The Battle of Prairie D'Ane (April 9 – 13, 1864), also known as the Skirmish at Prairie D'Ane, Battle of Gum Springs, or Battle of Moscow, was fought in present-day Nevada County, Arkansas, as part of the Camden Expedition, during the American Civil War. The Camden Expedition was launched by Union forces as part of the Red River Campaign of 1864. U.S. planners envisioned two federal armies converging simultaneously, one force under the command of Maj. Gen. Nathaniel Banks pressing northward up the Red River commencing at Alexandria, Louisiana and the other federal army under the command of Maj. Gen. Frederick Steele driving southwestward from Little Rock, Arkansas. The objective was to press the rebel army of Gen. E. Kirby Smith back upon the rebel stronghold at Shreveport and defeat him. If successful, a somewhat vague second phase envisioned the two federal armies combining into one large force and continuing their offensive with a westward push into Texas.
Prairie D'Âne—French for "Donkey Meadow"—was a prominent topographical feature in southwest Arkansas consisting of an open prairie 20 miles square, surrounded on all sides primarily by dense pine forest. In 1864 it was a well-known landmark some one hundred miles southwest of Little Rock. The prairie was a crossroads; to the west lay Washington, the Confederate capital of Arkansas since their abandonment of Little Rock in September 1863. To the east of the prairie lay the heavily fortified city of Camden, where many Confederate troops were headquartered. To the south of Prairie D'Ane lay the strategic Red River, with Shreveport, Louisiana beyond.
The US Army Captured Little Rock on 10 September 1863. As Union forces marched into the city, the Confederates hastily gathered up their official state documents and moved their seat of government to Washington. In their retreat to the southwest, the Confederates constructed defensive works at several points along the old military road running from Benton to Arkadelphia. As they built extensive earthen and log breastworks at the northern edge of Prairie D'Ane, it was . A Confederate defeat on the prairie would lay open the route to Washington for the federal army. But Prairie D'Ane posed a difficult defensive problem for the rebels. On the one hand, its wide open plain offered good fields of fire for defending artillery batteries; on the other hand, the same open country offered an attacking force plenty of space in which to maneuver and outflank the defenders in their fixed entrenchments. Most of the heavy rebel defensive barriers erected along the route from Little Rock to Prairie D'Ane had been built by slave labor. Roving groups of rebel guerrilla cavalry meanwhile were dispatched to harass federal forces along their line of march from Little Rock.
The American Civil War (1861–1865) was the deadliest conflict in American history, killing an estimated 620,000 to 750,000 soldiers and an unknown number of civilians. The Confederate States of America, formed by eleven seceding Southern states, faced the Union in four years of warfare across 23 states and territories. Major engagements included First and Second Bull Run, Antietam (the bloodiest single day in American history, September 17, 1862), Chancellorsville, Gettysburg (July 1–3, 1863), Vicksburg (surrendered July 4, 1863), and Sherman's March through Georgia and the Carolinas (1864–1865). President Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation on January 1, 1863, transforming the war's stated purpose to include the abolition of slavery and enabling the enlistment of approximately 180,000 Black men in the United States Colored Troops. Confederate General Robert E. Lee surrendered to Ulysses S. Grant at Appomattox Court House on April 9, 1865. The war resolved the question of secession and ended American slavery, though Reconstruction would face sustained resistance in its attempt to secure civil rights for formerly enslaved people.
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