Zagonyi's Charge: The Cavalry Rode Into Springfield

On October twenty-fifth, eighteen sixty-one, a Hungarian-born Union cavalry officer named Charles Zagonyi led about three hundred horsemen, including Frémont's Body Guard, Prairie Scouts and Irish Dragoons, in a charge against a Confederate force of somewhere between one thousand and fifteen hundred men defending Springfield, Missouri. By any calculation, this was not a survivable plan.

Zagonyi had been sent ahead of Major General John C. Frémont's army as a reconnaissance force. When he reached Springfield and found it held by Confederate irregulars, he made a decision that military historians still debate: he charged anyway.

The Union cavalry swept down through a wooded draw, took heavy fire, took heavy losses in the approach, and broke through into the town square. The Confederate defenders, who substantially outnumbered the attackers, broke and fled. Zagonyi's battered column released Union prisoners being held in the town, and held the square until they had to withdraw that evening, fearing a counterattack.

The losses were severe. Union losses are usually given at about eighty-five killed, wounded or missing. But the charge became an immediate sensation in the Northern press, a story of audacious heroism at a moment when the Union badly needed such stories. Newspapers across the North celebrated Zagonyi's raid. Frémont's army arrived two days later and occupied Springfield for the remainder of the fall campaign.

For Frémont himself, the occupation ended badly. He was relieved of command in November eighteen sixty-one, a victim of political conflict with the Lincoln administration over his unauthorized emancipation proclamation in Missouri. But Zagonyi's charge remained one of the Union cavalry's founding legends, the kind of story that gets retold in regimental histories for generations: a few hundred men, a thousand-man garrison, and the flag going up anyway.