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The Cincinnati Enquirer newspaper reported that the veterans throughout central Kentucky, including Boyle, Marion, Mercer, Washington, and Casey counties and many distant districts were preparing to meet for a joint reunion on the battlefield. The Louisville Courier Journal newspaper pointed out that there had been several reunions on the battlefield in the past, but for the first time “The “Old Confeds” and the boys who followed the Star and Stripes” would meet together for the first time in a joint reunion since 1861. The reunion was the result of the G. C. Wharton Post, G. A. R. of Springfield, Kentucky. The event would be aided by the people around Perryville. Everyone in the immediate vicinity would bring baskets filled with food for the veterans. Some of the speakers who would attend the event were Colonel Silas Adams, of Union Colonel Frank Wolford’s 1st Kentucky Cavalry, ex-Confederate General and ex-Governor Simon Bolivar Buckner, Judge Mike Saufley, and Confederate Colonel Robert J. Breckinridge, Jr. General Edward Hobson from Lawrenceburg, Kentucky was expected to make a brief visit. The newspaper pointed out that during the battle a number of Union generals were killed and many field officers were wounded during the battle. The generals killed were Union Generals James S. Jackson, William Terrill, and George Webster. The paper also stated that Union General William Lytle, the author of the poem “I am Dying, Egypt, Dying,” was wounded during the battle. i.
Of the 138 skirmishes and battles that took place in the state of Kentucky during the Civil War, the battle of Perryville was one of the most important and one of the most bloodiest. The Louisville Courier-Journal newspaper, which covered the reunion, wrote that of the twenty-five thousand Federals soldiers actually engaged in the battle, there were four thousand lost in killed and wounded, while the Confederates under Confederate General Braxton Bragg’s Army of the Mississippi lost one-fifth of the fifteen thousand soldiers engaged. All of the losses occurred between 2:30 pm and 6 pm. The paper stated that for the numbers engaged and the duration of battle, the battle of Perryville was one of the most destructive in military annals.
On the day of the reunion, hundreds of soldiers, both Union and Confederate, assembled on the battlefield. There were also two thousand spectators attending the reunion. The reunion was held where the Confederate lines were formed, opposite the hill from where the 15th Kentucky was almost wiped out, which put the location near the H. P. Bottom’s house and Doctor’s Creek. Unfortunately, Buckner and Hobson were not able to attend the event, but Colonel Breckinridge gave a speech which “filled the boys with enthusiasm and started a wave of good feeling.” Colonel Robert Breckinridge Jr. formed the nucleus of the famous Kentucky “Orphan Brigade.” His speech was “intensely” patriotic. Although he fought the Union soldiers, he held no malice towards them. His speech was followed by Rev. E. M. McMillan, of Lebanon, Kentucky, who stated he represented both sides, since his father was a Federal chaplain and his mother was a relative of Confederate General Thomas “Stonewall” Jackson. ii.
The baskets, which were filled with food, were brought by the people of Perryville to provide dinner for the veterans. The crowd formed a procession and marched a mile to where 480 Confederate veterans were buried, which is now located in front of the Perryville Battlefield State Historic Site museum. The War Hardin Rifles, under Captain Charles Corn of Harrodsburg acted as escort to the graveyard and fired a salute in honor of the dead. After the graves had been decorated, the crowd left. iii. The Louisville Courier-Journal paper wrote that thirty-three years had passed since the battle that brought “together on opposite sides so many Kentuckians. In a State where the wounds of the war were so quickly healed, the reunion is not remarkable; but the occasion it celebrates was.” iv.
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