Glory Enough for All: The Battle of the Crater: A Novel of the Civil War

St. Martin’s Press, 1993

 

July 1864. The Army of the Potomac and the Army of Northern Virginia—U. S. Grant and Robert E. Lee—are locked in deadly trench warfare that neither side can break. Cemetery Hill is the key to the 5-mile line of Confederate defenses. If Grant can take the Hill, his troops can walk into Petersburg, sever the railroad line to Richmond, and split Lee’s army in two, bringing the Civil War to an end.

Glory Enough for All tells the story of one of the most tragic events of the Civil War: the Battle of the Crater, recounting the efforts of Colonel Henry Pleasants and his regiment, the 48th Pennsylvania Volunteers, as they devise an ingenious plan to end the stalemate: dig a tunnel through 500 feet of Virginia Clay beneath Cemetery Hill and blow up the hill, a job military experts say cannot be done. In a blend of fact and fiction, the book relates their against-all-odds struggle as the unit fights cave-ins, floods, suffocation, and a bungling army bureaucracy.

The Union generals—Burnside, Meade, and Grant—foolishly allow the opportunity to end the war slip away. Concerned for their place in history, they let rivalries, jealousies, and racism lead to the war’s greatest tragedy, the massacre of the Fourth Division U.S. Colored Troops.

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