Marks' Mills

Background

After the Federal loss at Poison Spring on April 18, 1864, Major-General Frederick Steele held onto Camden even as Confederate Major-General Sterling Price kept up a loose, improvised siege from the surrounding countryside. Food and supplies within the Federal lines were running low, and when a shipment arrived from Pine Bluff, Steele became convinced that further resupply could be achieved by using the road connecting Camden and Pine Bluff. He directed Drake to lead an expedition for this purpose, giving him more than 1,400 infantry

Aftermath

Casualty counts from the Confederate side stood at 41 dead, 108 injured, and 144 unaccounted for. Pinning down Federal losses proves harder since the whole column fell into enemy hands; estimates run somewhere between 1,133 and 1,600. Beyond that, Confederate forces took 150 African Americans captive and stood accused of killing at least 100 more during or after the fighting. With more men and wagons gone, and Camden's already thin Federal supply stores further drained, Steele's situation grew precarious. That pressure, combined with Kirby Smith's arriving command, pushed Steele into abandoning Camden on April 26, 1864, and heading north toward Little Rock.

A soldier from the 36th Iowa later described the treatment of prisoners in blunt terms: the Confederates plundered nearly everyone, even the chaplain, stripping away clothing down to shirts, boots, and socks, leaving corpses unburied while fires burned through the woods. Wounded men had their clothes torn off even as they pleaded for mercy, with no regard shown for rank or age. He recalled Captain Charles Moss of the 43rd Indiana Infantry, an older man, being forced to march bareheaded under the blazing sun, his bald head and white beard exposed. Federal sources note that roughly 190 infantry and cavalry troops managed to escape and travel overland, reaching either the Federal Depot at Pine Bluff or Little Rock itself. Colonel William McLean, who led the brigade containing the three Federal regiments, wrote that captured men were sometimes stripped bare and marched into captivity with nothing on at all. According to McLean, the Confederates also left Federal dead lying on the battlefield for three days before burial was even attempted.

The bulk of the captured troops from the 36th Iowa, the 43rd Indiana, the 77th Ohio, and Peetz's Battery of the 1st Missouri Light Artillery ended up marching to Tyler, Texas, where they were held at the Camp Ford stockade. Disease and starvation claimed many lives there over the following year, though a number of prisoners managed to break out successfully. Most survivors were finally set free in 1865.

According to the 43rd Indiana's regimental history, a Federal paymaster carrying more than $175,000 in Greenbacks was among the captured, and this money ended up in Confederate hands. Southern authorities allegedly tried, without success, to use these funds to buy freedom for Confederate prisoners held in Chicago.

Cabell himself praised his opponents' fighting spirit, writing that his men "never fought better" and that they had bested some of the enemy's finest infantry, the so-called "old Veterans." He noted that the casualties suffered within his own brigade testified to how fiercely the Federals resisted and how unwillingly they surrendered the wagon train. Even so, many historians regard the disaster at Marks' Mills as the single worst loss the Federal military endured anywhere west of the Mississippi.

Strangely enough, this crushing defeat is credited with sparing what remained of Steele's army from total destruction. Fagan and Shelby had received orders to cut Steele's force off from its base in Little Rock; had they succeeded, their superior numbers, bolstered by more troops moving up under Kirby Smith, would almost certainly have trapped Steele and forced either his surrender or his army's destruction. Instead, by ignoring Smith's orders and choosing to fight Drake's brigade at Marks' Mills, Shelby and Fagan delayed the Confederate advance just long enough for Steele to pull out of Camden and bring the shattered remains of his command to safety. Colonel Drake himself went on to a distinguished political career back in Iowa, eventually becoming governor, yet the man who wrote the 36th Iowa's regimental history claimed that veterans of the 43rd Indiana never forgave him, blaming his "dithering indecisiveness" at Marks' Mills for leading them directly into an ambush.