The Photographic History of The Civil War: in ten volumes, Thousands of Scenes Photographed 1861-65, with Text by many Special Authorities, Volume 3: The Decisive Battles.
Francis Trevelyan Miller, Ed.

Federal infantry. The center of the Union front had been pierced. Like a wedge the Southern troops thrust themselves through the opening. Two captured batteries began an enfilading fire upon the broken Union lines, and from the right and the left the pitiless fire poured upon their flanks. The shattered regiments were past re-forming for the emergency. The teams from the captured batteries galloped to the rear. The day was nearly lost to the Union army.

Colonel Opdycke of Wagner's division had brought his brigade within the lines and was ready for the emergency. Turning toward his men to give the order to charge, he found they had already fixed their bayonets for the desperate encounter. Behind these men stood the Twelfth and Sixteenth Kentucky regiments in the same attitude. “First Brigade, forward to the works,” came the ringing words of the colonel. His men scarcely needed the order. Following their gallant leader, they saw him ride forward, empty his revolver, then use it as a club in a hand-to-hand fight, and finally dismount and grasp a musket. The men fought like demons, in their desperate endeavor to stem the tide of gray.

Stanley, at his headquarters beyond the river, had seen the impending disaster to the troops. Galloping to the scene of battle, he was about to order Opdycke to the attack. He was too late to give the command but not too late to enter the conflict. Cheering his men, he rode into the death-dealing contest in which he was presently severely wounded. The bayonet and the clubbed musket were freely used. The breach was closed, and the day was all but won by the Federals.

The recaptured guns now poured their charges of death into the shattered ranks in gray. But the courageous Southerners were not to be thus outdone. The cloud of smoke had hardly cleared from the field when they again took up the gage of battle. In sheer desperation and with an appalling recklessness of life, they thrust themselves upon the Union lines again and again, only to recoil, battered and bleeding.