The Massacre at Ross's Landing, 1864: Restoring Names to Vicksburg's Unknown Dead

Adapted from an article by Beth A. Kruse, Ph.D., a 2023–2025 Mellon Humanities Postdoctoral Fellow with the National Park Service at Vicksburg National Military Park.

"Ye have taken away our dead and where have ye laid them?"

In 1869, U.S. Superintendent of Cemeteries Edmund B. Whitman put that question to a reunion of Union veterans. More than 137,000 unidentified Union soldiers had been reburied in national cemeteries as "Unknown," and Whitman believed careful burial records kept open the "possibility of identifying many of the unknown dead in the future."

He was right. Nineteenth-century newspaper reports led to the rediscovery of an almost forgotten 1864 massacre of U.S. Colored Troops (USCT) from Vicksburg, and the Quartermaster's burial ledger, together with the soldiers' military records, allowed Vicksburg National Military Park to restore the names of the victims killed at Ross's Landing.

New Orleans Times-Democrat, March 13, 1864, page 3.

The massacre reported

In March 1864, the New Orleans Times-Democrat published a detailed account of a massacre involving the 1st Mississippi Infantry (African Descent) and a band of Missouri guerrillas, and two weeks later William Lloyd Garrison's Boston Liberator printed a brief report, carrying the news to the East Coast. Despite errors, they gave enough detail to trace the event in Union records: soldiers wounded or killed at Ross's Landing, Chicot County, Arkansas.

Foraging in Arkansas

In February 1864, the regiment went upriver from Vicksburg to Chicot County on a foraging detail, probably aboard the Navy vessel Petrel, though newspapers named the steamer Pringle. Confederate attacks on river traffic continued after Vicksburg's surrender on July 4, 1863, and Maj. Gen. William Sherman adopted "hard war" policies of seizing crops, livestock and supplies: "so long as they have cotton, corn, horses, or anything," he wrote, "we will appropriate it or destroy it." Confederate policy, too, called for destroying resources the Union might use, whatever the cost to Southern civilians.

It was under these orders that Company G of the 1st Mississippi Infantry (A.D.) was foraging at "Tecumseh" Plantation, just north of Grand Lake, Arkansas, on Valentine's Day 1864. The Times-Democrat claimed they seized 4,000 bushels of corn. They returned to Vicksburg only after burying thirteen of their murdered comrades.

The Liberator, March 1864. Boston Public Library.

The attack

The newspapers wrongly blamed Quantrill's Raiders. In 1911, Private "Weed" Marshall of Company E, 9th Missouri Cavalry, sent his own account to the Confederate Veteran, hoping to add it to the list of small fights that were "the most destructive and fatal of the war." A local resident, he wrote, told the scouts of Capt. W. N. "Tuck" Thorp that Union troops were nearby; Marshall left out that they were Black soldiers, almost certainly the reason for what followed. Thorp put the attack to a vote, "go" or "no," and his men readily chose to go. Marshall proudly described them as "half-bushwhackers," a term for the lowest kind of guerrilla. The absence of official records for the unit, the vote in place of orders, and the refusal to give quarter all mark it as an irregular guerrilla band.

Twenty-one men rode to the plantation and found the soldiers near the cotton gin house. One soldier fired a warning shot, and when the guerrillas rounded the building the company stood in line and fired a volley. Armed only with single-shot Austrian Lorenz rifles, they had no time to reload before the mounted guerrillas were on them, and they fled under fire from Colt revolvers. "Two minutes of clearing the gate," Marshall wrote, "not a Yankee was alive." Not content with shooting them in the back, the guerrillas dismounted, took the soldiers' own rifles and "pinned each one to the ground" with the bayonets.

The purpose was twofold: to leave no survivors and to warn formerly enslaved men in the area of what awaited them if they joined the Union army. Such atrocities did not stop nearly 100,000 African American men from the seceded states from joining the U.S. Army to fight for their freedom. And some of Thorp's victims were still alive. Six were treated in the regimental hospital at Vicksburg, and three survived, among them Private Howard Dixon, who had a defensive wound to his right wrist and a "saber cut across [his] head."

Marshall's account takes pride in the killing, closing with the names and hometowns of all twenty-one men so they would get credit. Such pride, found in other Confederate memoirs too, sits uneasily with the "Lost Cause" image of Confederate soldiers as heroic and saintly.

