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While members of the general public regularly travel to Civil War battlefield parks in large numbers, they usually do not give much thought to the history of those pastoral facilities. With the notable exception of Gettysburg, the same can be said of most scholars. Yet the slow evolution of battlefields as state-owned parks can tell us much about the nation’s post-Civil War history and search for meaning. Battlefields became the focus of new battles over how the Civil War was to be remembered, who was to be included or excluded in establishing an orthodox memory, and who was to profit from their establishment. In the process, those who saw the land as something other than a historical tableau struggled to establish a different identity. That process continues today.
The battlefield at Perryville, Kentucky, offers a lesser known example of the process. On October 8, 1862, Union and Confederate forces clashed just west of Perryville, a small market town located southwest of Lexington in the commonwealth’s central bluegrass. The climax of a hard, six-week campaign that shifted the focus of the western war from northern Mississippi hundreds of miles toward the Ohio River, the battle ended inconclusively. Although a tactical Confederate victory, Gen. Braxton Bragg abandoned the hard-won field overnight to his numerically stronger foe and commenced a retreat that eventually led back to Middle Tennessee’s Stones River at the end of the year. Maj. Gen. Don Carlos Buell’s Union Army of the Ohio soon followed. Although the widespread Confederate dream of adding Kentucky to the Confederacy did not die at Perryville, the last realistic hopes of accomplishing it faded like the autumn leaves that fell on Bragg’s army during its sullen retreat.[1]
The armies left Perryville’s homes and farms in gory shambles. Every resident within range of the guns suffered losses during the battle. The post-battle Federal garrison particularly targeted Confederates sympathizers, however, once the shooting stopped. As the most prominent secessionist living on the field , the prosperous farmer and magistrate “Squire” Henry P. Bottom felt the heaviest blow. Squire Bottom’s farm already resembled bedlam by nightfall on October 8. Hungry and angry Federals then exacted more tribute over the next several weeks. Years later Bottom complained that after the battle the Federals deprived him of nearly $5,000 worth of property, notably over 8,000 pounds of pork, almost 5,000 pounds of bacon, well over 3,000 bushels of corn, fourteen tons of hay, and 300 cords of wood. For the first time in his life, he had to purchase food to feed his family. Economically and emotionally, the battle broke Henry Bottom forever.[2]
Bottom and his neighbors faced another immediate problem, the hundreds of dead men and horses still scattered across their land. By the time Buell pulled out, most of the Federal dead lay in long, neat, trench-like graves, largely buried by their comrades but sometimes by impressed local slaves. Some regiments chose pastoral spots, shaded by cedars or oaks and marked with wooden headstones that denoted units and in some cases expressed hope in Christian resurrection.[3] In contrast, most Confederate casualties remained on the field unburied for a week after the fight. Angry at the Rebels for robbing their dead the night of the battle, Perryville’s garrison summarily refused to bury them. If the enemy wanted their dead buried, one man asserted, they should have interred them themselves instead of pillaging fallen Federals. Feral hogs that usually occupied the woods swarmed the field, devouring putrid body parts with aplomb until they too sickened and began to die from their gory repast. Bottom attempted to drive the hogs off his scarred land, but the absence of fences and the refusal of neighbors to associate with him while elements of the Federal army remained allowed the hogs to return repeatedly.
