The Battle of Perryville was the largest Civil War engagement fought on Kentucky soil, and its violence didn’t end when the armies moved on. With more than 7,500 casualties, the exhausted Union troops left behind couldn’t handle burying the dead or caring for the wounded, so the job fell to Perryville’s own residents.
Stuart W. Sanders, former executive director of the Perryville Battlefield Preservation Association, draws on period sources to reconstruct how the town’s homes, churches, and barns became makeshift hospitals. It’s a vivid, unflinching look at what a Civil War battle left behind for the civilians who had to clean it up.
Published 2012
160 pages
$18.96