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Pea Ridge: Civil War Campaign in the West

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Almost from the end of the war, most of the books and articles about various battles and leaders of the civil war tended to focus on Virginia. The western theater got nowhere near the attention it deserved and the Trans-Mississippi has been almost completely ignored. Fortunately, William Shea and Earl Hess have decided to end all of that and have given us a wonderful book about the campaigns that cumulated in the Battle of Pea Ridge. Remarkable characters with which many readers will not be familiar like Van Dorn, Curtis, Price and Pike will begin to come into focus and will not be easily forgotten.

The authors do an excellent job also of telling the stories of the common soldiers. They had to have dug through mountains of newspapers and journals to come up with all of this information but the results are well worth their efforts. Quote after quote tells the reader of the miserable conditions, the incessant marching, the hunger, and the fear. A large number of maps and portraits are a great help as the reader tries to picture what is going on. Many authors of this kind of detailed study of a battle end up giving the reader headaches with minute details about troop movements, but Shea and Hess manage to get the information across without becoming dull at all.

The portrait painted of this campaign is quite clear. Untimely deaths of commanders on the battlefield played a large part in the Confederate defeat, but mostly it was their inept General. With the exception of General Sigel, the Union commanders seem to have been an excellent group of officers who led brave men and led them well. Often overlooked is the bravery and fortitude of the common soldiers of both sides. These authors do not make that mistake. Shea and Hess do call it like they see it though and Freemasons beware, Albert Pike is not well treated.

The authors conclude with a look at the battle of Pea Ridge from a larger perspective. Many tactics used during this odd winter campaign would later become common practice for Union armies. Generals Grant and Sherman would take a large page from Curtis' play book when they in campaigns to come cut their supply lines and lived off of the land. As the authors point out, General Curtis does not get the credit he deserves for what he did at Pea Ridge. Things in Tennessee might have turned out very differently if the Federals had lost on that little ridge in Arkansas. To really understand the entire civil war, one must grasp what was going on in the west. To understand the west, one needs to grasp what happened at Pea Ridge. This book will go a long way in helping you reach that goal.

Pea Ridge is a rewarding book for both newcomers to Civil War reading, and Buffs, as well as researchers with a view toward writing about the last cavaliers' war on this continent.

I say that from the perspective of one who was born long ago, knew some of the vets of the G.A.R. (Grand Army of the Republic, the Civil War equivalent of the American Legion) who had experienced such "close contact" battles, and at age ten listened to their voices describe it all, which I can still hear. Some of them, older at that time than I am now, recalled war recollections they heard as boys, told by Revolutionary War vets who could remember what Washington looked and sounded like. So it all wasn't that long ago. When I was a boy we were closer to the American Revolution than the nuclear age. Outhouses and kerosene lamps were accepted as normal, even in parts of small towns, and everyone owned and shot guns for hunting and the simple sport of shooting well.

Why is this book different? It's authors are the new breed who are now using the rich resources of regimental and company histories, and personal memoirs and letters by men who lived what they wrote about. Rather than hearing grandiose broad terms such as "Custer swept around the right flank . . . " we hear of how individuals and small organizations traded volleys at close range in heavy timber and brush, visibility so short that they ran into each others by accident and had to shoot at flashes of guns since they couldn't see men in the heavy smoke from black powder.

I was raised on Civil War fare like Charles Carlton Coffin's account of the Seven Days around Richmond, written so intimately and graphically because he himself, although a noncombatant, had seen it through the smoke. But like the familiar Battles and Leaders series, it was mostly about leaders, and brigades were the smallest units mentioned, and usually divisions and corps. I knew who Bull Sumner and the other corps commanders of the Army of the Potomac were by the time I was ten.

This is different and about time.

The leaders at Pea Ridge are worthy of meeting, and the experience, due to their eccentricities and careers, would be rewarding without a full account of how they fought. You can read capsulated biographies in Boatner's indispensable Civil War Dictionary.

