Dixie Victorious: An Alternate history of the Civil War

by Peter Tsouras

  Reports from Marmaduke spurred Kirby Smith and his men to greater efforts. Command of the cavalry was transferred to Brigadier General James F. Fagan, after Marmaduke had suffered a fairly serious wound to his leg at Poison Spring. Like his predecessor, Fagan intended to isolate Steele and, when word arrived of the latest Yankee wagon train winding its way to Camden, Fagan moved to intercept it. Twelve days after the action at Poison Spring, 2,500 Confederate cavalry under Fagan caught the Union supply train at Mark’s Mill, little more than 20 miles due east of Camden. Although the numbers were much closer this time, the same result followed. The Rebel troopers washed over the Federals like a tidal wave. In a very brief time, most of the Union soldiers were prisoners and all of the wagons and guns were taken. Fewer than 100 officers and men on horseback reached the relative safety of Camden. The trap was closing around Steele.

  With the defeat at Mark’s Mill, Steele realized that he must form up his corps and fight his way free to Little Rock. Unfortunately for the beleaguered general, the Confederates had no intention of allowing that to come to pass. To the north and east, Fagan’s seven cavalry brigades, supported by several batteries of horse artillery and the nine captured Federal pieces blocked the most direct route to the state capital. Also, this direction necessitated the crossing of the Ouachita River, swollen by spring rains and guarded by the enemy. To avoid such a daunting task, Steele could march northwards with the river on his right and head for Arkadelphia, 50 miles above Camden, or head west towards Washington, 60 miles northwest from Camden. While these routes offered greater promise, especially the road to Arkadelphia, Kirby Smith fully appreciated their strategic import, too. As Steele prevaricated, Kirby Smith placed Churchill’s Arkansans across the north road and Parsons’s Missourians blocked the western road. Walker’s Texans deployed between the two as a reserve. Kirby Smith also liberally distributed his sizable artillery park along the cordon. As he waited his men dug fieldworks.

  After conferring with his officers, Steele settled upon a drive due north with the intention of shoving Churchill’s division aside and bolting for Arkadelphia. It was a bold plan and the Federals would bring more men to the point of attack. Nevertheless, numerous problems conspired to thwart Steele’s undertaking. The losses from Poison Spring and Mark’s Mill, coupled with the lack of forage, deprived the Northerners of any effective cavalry. Also, there were simply not enough healthy horses and mules to move what wagons and artillery they needed for the retreat. What Steele possessed was two divisions of infantry, who had been on half-rations for more than a month, supported by a decimated artillery arm. On the morning of May 13, the date set for the breakout assault, Steele and his staff rode forward to reconnoiter the ground. Through their field glasses they saw 2,000 Rebel soldiers, backed by several dozen guns ensconced in formidable defensive works. Steele’s heart sank at the sight. He had never approved of the march on Shreveport, nor the insistence by his superiors that he execute it. Now his command, reduced by defeat and tormented by want, faced a surely insurmountable challenge. While he could bring to the field 6,000 infantry, Steele would have to guard his left flank (his right was screened by the Ouachita) and provide a rearguard in the town. In addition, even with a victory, most of the wagons, artillery and worst of all, the ambulances, would remain behind. The thought of leaving his wounded to the Rebels proved particularly galling.

  As a pall descended over Steele’s spirits, word came that an envoy from the Confederate camp had arrived in Camden. Steele and his staff returned to town at a trot. There they found the ubiquitous Colonel Labranche. Under a flag of truce, Labranche now proffered fairly generous terms of surrender. Parole was out of the question, but the Southerners promised good treatment for all, medical care for the wounded and proper food, clothing and shelter in a prisoner of war camp at Marshall, Texas. Aware of the terrible rumors emanating out of Andersonville, Georgia, Kirby Smith had made sure that the longhorn cattle and cotton harvests of the Trans-Mississippi Department would keep such infamy east of the mighty river. Steele asked for 24 hours to consider the offer and, knowing that time favored the Rebels, Labranche cheerfully consented. That afternoon, following a spartan lunch, Steele conferred with his divisional and brigade commanders. While none advocated surrendering, none spoke convincingly for launching the assault. Unfortunately for Steele, the decision lay entirely with him. After a sleepless night, he sent out an aide-de-camp who met with Labranche and at noon, on May 14, at the Alan Halphen farmstead north of Camden, Steele surrendered his corps. Slightly fewer than 10,000 Federals went into captivity.

