In 1864, the Confederate military position had deteriorated significantly, prompting a major invasion of northern Missouri led by General Sterling Price and his Missouri State Guard. The invasion's primary objective was to influence the 1864 presidential election by capturing St. Louis and the state capital at Jefferson City. As part of this broader strategy, Price encouraged guerrilla warfare, particularly targeting railroad disruption. "Bloody Bill" Anderson and his guerrilla company participated actively in this campaign of harassment and sabotage.
On September 23, 1864, Anderson engaged Union forces in a skirmish near Rocheport in Boone County, Missouri, approximately seven miles east of the town. During this engagement, Anderson's guerrilla forces successfully killed eleven Union soldiers and three civilian teamsters. The Union army responded to these losses by shooting six of Anderson's men in retaliation.
This skirmish at Rocheport represented one of the escalating violent encounters during Price's invasion of Missouri and demonstrated the brutal nature of guerrilla warfare during the Civil War's final year. The engagement preceded the more infamous Centralia Massacre by four days, which would occur on September 27, 1864, when Anderson's forces would execute 24 captured Union soldiers. The Rocheport skirmish illustrated the intensifying conflict between conventional Union forces and Confederate guerrilla units operating within Missouri during this critical period of the war.
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.
11 Union soldiers and 3 civilian teamsters killed by Confederate forces; 6 Confederate guerrillas killed by Union forces
Content adapted from Wikipedia under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
Aubrey generates in-depth historical research for any location in the US, drawing on NRHP records, battlefield archives, census history and geological data to tell the full story of a place.