Price’s Lost Campaign: The 1864 Invasion of Missouri

In the fall of 1864, during the last brutal months of the Civil War, the Confederates made one final, desperate attempt to rampage through the Shenandoah Valley, Tennessee, and Missouri. Price’s Raid, the last of these attempts, has too long remained unexamined in a book-length modern study, but now Civil War scholar Mark A. Lause investigates the problems during the campaign and the myths propagated about it. He offers new insight into the two distinct phases of the campaign and shows that both sides used self-serving fictions, including the term raid, to provide a rationale for their politically motivated brutality.