One of the most important and hard-fought battles of the Civil War in the Trans-Mississippi Theatre occurred a few miles southwest of Fayetteville, in extreme northwestern Arkansas, on December 7, 1862. Although Pea Ridge is usually considered the biggest and most decisive battle fought west of the Mississippi, the casualties at Prairie Grove were almost as great as those at Pea Ridge -- with only about two-thirds as many troops involved.

Whereas Pea Ridge drove the Rebels from Missouri and secured that state for the Union, Prairie Grove resulted in the Southern forces being driven even farther south and made the Arkansas River the boundary line between Federal and Confederate territory.

Although the battle itself was more or less a draw, it was the sort of bloody draw which the South could ill afford. The casualties were great on both sides, given the amount of troops involved; but the net results were far more favorable to the Union than to the Confederacy. In addition to the hundreds of valuable troops lost in the battle, the Southern forces lost even more during the retreat into southern Arkansas following the battle. Many of the Rebels from northern Arkansas lost heart and left the army following their army's withdrawal south of the Arkansas River. These were troops which might have been put to good use in defending Vicksburg the following spring and summer of 1863.

Background

Following the defeat of Earl van Dorn's army at Pea Ridge in March, most of the remaining Confederate forces were withdrawn from Arkansas and sent east of the Mississippi to reinforce Beauregard's army at Corinth. Arkansas was all but stripped of defending troops. Part of Samuel R. Curtis' victorious Federal army had been withdrawn after Pea Ridge to defend Missouri against marauding partisans and guerrillas. The rest had moved, with Curtis, to the area around Batesville, in northeastern Arkansas, in order to threaten Little Rock by way of the White River.

Confederate Arkansas was now in a desperate situation. The only troops left to defend the state against Curtis' army was a small force of about a thousand men under John S. Roane. At best, they could serve only to annoy Curtis' force. To make matters worse, civil authority had broken down in most of the northern parts of the state, and guerrilla bands from both sides were plundering at will throughout the area. Arkansas Governor Henry M. Rector and the Arkansas delegates to the Confederate Congress began to put pressure on the central government in Richmond to do something about the situation.

President Jefferson davis simply referred the matter to General Earl Van Dorn, whose department still technically included Arkansas. Davis felt that the best defense of Arkansas lay with Van Dorn's army in northern Mississippi and did not favor detaching any of Van Dorn's troops to fight in Arkansas.

Van Dorn dispatched one of his most energetic officers, Thomas C. Hindman, to take command in Arkansas and organize the defenses of the state. Hindman, a former Arkansas lawyer and congressman, had a reputation as both a fiery secessionist and as an able brigade commander at Shiloh.

Hindman Takes Command

Hindman took command in Little rock on May 30, 1862 and immediately began using draconian measures to rescue Confederate fortunes in the state, announcing he would "drive out the invader or perish."

Hindman proclaimed martial law state-wide, and began to vigorously enforce the conscription act by drafting, almost without exception, every able-bodied man. He fixed prices and destroyed cotton liable to fall into enemy hands. He halted the flow of troops and resources going to the east, angering officials in Richmond. He demanded and got shipments of uniforms, equipment and small arms from the east.

In only six months, Hindman miraculously created an army of nearly 20,000 troops in a state which had already been stripped of available manpower to fill the ranks of the eastern armies earlier in the war. He had also succeeded in angering almost everyone in Arkansas and in the Confederate government in Richmond.

By July, 1862 Hindman had effectively thwarted Curtis' threat to Little Rock from northeast Arkansas. Threatened with being cut off by roving bands of partisans and detachments of Hindman's cavalry, Curtis decided to move his army to Helena, on the Mississippi in east-central Arkansas, where his men could have secure supply lines and the protection of the Union navy.

At about the same time, Hindman was replaced as department commander by Theopolis H. Holmes. Holmes was elderly, in poor health, partially deaf, and senile in appearance. He was ineffective as the department commander and generally let Hindman do as he pleased.

By this time, Hindman's activities in Arkansas had convinced the Federal authorities that they could no longer afford to ignore the Trans-Mississippi Theatre and they began to take steps to build up their forces there. Since Pea Ridge, the Union had held Missouri firmly in its grasp, relying upon the Missouri State Militia buttressed by a handful of volunteer regiments under the overall command of General John M. Schofield. This force was numerically strong, yet scattered over the state and often hampered by the refusal of militia units to cross certain boundaries. Schofield's department, despite its great force in troops, did not constitute an effective field force.

During the fall of 1862, Schofield began collecting his scattered regiments around Springfield, in southwestern Missouri. They were combined with a new force being raised by Brigadier James G. Blunt in eastern Kansas to form a new army, the Army of the Frontier.

