Arkansas

E

Early Statehood

From 1836 until the American Civil War started in 1861, settlement continued and slaveholding spread as plantation owners developed the rich cotton lands of southern and eastern Arkansas and the river bottoms of the northwest. The number of slaves rose from 4,576 in 1830 to 47,100 by 1850 and to 111,115, more than 25 percent of the state’s population, by 1860. Arkansas became the sixth-ranking cotton state, with an output in 1860 of 367,393 bales or 83,323 metric tons. Although independent small farmers greatly outnumbered plantation owners, the plantation owners controlled the state politically. Slaves and cotton were concentrated in the southeast, but every county had slaves and grew some cotton, and was therefore affected by the mounting attacks on slavery by representatives of Northern states in the Congress of the United States.

The early years of statehood were marked by hard times. Two banks were chartered in 1836, but they failed in the national depression of 1837, leaving the new state with a $3,000,000 debt and no banks. Money was scarce in the 1840s, and merchants became both moneylenders and suppliers of provisions. The cotton boom of the 1850s, however, brought prosperity. Steamboats took the state’s cotton and other farm products to New Orleans and brought back manufactured goods. Mills and factories in Arkansas produced lumber, flour, meal, cotton and woolen thread, and leather. From the state’s mineral-rich land came zinc, lead, iron, coal, manganese, and whetstones. Commerce flourished with ports on the Ohio and Mississippi rivers. Schools and academies were opened, newspapers and magazines multiplied, and the professions expanded. Beginning in 1849 Fort Smith, on the western border, became a center for outfitting gold prospectors on their way to California. By 1861 Arkansas had both telegraph lines and railroads, marking a new age in communication and transportation.

F

Civil War and Reorganization

Slavery was one of the most important issues dominating national politics in the first half of the 19th century. Politicians of the Northern states pressed to end it, both because it was considered immoral and because white labor could not compete with unpaid black labor. Politicians of the cotton-growing Southern states, including Arkansas, felt that slavery was necessary to their agricultural system and that the North was trying to dominate the country economically. Many in the plantation owner class were in favor of secession from the federal Union and formation of a separate Southern nation.

In 1860 Abraham Lincoln was elected president as the candidate of the Republican Party, which opposed the spread of slavery. The Southern state of South Carolina had threatened to secede if the Republicans won the presidency, and in December 1860 it did so. Other Southern states followed. In Arkansas, secession was postponed by strong Unionist feeling in the mountainous northwestern part of the state, where there were few slaves. On May 6, 1861, however, a state convention voted for secession with only one delegate, Isaac Murphy, dissenting. Arkansas was the ninth state to withdraw from the Union. It joined the Confederate States of America, or Confederacy, which had been formed by the seceding states on February 8, 1861.

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Confederate and Union armies fought for control of the state in more than 60 encounters. The biggest and bloodiest was the Battle of Pea Ridge, in northwestern Arkansas, which took place March 6 through 8, 1862. Here the Confederate army of Major General Earl Van Dorn attacked a smaller Union army under Major General Samuel Curtis and suffered a serious defeat. In July Curtis reached Helena, having devastated the plantation system in eastern Arkansas. Later, at the Battle of Prairie Grove (December 7, 1862), Confederate General Thomas C. Hindman unsuccessfully attacked the Union Army forces in northwestern Arkansas. By the end of 1863 Little Rock, Helena, and Fort Smith were under Union control. The Confederate state capital was moved to Washington in the southwestern part of the state.

An antislavery government loyal to the Union, under Isaac Murphy as governor, was established at Little Rock in 1864. Thus, until the Confederacy surrendered in April 1865, Arkansas had two governments. After the surrender, the Murphy government was opposed at home by ex-Confederates and in Congress by the Radical wing of the Republican Party, which refused to readmit Arkansas to the Union until blacks were given the right to vote.

In 1866 and 1867 the legislature, controlled by ex-Confederates calling themselves Conservative-Democrats, passed repressive measures against blacks and sent former Confederates to Congress. Because of these actions, which were duplicated elsewhere in the South, the Radical Republicans in Congress substituted harsh measures for the lenient plan that President Andrew Johnson had made for the restoration, or Reconstruction, of the Union.

