The United States haven\u2019t always been united, and the most impactful demonstration of that over America\u2019s 250 years has been the Civil War.<\/p>\n
The four-year war that pitted the North against the South, neighbor against neighbor and brother against brother was the deadliest in U.S. history, reportedly costing the lives of up to 850,000 Americans less than 100 years after America had become a country.<\/p>\n
The conflict from 1861-65 also established the trajectory of the disunited then reunited nation.<\/p>\n
According to Civil War historian James McPherson, President Abraham Lincoln in his Gettysburg Address called the war a \u201ctesting\u201d of whether a \u201cgovernment of the people, by the people, for the people\u201d would thrive or \u201cperish from the earth.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cIt did not perish,\u201d McPherson, a professor emeritus of history at Princeton University, wrote in 2010 for Prologue magazine. \u201cNorthern victory preserved the nation created in 1776. Since 1865, no disaffected state or region has seriously tried to secede.\u201d<\/p>\n
Lincoln also mentioned a \u201cnew birth of freedom\u201d in his address as the other fundamental problem resolved by the war, saying that \u201cthe monstrous injustice\u201d of slavery had robbed \u201cour republican example of its just influence in the world \u2013 enables the enemies of free institutions, with plausibility, to taunt us as hypocrites.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cThe institutions and ideology of a plantation society and slave system that had dominated half of the country before 1861 went down with a great crash in 1865 and were replaced by the institutions and ideology of free- labor entrepreneurial capitalism,\u201d McPherson wrote. \u201cFor better or worse, the flames of the Civil War forged the framework of modern America.\u201d<\/p>\n
In the process, those flames reportedly consumed the lives of nearly 7,000 of the 60,000 Arkansans in the Confederate Army and close to 3,500 in federal service with the Union Army. White County Historical Society board member Scott Akridge noted that more of those died from disease than combat, but Arkansas saw its fair share of battles, including the Battle of Helena, the Battle of Arkansas Post, the Battle of Oak Grove and the Battle of Pea Ridge.<\/p>\n
Whitney\u2019s Lane<\/p>\n
One of the lesser known of those battles took place in White County. Akridge and Emmett Powers wrote a book about it titled \u201cA Severe and Bloody Fight: The Battle of Whitney\u2019s Lane & Military Occupation of White County, Arkansas, May & June, 1862.\u201d<\/p>\n
There is a Civil War marker in Kensett about \u201cThe Action at Whitney Lane\u201d that reads, \u201cOne hundred Texas Rangers and 50 local men on May 19, 1862, attacked a foraging party from the 17th Missouri Infantry (U.S.), a unit composed largely of German troops, fighting near here along Whitney\u2019s Lane. Union losses were 22 killed and 33 wounded while four Confederates were killed.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe attack convinced Union Gen. Samuel Curtis to abandon his advance toward Little Rock and instead march cross- country to Helena on the Mississippi. Arkansas\u2019s capital would remain under Confederate control another year before falling to the Union.\u201d<\/p>\n
Ahead of the country\u2019s semiquincentennial, Akridge shared more details about the battle with the Citizen that displayed both the resiliency and resourcefulness of the South and ultimately the futility of its effort and cause. According to Encyclopedia of Arkansas, it was \u201cthe first major contact between Federal and Confederate forces in Arkansas after the Battle of Pea Ridge on March 6-7, 1862.\u201d<\/p>\n
Akridge lives in Searcy but grew up in Kensett and heard stories from his family and others in the area about what they referred to as \u201cThe Battle of Whitney\u2019s Lane, which supposedly took place just north of Kensett in the area of the Doniphan Lumber Mill.\u201d<\/p>\n
Akridge said his first interest in the Civil War sprouted from the stories he heard. \u201cWhen I got in college, my master\u2019s thesis was about a family from Mississippi County, during the Civil War, whose collection of letters was left to the Arkansas History Commission, the state archives,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
\u201cAnd then one day in the mid-\u201990s \u2013 my good friend, Bill Leach, was the former president of the White County Historical Society \u2013 Bill and Emmett Powers and I were sitting on the front porch of the log cabin at Pioneer Village and we were just rolling through topics of history of interest to us and one of us said, \u2018You know, there\u2019s supposedly that Battle of Whitney\u2019s Lane but nobody\u2019s ever written a book about it or nobody\u2019s every written anything about it.\u2019 And I think Emmett said, \u2018If you\u2019ll write the grant proposal and if we get a grant, I\u2019ll help you write it.\u2019<\/p>\n
\u201c… So we spent a year researching and writing that. Our original proposal was for a 50-page book and it turned out to be three times that long,\u201d he said with a laugh.<\/p>\n
The $3,000 grant came from the Arkansas Historic Preservation Program and paid for them to go to the Missouri state archives and to Waxahachie, Texas, where Akridge said there is a Confederate museum with some of the central characters who came up from Texas.<\/p>\n
Akridge said he learned from his research that the Union Army had made its way around southern Missouri and down to Batesville in April and May of 1862 \u201cafter the Battle of Wilson\u2019s Creek up around Springfield, Mo.\u201d He said \u201cit was the intention\u201d of the Union forces to capture Little Rock and there weren\u2019t many Confederate forces standing in their way.<\/p>\n
