Battle of Perryville

• 1. Introduction

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  The Battle of Perryville began before dawn on the 8th of October 1862. Men of the 10th Indiana pushed toward a nearly dry stretch of Doctor's Creek, west of a small Kentucky crossroads town. Algae covered the few pools of water still left in the creek bed. Both armies desperately wanted access to them. Soldiers of the 7th Arkansas waited on the far bank, and the first shots of the day passed back and forth over those puddles.

  By afternoon, tens of thousands of soldiers were fighting around the town. They belonged to Confederate Gen. Braxton Bragg's Army of Mississippi and Union Maj. Gen. Don Carlos Buell's Army of the Ohio. Measured against how few men were actually engaged, it became one of the bloodiest battles of the Civil War. Buell was resting at a farmhouse several miles behind the front line. For most of the day he had no idea a major battle was underway at all.

  Confederate troops held the ground when the fighting stopped that night. Within weeks, though, the entire Confederate campaign for Kentucky unraveled. How did a fight that began over stagnant puddles end up deciding who controlled a border state? And how could an army commander lose track of his own battle while it raged just miles away?

• 2. A Border State in the Balance

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  Kentucky sat between the Confederate states of Tennessee and Virginia and the Union states of Illinois, Indiana, and Ohio. That location, and its control of key rivers like the Ohio, made it a prize both sides coveted. In September 1861, Kentucky-born President Abraham Lincoln wrote in a private letter that losing Kentucky was nearly the same as losing the whole war. Kentucky's own legislature had declared official neutrality, hoping to keep both the Union and Confederate armies out of the state.

  That neutrality broke on the 3rd of September 1861. Confederate Maj. Gen. Leonidas Polk occupied Columbus, a town seen as key to controlling the Lower Mississippi. Two days later, Union Brig. Gen. Ulysses S. Grant answered by seizing Paducah. From that point forward, Kentucky's proclaimed neutrality was effectively dead. The state never seceded, but Confederate sympathizers in the legislature set up a temporary Confederate capital at Bowling Green in November 1861. That government never held much real power inside Kentucky. The Confederacy still added a star to its flag to represent the state.

  None of that settled who would actually fight for control of Kentucky's roads, rivers, and railroads in the year that followed.

• 3. A Race Two Armies Could Not Win Together

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  After the Battle of Shiloh on the 6th-the 7th of April 1862, the Confederate army under Maj. Gen. Pierre G.T. Beauregard retreated to Corinth, Mississippi. Union Maj. Gen. Henry Halleck commanded a combined force of about 100,000 men, more than double Beauregard's numbers. Yet he needed 51 days to cover the 20 miles from Pittsburg Landing to Corinth. The Confederates abandoned Corinth on the 29th of May. Confederate President Jefferson Davis, unhappy with the retreat, removed Beauregard and gave command to Braxton Bragg, who renamed the force the Army of Tennessee. Bragg then spent much of June drilling his troops at Tupelo, Mississippi, while Union armies largely left him alone through the summer.

  The push into Kentucky began with Confederate Maj. Gen. Edmund Kirby Smith, commander of the Department of East Tennessee. He believed a Kentucky campaign could win supplies, recruits, and the state itself for the Confederacy. In July 1862, Col. John Hunt Morgan led a cavalry raid deep into Buell's rear areas. He picked up 300 Kentucky volunteers, adding them to his 900-man force. Morgan promised Kirby Smith that the whole country could be secured, and that 25,000 or 30,000 men would join at once.

  Bragg eventually agreed to move his Army of Mississippi to join Kirby Smith. He sent 30,000 infantrymen by rail through Mobile, Montgomery, and Chattanooga, while wagons, cavalry, and artillery traveled overland through Rome, Georgia. On the 31st of July, Bragg and Kirby Smith met in Chattanooga and settled on a plan. Kirby Smith's Army of Kentucky, roughly 21,000 men, would move first and clear Union defenders from Cumberland Gap while Bragg's exhausted troops rested. The two forces would then combine and force Buell into a decisive battle.

