The Civil War in Arkansas - Places

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Prattsville
JENKINS' FERRY STATE PARK
1200 Catherine Park Road., Hot Springs, AR 71913, (501) 844-4176

From The Civil War Trust's Official Guide to the Civil War Discovery Trail;
Courtesy of Macmillan Travel

Description: This site marks the Battle of Jenkins' Ferry, the last major Arkansas battle in Union General Frederick Steele's Camden Expedition during the Red River Campaign. The April 30, 1864 battle was fought in flooded, foggy conditions as General Frederick Steele's Union army desperately and successfully withheld Confederate attacks and crossed the Saline River to escape to Little Rock. The battlefield, now largely in timber production, is still prone to heavy spring flooding, as it was when the two armies fought there.

Admission Fees: Free.

Open to Public: Daily: Dawn to 10 p.m.

Visitor Services: Rest rooms; picnic area.

Regularly Scheduled Events: Small reenactment on Armed Forces Day.

Directions: From I-30: take exit 98, Highway 270 to Prattsville; turn right on Highway 291; then turn right on Highway 46 to the ferryboat site.

What Happened...
The Battle of Jenkins' Ferry;
Steele's Camden Expedition in the Red River Campaign

From Rugged and Sublime: The Civil War in Arkansas;
Courtesy of the Department of Arkansas Heritage

The loss of the forage train and the military embarrassment at Poison Spring hit hard at Union General Frederick Steele and his thirteen thousand men. A supply train from Pine Bluff did arrive on April 20, 1864, but it carried only ten days' worth of provisions. By this time, also, the Louisiana prong of the Federals' Red River advance had been thoroughly blunted by defeats at Mansfield and Pleasant Hill. Steele received official notice that Banks was in retreat; he heard rumors that eight thousand Confederates led by Kirby Smith had arrived in Arkansas to join the attack against him. What was more, tensions had developed between his men and the citizens of Camden who, while adjusting to life with white occupation troops, resented Steele's black soldiers. "The one thing that really stirred my blood to heat was the sight of Negro troops going out to fight our men," reported one resident. Finally, too, the Rebels were closing in; artillery had been moved up for an apparent bombardment of the town.

The crowning blow, and the event that led Steele to abandon Camden, came with another military defeat on April 25 at Marks' Mills. On April 22, Steele had returned to Pine Bluff the convoy of wagons that had delivered his supplies in hopes of acquiring additional provisions. The 240 wagons were accompanied by approximately fourteen hundred men, mostly infantry, from Ohio, Indiana, Missouri, and Kansas regiments led by Lt. Col. Francis M. Drake. In addition, Drake escorted a "large number of citizens, cotton speculators, Arkansas refugees, sutlers, and other army followers, and also some three hundred negroes." Gen. James E Fagan, commanding four thousand Confederate cavalry in the region, learned of the wagon train's departure from Camden on April 24. Fagan moved swiftly to go around the wagon train and, like Marmaduke at Poison Spring, to insinuate his men between the train and its destination. The position he selected was at Marks' Mills (named for Hastings Marks, who owned several gristmills in the neighborhood) near the junction of the Camden - Pine Bluff Road and the Warren Road. As the Federal advance guard moved into view some two miles ahead of the train, Fagan's two divisions, led by Shelby on the right and Cabell on the left, launched an ill-coordinated assault at 8:00 a.m. Cabell, whose men spread out parallel to the Camden - Pine Bluff Road, moved too quickly, and the center of his division lagged behind his two wings. His initial advance achieved success in that he pushed the Federal lines back beyond the wagons, but this exposed the center of his own lines to a deadly fire by the Forty-third Indiana and Thirty-sixth Iowa on his left flank. Consequently, the Federal advance, joined in a timely fashion by reinforcements, swarmed all over Cabell's men in "desperate" fighting that lasted an hour and a half.

Luckily for the Rebels, the Federal reaction, while powerful, was equally ill-coordinated. Union regiments became separated and fought as single units rather than as a whole. Cabell did his best to exploit the resulting Confederate advantage. The popular general pushed and drove his men in spirited fashion, all the while swearing "like a sailor." "He cursed all alike," reported one soldier, "Officers as well as privates." But the belated arrival of Shelby's cavalry made the difference. Shelby's men had ridden in a wide arc of nearly ten miles around the Federal left flank in order to position themselves between the bluecoats and the Saline River. They now drove down the Camden Road to strike the flank and rear of the unsuspecting Yankees. The characteristically ferocious charge of the Missourians sent the outnumbered Federals reeling. Drake lost both his men and his wagons. Drake himself received a nasty thigh wound, and in five hours he surrendered. By that time, Fagan had 293 casualties (41 killed, 108 wounded, 144 missing), but the Federals had nearly 1,500, although only about 100 of those men lost their lives. The Confederates found no supplies in the wagons, but they nonetheless gained materially from the fight. "The rebs robbed nearly every man of us to our Chaplain," complained one Federal prisoner, "& many of our dead they striped of every stitch of clothes even their shirts & socks & left them unburyed & the woods on fire & many of the wounded they jurked off their boots, blouses, pants & hats."

"Not much was ever said about the debacle at Marks' Mill," conceded a Yankee after the war, "[yet] it was one of the most substantial successes gained by the western Confederates during the war. It forced General Steele to abandon Camden and retreat to Little Rock." The Federals stole out of Camden in the early morning hours of April 26, 1864. "Perhaps no order was ever executed more quickly or quietly," reported one relieved Federal soldier. "In a few moments we were on the march in the darkness of the summer night." The men must have been pleased to slip away, much as the Confederates had slipped away from them on Prairie D'Ane, but they were not at all pleased when the march turned into an ordeal akin to their advance from Little Rock over a month earlier. Rain, muddy roads, and harassing attacks by Rebel skirmishers dogged them every step of the way. The severest fighting came at Princeton, the Ouachita River crossing, Saline Bottoms, and Whitmore's Mill; that is, these were the severest fights before April 30, when Steele's army reached Jenkins' Ferry, twenty-two miles north of Princeton.

