The Camden Expedition of 1864

by Michael J Forsyth

  2 September — Confederates evacuate Atlanta, while Sherman, with the elements of the XVII Corps that participated in the Red River Campaign, moves into the city.

  7 — Price crosses the Arkansas River with over 10,000 troops thus launching the long awaited invasion of Missouri.

  19 — XIX Corps, now in Major General Philip Sheridan’s Army, defeats Early

  19 September — at Winchester, Virginia, in the Shenandoah Valley. Price crosses the Missouri state line.

  22 — Early suffers another setback at Fisher’s Hill in the Shenandoah with the XIX Corps present.

  19 October — XIX Corps once again plays a decisive role in battle as Sheridan routs Early at Cedar Creek finally wresting control of the Shenandoah from the Confederates.

  23 — Price meets with a resounding defeat in his invasion of Missouri at Westport. Union troops under Major General William S. Rosecrans nearly destroy Price’s army and force him on a long retreat back to Arkansas. In the process, Price’s army dwindles to a fifth of its original strength as men desert by the thousands.

  8 November — Northern public reelects Lincoln by a large majority guaranteeing a Union victory in the Civil War. All the Federal troops that escaped from the Red River Valley have now made significant contributions to the Union cause. Their contributions were not possible except for the diversion made by the Union army in Camden Expedition, which, in effect, saved them for service on other fields.

  * * *

  Notes

  1. Compiled from the following sources: OR, series 1, Vol. 34, part 1, 653–654; E. B. and Barbara Long, The Civil War Day By Day, 474–579; and Report of the Joint Committee.

  Appendix 2.

  Order of Battle1

  UNION

  Union Department of Arkansas and VII Army Corps

  Maj. Gen. Frederick Steele

  Headquarters Troops (escort)

  D Company, 3rd Illinois Cavalry

  H Company, 15th Illinois Cavalry

  Third Division

  Brig. Gen. Frederick Salomon

  Artillery

  Vaughn’s Illinois Battery

  E Battery, 2nd Missouri Light

  Voegele’s Wisconsin Battery

  Frontier Division

  (Joined the march in the vicinity of Elkins Ferry)

  Brig. Gen. John M. Thayer

  Cavalry Division Brig. Gen. Eugene A. Carr

  Total effective Union force: approximately 11,500 men of all arms

  * * *

  CONFEDERATE

  Confederate Army

  General Edmund Kirby Smith, Commanding, Dept. of the Trans-Mississippi

  District of Arkansas

  Maj. Gen. Sterling Price

  Escort: 14th Missouri Battalion

  Fagan’s Cavalry Division2

  Brig. Gen. James F. Fagan

  Marmaduke’s Cavalry Division

  Brig. Gen. John S. Marmaduke

  Maxey’s Cavalry Division

  (Arrived from Indian Territory 7-12 April and departed on 27 April)

  Brig. Gen. Samuel B. Maxey

  (The following infantry divisions arrived on 20 April in Arkansas and were attached to General Price’s command on 26 April 1864)

  Walker’s Division

  Maj. Gen. John G. Walker (wounded)

  Arkansas Division

  Brig. Gen. Thomas J. Churchill

  Missouri Division

  Brig. Gen. Mosby M. Parsons

  Total effective Confederate force: approximately 14,000 men

  * * *

  Notes

  1. Compiled from the OR, Vol. 34, Part 1, 657–658; B & L Vol. 4, 368; and Confederate Military History Vol. 10, 273–279. Confederate field returns are incomplete for the District of Arkansas and the data contained here are based on scanning several reports from the commanders. Data concerning Confederate artillery units are almost entirely incomplete. The Arkansas and Missouri divisions’ commanders kept better returns than Price’s cavalry units and the order of battle is more complete.

  2. Confederate units at the division and brigade levels generally took the name of their commanding officers and did not have number designations. Most of the regiments were numbered; however, in some cases these units took on the name of their commander as the designation.

