Page:Confederate Military History - 1899 - Volume 7.djvu/588

Rh of the abandoned rifle-pits, and at the same time attempted to throw a pontoon bridge over the lake on his right, which was thwarted by a few well-directed shots from Wofford’s battery and Lieutenant Tarleton's section of Ward’s artillery. To meet the effort to pontoon, Lee pushed his line two regiments to the left and called Colonel Layton’s Fourth Mississippi from Snyder’s Mill.

Morgan protested against the proposed assault, but Sherman was determined that it should be made, and it is related that he said that 5,000 men would be lost before Vicksburg could be taken, and they might as well be lost there as anywhere. So Morgan sent forward the brigades of Blair and De Courcy and Thayer. Only one regiment of the latter took part in the assault, leaving nine Federal regiments engaged.

"After 10 a. m.," Lee reported, "a furious cannonade was opened on my position by the enemy, he at the same time arranging his infantry to storm my position. At 11 a.m. his artillery fire ceased and his infantry, 6,000 strong, moved gallantly up under our artillery fire from eight guns, crossing the lake at two dry points, one being in front of the vacated pits and the other about 200 yards from my line. Here our fire was so terrible that they broke, but in a few minutes they rallied again, sending a force to my left flank. This force was soon met by the Twenty-eighth Louisiana and the Forty-second Georgia and handsomely repulsed. Our fire was so severe that the enemy lay down to avoid it. Seeing their confusion the Twenty-sixth and a part of the Seventeenth Louisiana were marched on the battlefield, and under their cover 21 commissioned officers and 311 non-commissioned officers and privates were taken prisoners, and four stand of arms captured. The enemy left in great confusion, leaving their dead and wounded on the field. About eighty of their wounded were treated in our hospitals. Their dead on the field numbered 200. Many of their wounded were allowed to be carried off by their