The Trans-Mississippi theater was a theater of the American Civil War that encompassed the states west of the Mississippi River and east of the Rockies. Although they were fought with great intensity, the battles in the Western states and territories took place on a much smaller scale than those in the East. Neitehr did they conclude with such overwhelming Union success as eventually resulted in other areas.
Operations in the Indian Territory and Texas[]
Background[]
Texas and Arkansas both declared for the South and Missouri was the focus of much prewar conflict. Other territories had divided loyalties.
The Indian Territory (modern-day Oklahoma) was occupied primarily by eastern Native American tribes that had been forcibly relocated there in the 1830s. When the war broke out, most of these tribes sided with the Confederacy in the belief that Southern independence represented their best chance for greater autonomy.
On 7 March 1862 a Union army routed a numerically superior Confederate force at Pea Ridge, the battle in northern Arkansas often termed "the Gettysburg of the West."
History[]
The Trans-Mississippi area - Texas, Arkansas, the Indian Territory, Missouri, and Kansas - did not see as much conventional fighting as the Western and Eastern Theaters. But military events in this region affected Northern and Southern morale, and thus the political arena. Confederate domination of this region would spell political disaster for Abraham Lincoln, whereas Union control could hamper, but not cripple, the Rebel struggle for independence.
Pea Ridge and Prairie Grove[]
The Union victory at Pea Ridge opened up much of Arkansas to Union conquest and wrecked Confederate strategic aspirations in the Trans-Mississippi. General Earl Van Dorn and his routed army transferred to the eastern side of the Mississippi in the late spring of 1862. Arkansas now lay open to Federal invasion, and after some initial skirmishes in the north of the state, Union general James G. Blunt pushed south. At Prairie Grove on 7 December 1862, he and his small army defeated a hastily created Confederate force led by General Thomas C. Hindman.
The Confederates react[]
Despairing over the series of defeats in Missouri and Arkansas, Jefferson Davis reorganized the command structure of the Trans-Mississippi Department in the spring of 1863, giving overall comand to General Edmund Kirby Smith. But before Smith could gather sufficient forces to challenge the Federals, they had marched quickly toward Little Rock, the Arkansas capital.
General Blunt, with a small Union army of 3,000, had entered the Indian Territory in April 1863 and reestablished a post at Fort Gibson, briefly held by the Union in 1861. After reoutfitting his men, he planned to march on Little Rock as part of a pincer strategy focused on the Arkansas capital. The Confederates, however, were not going to give him that opportunity. Brigadier-General Douglas Cooper collected about 6,000 troops at Honey Springs, a Rebel outpost some 20 miles southwest of Fort Gibson, and awaited only the arrival of another 3,000 to launch an attack on Blunt. Cooper's men were badly armed - only 75% of them had serviceable firearms, many of these being old smoothbore guns. They also had only four artillery pieces. But the Texas cavalry and Cooper's Choctaw and Chickasaw regiments had high morale and were aching for a fight. Blunt, now well aware of the danger if the two Confederate commands united, launched a preemptive attack on Cooper on 17 July. Outnumbered two to one, Blunt's multiracial command was composed of a black regiment, some Unionist Native American units, and white regiments from the Midwest. As one historian put it, it was "the first rainbow coalition." Blunt's men were almost all armed with the rifled Springfield musket and had good artillery. For the first half of the battle, which lasted four hours, their technological advantage was nullified by the Rebel numbers and terrain. A determined midday assault by the 1st Kansas Colored Infantry against the center of the Confederate line, however, forced the outgunned Southern artillery to withdraw, and with it the rest of Cooper's force.
Though Honey Springs would be the largest battle ever fought in the Indian Territory, in terms of casualties the engagement was insignificant - Union losses were fewer than 200 and Confederate casualties no more than 600. But the Union victory all but assured the conquest of Little Rock. About seven weeks later, on 10 September, the Arkansas capital fell to the other half of the Union pincer movement, placing three-quarters of Arkansas firmly under Northern control.
Honey Springs also demonstrated, at a sensitive point in the war, the fighting prowess of black Northern troops. Blunt lavished praise on the 1st Kansas in his report but unfortunately the deeeds of the regiment were destined to pass almost unnoticed by the Northern public, because the 54th Massachusetts Infantry Regiment's assault on Fort Wagner, South Carolina occurred one day later.
The Battle of Sabine Pass[]
The Union went on the offensive in Texas as well, occupying the major port of Galveston in October 1862. Having then lost the port to a miraculous Confederate counterattack on 1 January 1863, Major General Benjamin Butler, commanding Union forces in New Orleans, decided to retake it. On 7 September, four gunboats, 19 transports, and 5,000 bluecoats arrived offshore from Sabine Pass, which commanded a seaborne approach toward Galveston. There were only 47 Southern gunners in the main fort commanding the pass, but they had relieved their boredom over the previous months with target practice. Each of the guns was accurately registered to hit a designated target in the Texas Channel. The practice paid off when, waiting patiently until the Union gunboats passed directly by those targets, the Confederate commander suddenly ordered his six guns to open fire. The Union ships were pummeled with direct hits that put the first two gunboats out of action and blocked the channel.