  Missouri in the Balance

  For Kirby Smith, the capitulation of Steele’s corps opened a wide vista of opportunities. Even as his quartermasters saw to cataloging and pressing into service all the captured Union equipment, Kirby Smith marshalled his forces and pointed them northwards. Nary a Federal soldier remained in Arkansas. Harris Flanagin, the Confederate governor in exile, urged the departmental commander to march on Little Rock, for both understood the value of redeeming the state from the Yankees. Kirby Smith needed no prodding. Among his many talents were his political skills and his ability to work with civilian leadership. To take Little Rock and restore Confederate authority in Arkansas would set a precedent and severely damage the Lincoln administration’s reputation. As the newly named Army of Arkansas moved north, Kirby Smith sent out J.O. Shelby’s Iron Brigade to enforce the conscription laws. There would be no want of weapons to arm the new recruits.

  In Washington, D.C., the reports piled up the grim news. By the second week of May, 35,000 Federal soldiers had been killed or captured and, coupled to this, the North had lost over 125 cannon and more than 1,000 wagons and ambulances. Additionally, the entire Mississippi Squadron lay at the bottom of the Red River. These losses had led to the Union relinquishing all of Louisiana west of the Mississippi River and all of Arkansas save for a garrison established behind entrenchments at Helena. One of Sherman’s corps had been transferred to New Orleans and Grant now sent a reinforced corps to St Louis while other troops rushed to Memphis. These redeployments played havoc with the Northern spring offensives in Virginia and Georgia. General Joseph E. Johnston penned Sherman in the northwestern corner of Georgia and Grant could not sustain his war of attrition, especially after the bloody reverse at the Wilderness.

  On May 23, after a series of rousing speeches and an artillery salute from a battery comprised entirely of captured pieces, Governor Flanagin reestablished Confederate governance in Arkansas. Meanwhile, Kirby Smith kept pushing his Army of Arkansas forward. Shelby’s recruiting proved particularly effective, as he informed the men of the state that not joining in the fight left their lives and property at risk. In short order, Kirby Smith could count another infantry division of more than 4,000 amongst his order of battle. While some of the recruits harbored Unionist sentiments or simply wished to be left alone, many were veterans of Pea Ridge, Prairie Grove and Vicksburg and looked to avenge the depredations inflicted upon their homes. With 8,000 infantry, 4,000 cavalry and nearly 100 cannon, Kirby Smith marched into Missouri to deliver the coup de grâce of the Confederate campaign.

  For the Federal Military Division of West Mississippi, the crisis was coming to a head. Reinforcements sent from the east had to help secure all of the great cities on the eastern side of the river and St Louis on the western bank. Most of Major General Edward R.S. Canby’s men knew little of combat beyond garrison duty, pursuing Rebel raiders or brutalizing the secessionist elements in Missouri. To flesh out his forces, Canby called up the home guard units but, outside of their county of origin, they proved next to useless. Even worse for Canby, the Confederate advance emboldened the Missouri bushwhackers and their strikes grew in frequency and strength. As the Army of Arkansas crossed into Missouri, another 2,000 flocked to Kirby Smith’s banner and the partisan rangers ran rampant. An old warrior, Canby steeled himself to meet the threat. With approximately 25,000 men evenly divided into two corps, Canby marched out of St Louis int
ent on keeping Missouri in the Union.

  Missouri’s secession loomed large in Kirby Smith’s thoughts. One of the general’s entourage was Thomas C. Reynolds, the Confederate governor of Missouri. Reynolds enjoyed a very cordial relationship with Kirby Smith, and always vigorously supported the commander’s efforts to administer the Trans-Mississippi Department. Now Reynolds made a persuasive case for seizing Jefferson City, calling a convention and voting on an ordinance of secession. Coupled with the loss of Arkansas, this would ensure that the Lincoln administration would stagger into the election of 1864. It was a bold plan, and boldness had already carried the Confederates far. Also, the Missouri troops of Parsons and Shelby had already performed prodigies of valor as a regular course of action and now, back in their home state, their morale knew no limits. From Fayetteville, Arkansas, Kirby Smith led his corps-sized army to Springfield, Missouri, confident in his men’s spirits. Since his days with the Army of the Shenandoah, Kirby Smith never doubted his soldiers’ resolve and never wavered when it came to sending them into battle.