  That plan needed precise coordination between two armies with no shared command, and it began falling apart almost at once. Kirby Smith saw a chance for personal glory in a solo campaign and quietly abandoned the agreement. On the 9th of August, he told Bragg he intended to bypass Cumberland Gap entirely and march north on his own. Smith left Knoxville with 21,000 men on the 13th of August. Bragg departed Chattanooga on the 27th of August, just days before Smith reached Lexington.

  Buell abandoned his slow advance toward Chattanooga once he learned both Confederate armies were operating in Kentucky. On the 7th of September, his Army of the Ohio left Nashville and began racing Bragg toward Louisville. Bragg was delayed by capturing a Union fort at Munfordville, then chose to rejoin Kirby Smith rather than fight Buell for the city. Buell reached Louisville first and filled out his ranks with thousands of new recruits. Bragg, meanwhile, left his own army to meet Kirby Smith in Frankfort. There, on the 4th of October, they attended the inauguration of Confederate Governor Richard Hawes. Cannon fire from an approaching Union division interrupted the ceremony.

  The inaugural ball planned for that evening was canceled outright.

• 4. Chosen for Its Water

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  Hardee's wing, retreating east, stopped at Perryville, a village of about 300 people whose roads connected to nearby towns in six directions. The position blocked Federal troops from reaching the Confederate supply depot at Bryantsville. It also offered a possible source of water, which had grown badly scarce by early October.

  An unusually wet winter and spring in 1862 gave way to drought. Many blamed the dry spell on the eruption of Mount Dubbi in East Africa in May 1861. Dry weather held through June and continued into early fall. A stagnant high-pressure ridge pushed daytime temperatures up with almost no rain to cool them. Rivers and creeks west of town shrank to isolated puddles, and the heat proved brutal for soldiers and horses alike.

  On the 7th of October, Buell's army reached the Perryville area while Union cavalry skirmished with Confederate Gen. Joseph Wheeler's rearguard throughout the day. Buell planned to attack the next morning and ordered his corps to move at 3 a.m. and strike by 10 a.m. The march of the I and II Corps fell behind schedule after both wandered miles off course searching for water. Buell postponed the assault to the 9th of October and told his corps commanders to avoid a general engagement on the 8th.

  Buell could not personally oversee the deployment of his arriving troops that day. Thrown from his horse, he suffered injuries that kept him from riding, and he set up headquarters at the Dorsey house, about 3 miles west of town. Confederate commander William Hardee organized a defensive line across the three roads leading into Perryville. He held only three of Buckner's four brigades until reinforcements arrived overnight.

  By midnight, three brigades under Frank Cheatham had reached the field, marching quickly and leaving their baggage train behind.

• 5. Bragg Misreads the Battle

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  At 2 a.m. on the 8th of October, Buell and Gilbert, the III Corps commander, ordered newly promoted Brig. Gen. Phil Sheridan to seize Peters Hill. Sheridan advanced with the brigade of Col. Daniel McCook and pushed the Arkansans back across the creek. Confederate Brig. Gen. Simon Buckner, worried about starting a wider fight, ordered his subordinate St. John Liddell to pull back rather than reinforce. On the Union side, a nervous Gilbert then ordered Sheridan to return to Peters Hill.

  For days, Braxton Bragg had been convinced that a diversion toward Frankfort was Buell's main effort. He wanted Polk to strike the supposedly minor Union force at Perryville and quickly rejoin Kirby Smith. Polk first signaled he would attack, then changed his mind and settled into a defensive posture instead. Angered that he heard no sound of battle, Bragg rode from Harrodsburg to Perryville and arrived around 10 a.m., setting up headquarters at the Crawford house.

  Bragg found Polk's battle line gapped and poorly anchored on the flanks. He assumed the main Union threat remained on the Springfield Pike, unaware that Crittenden's entire II Corps was approaching along the Lebanon Pike. He ordered the army realigned into a north-south line for an attack made in sequence, brigade by brigade. Cheatham's division marched north to open the assault on what Bragg believed was the exposed Union left.

  An unusual acoustic shadow kept most sounds of the coming battle from reaching Buell's headquarters only 2 miles away. He would commit no reserves of his own until late in the afternoon.