Finally, with both the sight and smell of decomposing men growing “loathsome” to those Federals still in the area, Col. William P. Reid of the 121st Ohio impressed Bottom, his slaves, and other local Secessionists to assist 100 soldiers in accomplishing the grim task. Working with too few picks and shovels, burial parties also faced a difficult task breaking hard and rocky soil baked by the summer’s drought. Eventually, they gave up and carved out only shallow trenches, temporarily covering the dead with a thin blanket of earth in vain hope of deterring the hogs. Only two months later, after the 121st Ohio marched away, would Squire Bottom, other Perryville residents, and a group of students from Danville’s Kentucky School for the Deaf exhume those Confederates and bury 347 of them in a compact mass grave located on Bottom’s land. Using personal effects, he managed to identify a few, notably some Mississippians, but the identity of most remained, and remains, unknown.[4]
Perryville could not forget the battle that left it scarred, however much its residents tried to rebuild their shattered community and get on with life. Boyle County’s war cruelly did not end with Bragg’s retreat. Confederate raiders and partisans periodically operated in the area until the end of the war. Worried about such partisans as well as suspicious of Kentucky’s loyalties, Federal authorities maintained a heavy hand on the community and the commonwealth throughout the remainder of the conflict. The result was a crucial shift among whites from their pre-war Whiggery toward the postwar Democratic party, a redirection largely occasioned by Lincoln appointees’ treatment of Kentucky as an almost-conquered province coupled with an unrealistic hope to hang onto their slave property. The sight of Black men in blue uniforms, some local residents, particularly galled local whites and stimulated a violent reaction. In the bitter years immediately following the war, county “Regulators” lynched three Blacks. Some wags eventually opined that Kentucky had finally joined the Confederacy, only four years too late.[5]
In the face of such violence, Perryville’s African Americans struggled to build a viable and self-sustaining community in the aftermath of emancipation and the Thirteenth Amendment. In 1865, a group of three extended families led by Preston Sleet, a former Boyle County slave who took up arms during the battle and left with the Federal army, occupied about 150 acres of battlefield land. For several years, the male residents of Sleettown as it came to be called toiled as sharecroppers. They apparently worked hard and lived frugally, for in 1880 Preston and Henry Sleet purchased the property from the financially strapped Henry Bottom and a neighbor. During the years that followed, they added additional, smaller tracts purchased from the Bottoms. Sleettown survived as a different monument to the Civil War’s legacy well into a new century, its restaurant, general store, and taxi service providing a brief prosperity, while its church and one-room school otherwise enriched the lives of the hamlet’s populace.
While Sleettown experienced its genesis, Federal soldiers returned to other parts of the field to supervise the reburial of their hastily buried dead in a national cemetery. Burial parties in 1865 exhumed 969 bodies and moved the remains to a two acre square, hilltop compound. A handsome stone fence, five feet high, enclosed the cemetery, with two gates providing admittance to mourners. “In the center of the grounds,” a local doctor wrote, “is a vacant space fifty-two feet square, on which it is intended to erect a suitable monument.” Eight carriage roads, each ten feet wide, radiated from the monument site to a walkway bordering the stone wall, dividing the graveyard into eight distinct sections.[6]
As it turned out, the monument would never be erected, nor the grand design completed. In 1867 the government, unable to obtain legal title to the property due to the stipulations of a will, closed the new cemetery and transferred all the Federal dead buried at Perryville to a larger, central facility at Camp Nelson, in Jessamine County. Aside from a few lost souls whose lonely graves remained unmarked and largely unknown, no Federal dead remained on the field after the summer of 1868. One cemetery still existed, however, that built by Squire Bottom for Confederates. In the years following the war, Bottom attempted to erect a stone wall around the plot, similar in design to that described by Polk around the Federal cemetery.[7]
If Bottom seemed placid in the 1880s, others connected with the battle did not. Perryville receded quickly from the American popular mind during the two decades following Appomattox. Many Americans were in the mood to forget the war entirely, and even those who still wanted to fight it out non-violently increasingly focused on the Virginia campaigns. By 1884, Perryville veteran Marshall Thatcher could complain in his memoirs that no one remembered Perryville at all except as an unimportant skirmish.[8] Just at that moment, however, the Battles and Leaders series reopened old wounds and brought new discord. Buell’s long narrative of the campaign and defense of his actions created the greatest stir. A flurry of memoirs and articles followed, nearly all of which attacked Buell’s poor generalship. Former Confederates would write scathingly of Bragg as well, but his refusal to respond as well as his earlier demise at least provided less ammunition than Buell gave his critics.[9]
Although the war of words brought Perryville back to mind, it nonetheless failed to change the growing popular perception of the battle as an affair of relatively minor importance, an interlude between Shiloh and Stones River. That annoyed Kentuckians. The birth of a new century, however, coupled with approaching fortieth anniversary of the battle, did spur new interest in the battle. Aging veterans of a few units began holding their annual regimental reunions on October 8, their most significant day.[10] More importantly, the impending anniversary set off a growing movement intent upon memorializing the battlefield. By the 1890s, battlefields had come to loom in the American mind both as sites made sacred by the blood of soldiers, and outdoor classrooms superbly able to provide a tangible link to a more glorious past. To some, they promised to play a role in sectional reconciliation as veterans of both armies returned for annual reunions. Others placed them within a revival of proclaiming the glories of the south. At the same time a tug-of-war began nationally between battle survivors, who claimed dominion over the once bloody fields, and a growing host of artists, bureaucrats, and boosters who advocated giving control of battlefields to artists, landscape architects, government officials, and other Progressive Era ‘experts.’
