Scout from Helena to Sutton's Plantation (December 6–7, 1864)

A two-day scouting foray from Helena (Phillips County) into what is now Lee County netted a pair of Confederate prisoners and the arrest of two major landowners. 

Captain Albert Collins of Company F, Fifteenth Illinois Cavalry, under orders from Brigadier General Napoleon Bonaparte Buford, led twenty-six of his men out of Helena at 3:00 p.m. on December 6, 1864. The Federals proceeded to the St. Francis Road past “judge McKeals” (likely Josiah McQuill) to LaGrange (Lee County), where they took merchant Robert Simpson prisoner. 

After riding about three miles from LaGrange on the Paradise Road, “6 or 7 shots were fired at my command from the woods,” Collins reported, adding: “Think It was a Rebel Picket.” The officer determined that it was “unsafe to go further in the night,” so the Union soldiers rode to the Adams Plantation (likely that of Brigadier General Charles Adams) and camped for the night. 

At daylight on December 7, they rode to the plantation of Samuel Sutton, who in 1860 reported owning $28,000 in real estate and $10,000 in personal property, including two enslaved people. They took Sutton prisoner and then rode two miles south of LaGrange to the plantation of Thomas Gist, who in 1860 owned $50,000 in real estate and $125,000 in personal property, which included 108 enslaved men, women, and children. There they captured Lieutenant Lafayette Kinkle of Colonel Archibald Dobbins’s First Arkansas Cavalry (CS) and “a man named Bush belonging to the Confederate Army.” Kinkle, a forty-year-old soldier native to the area, stood about five feet nine and had gray hair, blue eyes, and a light complexion; he had been on recruiting duty when he was captured. They also arrested Gist.  

After seizing two bales of cotton there, they rode to LaGrange, where they loaded a bale of cotton belonging to Simpson onto their wagon, with “a colored man driving.” The Illinois trooper returned to Helena at 7:00 p.m. on December 7, where they turned their prisoners over to the provost marshal. Kinkle would remain in northern prisons until taking the oath of amnesty on May 16, 1865. 

The December 6–7, 1864, scout from Helena to Sutton’s Plantation was typical of the efforts of Union troops in Helena to capture Confederate soldiers in the area, as well as civilians suspected of disloyalty.  

For additional information:
Albert Collins to Louis Souther, December 8, 1864, National Archives and Records Administration, Records of Named Departments, 393P2E299, Box 1. 

Mark K. Christ
Little Rock, Arkansas 

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