Southern Historical Society Papers, Volume 8.
Reverend J. William Jones, Ed.

Fortunately the date, the occasion and the effect of the alleged warning against breastworks, are stated with such particularity that unlike many other things asserted and suggested in this book, the matter is susceptible of being reached directly.

The date was the 20th of July, 1864. The occasion was as Cleburne's “division was about to move forward to the attack on the 20th,” and the effect was, as the author was left to infer “from subsequent remarks” of Cleburne, “that his division would have taken quite a different action on the 20th had it not been for the forewarning of his corps commander.”

Cleburne's division was in reserve on the 20th July. On the repulse of the first assault, it was ordered up to replace other troops. The lines were reformed to renew the attack; and after the final order for the assault had been given, but before the troops were actually in motion, that division was withdrawn and dispatched to Atlanta in obedience to the order of General Hood, above referred to. Cleburne's division, therefore, made no assault or attack on that occasion, nor on that day; and it was impossible that its conduct or action could have been affected as alleged, and impossible that Cleburne could have said so.

And whether its action or conduct in battle was or could have been influenced by the alleged warnings, let the record of that matchless division, two days later, on the 22d of July, also answer, where it carried successive lines of entrenchments at the point of the bayonet — where well-nigh half its numbers, including thirty of its general, field and acting field officers, fell in the path of its bloody and victorious advance, and where it was foremost among the troops whose conduct that day won from their adversaries the admission “that in the impetuosity, splendid abandon and reckless disregard of danger with which the Rebel masses rushed on against our lines . . . , there had been no parallel during the war.”

But it so chances that a number of living persons, including myself, were present, and knew, and from the special circumstances are enabled to remember precisely what did transpire between Hardee and Cleburne on the 20th of July, as Cleburne's “division was about to move forward to the attack.” It was briefly as follows: That division was ordered in to replace other troops. It was