• 6. The Fight for Open Knob

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  Cheatham's artillery opened fire at 12:30 p.m., though his infantry did not move forward right away. Union troops kept extending their line north, beyond where the Confederates expected to strike. The brigade of Brig. Gen. Daniel Donelson crossed the Chaplin River first and began its attack around 2 p.m. Two of its four regiments had been detached elsewhere, leaving only three for the assault.

  Cheatham shouted, "Give 'em hell, boys!" as the attack went in. According to a lasting Civil War legend, Gen. Leonidas Polk, who was also an Episcopal bishop, echoed the cheer nearby. He supposedly shouted, "Give it to 'em boys; give 'em what General Cheatham says!" Donelson's men found themselves making a frontal assault rather than striking an open flank. Col. John Savage's 16th Tennessee raced ahead of the others, heading for the Union artillery of Capt. Samuel Harris. It took crossfire instead from the 33rd Ohio and eight guns on the Open Knob, 200 yards north. Donelson's brigade withdrew after thirty minutes with about 20% casualties, and Savage's own regiment lost 219 of its 370 men.

  Brig. Gen. George Maney's brigade approached the Open Knob undetected through the woods while Union attention stayed fixed on Donelson's attack. Union Brig. Gen. James Jackson, commanding the 10th Division, was killed in the fighting that followed, and command passed to Brig. Gen. William Terrill. Terrill then ordered the inexperienced 123rd Illinois into a bayonet charge down the hill. The 770 raw Union troops suffered heavy losses against 1,800 veteran Confederates. Maney's men eventually swept the hill and captured most of the Union guns there.

  Maney pushed on across a cornfield toward a ridge held by Col. John Starkweather's 2,200-man brigade and twelve guns. Starkweather's own 21st Wisconsin, formed less than a month earlier, panicked as Terrill's retreating men crashed through their cornfield position. Terrill himself shouted, "The Rebels are advancing in terrible force!" and pushed the regiment into another doomed bayonet charge. A single Confederate volley of 1,400 muskets then answered the 21st's own volley and shattered the regiment.

  One soldier later described the fighting on Starkweather's hill in vivid terms. "The guns were discharged so rapidly," he wrote, "that it seemed the earth itself was in a volcanic uproar." Brig. Gen. Terrill returned to the fighting there and was mortally wounded by an artillery shell, dying at 2 a.m. the next day. Starkweather salvaged six of his twelve guns and pulled them back 100 yards to a new ridge. Confederate brigades under Maney and Alexander Stewart tried three assaults against that position and failed each time, withdrawing near the Open Knob by about 5:30 p.m.

  Historian Kenneth Noe later called it the high-water mark of the Confederacy in the western theater, on par with the Angle at Gettysburg.

• 7. The Pincer at Dixville Crossroads

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  Almost all of McCook's I Corps was posted on land owned by "Squire" Henry Bottom. At about 2:30 p.m., Maj. John Austin's Louisiana Sharpshooters engaged the 42nd Indiana as it collected water in the ravine of Doctor's Creek. Brig. Gen. Bushrod Johnson's brigade then descended from Chatham House Hill around 2:45 p.m. and attacked the 3rd Ohio Infantry across the nearly dry riverbed.

  Confederate artillery accidentally set fire to Squire Bottom's log barn during the assault. Union wounded soldiers had taken shelter inside it, and many burned to death there. The Ohioans withdrew and were replaced by the 15th Kentucky. Brig. Gen. Patrick Cleburne's brigade joined the attack around 3:40 p.m. An artillery shell killed his horse, Dixie, and wounded him in the ankle, but he kept his men moving forward.

  Cleburne later guessed that friendly fire hit his troops because they wore blue trousers captured earlier from Union soldiers at Richmond. On his left, Brig. Gen. Daniel Adams's brigade joined the attack against the reinforced 15th Kentucky. Col. William Lytle, commanding the Union brigade on that flank, was wounded in the head while trying to rally his men and left for dead. Confederate troops later captured him from the field.

  Only a few hundred yards south, Phil Sheridan's division sat idle on Peters Hill through much of this fighting. Earlier, Buell and Gilbert had heard distant artillery fire during dinner and assumed it was only Union gun practice. They told Sheridan not to waste ammunition. When Gilbert later feared Sheridan would be attacked, he ordered him back into his trenches instead of forward.

