D. H. Hill, Jr., Confederate Military History, a library of Confederate States Military History: Volume 4, North Carolina
Clement Anselm Evans, Ed.

With the same disparity in numbers, another day of strife, attack and recoil, noise and bloodshed began on the 17th. At dawn, Potter carried a portion of the Confederate line, where the Federals found the exhausted Confederates asleep with their guns in their hands. Willcox's assault was, however, without success. Ledlie's attack was partly successful, but his losses were great and his success short, for he was driven out and many prisoners taken. At midnight, the lines were still in Confederate hands. But General Beauregard, not knowing that Longstreet's corps was near at hand, ordered withdrawal to a new and shorter line that his engineers had constructed. New fires were lighted along the old line, and the withdrawal was effected without Federal knowledge. The men at once fortified the new line, using bayonets, knives and even tin cans as dirt removers. On the 18th, Longstreet's advanced division got in place, and all assaults were repulsed with loss. These repeated assaults cost Grant's army 8,150 men. Grant learned, as McCabe aptly quotes, that Petersburg ‘could not be taken by the collar.’

With the coming of the rest of Lee's army, other North Carolina troops went into the trenches, as follows: Cooke's brigade, MacRae's brigade, Lane's brigade, Scales' brigade, and Williams' and Cummings' batteries. The four brigades in the valley were not recalled until the beginning of winter.

Then followed the dreary, suffering, starving months in the trenches around Petersburg. Soldiers have never been called upon to endure more than the Confederate soldiers were there forced to stand, and to stand with a full knowledge that their distant homes were being ruthlessly desolated, and that the pangs of hunger were pressing cruelly upon their unprotected families. What Captain Elliott says of Martin's North Carolina brigade was, changing only the numbers, true of every brigade that there lived in the ground, walked in the wet ditches, ate