which were not more than 1,200 yards from the line day had built and abandoned the night previous. I received orders from General McPherson to send out working parties and construct works on this line of the enemy's rifle-pits, and to occupy them as soon as completed, and as soon as General Dodge, with the Sixteenth Army Corps, who was ordered to take position on my left, could throw up works to cover his men on that line. After these orders were given, I returned to my quarters in company with General McPherson, and met General Dodge and the advance of his command marching to take up position on my left. The head of General Dodge's column was then on the Clay road,a mile and a quarter in rear of my line, and at a point where the road turns at right angles, due west, to reach my position. The column turned at this point and proceeded a short distance and halted to await the return of General Dodge, who had gone to the front to select a position for his command immediately idea of the positions held at this time by the Fifteenth, Seventeenth, and part of the Sixteenth Corps, facing to the west toward Atlanta, and part of the Sixteenth Corps halted on the Clay road running south, and the road at right angles with it, pointing toward the position held by the Seventeenth Corps. The diagram also shows the position held by the three corps at the close of the day, when the Fifteenth and Sixteenth held substantially their original positions, and the left of the Seventeenth Corps was bent back toward the east from the high bald hill captured by General Leggett on the day previous, and stretched toward General Dodge's line in the effort to hill the gap between the left of the Seventeenth Corps and the right of the Sixteenth Corps. A small brigade of the Fifteenth Corps, commanded by Colonel Wangelin, of the Twelfth Missouri Volunteer Infantry, is also represented on the left of the Seventeenth Corps, but even this addition did not suffice to fill the interval between these corps, which, in the morning at the time of the attack, was upward of a mile in extent. When I reached my headquarters, coming from the front with General McPherson, I received information that an attack had been made on my hospitals in rear by a small party of the enemy's cavalry, and that Colonel Alexander, my assistant adjutant-general, had taken a small company of infantry and gone to their assistance. I sent to General Leggett for a regiment of infantry to protect the hospital and move them nearer to the front. In half an hour or less there was sharp skirmishing in the rear and in front of General Dodge's line, and it became evident that the attack was something more than a cavalry raid on our flank and rear. With this impression I started to go back to my command, and witnessed the first furious assault made on the Sixteenth Army Corps, and its prompt and gallant repulse by that command.

It was a most fortunate circumstances for the whole army that the Sixteenth Corps occupied the position I have attempted to describe at the moment of the attack, and although it does not belong to me to report upon the bearing and conduct of the officers and men of that corps, still I cannot withhold my expressions of admiration for the manner in which this command met and repulsed the repeated and persistent attacks of the enemy. The attack upon our flank and rear was made by the whole of Hardee's corps, the divisions

---------------

*To appear in the Atlas.

---------------

35 R R-VOL XXXVIII, PT III