Read ARKANSAS, A NARRATIVE HISTORY.   Chapter 7    pp. 135-165.

 The Year 1856 as Viewed by an Arkansas Whig,

Michael Dougan, Arkansas Odyssey. Rose Publishing Com. Little Rock, 1994,684pp.

            The decade of the 1850’s was crucial in Arkansas’s development.  National the resulted in a renewed interest in the state, primarily for the development of cotton plantations.  These trends, which were supported by generous land policies and buttressed by slavery, led to rapid development in the eastern and southern sections of the state.  Small farmers continued to settle in the Ozarks and Ouachitas, but this call underwent certain changes.  Long cabins remained, but frame houses became more common as did organized religion, respect for law, involvement in commercial agriculture and education.

            Both 1850 and 1860 were years of debate on Southern nationalism.  Sectionalism destroyed the Whig Party after 1852, and the Know-Nothings failed to make much headway in a state almost totally devoid of foreign immigrants and happy to welcome all newcomers.  In the end, issue of state internal improvements remained to divide the triumphant Democrats.  Southern nationalism, which became a bitterly divisive issue by 1861.

ECONOMIC TRENDS 

            Cotton was king in Arkansas during the 1850’s.  The stat produced 20,000,000 pounds of cotton in 1850; ten years later the amount was 150,000,000.  This 750 percent increase compared to only a 333 percent increase in the decade between 1840 and 1850.  “Ere long,” wrote C.F.M. Noland in 1857, “Arkansas will be the cotton state of the Union. If cotton will only hold present prices for five years, Arkansas planters will be as rich as cream a foot thick.”

            Because of cotton and dependence on slave labor to work it, the years 1850-1860 were crucial in moving the Arkansas economy form a frontier state with a Western character to a Southern state, but the promise of wealth from cotton was never fulfilled.

Land Policy 

            The rising dominance of cotton was fueled by attractive bargains in Arkansas land.  Most important was the federal government’s grant of swampland to the state.  Although there was a token beginning in 1848, the program really got underway in 1850, when 8.6 million acres of federally owned land, amounting to one-quarter of the state, were turned over to the Board of Swampland Commissioners. With great political acumen but almost total disregard for geography. The Board managed to find swamps in ever Arkansas County.  Some of theirs lands were bargains at 50 cents an acre.  The income generated was to be managed by the Board for levee and drainage projects, but poor engineering and favoritism meant that the money was spent unwisely. 

            According to an 1856 report, levees built at a cost of $300 a mile were mere piles of logs and brush with some dirt thrown on top, and often were located too close to rivers to be effective because the did not give food waters room to expand.  The study touched off a ho9t political debate, but the floods of 1858 and 1859 vindicated its authors.  Miles of levee simply rose up and floated away, and other parts were eaten away by floods. Thus a potentially valuable program for developing Arkansas was sacrificed for the profit of influential individuals. 

            A second lure to settlement came from selling land owned by the state.  Thousands of acres reverted to state ownership for unpaid taxes in the crash of the 1840s.  Under the Donation Act of 1840, each family member, including females, could get 160 acres free on the condition that future taxed is paid.  By law, these individuals were to reside on the land and make suitable improvements, but these conditions largely were un-enforced. 

            These two sources of cheap land attracted many Southern families.  Some bought land thinking they might someday move to the state’ other hoped that a general rise in value would justify the risk. One of the most famous speculators was the future president of the Confederacy, Jefferson Davis, who owned land in the White River Valley, by 1859, half the state’s swampland had been claimed, but the value of farmland continued to rise.  One Pulaski county farm that sold for $600 in 1856 changed hands fro $ 1,300, then for $ 1,500, and finally in 1861 for $2, 5000.  Because population merely doubled during the decade, this great increase in property value indicated that Arkansas was at last moving out of the frontier stage of development.  “Obtain a foothold before ‘tis too late,” a farmer wrote to friends in the East. 

