Price saw wide service in the war with Mexico, first as commander of a regiment of Missouri volunteers and later as military governor of New Mexico. He emerged from the war a brevet brigadier general, having gained a higher rank in Mexico than any other future Confederate military leader except Gideon Pillow. His Mexican War service brought him fame and glory, but it also revealed disturbing traits that should have raised doubts about his fitness for command.
A penchant for independent action, bordering on insubordination and aggravated by a deep thirst for glory, was the most serious flaw to surface, and it drove Price to invade the State of Chihuahua. The Mexican governor tried to intercede with the invaders, claiming that peace had been declared, but Price dismissed him and attacked, capturing the capital and killing 200 Mexican soldiers at a loss of only four dead. Six days earlier the United States Senate had ratified the Treaty of Guadalupe-Hidalgo.
Maj. Gen. Sterling Price (Louisiana Historical Association Collection, Howard-Tilton Memorial Library, Tulane University)
In the fanfare that followed, the fact that Price had waged an illegal campaign was forgotten. President James K. Polk considered the operation one of the most complete victories of the war, and the Missouri press predicted Price would emerge “with a higher military fame and with laurels more imperishable than any other officer who has been or is now connected with the army of the west.” Which is precisely what Price had hoped for.2
Fame brought new office, but with it came great turmoil. Passage of the Kansas-Nebraska Act during his second year as governor tore asunder the state Democratic Party and placed Price in a personal quandary: he sympathized with those who would make Kansas a slave state, yet he was still a Union man. Price refused to ally himself with the growing secessionist element, preferring compromise in a time of seething radicalism.
On the strength of his reputation as a conditional Unionist, in February 1861 Price was chosen president of a state convention that voted against all proposals advocating secession. Only after Fort Sumter, when President Abraham Lincoln issued a call for troops to suppress the rebellion, did Price despair of peace. And not until the hotheaded Federal commander in Missouri, Nathaniel Lyon, provoked a confrontation with the state militia that left twenty-eight civilians dead did Price side with the South, accepting secessionist Governor Claiborne Jackson’s offer of command of the militia. Still hoping for a peaceful compromise, Price cautioned his subordinates not to incite trouble and promised Federal authorities he would keep Confederate troops out of Missouri.
Price’s policy of armed neutrality failed, as it was bound to, and the late summer of 1861 found him locked in a struggle with Federal forces for control of Missouri, a contest in which Price was sorely handicapped. By initially cooperating with Union authorities, he had gambled away his good standing with many Southern leaders. Governor Jackson distrusted him, and President Jefferson Davis took Price’s efforts at compromise as proof of the Missourian’s unreliability.3
Price had failed to prevent war and had offended the president of the Confederacy in the bargain. To restore both his reputation and the integrity of his beloved Missouri, Price joined Confederate forces under Brig. Gen. Benjamin McCulloch in an offensive against Nathaniel Lyon. At Wilson’s Creek on August 10, Lyon was killed and his command routed. Price seemed on the verge of liberating Missouri, but McCulloch refused to join him in a pursuit, arguing that a move deep into Missouri could not succeed without the cooperation of the Confederate army in Tennessee, which was falling back.
Price went on without McCulloch, capturing 3,500 Yankees at Lexington. The triumph brought him thousands of recruits and the adulation of the Southern press, but it was strategically barren. Lacking assistance from McCulloch, Price was forced to fall back to the southwest corner of Missouri. There he spent the waning days of the year brooding. As the weather turned cold and rations became scarce, recruits slipped away by the thousands. Price pleaded for their return: “Are Missourians no longer true to themselves? Are we a generation of driveling, sniveling, degraded slaves? I will ask for six and a half feet of Missouri soil in which to repose, but will not live to see my people enslaved. Do I hear your shouts? Are you coming?”
Few came. Price’s despair deepened. He railed against McCulloch for his lack of cooperation and nursed a private anger with President Davis for having neglected Missouri. In better moments his passion for freeing the state overcame his resentment, and he appealed to both McCulloch and Davis for help. Both disappointed him: McCulloch in part because he was away in Richmond answering charges arising from his failure to march with Price after Wilson’s Creek; Davis because of his continued suspicions about Price’s loyalty and his contempt for any general not schooled at West Point.