  Canby’s general staff finished the arrangements for a move from St Louis, and on June 11, the same day that Kirby Smith left Springfield, Canby’s army marched out to meet the enemy. The Union commander especially wished to prevent a Rebel entry into Jefferson City. The Yankee host made a direct course for Rolla, a town that lay 60 miles southeast of the capital and 100 miles southwest of St Louis. Any Confederate thrust at the state capital must proceed through Rolla. Canby planned to bring the Army of Arkansas to battle at Rolla, and Kirby Smith displayed no hesitation for a contest of arms.

  As the two armies closed, both sides could claim certain advantages and both faced serious drawbacks. For the Confederates, their problems were twofold. The most glaring lay in the fact that the Federals outnumbered the Southerners 25,000 to 15,000. Also, the burden of the attack rested squarely on Kirby Smith’s shoulders, with all of its attendant risks and higher casualties. Despite such considerations, Kirby Smith knew that his force, with the exception of one division of Arkansas infantry, was comprised of battle-tested veterans. His cavalry was keeping the Union horse at bay, depriving Canby of accurate reconnaissance and, because of all the battlefield captures, the Rebel artillery park surpassed its Northern counterpart. For Canby, his larger force and defensive posture held him in good stead. Yet, he also labored under dangerous handicaps. Most of the Missouri bushwhackers did not ride in and join the Army of Arkansas. Rather, they ranged far and wide, striking at isolated garrisons and breaking Canby’s supply line to St Louis. Even before the battle was joined, Canby had detached two brigades, one of infantry and one of cavalry, to secure his line of communications. More troubling, much of his infantry were either garrison troops or home guard units. For Canby, the Army of the Missouri was blue on the outside and green on the inside.

  On the morning of June 18, the two armies drew themselves up near the John Flettrich Plantation, approximately two miles south of Rolla. Only a few buildings and fences broke up the landscape, and it was here that Canby meant to stop the Rebels once and for all. Kirby Smith deployed his cavalry in equal parts on both wings with his veteran infantry in the center, backed by most of the artillery. The recruit division he placed in reserve. Canby matched his opponent’s dispositions and, while his superior numbers in infantry allowed for a longer line, Canby’s men suffered in terms of morale and experience. A military career built on burning down the farmsteads of families of suspected bushwhackers inculcated poor discipline and fleeting courage. While spreading out his infantry extended his line, it also led Canby to broadcast his batteries up and down the army’s frontage. Already outgunned, the move robbed the Federals of any concentrated artillery fire.

  At 10.00 a.m., Kirby Smith ordered his guns to open up on the Army of the Missouri. The Yankee cannoneers soon replied. Kirby Smith’s chief of artillery, Brigadier General Peter Van Wooten, a Scottish engineer and soldier of fortune, brought practically all of his guns to bear on the center of Canby’s line. Here they did a terrible execution, to the point where the Union commander ordered forward half of his reserves to bolster the line. Confederate counter-battery fire also silenced many of the Federal guns on this section of the front. For an hour and a half the guns roared, until bugles sounded and drums rolled and the whole of the Rebel infantry advanced. Walker’s Texans took the left and Churchill’s Arkansans were on the right. Both marched in echelon to protect the flanks and to allow Parsons’s Missourians in the center to serve as the spearpoint of the assault. As Taylor did with Gray’s Louisianans at Mansfield, Kirby Smith gave the Missourians the honor of drawing first blood on their native soil. The reserve, the artillery and the cavalry all supported the attack.

  The Federal soldiers braced for the shock. The infantry, inexperienced and unnerved, discharged ragged musket volleys and many of the cannon were already silenced. As the Confederates closed to within a hundred paces, they halted, fired one volley and then with a Rebel yell charged at the double quick. Once more in the campaigns of the Trans-Mississippi Department, elan and impetus carried the day over superior numbers. The center of Canby’s position gave way in one huge surge. The remainder of Canby’s reserve, a brigade of infantry, melted away at the sight of the carnage before them. Within a quarter of an hour, the Army of the Missouri was streaming back up the road towards St Louis. Shelby, Fagan and the other cavalry officers then took up the pursuit, granting the Yankees no respite and bagging nearly 3,000 prisoners and practically every cannon, wagon and ambulance in the Northern army. The Southern horse finally drew off after many days of giving chase brought them to the outskirts of the defenses of St Louis.

