arkansas

Arkansas, located just west of the Mississippi River, straddles a border between the South and the West and encompasses something of both those regions in its history and customs.

Throughout most of the eighteenth century, the small white population was concentrated at Arkansas Post, located on the Arkansas River just a few miles above where it feeds into the Mississippi River. Arkansas Post was established by Henri de Tonti in 1686, but it was a small and primitive affair that had a difficult time surviving. It was abandoned in 1699, founded again in 1721, and then moved several times between 1749and 1780.

While Arkansas Post clearly had importance as a place for reprovisioning boats on the long journey on the Mississippi River, it had political and economic importance as well. Politically, it gave the French—and, after the Seven Years' War, the Spanish—a foothold in an otherwise undermanned region, and it provided them a means for establishing relations with Native Americans in the area, particularly the Quapaws.

Other native groups in Arkansas had less contact with whites at the post, but the Osages did make themselves known. While their home villages were in southwestern Missouri, the Osages claimed most of northern and western Arkansas as their hunting grounds and ferociously protected their prerogatives there, effectively inhibiting white settlement in western Arkansas until the early nineteenth century. When the Americans took over and began to resettle Cherokee and Choctaw Indians in west Arkansas, the Osages resisted and were themselves resettled to INDIAN TERRITORY (present-day Oklahoma).

The American Era in Arkansas

The LOUISIANA PURCHASE ushered in the American era in Arkansas, and it had implications for the Indians there, some of whom had moved to Arkansas voluntarily in the late eighteenth century to escape the Americans. Cherokees, for example, settled along the Black and St. Francis rivers in the 1780s and 1790s. Although some eastern Indians, particularly the Cherokees, were "removed" to Arkansas in the late 1810s, they were later resettled in Indian Territory. Native groups would find themselves at a distinct disadvantage as the Americans spread across the Mississippi River; established plantation agriculture, particularly on Quapaw lands in southeastern Arkansas; and placed the state on a certain economic trajectory and a collision course with the CIVIL WAR.

As white settlers swept into the region in the first three decades of the nineteenth century, they found ample fertile land to develop in Arkansas and secured the cooperation of the federal government in removing all Indians from the territory by the mid-1830s. By the time that Arkansas applied for separate territorial status in 1819—it had been part of Missouri Territory until then—slavery was firmly established, and it came as a shock when New York Representative John Taylor proposed effectively banning slavery. The debate that ensued became intertwined with Missouri's application for statehood, and, in fact, the idea of a dividing line (36 degrees, 30 minutes—the border between Missouri and Arkansas), which became one of the key features of the great MISSOURI COMPROMISE, was first articulated by Taylor in connection with the Arkansas bill. In the end, of course, slavery remained intact in Arkansas and became an important element in the delta's economy and in the state's political history.

Other differences existed between the southeast and northwest. While the southeast was given over to cotton cultivation, plantation agriculture, and a higher concentration of land ownership, a mixed agriculture of wheat, corn, livestock, and orchards predominated in the northwest, where land holdings tended to be much smaller. Part of the Arkansas Ozark Mountain range, northwest Arkansas was simply not suitable for plantation agriculture. The northwest was predominantly Whig in political orientation, and although some Whigs had interests in the delta, most planters there were Democrats.

A crucial factor in the ability of southeastern planters to control Arkansas politics was their influence upon the capital city. The first territorial capital, Arkansas Post, proved to be an inadequate location, and in 1820 a centrally located site farther up the Arkansas River, known as the "little rock," was chosen as the new territorial capital. LITTLE ROCK developed rapidly, and with significant ties to the southeastern Arkansas planters, Little Rock businessmen and politicians could be counted upon to support issues of importance to them.

Conflicts Over Statehood

Its central role in the political struggle between the southeast and the northwest became manifest when Arkansas drafted its first state constitution in early 1836. The drive for statehood in Arkansas had been influenced by the desire to maintain a balance on the national level between slave and free states. When it became clear in 1834 that the territory of Michigan was preparing to apply for state-hood in the near future, Arkansas territorial delegate Ambrose Sevier was determined that Arkansas would be paired with Michigan.

When delegates met in Little Rock to draft a state constitution, southeastern planters were defeated in their attempts to apply the three-fifths rule in counting slaves for purposes of representation, but they succeeded in carving out a three-district political structure: one made up of southeast counties, one of northwest counties, and one of three counties in the center of the state. The largest of those three counties in the central district was, of course, Pulaski, where Little Rock was located. Northwestern delegates largely opposed this arrangement because it was clear that this central district would support the southeast, but enough northwestern delegates voted in favor of it to secure its passage.