            The new settlers of the 1850s differed from the first generation by having a thicker veneer of civilization and by being more economically oriented. From Desha County, one man wrote:"This county has changed more this spring that I ever seen Any place.  Good planters are filling up the county.  I wish you could see my Milch cows, then walk into our little room, open the old box and look at the butter." Not all newcomers found Arkansas a Garden of Eden.  One Izard County farmer observed: "The worst I have against tending of if is that I can hit the ground to with my hoe for there is a rock in the way every time and I cant begin to chaw tobacco and plow."   Even so, he concluded, “ I am still well pleased with my move.”

One important characteristic of these new settlers was their middle-class orientation.  More likely to be literate and church going, they established new standards of conduct.  As one of them wrote home,  “Our society here is what I call good-no fighting, but little stealing, we use whiskey in moderation and have a jovial talk every time we meet, and as for revival, we have some here but just below they have it awful bad.”

Westward Expansion  

            Many settlers passed through Arkansas heading for Texas during the 1850s, and Arkansas developed some new western connections just before the Civil War. The California gold fields.  Although it took six months to make the trip, a $5 Arkansas steer brought $50 in the fields.  James M. Moore, a returned’ 49er, supposedly made the first such trip in 1853, and others followed.  Drover Thomas J. Linton of Dover reported back in 1858 that the market was saturated. By that time, Arkansas herders had found closer markets.  St. Louis and Chicago buyers had located in Sedalia, Missouri, which became the first cattle capital of the Southwest. 

Industrial Development 

            Opportunities to exploit Arkansas’s untapped natural resources surfaced in the 1850s. Although geologist G. W. Featherstonhaugh reported in 1844 that Arkansas had enough lead for “ countless ages, “ frontiersmen were so short of bullets that in the antebellum pastime of shooting for beef the predecessor of the turkey shoot-the top four winners divided the meat and the fifth got the lead. Other early travelers had noted possible mineral resources, but because of Governor Yell’s veto, the state refused to commission a geological report.  Because farmers and planters thought only in terms of agriculture, it was up to the merchant class to promote industry. Unfortunately, their Whig Party was powerless in state affairs and the cause languished.

            The industrial age produced the modern corporation.  Northern states took the initiative by changing laws to allow companies to form under general incorporation laws.  Arkansas resisted this trend, and throughout this period, each company had to waste its energies lobbying the legislature to get its incorporation act passed.  However, there was little corporate activity.  One of the first goals was the building of railroads, and before the crash, the legislature approved charters for proposed lines to connect Little Rock to Napoleon and Helena.  Neither road progressed beyond the planning stage.   Interest revived during the 1850s.  One newspaper commented:"We have frequently directed the attention of the public to the importance of diversifying our agricultural productions, establishing manufactories, opening our mines, and fostering with all care every industrial pursuit."

            Economic analysis indicated that Arkansas exported only cotton and imported flour and wheat.  Rising sectional tension carried over into an editorial demand for diversification.  Thus the state haired a geologist, David Dale Owen, a Northerner who was no less than the son of famous Utopian reformer Robert Dale Owen.  His first two reports, published in 1857 and 1860, provided a general survey of soils and minerals for part of the state.

            A variety of mining ventures were underway by 1860.  Lead had been mined on the Strawberry River as early as 1818, but production shifted to Newton County, where one shaft near Cave Creek produced some sixty to seventy pounds.  In all, more than 20,000 pounds of ore came down form the Buffalo River region before the Civil War. Zinc frequently was found with lead.  At Calamine in Lawrence County, the Independence Mining Company opened three small mines and a smelter.

            Manganese, discovered near Batesville, was shipped down the White River to market.  The first iron works, also in the northeast, shipped 200 blooms in 1858.  Coal from Spadra near Clarksville first reached Little Rock in 1841 but could not be received regularly because the Arkansas River was unreliable.  All of these mining operations were undercapitalized and hampered by the absence of adequate transportation system.  Although “firsts,” they did not alter the agrarian economy significantly.  What they did was show how much Arkansas needed better transportation.

