Events

Union cavalry and infantry under Major General Samuel Curtis converged on Confederate General Sterling Price's exhausted army at Westport, Missouri, on October 23, 1864, and delivered the decisive blow in what became the largest Civil War engagement west of the Mississippi River. The battle ended Price's ambitious raid into Missouri, a desperate Confederate gamble to seize a Union state and influence the upcoming presidential election. Price had crossed into Missouri in September with roughly 12,000 cavalrymen, hoping to capture St. Louis, rally Confederate sympathizers, and tip the November vote against Abraham Lincoln. The plan was wildly optimistic. Union forces in Missouri were more numerous and better supplied than Price's intelligence had suggested. After being turned away from St. Louis and suffering a costly repulse at Pilot Knob, Price turned westward across the state, his column swelling with recruits but also with thousands of civilian refugees and plundered wagons that slowed his march to a crawl. By the time Price reached the Kansas City area, Union forces had closed in from three directions. Curtis attacked from the west with the Army of the Border while Major General Alfred Pleasonton's cavalry pressed from the east. The fighting at Westport ranged across open prairies and along Brush Creek, with roughly 30,000 troops engaged. Price's line buckled under the converging pressure, and by midafternoon his army was in full retreat southward. The defeat turned into a rout over the following week. Union cavalry pursued Price across Kansas and into Indian Territory, destroying his supply train and scattering his force at the battles of Mine Creek and Newtonia. Price eventually reached Texas with fewer than 6,000 men, barely half his original strength. Missouri remained firmly in Union hands, Lincoln won reelection twelve days later, and the Confederacy never again mounted a major military operation west of the Mississippi. Westport settled the war in the Trans-Mississippi theater.

Between 25,000 and 33,000 women marched up Fifth Avenue in New York City on October 23, 1915, in the largest suffrage parade the country had yet seen. The procession stretched for miles, its participants carrying banners, flags, and placards demanding the right to vote as tens of thousands of spectators lined the sidewalks from Washington Square to 59th Street. The march came at a critical moment for the suffrage movement. A statewide referendum on women's voting rights in New York was scheduled for November 2, just ten days away, and organizers knew that a massive public demonstration could sway undecided voters. The Woman Suffrage Party of New York, led by Carrie Chapman Catt, had spent months coordinating the logistics, recruiting marchers from every borough and every economic class, and ensuring that the spectacle would be impossible for newspapers to ignore. The parade included contingents of nurses, teachers, factory workers, society women, and college students marching in organized blocks. Male supporters formed their own section. Several prominent figures participated, including reformer Lillian Wald and labor organizer Rose Schneiderman, who had galvanized public opinion after the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire four years earlier. Despite the extraordinary turnout, the November referendum failed. New York men voted against women's suffrage by a margin of roughly 58 to 42 percent. But the movement's leaders treated the defeat as a rallying point rather than a surrender. They immediately began organizing for a second referendum, building an even broader coalition that included Tammany Hall politicians and influential labor unions. Two years later, on November 6, 1917, New York became the first major Eastern state to grant women full voting rights. The victory proved decisive for the national movement: New York's large congressional delegation now had political incentive to support a federal amendment. The Nineteenth Amendment, ratified in August 1920, owed much of its momentum to the women who walked up Fifth Avenue on that October afternoon.