Southern Historical Society Papers, Volume 2.
Reverend J. William Jones, Ed.

Pleasants has done his work with terrible completeness,

for now the site of the Elliott Salient is marked by a horrid chasm, one hundred and thirty-five feet in length, ninety-seven feet in breadth, and thirty feet deep, and its brave garrison, all asleep, save the guards, when thus surprised by sudden death, lie buried [284] beneath the jagged blocks of blackened clay — in all, 256 officers and men of the Eighteenth and Twenty-second South Carolina--two officers and twenty men of Pegram's Petersburg Battery.¹

The dread upheaval has rent in twain Elliott's brigade, and the men to the right and left of the huge abyss recoil in terror and dismay. Nor shall we censure them, for so terrible was the explosion that even the assaulting column shrank back aghast, and nearly ten minutes elapsed ere it could be reformed.²