Davis offered nothing and demanded much. He told Price that he would entertain a request for help only if Price’s Missourians were mustered into the Confederate service. And Davis told a Missouri congressional delegation requesting Price’s appointment as commander of the Trans-Mississippi District that he could offer Price no command until his troops were part of the Confederate army. It was a disingenuous reply; Davis had no intention of granting Price so important a command under any circumstances. Privately he deprecated the “irregular warfare” that Price had waged in Missouri and implied that it was time to send a West Point graduate to the theater.4
Price did little to redeem himself with the president. He told all who cared to listen, the press included, that Richmond not only had failed to succor the Missouri troops but also was sowing disaffection in their ranks. Not surprisingly, Davis refused to entertain the renewed demands of Price’s congressional allies that he appoint him to command in Missouri and Arkansas. “Gentleman, I am not to be dictated to” was all he had to say to the congressional delegation that came calling on Price’s behalf.5
Davis already had resolved to begin 1862 with a commander for the Trans-Mississippi District able to end the discord there. Finding a general willing to take the assignment proved a problem. His friend and fellow West Point graduate, Col. Henry Heth, declined the offer after apprising himself of conditions in Missouri and Arkansas. The president next offered the command to Maj. Gen. Braxton Bragg, also a West Point graduate and friend. Bragg wanted no part of the job; the Missouri army, he said, was a “mere gathering of brave but undisciplined troops, coming and going at pleasure, and needing a master mind to control and reduce it into order and to convert it into a real army.”
The third candidate was Maj. Gen. Earl Van Dorn. Unlike Price, who confined his ambition to the borders of Missouri, Van Dorn would take glory wherever he could find it. He accepted the command eagerly, and the Confederate Congress endorsed his assignment. Even Price’s friends concurred in the appointment of the charismatic Mississippian.6
Van Dorn certainly looked a leader. Handsome and dapper, with a head of full, wavy hair, he seemed the quintessential Southern cavalier. Dabney Maury came to know Van Dorn during the Mexican War. A distinguished veteran of the Regular Army and normally a good judge of men, Maury was completely taken with the Mississippian: “He was one of the most attractive young fellows in the army. His figure was lithe and graceful; his stature did not exceed five feet six inches; but his clear blue eyes, his firm-set mouth, with white strong teeth, his well-cut nose, with expanding nostrils, gave assurance of a man whom men could trust and follow.”
His classmates at West Point, where he had graduated near the bottom of his class and had come within a hair of being dismissed for bad conduct, were less impressed. Cadet John Pope thought him feminine in appearance— “he had the soft, sweet face of a girl. . . blue eyes and long, curly, auburn hair” — and possessed of only modest ability and limited intellect. But Van Dorn loved to fight, and he emerged from the Mexican War with a wide reputation for courage and daring. He also won the attention of Jefferson Davis, then a colonel of Mississippi volunteers, who recommended him for brevet promotion to captain. Later, as secretary of war, Davis secured Van Dorn a choice c
ombat assignment fighting Indians on the Texas frontier.
Van Dorn served five years in Texas, taking a near-fatal arrow wound while chasing a band of Comanches alone. Unlike Sterling Price, Van Dorn saw no moral dilemma in secession; shortly after the election of Lincoln, he resigned his commission to serve his native Mississippi. Experienced officers were few in the Deep South, and Van Dorn was named senior brigadier general of the state troops, second only to Maj. Gen. Jefferson Davis. Davis welcomed him into his plantation home, and the two worked closely to forge a state army. When Davis went east as president, Van Dorn succeeded him in command of the Mississippi forces. He was inducted into the Confederate service in June 1861 and transferred to Virginia that fall. Van Dorn was promoted to major general in October 1861, three months before being assigned as commander of the newly created Trans-Mississippi District of Department Number Two.7
Van Dorn’s dashing manners and courage led most people to overlook his faults, which were egregious. Bold beyond prudence, he had no patience with reconnaissance, staff work, logistics, or anything else that might keep him from closing quickly with the enemy. A “rash young commander with a one-dimensional mind” is how his biographer described him. Disdainful of death, he showed little concern for the lives of others.
