New and Noteworthy----1863, A Year of Turning Points: Arkansas

Civil War Arkansas, 1863: The Battle for a State, Mark K. Christ, University of Oklahoma Press, notes, bibliography, index, maps, illustrations, 321 pages, $34.95.

The Arkansas River, bisecting the state, in 1862 was a breadbasket for much of the trans-Mississippi Confederacy. Its productivity resembles Virginia's Shenandoah Valley. Also like Virginia, Arkansas was reluctant to join the Confederacy. The slave holding delta and lowland counties favored secession and the western mountainous regions favored the Union. The state's assembly on December 22 1860 called for a convention to meet; on January 15, 1861 the state's senate agreed and set the date as February 18 for an election of delegates to the state's convention. Two weeks before the Arkansas convention, the Confederacy declared its existence on February 4.

For the most part, the election confirmed a strong Unionist population. The convention was set for the first Monday in August. But Lincoln's call for troops and a fear that southern and eastern Arkansas counties would leave both the Union and the northern and western counties in it compelled the convention to vote Arkansas out of the Union.

Not all Arkansans rushed to the Confederate cause. The mountainous north-central Arkansas region generated the Arkansas Peace Society, a county home guard militia of ardent Unionists. A small Confederate army proceeded from northwest Arkansas and into southwest Missouri were in engaged Federal troops at Wilson's Creek. The Battle of Wilson's Creek was on August 10, 1861, near Springfield, Missouri. It was the first major battle of the war west of the Mississippi River and is called the Bull Run of the West.

The Battle of Elkhorn Tavern (Pea Ridge) sent them back into Arkansas on March 7 and 8, 1862, in northwest Arkansas, near Bentonville. By July 12 1862 a federal army occupied Helena, one of Arkansas' major cities ranked in importance right behind Little Rock, its capital. Throughout the rest of 1862 and 1863 a vicious guerrilla war was waged and the major battles at Arkansas Post, Helena, Bayou Fourche, Fort Smith that guarded the Arkansas River as it crossed into the Indiana Territory, and Pine Bluff were fought.

Well mapped and well illustrated Civil War Arkansas: The Battle For A State lacks only a chronology of Arkansas' Civil War history. Mark K. Christ's text is clear, concise and compelling. Balancing the major army campaigns in the state, the impact of the Federal brown water navy, the guerrilla war, the Native Americans on both sides, and the slaves and contrabands, Christ has composed a story diligence, exhaustion, cruelty and luck. Presenting descriptive anecdotes from the primary sources of soldiers and civilians, Native Americans and African Americans, Christ's narrative moves the reader through Arkansas' truly uncivil civil war and how it turned on soldiers courage and civilians endurance.

Bottom Image Source: interactive National Park Service map

Forthcoming: Arkansas' Fields of Blood

Fields of Blood: The Prairie Grove Campaign , William L. Shea, The University of North Carolina Press, 392 pp., 41 illus., 17 maps, appendices, notes, bibliolography., index, $35.00 release date October 24, 2009.

Reviewed by William C. Davis:

More than 25 years ago millions of Americans who never heard of the Battle of Prairie Grove, Arkansas, watched a Civil War battle being fought on that battlefield. It was not, as it happens, the Battle of Prairie Grove, but was rather, through the magic of Hollywood, the First Battle of Bull Run. It was the CBS Television mini-series “The Blue and the Gray,” and Arkansas was standing in for Virginia, with the battle scenes filmed on the Prairie Grove state park not far from Fayetteville. Now Prairie Grove stands up for itself to claim the attention of Civil War readers in the first substantial book ever written on the subject, and an outstanding piece of work at that. Fields of Blood: The Prairie Grove Campaign is written by William L. Shea, already the author of the distinguished Pea Ridge: Civil War Campaign in the West, which was a History Book Club selection some years ago. He brings the same exhaustive research to this project, the same crisp pen and the same sound judgments. Arkansas was crucial to control of the region west of the Mississippi River. Confederates needed it as a buffer to protect western Louisiana and as a launching pad for their ambitions of taking and holding Missouri. The Union had exactly the same interest in it for exactly opposite reasons. Not surprisingly, then, two of the three biggest battles of the war west of the river were fought there [the third being Westport, Missouri, in 1864]. At Prairie Grove, Major General Thomas Hindman hoped to drive the Union army commanded by Brigadier General James G. Blunt out of Arkansas for good, thus opening the way for an invasion of Missouri. Blunt was outnumbered and appealed for assistance, whereupon a now unknown officer named Francis J. Herron led 6,000 reinforcements on an incredible push that covered 110 miles in three days to reach Blunt just hours before the battle commenced at dawn. That feat alone would have won Herron the promotion he soon got that made him at the time the youngest major general in the history of the army [only to be outdone later in the war by George Armstrong Custer]. The battle that followed, like all the western battles, was rough and mean. William C. Quantrill’s bushwhackers took part in one of their few regular military actions, and so did several hundred Creek and Seminole Indians on both sides, some of them using the war to continue old clan feuds. The battle hinged on Hindman’s judgment, and with victory in his grasp he made the fatal error so often easily seen in hindsight. Blunt’s victory drove the Confederates out of northern Arkansas for two years and kept Missouri inviolate until the fall of 1864, unquestionably changing the course of the war west of the great river—just as surely as Shea’s Fields of Blood will persuade future filmmakers that the next time cameras roll at Prairie Grove it should be to capture the drama of that battle in its own right.

Source Text: History Book Club

Top Image Source: University of North Carolina Press

Bottom Image Source: painting by Andy Thomas, The Battle of Pairie Grove, The Ozarks' Civil War website