In regard to Perryville, Kentuckians and especially local citizens took the lead in working to establish such a park there. Their task was by no means an easy one, for Perryville lagged behind other sites. Monuments already littered battlefields like Gettysburg, increasingly regarded as the nation’s most important scene of combat as well as a tourist mecca. In contrast, by 1900 there was little left to suggest that a major battle once took place at Perryville. Only Squire Bottom’s Confederate cemetery marked the spot, and it now stood in disrepair, its grounds and the still incomplete wall now overgrown with briars and weeds.
A stillborn attempt by Kentucky Congressmen to have the area purchased for a National Military Park along the lines of the new facilities at Chickamauga and Gettysburg, opened in 1895, nonetheless served to refocus a least Kentucky’s attention to Perryville. With much of the 1862 battlefield still in use by the Bottom heirs as a working farm, however, most of that interest automatically devolved on the Confederate cemetery and its immediate environs. The Kentucky Division of the Daughters of the Confederacy spearheaded a drive to raise both public and private funds to erect an appropriate monument in the cemetery. The first decade of the twentieth century had witnessed the peak of Civil War monument erection. That women led such a project is not surprising, since in the years between 1865 and 1885, elite women’s groups and especially the Daughters had spearheaded most monument efforts. As in Perryville, more often than not they had erected the completed monuments in cemeteries, since theoretically Federal authorities would object less to commemoration confined to the dead. Although more public town squares increasingly became home to monuments after 1885, Perryville’s and Kentucky’s peculiar situation empowered the earlier tradition, as did continuing southern poverty that usually precluded state aid.
On October 8, 1902, forty years to the day of battle, a crowd of at least 5,000 celebrants gathered for the monument’s unveiling. Among them were two Union veterans of the 10th Ohio, both carrying regimental flags and embodying the turn of the century’s growing spirit of reconciliation, as evinced by many of the war’s veterans at ‘Blue-Gray reunions’ and monument dedications. While Union veterans generally refused to participate in events that seemed to honor the Confederate cause, men like the veteran Ohioans had grown perfectly willing to salute the bravery of individual Johnny Rebs at places like Perryville. After prayer and a speech, the crowd followed the path of the initial Confederate assault to the cemetery site. There, within the hastily completed stone wall, they found a granite shaft, twenty-eight feet high, and topped by the figure of an alert Confederate infantryman prepared to begin the manual of arms. The rather typical soldier atop the monument, of the sort increasingly mass produced commercially for southern town squares, represented a new trend that had appeared after 1885. Earlier monuments tended to be simpler, funerary obelisks. Still, there was no mistaking the monument’s essential purpose as headstone. Inscribed with lines from Theodore O’Hara’s already standard “Bivouac of the Dead,” the shaft also provided the names of the roughly thirty men Squire Bottom had been able to identify.[11]
Despite the very public and blatantly Confederate commemoration, no national acknowledgment of Perryville’s first-rank importance followed, and the remainder of the field went back to the plow in the spring. Indeed, almost another thirty years would pass before Perryville’s Federals received a similar honor. That is not surprising. Nationally, the 1930s marked another period of renewed interest in the Civil War, an upswing in interest created by both the widening Great Depression, which had Americans searching for hope in a simpler and more noble past, and the increased passing of many of the war’s now elderly combatants. Battle anniversaries figured prominently. Perryville, like many others towns, participated fully in the wider trend. On October 8, 1931, the Perryville Woman’s Club and Perryville Battlefield Commission, the latter the latest incarnation of the town’s booster spirit, unveiled a complementary Union monument near the cemetery. Symbolically smaller than the Confederate column, the Union obelisk drew its inspiration from the Washington Monument as well as the hundreds of memorial obelisks around the nation. Acknowledging the Federal dead’s role in preserving the Union, the monument’s creators also inscribed on it yet another verse from O’Hara. After the troubled unveiling--at first the shrouding veil refused to come off despite herculean efforts--a tremendous downpour ominously soaked the crowd and shortened the festivities.[12]