Insatiable ambition propelled Van Dorn. “He craved glory beyond everything,” said Dabney Maury. The possibilities the war offered thrilled Van Dorn, and he wrote with immodest anticipation, “Who knows but that out of the storm of revolution . . . I may not be able to catch a spark of the lightning and shine through all time to come, a burning name! I feel a greatness in my soul. I am getting young once more at the thought that my soul shall be awakened again as it was in Mexico.”8
Van Dorn would have a hard time getting anyone east of the Mississippi River to notice his exploits. The huge area of the Confederacy west of the Appalachian Mountains played hard on President Davis and the War Department in Richmond; its vastness and remoteness precluded centralized control from the capital. Then, too, there was Davis’s understandable preoccupation with the enormous Federal army of George B. McClellan that was marshaling on his doorstep. Finally, his choice of Albert Sidney Johnston, in whom he had unbounded faith, to exercise supreme command in the West led him to pay even less attention to the theater than he otherwise might have.
The reality of affairs west of the Appalachians was quite different from what Davis imagined. Although the new Department Number Two included Tennessee, Kentucky, Arkansas, Missouri, Kansas, western Mississippi, and even the far-flung Indian Territory, Johnston had no time to spare on matters beyond the Mississippi River. A lack of navigable rivers beyond Mississippi and an absence of railroads meant that any Union offensive in the trans-Mississippi would of necessity be overland and thus comparatively slow. East of the Mississippi, however, the situation was decidedly different. Leaving the Ohio River near Paducah, Kentucky, were the Cumberland and Tennessee Rivers, aquatic daggers into the Confederate heartland. The former flowed southeastward to Nashville; the latter, south to Florence, Alabama. Then there was the Mississippi itself, defensible only from Fort Pillow, fifty miles above Memphis, northward; south of the fort, low banks and swampy bottomland prevented the construction of strong points.
Maj. Gen. Earl Van Dorn (Alabama Department of Archives and History)
Good railroads also led from Federal depots into the Deep South. Among them were the Mobile and Ohio, which ran from Cairo, Illinois, through Corinth, Mississippi, and on to the Gulf Coast, and the Louisville and Nashville line, which split at the Tennessee capital, continuing on in two lines to Decatur, Alabama, and Chattanooga, Tennessee.
Cavalry and partisans could dismantle railroads, but only a strong forward defense could protect the river routes of invasion. To these Johnston gave his nearly undivided attention. In the waning months of 1861 he shuttled between his forces under Leonidas Polk at Columbus and William Hardee at Bowling Green, Kentucky, trying to make them strong enough to prevent the Federals from starting south at all. He ordered work pushed forward on forts to guard the rivers along the line of the Kentucky-Tennessee border: Island Number Ten on the Mississippi, Fort Henry on the Tennessee, and Fort Donelson on the Cumberland. When in January 1862 Van Dorn visited him at Bowling Green on his way to assume command in Arkansas, Johnston had on hand 43,000 men to defend a 400-mile front from the Mississippi River to the Cumberland Gap. Opposing him were 90,000 Federals, whose numbers were growing rapidly.
The diminutive Mississippian must have struck Johnston as slightly unbalanced. Far from contenting himself with the Federals in southern Missouri, Van Dorn had concocted a scheme for taking the war to Illinois. To Johnston he explained how he would flank the Yankees out of St. Louis and cut the supply lines of Brig. Gen. Ulysses S. Grant at Cairo, thereby easing pressure on Johnston and allowing him to carry the war across the Ohio River with Van Dorn.9
What, if any, encouragement the harried Johnston may have given Van Dorn is unknown, but conditions in Van Dorn’s new department in any case rendered his plan moot. Nothing approaching the number of troops needed to launch a major offensive was on hand. While Van Dorn thought Price had gathered 10,000 eager recruits to fill out his state militia, the Missourian actually counted fewer than 7,000 tired and dispirited soldiers in his camp. Van Dorn had expected to find 8,000 Indians under Albert Pike, but Pike commanded only 2,000 warriors of dubious reliability. Admitting another 5,000 troops under McCulloch, Van Dorn’s army of invasion, which he had estimated would be 45,000 strong, numbered fewer than 15,000 of all arms. The Federals were closer and stronger than Van Dorn had imagined. Thirty miles away, in the thinly populated, mountainous country of northwestern Arkansas, were 12,000 troops under Maj. Gen. Samuel Curtis.