  Sheridan's division finally moved late in the battle. It met three Confederate regiments under Col. Samuel Powel, sent to silence a Union battery on the Springfield Pike. His men repulsed Powel's regiments, and Col. William Carlin's brigade then chased the retreating Confederates toward Perryville. One soldier described the chase: "It was like running a marathon, over fences and ditches and cornfields, the enemy ahead and we in pursuit. At times, we were so close that I was once able to give a Rebel a kick in the rear." Carlin's advance toward the town was later halted by an order from Gilbert.

  Bragg's attack formed a pincer that squeezed both of McCook's flanks toward the Dixville Crossroads, where the Benton Road met the Mackville Road. Col. George Webster's brigade held that position and was mortally wounded defending it. The evening before, Webster had joked with two fellow officers that the odds of all three dying together were mathematically negligible.

  Col. Michael Gooding's brigade arrived from Gilbert's corps to help hold the crossroads. Leonidas Polk, riding forward to investigate what he thought was friendly fire, discovered he had ridden into the lines of the 22nd Indiana by mistake. He bluffed his way out by riding down their line and shouting for them to cease fire as though he were a Union officer. Once clear, Polk shouted to his own troops to fire. The resulting volley killed Col. Squire Keith. It inflicted 65% casualties on the 22nd Indiana, the highest of any Union regiment at Perryville.

  Polk, unsettled by his brush with the enemy, blamed the falling darkness and called off any further pursuit that evening.

• 8. Kentucky After Perryville

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  Union casualties at Perryville totaled 4,276: 894 killed, 2,911 wounded, and 471 captured or missing. Confederate casualties totaled 3,401: 532 killed, 2,641 wounded, and 228 captured or missing. Altogether, casualties amounted to one-fifth of the men engaged. One veteran of the 1st Tennessee later wrote about the fight. He said he never remembered a harder or more evenly matched contest in the entire war. He called the result a "dog fall," since both sides claimed victory, and both had been whipped.

  Braxton Bragg had arguably won a tactical victory, pushing his opponent back more than a mile through hard fighting. His strategic position looked precarious once he learned of the Union III Corps on the Springfield Pike and the II Corps on the Lebanon Pike. At 9 p.m., he met his subordinates at the Crawford house and ordered a withdrawal to begin after midnight. A picket line stayed behind while the army marched to join Kirby Smith. Nine hundred wounded men had to be left behind on the retreat.

  Bragg united his army with Kirby Smith's at Harrodsburg, but the recruits he had hoped for from Kentucky never materialized in large numbers. Concluding he lacked the logistical support to stay in the state, he withdrew southeast to Knoxville, Tennessee, through the Cumberland Gap. Confederate President Jefferson Davis summoned Bragg to Richmond, Virginia, to answer charges from officers who wanted him replaced. Davis chose to keep Bragg in command, though his relationship with his subordinates never recovered, and Bragg soon ordered a move to Murfreesboro, Tennessee.

  Buell pursued Bragg only half-heartedly before returning to Nashville, rather than pushing into East Tennessee as Washington wanted. On the 24th of October, a new Department of the Cumberland formed under Maj. Gen. William Rosecrans. Buell's army was folded into it as the XIV Corps. Buell was ordered to appear before a commission investigating his conduct during the campaign. He remained in military limbo for a year and a half and resigned from the service in May 1864.

  Following the battle, the Union held Kentucky for the rest of the Civil War. Historian James McPherson later described Perryville, alongside the Battle of Antietam, as a turning point of the war. Together, he wrote, they threw back Confederate invasions and helped set the stage for the Emancipation Proclamation. Just two days after the fighting, a cold front finally broke the long drought and brought rain across Kentucky.

  Portions of the battlefield are now preserved by the state of Kentucky as the Perryville Battlefield State Historic Site. The Perryville Historic District includes the Elmwood mansion, which served as a field hospital during the fighting. Through the American Battlefield Trust and Kentucky's own Heritage Land Conservation Fund, about 1,202 acres of the battlefield had been saved by mid-2023. That ground once held the largest single battle ever fought in the state of Kentucky.