Brigadier-General Ellison Capers, Confederate Military History, a library of Confederate States Military History: Volume 5, South Carolina
Clement Anselm Evans, Ed.

[324] line, a detail which left only 550 men of these regiments in the second line. The attack was made, and the enemy driven from his rifle-pits and part of the first line of intrenchments, but the South Carolinians were too few to go further, and their expected support did not arrive in time. So the battle failed, but Hagood held the Federal rifle-pits all day. The loss in the three regiments and Seventh battalion was very heavy, 25 killed, 73 wounded and 208 whose fate was at the time unknown. Lieutenant-Colonel Nelson was missing; Captain Axson, Twenty-seventh, was killed; and Lieutenants Huguenin and Trim, Twenty-seventh, Chappell, Ford and Vanderford, Twenty-first, and Smith, Eleventh, wounded; Captains Mulvaney and Buist (wounded) were captured; Captain Raysor and Lieutenants Reilly, White and Clemens, missing.

On the 29th of July, Bushrod Johnson's division was arranged in the works with Ransom's North Carolinians on the left, Elliott's South Carolinians next, then Wise's Virginians, and Colquitt's Georgians on the right. A projecting part of the works known as Pegram's salient was occupied by Pegram's battery, with the Eighteenth South Carolina on its left and the Twenty-second behind it and to the right. To the left of the Eighteenth were the Twenty-sixth and Seventeenth, and to the right of the Twenty-second was the Twenty-third, all along the parapet. A second line of intrenchments, behind, Elliott did not have men enough to occupy. Upon these devoted South Carolinians in the parapets was to fall a tremendous blow, which was expected to open a way for Grant's army into Petersburg.

About 4:55 on the morning of July 30th, after a moment's appalling rumbling and trembling, the earth burst like a volcano beneath them, and great masses were cast in the air. Mingled in this horrible eruption which followed the explosion of the Federal mine, were the bodies of men, who fell nearly all of them lifeless, while stores