Slavery and Secession in Arkansas: A Documentary History

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INTRODUCTION

What caused the Civil War? has been one of the most debated historical questions in the last fifty years, especially among the general public. As historian Charles Dew noted, even the Immigration and Naturalization Service had a hard time coming up with a clear answer, recognizing both slavery and state’s rights as correct responses for those taking the US citizenship exam.¹ The debate, however, is not merely about history. Instead, it is very much wrapped up in questions of identity and resonates for many today.

In Arkansas, as in the rest of the South, debates over the cause and conduct of the Civil War still rage, most notably in various local chapters of the Sons of Confederate Veterans (SCV), though the uncertainty of the war’s cause continues to exist even in Arkansas public schools. Like the INS citizenship exam, Arkansas’s 2007 Social Studies Curriculum Framework for kindergarten through eighth grade noted that, in grade four, students should identify events that led to Arkansas’s involvement in the Civil War, events that included excise taxes, state’s rights, and slavery.² At the same time, the Civil War sesquicentennial commemoration, beginning in 2011, allowed SCV chapters to reflect on the war’s causes. The Seven Generals Chapter of Helena did just that on its website, The Arkansas Toothpick, when in January 2011 they promised not only to keep readers updated on the goings-on in Arkansas 150 years ago but also to quell any myths as to the original causes of the War for Southern Independence.³ A little over two weeks later, the chapter elaborated on the meaning of the earlier post, claiming, Sadly, a lot of the people who are commemorating have that attitude . . . that the Civil War was a war fought over slavery. Instead, as a majority of us know, the history books and lessons used to teach about the civil war in schools across the nation do not tell of the factual events of the war. They make it out to be about slavery only, even though Lincoln argued incessantly that it was not in the war’s early years. More importantly, though, these history books do not tell of the illegal tax and tariffs the Northern states were trying to impose on the southern states, which is what really led up to the rebellion and succession [secession] of the Confederate States.⁴

Like most things, the origins of the Civil War and the conduct of its leaders are quite a bit more complicated than many participants in these debates would admit. Southerners supported secession for a variety of reasons, which varied on individual experiences and relationships with the federal government and the institution of slavery. Most importantly, from Lincoln’s election in November 1860 to Arkansas’s secession in May 1861, opinions were not stagnant; they constantly changed based on events happening across the nation. Yet, in the words of those involved in the secession debates, slavery was spoken of often. Participants in these debates across the South in 1860 and 1861 openly discussed their ideas on slavery and fears of slave rebellion, of black equality, of amalgamation, and of the dangers inherent in abolition. It is their words, collected and reproduced in this book, that allow students of history to compare and contrast the different arguments for and against secession in Arkansas. Most speak to concerns over the future of slavery explicitly, while others raise concerns over issues that were stand-ins for larger concerns over the institution’s future. Still others provide a larger context for the world that Arkansans lived in during this pivotal period, discussing events that influenced their decisions apart from slavery. Through an examination of these historical actors’ real words, we can better understand why the Civil War began, the role that slavery played in the founding of the Confederate States of America, and why so many white Arkansans felt that secession was the only viable option left to them in May 1861.⁵

Slavery was the most important economic system and most valuable form of property-holding in the United States in 1860 and had been integral to the development of the nation from its very inception—historian Adam Rothman appropriately claims that the United States was founded as a slave country.⁶ The institution was, of course, not merely a southern one. Northerners held slaves, participated in both the Atlantic and interstate slave trade, and grew rich alongside southerners from the agricultural products slaves produced. At its very core, slavery pervaded all walks of American life for slaveholders and non-slaveholders alike.⁷

