ahead a few steps before dropping dead.
The regiment, fighting alone for the better
part of an hour, pressed the Confederates
hard and won the nickname the “Bloody
Tenth.” Lytle had proven his worth as a
combat leader while also continuing his
unfortunate habit of getting injured. His
commander, Rosecrans, marked him down
as a man who would fight.
The wound at Carnifex Ferry knocked
Lytle out of action for the next four
months, and he returned to Cincinnati to
recuperate. In November 1861, the regi-
ment arrived home on leave and immedi-
ately marched past Lytle’s mansion at
Third and Broadway, cheering loudly and
throwing their hats into the air while their
colonel, still unable to ride a horse, took a
seat in an open barouche alongside regi-
mental pastor Father William O’Higgins
and led the men on an impromptu parade
through the city. The 10th’s now-tattered
battle flag was proudly displayed in the
window of Shillito’s department store.
After a brief interlude as company com-
mander of Camp Morton at Bardstown,
Kentucky, Lytle rejoined the Army of the
Ohio, now led by Maj. Gen. Don Carlos
Buell. His hard fighting at Carnifex Ferry
had won Lytle advancement to the brigade
level as commander of the 17th Brigade,
3rd Division. The brigade included the
10th Ohio, 3rd Ohio, 15th Kentucky, and
42nd Indiana. Brig. Gen. Ormsby Mitchel,
an old professor of Lytle’s at Cincinnati
College, commanded the division. Despite
his new position, Lytle was passed over for
brigadier general, an omission his ever
solicitous sister Lily attributed to rumors
that he was drinking heavily. “It cannot
pain you half as much to read this my
brother as it pains me to write it,” she told
him. “But when you know that promo-
tions—respect & everything you are ambi-
tious of awaits your abstaining from the
vile poison it is incomprehensible to me
why you have not the moral courage to
abandon it forever.”
Lytle, who had responded to a similar
entreaty from Lily two months earlier by
promising to abide “happily” by her
wishes, apparently did not feel the need tore-avow his dedication to abstinence.
Future letters did not mention the matter,
although Lytle complained to his brother-
in-law Samuel Broadwell that he had been
“treated like a dog from the jump” in the
matter of promotion. Continuing the
metaphor, he attributed his situation to “a
lot of dogs at Cincinnati or Columbus or
Washington [who] have tracked me like
bloodhounds.” He threatened darkly to
“settle my private accounts with the cow-
ardly miscreants who have maligned me”
once the war was over.
For the time being, Lytle was too busy
with garrison and patrol duty in northern
Alabama to worry about his political ene-
mies. “My life has been one of constant
activity and incessant unremitting toil,” he
told his sisters. “Never in my life have I
done so much hard work.” Operating out
of Huntsville, Lytle’s brigade was respon-
sible for safeguarding the Athens &
Decatur Railroad and the bridges across
the Elk River. It was arduous and unwel-
come duty, particularly in an area of the
South that recently had suffered the brutal
touch of Cossack-style campaigning,
thanks to the hard hand of Lytle’s fellow
3rd Division commander, Russian-born
Colonel John Basil Turchin, born Ivan Tur-
chinineff. Turchin’s 8th Brigade had sacked
and plundered nearby Athens, Alabama,
after Confederate snipers fired on them
from upstairs windows in the town. To
Lytle’s “great disgust,” he said, the sistersof a family friend had been “plundered of
everything they had” by Turchin’s soldiers.
It did not improve Lytle’s mood to learn
that Turchin had been recommended,
along with him and their divisional com-
rade, Colonel Joshua Sill, for promotion—
or that both Turchin and Sill would be pro-
moted ahead of him later that year.
At the end of August 1862, Lytle and the
rest of the Army of the Ohio rushed north-
ward to stave off Confederate General
Braxton Bragg’s surprise invasion of Ken-
tucky. For a time, no one knew what
Bragg’s intentions were, and cities along
the Ohio River from Louisville to Cincin-
nati fortified themselves against imminent
Rebel assault. Lytle’s sisters naturally wor-
ried that their hometown would come
under attack, as did their brother, but at
the last minute Bragg swung away from
the river and turned southeastward into
rural Kentucky to link up with General
Edmund Kirby Smith’s army at Bard-
stown. On October 8, the Union and Con-
federate armies blundered into each other
on the outskirts of Perryville, a small ham-
let nine miles southwest of Harrodsburg
on the banks of the drought-stricken
Chaplin River.
From the start, the Battle of Perryville
was an affair—one could scarcely call it a
comedy—of errors. Owing to a natural
phenomenon known as “acoustic
shadow,” Buell could not hear the roar of
cannons three miles away, and his second
in command, Maj. Gen. Charles Gilbert,
blithely assured him “that his children
were all quiet and by sunset he would have
them all in bed, nicely tucked up.” Mean-
while, Lytle’s brigade, in Brig. Gen. Lovell
Rousseau’s division on the Union left, was
being roughly handled by successive waves
of Confederate infantry led by Brig. Gen.
Patrick Cleburne’s redoubtable division.
Attempting to rally his men on the
heights overlooking Doctor’s Creek, a trib-
utary of the Chaplin River, Lytle was
struck behind the ear by a piece of Rebel
shrapnel that exited his cheek and knocked
him to the ground. Left for dead along
with 265 of his 500 men, he was found sit-
ting dazedly on a rock, still holding his“My life has been one
of constant activity and
incessant unremitting
toil,” Lytle told his
sisters. “Never in my
life have I done
so much hard work.”
CWQ-EW16 William Lytle_Layout 1 10/22/15 2:42 PM Page 76