The Battlefield Commission already had bigger plans than merely erecting an additional monument. Since the initial battlefield movement that three decades earlier culminated in completing the Confederate cemetery, Perryville’s residents had continued hoping that they could persuade the federal government or the state to purchase the forty or fifty acres surrounding the site, essentially the locale of the battle’s initial clashes, for a battlefield park. The new commission was no exception. The all-Black settlement of Sleettown, lay squarely in the middle of their proposed battlefield. Sleettown actually disappeared in these years of proposed park expansion, its residents abandoning the area for homes in town. The Depression usually is cited as the cause of Sleettown’s demise, but a recently undertaken oral history project should provide more information on the town’s demise. As David Blight has noted, reminders of slavery and Black freedom did not mesh with the national trend toward white reconciliation and memory of the war as a whites-only affair unconnected to slavery. One cannot help but wonder if Sleettown simply was in the way.[13]
Despite continued lobbying and anniversary celebrations, however, nothing could be done during the World War II years, a period when attendance at all national battlefield parks plummeted. Indeed, by the early 1940s the battlefield once again bore signs of ongoing neglect and disrepair, an isolated spot best suited for romantic assignations and other shadowy activities. A pond sprang up in the midst of the field. Weeds and briars wound their way from its banks up the hill toward the stone wall of the cemetery. Vandals repeatedly defaced the monuments. Anniversary activities ceased during the war, and authorities finally hauled away the site’s decorative cannons to melt down the metal for scrap.[14]
With the end of the world conflict came a new, prosperous, and often nostalgic postwar era provided by the sacrifice of soldiers of another conflict and coupled with the fears and continuing nationalism stimulated by the Cold War. After 1945, the relatively new concept of “heritage” became an increasing preoccupation with many Americans, some of whom nationally embraced it with missionary zeal. Not surprisingly, there emerged new hopes to memorialize World War II soldiers’ Civil War progenitors. By 1952, however, the Perryville site’s deterioration had grown so embarrassing to the community that the local Lions Club finally persuaded the State Conservation Commission to step in and create a state park, initially on eighteen acres surrounding the monuments. State workers rebuilt the stone wall around the cemetery, placed two cannon at its gate, sandblasted the older Confederate monument, erected a marker that described the battle, and instituted regular upkeep. Meanwhile, holding up their end of the bargain, the Lions raised funds to build a picnic pavilion with cooking amenities and rest rooms, and reshaped the pond. Later, a playground would be added, further cementing the park’s role as a multi-use facility. Nearby farmers joined in, clearing the surroundings and in so doing again subtly reshaping the landscape of the battlefield as other landowners had been doing since 1862.
On the ninety-second anniversary of the battle, October 8, 1954, Vice President Alben W. Barkley officially opened the Perryville State Battlefield Site. The years that followed saw increased activity and continued small land acquisitions, the pace quickened by the impending centennial of the war. The crowning achievement came on the 100th anniversary, at the height of the Civil War Centennial, when the park curators opened a new museum and visitor’s center near the cemetery. The new visitor center meshed nicely with the Commonwealth’s myriad Centennial observances, which in addition to essay contests and other educational activities emphasized developing the state’s battle grounds as potential tourist sites.
By the mid-1970s, Perryville had grown over time to ninety-eight acres, including the now unmarked Sleettown site. Over 7,000 acres were recognized as a National Historic Landmark. At the park the pond disappeared. Under new park manager Kurt Holman, a subtle shift began that during the early 1990s transformed the site from a multi-use park to a battlefield memorial. The national response seemed to justify the shift, for despite Perryville’s distance from the new interstate highways, the field attracted increasing number of visitors including the new breed of Civil War reenactors, the latter manning an annual and still growing battle recreation every October. Some townspeople complained, however, that in emphasizing history over recreation, the town had lost a popular recreation facility. As a compromise, some of the picnic tables and playground equipment remain.