In Arkansas, like in the rest of the South, slavery was important economically and fueled the nineteenth-century growth of this frontier state. Even though Quapaw, Osage, Frenchmen, Spaniards, Englishmen, and Americans had lived in Arkansas for many years, Arkansas at mid-century remained more underdeveloped than most of the South. The state had only achieved statehood in 1836, and its small population and desperate financial condition, due to a series of banking scandals, left it without many internal improvements. However, it did have fertile ground that sped migration to the state, especially in the 1840s and 1850s. Slavery was key to this growth as the number of slaves increased by 335 percent from 1830 to 1840 and by another 136 percent from 1840 to 1850. Cotton production similarly increased, from 6 million pounds in 1840 to 26 million pounds in 1850, as did the value of Arkansas farms, from $15 million in 1850 to $91 million in 1860. The 1850s heralded an economic boom that helped transform Arkansas into not only a strong agricultural power but a commercial center. The Arkansas River, flowing to the Mississippi near Memphis from the border with the Indian Territory near Fort Smith, linked the growing state to St. Louis, New Orleans, Cincinnati, and dozens of other cities along the Mississippi, Missouri, and Ohio Rivers.⁸

The meteoric economic growth seen in the 1850s, however, exposed regional tensions within the state. Plantations filled with slaves predominated in eastern and southern Arkansas while mountainous northern and western Arkansas had few slaves and far more small yeoman farmers. By 1860, almost 82 percent of the state’s slaves lived in southern and eastern Arkansas, where slaves in some counties, like Chicot, made up 81.4 percent of the population. In comparison, slaves in Newton County in northern Arkansas made up only 0.7 percent of the population.⁹ In the 1850s, however, average white Arkansans were less interested in the debates over slavery that had predominated national politics than in pushing for internal improvements, education, and economic development. For example, in 1860, the state had less than fifty miles of railroad and had only just been linked into the national telegraph system that year. What little Arkansas had accomplished with respect to education and infrastructure had come from federal lands and funds. The need for internal improvements led Arkansans toward the Union in greater numbers than in other parts of the South where fire-eaters, or radical pro-slavery advocates, had taken hold. Many Arkansans knew the state was not only too weak to stand against the federal government but needed it for railroads, telegraphs, and the recently federally financed swampland reclamation program that had reclaimed nearly one-tenth of the state’s land. Equally important, those in western Arkansas were keenly aware of their dependence on the federal dollars spent to support army units stationed along the border with the newly created Indian Territory.¹⁰

Much of the resistance to fire-eating came from the domination of the state’s political system by the Family or Dynasty. Members of the Conway, Sevier, and Johnson families and their allies had largely controlled state politics since the late territorial period and had served as a level-headed political machine concerned more about preserving their power than becoming demagogues. By the 1850s, some of the Dynasty’s newest members, including Robert Ward Johnson, elected to US House of Representatives in 1846, spoke vigorously against the perceived aggressions of the North, but the state’s noisiest fire-eater actually made his career in opposition to the Family. Thomas C. Hindman, originally allied with the Family and awarded a seat in Congress for his support, broke with them in 1858 when he founded his own newspaper, the Old Line Democrat, to support his candidacy for the state’s open US Senate seat. At war with the establishment, Hindman mobilized dissident Democrats, former Whigs, and the legions of Arkansans who had just recently arrived and lacked Dynastic loyalty in support of both himself and anti-Family candidate Henry Rector in the 1860 governor’s election. However, amidst this violent factionalism, there was little disagreement over slavery. Both the Family and Hindman supported slavery’s westward expansion and the quick return of fugitive slaves. Hindman, however, tended to be more of a political firebrand than the establishment, as can be seen through his speeches in chapter 1. He not only supported southern property rights and the return of fugitive slaves from the North but also advocated the reopening of the Atlantic slave trade in order for more slaves to flow into Arkansas and thereby depress their prices and allow greater economic development. Even though Arkansans clearly supported slavery’s continuation in the nation, only Hindman exerted much energy on national battles over it.¹¹

