Ben Johnson
Associate Professor, History
Southern Arkansas
University
In July 1676, explorers Jacques Marquette and Louis Jolliet
reached a Quapaw Indian village at the confluence of the White and Mississippi
Rivers. The Illinois peoples had assured the Frenchmen that the Akamsea (their
name for the Quapaw) would receive them favorably. The cordial relations between the Quapaw and the French
continued three years later when Henri de Tonty, a lieutenant of the La Salle, established Poste aux
Arkansas. Located twenty miles up the
Arkansas River from where it emptied into the Mississippi, Arkansas Post was
the first colonial settlement in the vast region known as French Louisiana. The
outpost served both as a trading center and a military fort to check European
rivals. The raucous French hunters who exchanged goods at the Post inspired the
contempt of the military commandants, who themselves sought profit in the
exportation of buffalo tallow and bear oil. In 1766, the Spanish acquired
Arkansas Post following the French defeat in the Seven Years War. Little
changed in the operation of the fort or in the rhythms of daily life. Napoleon
of France briefly possessed Spanish Louisiana before selling the territory to
the United States. In March 1804 Lt. James Many arrived to
claim Arkansas Post as part of the new Louisiana Purchase.
Five months after Lewis and
Clark left St. Louis to explore the northern portion of the new territory,
William Dunbar and George Hunter began their official expedition up Ouachita
River. Throughout the trek that ended at the present day site of Hot Springs,
Dunbar and Hunter encountered French hunters and Indians who had recently moved
into the region. Still, the explorers’ report to President Thomas Jefferson
gave the impression that the region was largely empty and suitable as place to
shift Indian tribes from the eastern United States. Increasing white
incursions, however, led the government to relocate the eastern tribes farther
west in what is now Oklahoma. The James Monroe administration confirmed that
Arkansas would be open to white settlers when it acted upon the official
promise to provide veterans of the War of 1812 with western land grants. In
1815 Prospect Robbins and Joseph
Brown began the first survey in the Louisiana territory. They established the
initial point in an east Arkansas swamp that would eventually designate
property boundaries throughout the Great Plains.
Migrants from Tennessee and
deep South states headed to Arkansas, and the new settlers found it easy to
claim acreage to get started as independent farmers. The expansion of the
cotton holdings in the lowland southern and eastern sections of the state
created an economy distinct from the corn-dominated upland north. In 1819 the bill
to create a territorial government ignited a sharp congressional debate over
whether slavery should continue in Arkansas, but the labor system survived a
close vote. In 1820 the territorial capital was moved upriver from swampy,
disease-infested Arkansas Post to the new town of Little Rock, which remained
the seat of government when Arkansas achieved statehood in 1836. Throughout the
decades leading up to the Civil War, Arkansas government was dominated by a
small group of men linked primarily by kinship. Known as the
“Family” or the “Dynasty,” they reflected the interests
of plantation owners. As the United States fell into crisis over slavery
expansion, Arkansas political leaders delivered incendiary speeches endorsing secession as the best means to protect
the state’s prospering cotton economy. Nevertheless, the majority of white Arkansans lived where
there were few slaves, and Arkansas did not follow seven other southern states
which seceded following the 1860 election of Abraham Lincoln. In May 1861,
however, the state treated the firing upon Fort Sumter as provoked by Union
aggression and joined the Confederate States of America.
Confederate military planners
viewed Arkansas as strategically
necessary in seizing Missouri, a slave state that had not left the Union. The
March 1862 victory of Federal
forces under Gen. Samuel Curtis at the Battle of Pea Ridge left Missouri beyond
the grasp of the South, and Confederate armies withdrew from Arkansas. As Gen.
Curtis marched through east Arkansas he conferred “freedom papers”
on slaves who fled farms and plantations. By September 1863, Little Rock was in
Federal hands and Confederate Gov. Harris Flannigan nominally governed from
Washington in southwest Arkansas. Property destruction and violence against civilians
by irregulars and guerillas raged throughout the countryside as neither Union
nor Confederate officials could provide order and security. The end of the
Civil War in spring 1865 stirred little emotion among an exhausted people
living in a broken state. The Reconstruction phase offered the promise of a more democratic political system
that included African American voters and a program of economic modernization.
Governor Powell Clayton, leader of the state’s Republican party,
instigated a small boom of railroad construction and oversaw the establishment
of the state’s first public school system. His Democratic party enemies
complained of corruption and high taxes and were incensed when he used militia
troops in 1869 to suppress the Ku Klux Klan. Following Arkansas’s readmission to the United States
in 1868, the Republicans steadily lost seats in the state legislature. Violence
flared again in 1874 over the disputed outcome of a governor’s election,
but President U. S. Grant intervened by anointing the Democratic-backed
candidate. This decision ended the Reconstruction experiment. The new state
constitution enabled large landholding elites to exercise political authority
and dominate an evolving sharecropping system of cotton production.
Arkansas remained more rural than almost any
other state in the period between the end of Reconstruction and World II. On
the other hand, towns and manufacturing establishments spread throughout the
late 19th century, and the state attempted to balance its rural traditions
with a diversified economy. Rising prosperity in the first two decades of the
twentieth century were accompanied by reforms that encouraged government
efficiency and improvements in education and highways. It was also an era of segregation and
brutal violence against African Americans. In 1919, planters and law officers near Elaine used arms to
crush a sharecropping union, leaving scores of black residents dead. Optimism for a brighter future in the
1920s was blasted by a sustained
agricultural depression as well as the twin natural disasters of the 1927 flood
and the 1930 drought. The Great
Depression of the 1930s deepened the state’s plight. If federal
intervention had been denounced during Reconstruction, Arkansans eagerly
welcomed the New Deal programs of the Franklin Roosevelt administration to
provide relief and prod recovery.
During and after World War II
the largest number of migrants left Arkansas since the catastrophic Civil War
era. Cotton plantation owners finally embraced mechanization as agricultural
workers found opportunity elsewhere. Yet rural Arkansans also began to take
jobs in the new food processing and clothing manufacturing plants that entered
the state in search of lower labor costs. The civil rights struggle proved to be
a greater force for change than industrial expansion. Although moderate leaders in the 1940s paved the way for
voting rights and desegregation of professional schools, Governor Orval Faubus
used state police power in 1957 to prevent the admission of nine black students
into Little Rock Central High school.
The event proved to be a landmark in the civil rights movement, but the
triumph of resistance damaged the state’s reputation and stunted
democratic institutions. Beginning with the administration of Winthrop
Rockefeller in 1967, the first Republican governor since Reconstruction, reform
and racial moderation characterized a new Arkansas politics. If Arkansas had
not undergone this shift to a more open and responsive system, the rise of Bill
Clinton from governor to president would have been unlikely.