In 1864, the Confederate States faced a rapidly deteriorating military position and launched an invasion of northern Missouri led by General Sterling Price and his Missouri State Guard. The strategic objective was to influence the 1864 presidential election by capturing St. Louis and the state capitol at Jefferson City. As part of his overall strategy, Price encouraged guerrilla warfare, particularly targeting railroad disruption. William T. Anderson, known as "Bloody Bill" Anderson, and his guerrilla company participated actively in this campaign of irregular warfare.
On September 27, 1864, Anderson's Confederate bushwhackers perpetrated the summary execution of 24 captured Union army soldiers in Centralia, Missouri. Future outlaw Jesse James was among the killers involved in this massacre. The execution was followed by the Battle of Centralia, in which a large detachment of Union mounted infantry attempted to intercept Anderson and his forces. The ensuing combat proved devastating for the Union forces.
The immediate consequence of these events was the near-total destruction of the Union detachment that engaged Anderson's bushwhackers in the Battle of Centralia, with nearly all of them killed in combat. These engagements demonstrated both the brutality of guerrilla warfare in Missouri during 1864 and the military effectiveness of Anderson's irregular forces against conventional Union cavalry units.
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.
24 Union soldiers executed at Centralia; nearly all Union mounted infantry killed in the Battle of Centralia
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