G

Reconstruction

In 1867 Arkansas, along with all other former Confederate states except Tennessee, was placed under federal military rule. An election for a constitutional convention was held in which blacks voted for the first time. The newly organized state Republican Party won the election. Early in 1868 the convention drew up a constitution that extended the vote and full civil rights to blacks, provided for tax-supported public schools for the first time, and called for a state election. In that election, the constitution was ratified and the Republicans were victorious. The new legislature met and ratified the 14th Amendment to the Constitution of the United States, which guaranteed civil rights for blacks. On June 22, 1868, Arkansas was readmitted to the Union and its Republican delegation was seated. In July, Republican Powell Clayton succeeded Murphy as governor.

Many whites opposed the military occupation and what they viewed as Northern rule based on black votes. Opposition groups, including the notorious Ku Klux Klan, were organized secretly to intimidate blacks by violence.

Nevertheless, Republicans controlled the state government until 1874. They set up free public schools; founded a university that became the University of Arkansas; established a school for the deaf; protected the rights of black citizens; prosecuted the Ku Klux Klan; encouraged immigration; provided for payment of the state’s debts; and extended state financial aid to the building of railroads and levees. The Conservatives denounced the Republicans for plunging the state into debt and accused them of financial corruption. Furthermore, the Conservatives maintained that the Republicans ruled through fraudulent political practices such as barring white opponents from voting, exploiting black voters, and using multiple voting and dishonest vote counting. The charges of the Conservatives were only partly justified. The debt problem was in large part due to a nationwide depression of 1873 and to the critical need for railroads, levees, and rebuilding of public facilities. The charges of stealing money were never proved.

There was some corruption in the state Republican Party, however, and it culminated in what was known as the Brooks-Baxter War. Elisha Baxter, a Republican, won the 1872 election for governor; his opponent, Joseph Brooks, also a Republican, charged fraud. In early 1874 armed forces of the two rivals clashed on Main Street in Little Rock. Other clashes occurred elsewhere around the state, and about 200 people were killed. President Ulysses S. Grant eventually declared that Baxter was the governor.

The Republican turmoil permitted the Conservatives, who by then identified themselves with the Democratic Party, to regain control of the state that year and draw up a new constitution. They repudiated the debts incurred by the Republicans for levees and railroads, paid off the pre-Civil War bank debt, retrenched on expenditures for needed state services, halted funding to the public schools and the state university, and used ruthless methods to keep themselves in office. Although the Democrats were under the control of railroad and business interests, they retained the support of white Arkansas farmers by calling for white solidarity. The Democrats acclaimed the future of Arkansas in a “New South” that they pictured as throbbing with economic progress. However, Arkansas remained a cotton-growing state, with its farmers suffering great hardship because of low crop prices, high railroad rates, and exorbitant prices for manufactured goods.

The state’s blacks made some progress during Reconstruction. They enjoyed the rights of citizens, founded schools and churches, developed a black professional class, and adjusted to the new agricultural system of sharecropping and tenant farming. Three-fourths of black families in Arkansas, and nearly half of white families, labored under this system. An entire family provided labor on a farm in return for a share of the crop they produced, and the owner of the land provided equipment, animals, seed, and housing. If the profit on the crop was low, the landowner took his share first. The cropper or tenant took what was left or, if none was left, got an advance to keep going until the next harvest.

H

Economic Expansion and Farm Revolt

Extensive railroad building in the 30 years before 1900 helped encourage economic growth. Railroad companies and the state government sought farmers from other states and foreign countries to settle on railroad lands. The population of Arkansas grew from less than 500,000 in 1870 to 1,300,000 in 1900. Farming boomed, lumbering became important, and coal and bauxite mining grew profitable. Cotton remained the chief money crop, although rice was introduced in 1894 and became important in the Grand Prairie region, near the town of Stuttgart. Central to agricultural growth after 1890 was large-scale drainage. By 1930 Arkansas had 8,005 km (4,974 mi) of ditches and ranked second only to Florida in area drained. Drainage, however, resulted in high taxes, overproduction, and falling crop prices that hurt all farmers.

