Bragg wins the field at Perryville, then marches away from Kentucky in the dark
By October 1862, Kentucky was a prize both armies wanted and neither fully held. West of Perryville on October 8, Confederate divisions under Braxton Bragg struck the Union left flank near Doctor's Creek, driving back Alexander McCook's corps. Union troops rallied and pushed into the streets of Perryville by dark. Bragg's men held the field by nightfall. Short of supplies and facing Union reinforcements, he pulled his army out that night and marched through Cumberland Gap. Kentucky never again left Union hands.
Perryville settled the question Lincoln had raised in 1861, when he called Kentucky key to keeping the whole war winnable. The battle kept a slaveholding border state inside the Union for good, denying the Confederacy the recruits and river access it needed, and shaping Union strategy in the war's western theater for the next two and a half years.
QWhat triggered the very first shots fired at Perryville?
A scramble for drinking water set off the battle. Soldiers of the 10th Indiana pushed forward before dawn on October 8 to reach algae-covered pools sitting in the nearly dry bed of Doctor's Creek, the only water worth fighting over after a prolonged dry spell had turned regional streams to stagnant puddles. They ran into forward pickets of the 7th Arkansas guarding the same pools, and the two sides traded fire. Neither unit was executing a battle plan; both were simply trying to fill canteens. That skirmish over fouled, algae-slicked water grew into the opening exchange of the largest battle ever fought on Kentucky soil.
QWhat order did Bragg give once he took personal command at the Crawford house?
Bragg scrapped Polk's defensive posture and ordered a north-south realignment built around an en echelon attack, where units strike in a staggered sequence rather than all at once. Benjamin Cheatham's division was told to march north first and open the assault on the Union left, with brigades from Anderson's and Buckner's divisions following in sequence behind him. Bragg had arrived around 10 a.m. believing the real threat lay along the Springfield Pike, before he spotted Alexander McCook's I Corps troops massing north of town. The staggered attack plan, not a simple frontal assault, was Bragg's personal fix for the gapped line he found when he reached the field.
QWhy did some of McCook's own men think the Confederates were retreating before the attack hit them?
Cheatham's division kicked up such large clouds of dust marching north to open Bragg's attack that Union soldiers watching from a distance mistook the movement for a Confederate withdrawal. That misread cost them the advantage of alertness. When Cheatham's men pivoted into position and struck the Union left, the assault landed with extra force simply because McCook's troops had just convinced themselves the enemy was pulling out, not lining up to attack. A column raising dust on a dry October road worked, by accident, as cover for Bragg's attack.
