It was about then, late and into the collapsing attack, that the Black division was finally fed in, exactly the disaster they had trained to avoid. The USCT fought hard and took the heaviest losses of any Union division on the field, somewhere around 1,300 to 1,380 men, the worst-mauled command of the day. But the casualty count alone does not carry what happened to them. When the line broke, surrendering and wounded Black soldiers were murdered.

At the crater rim, Confederates were heard shouting a command that sorted the captured by race: take the white man prisoner, and kill the Black one. Black men who tried to surrender were shot or bayoneted on the spot, or marched to the rear and executed after capture, while white prisoners standing beside them were taken alive. Surrender was offered to white soldiers and refused to Black ones, for no reason but that they were Black. These were men, many of them formerly enslaved, being killed for trying to surrender to the army that had claimed to own them.

This is not a Northern accusation. It is confirmed by the Confederates who were there. The Confederate artillery general Edward Porter Alexander (South) admitted afterward that some of the Black prisoners were shot by others, and that there was a great deal of unnecessary killing of them. A Confederate private, William Cowan McClellan of the 9th Alabama (South), described captured Black soldiers as the worst-looking set you ever saw, bayoneted and clubbed with musket butts, and wrote that all of them would have been killed but for Mahone, with one man in his own brigade having killed several. And a Confederate colonel, William Pegram (South), wrote home that the killings had a splendid effect on his men. A general admitting it, a private describing it, a colonel approving of it: the murders were not the work of a few rogue soldiers. They were widespread, witnessed, and on the Confederate side, in at least one officer’s telling, celebrated.

Mahone (South) himself appears to have tried to stop it. Multiple accounts have him pleading with his men to spare prisoners, and the private McClellan credited him with saving lives. That does not soften the verdict. The killing was general enough that a general had to beg to slow it, and even then at least one prisoner was reportedly murdered afterward anyway, while Pegram called the whole business a good thing.

The statistics leave a fingerprint of it. Across the war, Union soldiers tended to be wounded roughly five times for every one killed. In Ferrero’s (North) Black division at the Crater, the ratio was closer to two wounded for every one killed: far too many dead relative to wounded, the pattern you would expect when men are killed outright rather than allowed to fall wounded or to surrender. The eyewitnesses prove the massacre. The numbers agree with them.