Sterling Price

Sterling Price

Sterling Price (born September 20, 1809 in Farmville , Virginia , † September 29, 1867 in St. Louis , Missouri ), also called Old Pap , was an American politician , brigadier general of the US Army and major general of the Confederate Army during the American Civil War .

Price is best remembered for his notable military endeavors aimed at winning Missouri to the Confederation. At the end of the war, he evaded a surrender to the Union Army and joined the rest of his units on Mexican territory.

Early biography

At the prestigious Hampden-Sydney College in Virginia studied the Price Rights . Until he received his legal license, he worked as a bailiff and clerk in his hometown court in Prince Edward County . In 1831 he moved with his family to Missouri, where after several changes of location he ran a hotel and a goods store. In 1833 he married Martha Head, who was also based in Missouri. The marriage resulted in seven children, of which only five survived to adulthood.

Price was elected to the Missouri House of Representatives for four years in 1840 , and he was promoted to speaker . Finally he entered the 29th Congress of the United States in Washington, DC in March 1845 for the Democratic Party . In August 1846, however, he gave up his mandate to take part in the Mexican-American War .

Mexican-American War

Back in Missouri, Price was involved in the formation of the second Missouri Mounted Volunteer Regiment - the term cavalry was not yet in use in the USA. On August 12, 1846, he was appointed its commander with the rank of Colonel ( colonel ), although he had never completed military training. First he led his regiment to Santa Fe . There he took over as the successor of General Stephen W. Kearny, who had been posted to California , command of the military commander of the New Mexico Territory , which was roughly the size of the later state of New Mexico .

Price was able to achieve his first major military success with the suppression of the so-called Taos revolt on the upper reaches of the Rio Grande , in which members of local Indian tribes and established Mexican settlers jointly rebelled against the new sovereignty of the United States. Soon after, Price was promoted to Volunteer Brigadier General on July 20, 1847 by US President James K. Polk .

In the Battle of Santa Cruz de Rosales, Chihuahua on March 16, 1848, Price then commanded a so-called Army of the West for the first time . This battle was the last of the Mexican-American War and took place after the US Congress ratified the Guadalupe Hidalgo Treaty on March 10, which was supposed to end the war. It is widely believed that in response to inaccurate reports that Mexican forces crossed the demarcation line again, Price attacked his troops.

Between the wars

In November 1848, Price was honorably discharged into civilian life. He immediately returned to Missouri, where he bought a farm and campaigned for the agricultural reclamation of the prairie . Among other things, he maintained a tobacco plantation and, like many plantation owners of the time, was a slave owner . His unbroken popularity earned him the office of governor of Missouri, which he held from 1853 to 1857. In this role, he drove the expansion of the railway network in Missouri. After the end of his tenure, he ran the affairs of the State Bank of Missouri from 1857 to 1861 . Eventually Price was elected presiding delegate of the Missouri State Convention , which voted on February 28, 1861 against secession .

American Civil War

When in Missouri, despite the vote against secession, some tendencies towards the side of the Confederate states emerged, Price initially felt obliged to the valid result of the vote. Like many citizens of Missouri, he probably hoped to keep the state out of armed conflicts and to achieve a kind of neutrality .

The situation changed when command units under the command of the later Brigadier Generals Francis Preston Blair and Nathaniel Lyon began to secretly take over the strategically important St. Louis for the Union . Finally, the Missouri Militia base at Camp Jackson near St. Louis was also occupied by regular Union troops. Price reacted indignantly and saw that Missouri sovereignty was disregarded; he decided to turn against the Union after all. In May 1861 he was entrusted by Governor Claiborne Fox Jackson with the command of the newly established Missouri State Guard . His mostly quite young recruits , who gave him the affectionate nickname Old Pap , he now led into a long battle with the primary goal of securing Missouri for the Confederation .

Soon after, Price was given the rank of major general in the Confederate Army , and the Missouri State Guard forces he commanded were given the Army of the West, adopted from the Mexican-American War . Among the battles and skirmishes he has been involved in in a senior operational position are: Battle of Wilson's Creek , First Battle of Lexington , Battle of Pea Ridge , Second Battle of Corinth , Battle of Helena, Second Battle of Lexington, Battle of Carthage, Battle of Prairie D'Ane, Battle of Pilot Knob, Battle of Westport, and the Battle of Mine Creek.

Price has always been loyal to the leadership and cause of the South. The primary goal of his operations, however, was probably always only to drive the Union troops out of Missouri and control the Mississippi / Missouri . Relief of the Confederate army in the east or even a further advance in the rear of the Union, as was sometimes hoped in the south and is still sometimes assumed, could hardly have afforded Price with his relatively small and gradually weakening units. Most of his later battles had to be fought under the well-known unfavorable conditions characteristic of the entire Confederate army, such as the permanent lack of supplies, armament, equipment and personnel, and ended in sometimes devastating defeats.

The Missouri Raid of 1864

One of Price's most famous and tactically most remarkable operations was the so-called Missouri Raid (also Price's Raid ) in the fall of 1864. This was another attempt to reach a decision in favor of the Confederation in the combat area west of the Mississippi. Price led his Missouri Army, which was still largely made up of members of the former Missouri States Guard and comprised around 12,000 mounted men, from Arkansas in a short time over almost 1,500 miles through Missouri and parts of Kansas . The first major combat operations did not occur until Pilot Knob at the end of the St. Louis & Iron Mountain Railroad on September 27th. There the attempt to take Fort Davidson failed with considerable losses. Price was now moving northwest. At the heavily secured St. Louis, a declared target of the Missouri Raid , Price had to turn southwest. The capture of Jefferson City on the Missouri also failed.

