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  • The Last Hurrah: Sterling Price’s Missouri Expedition of 1864by Kyle S. Sinisi
  • Thomas F. Curran
The Last Hurrah: Sterling Price’s Missouri Expedition of 1864. By Kyle S. Sinisi. The American Crisis Series: Books on the Civil War Era. (Lanham, Md., and other cities: Rowman and Littlefield, 2015. Pp. xviii, 432. $55.00, ISBN 978-0-7425-4535-9.)

In The Last Hurrah: Sterling Price’s Missouri Expedition of 1864, Kyle S. Sinisi provides a valuable and compelling history of a campaign that failed. In the fall of 1864 Confederate major general Sterling Price carried out a long-anticipated invasion of Missouri, a state that he once governed and where he still enjoyed great popularity among the rebel-leaning population. According to Sinisi, Price sought to reclaim Missouri for the Confederacy, although whether the Confederates ever actually reclaimed Missouri is highly questionable.

In meticulous detail Sinisi traces the campaign from its organizational stages in Arkansas through the Army of Missouri’s first significant engagements in the Arcadia Valley in southeastern Missouri. Learning that St. Louis had been reinforced with additional troops, “Old Pap” Price decided to bypass the important river city and instead set his sights on capturing Jefferson City. Failing to take the state capital, although his forces reached the city’s gates, Price abandoned hope of claiming Missouri for the Confederacy, all by the first week of October. His raid shifted primarily to recruiting fresh soldiers for the cause. Price and his men improved their situation as they entered the prosecessionist Boon’s Lick region along the Missouri River, where the Confederates received their warmest welcome in the state. The reception in Boon’s Lick did not stop Federal forces from moving in on Price’s army, as Union troops under Alfred Pleasonton pushed west from St. Louis while others commanded by Samuel R. Curtis pushed east from the Kansas border region. Sinisi does not truncate the story with the Confederate defeat at the battle of Westport, continuing Price’s saga as his army desperately fled southward toward Arkansas by way of the Indian Territory with Federal troops in hot pursuit.

Sinisi’s narrative is thorough, as he follows the campaign day by day, at times hour by hour and minute by minute. Yet he offers much more than a retelling of military movements. Sinisi deftly relates the relationships, rivalries, and infighting between Price, Missouri governor-in-exile Thomas C. Reynolds, and Lieutenant General Edmund Kirby Smith; between Union major general [End Page 940]William S. Rosecrans in St. Louis and his superiors in the East, Henry W. Halleck and Ulysses S. Grant; between Samuel Curtis and military and political players involved in Kansas; between Curtis and Alfred Pleasonton; and between Price and the irregular guerrilla commanders who the Confederate general had hoped would join the campaign. Sinisi shows the effect that the years of guerrilla strife in the state imposed on the campaign, as Price continued to try to stem the unnecessary violence, revenge killings, lootings, and other brutalities that accompanied his move into Missouri. The Confederates did not have a monopoly on such atrocities, Sinisi asserts, as Federal soldiers also engaged in such activities. In particular, Sinisi makes a compelling case that Union soldiers killed surrendering Confederates in large numbers at the battle of Mine Creek, likening the incident to the massacre at Fort Pillow and other racially motivated incidents.

Sinisi also challenges and corrects several long-standing assumptions and interpretations concerning Price’s campaign. For example, he addresses issues from overinflated casualty numbers in several engagements, which have been accepted without question, to the size of Price’s wagon train and why he seemed so obsessed with protecting it during the battle of Westport. During the campaign, Price and his army traversed over one thousand miles and entered into thirteen major engagements and many smaller ones. Yet as Sinisi asserts, the outcome of the campaign “was a tactical and strategic disaster that exemplified . . . the unrealistic last-ditch efforts of the Confederacy to survive in late 1864” (p. xiii). Even if Price had been more successful in Missouri, one must wonder, would it have mattered at all.

Thomas F. Curran
Cor Jesu...

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