 It's hard to imagine what it must have been like during the night, between March 7th and 8th, in which the Battle of Peeridge took place. On the 7th, the two armies had fought what was, at that point, one of the largest battles of the Civil War, and it wasn't over yet. Both sides had already suffered hundreds of casualties or more, far more than the surgeons could effectively tend to. I shall never forget that night, one Confederate soldier said. Wounded Union soldiers were all around me, and their suffering and calls for water and fire appealed to me and gained my sympathy. Those supplications to God and us for help were enough to soften the heart of even a Missouri soldier. I've talked plenty about the loss of romance in war, but many of the soldiers on both sides were still green. So the transition from visions of glory to facing the grim realities of war was still taking place. Another Confederate soldier serving as a sentry during the night where he could see the piles of body in the moonlight described his experience, quote. It was a cold night and it was pitiful to hear the wounded calling all through that night in the woods. For some water or something to keep them warm, I hope I will never hear such pleadings and witness such suffering again, such cruelty and barbarity ought not to be tolerated by civilized nations, end quote. On either side we find examples of some soldiers having sympathy for the dead and wounded enemy and some happy to loot the bodies of their fallen foes. In one case, a Missouri Union soldier took a bullet he thought would kill him. I was shot somewhere in the heart, he later said. I cannot tell where, but I was sure it was a death shot as the blood was flowing from my mouth and I was choking for breath. He made his way to a cornfield that was already littered with bodies from the day's fight and he collapsed. Some Missouri Confederates were making their way through the cornfield and thanking him dead, stole his sidearm and rifled through his pockets. The soldier probably would have bled to death had it not been for a couple of Union soldiers who found him a little while later, realized he was still alive and brought him to the surgeon. The doctor said that his wound was fatal, but the men who rescued him stayed with him and made sure he didn't drown in his own blood and the soldier survived. Just as we saw in previous battles, soldiers new to combat were particularly taken aback by the side of the makeshift hospitals. One Union soldier described his reaction, quote, The surgeons were busy cutting and carving like butchers, arms and legs de-severed lay thick around outside, while inside were some of the unfortunate victims of the bloody day. Some were praying, some swearing, some laughing, others crying, some growing, many dead and dying, end quote. The night was cold, some of the soldiers hadn't eaten in two days. They were entirely exhausted. But for many, this was their first combat experience. And if the trauma of that wasn't enough, they had to try to sleep, knowing that they would have to face the horrors of war again as soon as the sun came up. I'm Chris Calton and this is the Mises Institute podcast Historical Controversies. In the previous episode, we looked at one part of the Battle of Peeridge, which took place at Leetown. This fighting took place on March 7th and it turned out to be a Confederate disaster in which two Brigadier Generals, Ben McCulloch, and his immediate subordinate James McIntosh were both killed within minutes of each other. The result led to a breakdown in Confederate leadership that left one section of the army under Major General Earl Van Dorn unable to reinforce the other section of the army, which was fighting at Elkhorn Tavern. While General Van Dorn and Sterling Price, who led the Confederate Missouri State Guard, were fighting, they fully expected Ben McCulloch to arrive with his division at any moment to reinforce them. This, of course, would not happen. In today's episode, we will finish the story of the Battle of Peeridge, looking at the fighting that took place around Elkhorn Tavern. The Union General in charge of the Army of the Southwest was Samuel Curtis. When he learned on March 7th that the Confederates were marching up the Telegraph Road, Curtis decided he had to intercede to maintain control of this important road. The Army of the Southwest was composed of four divisions, one of which had been already sent to deal with Ben McCulloch in Leetown, as we covered in the previous episode. Now to defend Telegraph Road, he sent Colonel Eugene Carr and his division to hold off the Confederates who were following Van Dorn and Sterling Price. Cars selected the land around Elkhorn Tavern as the best strategic ground to defend against the Confederates. The Tavern itself was a prominent two-story building with a large set of antlers decorating the outside of its roof. But what made the ground around it so suitable for Carr's defense was that the Tavern was located at the top of a plateau that the Telegraph Road ran through. The hillsides of the plateau were covered with trees, so this gave the Union the high ground advantage and its forested hillsides provided natural cover for the soldiers. Now roughly half of Curtis' army was held back from either front of the battle. In the previous episode, we saw how the Confederates at Leetown should have easily been able to overrun the Union forces, had it not been for the breakdown in leadership that followed the deaths of McCulloch and McIntosh. In many ways, luck was on the Union