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Steele
spent the rest of 1863 and the first three months of 1864 helping local
Unionists establish a loyal civilian government for Arkansas. The general
reluctantly resumed offensive operations in late March 1864, leading 14,000 blue
soldiers from Little Rock and Fort Smith into southwest Arkansas. Steele’s
objective was Shreveport, Louisiana, on the Red River, where he was supposed to
rendezvous with a larger Union army and a gunboat flotilla under Major General
Nathaniel P. Banks for an invasion of Texas. Six thousand Rebel cavalry under
Sterling Price played hell with Steele’s supply line. They managed to capture
two large trains of enemy supply wagons, annihilating the equivalent of two
brigades that Steele had detailed for escort duty. After Steele reached Camden,
a port on the Ouachita River 120 miles south of Little Rock, he learned that
Banks had been stopped on the Red River and was in full retreat. In addition,
three Confederate infantry divisions from Louisiana were trudging north to trap
and destroy what remained of Steele’s army. Steele managed to extricate his
troops from the trap and conduct a successful retreat to Little Rock after
fighting his pursuers to a standstill at Jenkins’ Ferry on April 30, 1864.
Nevertheless, the ill-conceived Camden Expedition had cost the Union Army 2,500
casualties, hundreds of wagons, and thousands of horses and mules.
Once
again, the tables had turned in Arkansas. Confederate morale revived. While
Rebel forces were not strong enough to retake Little Rock, Fort Smith, Pine
Bluff, or Helena by direct assault, there were plenty of opportunities for large
bodies of gray cavalry to raid north of the Arkansas River and subject the
Federals to steady attrition. Such activities also emboldened guerrilla bands,
who contributed to the Union Army’s growing discomfort. It became so difficult
and dangerous to transport supplies up the Arkansas to Fort Smith that the
Lincoln administration briefly considered abandoning that important outpost.
There is no telling what would have happened had the Confederates not thrown
away their advantage.
Sterling Price had acquitted himself well in preventing Steele’s Federals from
overrunning southern Arkansas. Unfortunately, Price remained obsessed with
driving the Yankees out of his beloved Missouri, and he pestered his superiors
incessantly until they gave him leave to pursue his most cherished dream. On
September 19, 1864, Price entered Missouri with 12,000 Confederate cavalry. His
raid threw the state and eastern Kansas into a tumult, but Northern commanders
massed sufficient forces to subject Price’s column to a series of stinging
blows. By the time Price limped back into Arkansas on December 2, only 3,500
Rebel troopers were still with him, and two-thirds of them had lost their
weapons. Everything the Confederacy had managed to gain in Arkansas the
previous spring had been squandered by Price’s vanity and provincialism.
With
the destruction of the main Confederate army in Arkansas, irregular warfare
became the last viable option for battling Federal authority. The state had
been transformed into the haunt of numerous guerrilla bands in June 1862 when
General Hindman called for a popular uprising to oppose the first Union attempt
to capture Little Rock. Hindman’s General Orders Number 17 instructed “all
citizens from this district” to organize themselves into ten-man companies
under elected captains and start killing Yankees. An estimated 5,000 men
responded to this summons by August 1862. They may not have been a decisive
factor in Samuel Curtis’ failure to take Little Rock, but they aroused the ire
of Union forces by picking off sentries and couriers, ambushing small patrols
and foraging parties, and firing on gunboats and transports. Federal commanders
announced that they would hold civilian responsible for any guerrilla activity
occurring in their vicinity. When warnings failed to restrain the irregulars,
details of Union soldiers and sailors began burning small hamlets or individual
houses and barns. This retributive strategy caused many Arkansans to abandon
their homes in the delta and north of the Arkansas River, but it did not
suppress guerrilla depredations.