  From St Louis, Canby telegraphed Washington with the black news, while simultaneously requesting reinforcements and resigning his commission. In the meantime, Kirby Smith turned his army to the northeast and marched on Jefferson City. Even though it was but a short distance to the capital from Rolla, several thousand recruits joined the Army of Arkansas in its victorious progress, and each received a newly captured Springfield musket. On June 21, three days after the rout at Flettrich’s Farm, the Iron Brigade, 600 Missourian troopers accompanied by two batteries of horse artillery, trotted into Jefferson City. Since the brigade lacked a national banner, the 5th Missouri Regiment volunteered its colors, which were run up over the capital building.

  The following day, the Army of Arkansas trooped into town and 36 hours later Governor Reynolds sent out the call for a convention to consider an ordinance of secession. As the former government-in-exile assumed authority and delegates arrived from the Missouri hinterland, Kirby Smith took his army to the east. Leaving the new division of Missouri recruits to train and dig fortifications, he rendezvoused with his cavalry eight miles due east of St Louis at the town of Clayton. Recalling the debacle at Helena, Arkansas, the prior July, the Confederate commander entertained no notion of assaulting Yankees dug in with their backs to the river and supported by the big guns of the United States Navy. His men could accomplish the difficult, but not what he deemed the impossible. In any case, Canby, whose resignation was denied, could not hope to leave his defenses and challenge Confederate hegemony in the state. On July 23, the secession convention met and in an overwhelming vote Missouri left the Union.

  Victory and Independence

  While no one at the time recognized Missouri’s secession as the turning point in the war, such was the case. West of the Mississippi River, Union forces confined themselves to the fortifications of St Louis and Helena. More Federal troops dispatched from the East secured these two spots but the Federal cantonments on the Texas coast were abandoned. A sizable portion of the Northern reinforcements went to Minnesota to keep the Sioux Nation in check. Missouri left the Union and with Arkansas redeemed, the majority of neutral or Unionist tribes in the Indian Territory went over to the Confederacy. As spring gave way to summer, Grant’s and Sherman’s campaigns in Virginia and Georgia came to grief as the Federal leaders helplessly watched as entire corps l
eft for the west. The shifting of troops robbed the Federal offensives of the weight of numbers needed to grind down the Rebels. Without such an advantage, their attacks quickly stalled, then stopped altogether. Against this depressing background, Lincoln went out to meet George B. McClellan in the election of 1864. Despite the questionable Republican machinations behind West Virginia and Nevada achieving statehood before the election, and the use of the “bayonet vote,” the defeats and war weariness gave the Democrats the presidency and both houses of Congress. President-elect McClellan arranged an armistice for Christmas which held throughout the spring and summer of 1865 until the Treaty of Hamilton, signed in Bermuda on August 22 of that year, ended the war with complete independence for the Confederate States of America.

  Victory did much to ease the ill will between Edmund Kirby Smith and Richard Taylor. Kirby Smith eschewed several opportunities to enter the political arena and instead accepted the post of superintendent at the newly established Southern Military Academy in Montgomery, Alabama. Taylor followed in his father’s footsteps and, after sitting in the Confederate Senate, he became the Confederacy’s third president, after Robert E. Lee’s administration. The fates of the Union leadership in the west proved much less sanguine. No one’s career or reputation survived intact, although Banks, Steele and Canby all penned exculpatory memoirs. Banks went back to politics and prospered well enough to return eventually to the United States House of Representatives for Massachusetts. Steele retired to his property in Connecticut, went into semi-seclusion and made his living as a gentleman farmer. Canby, who possessed more military acumen than good fortune, accepted a generalship in the army of the khedive of Egypt. He perished bravely with his men at the hands of the Mahdists in 1881 in the Sudan. Porter faced a court-martial which found his negligence only exceeded by his greed and ego. Stripped of his rank, fined into penury, within a year he was dead by his own hand in a bordello in Boston. The unforgiving Taylor summed up the news, that Porter died “without honor, without mourning and without his pants.”10