\u201cIn April, much of the Arkansas Confederate force had made their way east to what would become the Shiloh, Tenn., battle, so they were around Corinth, Miss., just across the line, and the number of Confederates left to defend Arkansas was very little,\u201d Akridge said. \u201cBut Texas troops were begging to arrive.\u201d<\/p>\n
However, he said that those troops \u201cwere a company here and a company there or a regiment here and a regiment there\u201d amounting to a few hundred while Gen. Curtis\u2019 Union Army of the Southwest had originally been 22,000 strong. And even though \u201cbefore he gets to Batesville, the Union syphons off about half of them to send over in the direction of Shiloh, Tenn., they still had a 10,000- to 12,000-man army, still big enough to have easily have taken Little Rock.\u201d<\/p>\n
Curtis, though, \u201cdidn\u2019t know exactly what was in front of him, and what the Confederates started doing was skirmishing here and there,\u201d Akridge said. \u201cA big part of their effort involved removing all the food and forage from the pathway between the Little Red River and Little Rock. They really couldn\u2019t fight them in a head-on battle and so they were just going to try to starve them out, and that was kind of the strategy.\u201d<\/p>\n
According to Akridge, several factors came together so that it worked. He said there were small Confederate groups that would hit Curtis\u2019 supply line of wagons between Batesville and Missouri. \u201cThe small number of Texas and Arkansas troops that were in White County were able to engage in several skirmishes that just made the Yanks keep their guard up but not advance forward because they literally thought that there was a larger amount of Confederates present than there really were.\u201d<\/p>\n
Curtis tried to get supplies on steamboats to come up the White River to Batesville, Akridge said, \u201cand they could not make it due to both low water and Confederates shooting at them along the way. So a combination of factors resulted in Curtis abandoning the idea of taking Little Rock and instead went down the east side of the White River all the way to Helena.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cSo they do take Helena,\u201d he said, \u201cand then a year and three or four months later, they decided to try to take Little Rock and were successful in the fall of 1863 of taking Little Rock.\u201d<\/p>\n
In 1863 when the Union decided to move from Helena to try to capture Little Rock, Akridge said that \u201ctwo Confederate transport boats were hiding out somewhere up the White River, and so three Union gunboats were sent up the White River. Two of them stop at the mouth of the Little Red and one comes up to Searcy and it finds the two transport boats and they capture the transport boats and put their own Union pilot on them and make their way back down the Little Red River.\u201d<\/p>\n
Akridge said he found it interesting that when Curtis\u2019 army arrived in 1862, it used lumber from a local sawmill and logs as floats to build a type of floating pontoon bridge across the Little Red River at Searcy Landing. Then in 1863 when the gunboats came up the river and found those two Confederate transports, there is a statement made that they destroyed the pontoon bridge.<\/p>\n
\u201cThey tore it up, and that\u2019s a different bridge,\u201d Akridge said, \u201cso it had been rebuilt. It has only been in recent years that I learned about some Union troops that disembarked from a boat down around DeValls Bluff and they were sent up to Searcy in 1864 and there\u2019s just a phrase in there where one soldier says, \u2018We crossed the bridge at Searcy Landing,\u2019 so whether it was Union or Confederate, everybody is using that crossing and they\u2019re keeping a wooden, floating bridge across the river there, which is where the River Oaks Golf Course is now.\u201d<\/p>\n
By the time the gunboats had captured the transport boats and the bridge had been destroyed, \u201cabout 500 Confederates had succeeded in making it to the Little Red River on the west side and were shooting at it basically from a little below Judsonia all the way down past West Point,\u201d Akridge said. \u201cThey\u2019re shooting at the boats with small arms and the Union gunboat responds with basically what we call canister \u2026 firing along the west bank of the Little Red River.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe largest of the Union gunboats that had remained at the mouth of the Little Red had begun coming up the Little Red River because they thought the other boat had been gone too long … and just below West Point, the USS Lexington unleashed, I think it was, 18 rounds of explosives, 8-inch across shells, and the quote from the captain was \u2018We must have given them such a scare as they never had before\u2019 for they, meaning the Rebels, left very suddenly.\u201d<\/p>\n
Akridge said while there was \u201cthat gunboat activity … it was the capture of the Confederate steamers \u2013 those were the last two boats on the White River, and that\u2019s in 1863 \u2013 that ends Confederate boats going up and down the White River.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cIn 1864, the Union Army has Little Rock at this point \u2013 they captured Little Rock \u2013 so they\u2019re sending out these expeditions, ranging in numbers from 500 troops up to as many as 3,000, up in the direction of White County for the purpose of really they were after some of the Confederate leaders in this area.\u201d<\/p>\n
He said Joe Shelby was probably \u201cthe No. 1 target,\u201d but the Confederates were \u201cjust hiding out between Searcy and Augusta and up toward Jacksonport\u201d and \u201cbasically they have real good knowledge of the landscape.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cThere was very little in the way that these Union forces were going to make any success in capturing all these guys who knew where all the swamp crossings were,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