Instead of landing the infantry at an alternate location, the infantry were at an alternate location, the Yankees were overawed by the fierce defense, and turned their remaining boats around, sailing back to New Orleans. Jefferson Davis and the Confederate Congress acclaimed Sabine Pass as a glorious victory and pumped up its significance to help restore lagging Southern morale. Special medals for each of the 47 gunners were struck to commemorate the heroic defense, and Galveston eventually remained the only major Southern port still under Confederate control at the end of the war.
Aftermath[]
Frustrated by the failure at Sabine Pass and determined to win East Texas and subdue the rest of Louisiana, the Lincoln administration authorized an incursion into northwestern Louisiana in the spring of 1864. Two Union armies converged on Shreveport from Arkansas and New Orleans. Both were plagued by poor leadership and, meeting determined Confederate resistance, were forced to retreat.
Both regions were, in effect, occupied by Union forces until the end of the war, though General Sterling Price's 1864 raid into Missouri briefly drove Union forces out. In both places, however, a vicious guerrilla war erupted that pitted neighbors and relatives against each other.
Mississippi operations[]
Background[]
After the Union captures of New Orleans, Memphis, and Vicksburg, the North controlled the Mississippi River, but the Confederates were still active in the river's hinterland. Southern forces held most of Mississippi - the state's black prairie region was an important granary, and General Nathan Bedford Forrest's feared horsemen roamed the pinewoods. West of the Mississippi River, Confederate General Kirby Smith was based in Shreveport, Louisiana. General Sterling Price, the victor at Wilson's Creek in 1861, faced Union forces in southern Arkansas.
In his grand strategy for 1864, General Ulysses S. Grant planned for General William Tecumseh Sherman to advance on Atlanta, leaving detachments in Tennessee to patrol his long supply lines against Forrest's raiders. Grant hoped that General Nathaniel P. Banks in New Orleans might advance of Mobile, Alabama. But President Lincoln wanted Banks, in conjunction with Admiral David Dixon Porter's river fleet, to attack Shreveport via Louisiana's Red River. He hoped to isolate Texas and thwart any Confederate alliance with the French in Mexico.
History[]
For Union general William T. Sherman, the Red River Campaign of March-May 1864 was one "damn blunder from beginning to end." General Nathaniel Banks' target was Shreveport, Louisiana, the Confederate headquarters of the Trans-Mississippi West, standing on the Red River, a tributary of the Mississippi. But he was routed by Richard Taylor at the Battle of Mansfield on 8 April. Although Banks rallied the next day to fend off Taylor at Pleasant Hill, Union reinforcements from Arkansas were also defeated, spelling doom for the expedition. On the campaign's naval front, Admiral David D. Porter's gunboats were stranded upriver by low water. They only escaped after the herculean efforts of the 10,000 men who built wing dams, which stemmed the current enough to refloat the ships.
The "Wizard of the Saddle"[]
In Mississippi, meanwhile, the Union's woes could be summed up in three words: Nathan Bedford Forrest. The fearsome Confederate cavalryman - nicknamed the "Wizard of the Saddle" - had for years been wreaking havoc in Union-held Kentucky and Tennessee. He also triggered outrage across the North when, on 12 April 1864, while sacking Fort Pillow to the north of Memphis, he appeared to condone the massacre of many of its Black soldiers.
As spring turned to summer, the Confederate forces in Mississippi, guarding the western approaches to the South's vital Selma Arsenal in Alabama, were increasingly needed in the campaign against Sherman, who had begun to move on Atlanta. Forrest spurred northward to raid Sherman's long supply line, which snaked back through the hills of Tennessee. Shermna dispatched Samuel D. Sturgis from Union-held Memphis to stop Forrest.
With only 4,800 troopers in his command, Forrest lured Sturgis and his 8,500 men ever deeper down the rutted Mississippi lanes. Then, on 10 June, at Brice's Crossroads, Forrest sprang his trap. Sturgis' long columns, nearly prostrated by unseasonable heat, were bogged in mud and enclosed by thickets. In a series of masterful frontal and flank attacks, Forrest pushed the Union soldiers back against the rain-swolled Tishomingo Creek, rolled his artillery forward, and broke their line. His troopers chased the Northerners nearly back to Memphis. Having destroyed a force twice his size, Forrest captured wagons, cannons, ammunition cases, provisions, and prisoners.
