Among the many gruesome battles fought during the Civil War, the Battle of the Crater, waged near Petersburg, Virginia, during the summer of 1864, might have best captured the futility of racial separatism. During a stalemate in the fighting, black, white, and Indian Union soldiers tunneled for 500 feet underground into "No Man's Land," a 150-yard stretch of contested ground between Confederate and Union trenches. The men packed the far end with four tons of dynamite and detonated the fuse, opening a crater 170 feet long, 60 wide, and 30 deep. Rather than trapping the Confederates, the crater became a shooting gallery. As journalist Scott L. Malcomson imagines the scene in his exhaustively... More >>>