Measuring consequences<\/p>\n
Overall during the war, Akridge said, it\u2019s believed that \u201cthere were 17 companies of infantry raised in White County. That could be infantry and calvary. At full strength, there\u2019s supposed to be 100 per company, however a lot of times they would be accepted into service even if they didn\u2019t have that many. They might be accepted if they only raised 80 or so or whatever.<\/p>\n
\u201cOne thousand, 500 men or so were raised from a county whose population at the time was maybe 5,000 … so it\u2019s a significant chunk of the population [that] does enlist in the service.\u201d<\/p>\n
Akridge said the South\u2019s strategy at the beginning of the war was trying to place a series of forts or large camps along the northern border of the South, around Pocahontas in Arkansas. Then there was a series of forts along northern Tennessee, the Kentucky line and continuing on east.<\/p>\n
\u201cThat strategy is trying to build a defensive wall basically, and it didn\u2019t work much in the same concept as say the Great Wall of China,\u201d Akridge said. Stretching out forces across a long distance means the enemy only has to concentrate in one or two places and overwhelm them, and that was eventually what the Union Army did.<\/p>\n
\u201cFirst, Samuel Curtis here in the west and then Gen. [Ulysses] Grant and others, and, of course, when the Union captured the entire length of the Mississippi River, kind of cut off the west from the east, and then Gen. [William] Sherman marches through Georgia and cuts another third of it.\u201d<\/p>\n
The war in Arkansas, Akridge said, was a lot of guerilla fighting with the Union Army, based in Little Rock with a few outposts. He said one of these was in Batesville for a while. \u2019It just evolves into guerilla warfare, hit and runs in Arkansas as the war went on and that part had a much greater impact on the civilian population than did the larger battles.\u201d<\/p>\n
There are seven historical markers in White County that reflect both the war effort and its toll.<\/p>\n
Akridge mentioned one at Searcy Landing at the River Oaks Golf Course, just before the pro shop and the parking lot on the right. There is one in front of the Gum Springs Volunteer Fire Department about the Confederate attack on Union troops at the creek just below where the fire station is, and Bald Knob City Hall has a marker about a Confederate Salt Works that was destroyed that was somewhere in the region between Bald Knob and Augusta.<\/p>\n
\u201cThere\u2019s some salty areas over there where they would boil the water and leave the salt,\u201d Akridge said, \u201cprimarily for preservation of meat supplies and that sort of thing, and the Yanks found it. They use these extra large kettles and the Yanks punched holes in the kettles to render them useless.\u201d<\/p>\n
There also is a marker at West Point City Hall about the gunboat activity and a fiberglass panel marker was put up in the West Point Cemetery. \u201cWe were hoping to get 10 or 12 years out of it and it\u2019s been there like 28 years now,\u201d Akridge said with a laugh.<\/p>\n
Akridge said that with the help of numerous others, he helped write the grants for the historical markers, and the matching funds for each of them were provided by community members and organizations that stepped up.<\/p>\n
\u201cI\u2019m proud that we were able to do that because most of the counties across the state were only able to round up enough money to put up one, some two, but we got seven all together,\u201d Akridge said, \u201crelated specifically to the Civil War, so that\u2019s kind of a moment of pride. It carries over from the Civil War research we mainly did in the \u201890s.\u201d<\/p>\n
Akridge, who is a past president of the Arkansas Archeological Society, and Powers, also a member, researched and completed their book while serving as teachers at Riverview public schools. They have donated all proceeds from the book to the White County Historical Society.<\/p>\n
The aspect of the war they covered in their book, though, is only a small part of the big picture of a nation in turmoil, going through dire growing pains, to become what it its now approaching its 250th anniversary.<\/p>\n
In his Prologue article, McPherson quoted Samuel Clemens, aka Mark Twain, as writing in 1873 that the war \u201cuprooted institutions that were centuries old, changed the politics of a people and wrought so profoundly upon the entire national character that the influence cannot be measured short of two or three generations.\u201d<\/p>\n
As McPherson wrote back in 2010, \u201cwe are still measuring the consequences of that cataclysm.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The United States haven\u2019t always been united, and the most impactful demonstration of that over America\u2019s 250 years…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":687329,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[18],"tags":[23,3729,3,21,19,22,20,25,24],"class_list":["post-687328","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-united-states","tag-america","tag-local","tag-news","tag-united-states","tag-united-states-of-america","tag-unitedstates","tag-unitedstatesofamerica","tag-us","tag-usa"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/687328","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=687328"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/687328\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/687329"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=687328"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=687328"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=687328"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}