In point of fact, Steele had covered his retreat well, and it took several days for Confederate General Kirby Smith, who had been caught off guard by the withdrawal, to organize his brigades fully enough to pursue in force. Steele reached the Saline River at Jenkins' Ferry on April 29, a little more than halfway between Camden and Little Rock. After erecting a pontoon bridge, he pressed all day in a driving rainstorm to cross his command over the river, but it was difficult work, made all the more difficult by the knowledge that the Confederates must soon attack him in force. The riverbank and the road leading to it "soon became a sea of mud," reported Steele's chief engineer. "[The] wagons settled to the axles and mules floundered about without a resting place for their feet. . . . The rain came down in torrents, . . . the men became exhausted, and both they and the animals sank down in the mud and mire, wherever they were, to seek a few hours' repose." By early morning of April 30, his wagon train still stretched two miles back down the road from Princeton. Rebel cavalry under Colonel Greene attacked the rear of the column at first light. Gen. James C. Tappan's infantry joined them around 8:00 a.m., and the broader engagement commenced. All of the Confederate troops involved in these initial encounters were Arkansans under the command of General Churchill. "The firing ... was terrific," reported the general, "and the struggle was desperate beyond description." The unexpectedly stiff Union resistance was made possible by a line of abatis, rifle pits, and log breastworks erected near the river during the previous day. Churchill continued to feed additional regiments and brigades into the assault as needed. The situation improved considerably for the Confederates when, at about 10:00 a.m., Gen. Mosby M. Parsons arrived on the scene and directed his two brigades of Missouri infantry against the Federal right flank. By then, Confederate strength had doubled to about four thousand men.

The Yankees fell back steadily toward the river throughout the remainder of the morning, but when reinforcements failed to appear from the north side of the river, the Federal defense stiffened once again. This time the Yanks were aided by the physical limitations of the battlefield, which made flanking movements virtually impossible. From the point of the original attack, the land sloped down to the tree-lined riverbank. The land between the bank and the battlefield normally boasted a cornfield, but the incessant rains had turned it into a waterlogged, mud-churned quagmire. The open terrain extended only about a quarter-mile across, with the Federal right flank covered by a cane swamp and the left flank protected by an abrupt hill covered with timber. The field proved to be so narrow that the Confederates could not deploy their entire force at one time. Thick billows of gun smoke added to the fog which hovered, and continuing rain sharply limited visibility.

One Federal regiment, the Second Kansas Colored, fought with particular verve. The bitter memory of Poison Spring fresh in their minds, these men had no intention of meeting the same fate as their comrades in the First Kansas. "The rebels could not stand the storm of bullets," reported an admiring officer of the regiment, "nor face the music of the minnie balls, which tore through their ranks in deadly volleys. They were driven like waves before the wind, leaving the field in our possession." The Second Kansas even managed to drive off a Confederate battery and capture two of its guns. The regiment's stand proved typical of the general Federal defense, which mowed down line after line of the piecemeal and uncoordinated Confederate attack. Kirby Smith finally broke off the engagement at about 12:30 p.m. and pulled his weary infantry back onto the bluffs from which they had charged so confidently. He had officially lost 86 killed and 356 wounded, compared to Federal losses of 63 killed, 413 wounded, and 45 missing; but these numbers are based on extremely incomplete returns. One historian estimates that the real figures probably come closer to 1,000 killed and wounded for the Confederates and 700 losses for the Federals.

Smith had missed an excellent opportunity to crush Steele, and the Federals were more than happy to take advantage of Confederate errors and continue their retreat. Steele's train had been moving across the river all through the morning fight. By 11:00 a.m., all the wagons were safe on the north bank. By 2:00 p.m., with the Confederate attack at an end, most of the infantry had followed. By 3:00 p.m., Steele had transferred his entire army north of the Saline and had destroyed his pontoon bridge to prevent further Confederate pursuit. The remainder of the route to Little Rock proved to be physically as challenging as the route from Camden. Rain, mud, hunger, and fatigue were the orders of the day. "It was a strange, wild, time," said an Iowa soldier, to cross the river all through the morning's fight. Steele led his troops into his headquarters city on May 3. The general looked spent, "splashed and splattered with mud from head to foot." The men looked even worse. "The most of them looked as if they had been rolled in the mud," swore one member of the city's provost guard, "numbers of them were barefoot, and I also saw several with the legs of their trousers all gone, high up, socking through the mud like big blue cranes."

If the concluding battle of the arduous campaign had been a draw, the campaign as a whole had been a Federal disaster. Steele had not come close to accomplishing his mission of linking forces with General Banks in Louisiana. His only consolation was that even had he managed to punch through, Banks had been equally unsuccessful in moving into northern Louisiana. Indeed, it could be argued that had Steele succeeded in reaching Shreveport, he might have been in an even worse situation - isolated and cut off from both Banks and Little Rock and surrounded by two Confederate armies. As it was, he at least still controlled northern Arkansas, where he had begun. Steele's most serious errors in the campaign were logistical. He did not anticipate the problems he would have in provisioning and supplying his men, and he lost far too many wagons and too much livestock. Kirby Smith, for his part, was content to return to Camden and solidify the Confederate hold on southern Arkansas.

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