Final Line

Final Line. Perryville . The Battle For Kentucky. , When night fell and the fighting ended, Union troops in this area feared the Confederates would resume the attack. The Union army controlled the crucial Dixville Crossroads, the intersection located to your right. The Union soldiers spent several hours moving supplies and equipment off the Mackville Road and onto the Dixville Road, toward the rest of their army., Once the Union troops secured their lines of communication to the rest of their army, the Dixville Crossroads were no longer important and were abandoned. The Northern soldiers then pulled back to a new defensive position, located here. From this point they awaited the next Confederate attack. However, there would be no more fighting. The outnumbered Southerners withdrew to Harrodsburg, located ten miles northeast of Perryville., The Union soldiers spent the next day (October 9, 1862) gathering the wounded and burying their dead. This was the final Union position on the battlefield., The battlefield presented horrific scenes to the soldiers and civilians who walked the ground after the fight. One member of the 36th Illinois Volunteer Infantry recalled that, "The road for miles was strewn with clothing, muskets and military trappings of every description. Every farm house and barn along the route was tenanted with wounded rebels . . . some of them with hardly life enough remaining to realize the horrors of their situation; others mangled and bleeding, presented sad sights and sounds, never to be forgotten." One Hoosier veteran concurred. "Upon visiting the battle field [the] next day a sad sight was presented to view," he wrote. "The dead . . . lay just as they had fallen. Some with features calm and serene, others ghastly and distorted, some mangled and torn, others pierced by a single shell.", The Union soldiers buried their own dead in regimental plots, which were later moved to Camp Nelson in Jessamine County, but left the Confederate dead unburied. As one Union soldier explained, "Not that [we were] unfeeling or inhuman, but it was not [our] business to kill, and then bury traitors." Others refused to bury Southern corpses because the Confederates reputedly plundered Federal bodies. As late as October 16, more than a week after the battle, a Union officer complained, "There are hundreds of men being eaten by the buzzards and hogs." Finally, Federal authorities in Perryville ordered Southern sympathizers to bury the dead Confederates, and most of the bodies were placed into two large pits. This mass grave is now located across from the battlefield museum.