By April 1864, the Confederacy was losing the war, but in southwestern Arkansas, the situation was peculiarly reversed. Steele's Union force held Camden, yet they were the ones slowly starving. Guerrillas had poisoned wells with dead animals. Banks's Red River campaign had collapsed after defeats at Mansfield and Pleasant Hill, leaving Steele isolated and without support. Confederate cavalry under Sterling Price circled Camden like wolves, picking off patrols and foraging parties. Williams set out on April 17 with 438 soldiers from the 1st Kansas Colored, 195 cavalrymen from three Kansas regiments, and two James rifles from the 2nd Indiana Light Artillery. When his column reached White Oak Creek, they found the Confederates had already destroyed half the corn. What remained was scattered across small farms, forcing the soldiers to fan out across the countryside. By the time they loaded 141 wagons and turned back toward Camden on the morning of April 18, Confederate scouts had been watching them for a full day.

Confederate Brigadier General John S. Marmaduke had set his trap carefully. His men formed a roadblock along the route back to Camden, while Major General Samuel B. Maxey's division -- Texans under Colonel Charles DeMorse and Choctaw soldiers under Colonel Tandy Walker -- prepared to strike from the south. Williams's column, reinforced that morning by 386 men from the 18th Iowa Infantry, numbered roughly 1,169 soldiers, but many were straggling from exhaustion. The Confederates fielded 3,621 men and twelve cannons. Williams spotted the roadblock and formed his wagons into a compact line north of the road, deploying the 1st Kansas Colored to face both east and south. For half an hour, Confederate artillery pounded the Union position. Then Maxey's men charged. The first assault was repulsed at close range. The second was beaten back as well. But Williams's men were running out of ammunition, and the sounds of battle, audible in Camden, brought no reinforcements. Steele, for reasons never explained, did not send help.

The third Confederate assault broke the Union line. Crawford's brigade outflanked the 1st Kansas Colored while Cabell's men drove into their center. As Black soldiers fell back through the wagon train, Confederate troops began murdering wounded men on the ground. The sight of their comrades being killed as they lay helpless caused portions of the regiment to flee. Williams abandoned the wagons and tried to save his remaining troops. The 18th Iowa conducted a fighting withdrawal, making stands at successive ridgelines, but the 1st Kansas Colored had been shattered. The regiment lost 182 men -- 117 killed and 65 wounded -- a ratio of dead to wounded almost unheard of in Civil War combat. The disparity was no accident. Historian Urwin described what followed as an 'orgy of barbarism.' Wounded Black soldiers were shot on the ground. Men trying to surrender were killed. Cabell's troops drove wagons over the heads of fallen African American soldiers as a game. Walker's Choctaw troops scalped several bodies. Union burial parties who visited days later found three officers scalped, stripped naked, and laid face-down inside an arranged circle of dead Black soldiers.

The Confederates captured 170 wagons, 1,200 mules, and four cannons. Steele's position was now untenable. A week later, another foraging column was destroyed at the Battle of Marks' Mills, where more than 100 African American noncombatants were reportedly murdered. Steele abandoned Camden on April 26 and retreated toward Little Rock. On April 30, at Jenkins' Ferry on the Saline River, Confederate forces attacked his rearguard. This time, men of the 2nd Kansas Colored Infantry Regiment were waiting. Their officers had sworn after Poison Spring that 'the regiment would take no prisoners as long as the Rebels continued to murder our men.' They kept that oath, executing captured Confederates and cutting the throats of wounded men on the field. The cycle of atrocity spiraled. Historian Thomas DeBlack called the entire Camden Expedition 'the greatest Federal military disaster of the Civil War in Arkansas.'

Today, Poison Springs Battleground State Park preserves 84 acres of the site where 301 Union soldiers fell. The park sits along the road from Camden, part of the Camden Expedition Sites National Historic Landmark, listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1994. For decades, the Arkansas Department of Parks and Tourism, as historian Urwin noted in 2000, 'tended to ignore the dark deeds that stained that particular patch of hallowed ground.' The Confederate newspaper Washington Telegraph had set the template back in 1864, burying news of the massacre under a heading called 'Choctaw Humor.' Its editor, John R. Eakin, later wrote that Confederate soldiers were 'not bound to receive' the surrender of Black troops. The battlefield is quiet now -- split-rail fences, evergreen trees, a park bench where visitors can sit and contemplate what happened when desperate men fought over corn, and one side decided the other was not human enough to deserve mercy.