The Last Hurrah: Sterling Price's Missouri Expedition of 1864 (The American Crisis Series: Books on the Civil War Era)

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. Price’s invading army was like few others seen during the Civil War – an army of cavalry that lacked men, horses, weapons, and discipline. Its success depended entirely upon an uprising of pro-Confederate Missourians. When that uprising did not occur, Price’s rag-tag army marched through the state exacting revenge, seeking supplies and gathering conscripts. It was a march that took too long and allowed Union forces to converge and defeat Price in a series of battles that ran from Kansas City to the Arkansas border. Three months and 1,400 miles after it started, the longest sustained cavalry operation of the war ended in disaster. The Last Hurrah is the story of Price’s invasion from its politically-charged planning to its starving retreat. The Last Hurrah is 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 and demonstrated little regard for the lives of the prisoners they had captured. Many more would suffer and die long after Sterling Price had fled Missouri.