ARArkansas History

Arkansas voted against leaving the Union and then left it anyway six weeks later. A convention at Little Rock rejected secession in March 1861 by 39 votes to 35. After Fort Sumter the same delegates reconvened on May 6 and voted 65 to 5 to go out, and when the chair asked the holdouts to make it unanimous, four agreed and Isaac Murphy of Madison County refused. Three years later Murphy was sworn in as Unionist governor at Little Rock while a Confederate governor was still holding office ninety miles to the southwest.

Plum Bayou, the Quapaw and the Osage

The mound group at Scott, southeast of Little Rock, was raised between about 650 and 1050 by people archaeologists call the Plum Bayou culture. The tallest mound still stands around 38 feet, and the site was laid out to line up with sunrise positions at the solstices. It carries the name Toltec Mounds only because a nineteenth century landowning family assumed anything that impressive had to be Toltec work from Mexico. It was not, and the park kept the wrong name.

Hernando de Soto's expedition crossed the Mississippi in 1541 and wintered among towns it recorded as Casqui and Pacaha. De Soto died the following year and his men sank his body in the river. By the time French traders returned the Quapaw, whose name means the downstream people, held the mouth of the Arkansas, the Osage claimed the hunting grounds of the northwest, and the Caddo the pine country of the southwest. Marquette and Jolliet reached the Quapaw villages in 1673.

Arkansas Post under three flags

Henri de Tonti, La Salle's lieutenant, established Arkansas Post in 1686, the first lasting European settlement in the lower Mississippi Valley. It stayed tiny. John Law's Company of the West took an enormous concession on the Arkansas in 1717 and recruited German families for it, but when the speculative bubble burst in 1720 the colonists drifted down toward New Orleans. France transferred Louisiana to Spain in 1762 and the post became Fort Carlos III. On April 17, 1783, months after the fighting had ended in the east, British partisans under James Colbert attacked the Spanish garrison and were driven off, the only Revolutionary War engagement fought on Arkansas soil. Spain returned Louisiana to France in 1800 and Napoleon sold it all to the United States in 1803.

A territory argued over, a state admitted in pairs

Congress created Arkansas Territory by an act of March 2, 1819, and getting there took a fight. In the same February weeks that the Missouri question exploded, Representative John Taylor of New York moved to bar any further introduction of slavery into Arkansas Territory. The amendment lost by a handful of votes, and the pattern of the next forty years was set. The capital moved from Arkansas Post to Little Rock in 1821.

Arkansas entered the Union on June 15, 1836 as the twenty-fifth state, matched against Michigan, admitted free seven months later to hold the Senate even. The young legislature was not a genteel body. On December 4, 1837, during debate over a bounty on wolf scalps, Speaker John Wilson came down from the chair and killed Representative Joseph J. Anthony with a bowie knife on the floor of the House. Both of the state's chartered banks then collapsed, Arkansas repudiated the bonds, and an 1846 amendment banned banking in the state outright.

Two governments, 1861 to 1865

At Pea Ridge on March 7 and 8, 1862, in the northwest corner near Bentonville, a Union army beat a larger Confederate force that included Cherokee regiments under Stand Watie, and the victory kept Missouri in the Union. Prairie Grove followed that December. Federal troops under Frederick Steele took Little Rock on September 10, 1863, and the Confederate state government retreated to the town of Washington in Hempstead County, where it sat out the war.

Steele's 1864 push toward Camden ended in retreat, marked by the killing of surrendering Black soldiers of the First Kansas Colored Infantry at Poison Spring and a rearguard fight at Jenkins' Ferry. A Unionist convention meanwhile wrote a constitution abolishing slavery and installed Isaac Murphy as governor. Arkansas was readmitted in June 1868. Reconstruction politics ended in 1874 with the Brooks-Baxter War, when two men each claimed the governorship, their supporters fortified opposite ends of Little Rock, and President Grant told one of them to stand down.

The Delta century

Cotton came back after the war on the backs of sharecroppers, and the arrangement was enforced hard. In Phillips County in the autumn of 1919, after Black sharecroppers organized a union to demand fair settlement for their crops, white posses and federal troops swept the countryside around Elaine. Five white men died and estimates of Black deaths run from dozens into the hundreds. Twelve men were sentenced to die after trials that lasted minutes, and their appeal produced Moore v. Dempsey in 1923, the decision that opened federal review of mob-dominated state trials.

Then the water came. In the spring of 1927 the Mississippi and its tributaries put roughly 6,600 square miles of Arkansas under water, about an eighth of the state and more ground than any other state lost. Drought and depression followed at once, and in January 1931 several hundred farmers walked into the town of England demanding food from merchants, a story carried by newspapers nationwide. Two odd resources helped: the Saline County bauxite mines supplied nearly all the aluminum ore the country used in the Second World War, and the diamond field found near Murfreesboro in 1906 is still the only one in the world open to public digging.

Central High, and the shift northwest

In September 1957 Governor Orval Faubus ordered the Arkansas National Guard to stop nine Black students from entering Little Rock Central High School. Eisenhower federalized that Guard and sent the 101st Airborne to escort them in. Faubus answered by closing every public high school in Little Rock for the 1958 to 1959 year, remembered locally as the Lost Year. The economy tilted while that fight went on. Sam Walton opened his first Wal-Mart in Rogers in 1962 and headquartered the company at Bentonville, Tyson Foods grew out of Springdale and J.B. Hunt out of Lowell, so three of the largest corporations in the country now sit within an hour of the Pea Ridge battlefield. Mechanized picking emptied the Delta counties in the other direction. Bill Clinton, born at Hope in 1946, was governor for most of the 1980s before winning the presidency in 1992.

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