The Last Hurrah: Sterling Price's Missouri Expedition of 1864 [Paperback]

In the late summer of 1864, Confederate General Sterling Price led a last ditch attempt to liberate Missouri from Union occupation and brutal guerrilla warfare. Prices invading army was like few others seen during the Civil War. It was an army of cavalry that lacked men, horses, weapons, and discipline. Its success depended entirely upon a native uprising of pro-Confederate Missourians. When that uprising never occurred, Prices rag-tag army marched through the state seeking revenge, supplies and conscripts. It was a march that took too long and ultimately allowed Union forces to converge on Price and badly defeat him in a series of battles that ran from Kansas City to the Arkansas border. Three months and 1,400 miles after it had started, the longest sustained cavalry operation of the war had ended in disaster.The Last Hurrahis the story of Prices invasion from its politically charged planning to its starving retreat.The Last Hurrahis also the story of what happened after the shooting stopped. Even as hundreds of Missourians followed Price out of the state and tried desperately to join his army, elements of the Union army visited retribution upon Confederate sympathizers while still others showed little regard for the lives of the prisoners they had captured. Many more would have to suffer and die long after Sterling Price had fled Missouri.Kyle S. Sinisiis professor of history at The Citadel. He is author ofSacred Debts: State Civil War Claims and American Federalism, 18611880and co-editor ofWarm Ashes: Essays in Southern History at the Dawn of the 21st Century.

The Last Hurrah effectively recounts the campaign from inception to end. Near the end of summer 1864, Sterling Price would finally get his grand opportunity to try to wrest control of his home state from federal forces. . . .Covering such a vast campaign in a single volume of reasonable size is a difficult proposition but Sinisi's efforts toward maximizing availablelÓ+