I stand with my daughter on the lip of a hill, overlooking a hollow where a mock battle is taking place in Boyle County. The men before us are Confederate soldier reenactors, and they are slowly gaining ground against Union troops. Officers at the edge of the skirmish are astride horses, occasionally shouting orders. The air is filled with the crack of rifles and stifled by smoke. It is mid-October, and the open fields have gone dry under a clear sky. The sun burns down on the men in the hollow and the crowd gathered along the ridge. A young boy on his father’s shoulders asks if the men will pretend to fall when they are shot. I wonder the same, but that’s not what happens.
We stand close to a woman wearing a 19th century corset, hoop skirt and bonnet. She cheers the Southern soldiers and, much like a sports announcer, details the movements of the regiments. The Confederates begin to gain the hill, atop which sits a Union cannon battalion that periodically punctuates the rifle fire with bursts of gunpowder, which echo through the Chaplin Hills. In 1862, the cannonade was supported by a regiment of Wisconsin men and by volunteers from Indiana.
I have brought my 13-year-old daughter here because we are descended from one of those Indiana soldiers who defended that very hill—my third great-grandfather.
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The weekend of our visit in early autumn 2022 marked the 160th anniversary of what is generally known as the Battle of Perryville, one of only a few Civil War battles fought in Kentucky, and one that, historically, has been little regarded. Bull Run, Shiloh, Antietam, Gettysburg—each of these names comes easily to mind. Perryville was, however, one of the most important battles in the War Between the States, and it determined the fate of Kentucky, which, of course, remained neutral during the war.
The battle, fought on Oct. 8, 1862, pitched Gen. Braxton Bragg, who led the Army of Mississippi, against Maj. Gen. Don Carlos Buell and his Army of the Ohio. The battle was a culmination of what was known as the Confederate Heartland Offensive or, more generally, as the Kentucky Campaign.
Kentucky’s strategic value was immense. It gave access to the Ohio River and to the railroads in the region, all of which could be used for military supply routes. President Abraham Lincoln knew full well the importance of keeping Kentucky under Union control.
In late August, Maj. Gen. Edmund Kirby Smith, with some 21,000 Confederate troops, arrived in Lexington. Bragg began moving north from Nashville toward Louisville. Buell, when he discovered the Confederate movements, made haste for Louisville to block the two armies from joining. When he reached Louisville, Buell managed to recruit thousands of new soldiers; my great-great-great-grandfather was among them.
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Henry T. Henson was born in March 1845, a descendant of the original settlers of Orange County, Indiana. Henson was a farmer who enlisted in Company I of the 38th Indiana Infantry on Sept. 18, 1861. He fought and was wounded at the Battle of Perryville. He went on to fight a few months later at Stones River in Tennessee on New Year’s Eve, where he was wounded again, after which he served in the Invalid Corps for the remainder of the war. He mustered out as a corporal on July 15, 1865.
What astounds me most is that Henson would have been only 17 when he fought at Perryville. What the roar of the cannons, the sight of mangled bodies—not to mention his own wound—would have done to him I’ll never know. Once home, he married and fathered 10 children. He died at the age of 80, when my grandfather, my mother’s father, would have been eight or nine years old. I wonder if my grandfather heard stories of the war when he was young.
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Kenneth W. Noe’s book The Howling Storm details the ferocious drought of 1862 and how it demoralized the soldiers, even disabling them.
Parched crops failed, and there was little food for troops on either side to forage during the interminable marches. River levels were low, and, in places, the waterways had run dry. Supply lines along rivers faltered, and men at the front wanted for necessities and stores. Temperatures soared. The men were exhausted, and some died from heatstroke. They drank when they could, Noe writes, “from puddles or wagon ruts.” Wherever they walked, stifling clouds of dust rose to choke them.
On Oct. 1, Buell moved his army—Hoosiers included—out of Louisville south toward Bardstown in the 86-degree heat. They numbered some 55,000 soldiers. Men fainted along the road. They tossed their equipment into ditches and drank from stagnant ponds, sometimes trying to filter the water through handkerchiefs. What rain fell was inconsequential, each time less than a quarter inch.
When the Confederates arrived in Perryville, the Chaplin River was mostly dry. There was some stagnant water in the bed, but in the hills beyond town, the armies could find both cover and an occasional spring. Three roads met at Perryville—Buell’s Union forces were approaching on each. On one ridge, Peters Hill, Confederates took up a line, behind which were the aforementioned springs. They were guarding the water with their lives.
The Union troops were exhausted. One corporal in the 81st Indiana wrote, “Our marching was very severe on us, we suffered a great deal for water. The enemy drank up all the streams and wells on each side of the road. Some of the men went three and four miles to get water. We were thankful for any kind of water we could get, although some of it was not fit for animals to drink.”
The day of the battle, the temperature swelled to 90 degrees. The air was choked with dust. As Noe writes, it was reported that desperate soldiers “shoved the dead aside to drink from the bloody pools in the bed of Doctor’s Creek.” The wounded suffered yet more. Buell had left medical supplies in Louisville to save time, so hospitals were fashioned out of sheds and barns, but there was virtually no water for doctors to wash their hands. Gangrene, sepsis and typhoid spread.
Today, you can walk the main road in Perryville, past the houses along the Chaplin River, and imagine the dying men in those rooms.
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The battlefield is preserved as the Perryville Battlefield State Historic Site. It commemorates, among other things, the more than 7,600 men who were killed, wounded or went missing in its single day of battle. Its 1,200 acres are virtually unchanged from the day of the fight. Save for the abundant birdsong, it is immensely quiet. The wind worries over the grasses and wildflowers growing there, pricking at the occasional fence line.
I spoke with Bryan Bush, the park manager, and told him I came to the battle reenactment to follow the history of my ancestor. Bush went to his office and returned with a copy of Henry T. Henson’s military card that Bush had downloaded from a government database. Henson was discharged as a corporal. Bush told me that the promotion of my ancestor was an honor.
I drove up the road to the position of Simonson’s Battery, where Henson fought. It is marked by a cannon set beside a small stand of maples. On the signboard there, I get a sense of what my third great-grandfather experienced in quotes of men from his regiment. Col. Benjamin F. Scribner wrote, “The wonder is that any of us were saved, for we were under a murderous crossfire for hours.” Henry Fales Perry, a private who was wounded in the shoulder, wrote, “The spectacle presented by the battlefield was enough to make angels weep.”
During the reenactment, I’d asked a park officer if I might go near the cannonade. I could see from the main viewing area that it was cordoned off by yellow tape. I told him I only wanted to photograph the men around the cannons. He assured me I could, though he warned my daughter and I that we might not want to be too close when the cannons began firing. He was right.
I was left with a feeling of astonishment. I admired this man, my great-grandmother’s grandfather, not because he fought for his country, or for a cause, but simply because he survived. He was a boy, and what he saw must have not only terrified him but left him with no delusions about what men are capable of. He may have felt excitement and anticipation, but, more likely, he felt fear, panic.
That a nearby farmer buried many Confederate soldiers was an act of mercy. Men, many of them young, suffered on both sides. Many returned home deeply wounded. And some, like Henry Henson, went on to more battles as winter came on and the snow began to fall.
A monument to the fallen Confederate soldiers and another to the dead Union soldiers are located on the park grounds. Being a descendant of one of the men who survived, married and ensured my birth, I feel the weight of that marble.