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Overview
Christ analyzes the campaign from military and political perspectives to show how events in 1863 affected the war on a larger scale. His lively narrative incorporates eyewitness accounts to tell how new Union strategy in the Trans-Mississippi theater enabled the capture of Little Rock, taking the state out of Confederate control for the rest of the war. He draws on rarely used primary sources to describe key engagements at the tactical level—particularly the battles at Arkansas Post, Helena, and Pine Bluff, which cumulatively marked a major turning point in the Trans-Mississippi.
In addition to soldiers’ letters and diaries, Christ weaves civilian voices into the story—especially those of women who had to deal with their altered fortunes—and so fleshes out the human dimensions of the struggle. Extensively researched and compellingly told, Christ’s account demonstrates the war’s impact on Arkansas and fills a void in Civil War studies.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780806184449 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | University of Oklahoma Press |
| Publication date: | 12/04/2011 |
| Series: | Campaigns and Commanders Series , #23 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 336 |
| File size: | 2 MB |
About the Author
Mark K. Christ is Community Outreach Director for the Arkansas Historic Preservation Program, Department of Arkansas Heritage, Little Rock, and a member of the Arkansas Civil War Sesquicentennial Commission. He is the author or editor of several books on Arkansas history, including Rugged and Sublime: The Civil War in Arkansas and Getting Used to Being Shot At: The Spence Family Civil War Letters.
Read an Excerpt
Civil War Arkansas, 1863
The Battle for a State
By Mark K. Christ
UNIVERSITY OF OKLAHOMA PRESS
Copyright © 2010 University of Oklahoma PressAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8061-8444-9
CHAPTER 1
"The Die Is Cast"
Arkansas Goes to War
Arkansas had been reluctant to join the Confederacy. In the tense months following Abraham Lincoln's election as U.S. president, opinions on the state's course of action polarized, with the slave-holding delta and lowland counties favoring secession and the mountainous regions supporting the Union. Henry Rector, Arkansas's newly elected governor, voiced the tension facing his state and the nation in his inaugural address: "the states stand tremblingly upon the verge of dissolution." That tension increased on December 20, 1860, as South Carolina pushed the issue by withdrawing from the Union. The next day Rector asked the Arkansas legislature to follow suit; the house of representatives on December 22 voted to hold a convention to chart the state's course, and the state senate followed suit on January 15, 1861. A public election on calling a secession convention was set for February 18.
The regional divide between the yeomanry of the northwest and slaveowning planters of the east and south became even more apparent as public rhetoric heated up in the weeks preceding the election. As upland Unionists struggled to get word of the election to likeminded people in the remote hills and hollows of the Ozark and Boston Mountains, a resolution from Van Buren County stated what many across the region felt: "We follow no secessionist ... nor any set of disunionists who have nothing in view but their own selfish and hellish designs." Robert W. Johnson, one of Arkansas's U.S. senators and a leading proponent of secession, summarized the fears of the planter class, saying that Lincoln's election meant "the extinction of four thousand million dollars of southern property and the freedom, and the equality with us of the four million negroes now in the South." Even as this debate raged in Arkansas, six more states—Alabama, Georgia, Texas, Mississippi, Louisiana, and Florida— followed South Carolina out of the Union between January 9 and February 1. An independent Confederate States of America was declared on February 4.
As the situation became ever more volatile, a new crisis erupted in Little Rock. Capt. James Totten and sixty-five soldiers of the Second U.S. Artillery had quietly manned the old U.S. arsenal complex on the edge of town since the previous November. On January 28 Governor Rector notified Totten that the small garrison should not attempt to remove or destroy supplies at the arsenal and that reinforcements would not be permitted. The captain stiffly replied that he took his orders from the U.S. government, not the state of Arkansas, but that no reinforcements were anticipated. Despite his assertion, a rumor in early February electrified Arkansas secessionists, who flocked to Little Rock on a report that Federal troops were approaching the capital aboard the steamer S. H. Tucker. Rector sent Little Rock volunteers armed with cannon to the banks of the Arkansas to repel any attempts to reinforce the arsenal, though they were disbanded once the rumors proved false.
