JOHN RUTHERFORD: There was an estimate that the Union Armies stockpiled supplies in Springfield for the winter for the whole Southwest Missouri region and the Army of the Frontier in Arkansas, estimated as high as $15 million back then, which is $331 million in today's money.

And therefore, if he could destroy that supply base, he could literally wither the Union forces in their region.

[music playing] Many of us enjoy learning about Civil War history, especially what occurred in the area that we grew up in or live.

There have been individuals, large and small battles, and political activities that have been impacting and important to our understanding of the issues and fighting in Southwest Missouri and Arkansas.

Among these are the military raids of General John S. Marmaduke.

My guest on today's program are historians and authors William Piston and John Rutherford, who will talk about General Marmaduke and the Civil War raids that he led.

ANNOUNCER: Ozarks Public Television and Missouri State University are proud to present "OzarksWatch Video Magazine," a locally-produced program committed to increasing the understanding of the richness and complexity of Ozarks culture.

Visit our website for more information.

Well today, I have two special guests.

And before we get into the book that you guys co-authored, why don't you talk a little bit about yourselves, just a little bit of background for the viewers.

All right.

I'm William Garrett Piston, and I'm Professor Emeritus in the History Department at Missouri State.

I taught for 29 years in the History Department, and specializing in the Civil War and American military history.

I'm John Rutherford.

I was lucky enough to join the Springfield Greene County Library back in 1995 and their local history department, and from the very first day nearly that I worked there, people started asking me about the Battle of Springfield.

JIM BAKER: Very good.

And then, of course, Dr. Piston was-- did the Wilsons Creek and you've done a lot of work in that area.

So how did you guys get together and start figuring out that you wanted to work on a joint project?

Well, there's a specific origin to this project on my side.

Professor Tom Dickey decided to do an anthology of articles about Springfield's history and asked me to do something on the Civil War, and I thought about the Battle of Springfield would make a nice article, because I knew nothing had been written about it in a long time or in any great depth.

And once I decided that would make a good piece for the book, and looking and doing research very quickly and talking to John, realized, yeah, this is the perfect person to partner with, because his knowledge of Springfield's history is really unequal for the 19th century.

And so decided to do that article, and then later, decided we would expand that article into a book at the urging of Jim Baumlin, distinguished professor of history and English, and we're fortunate enough to have the Missouri Studies Institute agree to publish it.

So that's the specific origin from my side.

One of the things you have to keep in mind is that Bill was one of my professors early on.

And I admired him and respected him.

And when I got wind that someone was working on a project for a series of anthology stories, and he was asked about the Battle of Springfield-- it was just a rumor, and I went and asked you, I remember very clearly asking you at a Civil War roundtable conference one day, and you said yes you are, and I said, can I jump in on it?

And you said, yes, let's talk about it after the conference.

And that's how we joined together.

So now the focus-- I guess the focus of all this, then, turned out to be General Marmaduke and-- as far as the book and the Battle of Springfield.

The battle-- the article was on the Battle of Springfield because of the format.

It was limited in the size.

JIM BAKER: Yeah.

And the idea, well, can you do something larger?

The obvious thing was to do the whole Marmaduke's raid.

The Battle of Springfield was one of two battles, Springfield and Hartville, that were part of Marmaduke's raid.

And certainly the idea of expanding it would also allow us to put the raid into context of the Civil War in Missouri and Arkansas and write a bigger project, which would justify a book length, and also be more fun.

So how did-- I was trying to figure out like with-- in the Civil War in Missouri, to me, was very fascinating because I can never figure out who was on whose side and how everything worked out and all that.

What made Marmaduke, that raid-- what made that a particularly important part?

I know the Hartville thing and also Springfield, but you focused on him and what he was doing, but-- and also the Union generals and so on.

So why don't you tell a little bit of the story about Marmaduke, how it came into being, and we'll just kind of go through a chronology of the Springfield battle, because I think that's probably pretty new to most viewers as far as that role.

How bout I just do a quick background-- deep background before I turn it over to John.

Marmaduke's raid is really part of a long-term struggle over a transportation corridor that ran from St. Louis to Rolla to Springfield down to Fayetteville and Fort Smith, Arkansas.

It was really the superhighway of the interior of what trans-Mississippi, the inner west of Mississippi.

Tens of thousands of soldiers fought over in the Battle of Wilson's Creek, Pea Ridge, Prairie Grove were essentially struggles to control that, because by doing that, you could either be Confederates and hold Missouri or be Union and kick the Confederates out of Missouri.

So it is part of that larger event.

