THE CRATER FIGHT.
Burnside held an advanced position, carried in the assaults of the 17th and 18th of June by his own troops and Griffin's division of Warren's corps, and had succeeded in constructing a heavy line of rifle-pits scarcely more than 100 yards distant from what was then known as the Elliott Salient.[1] Immediately in rear of this advanced line the ground dipped suddenly and broadening out into a meadow of considerable extent, afforded an admirable position for massing a large body of troops, while working parties would be effectually screened from the observation of the Confederates holding the crest beyond.[2]
Now, it happened that the Second division of the Ninth corps guarded this portion of the Federal front, and as early as the 24th[3] of June, Lieutenant-Colonel Henry Pleasants, commanding the First brigade of that division, a man of resolute energy and an accomplished mining engineer, proposed to his division commander that he be allowed to run a gallery from this hollow,
AND BLOW UP THE HOSTILE SALIENT.
Submitted to Burnside, the venture was approved, and at 12 o'clock next day, Pleasants began work, selecting for the service his own regiment, the Forty-eighth Pennsylvania, most of whom were miners from the Schuylkill region. But though Burnside approved, the Commanding General of the Army of the Potomac and the military engineers regarded the scheme from the first with ill-concealed derision. Meade and his Chief of Engineers, Duane, declared that it was "all clap trap and nonsense"—that the Confederates were certain to discover the enterprise—that working parties would be smothered for lack of air or crushed by the falling earth—finally, as an unanswerable argument, that a mine of such length had never been excavated in military operations. "I found it impossible to get assistance from anybody," says Pleasants, with an indignation almost pathetic; "I had to do all the work myself." Day after day, night after night, toiling laboriously, he came out of the bowels of the earth only to find himself in the cold shade of official indifference; yet the undaunted spirit of the man refused to yield his undertaking. Mining picks were denied him, but he straightened out his army picks and delved on; he