  3. Incomplete records in the OR do not permit the listing of subordinate units.

  Bibliography

  Bibliographical Note

  One would think that since so little has been written about the Camden Expedition it would be difficult to find adequate sources. I found that this was not the case. In fact, there is a wealth of sources available for researching this forgotten operation. In this note, I would like to identify those sources I found most useful and those that are questionable in reliability; and offer a possible explanation for a yawning gap in Camden’s historiography.

  Without a doubt the most useful source is War of the Rebellion: A Compilation of the Official Records of the Union and Confederate Armies, which compiles all after action reports and correspondence of the unit commanders into Volume 34, Parts 1–3. It is an excellent repository for investigating the progress of the campaign and veracity of the participants. By far the best firsthand account is The History of the 33rd Iowa Volunteer Infantry by the oft-quoted Union Private Andrew Sperry. I found his record of the Camden Expedition accurate, lively, and complete. Sperry had a talent for capturing the moment and placing the reader at the center of the action he was experiencing. Without this fine chronicle, a full history of the expedition would have been far more difficult to weave together.

  No full-length firsthand Confederate account exists of the expedition. Therefore, I used several reminiscences of the expedition written at different points to piece together a viewpoint from the Confederate soldier’s perspective. Among the best is Dr. Junius Bragg’s short article “Chasing Steele through Jenkins’ Ferry” and Joseph Blessington’s Walker’s Texas Division.

  There are two excellent general overviews available that provide an account from the Union and Confederate points of view. Both were written by participants some years after the war and give a fairly accurate synopsis of events. From the Union side, Wiley Britton’s history The Civil War on the Western Border provided a fine overview of the entire operation, while the authoritative Confederate Military History, Volume 10—Clement Evans, editor—gives a review from the Rebel standpoint.

  Unfortunately, some chroniclers wrote highly biased treatises that, while useful in specific areas, were suspect in others. John Edwards’ Shelby and His Men is the most prominent of these from the Confederate side. Edwards was an aide to Joseph Shelby and his biography of the cavalry commander was an unabashed attempt to inflate the considerable reputation of his chief. Yet, Edwards does provide an excellent glimpse of such incidents as the atrocities at Poison Springs and Marks’ Mills. While maintaining a critical eye, one can find a great deal of excellent information from his biography. Samuel Crawford’s Kansas in the Sixties is a subjective history on the Union side. Crawford openly expresses disdain for Frederick Steele’s leadership. However, just like Edwards, Crawford offers many interesting anecdotes of the expedition and his role as commander of the 2nd Kansas (Colored) is critical to unfolding events at Jenkins’ Ferry.

  As rich as the Camden literature is, a gap still exists in the written history of the expedition from the perspective of the Rebels. With the exception of the Official Records and John Edwards’s biography of Shelby, there is no Confederate account of the opening phases from a private soldier’s standpoint. There is little primary Confederate source material describing the Union advance on Washington and Elkins’ Ferry, or the attempt to block Steele from reaching Camden—those phases prior to the point where the Rebel infantry divisions arrived from Louisiana. We may find a possible explanation by examining the background of the Confederate units that participated in the early operations. By and large the Confederates hailed from the poorest, hardscrabble regions of the Confederacy.
These men came from the backwoods of Missouri, lowlands of Arkansas and Louisiana, and open plains of the Indian Territory. Not noted for emphasis on education, these areas had a high percentage of illiterate men who were of military age. Therefore, few would have left a written account of their experiences. Perhaps this is the reason for the dearth of Rebel material from the opening stages of the Camden Expedition.

  Nevertheless, I enjoyed searching for sources and reading about the unique and trying expedition. Though history has largely ignored the experiences of the men who fought its battles, Camden is no less exciting than any other action of the Civil War. Further, as I attempt to show in the text, this operation did have an important effect on the outcome of the war and is well worthy of examination by serious students of the conflict as well as by casual readers.

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