King's battery started in September of 1861 as an artillery company in the Eighth Division of the Missouri State Guard, commanded by Captain Samuel Churchill Clark, 19-year-old son of Brigadier General Meriwether Lewis Clark (who himself was the son of General William Clark, of Lewis & Clark Expedition fame). Churchy Clark was a West Point cadet who resigned from the Academy to join the State Guard. The battery was equiped with 2 six-pound smoothbore howitzers for the Siege of Lexington, and then was given two additional guns captured at Lexington. On 9 October 1861, the battery was reassigned as the only artillery unit for the Fourth Division of the Guard. Most of the men in the battery came from western Missouri, generally from Boone, Saline, Lafayette, and Chariton Counties, though it is possible that men from Captain Richard Overall's St. Charles Light Artillery Battery ultimately joined the battery--Overall's men belonged to the Second Division and, though organized as an artillery unit, were never equiped with any cannon and served as infantry for the duration of their six-month enlistments.

On 27 December 1861, Clark reorganized his men as the 2nd Light Artillery Battery of the Missouri Confederate Volunteers. The battery was assigned to the First Missouri (Infantry) Brigade and served at the Battle of Elkhorn Tavern (Pea Ridge) and was thence transferred east of the Mississippi River. Clark himself was beheaded by a cannon shot during the last few moments of Elkhorn Tavern.

Captain Houston King assumed command of the battery following Clark's death and led it through the various campaigns east of the river, including the Siege of Corinth, the Battles of Iuka and Corinth, and the Vicksburg Campaign. Though the battery served in the Army of the West during the first three fights, it was converted into a horse cavalry unit during the late fall of 1862 and subsequently served with Major General Earl Van Dorn's Cavalry Corps of the Army of North Mississippi, and thence under Brigadier General William Hicks Jackson in his cavalry division of the Army of Mississippi. As a result, they managed to escape the capture of Pemberton's army at Vicksburg, though they did participate in the campaign.

Because the original battery was never recruited to full strength, men from Companies B and C of the 6th Regiment of Missouri Confederate Volunteer Infantry (including two of my great-great-uncles) were seconded to the battery to fill its ranks and they served with the battery to the end of their service though they remained on the books of the infantry.

The 2nd Missouri Light Artillery Battery accompanied Jackson when his division and the three infantry divisions of the Army of Mississippi joined the Army of Tennessee for the Atlanta Campaign. Jackson's division remained detached from the Major General Joseph Wheeler's Cavalry Corps of the Army of Tennessee and, when Wheeler was left in Georgia following the Atlanta Campaign, Jackson accompanied the Army of Tennessee into Tennessee, where he was assigned to duty with Lieutenant General Nathan Bedford Forrest's Cavalry Corps for the battles of Franklin and Nashville, and remained with Forrest until the end of the war. At the war's end, Captain James L. Farris was commanding the battery.

Muster rolls of the battery can be found in the collections of the State Historical Society of Missouri in Columbia, MO. Several articles about the battery appeared in the "Daily Missouri Republican" newspaper published in St. Louis during the mid-1880s.