Battle of Helena: The Fourth of July That Went Wrong

On the morning of July fourth, eighteen sixty-three, Confederate General Theophilus Holmes ordered an assault on the Union garrison at Helena, Arkansas. Holmes had approximately seven thousand seven hundred men. The Union defenders, under General Benjamin Prentiss, had roughly four thousand troops but held the high ground, had spent months fortifying their positions, and had the gunboat Tyler sitting in the river with its guns trained on the town.

Holmes planned a coordinated four-column attack timed for dawn. The coordination failed. The columns went in at different times, the Confederate right was repulsed almost immediately, and the soldiers who briefly captured Fort Curtis at the center of the Union line found themselves exposed to fire from Hindman Hill on their flank and from the Tyler's artillery in the river. By mid-morning the assault was collapsing. Holmes ordered a withdrawal. Confederate losses were approximately one thousand six hundred killed, wounded, or captured. Union losses were around two hundred and thirty.

The same day, Vicksburg fell. Grant accepted Pemberton's surrender on the evening of July fourth, splitting the Confederacy in two along the Mississippi River. The Helena assault had been intended partly to draw Union forces away from Vicksburg. It did not. Holmes had received intelligence suggesting the Vicksburg siege might be lifted if pressure were applied elsewhere. The intelligence was wrong, or at least too late.

The men who died here were sacrificed to save a fortress that was already surrendering by the time the first Confederate column stepped off. Helena's garrison held the town for the remainder of the war. The fortifications are gone, but Crowley's Ridge still rises above the river, and the grades where the Confederate columns scrambled uphill into Federal fire can still be traced. The Phillips County Courthouse in Helena contains artifacts from the battle. The town, now called Helena-West Helena, has preserved the battlefield within a Civil War battlefield park maintained by the Delta Cultural Center.