The Battle of Clark's Mill was fought on November 7, 1862, near Vera Cruz, Missouri, as part of the American Civil War. Confederate troops led by Colonels Colton Greene and John Q. Burbridge were recruiting in the Gainesville area. Union Captain Hiram E. Barstow commanded a detachment at Clark's Mill near Vera Cruz, and heard rumors of Confederate depredations around Gainesville. In response, Barstow sent patrols towards Gainesville and Rockbridge, personally accompanying the latter. Confederate forces were encountered before reaching Rockbridge, and Barstow fell back to Clark's Mill. The Confederates arrived from multiple directions, and after a skirmish of five hours, surrounded the Union position. With night falling, the Confederates offered Barstow surrender terms that were accepted. The Union soldiers were paroled and their blockhouse destroyed; both Barstow and the Confederates left the area after the skirmish. A Union counterstroke left Ozark the next day.
Early in the American Civil War, the state of Missouri was hotly contested. The state's citizens were divided between Confederate sympathizers and those loyal to United States federal government (known as the Union). A coalition of Confederate and Missouri State Guard (a pro-Confederate state militia) forces defeated Union forces in the Battle of Wilson's Creek in August 1861, and Missouri State Guard troops drove to the Missouri River later that year, but by the end of the year, were restricted to southwestern Missouri. Missouri had two competing governments: a Union government, and the competing Confederate government of Missouri, which was unable to exercise territorial control of the state.
In early March 1862, Confederate and Missouri State Guard forces were defeated in the Battle of Pea Ridge in northern Arkansas; the battle secured Missouri for the Union. The Missouri State Guard was mostly merged into the regular Confederate army after the battle, and both sides transferred troops out of the Ozarks region. Union leadership, including regional commander John M. Schofield, viewed the area as a now-quiet theater of the war. By the middle of the year, increased Confederate activity in the state proved this perception to be wrong. Besides guerrilla warfare, Confederate Major General Thomas C. Hindman had led some of his forces into southwestern Missouri from Arkansas. While Hindman's regular Confederate troops withdrew in early October not long after the First Battle of Newtonia, a guerrilla presence remained in the Ozarks.
Some of the Confederate troops included men recruited by Colonels Colton Greene and John Q. Burbridge. Burbridge's command was what later became the 4th Missouri Cavalry Regiment, while Greene's became the 3rd Missouri Cavalry Regiment. Greene and Burbridge were operating in the vicinity of Gainesville. There was a Union presence in the area, about 30 miles (48 km) north of Gainesville. Under the command of Captain Hiram E. Barstow, this force was based at Clark's Mill near Vera Cruz. The historian Louis Gerteis credits Barstow with about 100 men, roughly half of whom were from the 10th Illinois Cavalry Regiment and the rest of whom were militiamen, while the historian Bruce Nichols places Barstow's strength at about 200 men. Barstow's post-battle report stated that he had about 110 men. The militiamen were from the 2nd Missouri Militia Cavalry. Barstow had previously been informed of Confederate activities in the region, but previous scares had turned out to be false alarms. On the morning of November 7, Barstow sent twenty men to Gainesville in response to rumors of Confederate depredations there, while he personally led a similarly-sized force in the direction of Rockbridge.
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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