cano-torn, desolate earth between them.

The Black Legions were massed for a dramatic ending of the war. Grant,
Meade, and Burnside had developed a plan. Hundreds of sappers and miners
burrowed under the shell-torn ground for months, digging a tunnel under
Lee's fortress immediately before Petersburg.

The tunnel was not complete before Lee's ears had caught the sound. A
counter tunnel was hastily begun but Grant's men had reached the spot
under the center of Elliot's salient before the Confederates could
intercept them.

Grant skillfully threw a division of his army on the north side of the
James and made a fierce frontal attack on Richmond while he gathered
the flower of his army, sixty-five thousand men with his Black Legions,
before the tunnel that would open the way into Petersburg.

Lee was not misled by the assault on Richmond. But it was absolutely
necessary to meet it, or the Capital would have fallen. He was
compelled, in the face of the threatened explosion and assault, to
divide his forces and weaken his lines before the tunnel.

His men were on the ground beyond the James to intercept the column
moving toward Richmond. When the assault failed, Hancock and Sheridan
immediately recrossed the river to take part in the capture of
Petersburg and witness the end of the Confederacy.

The tons of powder were stored under the fort and the fuse set. The
Black battalions stood ready to lead the attack and enter Petersburg
first.

At the final council of war, the plan was changed. A division of New
Englanders, the sons of Puritan fathers and mothers, were set to this
grim task and the negroes were ordered to follow.

High words had been used at the Council. The whole problem of race and
racial values was put to the test of the science of anthropology and of
mathematics. The fuse would be set before daylight. The charge must be
made in darkness with hundreds of great guns flaming, shrieking, shaking
the earth. The negro could not be trusted to lead in this work. He had
followed white officers in the daylight and under their inspiration had
fought bravely. But he was afraid of the dark. It was useless to mince
matters. The council faced the issue. He could not stand the terrors of
the night in such a charge.

The decision was an ominous one for the future of America--ominous
because merciless in its scientific logic. The same power which had
given the white man his mastery of science and progress in the centuri