side that day. At Elkhorn Tavern, Carr realized that even with the natural defensive advantages the plateau provided, Van Dorn's Confederates greatly outnumbered him and could potentially run him out more quickly than Curtis could reinforce him. He asked Curtis to send more men, but it would take at least an hour for them to arrive and they may have been driven back by then. But nothing could be done by the time the fighting started, except to try to hold the rebels off until reinforcement showed up. As soon as the Confederates came in range, the small Union battery at the top of the hill started firing. Van Dorn reacted quickly, calling up his own artillery to respond in kind. The Confederate Artillerists were at a clear disadvantage, having to maneuver their guns into place while the Union cannon fire was landing around them, sending tree limbs and piles of dirt flying everywhere. But they managed to get their guns in position and when they started firing back, the small Union battery couldn't hold out long. They had already lost a gun when a shell got stuck. Now the Confederates were firing on them. One shell landed on a Union ammunition chest creating an explosion that sent smoke and debris everywhere. Not long after, the Southerners landed a hit on another ammunition chest that was being brought in by horses. The explosion this time panicked the horses who ran off dragging supplies behind them. Even after the explosion of the second ammunition chest, none of the Union Artillerists were killed, but they were now either stunned or groping around blindly in the thick cloud of smoke that engulfed them. It's worth remembering, as I've mentioned at least once in previous episodes, that artillery had a tremendous psychological effect and deaths from cannon fire could be particularly gruesome, but overall artillery wasn't as deadly as we might think because people could actually see it coming and react accordingly. But covered in smoke, the soldiers were blind and therefore that much more vulnerable to the Confederate cannons. While the Yankees were struggling with the smoke, a quote-unquote perfect storm of grapeshot and shell and debris pounded at the Union Battery, injuring the officers, including Carr himself, and killing several men. Enough men and horses were either killed or wounded that there weren't enough left to operate the cannons, and Union fire slowed nearly to a halt. While the Union Battery was falling into disarray, the commander of the 1st Missouri Brigade, Colonel Henry Little, decided to try to force them to retreat. He called for Colonel Elijah Gates, leader of the 1st Missouri Cavalry, to help him. According to Little's orders, Gates' cavalry would move up the hill to capture the battery while the infantry followed behind to cover them. Now this may be one of the muddiest moments in the battle in terms of the details we have. Think of old cartoons like Looney Tunes or something, where when two characters would fight, the animators would just draw a big cloud of dust and add sound effects to illustrate the fighting. So you couldn't really see what was going on in the cartoons. A fight was just a ball of dust and sound effects. Well, that's kind of what was going on here. The smoke from the cannon fire was so thick that the cavalry couldn't really see what they were charging into. They rode up the ravine, but before they charged into the smoke, they dismounted and proceeded on foot, pulling their horses behind them. Colonel Little ordered his men to support the cavalry by firing a volley into the cloud of smoke. But the scene was so obscured that there was no way for the infantry to avoid hitting the very men they were supposed to be supporting. To make matters worse, when the cavalry, now on foot, moved into the smoke-filled area, they ran headlong into a line of Union infantry that was coming in to support the battery. They weren't expecting this, and many of the Missourians panicked, running back down the ravine with the horses following behind them. In the words of one witness, quote, the horses came galloping down the hill in writerless yet regular order as if guided by unseen hands, end quote. The horses were obviously more visible than the men leading them down the hill. One man, seeing the horses without anybody riding them and unaware that the cavalry was on foot, screamed, my God, they have all been killed! Now the Union infantry was advancing slowly down the hill. Sterling Price, who was on the left side of the Confederate line, mistakenly assumed that the Union was now attacking the Confederates on each flank, and he ordered some of his artillerists to turn their guns in the direction of what he believed was a Union attack. He overestimated the Union advance, though, and by diverting some of his cannons away from the direct Confederate assault, the advantage they had won against the Union battery was gone. Instead of attacking, the Union infantry only advanced a little way down the slope before they were ordered to lie down and try to aim their shots at specific targets rather than just firing at the Confederate line while they marched. Both sides now exchanged heavy fire for maybe a half hour or so without advancing. The Elkhorn Tavern, which had been converted into a Union hospital, started to take damage from Confederate cannons, forcing the evacuation of the wounded soldiers inside. One survivor described how intense the fighting was, I never heard anything to equal it in any other battle. The incessant crash of musketry and roar of artillery amid curtains