Report of the Committee on the Conduct of the War on the Attack on Petersburg, on the 30th Day of July, 1864

Washington DC: Government Printing Office. Fair. 1865. First Edition. Hardcover. (no dust jacket, as issued) [heavily worn, including exposure of boards at all corners, but binding is intact; foxing/discoloration to endpapers and early pages; ex-private library, with label of W.H. Edwards, Downers Grove, Illinois on front pastedown]. The official Congressional report on one of the major debacles of the Civil War, known historically as the Battle of the Crater. An early engagement in the Union Army's siege of Petersburg, Virginia, this event involved the detonation of 8,000 pounds of gunpowder packed into a mine shaft that had been dug by Union troops underneath a Confederate fortification. The idea was to blow a big hole in the enemy's defensive line, through which the troops were to then charge, overwhelming the enemy; however, things went badly almost from the get-go (when the 500+-foot fuse fizzled out, and some poor schmuck was ordered to crawl into the tunnel and re-light it). The explosion was eventually achieved, and a gigantic crater was created (and nearly 300 Confederate soldiers instantly killed), but almost everything thereafter went wrong, and in the end both sides suffered massive casualties (about 850 men killed and a couple of thousand wounded) and the unsuccessful assault, instead of bringing a quick end to the siege as its planners had hoped, was merely the precursor to another eight months of brutal trench warfare. General Ulyssses S. Grant called the battle "the saddest affair I have witnessed in this war," and part of the aftermath was the Congressional investigation which resulted in this very report, which includes personal testimony and statements from many of those involved as well as numerous supporting documents. The two generals most directly responsible -- Gen. Ambrose Burnside and Gen. George Meade -- both testified at length, and others interrogated by the Commitee included Lt. Col. Henry Pleasants (the engineer who came up with the exploding-mine scheme in the first place), Brig. Gen. Edward Ferrero (commander of a division of African-American troops which suffered heavy casualties in the battle), and U.S. Grant himself. This copy bears a five-line inscription on the second front endpaper (see scanned image accompanying this listing), but all I can make anything out of is the third line: "with the compliments of." (I doubt that the signature is authorial -- since there was no author, per se, for this Congressional report -- but it's possible there may be some historical or associational significance to the inscription and/or signature, a puzzlement which I will leave to the eventual purchaser to work out. The book's one-time owner, W.H. Edwards, was a businessman and bank president in Downers Grove, Ill. (the latter position assumed in 1898), but the inscribee's name does not resemble "Edwards" at all, so I assume he was not the book's first owner.) .