He then moved west along the Missouri to Kansas City , Missouri at the confluence of the Missouri and Kansas rivers. Southeast of Kansas City, Price's column was provided by two Union contingents. The ensuing battle of Westport (now Kansas City) on October 23 was unfavorable for Price and he had to go to the prairie of Kansas. But the Union troops followed up and put him to fight again at Mine Creek on October 25th. Price was unable to carry out his intention to use the battle to cover a well-ordered retreat. His bandage, defeated again, had to make a hasty escape south. On the same day, with the battle at the Marmiton, his hope of being able to supply and regroup in Fort Scott, Kansas was dashed.

On October 28, near the border with Indian territory, there was another major clash with Union units in the second Battle of Newtonia in what is now Newton County, which finally drove Price out of Missouri. Still beset by Union forces, he and the remnants of his army were then forced to retreat southwest to Texas . A few weeks later, Price managed to get his men back to Arkansas. It is estimated that he lost more than half of his personnel, or more than 6,000 men, during the Missouri Raid .

After the war

After the end of the fighting, Price and the remnants of his army, contrary to the Appomattox agreements , did not face the Union troops. With the men who remained with him, he entered Mexican territory under arms. There he tried in vain to be able to enter the pay of Emperor Maximilian . On the one hand, this may have been due to the low combat value of his emaciated troops; on the other hand, Price was met with suspicion because of his earlier involvement in the Mexican-American war.

Price was still a chairman of the Confederate Colony in Exile in Carlota, Veracruz for a while . But when this colony soon fell apart, he finally returned to Missouri. Price did not have to fear reprisals there , but he had lost practically all of his fortune to the effects of the war and his health was deteriorating noticeably. A few days after his 58th birthday, Sterling Old Pap Price died on September 29, 1867 in St. Louis. He found his final resting place in the local Bellefontaine cemetery.

Memory and trivia

Price received various honors during his lifetime . For example, at the beginning of the Civil War was the steamer Laurent Millaudon the name CSS General Sterling Price renamed. The ship, which was badly damaged and sunk in the Battle of Memphis , was lifted and repaired by the Union. From then on it was remarkably used as the USS General Price and after the end of the war as General Sterling Price . Old Pap Price has a firm place in the collective memory of the South as Lee of the West . There are still images of Price in Springfield and Keytesville, Missouri, where there is also a municipal park named after him and there is even a Sterling Price Museum. A district of Keytesville celebrates the Sterling Price Days every year with parades and festivals. In St. Louis, a veterans camp run by descendants of Confederate Civil War veterans bears Price's name. American composers honored Price with marching music . MV Washington composed General Sterling Price's grand march (1883), Felix Schram the Sterling Price grand march (1884). In the two Hollywood films The Marshal and With Dynamite and Pious Sayings , in which John Wayne plays the role of a US Marshal , a cat is called General Sterling Price .

literature

• Richard J. Hinton: Rebel invasion of Missouri and Kansas. And the campaign of the army of the border against General Sterling Price in October and November 1864 . FW Marshall, Leavenworth 1865.
• William Parker Snow: Lee and his generals . Richardson & Company, New York 1867.
• Jacob Miller, Samuel Peter Heintzelman, George T. Robinson, LG Bennett, Warren Kemble, Calvin D. Cowles: Campaign against Sterling Price, 1864 . In: Atlas to accompany the official records of the Union and Confederate armies . Pl. LXVI. United States (War Department) u. a. 1891-1895.
• TJ Mackey, Walter J. Morris, John McAllister Schofield, George Henry Thomas, Joseph Hooker, Calvin D. Cowles: Map of the fall campaigns of the Army of Missouri, Maj. Gen. Sterling Price commanding in Sept., Oct., Nov. 1864 . In: Atlas to accompany the official records of the Union and Confederate armies . Pl. XLVII. United States (War Department) u. a. 1891-1895.
• The Battle of Lexington. Fought in and about the City of Lexington, Missouri, on September 18th, 19th and 20th, 1861 . Lexington Historical Society 1903.
• Ralph Emerson Twitchell: The History of the Military Occupation of the Territory of New Mexico from 1846 to 1851 . The Smith-Brooks Company Publishers, Denver (Colorado) 1909.
• Ralph R. Rea: Sterling Price, the Lee of the West . Pioneer Press, Little Rock, Arkansas 1959.
• Robert E. Shalhope: Sterling Price, portrait of a Southerner . University of Missouri Press, Columbia 1971.
• Albert E. Castel: General Sterling Price and the Civil War in the West . © 1968. Louisiana State University Press, Baton Rouge 1993.
• Dictionary of Missouri Biography . University of Missouri Press 1999.
• John F. Wakefield (Ed.): Battle of Corinth . Honors Press, Florence (Alab.) 2000.
• James F. Muench: Five stars: Missouri's most famous generals. Alexander W. Doniphan - Sterling Price - Ulysses S. Grant - John J. Pershing - Omar N. Bradley . University of Missouri Press, Columbia 2006.

Web links

Commons : Sterling Price  - Collection of Images, Videos, and Audio Files

• Sterling Price in the Biographical Directory of the United States Congress (English)

• 21746 Sterling Price in the database of Find a Grave (English)
• Portrait Price (English)
• Greene County biography by Price (English)
• Sterling-Price-Camp United Confederate Veterans of 1889 in Dallas, Texas (English)
• USS General Sterling Price (English)
• Sterling Price at the National Governors Association (English)