The Second Battle of Independence: Price's Last Gamble in Missouri
Near Kansas City, Missouri
In October of eighteen sixty-four, the Civil War was effectively decided in the east. General Grant was grinding Lee down in Virginia; Sherman was carving through Georgia. But in Missouri, the war blazed up one last time with a daring Confederate cavalry raid that came within miles of deciding the November presidential election.
Major General Sterling Price, a former Missouri governor turned Confederate commander, led twelve thousand to thirteen thousand horsemen north out of Arkansas into his home state. His objectives were ambitious: disrupt Union supply lines, conscript Missouri men into the Confederate cause, capture St. Louis if possible, and, his commanders hoped, damage Abraham Lincoln's chances for reelection by demonstrating that the Union could not control its own border states.
Price swept across Missouri through September and October, fighting a dozen engagements. His forces reached Independence on October twenty-first, occupying the town after pushing Union cavalry back across the Little Blue River. The Second Battle of Independence, fought the following day, October twenty-second, saw Union forces mount a coordinated assault that captured men and two Confederate cannons, forcing Price to pull back.
The raid's climax came the next day, on October twenty-third, at the Battle of Westport, just south of present-day Kansas City, where thirty thousand troops from both sides clashed in what is sometimes called the largest Civil War battle west of the Mississippi. Price's army was broken and driven south, never to return to Missouri.
The raid had failed to take St. Louis, failed to topple Lincoln, and failed to hold Missouri. Price's men straggled back to Arkansas with fewer than half of their original force. The Second Battle of Independence now sits at the edge of Kansas City's eastern suburbs, its ground absorbed into neighborhoods, its significance remembered mostly by the Civil War enthusiasts who walk the old ridge lines looking for what is no longer there.
