The Collapse of Price's Raid

The Collapse of Price's Raid
Author: Mark A. Lause
Publisher: Shades of Blue and Gray
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2016
Genre: History
ISBN: 9780826220257

As the Civil War was drawing to a close, former Missouri governor Sterling Price led his army on one last desperate campaign to retake his home state for the Confederacy, part of a broader effort to tilt the upcoming 1864 Union elections against Abraham Lincoln and the Republicans. In The Collapse of Price's Raid: The Beginning of the End in Civil War Missouri, Mark A. Lause examines the complex political and social context of what became known as "Price's Raid," the final significant Southern operation west of the Mississippi River. The success of the Confederates would be measured by how long they could avoid returning south to spend a hungry winter among the picked-over fields of southwestern Arkansas and northeastern Texas. As Price moved from Pilot Knob to Boonville, the Raid brutalized and alienated the people it supposedly wished to liberate. With Union cavalry pushing out of Jefferson City, the Confederates took Boonville, Glasgow, and Sedalia in their stride, and fostered a wave of attacks across northern Missouri by guerrillas and organizations of new recruits. With the Missouri River to their north and the ravaged farmlands to their south, Price's men continued west. At Lexington, Confederates began encountering a second Federal army newly raised in Kansas under General Samuel R. Curtis. A running battle from the Little Blue through Independence to the Big Blue marked the first of three days of battle in the area of Kansas City, as the two Federal armies squeezed the Confederate forces between them. Despite a self-congratulatory victory, Union forces failed to capture the very vulnerable army of Price, which escaped down the Kansas line. The follow-up to Price's Lost Campaign: The 1864 Invasion of Missouri, Lause's The Collapse of Price's Raid is a must-have for any reader interested in the Civil War or in Missouri state history.

The Last Hurrah

The Last Hurrah
Author: Kyle Sinisi
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
Total Pages: 470
Release: 2015-07-16
Genre: History
ISBN: 0742545369

In the late summer of 1864, Confederate General Sterling Price led a last ditch attempt to liberate Missouri from Union occupation and brutal guerrilla warfare. Price’s invading army was like few others seen during the Civil War. It was an army of cavalry that lacked men, horses, weapons, and discipline. Its success depended entirely upon a native uprising of pro-Confederate Missourians. When that uprising never occurred, Price’s rag-tag army marched through the state seeking revenge, supplies and conscripts. It was a march that took too long and ultimately allowed Union forces to converge on Price and badly defeat him in a series of battles that ran from Kansas City to the Arkansas border. Three months and 1,400 miles after it had started, the longest sustained cavalry operation of the war had ended in disaster. The Last Hurrah is the story of Price’s invasion from its politically charged planning to its starving retreat. The Last Hurrah is also the story of what happened after the shooting stopped. Even as hundreds of Missourians followed Price out of the state and tried desperately to join his army, elements of the Union army visited retribution upon Confederate sympathizers while still others showed little regard for the lives of the prisoners they had captured. Many more would have to suffer and die long after Sterling Price had fled Missouri.

Midnight Rising

Midnight Rising
Author: Tony Horwitz
Publisher: Henry Holt and Company
Total Pages: 383
Release: 2011-10-25
Genre: History
ISBN: 1429996986

A New York Times Notable Book for 2011 A Library Journal Top Ten Best Books of 2011 A Boston Globe Best Nonfiction Book of 2011 Bestselling author Tony Horwitz tells the electrifying tale of the daring insurrection that put America on the path to bloody war Plotted in secret, launched in the dark, John Brown's raid on Harpers Ferry was a pivotal moment in U.S. history. But few Americans know the true story of the men and women who launched a desperate strike at the slaveholding South. Now, Midnight Rising portrays Brown's uprising in vivid color, revealing a country on the brink of explosive conflict. Brown, the descendant of New England Puritans, saw slavery as a sin against America's founding principles. Unlike most abolitionists, he was willing to take up arms, and in 1859 he prepared for battle at a hideout in Maryland, joined by his teenage daughter, three of his sons, and a guerrilla band that included former slaves and a dashing spy. On October 17, the raiders seized Harpers Ferry, stunning the nation and prompting a counterattack led by Robert E. Lee. After Brown's capture, his defiant eloquence galvanized the North and appalled the South, which considered Brown a terrorist. The raid also helped elect Abraham Lincoln, who later began to fulfill Brown's dream with the Emancipation Proclamation, a measure he called "a John Brown raid, on a gigantic scale." Tony Horwitz's riveting book travels antebellum America to deliver both a taut historical drama and a telling portrait of a nation divided—a time that still resonates in ours.

