orator, James S. Green.

Though he belonged to the dominant Anti-Benton faction of the Missouri
Democracy and the Stephen A. Douglas wing, he never was admitted to the
select inner council, nor secured any of its higher rewards, except one
term as Governor.

At the outbreak of the war he was holding the comparatively unimportant
place of Bank Commissioner. For all that, he was to become and
remain throughout the struggle the central figure of Secession in the
trans-Mississippi country.

92

Officers of high rank and brilliant reputation like Ben McCulloch, Earl
Van Dorn, Richard Taylor and E. Kirby Smith were to be put over him, yet
his fame and influence outshone them all.

Unquestionably able soldiers such as Marmaduke, Shelby, Bowen, Jeff
Thompson, Parsons, M. L. Clark and Little, were to serve him with
unfaltering loyalty as subordinates.

The Secessionist leaders of Missouri, headed by Gov. Reynolds, were to
denounce him for drunkenness, crass incapacity, gross blundering, and a
most shocking lack of discipline and organization.

Very few commanding officers ever had so many defeats or so few
successes. He was continually embarking upon enterprises of the greatest
promise and almost as continually having them come to naught; generally
through defeats inflicted by Union commanders of no special reputation.

Yet from first to last his was a name to conjure with. No other than his
in the South had the spell in it for Missourians and the people west of
the Mississippi. They flocked to his standard wherever it was raised,
and after three years of failures they followed him with as much eager
hope in his last disastrous campaign as in the first, and when he died
in St. Louis, two years after the war, his death was regretted as a
calamity to the State, and he had the largest funeral of any man in the
history of Missouri.

93

Sterling Price was born in 1809 in Prince Edward County, Va., of a
family of no special prominence, and in 1831 settled upon a farm
in Chariton County, Mo. He went into politics, was elected to the
Legislature, and then to Congress for one term, after which he commanded
a Missouri regiment in Doniphan's famous march to the Southwest, where
he showed great vigor and ability. He was a man of the finest physique
and presence, six feet two inches high, with small hands and feet and
unusually large body and limbs; a superb horseman; with a broad, bland,
kindly face framed in snow-white h