In response to the continuing deterioration on his right, Sheridan began preparing his third defensive line of the morning. Meanwhile, the Confederates would not make it easy for the enemy. Maney’s brigade resumed moving. He managed to get Lieutenant William B. Turner’s Mississippi battery up, and they immediately sent a shower of case shot toward Bush’s retiring artillerists.

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Houghtaling opened fire on Maney’s troops, discharging spherical case shot and shell with telling effect. Maney and his officers became confused, believing the position had been cleared by Manigault, and assumed that Houghtaling’s guns were Confederate. Colonel H.R. Field, commanding the 1st and 27th Tennessee Consolidated Regiment, ordered his men to lie down without firing. Finally, it was ascertained that the battery firing canister into his prone soldiers was indeed Union, and the order was given to return fire. Maney ordered up Turner’s guns again and studied the lay of the field in front of his brigade. ‘The enemy had withdrawn from the ridge I now occupied and posted his infantry in these woods,’ Maney wrote, ‘and established his battery so as to rake the field between us with an oblique fire from my front and right. Evidently his dispositions were made in expectation of my moving directly over this field against him.’

Sheridan had thrown up an impressive defensive works in a hurry, and even though there were three Rebel brigades pressing his front, his first thoughts were for his right flank. If his right could be held, he was confident that — assuming the ammunition trains came up — he could hold against any frontal assault.

While Turner’s Mississippians went into battery on the ridge south of the Wilkinson Pike, Manigault’s brigade came up on Maney’s right, and Vaughan’s 4th Brigade supported his left. Turner’s guns were directed on Houghtaling’s batteries, posted 500 yards east. The Mississippi battery, Turner reported, discharged 200 rounds of case and solid shot from his dual brace of 12-pounders and howitzers.

As the men of his division were establishing their salient along the Wilkinson Pike, Sheridan took it upon himself to launch a reconnaissance of his right. What he found did not please him. There was, in effect, no organized resistance taking place west of his position. The officers of the 1st and 2nd divisions were unable to re-form a line, and Sheridan’s right flank was vulnerable to enfilade fire. He quickly returned to his command and ordered two of his brigade commanders, Greusel and Schaefer, to change front to the west and prepare for an immediate onslaught. ‘This movement was successfully accomplished under a heavy fire of musketry and artillery, every regiment of mine remaining unbroken,’ Sheridan wrote.

Greusel had lost the 36th Illinois (they were required to leave the line due to a lack of ammunition) and the 21st Michigan (which had taken up position south of the pike in support of Hescock’s battery), and now had only the 88th Illinois and 24th Wisconsin. Schaefer’s 2nd Brigade, or at least elements of it, rallied on Greusel’s left, deep in the thickly wooded cedar brakes, among the rocks, caverns and fallen trees north of the pike.

Sheridan’s salient on Wilkinson Pike quickly became the epicenter of Confederate attention. His division was the last organized Federal resistance along the pike, and the army’s commander, Maj. Gen. William Rosecrans, needed time to rally his troops. How long Sheridan held out would determine the outcome of the battle.

No sooner had Sheridan’s command taken up its new line than Brig. Gen. S.A.M. Wood’s Confederate brigade came charging across the field north of the pike. Sheridan’s artillery immediately enfiladed the assaulting columns and drove the charge into the ground. Brigadier General Lucius E. Polk’s 1st Brigade came up on Wood’s right, but was staggered and forced to change front by Houghtaling’s well-placed shot. The Confederate division commander, Maj. Gen. Patrick Cleburne, wrote: ‘Polk moved forward, but was forced by the infilading fire to change front forward on his first battalion, so as to place his line at right angles to the pike and facing eastwardly.’ This took time, and provided something of a respite for the beleaguered Federals hunkered down among the woods and limestone outcroppings along the Wilkinson Pike salient.

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