The
Union Army found an effective guerrilla fighter in Colonel Marcus LaRue
Harrison, a former railroad surveyor who commanded the Unionist 1st
Arkansas Cavalry. Harrison’s regiment consisted of rugged “Mountain Tories”
from northwest Arkansas, and they spent the last two years of the war stationed
in the area where they had been born and raised, which meant they were already
acquainted with the political sympathies of its inhabitants. Harrison turned
out to be almost as familiar with his surroundings as his men, as he had mapped
most of northern Arkansas before the war. After conventional methods failed to
end the guerrilla scourge, Harrison introduced a revolutionary approach in the
latter half of 1864. He established a network of fortified “farm colonies,”
populating them with the families of men who swore to serve in home guard
companies. Anyone living within ten miles of a colony had to join it or was
assumed to be a bushwhacker. Harrison’s 1st Arkansas Cavalry
patrolled between this fast-growing outpost network, killing or capturing men
who refused to submit to the new system. Harrison’s troopers fed their horses
on the bountiful hay grown by loyal farmers, which allowed the 1st
Arkansas to subject the enemy to constant harassment. With guerrillas isolated
from the general populace, Harrison’s methods started scoring dramatic results.
His troopers killed more than 100 guerrillas in February and March 1865 and
forced some of the larger Rebel companies to disperse. Harrison’s post colony
system spread into other parts of Union-controlled Arkansas. By the time
General Robert E. Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia and other organized
Confederate commands had surrendered, Arkansas’ Rebel guerrillas were also ready
to cease their struggle against Federal authority.
The
Civil War was the greatest catastrophe that the United States has ever endured,
and no part of the nation suffered more than Arkansas. More than 6,800 of the
60,000 Arkansans who joined the Confederate Army died of wounds, accident, or
disease, a mortality rate greater than 10 percent. At least 1,700 white
Unionists and 1,500 blacks died while in Federal service. No one has compiled
accurate statistics on the number of white civilians murdered by guerrillas or
retaliating troops, or the number of runaway slaves gunned down by Confederate
soldiers. Land values plunged from an assessed average of $5.32 an acre to
$2.21. Vast quantities of livestock were stolen or slaughtered. The
devastating impact of such violence and destruction caused perhaps as many as
half of the state’s white population to move elsewhere. Arkansas’ black
population also dropped by approximately 50,000 souls. Governor Isaac Murphy,
the head of Arkansas’ wartime Unionist government, did not exaggerate when he
confided to a friend in August 1865: “Our state is a picture of desolation.
The great majority of the people are reduced to poverty.”
This
wonderful web site, Arkansas in the Civil War, provides students,
scholars, and legions of Civil War buffs with convenient access to how the
Northern and Southern press reported the Civil War in Arkansas. Events in
Arkansas engaged the interest of Americans during that tumultuous era. They
formed part of the big picture for the generation that weathered America’s most
terrible crisis, and they need to be more familiar to subsequent generations
that attempt to understand the course and meaning of the American Civil War.
About the Author
Gregory
J. W. Urwin was born and raised in northeast Ohio, where he graduated summa
cum laude from Borromeo College of Ohio in 1977. He earned his M.A. at John
Carroll University in 1979 and his Ph.D. at the University of Notre Dame in
1984. He taught from 1984 to 1999 at the University of Central Arkansas, and
then moved to Temple University, where he is a professor of history and
associate director of the Center for the Study of Force and Diplomacy. He is
the author or editor of eight books on American military history, including such
Civil War titles as Custer Victorious: The Civil War Battles of General
George Armstrong Custer, Black Flag over Dixie: Racial Atrocities and
Reprisals in the Civil War, and A. F. Sperry’s History of the 33d Iowa
Infantry Volunteer Regiment 1863-6 (co-edited with Cathy Kunzinger Urwin).
Urwin was a historical consultant for “The Edge of Conflict: Arkansas in the
Civil War,” a documentary series that won a 1995 regional Emmy Award for the
Arkansas Educational and Television Network. His future plans include writing a
book about Union Army operations in Arkansas from the summer of 1863 through the
spring of 1864. Urwin is a Fellow of the Company of Military Historians and his
publications have won the General Wallace M. Greene, Jr., Award from the Marine
Corps Heritage Foundation and the Harold L. Peterson Award from Eastern
National. He also delivered the Twenty-fifth George Bancroft Memorial Lecture
at the U.S. Naval Academy in October 2004.
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