of rising smoke appeared both to sight and sound as if two wrathful clouds had descended to the earth, rushing together in hideous battle with all their lightning and thunder. The Union suffered the most damage from it, but they managed to hold off the Confederate advance. At around 1230, Union reinforcements arrived. Military outfits were still not uniform at this point, and when a regiment of Illinois cavalry started to move down the hill, the opposing Missourians weren't sure if they were friend or foe, so they held their fire. The regimental officer of the Missourians was on horseback and he rode forward to find out whose side the cavalry was on, only to find himself coming under fire. He immediately turned his horse around and started to race back down hill yelling, it's them, it's them, it's them. The Missouri Confederates and Illinois Cavalry were now less than 200 yards away when the Confederates opened fire, taking out several of the Illinoisans as they drove them back up the hill. Most of the other reinforcements moved down the slope and entered the battle more tactically. The Union was still suffering the greater number of casualties at this point, but they did manage to take out one Confederate brigade leader, killing him at roughly the same time that General McCulloch was shot down at Leetown. So in both fields of battle, the Confederacy was not suffering a high number of casualties, but they were losing high-ranking officers, though in this case it was only a brigade leader rather than a division commander. But the high ground actually proved to be something of a disadvantage for the incoming Union reinforcements. The slope of the ravine was so steep in some places that the men were falling and sliding down the hill while they tried to move forward. As the 9th Iowa Regiment closed in, a single volley of Confederate musket fire took out more than 60 of them, forcing the rest of the regiment to fall back before it could even start fighting. So in this case the Confederates actually seemed to have a defensive advantage by being on the low ground, which is obviously quite unusual. At one point the Union disorder was exacerbated when a Confederate shell set fire to some dry leaves and started a brush fire near one Union regiment, creating a panic about the wounded men who couldn't move out of harm's way. The fighting like this kept up for a couple of hours. Curtis was sending reinforcements to Elkhorn Tavern but only a little bit at a time because he was afraid of giving up other positions that he may need to defend depending on the outcome of the fighting at Leetown. So he was being somewhat conservative and Colonel Carr at Elkhorn Tavern had reinforcements trickling in, not enough to change the tide of battle but enough to keep the Confederates at bay. Van Dorn was also being conservative, which is rather out of character for him. He was usually a pretty aggressive leader but at around noon he received the message that Ben McCulloch had sent shortly before leading his own fatal charge against the Union line at Leetown. The message optimistically claimed that it seemed likely that McCulloch would be able to rejoin Van Dorn in Sterling Price before long. So Van Dorn was delaying any aggressive assault until he had his entire army at his disposal. He was content enough to remain on the defensive until then. Things seemed to be going well for the Confederates by around two o'clock. The Union line was finally starting to fall back. Colonel Little finally led his men up the hill to occupy the ground where the Union battery had been, which he later described as quote, a scene of wreck and disaster. One of his soldiers described the scene quote, the remains of parts of the Federal battery were scattered around and the effect of the explosions could be plainly seen. Dead horses and dead and wounded infantry told of the storm of iron, which had beaten them down, end quote. But as all this was taking place, Van Dorn and Price were discussing how to proceed when another messenger brought distressing updates about Leetown. He was able to inform Van Dorn that the Confederates at Leetown were no longer moving toward Elkhorn Tavern as they were caught up in their own battle. As if to prove him right, the fighting at Elkhorn Tavern was dying down as the Union fell back and the scene was now quiet enough that the musket and cannon fire from Leetown could be heard. The messenger didn't know it at the time but both McCulloch and McIntosh were already dead, having both been killed somewhere between 1.30 and 2.00 in the afternoon. So Van Dorn didn't realize the full scale of the Confederate disaster at Leetown but he was finally aware that he would not be receiving the rest of his army anytime soon at the very least. Then, as Van Dorn and Price were considering what to do with the Sun Happy update, Sterling Price took a bullet that ripped through his right arm and landed in his side. According to witnesses, Price maintained his composure quite well as aides bandaged the wound. The injury wouldn't kill him but it wasn't exactly minor either despite Price's stoic composure in front of his men. While his injury was being tended to, Van Dorn had to consider what to do now that things weren't looking quite so positive for the Confederates at Pea Ridge. This was an important turning point for the battle at Elkhorn Tavern. Up to this point, both sides were maintaining defensive positions. The Confederates had the early advantage but they didn't press aggressively up the hill because they were waiting on