In late November, with northeastern Arkansas effectively cleared of troops by Curtis' withdrawal to Helena, Hindman moved most of his army from Little Rock to Fort Smith and began making preparations to invade northwest Arkansas. If successful there, he probably envisioned an invasion of Missouri with the idea of adding the great resources and manpower of that state to the Southern cause. The result of the campaign would be the second largest battle of the Trans-Mississippi Theatre and in many ways, its hardest fought.

The Opposing Forces

The armies which would clash at Prairie Grove were, for the most part, composed of different regiments than those which had fought at Pea Ridge nine months earlier. Most were fairly new regiments, although the outnumbered Federal troops had considerably more experience than their Confederate counterparts. The Arkansas brigades of Fagan, McRae, Sahver, and Carroll were mostly composed of raw recruits, many of whom were unwilling draftees from mountainous counties of northern Arkansas where support for slavery and succession was low. Roane's brigade of dismounted Texas cavalry, Parsons' brigade of Missouri infantry, and MacDonald's brigade of Missouri and Texas cavalry were veteran troops, ,many of whom had fought at Pea Ridge. Shelby's "Iron" Brigade of Missouri cavalry was the only elite force in the Confederate army.

The Confederate artillery was poorly armed, mostly with light six-pounders from the Mexican-American War. Hindman discovered most of these pieces at the Little Rock arsenal, where they had been used for corner posts in the fences surrounding the arsenal grounds. He had them dug up, cleaned, and mounted on carriages.

Despite the fact that they outnumbered the Federals by about 11,500 to 9,000, and that they were defending a strong ridge-top position, these disadvantages in troop quality among the Rebels tended to even the odds, perhaps giving something of an overall advantage to the Federals.

The 42 Federal guns, mostly Parrotts and Napoleons, were well-served and greatly outranged and outweighed the 22 Confederate guns, mostly light six-pounders. This preponderance in artillery would prove to be the decisive factor in the battle. It gave the Federals a draw on the day of the battle, and would have given them a victory if the Confederates had decided to fight a second day.

Union Army of the Frontier

The Union army of the Frontier was a new army, but most of its regiments had a minimal amount of combat experience. The army was commanded by John M. Schofield, but he was absent on leave in St. Louis at the time of the battle. With no supreme commander, the two wings of the Union army fought the battle with little overall coordination.

The 1st Division was commanded by James G. Blune, a Kansas doctor who was a radical abolitionist and former associate of John Brown during the border wars of the 1850s. His division was composed mostly of Kansas regiments, with a sprinkling of Indian Home Guards and a couple of Wisconsin regiments. It was a large division which Blunt had raised in the summer of 1862. Many of its men were hardened veterans of the Kansas Border Wars and had few feelings of sympathy for the Rebels, particularly Missourians. This factor would tend to cause one to classify them as veteran troops despite their lack of much combat experience.

The 2nd and 3rd Divisions were commanded by Francis Herron, who had won the Congressional Medal of Honor while leading the 9th Iowa Regiment at Pea Ridge. Most were experienced troops who had already had quite a bit of experience in campaigning and in small engagements, but had not fought in a large battle. However, they were probably superior in quality to Hindman's Arkansas troops.

Like Hindman, Blune and Herron were aggressive, scrappy fighters. All three would expose their armies to great hardships, overextend their supply lines, and make very risky offensive movements during the course of the campaign and battle. Unfortunately for Hindman, his poor logistics and troop quality situation made his army more brittle and less able to carry out his plans.

The Campaign

In late November, Hindman sent John S. Marmaduke's 2,500 man cavalry division into northwest Arkansas to pave the way for his infantry. Marmaduke's men camped at Cane Hill, about fifteen miles southwest of Fayetteville, where they waited for their supply trains to catch up. Moving south from Kansas, Blunt's 5,000 man division attacked Marmaduke and drove him south during an all-day, rearguard action. Breaking off the fight at dark, Blunt went into camp at Cane Hill. Marmaduke's tired troopers had no more than reached Van Buren, forty miles south of Cane Hill, when they were ordered to turn around and accompany Hindman's 9,000 infantry back north. Hindman planned to catch Blunt's isolated force at Cane Hill and destroy it.

Blunt's division was in a bad situation. They were outnumbered by more than two-to-one, at the end of a tenuous supply line, and over a hundred miles from their nearest reinforcements -- the 2nd and 3rd Divisions near Wilson's Creek, Missouri, just south of Springfield. Most commanders would have withdrawn in such a situation, but Blunt was not made that way. He held onto his position at Cane Hill and telegraphed to Herron for help.

