Copyright 2011 by
The Curators of the University of Missouri
University of Missouri Press, Columbia, Missouri 65201
Printed and bound in the United States of America
All rights reserved
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Cataloging-in-Publication data available from the Library of Congress.
ISBN 978-0-8262-1949-7
This paper meets the requirements of the American National Standard for Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, Z39.48, 1984.
Design and composition: Jennifer Cropp
Printer and binder: Thomson-Shore, Inc
Typefaces: Minion, Adobe Jenson, and Rage Joi D
ISBN: 978-0-8262-7263-8 (electronic)
I would dedicate this work first and foremost to my wife, Katherine L. Allen, whose lifelong patience and support has always made her a part of anything I have ever accomplished, and, in this project, to the years of family members, teachers and school chums who have patiently borne part of the burden of my obsession with the 1864 Missouri campaign.
Introduction
By the fall of 1864, the American Civil War had entered its final and most desperately brutal months. Trench warfare mired the vast armies in Virginia while the hellish turn of events in Georgia aimed at breaking the morale and spirit of the civilian population. In futile desperation, large Confederate armies shook free of the Federal death grip for a final rampage through the Shenandoah Valley, Tennessee, and Missouri. The last of these, Price's Raid, is not only the least discussed but frequently also remains unmentioned in single-volume accounts of the war.
Certainly, one can ascribe much of the negligence to the ponderous parochialism accorded the Trans-Mississippi, reflecting the wartime priorities of both Washington and Richmond. After settling their respective claims in Missouri during the first year of the war, both governments contented themselves with self-fulfilling assumptions that marginalized the region's role and siphoned off the manpower from west of the river to Mississippi, Tennessee, or Georgia (which, in turn, suffered neglect in the interests of the war in Virginia). For this reason, in most accounts of the war, Missouri tends to wink out of existence after the first year, or makes periodic cameos as a sideshow of guerrilla warfare in which the brutality takes center stage rather than the military role of those brutalities within the wider conflict.
Nevertheless, the numbers involved justify no such inattention. The Confederates enumerated over 12,000 at the inception of the operation with perhaps 2,000 to 3,000 partisans already active in the state. They claimed to have acquired between 5,000 and 9,000 more men along the way. Even allowing for exaggeration, as many as 15,000 or more may have marched at some point with Price's army, though he never had a force near this large at the same timeand, in the end, lost many more men than he gained.
The Federals mobilized massive numbers to meet the incursion. Starting with only about 11,000 garrison troops across the entire state, they called more from Kansas and Illinois. They rushed several thousand more recruits into uniform and diverted another 9,000 veterans who had been on their way to Georgia. Before the campaign was over, they also mobilized over 24,000 Enrolled Missouri Militia (EMM) and perhaps 10,000 Kansas State Militia, which included an indeterminate number of exempts and resident aliens placed under arms. This brought into action a total of around 65,000 to 70,000 Unionists.
The fall 1864 campaign in Missouri put into motion numbers comparable to the contemporary operations in Georgia. However, the final, desperate Confederate gamble in the far west covered five times the distance as General William T. Sherman's march. One veteran described the last campaign beyond the Mississippi; a campaign in which a part of the Union troops and most of the confederates marched over 1500 miles. It began in a torrid heat and end[ed] in snow and zero cold; a campaign begun for politics and ending with dramatic coincidence on the day on which politics were finally swept out of the war. The campaign began with one of the most numerically lopsided engagements of the entire war and ended in the largest battle of the Trans-Mississippi war.
Then, too, how then did movements of 80,000 to 90,000 men over 1,500 miles become remembered as a raid? Those Confederate raids accorded pride of place in Civil War historythose of Generals J. E. B. Stuart and John Hunt Morganinvolved no more than a fraction of Price's numbers. In fact, the intentions of the Confederates arriving in Missouri also far exceeded those of a raid. They hoped to displace the Federals in control of the state, not merely to disrupt their functioning. Price's army aspired to capture of one of the nation's largest and most vital industrial centers as well to retake a state capital wrested with some difficulty at the war's start. They anticipated that Federal military occupation and the ascendancy of Radical Republican policies unsanctioned by regular elections had prepared Missourians to embrace a Confederate liberation.
Interestingly, incredulous Federal officials began discussing the operation as a raid. They did so because they entirely underestimated the size of the Confederate force entering the state and avoided drawing attention to their unpreparedness by redefining it. Interestingly, the less stringent standards of a raid suited the Confederates who failed to attain any major goal worthy of an incursion by such numbers at such a time in the war. In the end, history represents a consensus among those with a vested interest in how we remember the past and the power to shape that memory.
Of course, the Confederate goals did shift during the campaign, suggesting three distinct phases. From September 19 through October 7, the Army of Missouri sought to seize St. Louis and Jefferson City, reoccupying the state. Armed rebels moved to within striking distance of St. Louis and Jefferson City at a time when both were defended by significantly smaller Federal forces. Price's army not only failed to seize these strategic goals, but actually failed to make such an attempt. Leaving aside what became of the campaign after Jefferson City, this study focuses on the earlier phase of the campaign, which most clearly places Price's Missouri expedition alongside those of Generals Jubal Early in the Shenandoah Valley or John Bell Hood in Tennessee.
In addition, Confederate accounts of the campaign are unbelievably weak. The Richmond Daily Dispatch reported that Union troops were shooting old men in their homes, drowning children in rivers and, of course, that The females have been insulted and outraged, and then compelled to wash the filthy clothes of the Yankee soldiery upon pain of death on refusal. It also reported that the drafted militia desert and fly to the Southern army. A short time since two regiments of militia were organized and armed by the Federals at an inland post but turned themselves, their arms, and everything belonging to the post, over to the Confederate general. The
