Freedom by the Sword - US Army Center Of Military History

Arkansas, Indian Territory, and Kansas, 1863–1865 243
for Camden,” arriving there about 8:00, an hour after dark. Many of the men took
three days, on foot and through swamps, to make the same journey. 37
The initial casualty count for the entire force was 92 killed, 97 wounded, and
106 missing. Colonel Williams reported that many of his regiment’s wounded were
left on the field and that eyewitnesses assured him “that they were murdered on the
spot. . . . Many of those missing are supposed to be killed.” A revised tally showed
204 “killed and missing” and 97 wounded. The 1st Kansas Colored’s share was
117 (all noted as “killed”) and 65 wounded. Fatalities that amounted to nearly 65
percent of casualties strongly suggested a massacre. Both Major Ward and Adjutant
Gibbons reported having seen Confederate soldiers shooting the wounded. 38
Confederate officers’ reports do not mention a massacre; they could not be
expected to. From their point of view, the men of the 1st Kansas Colored were
escaped slaves, armed and deserving immediate punishment. Moreover, they and
their white comrades had been foraging and looting their way through Arkansas.
Private letters and journals written by Confederates a few days after the event
blamed Maxey’s Choctaw cavalry for much of the killing. “The havoc among the
negroes had been tremendous,” wrote a Texan diarist. “Over a small portion of
the field we saw at least 40 dead bodies lying in all conceivable attitudes, some
scalped & nearly all stripped by the bloodthirsty Choctaws.” The fact that the 1st
Kansas Colored was in the thick of the fighting that day—the regiment’s sixty-five
wounded men who eventually reached Camden amounted to more than two-thirds
of the entire expedition’s surviving wounded—meant that most of the men who
were too badly wounded to be moved from the field were black and likely to die at
the hands of vengeful Confederates. 39
Survivors brought the news of the fight at Poison Spring to the main body
of federal troops at Camden. A week later, Confederates captured another supply
train and with it some nine hundred men of the all-white infantry escort. Of the
“large number of citizens [civilians], cotton speculators, [white] refugees, . . . and
also some 300 negroes” who accompanied the train to what they hoped would be
security and freedom, many “were inhumanly butchered by the enemy,” the escort’s
commander reported. General Steele, faced with the prospect of starvation
and the arrival of Confederate reinforcements after the collapse of Banks’ Red
River Campaign, decided to turn his force north on 26 April and return to Little
Rock. This time, to avoid some bad roads he had encountered along the Ouachita
River, he headed somewhat to the east, toward Jenkins’ Ferry on the Big Saline.
The men were on quarter rations, one-and-a-half pounds of hardtack per man per
day; one veteran of the 2d Kansas Colored recalled the men stealing corn from
the expedition’s mules. About noon on 29 April, a few hours before the expedition
reached the ferry, rain began to fall. The pontoon train hurried to the front of
the column and managed to span the river in a few hours. Most of the wagons and
mounted men crossed before dawn the next day. “I never saw it rain harder than
37 Ibid., pp. 755–56 (quotation); NA M594, roll 213, 79th USCI.
38 OR, ser. 1, vol. 34, pt. 1, p. 754.
39 Ibid., p. 746; Gregory J. W. Urwin, “‘We Cannot Treat Negroes . . . As Prisoners of War’:
Racial Atrocities and Reprisals in Civil War Arkansas,” Civil War History 42 (1996): 196–201
(quotation, p. 197).