On February 5, amid secessionist demands that the governor seize the arsenal, nearly one thousand volunteers from Phillips, Prairie, White, Saline, Montgomery, Hot Spring, Monroe, and St. Francis counties poured into Little Rock, itching for action. A shaken Rector disavowed having called for the militiamen, but on February 6 he again contacted Totten, this time asking him to surrender the arsenal. Later events in the war would show Totten to be a somewhat flaky individual, but his judgment now was sound as he considered the odds of his tiny force withstanding an assault by hundreds of armed men. He would agree if Rector would hold the arsenal and its equipage in trust for the U.S. government and allow the garrison to evacuate, bringing with them their ordnance and equipment. The governor accepted these terms, and the Federal garrison marched from the arsenal on February 8, camped for a few days at Fletcher's Landing, then steamed to St. Louis on the twelfth. A shooting war in Arkansas was averted, at least temporarily.
The elections held on February 18 reflected the continued uneasiness of Arkansians on secession: voters elected to hold a convention but overwhelmingly rejected withdrawal from the Union by sending a clear majority of Unionist candidates to the meeting. Delegates gathered at the state capitol on March 4, the day Abraham Lincoln took office as president of the United States. Pro-Union members won the office of chairman of the convention and headed all of the major committees. For some two weeks, as secessionists railed and such luminaries as Governor Rector and Senator Johnson pleaded the case for disunion, the majority remained united. Finally, amid concerns that the planter counties of the delta would secede from the state, the convention determined to hold a referendum on secession on the first Monday in August. Delegates thus offered a reprieve from disunion, but the core divisions in the state remained. In Van Buren in western Arkansas, thirty-nine guns were fired in honor of Crawford County's thirty-nine pro-Union votes; at Pine Bluff and Napoleon in the delta, cannon were fired on steamboats believed to be carrying supplies for Federal forces.
Ultimately, the results of the convention were moot. Early on the morning of April 12, 1861, Confederate artillery at Charleston, South Carolina, opened fire on Fort Sumter after the garrison's commander refused to surrender the U.S. post. After two days of bombardment, the stronghold fell. On April 15 President Lincoln issued a call to the states for 75,000 men to crush the rebellion. Rector refused the request for 780 troops from Arkansas, telling Lincoln that "the people of this state are freemen, not slaves, and will defend to the last extremity, their honor, lives and property against Northern mendacity and usurpation." Instead the governor ordered Mexican War veteran Solon Borland to take a thousand militiamen and steam upriver to seize the Federal post at Fort Smith. They arrived to find that the small garrison there had already quietly withdrawn into Indian Territory with all of its equipment. Borland's expeditionary force was cheered from the banks of the Arkansas River as it returned downstream. David Walker, the secession convention chairman, gloomily called for the delegates to reassemble at Little Rock on May 6.
Unlike the earlier convention, the gathering in the house of representatives chamber was marked by no heated debate or lengthy discussion; one chronicler noted that the "intensely excited throng could not brook the ordeal of discussion." Walker began the roll-call vote, and only five of delegates, mostly from mountain counties, voted against secession. The chairman addressed the dissenters: "Now, since we must go, let us all go together; let the wires carry the news to all the world that Arkansas stands as a unit against coercion." Four of the pro-Union delegates changed their vote, then Isaac Murphy of Madison County rose to his feet: "I have cast my vote after mature reflection, and have duly considered the consequences, and I cannot conscientiously change it. I therefore vote 'no.'" The chamber erupted with howls of rage against Murphy, but a Little Rock widow seated in the balcony threw the Unionist a bouquet of flowers in recognition of his principled stand. It was a gesture of civility that would soon be alien in the divided state.
In the days following the vote, thousands of men flocked to join local companies, leaving their homes amid cheers and with flags hand sewn by local women. One young recruit from southwest Arkansas spoke of the men's mood in a letter to his sister: "The Northern States are every where preparing for battle. Lincoln says the United States Flag shall float over every seceding state, a glorious time he will have in placing it over them." Mustered in to state or Confederate service, many were sent to training camps in northwest or north-central Arkansas while others were immediately sent east of the Mississippi. The new troops learned the rudiments of drill, the boredom of camp life, and the horrors of disease as childhood illnesses swept through the close-packed camps and killed hundreds of men never before exposed to them. One regimental surgeon recorded: "[M]easles are making sad havoc with all the troops, and some of our Arkansas regiments have lost several men with them.... [T]he mumps came in by way of variety I suppose, just to keep the measles company." Nonetheless, the Arkansas regiments began to take on the appearance of viable military units.