Herron, then in command of the other two divisions at Springfield in the absence of Schofield, who was on medical leave in St. Louis, received Blunt's pleas for help on December 3 and moved decisively. Within an hour, the lead elements of his army were on the road heading south. Over the next three days, Herron's troops made one of the greatest forced marches of the entire war, rivaling anything done by Stonewall Jackson's "foot cavalry." With their knapsacks and other baggage in wagons, the Yankees made the one hundred miles to Fayetteville in three days and camped in the streets of the town during the night of December 6-7. However, the hard marching had taken its toll. As many as 4,000 to 5,000 of Herron's 8,500 men straggled during the march and were unavailable for the battle which followed.

The Battle

The vanguard of Hindman's army arrived near Cane HIll on December 6 and skirmished with Blunt's troops most of the day. That night, Hindman received the starling news that Herron was in Fayetteville. Believing himself to be outnumbered, Hindman dropped his plans to attack Blunt and decided instead to march north and interpose his army between those of Blunt and Herron. Then he would defeat or drive away Herron before turning to bag Blunt.

The battle began in the early morning darkness of December 7 when the lead elements of Marmaduke's cavalry, led by the infamous Quantrill's guerrilla company dressed in Union uniforms, surprised and routed the lead elements of Herron's cavalry. The routed Federals fled almost two miles, beyond the Illinois River (really only a creek) before finally being halted by the advance elements of Herron's infantry. Seeing himself outgunned, Marmaduke withdrew his troopers beyond the river and took up a position on a wooded ridge just north of the Prairie Grove Church.

Shoup's Division of Hindman's infantry was arriving on the ridge about this time and Hindman ordered the men to take up defensive positions on the ridge. Frost's Division was ordered to take up a position as a rearguard southwest of Prairie Grove Church in case Blunt should suddenly appear from that direction. The aggressive Hindman apparently lost his offensive intentions at this point. Instead of pushing forward to defeat Herron, he sat down on the ridge to await movements of the enemy. In doing so, he surrendered the strategic initiative and would never regain it.

Herron moved forward and crossed the illinois River at about 10:00 am. Placing some of his long range Parrotts on Crawford Hill, he began counter-battery fire against the Confederate guns posted near the Borden and H. Rogers houses on the forward slope of the ridge. The batteries were dismounted and forced to withdraw behind the cover of the ridge, where the Confederate infantry and cavalry were deployed.

Fearing for the safety of Blunt's Division, Herron moved his small force forward to the fields north of the ridge. Seeing the Rebel batteries silenced, he ordered two badly coordinated attacks against the Borden House sector. Four of his six infantry regiments were severely cut up as they crested the ridge and ran head on into the massed Confederates behind a fence on the southern edge of the Borden orchard. Counter-attacks by Hindman's infantry were repulsed in the Borden cornfield and wheat field by the massed Union artillery.

Defeat and Victory

By 2:00 pm, Herron's badly outnumbered army was on the verge of defeat. By this time, Hindman had moved Frost's Division onto the ridge between the blacksmith shop and Wilson Field. This division was now poised to sweep down the ridge and take Herron's exhausted force in the flank. Hindman ordered the attack, only to have several of his conscript regiments refuse to go. One regiment even deserted en masse.

After some delay, Frost's attack finally got under way and by about 2:30 pm was wheeling down the ridge against Herron's right flank. At this point, the van of Blunt's Division arrived in the northwest corner of the battlefield near West's cornfield.

Blunt had heard the cannons at Prairie Grove about noon. Correctly assuming that Hindman had gone around him and was engaging Herron at Prairie Grove, Blunt immediately put his troops on the road. However, a wrong turn took them on a roundabout route through Rhea's Mill, northwest of Prairie Grove. Blunt's men arrived just in the nick of time. Hindman had finally gotten Frost's Division in position near the blacksmith shop and they, along with Roane's Brigade, were sweeping in on Herron's flank by way of the Morton cornfield when Blunt's vanguard hit them in the flank in Crawford's and Wilson's fields.

The Rebels retreated back to the ridge, hotly pursued by Blunt's Kansans. Blunt tried several times between 3:00 pm and 6:00 pm to take the ridge, but was driven back each time. There was heavy fighting in the area of the Morton house and blacksmith shop. Blunt and Herron's troops withdrew at dark, about 6:30 pm, to the far side of the valley near the West and Crawford farms. The stragglers from Herron's Division were coming up all night, and the Federals expected to begin the next day's battle with 3,000 to 4,000 fresh troops. However, they never got the chance. The Confederate army had exhausted its limited supply of ammunition and suffered the loss of several of its artillery pieces. Hindman's aggressive spirit had been severely shaken by the desertion of large numbers of his conscript soldiers. During the night he ordered the wheels of his wagons to be muffled with blankets and withdrew to the south. When the Federals launched an attack early the next morning, they found the ridge deserted.

The Battle of Prairie Grove Scenario and Order of Battle

The Battle of Prairie Grove Scenario Map

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