Disunion follows the Civil War as it unfolded.
On the morning of Sunday, Dec. 7, 1862, Gen. James Blunt, commanding the Kansas division of Gen. John Schofield’s Union Army of the Frontier, heard “dull booming” over the northeastern horizon near Prairie Grove, Ark. Blunt was waiting for reinforcements, and he knew immediately where the noise was coming from: the Confederate Trans-Mississippi Army, which had been facing him the night before, must have wheeled around his left flank to attack the approaching Union divisions under Gen. Francis Herron, before Herron and Blunt could join forces.
As Shelby Foote would later remark, many historians played down the Civil War west of the Mississippi River as a “sort of running skirmish that wobbled back-and-forth” without purpose. But in doing so, they overlook a significant theater of battle. Well before Gen. William T. Sherman made his destructive March to the Sea in 1864-65, central Louisiana suffered enormous losses to civilian property during the Red River campaign in the spring of 1864.
Although small when measured against those east of the river, battles beyond the Mississippi were sizable compared with prior American wars. During the Mexican War, Mexico City was captured by an American army of no more than 10,000 soldiers — a number smaller than the Union or Confederate armies at the battles of Wilson’s Creek, Lexington, Pea Ridge, Prairie Grove, Arkansas Post, Sabine Crossroads, Mansfield, Jenkins Ferry, Pilot Knob and Westport. And the trans-Mississippi theater was a breeding ground for commanders like Ulysses S. Grant, Philip H. Sheridan and Schofield, each of whom would later become the commanding general of the United States Army, the highest rank in the military.
Through the fall of 1862, elements of the Army of the Frontier skirmished with Confederates across the Ozarks. It was a near miracle that the rebels could challenge Schofield at all, since the region had been emptied of defending troops following the loss at Pea Ridge, Ark., in March, after which the retreating rebels were ordered to join Albert Johnston’s concentration at Corinth, Miss., for a showdown against Grant. Although arriving too late for the cataclysm at Shiloh, nearly all Pea Ridge veterans remained distant from their trans-Mississippi homes while fighting on the east bank for the remainder of the war.
The loss at Pea Ridge had left most of Arkansas temporarily vulnerable to Union conquest. Arkansas politicians complained bitterly to Richmond about abandonment. Instead of sending troops, President Jefferson Davis dispatched an industrious general named Thomas Hindman. A Mississippi native who had settled across the river in the port town of Helena, Ark., in the 1850s, Hindman served in Congress before his state seceded, after which he joined the Confederate Army.
Hindman arrived in Little Rock, Ark., on May 31, 1862, and within 10 weeks he raised nearly 20,000 troops. He fortified Arkansas Post, a strategic settlement near the confluence of the Arkansas and Mississippi Rivers, with 5,500 soldiers to block potential upstream invasions. He organized 11,500 more into the Trans-Mississippi Army and took it to Fort Smith, on the western border with the Indian Territory. Hindman’s goal went beyond securing Arkansas: owing to Schofield’s harsh policies toward civilians in Missouri, guerrilla warfare was rampant, giving Hindman hope that he could recover the “show me” state.
Still, despite several attempts, Hindman was unable to create a favorable opportunity to attack Schofield’s army. After pushing Confederate cavalry southward at the Battle of Cane Hill in late November, Schofield assumed the Confederates would suspend further invasion plans because of approaching winter. At the same time, he realized his forces were stretched too thin for winter supply lines, so he split them in two, ordering the Kansas division to be supplied from Fort Scott, while the Missouri divisions at Springfield would be supplied from the railhead at Rolla. Schofield himself returned to St. Louis to convalesce from a stubborn illness.
But Hindman had not given up. Since Blunt and Herron were 130 miles apart, he resolved to attack the former’s 7,000 Kansans, which were just 40 miles away from Confederate campsites. After beating Blunt, he would attend to Herron’s 6,000.
When Union scouts learned that the Confederates had broken camp on Dec. 3, Blunt ordered Herron to rush to his aid. Although Hindman was much closer, the Southerners had to cross the Boston Mountains, the highest and most rugged range in the Ozarks. By the evening of Dec. 6, Hindman and Blunt were squared off for battle the next morning.
However, upon learning of Herron’s advance, the rebels decided to hit his road-weary Missouri divisions first, which had marched over 100 miles in three days. Hindman secretly marched around Blunt’s left and positioned his army on a low ridge at Prairie Grove to await Herron’s approach.
