Not available to order
Publication date:
16 July 2015Length of book:
468 pagesPublisher
Rowman & Littlefield PublishersISBN-13: 9780742545366
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.
Save the Red River Campaign of the same year, no other operation conducted west of the Mississippi river in 1864 can match the numbers involved and geographic sweep of Sterling Price's expedition in Missouri, yet no full-length military treatment of it has been published until now. Kyle S. Sinisi's The Last Hurrah: Sterling Price's Missouri Expedition of 1864 is noteworthy not only for bridging this long-standing gap in the Trans-Mississippi Civil War historiography but also for being by any estimation a first-rate operational history. The author persuasively rejects or revises a large number of traditional campaign interpretations while advancing fresh ones of his own.