Union troops, incompetently led and ill prepared, failed to take advantage of the breach in the Confederate lines, while the Confederates quickly regrouped and ripped the belated Union advance apart with devastating crossfire. There was more horror to come, and it is in its vivid recounting, and in putting it into a political context, that Slotkin, a professor of American Studies at Wesleyan University, lifts “No Quarter’’ into the first rank of Civil War histories.
One division of black soldiers, the “Colored Division,’’ had initially been chosen as the spearhead of the advance beyond the crater and had been specially trained for that role. But General George Meade, the field commander, vetoed their use. As General Ulysses S. Grant, the overall commander, later recalled, Meade felt that “if we put the colored troops in front . . . and it should prove a failure, it would be said . . . that we were shoving those people ahead to get killed because we did not care anything about them.’’ Grant concurred, for as Slotkin comments, he understood “that Black soldiers were a highly charged political symbol.’’
When the ill-prepared white troops were repulsed, the Colored Division was finally sent in - after three hours of being jammed in the assault trenches as the wounded were carried back past them. Initially, they swept forward, shouting “no quarter’’ in memory of the massacre of black soldiers at Fort Pillow in Tennessee three months before.
