Civil War Photo Friday: Confederate General John S. Marmaduke

I'm back safely from Iraq and while I've been blogging about my trip, it's time to get back to some Civil War and Wild West stuff! My Iraq series for Gadling will be starting shortly and I'll announce it here.

This week's Civil War photo is of John Sappington Marmaduke, a Confederate commander from Missouri. Born to a wealthy plantation family in Arrow Rock, he went with the South when his uncle, Governor Claiborne Fox Jackson, planned the state's secession from the Union. Marmaduke commanded the rebel troops and tasted defeat at the Battle of Boonville, one of the first battles of the Civil War.

Marmaduke rose in the ranks and was appointed a Brigadier General 150 years ago this month. He's most famous for two raids he conducted into Union-dominated Missouri in 1863 in an effort to reduce pressure on Confederate-held Arkansas. The first raid saw him in a bitter fight in Springfield. The second saw him causing havoc in southeast Missouri. Neither raid was particularly successful. His career was further tarnished when he challenged a fellow officer to a duel and shot him dead.

Marmaduke's career ended at the Battle of Mine Creek on October 25, 1864. This was near the end of General Price's disastrous invasion of Missouri, the background for my Civil War novel A Fine Likeness. Marmaduke positioned his artillery and men poorly and the Union army cut him off from the rest of the rebel army and captured him and some 800 of his men. I'll cover all of these events in more detail as their 150th anniversaries come up.

Despite his failings as a commander, Marmaduke remained a popular figure and served as governor of Missouri from 1885 to his death in office in 1887.

Photo courtesy Wikipedia.

W is for Waning Days of the Civil War

Robert E. Lee's surrender to Grant at Appomattox on April 9, 1865, is often held up as the end of the Civil War. It certainly took the fight out of most of those rebels who still had fight left in the them. A string of surrenders came after that, most notably General Johnston's Army of Tennessee on April 26. Confederate President Jefferson Davis fled, hoping to somehow continue the Confederacy from Mexico, but got captured May 10.

West of the Mississippi River, things moved a bit more slowly. At first, many Confederates thought that news of the surrenders was a Yankee trick. Realization of the truth eventually dawned, however, and General Kirby Smith surrendered his Department of the Trans-Mississippi on May 26. The last rebel to surrender was General Stand Watie in the Indian Territory, shown in this Wikimedia Commons image, who didn't give up until June 23. By this time there had been several more battles and skirmishes in various parts of the South, although things were rapidly winding down.

Despite all this, President Andrew Johnson (who came into office after Lincoln was assassinated on April 14) didn't feel secure enough to issue a proclamation officially ending the war until August 20, more than four months after Appomattox!

P is for General Sterling Price

One of the defining figures of the Confederate cause west of the Mississippi was General Sterling Price. A former Missouri governor and commander of the Missouri State Guard when the war started, he was a popular figure and was very effective at rallying troops to the Confederacy.

Price was the victor of several early battles such as Wilson's Creek and Lexington, but his star soon faded as he suffered a number of defeats. Price was a brave man who often led his troops from the front (rather than several miles to the rear like too many generals) yet he was a poor strategist. The consensus among historians is that he would have made a better regimental commander than army commander.

In 1864 he led his last campaign, an ill-planned invasion of Missouri. He thought that after more than two years of Yankee rule that Missourians would rise up to support him. Some did; most didn't. His poorly armed troops plodded through the state, winning some battles but losing others, never strong enough to take St. Louis or the state capital at jefferson City as Price had planned.

By this time Price weighed 400 pounds and could barely ride a horse. He rode most of the time in a carriage while many of his ill-equipped troops had to walk. The expedition met disaster at Westport near Kansas City and fled south, having their final engagement at the Battle of Newtonia before retreating south to Arkansas, never to return.

Price never stopped believing in the Confederacy. When the South surrendered he and some other diehards fled to Mexico and started a Confederate colony. It too was a failure and eventually he returned home to live his final years in quiet retirement.

I've always been fascinated with Sterling Price because he sums up much of what was good and bad about the Confederacy: enthusiastic yet ill-conceived, brave yet foolhardy, willing but unequal to the task. And he accepted defeat with his head held high.

Photo courtesy Wikimedia Commons.

Civil War Photo Friday: The Aftermath of the Battle of Pea Ridge

On this day 150 years ago, the Confederacy west of the Mississippi was reeling from its defeat in what was arguably the most important battle of the Civil War in the Trans-Mississippi Theater.

The Battle of Pea Ridge was fought from March 6-8 in northwestern Arkansas. Several good accounts of this battle are already online and in print, so I'm just going to look at its ramifications.

The Confederate thrust into Missouri by a rebel army led by Maj. Gen. Earl Van Dorn and numbering more than 16,500 had been stopped by Brig. Gen. Samuel Curtis' Union force of only 10,500. The Confederates suffered about 2,000 casualties during the battle, most notably the death of Brig. Gen. Benjamin McCulloch, pictured here.

Van Dorn had left his supplies far behind, and so for a week his troops, weary from forced marches and hard fighting, shambled their way south with little to eat but what they could scrounge or steal from the locals. Men deserted by the thousands.

It seems that after the battle the Confederate high command pretty much gave up on the region. Van Dorn and his Arkansas troops were transferred east of the river, and were shortly followed by General Price and his Missouri troops. There would be no major Confederate threat to Missouri for the rest of the war, unless you count Price's ill-fated 1864 raid/invasion, which provides the background to my Civil War novel.

The war west of the Mississippi was not finished, however. The Union high command was also hungry for troops to throw into the killing fields. Northern states west of the Mississippi were drained of many of their men, making what could have been a short campaign south through Arkansas and Louisiana a long and arduous struggle that was never completed.

