home

1 | 2 | 3 | 4

About the Author

Back | Next

Arkansas can claim as rich a Civil War heritage as most of the ten other states that joined the short-lived Southern Confederacy, and undoubtedly experienced its share of the war’s violence.  At least 771 of the 10,000 battles and skirmishes generated by that conflict bloodied Arkansas soil.  Vicious guerrilla warfare also ravaged much of the state, forcing the Union Army to devise successful counterinsurgency techniques that have much to teach today’s American military.

Unfortunately, most Americans do not associate the Civil War with Arkansas.  They recall that struggle as a series of Napoleonic-style battles fought east of the Mississippi River – First and Second Bull Run, Shiloh, Antietam, Fredericksburg, Chancellorsville, Gettysburg, Vicksburg, Chattanooga, the Wilderness, Spotsylvania, Cold Harbor, Petersburg, and Atlanta.  Pea Ridge is probably Arkansas’ only Civil War battle to command widespread recognition, but not many people know what happened there.  Except for Arkansans themselves, names like Prairie Grove, Arkansas Post, Helena, Poison Spring, and Jenkins’ Ferry appear in the lexicons of relatively few Civil War buffs.

The armies that contended for Arkansas were admittedly smaller than those that butted heads in the Eastern and Western Theaters.  Compared to the clashes that occupy a more prominent position in America’s historical memory, Arkansas’ largest Civil War battles involved far fewer men.  Nevertheless, the military campaigns that crisscrossed Arkansas between 1862 and 1864 witnessed moments of drama, desperation, and tragedy as compelling as those that characterize the war’s more celebrated episodes.  Since Confederate Arkansas contained a substantial Unionist minority, its people experienced the war as a fratricidal conflict.  In some communities, the animosities aroused by war lingered for generations afterward.  Civil War Arkansas also produced some of the period’s most colorful characters.

It took more than set-piece battles to decide the outcome of the American Civil War.  Like other great modern conflicts, the Civil War was a contest of wills between two peoples, a struggle for hearts and minds.  It also plunged America into a traumatic revolution that destroyed slavery and the South’s economic and social order.  Arkansas played a pioneering role in these crucial aspects of the struggle.  Union forces captured enough Arkansas territory in 1862 and 1863 for the state to become an early laboratory in the experiment that Abraham Lincoln called Reconstruction.  That controversial process laid the groundwork for today’s America and many of the social problems that continue to defy solution.

When Arkansas first entered the Union in 1836, Americans tended to view it as an isolated frontier area -- the ideal destination for a hunting trip, but not a decent place to raise a family.   One traveler claimed in 1849 that Arkansas was “peopled by a race of semi-barbarians, who would not hesitate to cut a Christian into shoe strings in the twinkling of a bed post, merely for the amusement it might afford them.”  The two decades preceding the Civil War, however, witnessed the state’s steady integration into the booming economic system that made white Southerners proclaim, “Cotton is king.” Between 1840 and 1860, the state’s annual cotton production soared from 6,000,000 pounds to 150,000,000. “Ere long,” Charles Fenton Mercer Noland predicted in 1857, “Arkansas will be the cotton state of the Union.”  The value of taxable property climbed from $42,900,080 in 1852 to $99,872,248 in 1858.  Growing economic opportunity impacted on demographics.  In the last two years of the 1850s, the state’s population increased by 100,000 souls.

By embracing the prosperity bred by expanding cotton production, Arkansas also tightened its hold on the South’s most distinctive and inhumane institution, chattel slavery.  The 1860 census revealed that more than 110,000 slaves lived in Arkansas.  The white population stood at 324,143, and one in five whites either owned slaves or belonged to a slaveowning family.  Slavery had existed in nearly every county in the years immediately following Arkansas’ admission into the Union, but slaveholding patterns changed dramatically after the state became part of the “Cotton Kingdom.”  By 1850, 70 percent of the state’s slaves lived on the rich southern and eastern lowlands comprising the Arkansas delta.  Most of them belonged to the 1,363 white planters who each owned twenty or more slaves.  That rising planter class controlled a disproportionate amount of the state’s wealth and political power, a situation that inspired resentment among the yeoman farmers inhabiting the state’s hillier sections to the north and west.

Although Arkansas had definitely acquired a strong Southern character by 1860, its people did not react with unanimity to the secession crisis that engulfed the republic following Abraham Lincoln’s election as president.  Secessionist sentiment burned brightest in the delta, with its strong ties to the “Cotton Kingdom.”  Firebrand rhetoric inspired radical action.  In November 1860, President James Buchanan’s administration took the precaution of sending Captain James Totten and sixty-five men from the 2nd U.S. Artillery to occupy the undefended Federal arsenal in Little Rock, Arkansas’ capital.  Early in 1861, baseless rumors began spreading that more regulars were en route to reinforce Totten.  By February 5, 1861, nearly 1,000 hot-blooded militiamen from Helena and other delta towns had converged on Little Rock, and it looked like the arsenal was about to become the scene of a pitched battle.  Governor Henry M. Rector assumed the role of mediator the following day and urged Captain Totten to avoid useless bloodshed by evacuating the arsenal.  Lacking any authority from Washington to provoke a fight, Totten agreed and left the arsenal in Rector’s safekeeping.  The fact that the governor had turned into an outspoken secessionist cast his involvement in this affair in a suspicious light.

Whatever Rector’s true motivations at the time, most Arkansans were not yet ready to forsake their allegiance to the United States.  On February 18, 1861, the same day that Jefferson Davis was inaugurated as the first president of the newly formed Confederate States of America, Arkansas voters elected a Unionist majority for a convention to consider the question of secession.  That assemblage began its deliberations at Little Rock on March 4, 1861, and spent the next two weeks squelching every motion to yank the state out the Union.  The only concession the secessionists could extract was an agreement to submit the issue to a popular referendum in August.

Arkansas Unionism had prevailed for the moment, but it was by no means unconditional.  Like the inhabitants of the other loyal slave states, moderate Arkansans opposed any use of force by the Federal government against the seven Southern states that had already adopted ordinances of secession.  White Arkansans believed that the nation should be reunited through compromise, not coercion.

These convictions were put to the test after Confederate artillerymen opened fire on the small Federal garrison at Fort Sumter in Charleston Harbor, South Carolina, on April 12, 1861.  President Abraham Lincoln, Buchanan’s successor in Washington, responded to the attack on April 15, the day after Sumter’s surrender.  Lincoln called on all the loyal states to supply 75,000 militia for ninety days of national service to put down the Southern rebellion.  Each state’s troop quota was based on its population.  Little Arkansas was supposed to field a single regiment of 780 men.   For Christopher C. Danley, the editor of the Arkansas Gazette and an outspoken opponent of secession, Lincoln’s decision to wage war on the Lower South changed everything.  “Lincoln’s administration has committed the overt act,” he declared.  “Now that the ‘overt act’ has been committed we should I think draw the sword, and not sheathe it until we can have a guaranty of all our rights, or such standards as will be honorable in the South.”

1 | 2 | 3 | 4

Back | Next

 

     
 

 
     
 

 
     

Website design © 2000-2007 HarpWeek LLC
All Content © 1998-2007 HarpWeek, LLC
Please submit questions to support@harpweek.com