in weird echoes:

”Oh, my men! Dis here's gwine ter be er great fight. De greatest fight in all de war. We gwine ter take ole Petersburg dis day. De day er Juberlee is come. Yes, Lawd! An' den we take Richmon', 'stroy Lee's army an' en' dis war. Yas, Lawd, an' 'member dat Gen'l Grant an' Gen'l Burnside, an' Gen'l Meade's is all right here a-watch-in' ye! An' member dat I'se er watchin' ye. I'se er sargint in dis here comp'ny. Any you tries ter be a skulker, you'se gwine ter git a beyonet run clean froo ye--yas, Lawd! You hear me!”

He had scarcely finished his harangue when a smothering peal of thunder shook the world. The ground rocked beneath the feet of the men. Some were thrown backwards. Some staggered and caught a comrade's shoulder.

A pillar of blinding flame shot to the stars. A cloud of smoke rolled upward and spread its pall over the trembling earth. A shower of human flesh and bones spattered the smoking ground.

The men in front s.h.i.+vered as they brushed the pieces of red meat from their hands and clothes.

The artillery opened. Hundreds of guns were pouring sh.e.l.ls from their flaming mouths. The people of Petersburg leaped from their beds and pressed into the streets stunned by the appalling shock and the storm of artillery which followed.

The ground in front of the tunnel had been cleared of the abatis.

Burnside's New England veterans rushed the crater. A huge hole had been torn in Lee's fortifications one hundred yards long and sixty feet wide and twenty-five feet in depth.

The hole proved a grave. The charging troops floundered in its spongy, blood-soaked sides. They stumbled and fell into its pit. The regiments in the rear, rus.h.i.+ng through the smoke and stumbling over the mangled pieces of flesh of Elliott's three hundred men who had been torn to pieces, were on top of the line in front before they could clear the crumbling walls.

When the charging hosts at last reached the firm ground inside the Confederate lines, the men in gray were rallying. Their guns had been trained on the yawning chasm now a struggling, squirming, cursing ma.s.s of blue. Slowly order came out of chaos and Burnside's men swung to the right and to the left and swept Lee's trenches for three hundred yards in each direction. The charging regiments poured into them and found the second Confederate line. Elliott's men who yet lived, driven from their outer line by the resistless rush of the attack, retreated to a deep ravine, rallied and held this third line.

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