The four-way presidential contest in 1860 was likewise tame in comparison to those in other states. The Republican Party, which opposed slavery’s expansion in the western territories, had no infrastructure in Arkansas, and few Arkansans were likely inclined to cast their votes for Lincoln. Since both the Hindman and Family sects of the Democratic Party distrusted Illinois senator Stephen Douglas, the nominee of the Northern Democratic Party, his idea of popular sovereignty—that residents in western territories should decide for themselves on the slavery question—failed to attract many votes. Instead, they threw their support to John C. Breckenridge, the Southern Democratic Party candidate who staunchly supported slavery’s expansion and protection. Former Whigs and Know-Nothings, largely an anti-Family party since Arkansas had few immigrants or Catholics to attack, propped up John Bell and the Constitutional Union Party, which opposed secession and hoped to form a unity government to mediate the differences between the North and South. They helped give Bell a strong showing, but the majority of Arkansas’s voters supported Breckenridge.¹²

Lincoln’s election in November 1860 spurred on much debate over Arkansas’s place in the nation and the continued importance of protecting slavery. Across the South, critics of Lincoln claimed that he and other Black Republicans, the moniker southerners gave Republicans whom they felt supported black equality and civil rights, would encourage abolitionism, halt slavery’s expansion into western territories, and further slow the return of fugitive slaves from the North. Fear was a powerful motivator among southerners scared of Republican domination; many in the South latched onto three key threats that they believed Republicans represented: the danger of racial equality, the possibility of race war, and the intermarriage or amalgamation of the races.¹³ Many of these fears came from a misunderstanding of Republican sensibilities. Few were abolitionists and fewer still actually believed in black equality. Instead, most supported a free soil ideology, one that hoped to keep slave labor out of western territories, and some, including Lincoln, would rather have seen blacks relocated to Liberia by the American Colonization Society than compete with these newly freed workers on an even footing. Despite these realities, Arkansans and other southerners feared what they believed to be abolitionist and anti-democratic policies of the wholly northern Republican Party and said so repeatedly after Lincoln’s election and during the debate over secession.¹⁴ One of their main complaints, that the northern states had violated their constitutional responsibility to return fugitive slaves, had some truth to it. Numerous speeches and resolutions written by Arkansans in 1860 and 1861 and reproduced in this volume cite northern failures in returning fugitive slaves as one of the main reasons why the North could not be trusted to participate any longer in the federal compact. The protection of slave property lost through the lack of northern cooperation in fugitive recoveries was so great that many southerners believed it a primary reason to leave the Union. Indeed, the issue had been critical in the creation of the 1850 Fugitive Slave Law, part of the Compromise of 1850 that quelled sectional dissention after California’s admission as a free state. Many northern states had, in the 1840s and 1850s, placed restrictions, called personal liberty laws, that impeded fugitive returns. They claimed that southerners had violated northern state’s rights to protect those within their borders from unwarranted seizure. These laws infuriated slaveholders as they purported to defend northern state’s rights against the rights of southerners to reclaim their constitutionally protected property. Slaveholders therefore argued forcefully for federal guarantees of protection from northern personal liberty laws. As historian Stanley Harrold has illustrated, this tension-ridden relationship over fugitive slaves precipitated a border war in the 1850s that created violent clashes, such as Bleeding Kansas, all along the border between North and South.¹⁵

In November 1860, Arkansans were faced with a difficult decision. Those who had supported John Bell and the Constitutional Union Party, especially planters in eastern Arkansas, gradually allied with the two wings of the Democratic Party that had backed Breckinridge. Led by US congressman Thomas Hindman and his press, many in eastern and southern Arkansas pushed for secession to protect property rights in slaves. Chapter 2 reproduces numerous petitions, speeches, and debates from within the legislature, chronicling this debate during the early winter of 1860–61. These debates illustrate a growing gulf between western, northwestern, and northern Arkansas and the rest of the state, as upcountry yeoman, non-slaveholders, and those economically dependent on federal troops in western Arkansas opposed secession. Many of these Breckinridge voters, feeling abandoned by their former political allies, believed Lincoln’s mere election did not necessitate such a bold move. Some even felt that the pro-secession Delta planters were plotting to further their own political power at their expense. Therefore, in general, support for secession was directly related to the percentage of a county’s enslaved population. By early December 1860, few likely believed that Arkansas’s secession was inevitable, as the state lay geographically divided over secessionism and slavery. Yet anti-secession’s strength in Arkansas relative to other southern states does not mean that slavery played any smaller role in the debates over secession. On the contrary, discussions over the future of slavery in Arkansas and the nation at large remained vital to how Arkansans understood the benefits of leaving the Union.¹⁶

