by MJ Gabbard For the invading armies of the North, the Ohio River the arm holding the spear pointed at the South's heart, the Mississippi River. It was after securing that arm with the capture of Vicksburg that Sherman was able to plunge it through the South's heart, from Chattanooga through Atlanta, and all the way to the Sea.
-Jesse Cox, 1949
Thus Kentucky was a far more enormous prize than is often recognized in 1862, and once lost, was perhaps the Confederacy's greatest strategic liability. Had Kentucky been fully secured in the Fall of 1861 and held in 1862, the South would have had access to the North's primary artery for rapid supply and communication of U.S. forces in the Western Theater, and connected the North to the most important waterway on the continent, the Mississippi River. Free travel and operational control of the Ohio River also opened up the Federal Army's most lethal invasion routes through Tennessee on the Tennessee and Cumberland Rivers, which effectively broke the Confederacy's strategic back in the West. (As both Grant and Sherman stated, in their different ways, the corridor of the Tennessee and Cumberland Rivers from near Paducah to Nashville, seemed to have been ready-made by Providence for invasion through the Upper South.)
With control of the state of Kentucky maintained or regained by Bragg and Kirby Smith's offensive in the Fall of 1862, the South could have disrupted Federal traffic on the Ohio, choking off the life-line of the Federal Armies to the South and West with it's vast daily amounts of supplies and troop transports full of re-inforcements, enabled the threatening of the Midwestern states along the Ohio's northern bank, and last but not least, forced Federal high command to react to the Confederates rather than the reverse. And so, when Bragg was turned back at Perryville in October of 1862, what was at stake was far more than fat Bluegrass cattle, Kentucky thoroughbreds, and the additional recruits the South could have possibly gained, but to a very large degree, the fate of the War itself. For the fall of Kentucky paved the way for the fall of all that followed, from Nashville to New Orleans after Donelson, control of the Mississippi at Vicksburg, the fall of Atlanta, the March to Sea and the roasting of South Carolina, eventually on to Appomattox in the end. Despite all of the attention given to Lee's mighty efforts in the East, as first Grant and later Sherman would prove, the War would be won or lost in the West, long before the issue could ever be decided in Virginia. And more than any other state, Kentucky was the key to the West.
The crippling loss of Kentucky as a Federal launching pad from the Ohio River virtually guaranteed the eventual loss of the Mississippi. And with the fall of the Mississippi, the fate of the entire Confederacy had been decided. From that time forward, the only question that remained was how much more the people of the South would suffer before acknowledging their inevitable defeat.