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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[630] capacity until the beginning of the war. During his connection with this institution in the ante-bellum days he was intimately associated with Gen. Stonewall Jackson, both as a student of his and as a co-professor. A warm friendship sprang up between the two which continued until the death of that gallant chieftain in 1863. In the beginning of the war Mr. Hardin was offered a position on General Jackson's staff; but this he declined, preferring the line. Accordingly he joined the Thirty-third Virginia regiment as acting major and fought with it in Jackson's brigade in the first battle of Manassas. In October, 1861, he was appointed major of artillery in the active volunteer forces of Virginia and assigned to duty at Craney island by order of the secretary of war. He remained there until the evacuation of Norfolk on May 10, 1862, being a witness of all the stirring scenes enacted in that vicinity, including the destruction of the Cumberland and Congress and the fight between the Merrimac and Monitor. In June, 1862, he was appointed major of artillery in the provisional army of the Confederate States and assigned to duty as commander of the Eighteenth Virginia battalion of heavy artillery in the defenses of Richmond. He continued in this capacity, being in charge of a considerable portion of the line, until the evacuation of Richmond, and while in this service, in the fall of 1864, he was sent to Fort Harrison, to take command of troops at Chaffin's farm, in the place of Maj. Dick Taylor, who had been captured. While here he was wounded in the left arm. He had received one wound prior to this in the Kilpatrick raid. When the evacuation of Richmond became a certainty, his battalion was placed in Crutchfield's brigade, Custis Lee's division, for the retreat, and in an effort to reach Gen. Robert E. Lee's army they were overtaken by the enemy at Sailor's creek, where a desperate battle ensued, in which General Crutchfield was killed and his entire brigade captured. Major Hardin was taken as a prisoner to Old Capitol prison, Washington. On the evening of his arrival there President Lincoln was assassinated, and this created such intense feeling that, for safety, he, together with the other Confederate officers, was taken to Johnson's island, Lake Erie, where he was held a prisoner of war until July 3, 1865, when he was released. For two years after the war he was an analytical chemist in New York