On January 15, 1861, after South Carolina, Mississippi, Florida, and Alabama had already seceded, the state senate agreed to call a state convention in March 1861 to discuss secession. Voters would, on February 18, vote on whether a state convention should be held and simultaneously vote for delegates to represent their county at the convention if one were approved. Four weeks of campaigning before the election, chronicled in chapter 3, set off debates across Arkansas both in favor of remaining in the Union and in favor of joining the Deep South in rebellion. The secessionist cause was helped when Albert Pike, a longtime opponent of the Family, wrote a stirring pamphlet distributed across the state that called for disunion. He believed that Arkansas needed to join the South in defending its property rights against northern incursion. Pike had, before the election of 1860, opposed Douglas’s popular sovereignty concept and instead supported the unrestricted access of slavery to the territories in the same vein as the Supreme Court’s Dred Scott decision, alleging that the Union could be dissolved if an individual state felt that its rights had not been protected by the federal government.¹⁷ Likewise, most in northwestern and western Arkansas rallied around the idea that they were cooperationists, believing that although slavery needed to be defended, it was too early to consider leaving the Union. Instead, Arkansas could not secede on her own but needed to cooperate with the slave states of the upper South, especially its most important neighbor, Tennessee, in deciding how to handle the crisis. The vast majority of Arkansas Unionists would have classified themselves as cooperationists and hoped that a compromise over the issue of slavery could be reached in the Union.¹⁸

Before the election, however, the state was rocked by fears that the federal government had attempted to reinforce the federal arsenal in Little Rock. In November, federal troops under Captain James Totten had been transferred to the arsenal under routine orders. Pro-secession forces in the Delta, especially around Helena, spread rumors that federal forces would soon arrive to support Totten’s troops. Hundreds of volunteers arrived from the Delta and pledged themselves to defend Arkansas against this federal incursion and seize the arsenal to prevent its reinforcement. Little Rock natives, unhappy with the increasing numbers of Delta firebrands arriving daily in their city, were angered when Governor Rector negotiated with Totten to surrender the arsenal on February 8. The arsenal crisis, though it ended peacefully, revealed the determination of pro-secession forces and further accentuated the divisions between Unionists and secessionists.¹⁹

The election on February 18 affirmed the need for a convention, with a vote of 27,412 to 15,826. Unlike other states, which returned larger numbers of pro-secession delegates to their conventions, Arkansas’s Unionist/cooperationist contingent was stronger and returned five more seats than secessionists did. The majority of these Unionists/cooperationists came from northern, western, and northwestern Arkansas, while secessionist delegates came from eastern and southern Arkansas. When the convention assembled on March 4, 1861, the Unionist/cooperationist majority helped elect David Walker of Fayetteville as convention president. Chapter 4 details the discussions within the first meeting of the convention, which lasted from March 4 to March 21, and includes numerous calls for secession based on a defense of slavery and the rights of southern slaveholders. Likewise, resolutions that supported the Union as well as remembrances of the convention from delegates in the early twentieth century are also reproduced. During these roughly two weeks, the seventy-seven delegates heatedly debated secession, with Unionists/cooperationists seeking a mediated solution with support from other slaves states that had not yet left the Union, while the secessionists believed further negotiation would be unproductive. The majority of these men were either farmers or lawyers (73 percent) and almost two-thirds were slaveholders. In total, the delegates held 881 slaves, with the average holding among slaveholders at 18.7; and 17 of the 77 were planters, holding more than 20 slaves, while 30 held no slaves. Of the slaveholders, most supported secession, while Unionists/cooperationists held few or no slaves. The main difference between the delegates, however, was in their relative wealth. Those who supported secession had a median real property holding of $13,170 while those who opposed secession only had a $2,500 median.²⁰

