Who won the Battle of Perryville?
On 8 October 1862 Confederate and Union armies fought the Battle of Perryville, the largest battle of the Civil War in Kentucky. The Confederates won tactically, but the battle ended their invasion of the state: outnumbered, General Bragg withdrew to Tennessee, and Kentucky stayed in the Union.3
On 8 October 1862 the American Civil War reached its high-water mark in the West, when Confederate and Union armies collided in confusion near the small town of Perryville, Kentucky, in a parched landscape where men fought for water as much as for ground. It was the biggest battle ever fought in the state, and though it ended without a clear winner on the field, it decided the fate of Kentucky.4
Part of The greatest battles of the Civil War · Before: The Battle of Antietam · Next: The Battle of Fredericksburg
Background: the invasion of Kentucky
In the late summer of 1862, after a spring of defeats in the West, the Confederacy went on the offensive. Two Confederate armies marched north into Kentucky, one under General Edmund Kirby Smith and the other under General Braxton Bragg. They hoped to win the border state for the South and to gather supplies and recruits there.5
At first the campaign went well. Kirby Smith routed a Union force of raw recruits at Richmond, Kentucky, at the end of August, and in mid-September Bragg forced the surrender of the Union garrison at Munfordville. But the Kentuckians did not rise. Few joined the Confederate ranks, and Bragg was troubled that the state offered encouragement but not soldiers.6
To show that the occupation was there to stay, Bragg and Kirby Smith installed a Confederate governor of Kentucky, Richard Hawes, at the Old State Capitol in Frankfort on 4 October 1862. Union guns interrupted the day, and the Confederates soon left the town.7
Armies and commanders
Facing the invasion was the Union Army of the Ohio under Major General Don Carlos Buell, who had brought it back from Tennessee to Louisville. It numbered about 55,000 men by the American Battlefield Trust's count, around 60,000 by John Rickard's and the historian Jeffry Wert's. Buell sent one wing toward Kirby Smith at Frankfort, and his main body, in three columns, toward Bragg around Bardstown. Rickard reads the Frankfort move as a feint to deceive Bragg; Wert describes it as a real advance.8
The Confederates, for their part, were divided. Wert counts about 21,000 men under Kirby Smith and 30,000 under Bragg; Rickard gives about 40,000 for the two together, but notes that their wings were widely separated, and Wert has them about 100 miles apart when Bragg asked Kirby Smith to join him near Bardstown.9
Either way, it worked. Bragg took the Frankfort column for the main threat and shifted troops toward it, leaving Major General Leonidas Polk with about 15,000 to 16,000 men to face what was in fact most of Buell's army. Under Polk's overall command were the divisions of Benjamin Cheatham and Simon Bolivar Buckner. Many of the Union soldiers opposite them, in the corps of Alexander McCook, had been in the army for less than three months.10
Both armies were suffering from a severe drought. Streams and creeks had dried up, hundreds of men fell sick with dehydration or bad water, and as the armies maneuvered both were drawn toward the creeks and pools around Perryville in search of water.11
The battle in phases
The fight for water, 7 and 8 October. On 7 October the Union columns converged on Perryville and made contact with the Confederates, who had taken up a position west of the town behind Doctor's Creek. Before dawn on the 8th, Brigadier General Philip Sheridan's division drove the Confederates back and took the high ground. A lull followed. Bragg's cavalry had led him to believe he faced only a small part of Buell's army, and he ordered an attack.12
The Confederate attack. The assault was slow to start: the American Battlefield Trust has it getting under way at about noon, Rickard at around two in the afternoon. Cheatham's and Buckner's men struck McCook's corps on the Union left while it was still deploying. They overran a battery, routed a division of new volunteers and drove McCook back about a mile. The Union division commander James S. Jackson was killed early in the fight.13
Starkweather's hill. On the far Union left Colonel John Starkweather's brigade made a stubborn stand on a hill against George Maney's Tennesseans, a defense that Stuart Sanders, the historian of the battle, counts among its key events because it kept McCook's corps from being cut off. Some regiments were shattered: the 22nd Indiana lost about 65 percent of its men by the Trust's count, nearly 70 percent by Wert's.14
How many fought. Only a fraction of the two armies ever came to blows. The American Battlefield Trust counts some 72,000 men in the area but only about 20,000 Union and 16,000 Confederate soldiers in the fighting. Rickard puts the Union troops engaged at about 22,000, Sanders at about 18,000, both against some 16,000 Confederates.15
Late afternoon. Union reinforcements stiffened the line and stopped the Confederate advance, and the attacks on the Union center were beaten back. As night fell, a fresh Confederate brigade made one last attack and was repulsed.16
Turning point: the acoustic shadow
The strangest thing about Perryville was that the Union commander did not know it was happening. Buell was only two or three miles from the fighting, but the rolling hills and the wind created an acoustic shadow, and for hours he heard almost nothing. The physicist Charles Ross, cited by the historian Gordon Berg, adds the effect of hot air near the ground bending the sound upward.17
The result was that only McCook's corps fought in earnest while most of Buell's veterans stood idle. By the time Buell grasped what was happening, it was too late to use his numbers. A Union army that outnumbered its enemy several times over had fought him with a fraction of its strength.18
Aftermath
The casualty counts vary a little by source. The American Battlefield Trust gives 4,211 Union losses and 3,401 Confederate (510 killed, 2,641 wounded and 251 missing). The Perryville battlefield's own website and the Kentucky Historical Society's highway marker break the Union losses down as 845 killed, 2,851 wounded and 515 missing. The historian Stuart Sanders counts 894 Union killed, 2,911 wounded and 471 missing against 532 Confederates killed, 2,641 wounded and 228 missing.19
That night Bragg learned the truth he had not grasped during the battle: he had fought only part of a Union army far larger than his own. Short of men and supplies, he withdrew toward Kirby Smith, paused at Harrodsburg and then retreated through the Cumberland Gap into East Tennessee. Kentucky remained under Union control for the rest of the war.20
Who won is still argued. The American Battlefield Trust counts it a Union victory, while noting that Bragg is often described as the tactical winner; Kentucky's Office of Nature Preserves calls it a tactical Confederate victory, and Berg writes that most historians call it a Pyrrhic victory for the Confederates. Strategically there is no doubt: by retreating, Bragg gave up the campaign and the hope of winning Kentucky.21
Buell did not profit from the victory. His slow pursuit of Bragg, and his objections to the plan of campaign Washington wanted, cost him his command, and in 1864 he left the army.22
Legacy and memory
Perryville was the largest battle ever fought in Kentucky, and Kentucky's Office of Nature Preserves calls it the most important. Wert sees it, together with Lee's defeat at Antietam in the same autumn, as a blow that dimmed Southern hopes for independence.23 › Battle of Antietam, 1862
For the men who fought, it was remembered for its ferocity. The Tennessee private Sam Watkins wrote that he did not remember a harder contest and more evenly fought battle than Perryville. The historians Joseph Ricci and Sean Chick describe a battle shrouded in confusion at every level of command.24
Visiting today
The battlefield is preserved as the Perryville Battlefield State Historic Site, a Kentucky state park with a museum and an interpretive trail open to walkers, where a reenactment of the battle is held each October. The American Battlefield Trust, which has helped buy land there, gives the site more than 890 acres on one page and over 1,000 acres on another; the state counts 1,184 acres in all, 745 of them in the main park.25
