This Hallowed Ground - Bruce Catton [114]
On the evening of October 7, Buell had his army up near the town of Perryville, Kentucky, spraddled out on high ground west of the village along a stream known as Doctor’s Creek. Bragg’s Confederates were in and around Perryville, and apparently neither commander had a clear idea of what either he or his adversary was going to do next. The weather had been hot and water was scarce, advance elements of the two armies began to fight for possession of the pools of water in the little creek, and on October 8 they blundered into a battle that the generals neither desired nor understood.
The Confederates attacked the left end of Buell’s line with vigor, routed the greater part of one army corps, and brought on an unusually savage and expensive fight. On the Federal side there was an almost complete breakdown of communications, and Buell (who was several miles away) did not even know that a battle was going on until it was all over. He found out finally, at dusk, after he had lost some four thousand men. Concluding that the Confederates would renew the attack the next day, he made ready to receive them, and starchy General Gilbert (whose troops were accusing him of posting guards about the water holes to reserve the water supply for headquarters) pessimistically believed that the Confederates were about to win a great victory.
But Bragg had had enough. Kentucky had not risen to support him as he expected, there seemed to be armed Yankees all over the state, and — inexplicably — he abandoned his offensive plans just when he might have made something of them, and started his army back to Tennessee. A Confederate private, remarking that even if Perryville was a meaningless battle it was the hardest fight he was ever in, summed it up: “Both sides claim the victory — both whipped,” and Buell moved forward with great caution, not so much to pursue his antagonist as to escort him out of the state. A Union cavalryman wrote in disgust that his fellows believed Buell to be “either incompetent, a coward or a traitor.”6
In Washington both the White House and the War Department implored Buell to take off the wraps and show a little drive. Specifically they demanded that he march his army over into east Tennessee, as he had been ordered to do a solid year earlier. Buell agreed that there would never be real security for Kentucky (where he felt obliged to leave thirty thousand troops to guard communications and repel raids) until east Tennessee was occupied, but he remarked that there were problems. He could reach east Tennessee only by moving over two hundred miles of very bad mountain roads; he would need a supply train of ten thousand wagons, which he did not have, and the move would stir up a hornets’ nest anyway because the Rebels would consider it the most dangerous thrust of the war and would muster all their resources to stop it.
This did not placate Mr. Lincoln at all, and Buell got a very stiff note from Halleck: if east Tennessee was the heart of the enemy’s resources it might as well be the heart of Buell’s, and his army could support itself there if a Confederate army could. He could get his supplies from the countryside, seizing what he could not buy, which is just what Bragg was doing on his present retreat. The President, said Halleck sharply, “does not understand why we cannot march as the enemy marches, live as he lives and fight as he fights, unless we admit the inferiority of our troops and our generals.”7
Luckless Buell had all of McClellan’s fatal reluctance to move until everything was just so and, like McClellan, he was describing all of his deficiencies and putting an undue strain on presidential patience. Meanwhile, down in Mississippi there had been an important development.
From the Memphis area Grant had sent troops north to help Buell, and as a result he was short-handed; and while Bragg was moving up toward Perryville, Confederate Van Dorn with twenty-two thousand men swept in to recapture Corinth and knock out the keystone of Grant’s defensive line. There were perhaps twenty thousand