McCulloch to join them. The Union didn't move aggressively down the hill because they had a tactical position on the plateau. They were outnumbered and their goal was to maintain control of the Telegraph Road which didn't require an advance anyway. But with the news of Leetown, Van Dorn made the decision to finally push his attack. Although he couldn't know what was going on with McCulloch, had he done this a few hours earlier, he likely would have driven the Yankees away. But since he waited, he gave the Union time to receive the reinforcements that continued to trickle in. Moreover, the steep slopes may have worked to the Confederate advantage when the Union soldiers were trying to move downhill to face them. But all this meant was that the steep ravines would work to the advantage of the defenders regardless of whether the attackers were moving uphill or downhill. So Van Dorn's decision to advance was exactly what Carr had been positioning his men to be prepared for. Despite his injury, Sterling Price refused to leave the battlefield. They divided command of the Missouri State Guard between them with Van Dorn taking the right half and Price commanding the left half of the Confederate line. They decided that the Union right flank was the weakest, so that would be the point they would push against. On paper, this looks like a reasonable plan. But due to the rough terrain, the steep slopes and the foliage, it was impossible for the men to advance in an orderly fashion and the advance was painfully slow. Since the push was against the Union right flank, it was made by the Confederate left under Price's supervision. Van Dorn maintained the Confederate right, which would occupy the rest of the Union line so that the Union right flank couldn't be reinforced. Now here was Van Dorn's logic. McCulloch's division was quite strong. Since it consisted of roughly 7,000 men, it was almost as big as the entirety of Curtis's army of the Southwest. The Confederates had the clear advantage of numbers. So Van Dorn assumed that if McCulloch was being held up this effectively, he must be facing the entire Union force that wasn't already at Elkhorn Tavern. This of course was incorrect. Only one of Curtis's four divisions was at Leetown, and the only reason they weren't overrun by McCulloch is because of the back-to-back death of the two division commanders, which resulted in a breakdown in Confederate leadership. But Van Dorn didn't know this, so he incorrectly assumed that the other two divisions that Curtis had on standby must be occupied at Leetown. He also misinterpreted the movement of Union troops around Elkhorn Tavern, in which the Union line was shortened, indicating that Curtis had pulled some of Carr's troops to Leetown as well. But in reality, the troops at Elkhorn Tavern had simply been repositioned so the Union line was shorter but more concentrated. So Van Dorn was making assumptions that may have been reasonable, given the knowledge he had, but was entirely incorrect and demonstrated Van Dorn's tendency for naive optimism. It was roughly 4.30 when Price commenced his attack up the hill. The lull was over. The march up hill moved through the thick forests, but the Union right flank extended to a farm where the trees had been cleared away long ago. The result was that the Confederate advance was mostly invisible in the dense forest, but when they emerged into the farm, they were only about 100 yards from the enemy. Intense, close-range gunfire erupted immediately from both sides. By many accounts, the fighting here was even more intense than what took place a few hours earlier. One regimental officer from Iowa later stated, I charged the battlements of Vicksburg and assisted in driving the Confederates from their almost impregnable position on Missionary Ridge, but in all my army experience, I did not see any fighting compared with the plain, open-field conflict that occurred in and around Elkhorn Tavern on March 7th, 1862. Those who could found shelter behind tree stumps or a nearby limestone outcropping and everybody else dropped to their bellies. It was a war of attrition as each side exchanged gunfire in an open field from less than 100 yards away. Van Dorn moved up the hill as well to occupy the Union left. With both flanks of the Union line unable to reinforce the other, Van Dorn was able to push the Union line back and occupy the ground at the top of the terrace by five o'clock. His push was successful, but the climb-up hill left his men completely exhausted. Despite all the setbacks and difficulties, though, the Confederate advance was going well, as they still heavily outnumbered the Union. One Northerner said, quote, It seemed to me that the whole world over there was full of rebels. It was one line after another, end quote. The Confederates were swarming up hill from every direction. While this fighting was going on, Van Dorn finally received word that both McCulloch and McIntosh had been killed, and the third-ranking officer, Louis Hebert, was unaccounted for. At this point, the Confederates at Leetown were already completely done for, even though Van Dorn still didn't know the full story. So he sent orders for Colonel Greer, the fifth officer to take command of McCulloch's division at Leetown, to hold the position at all costs. But of course, by the time the message was delivered, Greer and the rest of the division would already be gone. Given that Sterling Price was the division leader of the Missouri State Guard at Elkhorn, Van Dorn probably should have gone to Leetown himself to take