mon to him, and he can act as aggressively as any race
of men who are naturally quicker in temperament. It is this
characteristic that made the negro what General Grant said he was: in
discipline a better soldier than the white man. It was said that he
would not fight: there is no man in the South who met him on the
battle-field that will say so now.

These are a few of the thoughts that came to me as I listened for an
hour, one evening in June, 1883, to the confederate Gen. Mahone, whose
acquaintance the writer enjoys, reciting the story of the fight at the
crater, where the negro met the confederate, and in a hand-to-hand
struggle one showed as much brute courage as the other. It would not be
doing the negro justice to accord him less, and yet that courage never
led him to acts of inhumanity. It is preferable that the confederates
themselves should tell the stories of their butcheries than for me to
attempt them. Not the stories told at the time, but fifteen years
afterward, when men could reflect and write more correctly. There is
one, an orator, who has described the fight, whose reference to the
crater so gladdened the hearts of his audience that they reproduced the
"yell," and yelled themselves hoarse. No battle fought during the war,
not even that of Bull Run, elicited so much comment and glorification
among the confederates as that of the crater. It was the bloodiest fight
on the soil of the Old Dominion, and has been the subject of praise by
poets and orators upon the confederate side. Capt. J. B. Hope eulogized
"Mahone's brigade" in true Southern verse. Capt. McCabe, on the 1st of
November, 1876, in his oration before the "Association of the Army of
Northern Virginia," in narrating the recapture of the works, said:

"It was now 8 o'clock in the morning. The rest of Potter's
(Federal) division moved out slowly, when Ferrero's negro
division, the men, beyond question, inflamed with drink,
(there are many officers and men, myself among the number,
who will testify to this), burst from the advanced lines,
cheering vehemently, passed at a double quick over a crest
under a heavy fire, and rushed with scarcely a check over
the heads of the white troops in the crater, spread to their
right, and captured more than two hundred prisoners and one
stand of colors. At the same time Turner, of the Tenth
corps, pushed forward a brigade over the Ninth Corps'
parapet