Arkansas in the Civil War

When the secession crisis of 1860 took place, some Southerners believed that President Abraham Lincoln's election to the presidency alone was sufficient to justify immediate SECESSION, but most Arkansans were willing to give Lincoln a chance to prove that he was not, as he insisted, opposed to slavery where it existed. Those most in favor of immediate secession were from the southeastern delta; those most opposed were from the northwest. A secession convention was called in March 1861, just as Lincoln was taking the oath of office. The northwestern delegates succeeded in defeating the immediate secessionists, but the convention scheduled an election to take place the following August that would allow voters to decide the issue. Before that election could be held, however, Confederate forces fired on Fort Sumter on April 12, and in response Lincoln put out a call for troops to all the states. Arkansas's moment of truth had arrived. The secession convention called itself back into session and voted 69to 1 to secede and join the Confederate cause.

Although few important battles were fought in the state, the Civil War brought devastation to Arkansas. It was ill-positioned to fight a war. Due to banking problems, the state was in poor economic standing at the time the Civil War broke out. Meanwhile, state officials feared—with justification—that Arkansas troops would be transferred east of the river, leaving Arkansas relatively defenseless. Although the Confederate military never fully abandoned Arkansas, it remained a lower priority and suffered as a consequence.

Ironically, the largest battles fought in the state took place in northwest Arkansas, the area least in favor of secession. On March 7–8, 1862, Federal forces pushed into the state from Missouri, hoping to wipe out Confederate resistance in the northwest counties and possibly reach the Arkansas River valley. Confederate forces met the Union forces at Pea Ridge (or Elkhorn Tavern). After a seesaw battle with heavy losses on the Federal side, the Confederates were ultimately forced to retire south to the Boston Mountains, but the Federals failed to follow them. Neither side truly won the battle as neither achieved its objectives. Much of Arkansas was then embroiled in a relentless guerrilla war from which many civilians, particularly in northwest Arkansas, fled.

The Reconstruction Era

The Reconstruction history of Arkansas is similar to that of other southern states. Initially Confederates regained political office under President Andrew Johnson's mild Reconstruction policies, only to be removed and disfranchised under congressional (or radical) RECONSTRUCTION. The Republican Party of Arkansas, like that of other southern states, attempted to build railroads, founded an educational system, and fell victim to charges of corruption. Ultimately, Reconstruction was overturned and a Redeemer Democrat, Augustus Garland, took over as Democratic governor in 1874.

One major issue emanating from the Civil War was what to do about the freedmen. The FREEDMEN'S BUREAU functioned in Arkansas during its brief life, but planters soon regained the upper hand and reduced the Arkansas freedmen to a kind of peasantry through the sharecropping system. Meanwhile, the cotton economy sank into a long decline, although Arkansas planters remained locked into it through the system of advances they received from cotton factors, who demanded they grow cotton. The state legislature, now controlled by Democrats, forswore an activist role in addressing the economic problems facing farmers. By the early 1880s farmers in Arkansas were in such dire straits that they formed the Agricultural Wheel, an organization determined to influence the legislature to address their problems. By 1886 they mounted a candidate for governor who very nearly defeated the Democratic candidate.

The fact that blacks had voted for the "Wheel" candidate did not escape the attention of leading Democrats, and fearful of the threat from below, Democrats were motivated to conquer by dividing their enemies along racial lines. In 1891 the legislature enacted both segregation and disfranchising legislature. The Separate Coach law prohibited blacks from riding in first-class coaches within the state. The election law of 1891 discriminated against illiterate voters (by allowing only election officials to mark their ballots) and imposed a poll tax. A final disfranchising piece of legislation became effective in 1906 when the state Democratic Party declared a "white only" policy, whereby only whites could vote in the Democratic primary.

Industrial Development Emerges

The end of the nineteenth century also marked something of an economic renaissance in Arkansas, albeit of a very limited kind. Despite efforts on the part of Arkansas boosters to attract industry and development to the state, the only industries that emerged were extractive in nature. The lumber industry, for example, became extraordinarily important all over Arkansas, from the eastern delta to the Ouachita and Ozark mountains in the west. Northern financiers and entrepreneurs, eager to reach the wealth of the Arkansas forests, extended hundreds of miles of railroad into a state that on the eve of the Civil War had less than a hundred miles of rail line. Deforestation in eastern Arkansas led directly to the expansion of the plantation system there and an explosion of population growth in the early twentieth century. By the end of that century, coal mining had become important. In central Arkansas, meanwhile, bauxite mining emerged near Benton. But efforts to move beyond these extractive industries and broaden the economy past its dependence on agriculture failed.

