Francis J. Herron looked like he should’ve been
selling dry goods instead of commanding men into artillery fire. One soldier
remembered him as “slight of build, quick in motion, with eyes that never
seemed to stop measuring distance.”
General Francis J. Herron
He was young. Thin. Sharp-eyed. The man people underestimated fast and then regretted it later.
He wasn’t born in Iowa, but Iowa made him. By the
time the war arrived, he was living in Dubuque, working as a banker. When the
first guns fired in 1861, Iowa answered with farms, factories, and young men
who barely knew how to hold a rifle. Herron joined the fight. A Dubuque paper
said he left “without hesitation, with the confidence of one who had already
chosen his duty.”
He helped raise the 1st Iowa Infantry and marched
off with them like someone who’d been waiting for the war to start. At Wilson’s
Creek in Missouri, his regiment was thrown straight into one of the war’s early
disasters. The Union lost the field. Men scattered. Smoke swallowed the hills.
A private later wrote, “The air was thick with lead and fear. The trees were
cut as with knives.”
Herron’s conduct caught attention. Promotions came fast. By 1862, he was a brigadier general. By the end of that year, he would become the youngest major general in the Union Army. An officer in his brigade wrote, “He looked scarcely older than the lieutenants, yet carried the weight of command as if born to it.”
Late in 1862, the western war fractured again in Arkansas. Confederate General Thomas Hindman moved north, threatening Union supply lines and trying to reopen a southern road into Missouri. Union generals scattered across the region began maneuvering blindly through chilly rain and broken roads.
Herron marched fast. From western Arkansas, he pushed his division hard. Chilly nights. Short rations on roads that vanished into mud. Men fell out of line from exhaustion. Herron kept them moving anyway. A soldier wrote home, “We marched till our legs would hardly bear us, but the general would not let the column rest.”
He believed speed could substitute for numbers. On December 7, 1862, he ran into Hindman’s army near a place called Prairie Grove.
Herron was badly outnumbered. Most generals would’ve halted—entrenched, and waited for backup. Herron did the opposite, and attacked immediately.
Artillery went first. Union guns thundered across the fields, trying to hold off twice their weight in Confederate infantry. Herron threw his men forward. They climbed broken fences, crossed open ground under fire, and slammed into the rebel line. A soldier from the 20th Iowa wrote, “The roar of the cannon was one continuous crash, and the bullets flew like hail.”
They were pushed back. They went forward again. And again.
Prairie Grove was a grinding match of stubborn advances, collapsing lines, smoke so thick it swallowed commands whole. Herron’s division bled heavily. Men dropped fast. Officers went down around him. Horses collapsed in the traces. Batteries were chewed apart and hastily reformed. Herron later wrote that, “The enemy contested every inch of the ground with great obstinacy.”
By nightfall, another Union force under James Blunt arrived from the opposite direction. The Confederates, stunned by the two-sided pressure and drained by the unexpected resistance of Herron’s smaller division, slipped away in the dark. A Union officer recorded, “We lay upon our arms that night among the dead and dying, not knowing if morning would find us victorious or destroyed.”
Prairie Grove was not a clean victory. It was survival at the edge of collapse. And it worked.
Northwestern Arkansas stayed Union again. Missouri stayed locked down. Hindman’s army was broken as an offensive force. Herron’s gamble paid off in blood and ground. A newspaper declared the next week, “General Herron’s stubborn stand saved the day when retreat would have meant ruin.”
A promotion to major general followed soon after. Too fast, some said. Too young. Too raw. The war didn’t care.
In 1863, Herron went south again with the slow grind of Grant’s Mississippi campaign. He fought in the tangled corridors of Vicksburg, where siege lines stretched tight across the hills. Confederate guns locked inside the city. Union batteries choked the sky above it. A soldier wrote, “The sun beat on the trenches until the clay burned our hands and the air itself seemed poisoned with powder.”
Herron commanded a division along the siege lines and later helped chase Confederate forces that fled east after the city fell. Vicksburg cracked the spine of the Mississippi war. Herron was there when the river finally opened. One man in his command wrote simply, “When the city fell, the river belonged to us at last.”
After that, his war changed shape. He was sent west. Far west. To Texas. Along the Mexican border. Away from the big armies and famous names. The missions became political as much as military. Keep Confederate influence down. Watch the French in Mexico. Hold the frontier together with thin supply lines and thinner patience. An officer wrote from the border, “We fight heat, dust, and distance more than men.”
The danger didn’t leave. Enemy bullets were replaced by heat, disease, and isolation.
In 1864, during a campaign along the Red River and later at Jenkins’ Ferry, Union forces were hammered during a disastrous retreat through flooded forests. Confederate attacks tore into exhausted columns dragging wounded men through knee-deep water and mud that swallowed boots whole. One Iowa soldier wrote, “The road was a river, and the forest was alive with fire.”
Herron fought there again. Soaked uniforms. Broken wagons. Drowning guns. Infantry firing half-blind through rain and swamp smoke. It was one of the war’s ugliest retreats, and Herron helped keep parts of it from collapsing entirely. A survivor remembered, “If the line broke that day, none of us would have seen home again.”
By the time the war ground toward its end in 1865, Herron was worn thin. Already used up.
After Appomattox, he drifted back into civilian life, then into federal service. He served abroad as a diplomat. Quiet posts. Long distances from the noise that had defined his twenties.
Herron died in 1902, a footnote in the long history of the war. Iowa remembered him more than the nation he fought for.
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