Benjamnin F. Butler, Butler's Book: Autobiography and Personal Reminiscences of Major-General Benjamin Butler

[750] was gradually sloped until at the top it was scarcely more than twelve inches thick.

Commodore Smith was very enthusiastic about the canal and kept continually urging me to complete the work. When we were ready we were to blow up this mine and the earth over it would, of course, be thrown up into the air and fall back into our excavation. A goodly portion of it would be in such state as to be at once easily removed with a dredger, and then the canal completed.

We got all ready in the latter part of December to explode our mine. General Grant telegraphed me, that he had made some arrangements

View of Dutch Gap Canal, on James River, below Richmond. Blowing out bulkhead. From a drawing.

to utilize the canal by a movement toward Richmond in co-operation with the navy, and that I had better blow out the head of the canal. Meanwhile I had procured a dredger, and in twenty-four hours, or two nights' work, when the enemy could not annoy us with their shells, the canal could be made navigable. On Christmas day the mine was discharged. A tall mass of hard dirt was elevated into the air and came down in fragments into the canal, low enough to allow the waters of the James River to flow over it about three feet deep before it was dredged.

But in the meantime a very untoward occurrence had happened. Commodore Smith was wanted elsewhere by the Navy Department; and without giving any notice whatever to us or inquiring into his value where he was,--for he was both an intrepid and an enterprising officer,--he was relieved and sent elsewhere, and in his place a naval commander, one Parker, was sent. He had been a witness of the explosion and had examined the canal, and the first thing that I heard from him was by his letter to my commandant of the work, Major B.