command of McCulloch's division, now that he was aware of the crisis of leadership. At least this is what other historians have suggested, but things seem to be going well with the Confederate attack at Elkhorn Tavern, so Van Dorn chose to stay. Sterling Price and his men were still waging their war of attrition. Price called his artillery up to start pelting the Yankees in the cornfield. After battering the Union position, the Missouri infantry charged the cornfield again, and once more, they met with devastating results. As more Missourians fell, the rest retreated, even as Sterling Price, with his arms still in a sling, was trying to rally them forward. This kept up a number of times, with the Union officer in the field saying, I mowed them down in mounds. They charged us time and time again, but they could not move us. But Price still wasn't calling it quits. He tried to gather more of his men to conduct a more orderly charge, this time moving in from each side. As the southern battery continued to send shells into the cornfield, the Union battery was running out of ammunition. But by the time Price's men commenced this more tactical charge, more Union troops arrived to reinforce those who had been holding the field. The result was yet another bout of heated combat. For Price, this was quote, the fiercest struggle of the day, end quote. But even with the Union reinforcements, the Confederates had the advantage of numbers. Finally, by 6 p.m., the Union soldiers gave way and retreated downhill. Regiment by regiment, the Confederates at different points of the hill drove the Union forces back. They were gaining ground and winning the assault, but organization, which already was disrupted by the March of Hill, broke down even further as soldiers broke ranks to loot the Union camps they captured. These men were exhausted, and they hadn't eaten since the previous morning, so their reaction shouldn't be surprising, but it did undermine the Confederate advance. The Union forces fell back to another nearby farmed downhill. The Confederates who didn't stop to loot and eat continued pushing against them, but the strength of numbers was dwindling as too many soldiers remained at the top of the plateau, exhausted and famished. As a result, the Union forces concentrated at the farm were able to hold off any further Confederate advance. The Missourians who did run after them found dozens of their comrades dropping from Union musket fire and canister, bodies piled up in the cornfield, and the Union line held its ground. General Curtis finally showed up at around sunset, and he took command to try to lead his men to reclaim the ground lost to the Confederates. When some regimental leaders told him that they were completely out of ammunition, he told them to use their bayonets, the men did as they were told. As one regimental officer described the Union soldiers during this final assault, such a yell as they crossed that field with, you never heard, it was unearthly, and scared the rebels so bad they never stopped to fire at us or let us reach them. They finally succeeded in reclaiming a bit of ground, but not enough to matter very much. They were stopped far short of Elkhorn Tavern, which was now completely in Confederate hands. By 730, with the sun completely set, Curtis was still trying to stay in the fight, but his batteries were out of ammunition, along with his infantry. There would be no more fighting that day. Even without McCulloch's division, the Confederates had driven the Union men completely off the plateau. During the night, the rest of Curtis's army joined those around Elkhorn Tavern. The Confederates also had some of McCulloch's division find their way to the tavern from Leetown, though others were unaccounted for after their retreat. Van Dorn repositioned his troops to form a better line across the Telegraph Road. He was more than ready to fight, but he thought Curtis might be ready to surrender, so he was content with holding back in a defensive position to see what Curtis was going to do. Almost as soon as the sun came up, the fighting resumed, with the first shot fired on March 8th from a Union cannon. Neither side quite knew what to expect from the other. The Confederates now had the terrain advantage, and they made early use of it. The field that the Union managed to hold from the day before was the first target. Conciled in the woods around the farm, Southern batteries unleashed a surprising volley of cannon fire against the two Union batteries in the field that had been positioned and adjusted during the night. They barely put up a fight before the Confederates flushed them out and took the field. But when the Southerners emerged from the woods and tried to cross the field, they were quickly driven back by more Union artillery. This would prove to be the last Confederate offensive of the Battle of Peerage. Now it was Curtis' turn. With all four divisions of his army at hand, Curtis was much more prepared to meet the Confederates than he had been the day before. He formed them into a single line of infantry and artillery stretched across the Telegraph Road. He also had the high ground advantage once again. The Confederates may have pushed him off the hill at Elkhorn's Tavern, but by taking the field at the bottom of the hill, they were once again on the low ground, facing a Union line situated up a different hill this time. Curtis made full use of his entire army, including all 21 of his working cannons. Van Dorn had the numerical advantage, at least in artillery. It's hard to