Brigadier-General Ellison Capers, Confederate Military History, a library of Confederate States Military History: Volume 5, South Carolina
Clement Anselm Evans, Ed.

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[617] attended the village schools, standing always at the head of his classes, until 1861, when he entered the Arsenal academy at Columbia, was advanced to the Citadel the following year and remained there until the summer of 1862, when he, along with forty-four of his fellow cadets, left the institution to join the army. The majority of these formed themselves into a cavalry company, known as the Cadet Rangers, afterward Troop F, in the Sixth regiment of South Carolina cavalry, and distinguished themselves and shed luster upon their State and alma mater upon many a hard-fought field of battle. The subject of this sketch, upon finding that the regiment to which his comrades were attached would be assigned to duty upon the seacoast of South Carolina, joined the First South Carolina regment, which, it was supposed, would soon be ordered to Virginia. This regiment was raised by his distinguished brother, Gen. Johnson Hagood, and was then commanded by Col. Thomas Glover. It afterward formed a part of the brigade of Gen. Micah Jenkins at the Wilderness. His career was thenceforward as brilliant as any in the annals of war. He was in all of the battles in which the army of Northern Virginia was engaged, beginning with Second Manassas and ending at Appomattox. He was rapidly promoted, first to the office of sergeant-major, then adjutant of his regiment, then to the captaincy of one of the companies, and illustrative of the fact that worth levels all grades, upon the death of the gallant Kilpatrick, he was promoted over four senior captains and all of the field officers to the colonelcy of his regiment. All of these promotions occurred within a year of his enlistment as a private, and three of them were conferred as a reward for ‘distinguished skill and valor upon the battlefield.’ His colonel's commission is dated ten days before his nineteenth birthday, making him the youngest officer of that rank in the Confederate army. An article of this nature does not admit of an extended reference to his many acts of daring and devotion to duty, of his skill as an officer and patriotism as a man. Suffice it to say that his unexampled progress in the line of promotion was made while serving with and forming a part of ‘that incomparable infantry which bore upon its bayonets the failing fortunes of the Confederacy for four long and bloody years,’ that in a war of less magnitude would have made his name immortal. After