The Internal Improvements Campaign 

            Between 1850 and 1860, pro-industrial sentiment found a vocal outlet in the creation of industrial association.  Pulaski County merchants in 1852 created the first such body, the predecessor to the Chamber of Commerce of the twentieth century, and other counties followed.   Regional conventions, primarily intended to promote railroad construction, were held in Little Rock and Memphis.  Communities clashed over the best means to achieve their goals as political and geographic distractions surfaced.

            The political position of the Whigs- that the federal government should aid regional development- conflicted with the states’ rights theory of the Democrats, which denied the national government an active role.  In an 1845 Little Rock convention, Democrats endorsed the goals but not the means that Whig sought.  The Democrats were divided by 1852, for some argued that even in its bankrupt condition, Arkansas should assume a more active role in regional development.

The Beginnings of Railroads 

            Although the campaign for internal improvement scaled for greater federal expenditures for river improvements and road construction, the central issue by 1850 had become the need for railroads. “ I look upon it as a settled point that without a Railroad Arkansas is a gone coon,” wrote one supporter.  In the early 1850s, on editor beloved that Arkansas was awakening form its “Rip Van Winkle sleep.”  “The public mind is engaged in eagerly discussing the various objects that immediately or prospectively affect the interests of the state.”

            Unfortunately, there was no agreement about what those interests were.  One reason was localism, the sectional spirit that selfishly demanded that every project benefit each town, county and section.  This spirit, said Albert Pike in a preliminary warning to one convention, “ is here, it exists-it governs it controls everything.”  The editor of the Washington Telegraph warned:"Once arouse sectional feeling on this subject and nothing will be accomplished.  Each geographical division of the state and indeed every neighborhood will be found advocating its immediate interests, and there is an end to the concentration of our means."

            A second problem was that many remained skeptical of progress and unwilling to cooperate.  Batesville editor M.S. Kennard, in a lengthy analysis late in the decade, failed to analyze the cause, but he aptly described the symptoms. 

There is a strange and unaccountable disposition in our population, which prevents their being united in sentiment upon any subject.  In some cases sectarianism and others political partisanship; in still others personal piques and jealousies distract and divide the people so that the accomplishment of any public enterprise in which the cooperation of a number of citizens is necessary is next to impossible. 

            In the case of railroads, geography already had determined that no road could serve all sections. State Senator W.A. McClain from Johnson county finally concluded: “The north, and south, and east, and west seem wedded to peculiar interests which are impossible to reconcile so as to adopt any system or plan of general improvement.”

            Nothing illustrated McClain’s conclusion better than the 1850 debate about railroads.  Internal improvement supporters argued that the state should take the internal improvement funds given to it by the federal government and apply them to one major project.   A success, supporters urged, would prove what could be done, and then the state could address sectional concerns. Unfortunately, initial agreement cold not is an obtained.  Little Rock and Memphis merchants wanted a railroad between those points; the U.S. War Department, for military reasons, sought to connect Illinois with Texas; southern Arkansas cried for connections with the Mississippi River and both Napoleon and Helena resented Memphis and wanted rail connections with the capital.

            The clash of these com0peting interests spread into politics. Little Rock merchants forfeited the good will of Helena and Napoleon by voting a $1000,000 bond issue in 1855 to aid the Little Rock-Memphis route.  In retaliation, Helena Masons, under the leadership of Patrick Cleburne, refused to pay their $1 a head assessment to St. John’s College, ultimately helping to kill that promising institution.  Meanwhile, Arkansas’s Congressional delegation lined up behind the War Department’s plan and supported the Cairo and Fulton Railroad.  Roswell Beebe, a prominent Democratic speculator, became the first company president and former Congressman Edward Cross succeeded him.  As each project pushed ahead, Arkansas’s feeble economic resources were over-extended.