With each side too weak to make a decisive impact on the other, much of the region was overtaken by guerrillas and bandits. The Battle of Pea Ridge was a victory for the Union, but a defeat for civilians of both sides.

Civil War Photo Friday: A Union general and his family

Today my wife and I are celebrating our 12th anniversary, so in honor of that occasion here's a photo of Brig. Gen. John Aaron Rawlins with his wife and child, taken at their quarters during the siege of Petersburg. Although it's not known just when this photo was taken, the siege lasted from June 1864 to April 1865. In static campaigns such as that, soldiers often brought their families to stay with them.

Rawlins was born in Galena, Illinois, Ulysses S. Grant's hometown. Grant was a clerk in the leather store of Rawlins' brother. Once the war started, Grant's star rose faster than Rawlins'. Grant made Rawlins his aide-de-camp, a role he performed with meticulous attention to detail. He also tried, not entirely successfully, to keep Grant off the bottle and kept up an ongoing correspondence with Grant's wife, providing objective accounts of Grant's state of mind. Rawlins long friendship with Grant paid off after the war. Grant became president and made Rawlins his Secretary of War.

Here's a closeup of the happy family. I wonder what this little girl thought of life in an army camp?

Happy anniversary, Almudena!!!


Photo courtesy Library of Congress.

Civil War Photo Friday: The Last of Shelby's Men

I first saw this gravestone more than ten years ago at the Confederate retirement home in Higginsville, Missouri, and it has always stuck in my mind. Many old warriors came here to live out their days, and the last one to die was John T. Graves. He joined J.O. Shelby's famous Iron Brigade of Missouri cavalry raiders, survived the war, and lived through half of the twentieth century.

Remarkably, he wasn't the "last of Shelby's men". Joseph Hayden Whitsett was still alive in Texas and made it to 1951.

Of course I put this image in my book Ride Around Missouri: Shelby's Great Raid 1863. Shelby's Iron Brigade made numerous grueling raids into Union-occupied Missouri. His "ride around Missouri" was the most ambitious, and led the Union troops on a merry chase through the entire state.

It's amazing to look at these old gravestones and realize that some Civil War veterans lived so long. Albert Woolson, a Union drummer boy and the last surviving Civil War veteran whose story is confirmed, lived until August 2, 1956! There must be old folks around today who remember some of these guys. The Civil War wasn't so long ago after all. 

Tough times for the Confederacy in Missouri

General McCulloch

As winter set in for the first year of the Civil War, Brig.-Gen. Ben McCulloch, commanding the Arkansas forces in Missouri, wrote to J. P. Benjamin, the Confederate Acting Secretary of War:

"My forces are at present near the main road from Springfield to Fort Smith, the infantry and artillery in Arkansas, and three regiments of mounted men in this State. General Price has fallen back to Pineville, some 25 miles west of this. . .

"The Missouri force is getting weaker daily by men leaving for their homes. The time for which many of them enlisted will expire in a few days. Nothing but a battle within the next ten days will keep together over 4,000 or 5,000 out of the 13,000 they now have. This battle cannot be fought without the enemy should advance. For us to attack them in their present position would be to lose a battle. Our troops, being mostly mounted men, are unfit to attack a strong position or to be of great use in a general engagement with heavy forces.

The Missouri Army is composed of some 5,000 infantry and artillery, 8,000 horsemen, with all sorts of arms, and without discipline. This force, if possible, should be taken into the Confederate service and reorganized this winter. It is now under the control of politicians, who know not the value of discipline, and consequently can never make an army that would be but little better than a city mob. There is excellent material out of which to make an army in Missouri. They only want a military man for a general. . .

"As for myself, it would never to do place me in command of them. I have made myself very unpopular by speaking to them frequently about the necessity of order and discipline in their organizations. There is unfortunately but little cordiality of feeling between the two armies; hence it would not answer a good purpose to place any man now in either army in command of both."

Although McCulloch and Price had defeated the Union army at Wilson's Creek that summer, they did not like one another and their rivalry seriously hampered their cooperation. McCulloch's full letter can be read in the Official Records.

Ulysses S. Grant proves his worth in Missouri

Ulysses S. Grant was one of the greatest generals of the Civil War. While he's most famous for his campaigns in the East, he actually got his start in Missouri. On this day 150 years ago, he fought his first battle at Belmont, Missouri.

Grant has steamed down the Mississippi River from Cairo, Illinois, with 3,150 men under orders to make a demonstration against Columbus, Kentucky. Instead he decided to attack General Pillow's Confederate camp at Belmont, directly across the river in Missouri.

Pillow had about 2,700 men at Belmont and another 2,000 or so across the river at Columbus. A determined Union attack and a shortage of ammunition on the rebel side soon gave the field to Grant. His men plundered their camp. Grant, flushed with victory and still pretty green, allowed his men to descend into disorder and Confederate troops from Columbus crossed the river and cut off his retreat. Grant had to fight his way back to the steamboats, leaving some of his plunder more than a hundred of his men behind.

Both sides claimed victory. The rebels said they were left in possession of the field, which is true. The Union pointed out that they defeated both forces sent against them, which is also true. Whatever way you slice it, the real victor was Grant himself. While other Union generals stayed in camp training their troops and begging Lincoln for more supplies and men, Grant went out and sought the enemy. That got him noticed. A few more stunts like that and his career was made.

For more on the battle, there's a long description here. The Civil War Daily Gazette has also done a good coverage of the preparations for the battle and the battle itself. If you're interested in the Civil War (and why else would you be reading this?) I heartily recommend the Civil War Daily Gazette. I read it every day. Just don't forget to come back here for more detailed coverage of the Trans-Mississippi Theater and the Civil War in Missouri!

Photo courtesy Wikimedia Commons.