Civil War
The Porter brothers enrolled with Colonel Martin E. Green’s Missouri State Guard regiment and participated in the attack on the union Home Guard at Athens; and they later participated in the Confederate attack on Lexington, September 1861. Joseph Porter had no prior military experience, but proved to be a natural leader and was elected a lieutenant colonel (an official commission would come later) in the Missouri State Guard.
Following his participation in the Battle of Pea Ridge in March of 1862, Porter returned home on the orders of General Sterling Price, to raise recruits throughout northeast Missouri. His duties included the establishment of supply drops, weapons, caches and a network of pro-Southern informants.
Throughout Porter’s brief military career, his status as a regular army officer was not fully recognized by his adversaries, particularly Colonel John McNeil. Those serving behind Union lines were not recognized as legal combatants and were threatened with execution if captured.
Though most of his activities were guerrilla operations or harassment, a few battles were fought. On June 17, 1862, near Warren or New Market, in Warren Township, Marion County with 43 mounted men, he captured four men of the Union regiment he found there. The prisoners' weapons and horses taken, then they were paroled on their oath not to take up arms against the Confederacy until exchanged.
Read more about this topic: Joseph C. Porter
Famous quotes containing the words civil war, civil and/or war:
“Since the Civil War its six states have produced fewer political ideas, as political ideas run in the Republic, than any average county in Kansas or Nebraska.”
—H.L. (Henry Lewis)
“The United States is just now the oldest country in the world, there always is an oldest country and she is it, it is she who is the mother of the twentieth century civilization. She began to feel herself as it just after the Civil War. And so it is a country the right age to have been born in and the wrong age to live in.”
—Gertrude Stein (1874–1946)
“[W]e must remember that so long as war exists on earth there will be some danger that even the Nation that most ardently desires peace may be drawn into war.”
—Franklin D. Roosevelt (1882–1945)