The Van Buren Raid, A Town Shelled From Across the River
Near Fort Smith, Arkansas
Three weeks after one of the bloodiest battles in the Trans-Mississippi theater, the Union army came back.
The Battle of Prairie Grove, on December seventh, eighteen sixty-two, had ended in a bloody stalemate across the hills twenty miles southeast of here, with Major General Thomas Hindman's Confederate forces fighting Union troops under Generals James Blunt and Francis Herron to a standstill. Hundreds died on both sides, but when the guns stopped the Confederates pulled south, and the Union generals saw an opportunity.
On December twenty-seventh, Blunt and Herron sent eight thousand infantry, cavalry, and artillery soldiers marching south through the Boston Mountains toward the Confederate supply base at Van Buren, on the Arkansas River. They arrived the next morning. The Confederate cavalry they encountered first broke and ran. By midday the Union army held the town.
What they found on the riverbank was a Confederate logistics hub. Three steamboats sat at the Van Buren landing, along with a ferry and warehouses holding twenty-five thousand bushels of grain and other military supplies. Union soldiers began loading what they could carry. Across the river, in Fort Smith, Confederate artillery watched and waited.
At two thirty in the afternoon, with Union forces in full possession of Van Buren, General Hindman ordered his batteries to open fire on the town. He was shelling his own supply base, and his own state's civilian population, to deny the Federals their prize. An estimated one hundred artillery shells rained down on Van Buren. One burst nearly killed Blunt and Herron simultaneously. Buildings and homes were struck. Two Union soldiers were killed and six wounded. Civilian casualties were also reported.
When the bombardment finally stopped at sunset, the Confederates abandoned Fort Smith overnight. The Union troops burned what they could not carry, including the steamboats, the ferry, and the corn, and marched north. Freed enslaved people joined the column as it moved.
Van Buren had been held for less than a day, but the raid effectively ended Confederate control of the upper Arkansas River valley.