Not everyone in the state rushed to the Confederate cause, however. In the mountains of north-central Arkansas, Unionists formed an underground movement called the Arkansas Peace Society. This group, which may have numbered as many as 1,700 members who may have been motivated mainly by a desire to protect their homes, drew immediate and draconian reactions from pro-Southern authorities. Militiamen in Searcy County arrested seventy-eight Peace Society members, who "were chained together two and two, with an ordinary log chain fastened around the neck of each, and for twenty-four hours prior to their departure ... were thus guarded, in two ranks, as it were, with a long chain running down the centre of the column." The prisoners were marched to Little Rock and, along with thirty-nine other Ozark Unionists, forced to choose between standing trial or service in the Confederate army. One hundred two were formed into two companies and shipped east of the Mississippi; the other fifteen were never tried. The majority of these galvanized Rebels eventually deserted, and many ultimately joined Missouri Federal units. Arkansas's traditional Unionist strongholds would remain loyal to the United States throughout the war, and, historian Thomas A. DeBlack notes, "despite having the third-smallest white population, Arkansas would provide more troops for the Federal army than any other Confederate State except Tennessee."
While many of the new Arkansas regiments were sent east of the Mississippi, those that remained behind would see action first. Rebel troops had been concentrating in northwestern Arkansas since June, when Brig. Gen. Ben McCulloch had joined his Texas and Louisiana regiments with about two thousand Arkansians in state service under N. Bart Pearce. On August 4 the combined force entered Missouri, where a mixed bag of state troops under Sterling Price was being hounded into the state's southwestern corner by a tough army of 5,600 Yankees under Brig. Gen. Nathaniel Lyon. Price and McCulloch linked up at Carthage, then bivouacked their combined army of some 15,000 troops at Wilson's Creek southwest of Springfield. While numerically superior to Lyon, many of the Arkansas troops were indifferently armed with old muskets and shotguns; a large number of Price's men had no weapons at all. McCulloch planned to move on the Federals in Springfield on the night of August 9 but cancelled the advance because of heavy rain, withdrawing the pickets from around the Rebel camps in anticipation of a morning march. Lyon took advantage of this on the morning of the tenth, splitting his small force to hit the Rebels from front and rear. The attack caused pandemonium initially, but then Union troops under Brig. Gen. Franz Sigel fled after mistaking gray-clad Rebel soldiers for an Iowa unit wearing similar uniforms, allowing them to fire on the Yankees at point-blank range. The combined Rebel force then converged on Oak Hill, where Lyon was killed leading a counterattack. The exhausted Federals broke off the battle and returned to Springfield as the Rebels "watched the retreating enemy through our field glasses, and we were glad to see him go." The fields around Wilson's Creek were littered with 279 dead and 951 wounded Rebels; Lyon's force suffered 258 dead, 873 wounded, and 186 missing or captured. "I don't see how any of us escaped being killed that was in the Battle," a green Arkansas sergeant wrote to his parents in Clark County, "We have drilled but very little."
Following the victory at Wilson's Creek, McCulloch, who had never been comfortable about entering a state that had not formally seceded, withdrew to northwest Arkansas. The general left his troops there and hurried to Richmond to defend this decision. Price took his Missourians to Springfield, then headed toward the Missouri River, envisioning a popular uprising that would bring the state into the Confederacy. After defeating the Federal garrison at Lexington, however, many of his troops left his army, some returning home while others joined guerrilla bands. Price and the remnants of his force soon fell back to southwest Missouri. The Arkansas State Troops, meanwhile, were met on their return to Arkansas by Thomas C. Hindman, a fire-eating secessionist who had entered Confederate service as a colonel and would rise to the rank of major general. Hindman urged the soldiers to move to Pitman's Ferry in northeast Arkansas and there enroll in Confederate service under Brig. Gen. William J. Hardee. The prospect of leaving Arkansas and fighting east of the Mississippi was not attractive to these veterans, and whole companies disbanded, leaving the service and heading for home.
The fate of the Arkansas River Valley was not wholly dependent on activities within its namesake state, however. Moving upriver from Fort Smith, the Arkansas flows through Indian Territory, an area that had seen as much division over whether to ally with the Confederacy as had its eastern neighbors. It also was a strategically important area, with the lands occupied by the Cherokees, Creeks, Choctaws, and Chickasaws providing a buffer between Confederate Texas and pro-Union Kansas. Confederate officials moved quickly in 1861 to woo the Indian nations to the Southern banner.
