The Last Hurrah
Sterling Price's Missouri Expedition of 1864
By (author) Kyle Sinisi author of Sacred Debts: S
Publication date:
16 July 2015Length of book:
468 pagesPublisher
Rowman & Littlefield PublishersDimensions:
234x160mm6x9"
ISBN-13: 9780742545359
In the late summer of 1864, Confederate General Sterling Price led a last ditch attempt to liberate Missouri from Union occupation and brutal guerrilla warfare. Price’s invading army was like few others seen during the Civil War. It was an army of cavalry that lacked men, horses, weapons, and discipline. Its success depended entirely upon a native uprising of pro-Confederate Missourians. When that uprising never occurred, Price’s rag-tag army marched through the state seeking revenge, supplies and conscripts. It was a march that took too long and ultimately allowed Union forces to converge on Price and badly defeat him in a series of battles that ran from Kansas City to the Arkansas border. Three months and 1,400 miles after it had started, the longest sustained cavalry operation of the war had ended in disaster. The Last Hurrah is the story of Price’s invasion from its politically charged planning to its starving retreat. The Last Hurrah is also the story of what happened after the shooting stopped. Even as hundreds of Missourians followed Price out of the state and tried desperately to join his army, elements of the Union army visited retribution upon Confederate sympathizers while still others showed little regard for the lives of the prisoners they had captured. Many more would have to suffer and die long after Sterling Price had fled Missouri.
The Last Hurrah effectively recounts the campaign from inception to end. Near the end of summer 1864, Sterling Price would finally get his grand opportunity to try to wrest control of his home state from federal forces. . . .Covering such a vast campaign in a single volume of reasonable size is a difficult proposition but Sinisi's efforts toward maximizing available space succeed admirably. His description and analysis of the Missouri Expedition in all three major military dimensions — strategic, operational and tactical — are appropriately weighted and balanced. For a work of this scale the amount of tactical detail provided for the many battles and skirmishes fought is more than satisfactory. The roughly one hundred pages devoted to the October 19-23 series of battles fought just east and south of Kansas City comprise the best treatment yet of what one might consider collectively as the Battle of Westport. In support of the narrative is a very useful set of 21 maps created by Larry Hoffman. In general terms, the cartography of the Missouri Expedition is scant and woeful in the collective literature and The Last Hurrah goes a long way toward rectifying this deficiency. The somewhat complex movements and side-movements of Price's army are clearly traced on the book's operational scale maps and the many tactical maps correlate well with the text descriptions of the unit and landscape battlefield tableau associated with each one. . . .For students of the Civil War in Missouri, The Last Hurrah: Sterling Price's Missouri Expedition of 1864 has been well worth the considerable wait. The first thorough military treatment of the campaign, this deeply researched and skillfully composed study also holds the added distinction of ranking among the finer examples of Civil War operational military history regardless of subject. Highly recommended.