Late in the afternoon of July 1, two Confederate brigades attacked across the treeless flat terrain below Malvern Hill against the powerful Union position on its heights. Union guns in the Crew yard and elsewhere pounded the Confederate lines long before the Southern infantrymen could open fire with their muskets. The Confederates nevertheless reached the base of the hill and clung to the safety of the slope until dusk, when Virginians and North Carolinians rushed up this knob and nearly reached the yard of the Crew House. Only frantic resistance by the 14th New York Infantry and several pieces of Union artillery halted them, and the Confederate effort to destroy McClellan's army failed here as elsewhere.