The tribes themselves were ambivalent. Having been forced to leave their homelands in the southeastern United States and move to Indian Territory in the 1830s, many of the members of the so-called Five Civilized Tribes identified with Southern values, with many owning slaves. Economically the tribes had strong trade and banking ties with the South. At the same time, their active treaties with the United States provided them with annuities and U.S. Army protection. As Texans armed for war under the Confederate banner, however, the army abandoned its posts at Forts Washita, Cobb, and Arbuckle, violating treaties and leaving Indian Territory without an organized Federal presence. Into this void came Albert Pike, an adventurer and poet who at age fifty-two was already well known in the territory, having represented Creek and Choctaw clients as a frontier lawyer before the war. Pike's mandate from the Confederate government was to negotiate new treaties binding the Indian nations to the Rebel cause.
Pike entered negotiations aggressively, reminding the Indians that it had been the U.S. government that had forcibly removed them from their homelands. Targeting the slaveowning minority, he slammed the activities of abolitionist missionaries in the territory. Promising that the Confederate government would take up the annuities lately offered by the United States, that the tribes would retain their status as sovereign nations, and that any troops raised would not be asked to serve beyond the borders of the nations, Pike cemented treaties with the Chickasaws, Creeks, Choctaws, and Seminoles by August 1, 1861. Within the Cherokee tribe, however, long-fermenting tensions again rose to the surface. Principal Chief John Ross sought to maintain neutrality even as Stand Watie raised a regiment to serve the Southern cause. Facing the reality of being surrounded by pro-Confederate forces, Ross too signed a treaty with the South on October 7. Pike also won agreements with the Osage, Quapaw, Seneca, and Shawnee tribes, which lived in the northeast corner of Indian Territory. Appointed a brigadier general in the Confederate army in recognition of his efforts, Pike became commander of the Department of Indian Territory.
Despite the treaties, many tribal members did not embrace the new relationship with the Confederacy. The debate had not centered solely on whether to remain loyal to the Union, but had also revived bad feelings that dated as far back as removal. Some simply wanted nothing to do with the new war in the East. In mid-November Opotholeyahola, an aged Creek chief, led some five thousand men, women, and children toward Kansas. His band consisted mainly of Creeks and Cherokees but also included Seminoles and blacks, both slave and free. Col. Douglas Cooper led a force of Creeks, Choctaws, Chickasaws, and Texans in pursuit of the refugees, catching up with them near Round Mountain north of Red Fork. Setting fire to the horseshoe-shaped prairie, Opotholeyahola's warriors ambushed the Confederates and set them to flight. The refugees continued moving northeast, camping near Tulsey Town, while Cooper retreated to the east to lick his wounds. By November 30 the Rebels were again in pursuit, closing in on Opotholeyahola's camp on December 7. Cooper sent Cherokees from Col. John Drew's regiment to negotiate, but the old chief's arguments were apparently more persuasive: 400 of Drew's 480 men deserted that night, most to the enemy camp. Although Cooper again retreated, Opotholeyahola attacked his rear guard, goading the Rebel force into pursuit. The refugee force again selected the battlefield, this time at a bend of Bird Creek. After four hours of fighting, the battle ended in a draw, with Cooper falling back to Fort Gibson to resupply and Opotholeyahola, also running low on food and ammunition, continuing northwest and digging in on a ridge at a place called Chustenahlah.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Civil War Arkansas, 1863 by Mark K. Christ. Copyright © 2010 University of Oklahoma Press. Excerpted by permission of UNIVERSITY OF OKLAHOMA PRESS.
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Table of Contents
Contents
List of Illustrations,Preface and Acknowledgments,
Prologue. "A Muddy, Red, and Brackish Stream": The Arkansas River Line, January 1863,
1. "The Die Is Cast": Arkansas Goes to War,
2. "While It Lasted Shiloh Was Nowhere": The Battle of Arkansas Post,
3. "We Must Whip Them or Surrender": Holmes Moves to the Offensive,
4. "A Grivous Calamity": The Battle of Helena,
5. "We Are an Army of Prisoners": The Campaign to Capture Little Rock,
6. "If They Take Fort Smith, the Indian Country Is Gone": The Western Arkansas River Valley,
7. "The Federals Fought like Devils": The Battle of Pine Bluff,
Epilogue. "Old Year, I Bid You Farewell": The Arkansas River Line, December 1863,
Notes,
Bibliography,
Index,