Page:Southern Historical Society Papers volume 13.djvu/405

 404 Southern Historical Society Papers.

Colonel Suggs, commanding, as having been taken from the field by a detail under Adjutant Fletcher Beaumont, of the Fiftieth Ten- nessee regiment, who caused the Yankee drivers to drive some of the teams to the rear. Four of these pieces three-inch rifles be- longed to the First Missouri Federal battery, and are now in posses- sion of the First Missouri Confederate battery (Bledsoe s), attached to Gregg's brigade. A statement made by Adjutant Beaumont in regard to the capture is herewith enclosed.

In this advance, Brigadier-General E. McNair commanding the right brigade, and Colonel Harper, of the First Arkansas regiment, of that brigade, were wounded, the latter mortally, and the command of McNair' s brigade devolved upon Colonel Coleman, of the Thirty- ninth North Carolina regiment. Colonel Coleman reports that Mc- Nair's brigade charged and carried the eminence in the corner of the field to our right, capturing the ten guns, eight of which were immediately carried off, and two were subsequently removed, and that the brigade fell back for want of ammunition and support, and formed on the left of Robertson's brigade, of Hood's division. Whether Colonel Coleman' s report has any reference, in this con- nection, to the nine guns reported as captured by Gregg's brigade, or whether there is any point of dispute between these two brigades as to captured artillery, I cannot now determine. McNair' s brigade has been detached from this army, and I am unable to communicate with it in time to make my report explicit on this point.

In the meantime, I discovered what I conceived to be an important position directly in our front, an elevated ridge of open ground, run- ning nearly north and south, beyond the narrow strip of woods on the western borders of the open fields in our front and about six hundred yards west of the elevation on which the nine pieces of artil- lery had been captured, and I hastened to press forward Gregg's brigade, which had halted for a moment on the flank of the guns that were being removed, while Johnson's brigade approached the same position from the left. From the crest of this ridge the ground descends abruptly into a cornfield and cove, lying south of Villetoe's house; west of the cove is a range of the Missionary Ridge, while north of it a spur of that ridge spreads out to the east. Through a gap at the angle between this spur on the north and the ridge on the west of the cove, and about one thousand yards from the ridge on the east, where my division was now taking position, passes the Crawfish road, which continues south along the base of the ridge on the western side of the cove. Along this road a line of telegraph