say what the numbers of each respective army were after the fighting from the previous day, but Van Dorn only employed three of his 15 batteries, which means the Union had nearly twice as many cannons in the fight. This decision was likely made because some of the batteries were running low on ammunition, though Van Dorn's rationale isn't entirely clear here. Starting at around 8 a.m., the Union started unleashing the full power of their artillery against the Confederates at the bottom of the hill. For the next two hours, the two forces waged a heated artillery battle. Van Dorn tried to call more batteries into position to join the fighting, but this was much more difficult to do now that the Union was unleashing the power of 21 cannons against them. One battery full of rookie artillerists from Arkansas fled the field before they ever fired a shot. Another battery that Van Dorn tried to bring into the fight after the shelling already started was a Missouri battery supported by the infantry of the 2nd Missouri Brigade, but the terrain put the Union at a clear advantage. No longer covered by the woods around Peeridge, Union batteries on the high ground were able to slaughter them. To make matters worse, these Missourians were trying to position themselves along a rocky side of the ravine. If the Union shells didn't take them out, stray rocks that the explosion sent flying did. After the battle, Union soldiers would come to the area to find the bodies of dozens of men and horses lying either dead or wounded, having been mangled and often dismembered by the devastating barrage. The Union officer on sight said that it was a scene that he would never forget. In the words of one survivor, the assault was a perfect hell. Literally thousands of rounds of cannon fire were exchanged during these two hours. One soldier later wrote of it, It was a continual thunder, and a fellow might have believed that the day of judgment had come. Another described the ground as shaking like an earthquake. The Union cannon aides successfully disabled the Confederate batteries, either destroying them, killing the gunners, or sending them fleeing. This opened the door for an infantry assault, and if this ever gets made into a movie, here's the epic shot that would be needed to do the scene justice. The hills around Peeridge, as we've already seen, were heavily wooded, concealing the troops that moved through them pretty well. But the battle had now shifted to large patches of cleared farmland. So the Union troops, as they moved into position for the charge, were now organized uphill from the Confederates on completely clear stretches of land. If you were a Confederate looking up at this, you would be gazing at close to 10,000 Union soldiers staring back down upon you, standing nearly elbow to elbow in a single contiguous line that spanned roughly a mile long. The descriptions left by some of the witnesses don't give the details I would like to have, but they do illustrate how awe-inspiring the site was. One officer said, quote, I had heard of such things, but they were far beyond my conception, end quote. Another called it, quote, the grandest site that I had ever beheld. And years later said, I would not have missed that site for thousands, end quote. By the time they started their impressive descent, the Confederates were already retreating. Van Dorn having unhappily chosen to withdraw rather than surrender. They still faced some resistance, some of which came from the Confederate Cherokees that had arrived from Lytown during the night. But those Confederates who did try to hold their ground found themselves overtaken by the line of Union soldiers, swarming upon them, sending them a quote, unquote, perfect shower of bullets, as one Missouri soldier put it. I said in the previous battle that pretty much every soldier would end up blaming Van Dorn for the defeat. Van Dorn obviously made some mistakes, but it isn't fair to say that he is the reason for the Confederate defeat, at least not entirely. Some of the problems the Confederates faced, such as the death of two generals at Lytown, are hard to blame on any person. But if you want to know why the soldiers who took part in the battles were so willing to lay the blame at Van Dorn's feet, here's a really good example. Van Dorn called for the retreat, but he failed to send word of this. Did the 13 batteries that were still sitting around Elkhorn Tavern. As the thousands of Union soldiers swarmed up the hill toward the Tavern, these batteries didn't know what to do. They tried to fight back, and they fired off a few shots of canister at the Union soldiers, but any resistance was hopeless. They were massacred by the Union troops. At one point, an ammunition chest exploded, killing or wounding an entire team of horses and artillerists. The destruction of these units was awful. One survivor said that it was, quote, the most horrible spectacle it was my lot to witness during the war, end quote. We might see how these men would be ready to blame Van Dorn for their trouble once they learned that the rest of the army had already been ordered to retreat while they were facing a massacre. With the victory at hand, the Union troops were elated, but there were exceptions to this. One Union soldier writing to his brother back home tried to explain his complicated emotions, where he was happy about the Union victory, but overcome by the cost, he wrote, quote. Maybe you know what joy is, but you do not and never can know the wild delirious ecstasy which crazes the soldier or rather an