Perryville: The Fight for the Heartland

In the fall of 1862, after the great victories of the Seven Days and the Second Manassas, the Confederates began their only coordinated campaign in both the East and West. A campaign that would make everything that came afterwards, Gettysburg, Vicksburg, Appomattox, inevitable. The Confederate government hoped that by launching a two-pronged offensive into the border states of Maryland and Kentucky they could bring the war to a quick, victorious conclusion. In addition to bringing new recruits and supplies to the cause, the campaigns were designed to bring European recognition to the fledgling Confederate nation and possible armed intervention by Britain and France. The Campaign in the East would result in the single bloodiest day of the war and in the west a confrontation that for the number of troops involved just as horrific. Perryville would end the South's best hopes of winning the war. Had the South won the Union capital would have fallen, the South would have controlled the Ohio River and the Chesapeake Bay. More importantly, the Confederates would have possessed the main rail lines to the west and key manufacturing facilities. Shot with the cooperation of renowned Civil War experts and eight thousand re-enactors on the actual battlefield, Perryville covers the pre-war situation in the Border States and the early battles along the Mississippi and Tennessee Rivers.