This battle was a part of the Anaconda Plan conceived by aged General Scott, an American Icon and still Commanding General of the Army when the Civil War started. He envisioned using the naval superiority of the north and water transport on the western rivers to move armies that would strangle the South with coordinated campaigns, landing on the coasts and making inland incursions, complemented by coordinated movements down the Mississippi and along its tributaries. It was actually the strategy that finally was employed to win the war for the North, but ridiculed by the newspapers at first as visionary, and also by Gen. McClellan even as he adopted it. Mac was a rare study that replaced Scott (by undermining him). I have read widely and never heard of him having been seen on a front line, where even Lee and Grant appeared at times, which may explain his "slows" as Lincoln politely called them.

Get out your road atlas and look at the theatre of the southwest, which was headquartered at St. Louis. At the time of Pea Ridge the Western theater was commanded by Gen. Halleck, who is underrated as a strategist, probably due to his later misfortune of being brought to Washington where Lincoln called him a "first rate clerk," without realizing that was all his Secretary of War, Stanton, allowed him to be, aside from a scapegoat. (Halleck, no fool, probably shrugged his shoulders and acquiesced - pity he didn't write an outspoken memoir and explain himself better.) In St. Louis as the replacement for Gen. Fremont, he was more than that. He was often outright brash in ignoring his timid, foot-dragging superiors - both McClellan and Lincoln - and bold in his strategy. He planned the campaigns carried out by Grant and Pope in Kentucky and Tennessee (Ft. Henry, Ft. Donelson, Island Number Ten, Shiloh, and eventually Corinth, the latter in a glacial advance commanded by Halleck himself.) To do this he had to secure Missouri, especially St. Louis, first as a base of operations. This explains Pea Ridge. It was necessary to drive the Confederates out of Missouri, which was attempted first by Gen. Lyon, under Fremont in the summer of 1861, and finally successfully in the late winter of 1862 under Halleck with Gen. Samuel Curtis as his field commander of the Army of the Southwest. Lyon had suffered disaster and death at Wilson's Creek. Halleck picked up the pieces and wisely, or luckily, chose untried Curtis as his operating arm.

Look further at your atlas and draw a line from St. Louis to the southwest corner of Missouri and you will be tracing roughly the route of the pre war Butterfield stage line, and the transcontinental telegraph line, which gave the name "Telegraph Road" to Curtis's line of advance. Just south of the Missouri/Arkansas border, you will find the battlefield of Pea Ridge straddling the Telegraph Road. (Known as Elkhorn Tavern to the South, as we have Antietam and Sharpsburg respectively for the same battle).

Below the Elkhorn Tavern the roads branch, like the forks of an inverted slingshot and rejoin at Fayetteville, then branch south through the Boston Mountains to the Arkansas River at Ft. Smith. The forces of Gen. McCullough had been wintering in that vicinity.

When Curtis opened his campaign he moved west toward Springfield (see your atlas) and scared out the forces of Gen. Sterling Price who skedaddled for Arkansas, calling for help from Gen. McCullough. (They mutually detested each other.) In overall command of the Confederate army of the West, comprised of McCullough's and Price's armies, was Earl Van Dorn, a great psychological study in himself. (West Point, 1842, nearly last in his class, and an Indian fighter of note pre war on the plains and in Texas. He never grew beyond being a capable cavalry (dragoon) troop commander, which was to have a great bearing on the outcome at Pea Ridge, probably the decisive one.) Headquartered at Pocohontas, in northeastern Arkansas and intending to advance on St. Louis from there, he promptly changed his plans when he learned of Curtis's advance and Price's retreat.

Thus your modern road atlas gives you an idea of the larger area of the campaign. What was at stake was the Anaconda Plan. The book provides excellent maps on which to follow the major armies movements, and is lacking in a few more maps that would have shown tactical locations mentioned but not shown on the maps. You will also find excellent photos of the major participants and of the field of combat, most of the latter by the two authors.