Perryville’s increasing popularity to be sure was in part of a function of national trends. After a brief downturn in the 1970s, Americans interest in the Civil War again grew steadily through the next two decades, and attendance at parks like Perryville grew commensurately. It peaked in 1990 and 1991 after the initial broadcast of the blockbuster PBS series “The Civil War,” produced by Ken and Ric Burns. By the late nineties, despite the waning of Burns-mania, the Perryville battlefield still averaged a respectable 100,000 visitors a year despite being closed during the winter months.[15]
More dramatic changes, however, were in the offing as the century drew to a close. The year 1990 saw not only the advent of Ken Burns, but also the creation of the Perryville Battlefield Protection Association (PBPA), a largely local group dedicated to preserving, enlarging and interpreting the park through a combination of public and private monies. Like their spiritual predecessors throughout the century, PBPA members not only wanted to preserve and enlarge the field for its historical sake, but also hoped to increase local tourism and benefit the area economically. Working with the state government and private agencies, PBPA members drafted a battlefield management plan. In 1993, the same year that a Congressional committee identified Perryville as a top priority site for preservation, Kentucky provided an additional $2.5 million in federal funding and appointed a Perryville Battlefield Commission to oversee spending those and other public and private funds on implementing the finalized plan. Attorney and noted Civil War scholar Kent Masterson Brown, a native Kentuckian from nearby Danville, first president of PBPA, and former member of the Gettysburg battlefield advisory board, agreed to chair the commission and spearhead the raising of the 20 percent of matching funds made necessary by the state grant.
After appraising those privately-held lands earmarked for battlefield expansion, PBPA began purchasing property in the mid-nineties through the closely affiliated Perryville Enhancement Project (PEP). Among the most crucial PEP acquisitions were 149 acres of farmland from Melvin Bottom, Henry’s descendant. That property alone doubled the size of the existing park to 251 acres, and made possible for the first time a more or less complete tour of the entire battlefield. At the same time, other PBPA members purchased the Squire Bottom House, then in a sad state of disrepair, and commenced its restoration. Separately but in cooperation, PEP and private individuals acquired other historic sites in or near town. With assistance from preservation groups and corporate sponsors, property acquisitions continue today, toward the eventual goal of an 800 acre park. The size of the park at this writing is 370 acres, and PBPA has affected an additional 300 acres through protective easements. Plans call for the construction of representative cabins on appropriate sites after archaeological investigation, the simultaneous deconstruction of modern structures, restoration of the landscape to approximate the scene in 1862, the creation of a three mile hiking trail to follow the Confederate march from town to field, creation of an audio driving tour, and the addition of non-obtrusive informational markers. A museum located in town in a period structure will replace the existing but increasingly cramped visitor center.[16]
As the park expanded during the 1990s, those supporters interested in it further refined their goals. Battlefields nationally at the end of the century once again became contested ground between those who wanted battlefields to teach important lessons, inculcate patriotism (American or Confederate), right old wrongs, or preserve green space from rapacious developers. While some defended battlefields as sacred spots made holy in martyrs’ blood, others chastised the keepers of battlefield parks for both idealizing war on beautiful pastoral grounds that misrepresent the horrible totality of what occurred there, and for ignoring troubling political, social, and ideological questions that belie the lingering benign spirit of Blue-Gray reconciliation. Still others asked if the parks had not ‘wasted’ enough space as they opposed expansion plans in favor of commercial development at places such as Manassas. In 1999, Illinois Congressman Jesse Jackson, Jr., inaugurated a particularly lively debate when he called on the National Park Service to move beyond strict battlefield interpretation and broaden coverage of slavery and other issues that caused the war in the first place.[17]
At Perryville, however, Clarence Wyatt, a college professor and PBPA’s second president, already had raised the issue two years earlier in PBPA’s member newsletter. “How do we preserve the past?” Wyatt wrote. “Whose past is preserved? Who chooses? By what standards? Those of us who support the Perryville project have a responsibility to examine our own answers to these questions.” Admitting that many would focus solely on the battle, he continued, “are we really telling the full story of Perryville? What about the townspeople....And can we speak of the residents as a monolithic group? What about women? African Americans, slave and free? And in the same way, what if we dismiss the military aspects of this story as old-fashioned or out of favor?”[18]
Wyatt received little initial response, and initial PBPA policies suggested a continuation of the policy of emphasizing the battle rather than the “full story.” Its current Sleettown history project, however, seems to mark a new thrust. In the meantime, some townspeople have expressed second thoughts about the projected growth the battlefield might bring. At least a few quietly resent PBPA for the pressure brought to acquire property. In an ironic twist, a new water tower designed to accommodate future growth also has come in for criticism from Civil War enthusiasts, who note that the tower is in full view of the battlefield, marring the horizon. In regard to history, memory, and tourism, Perryville probably has not seen its last battle.
