Page:Confederate Military History - 1899 - Volume 7.djvu/668

Rh as the eye could follow, still ahead of his men, leading them on. The result you know. You remember the picket fence in front of the brigade? I was anxious to see how they would get over it and around it. When they reached it the fence disappeared as if by magic, and the slaughter of the red-breeched zouaves on the other side was terrible."

A Federal account of the action says that twenty-five guns were concentrated on the Confederates to hold them in check while the abandoned guns could be brought off. "When, after accomplishing its purpose, all that was left of Bigelow's battery was withdrawn, it was closely pressed by Colonel Humphreys' Twenty-first Mississippi, the only Confederate regiment which succeeded in crossing the run. His men had entered the battery and fought hand to hand with the cannoneers; one was killed while trying to spike a gun, and another knocked down with a hand-spike while endeavoring to drag off a prisoner." The loss of Barksdale's brigade was 105 killed, 550 wounded and 92 missing, the greatest casualties, except in missing, of any brigade of Longstreet's corps.

Col. Joseph R. Davis, of the Tenth Mississippi, aide-de-camp on the staff of the President, had been promoted to brigadier-general in September, 1862, and assigned to the command of a Mississippi brigade, composed of the Second, Eleventh and Forty-second infantry, and this command, after serving on the Richmond and Blackwater lines, was ordered to Goldsboro, North Carolina, in December. It served under Longstreet in the Suffolk campaign, and in May was transferred to Heth’s division of A. P. Hill's corps, and went to the front in Northern Virginia early in June. The Second was now commanded by Col. John M. Stone; Eleventh by Col. F. M. Green; Forty-second by Col. H. R. Miller. The Fifty-fifth North Carolina made the fourth regiment of the brigade. On the 1st of July, 1863, after Pettigrew's brigade of the same division had discovered the enemy at