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.”
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