Progressivism, Riots, and Flood

Just as the urge to reform and perfect swept across the rest of the country during the Progressive Era, it touched Arkansas as well. It was during the first decades of the twentieth century that the convict leasing system was eliminated, women got the right to vote, and the educational infrastructure was improved. Both the initiative and the referendum were adopted in Arkansas. Prohibition was implemented in 1916, three years before the national ban. As the automobile became a more important means of transportation, roads expanded. Unfortunately, many road improvement districts went bankrupt during the economic downturn following World War I. The governors of the 1920s and 1930s struggled with this legacy of debt.

But those two decades brought other significant problems that captured the attention of the state's governors and legislators. In 1919 a race riot in Phillips County brought unfavorable publicity. This was "red summer," when labor strife and race riots occurred across the country. In the Arkansas case, black SHARECROPPERS had formed a union and hired an attorney to represent them in suits they planned to file against planters for whom they worked. The planters learned of the union and purportedly concluded that the union was planning to murder them and appropriate their lands. After an incident outside a union meeting left a white man dead, a full-fledged race riot resulted, and Governor Charles Brough called on the president to dispatch troops from Camp Pike. Five whites and at least twenty-five blacks were killed, although unofficial reports suggest the number of blacks killed greatly exceeded that number.

While the Elaine Race Riot brought unfavorable publicity to the state, the sharp decline in prices paid for agricultural products that persisted throughout the 1920s brought ruin to farmers and many of the merchants and bankers who depended upon the agricultural economy. As if their economic woes were not problem enough, the great flood of 1927 inundated Arkansas. More than two million agricultural acres were flooded within the state. Arkansas had hardly recovered from this disaster and was reeling from the deteriorating economic conditions faced by Americans after the stock market crash of 1929 when the drought of 1930–1931 struck. Crops withered in the fields and livestock died while the Red Cross ruminated over whether a drought was the kind of natural disaster they should respond to. Finally, the Red Cross stepped in, but it was New Deal programs fostered under Franklin Roosevelt's presidency that began to improve the agricultural economy. The Agricultural Adjustment Administration (AAA) launched its crop reduction program in 1933 and secured the cooperation of planters and farmers throughout the state in "plowing up" up to 30 percent of the planted cotton acres. Farmers were given a check for "renting" the plowed-up acres to the government, although they were free to raise certain unrestricted crops on those lands.

As it worked out, the AAA greatly advantaged planters and large farmers and brought further devastation to tenant farmers. Planters who no longer needed the services of tenant farmers simply evicted them. Many planters refused to share the crop payments with the tenants remaining on their plantation.

Some historians have credited the AAA program with being largely responsible for the demise of the tenancy and sharecropping system and the emergence of capital-intensive agriculture. But World War II played an important role in pulling labor away from agricultural areas—sending them to the military or to work in defense industries—and, in any case, the transition from labor-intensive to capital-intensive agriculture in the Arkansas delta depended upon the creation of a marketable mechanical cotton harvester. Those were developed during the war and began to come off assembly lines in sufficient numbers by the late 1940s to begin a revolution in southern agriculture. As chemicals, some of them developed during the war for other purposes, were put to use on the delta plantations to keep weeds down, the shift was further augmented. By the end of the 1950s the transition was all but complete, leaving in its wake a massive depopulation of the Arkansas delta that wreaked havoc on small-town economies.

Attracting Industry to the State

The state was not quiescent in the face of the changes transforming the delta. At Governor Orval Faubus's suggestion, the legislature created the Arkansas Industrial Development Commission in 1955. Despite more than fifty years of efforts to expand industrial production in the state, no industrial base of any significance had been established. Faubus appointed Winthrop Rockefeller, scion of the famous New York Rockefellers, who had settled in Arkansas after World War II, as the first director of the AIDC. He served as director for nine years and pursued industrial development with zeal and energy. He had some successes, but the kinds of industries that ultimately settled in Arkansas were of a character that did not promote further development. In fact, with more than six hundred new industrial plants located in the state during his tenure, providing more than ninety thousand new jobs, those factories paid low wages to largely unskilled workers. By the mid-1960s, moreover, it was clear that Arkansas was serving as a way station for those industries on a trek south in search of lower wages. Towns that secured factories in 1955 would likely be looking for replacement factories a decade later.