Van Dorn arrived at Van Buren, near Ft. Smith on 1 March, after a forced march, and pushed the raw troops he found there to the battlefield roughly seventy-five miles away for the battle on March 8 and 9. As the authors comment, he took no time to learn anything about his subordinate commanders, principally Price, McCullough and McIntosh, and less of the capabilities of the troops. He stripped them to one blanket apiece in a climate where late blizzards and freezing weather were common, limited them to short rations, outran his wagon trains and later his artillery and changed his tactical plan at the last minute when he heard of an avenue to envelope Curtis, rather than merely outflank him with superior numbers of about three to two.

Thus he drove part of his hungry and weary army at night around the local prominence known as Big Mountain (or Pea Ridge) and actually got behind Curtis, to his ultimate sorrow. Curtis was ably served by Colonels Osterhaus, later Major General, and Colonel Jeff C. Davis (no relation to the Confederate President) and Colonel Eugene A. Carr, later a Major General. (Davis should have been a Major General as well, but unfortunately killed his superior Gen. "Bull" Nelson in an affair of honor, which stigmatized his promotion beyond Brigadier General even with Grant recommending him.)

The battle, skillfully described by the authors in great detail and with dramatic touches worthy of novelists, is a page-turner, to put it tritely, but truthfully.

The attack by McCullough's forces on the original tactical plan fizzled out when both he and his principal subordinate Gen. McIntosh were killed, acting like scouts instead of commanders. Osterhaus, supported later by Davis skillfully opposed it. By sundown they had cleared off the attackers, whose disaster Van Dorn learned of belatedly, since he was personally leading the enveloping movement around Big Mountain. He was held off by Carr in hard fighting at Elkhorn Tavern and when the night of the first day fell, Curtis finally got a full grasp of the situation and united his forces for a unified attack to the north at Elkhorn Tavern, which swept Van Dorn off the field and in full retreat by noon. (Like Rosecrans at Chickamauga, Van Dorn personally led the skillful retreat, leaving a wounded Price to hold the bag.) He completely circled Curtis, departing to the east, then south, leaving his distant trains to depart as best they could to the southwest the way they'd come.

Curtis was ably served by his major subordinates, except for the spotty performance of his two foreign born political generals, Sigel and Asboth. Both were types wearing stars because of a following of foreign voters, a significant consideration to the politically astute Lincoln.

Van Dorn went on to glory with a large cavalry raid on Holly Springs later that year that destroyed Grant's forward base which had been provisioned for an advance on Vicksburg and set back that campaign to the next summer. His final bow was to take a bullet in the head from a jealous husband who may have done the Confederacy a greater service than Van Dorn had managed at Holly Springs.

In summary this battle's major significance was in making possible full support of the Anaconda Plan from St. Louis down the Mississippi. Grant's successful career owed a debt to Curtis whose performance assured Halleck he could safely cut loose Grant to move up the Cumberland and Tennessee Rivers. It was the start of his trip to the White House that may never have occurred without Curtis's success at Pea Ridge.

Curtis and Price met again in 1864 when the latter prosecuted his disastrous invasion of Missouri, aimed at St. Louis, deflected west, and ending with the disintegration of his army at Westport, now a suburb of Kansas City.

Curtis was a general who suffered from lack of skill only at self-promotion. It is my opinion that he could have ranked, if given a chance, with the top tier of secondary stellar generals, such as Thomas and Meade. I also think he would have outperformed Rosecrans and Buell in their campaigns, and succeeded where they failed.

A great book with pertinent photos, maps, bibliography, two appendices, and an index that suffers from not being detailed in the Chicago Manual of Style, a small criticism in view of the overall impact of this watershed type of reporting.

Highly recommended. A must on any Civil War shelf.

