Despite the dominant role of Union artillery, Confederate infantry inflicted significant casualties on the Federals.
Colonel Henry J. Hunt's well-placed Confederate artillery dealt a devastating blow to the Confederate infantry, but Lee's troops continued to advance, even gaining effective range to fire their guns. Their muskets and smoothbore pose a danger to Union gunners. As a result, nearby Yankee infantry — such as Charles Griffin's 5th Army brigade or the Irish Brigade — charged forward to dislodge the insurgents and protect their artillerymen from artillery fire. This was especially true at the Stonewall Jackson front, where the terrain allowed Confederates to move out of sight of Confederate artillery. General Darius Couch's blue-shirted infantry division — consisting of a brigade of New Yorkers under General Daniel Sickles — descended the slope to check the advance. Confederate infantry became one of the facts about the Battle of Malvern Hill.
About Confederate infantry, after this bombardment disrupted the Union position, Lee's infantry would attack. Despite repeated attempts, the Confederates failed to mass their guns because of poor communication work by the generals' staff officers and the Confederate practice of deploying batteries with each brigade rather than with the more significant division. Of approximately forty-five Confederate artillery pieces that participated in the fighting, only six to eight did so simultaneously on either flank. The massed Union guns pounded the Confederate batteries and drove them from the field, inflicting about a hundred casualties and killing more than seventy horses. Union gunboats also lobbed shells into the Confederate lines. This challenges the simplistic view of Malvern Hill as merely a battle between Confederate infantry and Confederate artillery. However, as historian Bobby Krick has pointed out, given that Confederate artillery played a minor role in the struggle, it is likely that a large portion of the more than 3,000 Union casualties at Malvern Hill was the outcome of these infantry engagements.