Van Dorn responded to the situation with characteristic aggressiveness. Wisely deciding to leave Illinois in peace, he instead set about fashioning plans to attack Curtis, who had dispersed his army after food and forage. On March 4, under a wet and blowing snow, the combined armies of Price and McCulloch set out to meet the Yankees. Three days later the two sides clashed in the shadow of an Ozark range called Pea Ridge.
Van Dorn had intended to open the action with a flank march into the Union rear, followed by an attack on the Federal lines from behind. But Van Dorn neglected to scout the route of march beforehand, and the vanguard under Price had to stop to clear felled trees from the road, which alerted the Federals to their approach. Impatient of trailing Price, McCulloch attacked alone. Instead of striking Curtis an overpowering blow from behind, Van Dorn’s small army delivered two weak jabs.
The results were predictable. Price had some success on his front but was unable to break the Federal lines. McCulloch was killed and his wing shattered. Nightfall found the Rebel army “staggering with fatigue and half-dead with cold and hunger.” Artillery and cavalry horses were “beaten-out,” and ammunition was dangerously low. Displaying a quixotic detachment, Van Dorn chose to stay and fight.
The Federals attacked at daybreak on March 8 under the cover of a barrage that blew terrible holes in the Rebel lines. With his right arm in a sling from an infected flesh wound, Price rode among his Missourians and urged them to stand firm, risking his life in what Van Dorn had conceded to be a losing proposition. Inevitable though it was, the order to retreat stunned and then angered Price’s Missourians. They knew nothing of McCulloch’s debacle and were holding their own against the enemy. Van Dorn himself did little to win back their confidence. From euphoria he fell into hopelessness, so shaken that he told Brig. Gen. Martin Green to destroy the army’s wagon train — an order that Green ignored.
The Confederate retreat lasted a week. As they marched, the men in ranks took the measure of their commanders. Most agreed that Price had done well. While he had not overwhelmed the enemy on the first day, he had pushed them back. More important from the soldiers' perspective was his personal courage in battle and his concern for their well-being during the retreat. Stories of his kindly attentions made
the rounds, and Price’s standing grew both with his own Missourians and with McCul- loch’s veterans. By contrast, Van Dorn’s stock plummeted. The men muttered threats of mutiny and ridiculed Van Dorn openly. Among the Missourians the taunts were especially barbed. The night after the battle, so one story went, some of the Missourians found themselves encamped on a damp hillside covered with flat, white rocks that seemed a good surface on which to cook cornpone. But the rocks, when heated, burst with a loud report. The cornpone scattered, but no real damage was done. The soldiers likened the effect—an impotent bang—to Van Dorn’s braggadocio, and they named the rocks “Van Dorn skillets.”
Van Dorn halted at Van Buren, on the Arkansas River. There he penned Albert Sidney Johnston a dissembling explanation of the campaign: “I was not defeated, but only failed in my intentions.” Van Dorn concluded with a promise of coming glory and spoke again of marching on St. Louis.10
Johnston had no time for such schemes. Since Van Dorn’s bizarre interview with him in January, matters east of the Mississippi River had taken a decided turn for the worst. Although the Federals had no plan for concerted action against Johnston, the commander of the Department of Missouri, Maj. Gen. Henry Halleck, had grudgingly authorized Grant to attack Fort Henry. The fort fell on February 6. A week later, after two days of hard fighting, Grant took Fort Donelson as well. Grant wanted to keep on, but Halleck checked him, preferring that Grant wait until Maj. Gen. Don Carlos Buell, commander of the Department of the Ohio, joined forces with him.
The Darkest Days of the War- the Battles of Iuka and Corinth Page 2