About fifteen minutes after the explosion General Ledlie's Corps advanced in line. The cheval-de-frise was destroyed for fifty yards. Soon after General Wilcox's Corps came in line and bore to Ledlie's left. Then Potter's Corps followed by flanks and was ordered to the right of Ledlie's troops.
The pall of smoke was so great that we could not see the enemy until they were in a few feet of our works, and a lively fusillade was opened by the Seventeenth Regiment on the north side of the "Crater." I saw Starling Hutto, of Company H, a boy of sixteen, on the top of the breastworks, firing his musket at the enemy a few yards off with the coolness of a veteran. As soon as I reached him I dragged him down by his coat tail and ordered him to shoot from the banquette. On the south of the "Crater" a few men under Major Shield, of the [396] Twenty-second, and Captain R.E. White, with the Twenty-third Regiment, had a hot time in repelling the enemy.
Adjutant Sims and Captain Floyd, of the Eighteenth Regiment, with about thirty men, were cut off in the gorge line. They held the line for a few minutes. Adjutant Sims was killed and Captain Floyd and his men fell back into some of the cross ditches and took their chances with the Seventeenth.
It was half an hour before the Federals filled the "Crater," the gorge line and a small space of the northern part of the works not injured by the explosion. All this time the Federals rarely shot a gun on the north of the "Crater."
Major J.C. Coit, who commanded Wright's Battery and Pegram's battery, had come up to look after the condition of the latter. He concluded that two officers and twenty men were destroyed. Subsequently he discovered that one man had gone to the spring before the explosion, that four men were saved by a casemate and captured.
Colonel Coit says he took twenty-five minutes to come from his quarters and go to Wright's Battery, and thinks it was the first gun shot on the Federal side. Testimony taken in the court of inquiry indicate the time at 5.30 A.M.