GRANT

[L Verge]

One of the volunteers at Surratt House gave me a recent article from his New York hometown's newspaper. It contains a piece of history that I guess I missed in class. Entitled "This Month in the Civil War," the article chronicles the August 1864 events in Petersburg and Atlanta. One of the things mentioned as a follow-up to The Crater explosion at Petersburg was Grant traveling to Washington to meet with Lincoln, Gen. Halleck, and Phil Sheridan regarding the Union plans to destroy the Shenandoah Valley region of Virginia.

After the meeting, Grant headed back to Virginia to his base camp at City Point. His headquarters tent had been placed in the yard of a mansion that overlooked the wharves and warehouses where the James River and the Appomattox River meet. It was August 9, 1864. City Point was very well-guarded and considered safe from enemy attack; but on August 9, a Confederate secret service operative named John Maxwell had infiltrated the base, bringing with him a horological torpedo that he had rigged out of a candle box packed with twelve pounds of black powder, a percussion cap, and a clockwork mechanism to set it off.

Maxwell waited around the wharf for an opportunity to place his explosive piece on one of the barges. He finally saw the captain of an ammunition vessel go ashore and took the opportunity to set the timer, seal the box, and approach the boat long enough to hand it to a member of the crew with instructions that his captain had requested that the box be put below until he returned.

Around noon, as Grant was seated outside his tent, the huge explosion went off - almost matching the horror of The Crater ten days before. The ammunition barge held 20,000 artillery projectiles. Shells, bullets, pieces of wood, shards of metal, and bloody body parts were flying everywhere, covering over a quarter-mile radius. A nearby barge was loaded with cavalry saddles, and they were also flying around like giant bats. Estimates placed the deaths at more than 200 (the flying saddles alone killing about 43) and over $2 million worth of equipment and supplies destroyed.

Grant telegraphed Gen. Halleck that "every part of the yard used as my headquarters is filled with splinters and fragments of shells." The huge explosion remained a mystery until Maxwell's report was found after the war.