Pea Ridge is a well crafted book which deals with an obscure but extremely important battle early in the Civil War. The authors present their story in a very engaging and readable style which gives a real sense of being on the frigid and tangled battlefield in Northwestern Arkansas. The two armies and their commanders are described in wonderful detail, and the action flows right from the start. After finishing the book, I was struck by just what Curtis and the Army of the Southwest had accomplished, and by how many precedents he had set for future operations. Nevertheless, his accomplishments have been largely ignored. This book helps rescue him from obscurity, and is without a doubt the definitive study of this battle. Pea Ridge is a fantastic book on the Trans-Mississippi theater of the war, and when read along with Cozzen's book on Iuka and Corinth, provides a very complete picture of the formation of Van Dorn's and Price's armies and their fate. I highly recommend this book as an essential volume on the Civil War in the West.

I brought this book at Pea Ridge National Battlefield and read while I was at the park and immediately afterward. I found the book to be superbly written, insightful and well researched. Its also a pretty entertaining book. While packed with information about the battle, the book never weighted you down and the authors keep the pace going until the very end. I enjoyed reading the book while sitting at the actual location which gave me some very insightful understanding of how the battle went. This book will probably stand the test of time as a standard book for this battle for the current generation and maybe beyond.

Authors William Shea and Earl Hess tell the story of the campaign and battle of Pea Ridge, which is sometimes grandly called the Gettysburg of the West. The Union Army of the Southwest, commanded by Brig. Gen. Samuel Curtis numbered fewer than 11,000 soldiers, the same size as a single division in the Army of the Potomac at that time. Yet, while the vast legions of Army of the Potomac hovered uncertainly near Washington DC in February 1862, Curtis launched a winter campaign that took his small army clear across the Ozark Plateau and into northwestern Arkansas.

There, Union soldiers from Illinois, Indiana, Ohio, Iowa and loyal Missouri met an equally tough set of Confederates from Texas, Arkansas and Missouri. It was one of the few times in the Civil War that the Northern soldiers were outnumbered. But in the subsequent battle of Pea Ridge in early March 1862, the 16,000-man Confederate Army of the West went down to defeat.

According to the authors, bad luck, uninspired leadership and Maj. Gen. Earl Van Dorn's many outrageous blunders negated the Southern army's numerical advantage. On the Northern side, Curtis and three of his four division commanders maneuvered their soldiers with skill. Even Curtis' erratic second-in-command, Brig. Gen. Franz Sigel supervised a decisive artillery bombardment on the second day of the battle. Three Yankee brigade commanders showed courage and initiative, but at least one unit commander had a yellow streak.

The book devotes a chapter and a map to the preliminary operation in which the Confederates missed capturing a Union detachment that Sigel had carelessly exposed. The March 7 fights at Leetown and Elkhorn, and the March 8 battle at Elkhorn are explained in detail with maps. The Army of the Southwest's later march to Helena, Arkansas is sketched out more briefly. A concluding chapter ably critiques the strategy and tactics of both sides. There is an Order of Battle and extensive footnotes.

Compare this book with Shelby Foote's short account of Pea Ridge in his splendid "The Civil War -- A Narrative." Foote was a great historian, but it sounds like a different battle. To take only one example, Foote says Van Dorn's two pronged attack was planned. Yet Shea and Hess note that the attack was improvised after the Confederate flank march fell badly behind schedule. This is typical of the kind of detail that the authors add to the history of this battle.

My only criticism is a lack of information on weaponry. Except for one Illinois unit, it is not clear whether Union infantry and cavalry units carried rifled muskets, smoothbores, carbines or Colt revolving rifles. The Order of Battle contains detailed data about the type of cannons in each artillery battery, but in one case the text contradicts the OB. For the Pea Ridge battle and campaign, this book is a keeper, despite my quibbling about weapons.

Pea Ridge: Civil War Campaign in the West, authored by William Shea and Earl Hess, is a well done work describing one of the most important battles in the Trans-Mississippi theater. This Union victory ensured that Missouri would be Union territory; it also provided a spearhead for attacks further South (e.g., Arkansas). Compared with the Eastern Theater and the Western Theater, the Trans-Mississippi experienced fewer major battles; after Pea Ridge, the Confederacy lost a lot of "steam" in that district.