The next morning opposing cavalry clashed before dawn, as Herron had sent his ahead to reach Blunt before the infantry. Assuming that the Confederate cavalry he met was just a small detachment, Herron had his infantry march directly into the jaws of rebel artillery. Not only did it absorb the bombardment, but Herron also recklessly ordered his foot soldiers to attack — without realizing that trees behind the rebel cannons obscured Confederate infantry.
Hindman was an excellent administrator but a diffident battlefield commander. Much of the Confederate action during the remainder of the day was piecemeal, as division commanders often acted independently. After blasting back Herron’s first charge, rebel units heedlessly charged federal artillery, with similar disastrous results. Meanwhile, too much of Hindman’s army went unengaged all morning because it faced away from Herron, a precaution against Blunt’s joining the fight from the opposite direction.
By 2 p.m. Confederate divisions were better coordinated and preparing a unified attack that could sweep Herron’s smaller numbers from the field. At that moment, Blunt’s Kansas division appeared. Moreover, it arrived from the northwest, instead of the southwest, which Hindman had assumed, and was able to take the Confederate attack on Herron by the flank.
After the rebels were stopped, Blunt hastily attacked the Prairie Grove ridge but was repulsed, much like Herron had been hours earlier. By nightfall, Hindman exhausted his ammunition and withdrew. Casualties totaled about 1,300 on each side.
Much to the absent Schofield’s chagrin, Blunt and Herron were promoted to major general for their performance at Prairie Grove, an honor he himself had received only weeks earlier. Eventually, however, Blunt and Herron couldn’t match Schofield’s political skills. He wrote his superior, Gen. Samuel Curtis, that Army of the Frontier operations “since I left have been a series of blunders from which it narrowly escaped.” Blunt and Herron “were badly beaten in detail.”
Schofield proved a devious career climber. His political ally, Missouri Governor Hamilton R. Gamble, accused Curtis of illegal cotton trade, and Curtis was replaced with Schofield. After being granted a transfer to the east side of the river, Schofield ingratiated himself with Sherman and Grant. While serving under Gen. George H. Thomas at Nashville, Tenn., he secretly criticized his superior to Grant, who already had unmerited misgivings about Thomas. After the war Schofield served briefly as secretary of war, where he nominated himself for – and was awarded – the Medal of Honor based upon action at the Battle of Wilson’s Creek, seven years earlier.
Hindman was less fortunate. About a month after Prairie Grove, his detachment at Arkansas Post was overwhelmed by 33,000 federal troops under Gen. John McClernand and Sherman. Hindman was required to report to an ineffective theater commander, who ordered his army to Little Rock. That led to widespread desertions, since the move signaled an end to Confederate designs on Missouri.
Hindman requested a transfer east of the Mississippi to serve in the same army as his friend, Gen. Patrick Cleburne. As a division commander under Gen. Braxton Bragg, Hindman was involved in one of the Confederacy’s greatest lost opportunities, at McLemore’s Cove, immediately prior to the Battle of Chickamauga. After the war Hindman returned to Helena. In 1868 he was killed while sitting in his parlor by shots fired through a window, a likely victim of Reconstruction politics. The murderers were never caught.
During the Grant administration, Schofield was asked to evaluate the strategic significance of the Sandwich Islands. He concluded that a naval base should be established at a site called Pearl Harbor, on the island of Oahu. In one of history’s odd coincidences, on a Sunday morning 79 years to the day after troops under Schofield heard distant rumblings from a surprise attack, soldiers across Oahu awoke to similar rumblings — including those posted to a facility 10 miles from Pearl Harbor called the Schofield Barracks.
Sources: William L. Shea, “Fields of Blood”; C. Vann Woodward, New York Review of Books, March 6, 1975; Ludwell Johnson, “Red River Campaign”; Robert Selph Henry, “The Story of the Mexican War”; Albert Castel, “General Sterling Price”; Shelby Foote, “The Civil War: A Narrative,” Vol. 2; Craig Symonds, “Stonewall of the West”; Thomas W. Kremm and Diane Neal, “The Lion of the South.”
Phil Leigh is an armchair Civil War enthusiast and president of a market research company. He is preparing an illustrated and annotated version of the memoirs of Confederate Pvt. Sam Watkins, which will be released by Westholme Publishing next spring entitled “Co. Aytch: Illustrated and Annotated.”