The Camden Expedition, Arkansas and the Civil War
Near Little Rock, Arkansas
The fall of Little Rock in September of eighteen sixty-three came without a major battle. Union General Frederick Steele maneuvered his cavalry across the Arkansas River south of the city, threatening to cut off the Confederate garrison from its supply lines. Confederate General Sterling Price evacuated without a fight.
The capital of Arkansas fell to the Union quietly, almost anticlimactically, on September tenth, eighteen sixty-three. But the war in Arkansas was far from finished. In the spring of eighteen sixty-four, Steele led what became known as the Camden Expedition, a coordinated advance southward meant to support Nathaniel Banks's Red River Campaign in Louisiana.
It went badly. Confederate forces cut off Steele's supply wagons at Poison Spring on April eighteenth and at Marks' Mills on April twenty-fifth. The Poison Spring engagement was particularly grim: among the Union troops killed were men of the First Kansas Colored Infantry, and witnesses reported that wounded Black soldiers were killed where they lay.
The episode became one of the documented atrocities of the war in the Trans-Mississippi theater. Steele retreated to Little Rock, having lost more than twenty-five hundred men and failed to reach his objective. The Camden Expedition is largely forgotten outside Arkansas, but it shaped the state's postwar memory in complex ways, a Union garrison sitting in the capital while guerrilla warfare continued to burn across the counties, and a Black regiment that had fought and died for a Union that would take another century to make good on its promises.