Why such massacres happened

Ross's Landing was not an isolated event. A white fear of slave insurrection dating to colonial times, sharpened by the successful Haitian revolt of 1804 and the failed Nat Turner Rebellion of 1831, seemed to come true when African American regiments formed in 1863, and it shaped how Confederate soldiers treated Black Union troops.

Woodcut from a white account of Nat Turner's rebellion. Library of Congress.

Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation of January 1, 1863, allowed Black men to serve as armed soldiers. Confederate President Jefferson Davis had already proclaimed on Christmas Eve 1862 that captured enslaved men would be turned over to the states "to be dealt with according to the laws of said States," and that white officers of Black units should be "reserved for execution." Lincoln answered with General Order No. 252, promising to execute a Confederate prisoner for every Union soldier executed. Fear of retaliation and the need for labor led the Confederacy to imprison white officers and force captured Black soldiers to labor instead, but official policy did not stop soldiers and guerrillas in the field.

At Ross's Landing, Thorp's men executed the white soldiers leading the foraging party. Thaddeus Cock's military record states he was "Shot through the mouth after surrendering. Left for dead on the field." The massacre never appeared in the Army's Official Records; involving few soldiers, it was soon overshadowed by larger massacres of USCT that followed in 1864, at Ocean Pond on February 20, Fort Pillow on April 12 and Poison Spring on April 18.

Graves without names

An 1866 act of Congress led to the creation of Vicksburg National Cemetery. By 1868 it held 15,580 reburials, including 5,553 USCT, 98% of them recorded as unknown, compared with 60% of white soldiers identified. The gap reflects the lack of identification for Civil War soldiers, but also the inequality of the age.

The Vicksburg burial ledger recording the Chicot County victims. National Archives and Records Administration.

The two white men killed were returned to their families and buried with proper headstones. Cock's reads: "He died for his country, a martyr to the cause of freedom, a victim to the barbarism of Slavery... cruelly murdered after having surrendered as a prisoner of war." James Spencer's tombstone in Indiana notes his Masonic membership and that he was "killed at Tecumseh Landing, Miss." The eighteen Black soldiers killed or wounded received no headstones. Their names and fates were recorded in the reinterment ledger and their service files, but their graves went unidentified until 2024.

In March 1868, the thirteen men first buried in Chicot County were moved to the segregated Section M of Vicksburg National Cemetery, where they lie in two short rows in the shadow of the cemetery's "Gun Monument." Which man lies in which grave is unknown, but they are no longer "Unknowns."

Others wounded that day:

• Pvt. Henry Berry died of his wounds on March 23, 1864, at the regimental hospital at Goodrich Landing, Louisiana.
• Noah Powell died of his wounds on February 18, 1864, at the regimental hospital in Vicksburg.
• Pvt. James H. Boldin died on January 4, 1866, at Alexandria, Louisiana, of "Epilepsy" in "Company quarters."
• Pvt. Howard Dixon survived the war and died May 1, 1918, at Delhi, Louisiana.
• Pvt. Ruffian Epps survived the war and died April 24, 1918, at Gunnison, Mississippi.

All three who died of their wounds are buried at Vicksburg National Cemetery, in graves not yet located; the burial places of Dixon and Epps are unknown. Cock died at the Vicksburg regimental hospital on February 28, 1864, and was buried in Canton, Ohio; Spencer, killed at Ross's Landing, was buried in Decatur, Indiana.

Sources

• Beth A. Kruse, National Park Service, Vicksburg National Military Park, "Massacre at Ross's Landing." https://www.nps.gov/articles/000/massacre-at-ross-landing.htm. The fellowship is funded by the National Park Foundation with support from the Mellon Foundation and administered with American Conservation Experience.
• Sources cited include Weed Marshall, "Fight to Finish Near Lake Village, Ark.," Confederate Veteran 19 (1911); Official Records of the Union and Confederate Navies, Series I, Vol. XXV (1918); Quartermaster General's Office, Roll of Honor (1869, 1871); Richard Meyers, The Vicksburg National Cemetery: Administrative History (1968); and the soldiers' compiled military service records.
• The article gives the Section M grave numbers both as 14900–14912 and as 14900–14911, calls Thaddeus Cock both a lieutenant colonel and a first lieutenant, and describes Cock and James Spencer as officers while giving Spencer's rank as first sergeant; this page avoids those details. The article also contains a duplicated draft of its account of the attack, which is not followed where it differs. Photographs by the author and a service-record image from Fold3 are not reproduced.