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Highlights for October 8
The Confederate invasion of Kentucky stalls when Union General Don Carlos Buell stops General Braxton Bragg at Perryville.
In August, two Confederate forces, commanded by Bragg and General Edmund Kirby Smith, entered Kentucky. The Rebels hoped to raise troops and recoup territory lost during the summer. The invasion started well when Bragg captured a Yankee garrison at Mumfordsville on August 28 and Smith routed a Union force at Richmond on August 30. Despite the victories, the Confederates were disappointed by the response they received from Kentuckians. Bragg's army hauled 15,000 extra rifles to equip Kentuckians they hoped would join the Rebel army, but Union sentiment and presence were strong in the state. Buell's army had 78,000 men, and another 80,000 Federal recruits were drilling in Louisville and Cincinnati. With such a strong Union presence, many Kentuckians were unwilling to take up with the Confederacy.
Buell marched 58,000 men toward Bragg's army while he sent another 20,000 to confront Smith. Buell caught up with the Confederates outside of Perryville on October 7. Bragg was installing a provisional government in Frankfort, so General Leonidas Polk deployed the Confederate army in front of the Union lines west of Perryville. Bragg arrived the next morning around 10 a.m., perturbed because Polk had not yet attacked the Yankees. Bragg did not realize the size of the force he faced--he assumed it was a single corps and not the bulk of Buell's army. He ordered a strike for the early afternoon, hoping to fold the Union left flank back upon the rest of the army. The plan nearly worked. The assault drove Federals under the command of Alexander McCook back in disarray, and an acoustic shadow prevented Buell, who was two miles away, from hearing the battle. When Buell was finally alerted, he rode forward and directed two brigades to effectively shore up McCook's sagging line. A smaller Confederate attack against the right side of the Yankee line was turned back, and nightfall halted the fighting. Realizing that he was outnumbered, Bragg began a withdrawal.
The losses were heavy. Of 23,000 Yankees engaged in the battle, 4,200 were killed, wounded, or missing; of 15,000 Confederates involved, 3,400 were lost. Bragg retreated south to rejoin Smith, and the Confederates slipped back to Tennessee through the Cumberland Gap. Buell did not pursue, and as a result he was replaced by General William Rosecrans. The Confederates abandoned the invasion of Kentucky and it remained firmly in Federal hands for the rest of the war.
More Highlights on the American Civil War
1871 The Great Fire destroys much of Chicago
On this night in 1871, at nine o'clock on a Sunday evening, fire breaks out in a barn behind the Chicago cottage of Patrick O'Leary. ( according to legend, Mrs. O'Leary's cow kicked over a lantern in her barn. And though evidence suggests it was not Mrs. O'Leary's cow that started the blaze, many people still believe that Mrs. O'Leary's cow started the fire. The Chicago City Council once passed a resolution exonerating the cow and apologizing to the O'Leary family.)
Winds blowing off the prairie fed the flames, and the fire spread rapidly and engulfs the center of the city, and around midnight jumps the Chicago River, burning the southern portion of the city to the ground by daybreak. As thousands of panicked Chicagoans flee to the north, the fire pursues them, and by Monday the flames have reached Fullerton Avenue, then the northern-most limit of the city. Tuesday morning a saving rain begins to fall, and the flames finally die out, leaving Chicago a smoking ruin.
The fire eventually consumed a four-mile-long and two-third-mile-wide swath of Chicago. When the Great Fire was finally over two days later, nearly 300 people were dead, one hundred thousand were homeless, and Chicago's booming downtown was in ashes. The fire destroyed more than 17,000 buildings and the original Emancipation. Despite the devastation, Chicago would rise again and continue to be the economic center of the American West for decades to come.
Most people think of Chicago as a midwestern city, and geographically it obviously is. But economically, Chicago is best seen as the unofficial regional capital and economic center of the American West. Because of its location on the western edge of a system of lakes, rivers, and canals that linked the city to the East, Chicago was the natural destination for both western raw materials moving East and eastern manufactured goods moving West. After the Civil War, Chicago quickly eclipsed St. Louis as the primary trading hub between East and West, and the city's fate was inextricably tied to the rapidly growing settlement and development of western natural resources. Millions of dollars worth of cattle, lumber, swine, and grain that had originated in the plains of Wyoming or the mountains of Montana were channeled through the massive freight yards, slaughterhouses, and grain elevators of Chicago. Indeed, a look at a map of the U.S. during the 1880s revealed that while all roads may have once led to Rome, by the late 19th century all railroads led to Chicago.