While the convention met in Little Rock, the state’s newspapers continued the debate, noting national developments as well as raising fears of black equality and amalgamation just as their representatives did in the convention. As in other slaveholding states that had not yet left the Union, commissioners sent from the seceded states attempted to convince convention delegates to support the newly formed Confederate States of America. Arkansas was geographically important to a future Confederacy because of its border with the Mississippi River and its proximity to Missouri, whose secession was even more uncertain. Delegates from Alabama and Texas arrived in Little Rock to support secession, including Texan Williamson Oldham, a former Arkansas politician who now represented the Confederate government. Although Oldham likely did little to change delegate’s minds, his words tell much about how politicians in the Deep South understood the importance of slavery in their decision to secede from the Union and why Arkansas should join them. A motion to secede from the Union failed and delegates instead voted to send representatives to a border state convention and work diplomatically with the federal government and other states to head off the looming crisis. The Unionist/cooperationist majority, however, made clear that it did not oppose war nor did it disagree with the grievances that pro-secessionists raised over federal treatment of slavery. Instead, the Unionists/cooperationists believed the nation needed more time to find a solution. The convention adjourned, able to be called back into session, if developments warranted, while citizens prepared for a vote on secession in August.²¹

In the aftermath of the convention, Arkansans continued to follow the national crisis and communicate with each other about the secession movement, especially as the state prepared for an August vote. However, the April 12, 1861, bombardment of Fort Sumter in Charleston harbor turned most Arkansans to support secession. As shown in chapter 5, tensions over secession exploded, especially when Lincoln called for 75,000 volunteers to suppress the southern rebellion. Indeed, Governor Rector rejected Lincoln’s effort to enlist 780 Arkansans into the Federal army, claiming, The people of this commonwealth are freemen, not slaves, and will defend to the last extremity their honor, lives, and property against Northern mendacity and usurpation. Leaders from other states, including Governor Joseph Brown of Georgia, tried to convince Arkansans to leave the Union in Fort Sumter’s aftermath. In Brown’s letter, he carefully teased out for Rector the unity that Georgia and Arkansas had, especially over their slaveholding, and how the federal government had repeatedly injured their constitutional rights to hold slaves. The immediate threat to slavery that Lincoln’s call for troops presented, combined with their opposition to fighting fellow southerners, encouraged Arkansas’s cooperationists to abandon Unionism. Even though many of the Unionists/cooperationists had always believed that Lincoln’s government had threatened the institution of slavery, only Fort Sumter had convinced them that cooperation was no longer a viable option. Therefore, in chapter 5, fewer documents specifically mentioned slavery but instead declared that the time for compromise and cooperation was over. On May 6, 1861, the convention reassembled in Little Rock and debated secession yet again. Only five delegates now opposed it, with four of them changing their vote in an attempt to create unity as the fate of Arkansas was sealed. Arkansas joined the Confederacy in fighting the Union.²²

In the end, the documents in this collection illustrate how Arkansans debated their place in the nation and, specifically, how slavery fit into their decision to leave the Union and fight alongside much of the South for four bloody years of civil war. Despite not having enough secessionist support to leave the Union before Fort Sumter, the debates over the question heavily centered on slavery and its defense against a perceived aggressor. In this sense, the political leaders in the state held similar opinions to those in almost every other southern state. The only difference in Arkansas is that cooperationists held their ground against secessionism far longer, only faltering when the federal government asked them to not only endanger their property rights in slaves but also fight against other southerners. However, just because slavery encouraged the state’s political leaders to leave the Union does not mean that the average Arkansan who fought the war believed the same thing. Men enlisted for dozens of reasons: for money, because they were forced to, either by law or by fear of retribution from their community, for adventure, or to defend their homes. In any case, the political leadership that started the war was likely far more invested in defending slavery than the average Arkansan fighting in the war—a truism that likely applies for most soldiers from any southern state.²³

EDITOR’S NOTE

Most of the sources included in this volume have been edited for both readability and space. All attempts were made to maintain formatting, grammar, and syntax from the original sources, though, in some cases, some spelling and grammar were changed to improve