America’s Civil War: Digging to Victory at Vicksburg

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The miners were also worried when the sounds of Confederate countermining stopped. The Federal troops were left to wonder if the enemy chamber had been completed, and if so, if it was filled with powder. Would they disappear in a horrific explosion? On the night of June 24, the Yankee miners were so frightened by such possibilities that they quit work. In the morning, the men were persuaded to return to the mine, and they quickly rushed the completion of the galleries. They deposited 500 pounds of powder each into three different branch mines and 700 pounds in another chamber, for a total of 2,200 pounds of explosive. Fuses were arranged to explode all the charges at the same instant, and the powder chambers were sealed with cross-timbers, sandbags and other materials to concentrate the force of the explosion in the direction of the Rebel works.

By midday on June 25, the miners had completed their work and the Union forces prepared for the attack. Yankee artillery opened an intense barrage on the enemy works, and all along the line, sharpshooters kept Rebel soldiers pinned in place. Just before 4 p.m., the mine was detonated.

The explosion blasted a crater 35 feet wide by 12 feet deep and carried away a section of the 3rd Louisiana Redan, but did not destroy the cannon platforms of the Confederate fort. A soldier in the 3rd Louisiana recalled: Suddenly the earth under our feet gave a convulsive shudder and with a muffled roar a mighty column of earth men poles spades and guns arose many feet in the air. About fifty lives were blotted out in that instant.

The 45th Illinois led the Union surge into the opening in an attempt to finally gain an advantage. As the Yankees filled the gap created by the explosion, timbers were thrown up to provide works for the Union sharpshooters. The Rebels wheeled an artillery piece into place, opened fire at close range, shattered the protective timbers and showered the Union marksmen with deadly splinters that killed and wounded more men than the sharpshooters had shot. The Yankees quickly removed the timbers.

The working party of one regiment charged into the opening, and another regiment deployed as sharpshooters on the east flank. Some of the Yankees scaled the walls of the crater only to discover that the Rebels had constructed a parapet across the back of the redan, which put the Southerners in an excellent position to blunt the Union assault. The steep walls of the crater coupled with the newly constructed parapet gave the Confederates an advantage that they quickly exploited. Brigadier General Mortimer D. Leggett of the XVII Army Corps reported: Hand-grenades were then freely used by the enemy, which made sad havoc amongst my men, for, being in the crater of the exploded mine, the sides of which were covered by the men, scarcely a grenade was thrown without doing damage, and in most instances horribly mangling those they happened to strike. Some brave Rebels were using blankets to catch Union grenades, then heaving the unexploded devices back at their attackers trapped in the crater.

A Union work party began to prepare gun emplacements and to dig rifle pits to protect the section of the line that the Federals had gained. The Confederates rolled 6- and 12-pounder shells into the crater to harass the pioneers as they worked. Even so, by dark, a line of rifle pits had been completed across the center of the crater. During the night, the Yankees clung to their precarious positions amid the continual explosion of Rebel grenades and artillery shells.

The Northerners continued their work the following day, strengthening their entrenchments and constructing two gun emplacements in the crater. In addition, the Yankee pioneers began a covered gallery to protect the opening of a new mine that they hoped to dig under the Confederate lines. The timber over the gallery provided excellent protection against the Rebel hand grenades, but the Southerners adapted well to the situation, preparing a special weapon against the wooden entrance to this new mine. A barrel containing 125 pounds of gunpowder was rolled over the Union parapet and into the Union sap. When the 15-second fuse ignited the powder, the explosion ripped through the works, sending fragments of fascines, gabions and pieces of timber flying through the air. The pioneers, however, resolutely continued to work on the new mine that ran northwest under the 3rd Louisiana Redan.

Continuing their desperate efforts to stop the Federals from tunneling under their lines, the Confederates frantically dug and exploded smaller countermines. But those efforts all failed. On July 1, a second Yankee explosion ripped into the 3rd Louisiana Redan. A Confederate officer described the damage: The charge must have been enormous, as the crater made was at least 20 feet deep, 30 feet across in one direction and 50 in another. The earth upheaved was thrown many yards around, but little of it falling back into the crater. The faces of the redan were almost completely destroyed, and the blast destroyed part of the parapet that the Confederates had built across its open end. Although the Confederate works had been breached, the Union troops, remembering the bloodbath of June 25, made no attempt to assault the Rebels, who immediately set to work to repair the damage.

Notwithstanding the Rebel pluck at resurrecting their blasted lines, the explosions against the 3rd Louisiana Redan, plus similar progress at the Stockade Redan at the northeast corner of the Southern works and at other points along the line, pushed the Confederate works closer to the breaking point. At some places, Yankee regiments were within five yards of the enemy’s line.

Orders soon filtered out to Union commands to widen the main saps so that troops in a column of fours, four men marching abreast, could easily pass through them. Some of the trenches were even widened to an extent that artillery could be pulled through. Planks, sandbags and other materials were gathered to protect the blue-clad soldiers as they passed over the rough ground during an attack on the Confederate works. The relentless Union sappers went to work on a new set of mining galleries. Again, they could hear the countermining by the Confederates, but the Yankees continued preparing to explode mines that would rip holes in the Rebel works at the start of a new general assault on the defenses of Vicksburg.

On July 3, Union sappers had nearly completed their work in the dark tunnels when the word was passed down the line that the Rebels had asked for surrender terms. Later that day, Generals Grant and Pemberton met under a tree a short distance from the devastated 3rd Louisiana Redan. Later, after an exchange of terms, Pemberton agreed to surrender Vicksburg.

The siege had lasted from May 22 to July 4. Some Union officers believed that time was too long. They explained, We might have been as ready for an assault two or three weeks earlier, if there had been a sufficient supply of engineer officers to watch that no time was lost or useless work done; to see that every shovelful of earth thrown brought us nearer to the end, and personally to push and constantly supervise the special works to which they were assigned.

Regardless of the time it took, after Grant realized that assaults were futile, he stuck to his decision to out-camp his foes. Using hundreds of men, he managed to construct an intricate system of earthworks that leveraged Pemberton’s Confederates out of Vicksburg. The crucial Union victory, which allowed the Mississippi River, as President Abraham Lincoln put it, to flow unvexed to the sea, and split the Confederacy in two, was accomplished with picks and shovels as much as by muskets and cannons.

This article was written by Michael Morgan and originally appeared in the July 2003 issue of America’s Civil War.

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Tags: 19th Century, America's Civil War, American Civil War, Historical Conflicts

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