Agricultural prosperity in the 1880s was followed by a period of drought and falling crop prices. Arkansas farmers began to organize agrarian self-help societies, which acquired political influence, and to rebel against Democratic control. Their political movement was called populism. Populists sought, among other measures, to institute farmers’ cooperatives on a national scale; to lower transportation costs by nationalizing the railroads; and to achieve a more equitable distribution of the costs of government by means of a graduated income tax. In the 1888 elections they united with labor groups and came within 15,000 votes of electing their candidate for governor. Over the next 12 years the state Democratic Party adopted many of the reform planks in the farmers’ platform. As a result, many farmers returned to the party, dividing the agrarian movement.

With the votes of the formerly populist white farmers, Jeff Davis of the Democratic Party was elected governor. Adopting the methods and ideas of the agrarian movement, Davis challenged the power of the railroads, trusts, and insurance companies. Although he was denounced as an unprincipled demagogue, Davis achieved political and penal reform, collected unpaid taxes from the railroads, regulated business practices, secured needed labor legislation, and paid off most of the state’s bonded indebtedness.

On the negative side, Davis attempted to destroy the already weak black educational system and publicly defended groups that killed blacks as punishment for a presumed crime, without due process of law. This practice was known as lynching. During these years segregation of the races became pervasive and racial tensions rose. By 1900, blacks had effectively lost the vote through state-imposed techniques such as a poll tax, which denied the vote to those too poor to pay it.

I

Economic Developments in the 20th Century

Arkansas experienced a number of economic advances in the first quarter of the 20th century. In 1901 natural gas was first exploited, in the Fort Smith area. In 1907 and 1908 the Ouachita and Ozark national forests were established and tourists began to take an interest in the hill country. In 1909 lumbering reached an all-time peak. In 1921 oil was discovered near El Dorado. The state’s first large hydroelectric dam, on the Ouachita River, was completed in 1924.

In 1927 the flooding waters of the Mississippi River burst the levees and spread over the Delta flatlands. Arkansas barely had time to recover from this blow when it was plunged into the nationwide Great Depression of the 1930s. Arkansas was hard hit by falling farm prices and unemployment, especially because fewer farm workers were needed as crop controls and decreased acreage were instituted under the Agricultural Adjustment Act, a federal program intended to raise crop prices.

Hard times during the 1930s in the Delta produced a notable radical agrarian group, the Southern Tenant Farmers’ Union, which successfully focused national attention on plantation practices. The price of cotton had fallen soon after the Civil War and stayed depressed until the end of the century. Thus the tenants and sharecroppers found themselves in an endless cycle of debt. Laws were passed limiting the freedom of croppers and tenants and restricting their economic opportunities. For instance, they forfeited any share in crops they abandoned, and their personal property could be seized through chattel mortgages. It was not until World War II (1939-1945) that the tenant farming and sharecropping system began to disappear.

Dislocations were widespread during the Depression. Highways to the West were lined with so-called Arkies, packing all their possessions in old cars, headed for California to find work. When World War II came, Arkansans flocked to defense jobs in the country’s industrial cities, causing a further sharp decline in the state’s population. In 1955 the state government established an industrial development program to encourage the building of factories and to increase job opportunities. By the 1960s the program had brought discernible results, so that by 1970 the population was almost as large as in 1940.

Since the 1930s, as Arkansas has moved from a rural, agricultural economy to an urban, industrial one, the chief problem has been finding funds to support state services. The state’s fiscal problems in part relate to the low per-capita income of its people and the large numbers needing public assistance. They also relate partly to the state’s unwieldy constitution and subsequent amendments, which greatly limit the state’s taxing power. Legislation that would have modernized state government was rejected by the voters in 1970, 1980, and 1995.

The economy of the Ozarks and Ouachitas has been transformed by the rise of mass-production chicken farming, pioneered by Tyson Foods, and the enormous growth of Sam Walton’s Wal-Mart discount chain stores. By the 1990s the growing economy brought more than 100,000 Hispanic people into a region that formerly had a homogenous white Protestant population. The racially divided Delta, by contrast, continued to lose population.

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