Notes
[1]. The standard sources for the battle are Kenneth A. Hafendorfer, Perryville: Battle for Kentucky. 2nd ed. (Louisville: KH Press, 1991); and James Lee McDonough, War in Kentucky: From Shiloh to Perryville (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1994). A new if brief treatment is found within Earl J. Hess, Banners to the Breeze: The Kentucky Campaign, Corinth, and Stones River (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2000). See also my initial Perryville foray, a paper given in 1997 and published three years later as “‘Grand Havoc’: The Climactic Battle of Perryville,” in Kent Masterson Brown, ed., The Civil War in Kentucky: Battle for the Bluegrass State (Mason City, Iowa: Savas, 2000), 175-220. Several of my interpretations have evolved since then, as witnessed in a forthcoming monograph, “Perryville: ‘This Grand Havoc of Battle,’” (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2001). For the “Kentucky dream,” see Thomas Connelly and Archer Jones, The Politics of Command: Factions and Ideas in Confederate Strategy (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1973).
[2]. RG 56, General Records of the Department of the Treasury, Records of the Division of Captured Property, Claims, and Lands, Case nos. 9877 and 2514 consolidated, National Archives and Records Administration (cited hereafter as NARA). Bottom’s war claim is summarized in Kurt Holman, “Henry P. ‘Squire’ Bottom’s War Claim,” unpublished paper, Perrryville Battlefield Historic Site, Perryville, Ky. (Cited hereafter as PSHS).
[3]. James Stewart, Bowling Green, Ky., to My Dear Wife, Nov. 8, 1862, James Stewart Letter, Filson Club and Historical Library, Louisville, Ky. See also Cincinnati Daily Commercial, Nov. 12, 1862; Jefferson J. Polk, Autobiography of Dr. J.J. Polk: To Which is Added His Occasional Writings and Biographies of Worthy Men and Women of Boyle County, Ky., (Louisville: John P. Morton, 1867), 96-98.
[4]. Harry Lewis, Perryville, Ky., to Folks, Oct. 19, 1862, and Lewis, Lebanon, Ky., to Folks, Nov. 8, 1862, Lewis Family Letters, Ohio Historical Society, Columbus, Ohio (hereafter cited as OHS); Bliss Morse, Danville, Ky., to Mother, Oct. 154, 1862, Bliss Morse Papers, OHS; Documents of the United States Sanitary Commission, v. 1, (New York: n.p., 1866), Document No. 55, 9; Cincinnati Daily Commercial, Nov. 12, 1862 (quotation); “Graves of Our Dead at Perryville,” Confederate Veteran 3 (1895), 385; Thomas A. Head, Campaigns and Battles of the Sixteenth Regiment, Tennessee Volunteers.... (Nashville: Cumberland Presbyterian Press, 1885), 98-99; Polk, Autobiography of Dr. J.J. Polk, 96-98; Lyle Thoburn, ed., My Experiences During the Civil War (Cleveland: n.p., 1963), Oct. 13, 1862; Richard C. Brown, A History of Danville and Boyle County, Kentucky, 1774-1992 (Danville, Ky.: Bicentennial Books, 1992), 36-37; Geraldine Craig Harmon, Chaplin Hills: History of Perryville, Kentucky, Boyle County (Danville, Ky.: Bluegrass, 1971); Hambleton Tapp, “The Battle of Perryville, 1862,” Filson Club History Quarterly 9 (1935): 180-81.
[5]. Polk, Autobiography of J.J. Polk, 46; Brown, History of Danville and Boyle County, 38-47.
[6]. Polk, Autobiography of J.J. Polk, 98-101; “Account of the Re-interment of Soldiers Buried on the Battlefield,” Roll of Honor: Names of Soldiers Who Died in Defence of the American Union, Interred in the National and Public Cemeteries of Kentucky.... (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1868). In terms of identifying the dead, things have not improved very much. Kurt Holman, who has spent over a decade attempting to identify every known grave of men killed or mortally wounded at Perryville, indicates that as of today, only 626 Perryville casualties lay identified in marked graves, roughly a quarter of the battle’s casualties. See Holman, Perryville, Ky., to Kenneth W. Noe, May 26, 2000, Author’s Collection, PSHS.
