The battery made the crossing of the Mississippi River in April 1862 with Major General Earl Van Dorn's Army of the West.

John D. Adams had served as a private in Colonel Yell's 1st Regiment of Arkansas Mounted Gunmen and suffered a wound at the Battle of Buena Vista.

[3] Assigned to support Louis Hébert's brigade of Benjamin McCulloch's division in northwest Arkansas in December, 1861, the unit was stationed at the Leetown portion of the Battle of Pea Ridge on March 7–8, 1862.

[4] The battery participated in the retreat to camp near Van Buren, Arkansas after Pea Ridge, and then moved with the Army of the West to Corinth, Mississippi in April, 1862.

[3] The battery reorganized at Corinth on May 16, 1862, as a result of the Confederate Conscription Act, and assigned to support of John Selden Roane's (later Charles W. Phifer's) brigade of Dabney H. Maury's division, Army of the West, serving in northeast Mississippi.

[6] The battery's position with in the Vicksburg National military Park is marked by an iron tablet located on Confederate Avenue north of the Stockade Redan (Tour Stop #10).

Frank A. Moore, numbering about twenty-five officers and men,[9][10] was on detached service outside the Vicksburg lines and thus escaped capture.

Most of the Arkansas units, including many survivors of McNally's Battery, appear to have bypassed the established parole camps, and possibly with the support, or at least by the compliancy, of their Union captors, simply crossed the river and returned home.

Because so many of the Vicksburg parolees, especially from Arkansas, simply went home, Major General Pemberton requested Confederate President Davis grant the men a thirty- to sixty-day furlough.

[14][15] The furloughs were not strictly adhered to so long as the soldier eventually showed up at a parole camp to be declared exchanged and returned to duty.

Francis M. McNally was redesignated as the 1st Arkansas Field Battery and assigned to the 5th Artillery Battalion, commanded by Maj. William Durbin Blocher.

Bell was sent, in leg irons, to join McNally's Battery on April 19, 1865, at Rocky Mountain, La., 30 mi (48 km) northeast of Shreveport.

[25] The final report lists McNally's Battery with four, six pounder smooth bore cannon being turned in at Shreveport, Louisiana.