Westport was a Civil War engagement fought in Missouri, 1864. It was a Union victory.
Maj. Gen. Sterling Price's Missouri Expedition had changed course from St. Louis and Jefferson City to Kansas City and Fort Leavenworth. As his army neared Kansas City, Maj. Gen. Samuel R. Curtis's Army of the Border blocked its way west, while Maj. Gen. Alfred Pleasonton's provisional cavalry division was closing on their rear. Price decided that he needed to deal with the two Union forces and decided to attack them one at a time. With Pleasonton still behind him, Price chose to strike Curtis at Westport first. Curtis had established strong defensive lines and during a four-hour battle, the Confederates hurled themselves at the Union forces but to no avail. The Rebels could not break the Union lines and retreated south. Westport was the decisive battle of Price's Missouri Expedition, and from this point on, the Rebels were in retreat.
On October 23, 1864, opposing armies clashed at Westport, within the boundaries of present day Kansas City, Missouri, in one of the Civil War's pivotal western engagements. Major General Samuel R. Curtis led Union troops to a lopsided victory over Major General Sterling Price's smaller Confederate force, compelling Price to withdraw and shifting the momentum of his Missouri Expedition irreversibly. With this defeat, the Confederacy's final large scale push west of the Mississippi River came to a close, and Union soldiers would hold firm command over nearly all of Missouri for the duration of the conflict. The engagement drew more than 30,000 combatants, ranking it among the largest fought west of the Mississippi.
Long before soldiers wearing blue and gray met on its ground in 1864, Westport, now absorbed into Kansas City, Missouri, already held a notable place in the historical record. John Calvin McCoy, called the "Father of Kansas City," had platted the settlement, and travelers bound for the Oregon, California and Santa Fe Trails made their way through it heading west. Over time, the town took over from nearby Independence as the trails' "jumping-off point," a shift that helped fuel its expansion.
By the time war came, the neighboring settlement of Kansas City, then called the Town of Kansas, functioned as the base for the Federal "District of the Border" and held a substantial garrison of Union soldiers. Although Westport's prominence had started to dim as its northern neighbor rose, the town still carried some regional weight. Yet the choice to wage battle there stemmed not from any tactical value the place itself possessed, but from a sequence of unrelated events.
Sterling Price, holding the rank of major general, moved his Army of Missouri across the state border in September 1864. His aim was ambitious: seize Missouri for the Confederacy and, in doing so, sway Northern voters away from Lincoln during that year's presidential contest. In response, Major General William S. Rosecrans, who oversaw the Federal Department of the Missouri, mobilized forces to counter the incursion. Cavalry under Major General Alfred Pleasonton took up the chase, joined by a sizable infantry contingent from the Army of the Tennessee led by General Andrew J. Smith.
Price's plans suffered a setback at the Battle of Ft. Davidson, where defeat forced him to reconsider his options. St. Louis, he concluded, was defended too strongly for an army numbering only 12,000, so he redirected his march westward, setting his sights on Jefferson City instead. There, after a brief exchange of gunfire, he judged the defenses too formidable once more and pressed on toward Fort Leavenworth. All the while, his ranks steadily thinned. Combat losses combined with sickness and men slipping away in desertion to reduce his army to just 8,500 by the time he continued his advance.
Spies, Wild Bill Hickok among them, brought word of Confederate troop movements to Major General Samuel R. Curtis, who commanded the Federal Department of Kansas. This intelligence made clear that Price's army might push into his territory, so Curtis pulled his available forces together under a new banner, the Army of the Border. To head its 1st Division, he recalled James G. Blunt from campaigns against Indian tribes; that division consisted largely of volunteer regiments with a smattering of Kansas militia mixed in. At first Curtis could scrape together only around 4,000 volunteers, a shortfall that led him to request that Kansas governor Thomas Carney summon the state militia to strengthen his ranks.
Carney, however, grew wary, believing Curtis simply wanted to pull militiamen away from their home districts just as elections were approaching. He saw little cause for alarm in Price's presence, since the Confederate force remained distant within Missouri and did not appear to endanger Kansas itself. That calculus shifted once Price redirected his march westward toward Jefferson City. Faced with this change, Carney dropped his objections, and Major General George Dietzler assumed command of a Kansas Militia division that then joined forces with Curtis's Army of the Border.
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