army when they know they have met and put root to an enemy twice or three times their number, whom they may have been fighting with various success for three excited, anxious, almost eternal days. What, though their comrades moan and shriek with painful wounds, what, though hundreds of dead are strewn within their very sight, the victory is ours. The cost and all else is forgotten. The great joy and wild delight absorbs all else. Ecstasy rules the hour and the man and gives a life that he never knew before, end quote. This letter from this Union soldier kind of reminds me of Mark Twain's war prayer, where a man goes into a church and sarcastically prays to God for victory, praying for the blood of the enemies to run through the streets and for God to help make sure that the children of the enemy grow up orphans and all other manners of horror implied in the desire for victory and war. This soldier was trying to reconcile the joy of victory with the realization of the dead and wounded soldiers, his friends and comrades that littered the ground around every man celebrating. To everyone else it seemed they had forgotten their dead comrades even before they had been buried. I admit that I've never been to war so these are things I think about when reading these histories. How do you reconcile the joy of victory with the price you pay to achieve it? I don't know. The Confederates under Van Dorn would make their way to Corinth as the Confederate troops in the west would all be brought together in response to a string of Union victories. As they moved, they swarmed like locusts on the farm in towns they passed. After battles, both Union and Confederate soldiers made a habit of looting and pillaging and it's difficult to defend a soldier who, to give one example, steals children's clothing from a private home in a conquered city and this kind of pillaging occurred all throughout the war. But the looting by the soldiers under Van Dorn even if we won't condone it is at least more understandable. The soldiers were literally starving. Some of them hadn't eaten for three days because of Van Dorn's mishandling of the supplies which were left at train depots separated from the army they were intended for. But this hardly makes it any less destructive to the victims of the pillaging especially when the Confederate army was claiming to protect Southern citizens from exactly this kind of behavior from the Yankee villains. One farmer said that the Confederate soldiers quote, killed every fowl of any kind all the cattle, hogs and sheep and took all the bacon and corn they could find for several miles around. They cooked at our house from 11 o'clock until midnight until there was nothing left to cook. End quote. He went on to say, perhaps hyperbolically, perhaps not, quote, I seen lots of men cut out slices of beef and mutton before it was done bleeding and eat it raw. The only bread they had was the corn they had hooked on the road. They threw the ears into the fire and burnt the outside black and eat it, end quote. Soldiers give testimonies that suggest the farmer may not have been exaggerating. One soldier wrote, quote, I was so hungry I even picked up turnip peelings out of the mud and ate them and I saw many others do the same, end quote. But while we may be able to understand looting that is driven from desperation and starvation, they left the subsistence farmers of rural Arkansas with nothing left for themselves. Even as they picked the state clean of anything to eat, there wasn't enough to feed the thousands of soldiers who continued to effectively star for more than two weeks. The citizens were also left, in many cases, with the wounded Confederates that were left behind. Many of the Southern wounded were carried for a while, but Price eventually gave the order to leave the immobile soldiers behind as they were slowing the army down. One soldier who had taken a bullet to the thigh, recalled being, quote, laid out in a porch by the side of the road, end quote. We can think of what that soldier must have gone through being left behind by his friends, but it couldn't have been easy for the comrades who were ordered to leave him behind either. In fact, if you read some of the literature on the psychology of warfare, one of the most prominent phenomena that scholars have repeatedly observed is how the trauma of war makes men surprisingly willing to sacrifice their own safety or well-being for their comrades, which is not the reaction psychologists expected when they first started studying this stuff. But we can also imagine the citizen who comes home or opens their front door to find a bleeding and dying soldier lying on their front porch. In rural Arkansas in 1862, there weren't a whole lot of options for how to deal with that other than to take the soldier in, sometimes requiring months of care for another mouth to feed. To be sure, many, probably most, people who took care of injured soldiers did so out of compassion or a sense of moral duty, but the material burden of this could still be tremendous. The Union soldiers, being the victors, were left dealing with the bulk of the dead and wounded, as is the case with any relatively large-scale battle, and peerage was probably more mid-scale by the standards established later in the war. Numerous soldiers left testimonies of their first experience witnessing the piles of amputated legs and arms that surgeons casually built from the hundreds of amputations they had to perform. As the soldiers combed the ground around peerage for dead and wounded, some of