And the precipitating event, really, was the defeat of the Confederates on December 7, 1862 at the Battle of Prairie Grove.

And from that desperate defeat came a decision that, well, what can we do now?

JOHN RUTHERFORD: The first thing that happened is that there was a little bit of bad weather about Christmas time of 1862, but right after Christmas, Union General Blunt and his second in command Francis Herron agreed to go on a fast raid from Prairie Grove area down to basically Van Buren on the Arkansas River.

It was known that the Confederates had an advanced supply depot there, and they encountered, on the movement, almost no resistance to them but one or two cavalry regiments, and they were no match for the 7,000 or 8,000 that the Union forces had.

When they got there, they destroyed several steamboats that were on the Arkansas River.

Then they took all the wonderful supplies that were stored there, like 15,000 bushels of corn, all the sugar that was still there, and just about anything that they could put on a wagon, they hauled back North with them to Prairie Grove.

Now what happened here is that General Hyman, the theater commander, now is without his advanced supply base, and he's trying to move his forces downriver closer to Arkansas.

He's panicking because the Union forces now have a potential control point of the Arkansas River, and he's using riverboats to supply his troops.

So he asks Marmaduke at Lewisburg, what can you do to drive the Union forces away from the Arkansas River, maybe even back to the Arkansas line, maybe even back into Missouri?

Marmaduke decided to go through Yellville, Arkansas and team up later on at Hartville, Missouri with a force under a colonel named Joseph Porter.

And then they would move north theoretically and operate on the Rolla-Lebanon-Springfield supply line of wagon trains, hopefully destroying something.

So it really was an action to try to pull people away and get the attention pulled away from Arkansas.

It was the conundrum with their major army defeated at Prairie Grove.

What options are left for the Confederacy?

And it is a real act of desperation, because Marmaduke's column and Porter's column were both in very poor shape.

Their horses were largely unshod, the men were lacking uniforms and equipment, and the weather wasn't good.

So this was a real act of desperation.

But what other resources do you have with the potential of really making a major change in the situation?

A direct attack on the enemy isn't going to work, but an attack deep into his supply lines, that might work.

And once Marmaduke got up into Missouri, he very quickly learned that there was a very light garrison in Springfield and decided to attack Springfield directly because tons and tons of supplies are in Springfield.

He gave messengers-- sent messengers to redirect Porter, who he was planning to rendezvous with in Hartsville, to meet him in Springfield instead.

But those orders never reached Porter and Marmaduke ended up attacking Springfield by himself on the 8th of January.

JOHN RUTHERFORD: But it was worth it to Marmaduke to attack Springfield even without Porter, because there was an estimate that the Union armies stockpiled supplies in Springfield for the winter, for the whole Southwest Missouri region, and the Army of the Frontier in Arkansas, estimated as high as $15 million back then, which is $331 million in today's money.

And therefore, if he could destroy that supply base, he could literally wither the Union forces in that region.

So the Hartville connection, how was how was that really tied together?

Was that just simply-- WILLIAM PISTON: Hartville is what you usually call an encounter battle.

The battle did not result as plans of either one.

Springfield, Marmaduke was trying to attack a specific target, and the Union commander, Egbert Benson Brown, was defending that.

When Marmaduke did not end up taking Springfield, he headed east towards Hartville where he had originally intended to meet Porter, and they met in between.

Meanwhile, Union forces were moving all over in different directions trying to either find Marmaduke or get reinforcements to Springfield, and the Union troops that took part in the Battle of Hartville were actually some that had been dispatched to go to the assistance of Egbert Benson Brown and Springfield, but before they got to there, they ran into Marmaduke's troops, and that's, as we call it, an encounter battle because neither side had planned to fight, but as they literally collide into each other in the dark on the night of the 10th, early morning of the 11th of January, a very rare Civil War battle with significant combat in the dark, and it carries on over into the rest of the day.

Well, so how many soldiers were involved in the Hartville thing, for example?

Is there an estimate of the number of troops or-- Roughly 2,400 Confederates, and on the Union side, 880.

So there was a big advantage for the Confederates at Hartville.

But because of terrain, they never really-- because the Union position was largely concealed by the terrain, Marmaduke never realized he was facing such a small force and went away convinced that he'd run into and given a sound bloody nose to a force bigger than his.

It's common for people to overestimate the number of people they're facing, but for Marmaduke to think these 800 outnumbered him was pretty unusual.

So consequently, the Union troops that manage to fight it Hartville and live to fight another day knowing they'd faced a really much larger enemy thought they'd accomplished a great deal.

