Though he belonged to the dominant Anti-Benton faction of the Missouri Democracy and the Stephen A. Douglas wing, he never was admitted to the select inner council, nor secured any of its higher rewards, except one term as Governor.
At the outbreak of the war he was holding the comparatively unimportant place of Bank Commissioner. For all that, he was to become and remain throughout the struggle the central figure of Secession in the trans-Mississippi country.
Officers of high rank and brilliant reputation like Ben McCulloch, Earl Van Dorn, Richard Taylor and E. Kirby Smith were to be put over him, yet his fame and influence outshone them all.
Unquestionably able soldiers such as Marmaduke, Shelby, Bowen, Jeff Thompson, Parsons, M. L. Clark and Little, were to serve him with unfaltering loyalty as subordinates.
The Secessionist leaders of Missouri, headed by Gov. Reynolds, were to denounce him for drunkenness, crass incapacity, gross blundering, and a most shocking lack of discipline and organization.
Very few commanding officers ever had so many defeats or so few successes. He was continually embarking upon enterprises of the greatest promise and almost as continually having them come to naught; generally through defeats inflicted by Union commanders of no special reputation.
Yet from first to last his was a name to conjure with. No other than his in the South had the spell in it for Missourians and the people west of the Mississippi. They flocked to his standard wherever it was raised, and after three years of failures they followed him with as much eager hope in his last disastrous campaign as in the first, and when he died in St. Louis, two years after the war, his death was regretted as a calamity to the State, and he had the largest funeral of any man in the history of Missouri.
Sterling Price was born in 1809 in Prince Edward County, Va., of a family of no special prominence, and in 1831 settled upon a farm in Chariton County, Mo. He went into politics, was elected to the Legislature, and then to Congress for one term, after which he commanded a Missouri regiment in Doniphan's famous march to the Southwest, where he showed great vigor and ability. He was a man of the finest physique and presence, six feet two inches high, with small hands and feet and unusually large body and limbs; a superb horseman; with a broad, bland, kindly face framed in snow-white hair and beard. His name would indicate Welsh origin, but his face, figure, and mental habits seemed rather Teutonic. He had a voice of much sweetness and strength, and a paternal way of addressing his men, who speedily gave him the sobriquet of "Pap Price." He appeared on the field in a straw hat and linen duster in the Summer, and with a blanket thrown over his shoulders and a tall hat in Winter. These became standards which the Missourians followed into the thick of the fight, as the French did the white plume of Henry of Navarre.