We have mentioned the reaction of Alabama and other Confederate soldiers to their encounter with black men in Federal uniform during the Battle of the Crater, July 30, 1864, just outside Petersburg VA. If memory serves, Phoebe Pember was a nurse in a hospital which received Confederate wounded immediately after the battle. She described the men received into her ward as unusually bitter and angry despite having thrown the Yankees out of their lines. Men described their part in the action with clenched teeth and displayed musket locks smeared with blood and hair from hand-to-hand fighting.

These men seem to have felt that Federal employment of black men as soldiers against them was a dirty, underhanded Yankee ploy. The reaction seems to have been overpowering upon first encounter, as something shocking, unexpected and deeply distressing, almost like the revulsion of finding one's beloved in the arms of a stranger. Mines had been tried before with less success, and the troops involved in retaking the crater were called from parts of the line that weren't affected by the explosion, so the intense reaction almost certainly had to do with having to fight black troops.