[7]. Danville [Ky.] Kentucky Advocate, Apr. 2, 1900, clipping in William Woodward Collection, Perryville Enhancement Project, Perryville, Ky.; John E. Kleber, ed., The Kentucky Encyclopedia (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1992), 158.
[8]. Marshall P. Thatcher, A Hundred Battles in the West.... (Detroit: The Author, 1884), 75.
[9]. Robert Underwood Johnson and Clarence Clough Buel, eds., Battles and Leaders of the Civil War, v. 3 (New York: Century, 1888), 1-61; Stephen D. Engle, Don Carlos Buell: Most Promisng of All (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1999), 346-39.
[10]. Danville [Ky.] Kentucky Advocate, Apr. 2, 1900, and Monongahela Republican, Oct. 1912, clippings in Woodward Collection, PEP Pittsburgh Gazette Times, Oct. 12, 1908.
[11]. Danville [Ky.] Kentucky Advocate, Apr. 2, 1900, and Monongahela Republican, Oct. 1912, clippings in Woodward Collection, PEP; Harmon, Chaplin Hills, ch. 11; Paul H. Buck, The Road to Reunion, 1865-1900 (Boston: Little, Brown, 1937), 257-62; Gaines M. Foster, Ghosts of the Confederacy: Defeat, The Lost Cause, and the Emergence of the New South, 1865 to 1913 (new York: Oxford University Press, 1987), 40-42, 44, 129-30, 158, 167-68; Amy Kinsel, “From Turning Point to Peace Memorial: A Cultural Legacy,” 203-22, in Gabor S. Borritt, ed., The Gettysburg Nobody Knows (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), 205-22; Michael Kammen, Mystic Chords of Memory: The Transformation of Tradition in American Culture (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1991), 106-18; Stuart McConnell, Glorious Contentment: The Grand Army of the Republic, 1865-1900 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1992), 189-93; John S. Patterson, “From Battle Ground to Pleasure Ground: Gettysburg as a Historic Site,” in Warren Leon and Roy Rosenweig, eds., History Museums in the Unites States: A Critical Assessment (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1989), 128-40.
[12]. Harmon, Chaplin Hills, ch. 11; Kammen, Mystic Chords of Memory, 456; Kinsel, “From Turning Point to Peace Memorial,” 218-19.
[13]. David W. Blight, Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2001).
[14]. Harmon, Chaplin Hills, ch. 11; Patterson, “From Battle Ground to Pleasure Ground,” 142.
[15]. Harmon, Chaplin Hills, ch. 11; “Information Sheet,” Perryville Enhancement Project, n.d, PEP: Kammen, Mystic Chords of Memory, 533, 538-39, 572, 590-605; Patterson, “From Battle Ground to Pleasure Ground,” 142-43; Kurt Holman, Perryville, Ky., to Kenneth W. Noe, Mar. 3, 2000, Author’s Collection, PSHS.
[16]. See especially the following issues of PBPA’s newsletter, Action Front: v. 2 (July 1993): 1-3; v. 3 (Oct. 1994), 1-4; v. 4 (July 1995): 1-3; v. 5 (April 1996): 1-4; v. 5 (Aug. 1996): 2; v. 5 (Oct. 1996): 1-3; v. 6 (Jan. 1997):1; v. 6 (Apr. 1997): 1-3; v. 6 (July 1997): 1; v. 7 (Jan. 1998): 1; v. 7 (Apr. 1998): 1; v. 7 (Oct. 1998): 1, 4; v. 8 (July 1999): 1,2. Up-to-date information is provided on the PBPA website, <www.perryville.net>.
[17]. Edward Tabor Linenthal, Sacred Ground: Americans and Their Battlefields (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1991), 1-6, 89-118; Kinsel, “From Turning Point to Peace Memorial,” 221-22; Kate Masur, “Changes in the Offing for Civil War Sites,” Perspectives Online, March 2000 <www.theaha.org/perspectives>, paper copy in Author’s Collection, PSHS. Jackson’s call led to a long debate on H-CIVWAR, an electronic “list server” maintained by Michigan State University.
[18]. Action Front 6 (Oct. 1997): 1.
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