Sherman then dispatched an entire corps under General Andrew J. Smith, who reached as far south as Tupelo, Mississippi, before deciding to dig in. On 14-15 July, Forrest, reinforced with infantry, threw charge after charge against Smith's earthworks, but each was repulsed, and Smith managed to withdraw in good order. Forrest had been kept from attacking Sherman's supply line, and the Union commanders in Memphis, protected by 6,000 troops, could congratulate themselves on a victory. Yet on 21 August, the "Wizard" materialized in their midst, with 1,500 troopers galloping through the Memphis streets seeking prisoners, supplies, and horses, and chasing the Union district commander, General Cadwallader C. Washburn, out of his bed clad only in a nightshirt. After that, more Union troops, who would have been better employed elsewhere, had to be pulled back into the city.
Raiding Missouri[]
A week later, in Arkansas, Confederate General Sterling Price and 12,000 ragtag cavalrymen trotted north on a raid into Missouri, where Price had once been governor. They hoped to take that state for the Confederacy, or at least cause a defeat that would harm Lincoln's chances for re-election. Since St. Louis was too well garrisoned to chance an assault, they veered west along the Missouri River's south bank, and Price swept up whatever horses, mules, cattle, and supplies he could find. Price was, however, no Forrest. No doubt alarmed by the fresh scalps he saw hanging from the bridle of the bushwhacker leader "Bloody Bill" Anderson, he failed to deploy Missouri's hordes of Confederate bushwhackers in the Union rear. Above all, Price moved too slowly - after looting the state he was encumbered by a long train of cattle and wagons. Inevitably, Union troops closed in - 35,000 of them. In October, Price made a run west for Kansas and then south for Indian Territory (today's Oklahoma). Pitched battles occurred as he tried to ford swollen rivers. On 23 October, at Westport near Kansas City, he repeatedly charged a Union line but failed to break it before enemy cavalry was at his rear.
Over the next few days, a running fight developed until Price abandoned his booty and fled south. The very day that he crossed the Arkansas River to safety - 8 November - was Election Day in the North. Not only had Price's raid failed to capture Missouri for the South, but his ignominious retreat had actually helped Lincoln's victory - an ironic end to the Confederacy's final campaign west of the Mississippi.
Aftermath[]
By the end of 1864, the war in the states that bordered the Mississippi River had mostly ended.
In August 1864, Admrial David Farragut overcame Mobile's seaward defenses, while the city itself held out until war's end. In November, after continued raiding in Tennessee, Forrest and his command joined the Armyo f Tennessee on its fateful march to Franklin and Nashville. Forrest's glory days were over, howevre. In early 1865, a massive Union cavalry raid through Alabama and Georgia, led by General James H. Wilson, defeated Forrest at each encounter.
Rather than surrender in 1865, General Price led many of his men into Mexico, where they hoped to serve the Emperor Maximilian. They established a Confederate exile colony in Veracruz.
Last Terms of Surrender[]
In April 1865, the Confederate generals Robert E. Lee in Virginia and Joseph E. Johnston in North Carolina surrendered their field armies to the Union. In Alabama, the Confederate general Richard Taylor, watched developments to the north with fatalistic gloom. Like Johnston, he had been fighting a losing battle, in his case against two separate Union forces in the north and south of the state. As soon as he heard of Johnston's negotiations with Sherman, he too sued for peace. On 8 May at Citronelle, Alabama, he agreed with General Edward Canby, the Union commander-in-chief in the state, to accept terms similar to those that had been offered to Lee and Johnston.
By that time only one Confederate army was still officially at war with the Union: that of the vast Trans-Mississippi Department, under the command of General Edmund Kirby Smith. Not having suffered the reverses that Johnston and Taylor had known, Kirby Smith proved less willing to come to terms. On the day after Taylor's cpaitulation, he flatly refused a Union invitation to lay down hi sarms. On 12-13 May, a final engagement was fought at Palmito Ranch, a Confederate outpost on the Rio Grande. Twice the position fell to attacking Union regiments, and twice the defenders reclaimed it. Ironically, it was the Confederates who thus won the last battle of the Civil War, at a cost of four dozen men killed and a dozen or more wounded - the Union force suffered 30 casualties.
Final surrenders[]
By late May, in the Trans-Mississippi region, Kirby Smith was starting to feel the pressure of changed circumstances. As news of Jefferson Davis' arrest spread, many of his men laid down their arms and set off for home. With his army dissolving around him, the general also learned that Grant was sending the redoubtable General Philip Sheridan to enforce peace. Recognizing the inevitable, Kirby Smith sent word to Canby, now in New Orleans, that he too was prepared to negotiate a surrender. The document was signed on 2 June.
Even then, some groups held out. Brigadier General Stand Watie, a Cherokee in command of the Native American cavalry in Kirby Smith's army, only accepted a ceasefire on 23 June.