The battle itself resulted from a campaign headed by Union General Benjamin Curtis and Confederate General Earl Van Dorn, colorful but not the most competent Army general in the Confederacy. Other generals in the engagement were, on the Confederate side, Sterling Price, Ben McCulloch, and Albert Pike, and, for the Union, Franz Sigel (with one of his very few halfway competent campaigns of the Civil War), Alexander Asboth, and Peter Osterhaus. The Confederate side was burdened with more questionable leadership.

Van Dorn was able to maneuver his army behind the Union defensive position at Pea Ridge (or Elkhorn Tavern). In the battle that followed, Curtis was able to turn his army around, with the rear becoming the front. It was a stunning display of generalship under pressure. The Confederate attack was designed to be two pronged. On the right, initial advances were successful. Then, a leadership crisis. The charismatic Confederate general, Ben McCulloch, was cut down early and died, and chaos set in on his side of the battle. On the other front, advancing up the Telegraph Road from the North, Van Dorn attacked Curtis' position and made some headway. However, as the situation on the Confederate right (and Union left) stabilized, Curtis was able to release more troops to defend against Van Dorn's assault.

By the next morning, the Confederates were fought out. And, in a display of stupefying incompetence, the Confederate Army had not brought up the supply trains and, thus, was low on food and ammunition. The Union attack the next morning, featuring competent generalship from Sigel (well worth mentioning, given the paucity of such days in the war for him), led to a general defeat of the southerners.

The resulting retreat back to Arkansas was disheartening to Van Dorn's army. The end result: the Union solidified its hold on Missouri, turned back a major assault by a large force, and reduced the ability of the Confederate Trans-Mississippi forces to mount a major attack for some time. It is too much to say that this was the Gettysburg of the Trans-Mississippi, but it was a major Union victory. This battle is not as well known as others, but it warrants attention by those interested in the Civil War.

Although many, especially those who are not Civil War buffs, know little or nothing about the Battle of Pea Ridge, it was definitely a vital fight in the Civil War. After the Confederates lost Pea Ridge, the last hopes of bringing Missouri into the Confederacy were blown away "like dust in the wind." The campaign also left Federal General Curtis free to move into Arkansas. Mr. Shea's volume on this campaign brings Pea Ridge out of the shadows, and in fine style to boot.

Let me say that before reading this book, although being a dedicated Civil War buff, I knew very little about this battle. I also had never read a book written by Mr. Shea. His writing was great, and he clearly used many writings and diaries of the soldiers involved in the battle.

Next, and very important, were the maps. They were wonderful and plentiful. As in all battles, without these maps, the text would have been very hard to follow. Along with the maps came photos of commanders involved in the campaign, as well as modern photos of important sites across the battlefield, allowing the reader to see what kind of terrain the troops had to fight across in 1862.

I came away from this book feeling as though I knew this battle very much more well than before. For those of you out there who don't know much (or anything) about this campaign--and you're in a large group--buy this book. It is a priceless addition to my library.

The Trans-Missisippi and Western theaters of the Civil War have until now received short shrift. Shea and Hess have thrown a contender in the ring to offset that balance. I thoroughly enjoyed this book for its narrative style, attention to detail without bogging down, the descriptions of primary characters in the campaign and for illuminating the dynamic forces and decisions that shaped the battle. Very readable. Their research and accuracy lays the foundation for a complete treatment of the Pea Ridge clash and brings it out of obscurity. If you're interested in Generals Curtis or Van Dorn or interested in Arkansas and Missouri Civil War history, then you will not be disappointed with this gem.

This book is one of the best on a Civil War campaign to appear in many years. Beautifully organized and written, the volume takes the reader through a maze of complexities that have been clarified by the authors to an amazing extent. Anyone setting out to write a campaign history would be well advised to take a look at Shea's and Hess's work first. Anyone looking for a good read need look no further.

This was one of the better books I've read that dealt with a single battle. The authors organized this somewhat unorganized battle in a way that was fairly easy to follow. The description of each armies campaigns before and after the battle helped made a great setting. Map illustrations were not the best. The authors strived for historical accuracy on an overlooked battle.