them happened upon soldiers that had been scalped, and others who seemed to have either been finished off as they lay wounded, or at least mutilated, after their death by knives or hatchets. This was a testament to the different approach to warfare that the Indians engaged in, which frankly wasn't unlike what we saw in the episodes on Nicaraguan in the 1850s, where it was standard practice to bayonet enemy wounded after a battle. But it was enough to compel General Curtis to compose a letter to Vandoren complaining of the Confederate deviation from quote-unquote civilized warfare. Of course, the Southerners and Northerners generally showed the same deference to the rules of engagement, such as the practice of not attacking enemy hospitals and treating enemy wounded, but both sides were also guilty, at least in their newspapers, of painting the enemy as barbarians and stories of scalped, mutilated Northerners certainly fed into wartime prejudices. One final event is worth mentioning here, as it almost never gets talked about, and that's Curtis' march through Arkansas. Honestly, I would have liked to have devoted an entire episode to this, but it's nearly untouched in the scholarship. There is one book on the subject, but it's a self-published book by an amateur historian, which doesn't mean it's bad, by the way, but it is riskier to use such sources, especially when there's no corroborating literature. But after recovering from the battle intending to the dead or wounded, Curtis led his army on a long march through Arkansas that took place from the end of March through part of July. His goal was to capture Little Rock, but he would fail and ultimately situate his army in the city of Helena, off the Mississippi River. The fact that Curtis failed to capture Little Rock is probably the primary reason historians have given Curtis this march little attention, as it amounted to little of strategic military significance, especially in 1862, in which so many important battles took place. But it's worth mentioning for two reasons. One is that, as we will see when we look at Grant's Vicksburg Campaign, as Curtis was really the first Union general to take his army on a long march without consistent access to supplies. This meant that they had to live off of what they could claim along the way. This obviously compounded Arkansas's devastation, which they suffered from both the Confederate army and the Union army, and it also left them exposed to the occasional episodes of guerrilla warfare at the hands of Southerners acting independently of any larger army. The brutal tactics of guerrillas also contributed to the view that Confederates did not practice the oxymoron civilized warfare. But most importantly, Curtis would establish the precedent for the strategy that Grant would famously and successfully employ in his capture at Vicksburg. The other reason that the march through Arkansas is worth mentioning is because we should always keep in mind the psychological impact of these events in the minds of Southern citizens. Just like I described with the Tennessee River Raid after the fall of Fort Henry, the citizens of Arkansas were getting a rude awakening about the realities of war. They were not insulated from the conflict, even if they were on the western side of the Mississippi River, where neither side was focusing the bulk of its soldiers. From March through July of 1862, Arkansas was devastated. All in all, the battle of Peeridge is relatively minor engagement, not as large scale of a battle as many of the others that would take place in 1862, and not as strategically important as some of the smaller battles either. But it is large enough and interesting enough that I would have been remiss to skip it. So I decided to devote only two episodes to it. It probably would have been at least three if I went into the level of detail that I have for some other battles. But at the time that it took place, Peeridge would have been huge. The only battles that had been fought that were larger than it were Bull Run and Fort Donaldson. If you don't count the 12,000 Confederate prisoners at Fort Donaldson, Peeridge was also the bloodiest battle in proportion to the size of the armies engaged in it up to that point in the war. Bull Run had roughly 5,000 casualties between both sides, but both armies involved were more than twice those at Peeridge, which still had roughly 3,500 casualties. Obviously, casualty counts are incredibly rough estimates, but the point is that Peeridge, at the time that it took place, would have been a tremendous battle in the minds of the public on both sides of the war. But it would quickly be overshadowed. A month after Peeridge, a battle would be fought over the course of two days that would blow any conflict that the United States had seen out of the water. And by conflict, I don't mean battle, I mean war. The next major battle of the Civil War would be larger in size than Bull Run and would have more casualties than the entire Mexican-American war. I'm referring, of course, to the Battle of Shiloh, also known as the Battle of Pittsburgh Landing, and we will begin that incredible story in the next episode. Historical controversies is a production of the Ludwig von Mises Institute. If you would like to support the show, please subscribe on iTunes, Google Play, or Stitcher and leave a positive review. You can also support the show financially by donating at Mises.org slash support-h-c. If you would like to explore the rest of our content, please visit Mises.org. That's M-I-S-E-S dot O-R-G.