But in this invasion the rebel general was in some ways largely successful. He killed and wounded very many of our troops. During this campaign, though it lasted only a few days, there were more than forty skirmishes and about fifteen battles, some of them of considerable dimensions. Many places, either utterly without defence, or inadequately defended, were temporarily occupied, and plundered. Houses of Union men were burned. Railroad tracks were torn up, and the rails twisted and destroyed. Bridges, depots and warehouses were reduced to ashes. Horses, mules and wagons in large numbers were carried away. Vast quantities of commissary stores were ruthlessly gathered for the Confederate army. Price, in his report of this campaign, claims that he destroyed full ten million dollars worth of property. Perhaps that is an exaggeration; but he marched by a circuitous route from one end of our State to the other, devastating a strip of territory about twenty miles wide. He, to be sure, lost heavily. Ten pieces of his artillery, two stand of colors, large numbers of wagons, mules and small arms, and nearly two thousand prisoners were captured by the Federals. Many of his men were slain in battle. He had also been compelled in his flight to burn very many of the wagons that he had confiscated, and to destroy much of his ill-gotten plunder. Moreover, he had utterly failed, politically. He anticipated the uprising of the “Order of American Knights,” fully twenty-five thousand in number, and that most of them would join his army; he also expected to take St. Louis and swing our State into the Southern Confederacy; march into Illinois, where, re-enforced by the one hundred fifty thousand Knights of that State, and greeted by the Knights from Indiana and Ohio, with Vallandigham at their head, he hoped to establish a Northwestern Confederacy and put a stop to the war, which was being waged for the maintenance of the Union. But divine Providence had decreed that this audacious scheme of rebels and copperheads should never be realized. The effort to make the airy fabric of that dream a reality had been attended with devastation, misery and blood, and had ended in inglorious defeat. But one sad outcome of the devastating march of Price’s army was patent to every eye. Before it Union men with their families fled for their lives. Many of them hastily left their homes at night, lighted on their way by their flaming houses. Avoiding their pillaging foes, they made their way to St. Louis. They came in great numbers, and like the refugees that preceded them, were kindly received and abundantly cared for.[112] CHAPTER XXIV NEGRO SCHOOLS