Six months after Shiloh, the 4th Tennessee was deep in Kentucky with Braxton Bragg's army. The regiment had reorganized at Corinth under a new colonel, Otho Strahl, and marched north through Middle Tennessee in the late summer heat. On the evening of October 7 it left its camp near Harrodsburg at sunset and reached Perryville about midnight. The men slept on their arms in an open field.
The battle opened the next afternoon on the Confederate right, where Cheatham's division struck the Union left. About three o'clock General Leonidas Polk led Stewart's brigade to the far right of the line. The 4th Tennessee went in on the final charge through a cornfield toward a Union battery some four hundred yards ahead, taking fire from the flank as it went. The regiment pushed right up to the guns and drove the gunners from them. When the color bearer fell, Lewis White of the 4th caught up the flag and re-formed the men on it, the broken staff jammed into the muzzle of his rifle.
Beyond the cornfield, the Union brigade of Colonel John Starkweather held a hill behind a stone wall. Stewart's and Maney's brigades threw themselves at it again and again until dark. They could not take it. Stewart's brigade lost 423 men that day.
The 4th Tennessee lost about eighty-five men at Perryville, close to half of those it took into the fight. For the guns it had silenced, the regiment earned the right to carry crossed cannon, inverted, on its battle flag. The next morning the men marched to Harrodsburg and traded their old muskets for Enfield rifles picked up on the field. By then Bragg had already begun his withdrawal from Kentucky.
The Wigfall Grays at Perryville. First Lieutenant W. O. Capers and Privates William Parker and J. F. Reed were killed. Captain Wiley T. Cargill was slightly wounded, and Z. C. Debrach and A. Waller were wounded.
Sources: Luke W. Finlay, "Fourth Tennessee Infantry," Military Annals of Tennessee (1886); report of Col. John C. Starkweather, Official Records, Ser. I, Vol. 16, Pt. 1; list of casualties, ibid., p. 1108; compiled service records, National Archives; Morton Museum of Collierville History, master roster of the Wigfall Grays.
The story of Corporal Merritt R. Brown, the Wigfall Grays and their town is told in An Honor Unearned: From the Streets of Collierville, Tennessee, to Edgefield, South Carolina, by Michael Louis Meece. Available on Amazon in paperback and Kindle. More about the book at anhonorunearned.org.