So it's a battle where both sides actually claim victory.

So help me.

When Marmaduke first came into Missouri, how many troops did he have at his disposal as he was moving them to the-- sounds like almost like guerrilla warfare, only a little bit larger to me.

But, I mean-- Marmaduke moved in two columns based on where troops were and also to fool the enemy.

And the column under Marmaduke's direct command was just over 1,800 men.

The one under Porter's command was originally 850, but when he got up towards the Missouri line, 125, 150 his horses had broken down and he had to send them back, so he only made 700 men get to the Battle of Hartville.

So you have then a force that's about 2,500 men, which is a small force in terms of big battles like Gettysburg or anything.

But that is a substantial force to be moving through a barren countryside, because men and horses have to eat.

And they didn't bring any supplies with them other than what the soldiers could carry on their backs.

They didn't bring wagons of supplies or a mule pack train, because that would slow them down.

So they were counting on speed.

So their intention was to come in, do a hit, and go back to Arkansas?

Yes.

Yeah.

And so you would travel light and-- it's actually more troops than I thought.

I was thinking it would be a smaller number for the raid.

But when they got to Springfield, was Springfield like a Union stronghold at that time or was it-- what was-- because I always had the impression that there was a great mixture of sympathies that went in both directions.

What was the-- what was Springfield like when this all happened in 1963, I guess?

Estimates generally range from about 60% to 40% Confederates.

So it was generally just slightly an advantage for the Union side.

However, over time, the Confederates felt less and less welcome, and many of them took wagon train south into either Arkansas and then into Tennessee where their families had lived previously to sit out the war.

So was there-- in Springfield, was there a like-- some kind of a military installation or was it more of a storage area?

WILLIAM PISTON: Springfield had been completely taken over by the military.

Almost all businesses that remained-- Springfield had a population of about 1,500 in 1860, and by winter of 1862-63, that population was cut in half.

The town had changed hands, Union, Confederate, four times.

Soldiers visiting Springfield reported that 50% of the houses, there are about 700 houses by the 1860 Census.

50% of those houses were destroyed.

The Union government had built buildings and corrals to rehabilitate horses.

They had five forges that were running 24 hours a day.

There was martial law, businesses could be only open at specific times.

And the Union was in the process of building five major earthen work forts to protect Springfield, and for the building of those, civilians, both Black and white, slave and free, were impressed by the military and forced to give a certain amount of time each week to build on those forts.

So if you were a civilian in Springfield, you were living in a town that was-- just could not have imagined life would have been that-- like that if you knew Springfield in 1860.

It was completely transformed.

Yeah, I was thinking that would be a very dangerous time, because you simply would not know-- because I was trying to figure out how they would hold on to the supplies and all the things here if there's was that many sympathizers.

Did any of the locals kind of join up with Marmaduke and the-- you know, once he came in for the raid?

Or was that-- or did the local folks pretty much stay out of it and-- The-- in terms of any of the male population going off and joining up with Marmaduke, I don't know of any example of that.

There are reports of that women still living in Springfield, a small pro-Confederate population still there, when they got word that Confederates were coming, and some of the rumor was it included some of the people from Greene County who joined the Confederate Army back in 1861, that they were elated and confident of victory that Marmaduke would take Springfield, and started cooking meals that they were going to serve to their boys when they came home, and took Springfield and were victorious and drive the Yankees out.

And of course, those hopes were dashed.

So how did Marmaduke-- I guess going back a little bit, he became a general.

I always was intrigued about how these different folks became generals and colonels, and I guess they-- probably field promotions, I suppose.

But where did he come from and what was his general-- what was his background before he got into doing the raids?

Well, he was born in Arrow Rock.

So it's right here in Missouri.

He attended a couple of colleges and then West Point where he was one of the few Missourians who was a prominent leader in the Confederacy with a West Point degree.

I know-- I was reading someplace where he became governor of the state.

He did after the war, and died in office of natural causes.

1883 if my memory serves is the year he died.

And he served three years in office.

That had to be an intriguing-- I was thinking about some of the races we have today about the vitriol and all this stuff, that it had to be-- WILLIAM PISTON: It was, yeah.

I mean, it was a strange gubernatorial race, because at one level, he made an appeal, you know, let bygones be bygones and, you know, bring Missourians together.

At another level, he was unquestionably trying to rally former Confederates and get their assistance.