The Howling Storm

The Howling Storm
Author: Kenneth W. Noe
Publisher: LSU Press
Total Pages: 742
Release: 2020-10-07
Genre: History
ISBN: 0807174203

Finalist for the Lincoln Prize! Traditional histories of the Civil War describe the conflict as a war between North and South. Kenneth W. Noe suggests it should instead be understood as a war between the North, the South, and the weather. In The Howling Storm, Noe retells the history of the conflagration with a focus on the ways in which weather and climate shaped the outcomes of battles and campaigns. He further contends that events such as floods and droughts affecting the Confederate home front constricted soldiers’ food supply, lowered morale, and undercut the government’s efforts to boost nationalist sentiment. By contrast, the superior equipment and open supply lines enjoyed by Union soldiers enabled them to cope successfully with the South’s extreme conditions and, ultimately, secure victory in 1865. Climate conditions during the war proved unusual, as irregular phenomena such as El Niño, La Niña, and similar oscillations in the Atlantic Ocean disrupted weather patterns across southern states. Taking into account these meteorological events, Noe rethinks conventional explanations of battlefield victories and losses, compelling historians to reconsider long-held conclusions about the war. Unlike past studies that fault inflation, taxation, and logistical problems for the Confederate defeat, his work considers how soldiers and civilians dealt with floods and droughts that beset areas of the South in 1862, 1863, and 1864. In doing so, he addresses the foundational causes that forced Richmond to make difficult and sometimes disastrous decisions when prioritizing the feeding of the home front or the front lines. The Howling Storm stands as the first comprehensive examination of weather and climate during the Civil War. Its approach, coverage, and conclusions are certain to reshape the field of Civil War studies.

The Great Missouri Raid

The Great Missouri Raid
Author: Michael J. Forsyth
Publisher: McFarland
Total Pages: 291
Release: 2015-03-27
Genre: History
ISBN: 0786476958

In 1864, General Sterling Price with an army of 12,000 ragtag Confederates invaded Missouri in an effort to wrest it from the United States Army's Department of Missouri. Price hoped his campaign would sway the 1864 presidential election, convincing war-weary Northern voters to cast their ballots for a peace candidate rather than Abraham Lincoln. It was the South's last invasion of Northern territory. But it was simply too late in the war for the South to achieve such an outcome, and Price grossly mismanaged the campaign, guaranteeing the defeat of his force and of the Confederate States. This book chronicles the Confederacy's desperate, final, ill-fated attempt to win a decisive victory.

Battlefield Atlas of Price's Missouri Expedition Of 1864

Battlefield Atlas of Price's Missouri Expedition Of 1864
Author: Charles Collins
Publisher: Createspace Independent Publishing Platform
Total Pages: 232
Release: 2018-05-13
Genre:
ISBN: 9781719088947

This 230 page atlas is divided into seven parts. Part I, Missouri's Divided Loyalties, and Part II, Missouri's Five Seasons, provide an overview of Missouri's history from the initial settlement of the Louisiana Purchase Territories through the opening years of the American Civil War. The remaining parts cover the Confederate plan, the Confederate movement into Missouri and the Union reaction, the Confederate retreat and Union pursuit into Kansas, and the final Confederate escape back into Arkansas. The atlas has a standard format with the map to left and the narrative to the right. Each narrative closes with two or more primary source vignettes. These vignettes provide an overview of the events shown on the map and discussed in the narrative from the perspective of persons who participated in the events. In most cases there are two vignettes with the first from a person loyal to the Union and the second from a person who supported the southern cause. A few narratives have two or more vignettes from only the Union side. This was done to emphasize disagreements and struggles among senior leaders to establish a common course of action. Map 25, Decision at the Little Blue River, is a good example and the three vignettes emphasize the disagreement between Maj. Gen. Samuel Curtis and his subordinate, Maj. Gen. James Blunt on where to locate the Union defensive line.

Bluecoat and Pioneer

Bluecoat and Pioneer
Author: John Benton Hart
Publisher: University of Oklahoma Press
Total Pages: 319
Release: 2019-01-17
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 0806163585

In 1918, urged on by his son Harry, John Benton Hart began to tell stories of a three-year period in his youth. He recalled his days as a trooper in the Eleventh Kansas Cavalry, fighting in Missouri and on the frontier, and his time as a civilian jack-of-all-trades doing risky work for the U.S. Army on the Wyoming-Montana Bozeman Trail in the middle of the Indian resistance campaign known as Red Cloud’s War. Once started, John Benton Hart became an enthusiastic raconteur, describing events with an almost cinematic vividness, while his son, an aspiring writer, documented his father’s testimony in what became several manuscripts. Compiled and reproduced here, edited by historian John Hart, John Benton Hart’s great-grandson, this memoir is a singular document of living history. As a young Kansas cavalryman, John Benton Hart participated in two momentous episodes of the Civil War era—Sterling Price’s Missouri Expedition of 1864, including the Battle of Westport, and such engagements in the Plains Indian Wars as the Battle of Platte Bridge in July 1865 and the Hayfield Fight near Fort C. F. Smith in 1867. In the engaging style of a natural storyteller, Hart re-creates these events as he experienced them, giving readers a rare glimpse at moments of historical import from the point of view of the “ordinary” soldier. In arresting detail, he also tells of crossing the Plains as a bullwhacker, carrying the mail between the beleaguered forts on the Bozeman Trail, and befriending scout Jim Bridger and Mountain Crow Chief Blackfoot. Framed and supplemented with the editor’s biographical, historical, and explanatory notes, Hart’s memoir offers a new perspective on events long fixed in the historical imagination. As history writ large or on a personal scale, Bluecoat and Pioneer tells a remarkable story.

Hearings

Hearings
Author: United States. Congress. Senate. Committee on Commerce
Publisher:
Total Pages: 1572
Release: 1964
Genre:
ISBN: