SMITH AND CRAWFORD SAVE PETERSBURG.
I ordered Smith to take his regiment, the Twenty-sixth, and Crawford with Companies K, E, and B, to lie down in the ravine. Every General was ordered to charge to the crest. Had the enemy gotten beyond Smith's line fifty yards they could have marched in the covered way to Petersburg; not a cannon or a gun intervened. General Potter says his men charged two hundred yards beyond the "Crater," when they were driven back. Colonel Thomas said he led a charge which was not successful; he went three or four hundred yards and was driven back. General Griffin says he went about two hundred yards and was driven back. Colonel Russell says he went about fifty yards towards Cemetery Hill and "was driven back by two to four hundred infantry, which rose [412] up from a little ravine and charged us." Some officer said he went five hundred yards beyond the "Crater." There was the greatest confusion about distances. General Russell is about right when he said he went about fifty yards behind the "Crater." When they talk of two or three hundred yards they must mean outside the breastworks towards Ransom's Brigade.
From the character of our breastworks, or rather our cross ditches, it was impracticable to charge down the rear of our breastworks. The only chance of reaching Petersburg was through the "Crater" to the rear. Smith and Crawford, whose combined commands did not exceed two hundred and fifty men, forced them back. Had either Potter, Russell, Thomas, or Griffin charged down one hundred yards farther than they did, the great victory would have been won, and Beauregard and Lee would have been deprived of the great honor of being victors of the great battle of the "Crater."
ELLIOTT'S BRIGADE.
After the explosion, with less than one thousand two hundred men, and with the co-operation of Wright's Battery and Davenport's Battery, and a few men of Wise's Brigade, resisted nine thousand of the enemy from five to eight o'clock. Then four thousand five hundred blacks rushed over, and the Forty-ninth and Twenty-fifth North Carolina, Elliott's Brigade, welcomed them to hospitable graves at 9 o'clock A.M.
At about 9.30 A.M. old Virginia—that never tires in good works—with eight hundred heroes rushed into the trench of the Seventeenth and slaughtered hundreds of whites and blacks, with decided preference for the Ethiopians.