Ironically, it was in part the fear of losing industrial development possibilities that influenced Little Rock businessmen to take a stand on the Central High School crisis that began in 1957. Governor Orval Faubus had taken an extreme segregationist position just when it seemed the Little Rock school board had worked out a reasonable plan of gradual integration. He called out the National Guard to prevent nine black children from entering the school in the fall of 1957, and President Dwight D. Eisenhower was ultimately forced to nationalize the state guard and send in troops to enforce integration. The next year, Faubus elected to close the schools rather than allow them to be integrated.

For their part, the businessmen recognized that the crisis had drawn national and international attention that threatened their efforts to encourage industrial development in the city. They wanted an end to the bad publicity. By the early 1960s, even Faubus was changing his tune. With black voters gaining strength, particularly in the Arkansas delta, he began courting them and forswearing his segregationist past. When he decided not to run for office in 1966, his former AIDC director, Winthrop Rockefeller, secured the Republican nomination and defeated Jim Johnson, an avid race baiter. Clearly, Arkansas had had enough of the politics of race.

The Republican Rise to Power

The last six decades of the twentieth century witnessed a dramatic economic and political transformation in Arkansas. The emergence of the Republican Party and an economic boom in northwest Arkansas, two events that were not entirely unrelated, changed the face of the Arkansas political and economic landscape. While the delta struggled economically in the wake of the transformation of the plantation system, it reinvented itself politically as black voters made themselves felt at the polls. For the first time since Reconstruction, blacks were elected to important political positions on the local level in Arkansas.

Meanwhile, the rise of four economic giants in northwest Arkansas put that region on a phenomenal growth trajectory. Sam Walton, a retail genius, founded Wal-Mart, with its headquarters in Bentonville. John Tyson began his chicken business in Springdale, and his son, Don Tyson, expanded it dramatically and made it a worldwide enterprise. J. B. Hunt, who began as a simple trucker, founded a trucking empire and moved his headquarters to northwest Arkansas. John A. Cooper, who had founded a successful retirement community known as Cherokee Village, worked his magic in Bella Vista beginning in the 1960s, at approximately the same time that Walton, Don Tyson, and Hunt were laying the foundation for their businesses. The three business enterprises attracted a number of vendors and allied industries, and the population growth that followed generated an unprecedented construction boom.

Most of those who moved into northwest Arkansas and crowded into the growing suburbs of Little Rock were conservative in orientation. Only the presence of three moderate Democrats who could speak the language of fiscal conservatism kept the state otherwise in the hands of the Democrats. Dale Leon Bumpers, David Pryor, and Bill Clinton all served as governor between 1972 and 1992 (with the exception of a two-year period when a maverick Republican, Frank White, occupied the state house). Bumpers and Pryor would go on to have distinguished careers in the Senate, and Clinton, of course, went to the White House. In fact, his departure may have played a significant role in the Republican resurgence in Arkansas. Not only did he take with him many young Democrats who might have positioned themselves for elective office had they remained in Arkansas, but he also left the state in the hands of his Democratic lieutenant governor, Jim Guy Tucker, who proved to be more vulnerable than any one could have imagined. Within two years, Tucker faced serious charges arising from the Whitewater investigation and resigned, giving the seat over to Mike Huckabee, a popular Republican. Meanwhile, Republicans were experiencing a political renaissance elsewhere in the state, claiming a congressional seat in 1992 and a Senate seat in 1996. Clearly, by the end of the twentieth century, the Republican Party had become a force to be reckoned with, and the massive demographic changes that had occurred in the previous fifty years were a major factor in bringing that about.

Bibliography

Bolton, S. Charles. Arkansas: Remote and Restless, 1800–1860. Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press, 1998.

Donovan, Timothy P., Willard B. Gatewood, and Jeannie Whayne, eds. Governors of Arkansas. Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press, 1995.

Dougan, Michael B. Arkansas Odyssey: The Saga of Arkansas from Prehistoric Times to the Present. Little Rock, Ark.: Rose, 1993.

Johnson, Ben F. III. Arkansas in Modern America, 1930–1999. Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press, 2000.

Moneyhon, Carl. Arkansas and the New South, 1874–1929. Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press, 1997.

Reed, Roy. Faubus: The Life and Times of an American Prodigal. Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press, 1997.

Whayne, Jeannie, Tom DeBlack, George Sabo, and Morris S. Arnold. Arkansas: A Narrative History. Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press, 2002.

Whayne, Jeannie, and Willard B. Gatewood, eds. The Arkansas Delta: A Land of Paradox. Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press, 1993.

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