Although the Great Fire of 1871 destroyed Chicago's downtown, it left most of the city's essential industrial infrastructure in place. Scarcely missing a beat, the towering grain elevators and vast stockyards continued to collect the growing output of the West, process it into pork sausages or two-by-fours, and send it onward to the insatiable markets of the East.
Foot Note
Maybe you heard this story? On the evening of October 8, 1871, a small fire starts near the O'Leary's barn on the South side of Chicago. Strong winds whip it into the Great Chicago Fire. It rages through the city for thirty-one hours, killing two hundred fifty people and leaving 100,000 homeless. The devastation is immense.
But it isn't the deadliest fire in US History.
That dubious honor goes to a frightening blaze that killed more than a thousand people in and around the small town of Peshtigo, Wisconsin. But hardly anyone's ever heard of the Great Peshtigo fire. A case of bad timing. It took place 300 miles north of the Chicago fire… on the very same night.
1918 ALVIN YORK KILLS 25 AND CAPTURES 132:
During World War I, U.S. Corporal Alvin C. York is credited with single-handedly killing 25 German soldiers and capturing 132 in the Argonne Forest of France. The action saved York's small detachment from annihilation by a German machine-gun nest and won the reluctant warrior from backwater Tennessee the Congressional Medal of Honor.
Born in a log cabin in rural Tennessee in 1887, Alvin Cullum York supplemented his family's subsistence farming by hunting and, like his father, was soon an expert marksman. He also earned a reputation as a hell-raiser, and few imagined he would amount to anything but trouble. Around 1915, however, York experienced a religious conversion after a friend was killed in a bar brawl. He joined the fundamentalist Church of Christ in Christian Union and served as song leader and Sunday school teacher at the local church.
Two months after the United States declared war on Germany in 1917, York received his draft notice. Because his church opposed war, he asked for conscientious objector status but was denied at both the state and local level because the small Church of Christ in Christian Union was not recognized as a legitimate Christian sect. Enlisting in the 82nd Infantry Division, he was offered noncombat duty but eventually agreed to fight after being convinced by a superior that America's cause was just.
On October 8, 1918, York and 15 other soldiers under the command of Sergeant Bernard Early were dispatched to seize a German-held rail point during the Allies' Meuse-Argonne Offensive. The Americans lost their way and soon found themselves behind enemy lines. A brief firefight ensued with a superior German force, and in the confusion a group of Germans surrendered. However, German machine-gunners on a hill overlooking the scene soon noticed the small size of Early's patrol. Yelling in German for their comrades to take cover, the machine gunners opened fire on the Americans, cutting down half the detachment, including Sergeant Early.
York immediately returned fire and with his marksman eye began picking off the German gunners. He then fearlessly charged the machine-gun nest. Several of the other surviving Americans followed his lead and probably contributed to the final total of 25 enemy killed. With his automatic pistol, York shot down six German soldiers sent out of the trench to intercept him. The German commander, thinking he had underestimated the size of the American force, surrendered as York reached the machine-gun nest. York and the other seven survivors took custody of some 90 Germans and on the way back to the Allied lines encountered 40 or so other enemy troops, who were coerced to surrender by the German major that the Americans had in their custody. The final tally was 132 prisoners.
York was promoted to the rank of sergeant and hailed as the greatest civilian soldier of the war by several Allied leaders. He was given a hero's welcome upon his return to the United States in 1919 and was awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor, the nation's highest military decoration. In the 1920s, he used his fame to raise funds for the York Industrial Institute (now Alvin C. York Institute), a school for underprivileged children in rural Tennessee. He later opened a Bible school. Sergeant York, the 1941 film starring Gary Cooper, was based on his life. York died in 1964.
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