It was a time when, because of previous events, the so-called Drake Constitution that had been adopted from '65 to '75, had disfranchised a lot of Confederates, and now Marmaduke's being in office represented a resurgence of conservative Democrats, but also a split in Missouri Republicans, largely over issues of race, as some who'd supported the war were-- certainly did not want any change in the social status of African Americans in Missouri after the war.

And as for Springfieldians go, of course, Marmaduke was a Democrat running for his governor's seat.

And he said that he didn't think he had hardly a single friend in Springfield.

And as a matter of fact, General CB Holland, who commanded the Union forces, held hard feelings and would not vote for him in the election of that-- Well, I was thinking, about in 1880, that's still an open wound, I would imagine, for all the folks that were-- especially in-- The first joint blue-gray reunion-- not just veterans meeting Union here, but let's get there and have a joint reunion in Missouri was in 1883, and it was a reunion of the Battle of Wilson's Creek, although they invited veterans from both sides generally.

So by approaching 20 years after the war, things had changed enough that that idea was not shot down immediately.

But it took, really, about those 20 years to pass before you got a lot of joint reunions.

Veterans on each side started gathering pretty quickly after the war.

But the 1880s, as they go on, do mark a series of joint reunions across the nation.

And partly tied to-- you really had basically 20 years of generations passing, people who were young or not been born in the war deeply interested in it, and a tremendous publication boom of memoirs, magazines, and books.

The 1880s is just a huge boom, and it includes books on Missouri as well.

So for some people, the bitter feelings lasted forever, but 20 years is a ballpark figure of when people began to be able to put some of those feelings behind them and get together.

And so Springfield was the site of the first blue-gray reunion in Missouri.

We've got a couple-- few minutes left, but a couple of quick questions, I guess.

Talk a little bit about the Union-- the folks in the Union Army that did the resistance to Marmaduke, we have to give you full time here, at least some time, but-- JOHN RUTHERFORD: Sure.

General Egbert Benson Brown was the Union commander here at Springfield.

At the time Marmaduke approached, he had basically less than 24 hours' notice that Marmaduke was coming when a messenger arrived to say, there could be as many as 6,000 troops coming your way and he only had 1,300 troops total at that point.

If you aren't aware of this, we didn't write it in our book, but General Brown has kind of an illustrious military family history.

His father commanded the Michigan troops during the Black Hawk War and his uncle was Jacob Jennings Brown who was the overall commander of the US Army from 1815 to 1821.

So he may have had a little understanding of the military background, in addition to being the Mayor of Toledo, Ohio.

Interesting people.

So what was the-- the other question I always was fascinated by the Civil War and the impact it's had on the Ozarks in general, because I think it was obviously a defining period of time in the history of the Ozarks.

What about if you narrow it down to just Springfield, what do you think is kind of the lasting impact of that Marmaduke raid and Civil War in general on Springfield and Southwest Missouri?

Well, you had quite a number of Springfieldians who were Democrats, consider themselves conservatives, owned slaves, but supported the Union during the war, people like John S. Phelps-- Phelps Grove Park is named after that.

And others, Colley B. Holland and Charles [inaudible],, there are other people.

After the war, the postwar issue of, what's going to be the place of African Americans?

That becomes the question and does divide people.

And some conservative Republicans will drop to the Democratic party as their only choice.

So it helps Springfield become a more solidly Republican era in the immediate post-war.

Then it gets very complicated as you go through a period in the 1960s where it's the Democratic Party in the South as the resistance.

So I think the major impact is largely to validate those who had supported the Republican Party, and it becomes the ticket for political office.

JOHN RUTHERFORD: It's so interesting to read through the Greene County history from 1883, because they talk about how the Republican Party in 1860 and Greene County had a, quote, bad odor.

44 Republicans had the guts to show up to the polls to vote for Lincoln in 1860, but by 1864, the Unionist sentiment had turned totally towards Lincoln, and now there was like about 1,600 or 1,700 votes for Lincoln, overwhelming support for him.

So I guess the lasting impact is the political environment, the racial environment, and things of that nature.

So-- And republicanism has remained.

JIM BAKER: Yeah.

And we could have another whole series of discussions about those topics.

So thank you very much for being with me today.

It's good to see both of you.

A lot of fun.

We'll be back in a moment.

ANNOUNCER: Ozarks Public television and Missouri State University are proud to present "OzarksWatch Video Magazine," a locally-produced program committed to increasing the understanding of the richness and complexity of Ozarks culture.

Visit our website for more information.

I want to thank my guests William Piston and John Rutherford for sharing their knowledge of General John S. Marmaduke's Civil War raids in our area and their impact, and invite you to join us again for "OzarksWatch Video Magazine."

[music playing]