Erik:

I have a little more to add on the First S. C. Rifle Regiment. In late April 1861, a group of the younger members of the Washington Light Infantry Militia Company of Charleston sought to have the company enlsit for Confederate service, and go immediately to Virginia. The leaders of the company, however, refused to do so, preferring to wait. A group of the younger members then raised a company, using the WLI as a nucleus, called the Washington Light Infantry Volunteers. This move was led by, among others, Thomas Muldrup Logan, a 21 year old who would later become one of the Confederacy's youngest brigadiers, in February, 1865. They sought a captain, eventually settling on Captain James Conner, who had been the U.S. Attorney for the District of S.C. immediately prior to secession. This group had received assurances from Pettigrew that the newly formed WLI Volunteers would be accepted into the 1st Rifle Regiment. On 10 May Conner wrote to W. F. Hutson (a member of the Secession Convention) that Theodore G. Barker had gone to Montgomery "to get our orders and instructions." However, the next day, Charles Woodward Hutson, the son of W. F. Hutson, and a young private in the WLI Volunteers, wrote his mother, "Tonight I attended a meeting of our corps [company] at which we heard news which put a great damper upon the spirits of all of us ... Davis refuses to accept an organized regiment with its own officers, reserving unto himself the privilege of appointing the regimental officers. He will only accept the company as such and locate it afterwards to suit himself. Such an arrangement would defeat the desire of the corps to go instantly into the field ... We might have marched on to Virginia and taken our chances at organization there, but the Governor positively refuses to countenance the removal of a single other company from the State, & will not furnish su with arms or pay or traveling expenses, if we go to Virginia. ....." Both of these letters are in the Charles Woodward Hutson Papers, Southern Historical Collection, University of North Carolina. The WLI Volunteers then applied for and were accepted in the Hampton Legion Infantry Battalion.

There is an adequate biography of Pettigrew by Clyde N. Wilson, Jr., Carolina Cavalier: The Life and Mind of James Johnston Pettigrew, published by the University of Georgia Press in 1990. I do not have a copy, but if I recall correctly Wilson briefly deals with Pettigrew's role with the Rifle Regiment. By the way, if you come across a self-published book by Daniel F. Bauer, The Long Lost Journal of Confederate General James Johnston Pettigrew, published in 2000 by some outfit in California, SKIP IT; DO NOT buy it, unless you are looking for fiction. The author foisted it off as genuine, and printing in it a Dewey Decimal Number asserting it as history; as reputable an institution as the University of North Carolian still has it on its main library shelves in its Civil War History section, but its purely fiction, and not even clever fiction at that.

Pettigrew enlisted in Company A of the Hampton Legion at Richmond on June 29, 1861; he probably accompanied the company from Columbia. He was elected colonel of the 22 N. C. Volunteers ca 10 July and transferred to that unit.