            The Memphis and Little Rock line made the most progress.  Memphis voted $350,000 in bonds to start the work, and more than 400 Irish laborers laid tracks form Hope field to the St. Francis River at Madison.  The first locomotive in Arkansas, the Little Rock, made its maiden run in 1857, but Mississippi River floods that year damaged the line heavily.  At the other end, construction started at Huntersville (North Little Rock) but ended during the Panic of 1857.  The Civil War spurred new work, and finally, in January 1862, William E. woodruff drove the last spike on the section linking Little Rock to DeValls Bluff.  The middle section between the White River and the St. Francs River through the Cache River bottoms was not completed until 1869.

            Even though it was incomplete, the road was the first step in the economic domination of Memphis over eastern Arkansas.  More than 3, 700 bales of Arkansas cotton headed for the Chickasaw Bluffs in 1860.  Local resentment was keen, ‘for as one Arkansas editor wrote:  “That city had been a huge leech fastened on the side of our state sucking its life blood and never satisfied.”

            None of the other railroads made as much progress. The lines form Napoleon and Helena and from Little Rock to Fort Smith complete their surveys.  The Cairo and Fulton finished its survey and began construction in Missouri but did not reach Arkansas.  The Mississippi, Ouachita and Red River Railroad cut a path into the swamps and managed to lay twenty miles of track near Monticello, which were used briefly in 1862.  Thus railroads, which figured so prominently in the civil War, were still not an important part of the Arkansas scene in 1861.

Other Economic Developments 

            Aside for railroads, the most agitated economic issue concerned building cotton factories.  That Southern cotton should have to go abroad or to New England for processing seemed treasonous to Southern nationalist.  The South had both the labor and the waterpower; all that was lacking was capital and expertise.  Because Arkansas was blessed with numerous suitable, sites, agitation for cotton mills developed early.  Probably the first in the state was erected in Washington County by former salt maker Mark Bean. With only eighty-four spindles, its sigh workers were the Beans’ slaves.

            William E. Woodruff led the chorus of industrial promoters in eth 1850s.  Breaking rank with Jacksonian orthodoxy, he endorsed a protective tariff and called on men to invest in factories rather that land and slaves.  Despite the rhetoric, Little rock investors failed to raise enough money to open a cotton mill at eh capital, but one at Van Buren became the state’s leading factory.   With 1, 300 spindles and twenty looms housed in a two story brick building, the steam –powered operation employed thirty hands when set into operation in 1853.

            A second enterprise was the work of industrial promoter Henry Merrill.  Merrill dammed the Little Roc north of Murfreesboro and powered a sawmill, gristmill, and flourmill, in addition to carding wool and spinning thread.   So extensive were there works that the community was called Royston.  Pike Countians responded to this New York-born promoter with “cursing and bitterness.”  Merrill compared his existence to that of Robinson Crusoe. During the Civil War, Merrill, although a loyal Confederate, received so much criticism that he sold out.

Other businesses in Arkansas were craft oriented like Little Rock’ chair factory and hattery. The capital had only fourteen establishments employing seventy-three persons in 1860.  The value of the goods produced was a mere $144,125.  Aside from a few potteries, the only industrial activities in the state were rural gristmills, gins and sawmills.

THE REVIVAL OF POLITICS 

            The arrival of new settlers and the rise of Southern nationalism slowly altered the political system during the 1850s. As more counties were added, new courthouse elites surfaced, stringing the politics of personality and patronage.  Demagoguery, the art of manipulating people though rhetoric, emerged at the end of the decade in the person of Thomas C. Hindman.

The Fall of the Whigs 

            The status of slavery in the new lands acquired in the Mexican War touched off a heated sectional debate that culminated in the Compromise of 1850 worked out by the Whig Henry Clay and Democrat Stephen A. Douglas.  As a result of the Compromise, the South obtained a new Fugitive Slave Law and the possibility that the new lands mighty become slave states; the North got California as a free state and ended the slave trade in eth District of Columbia. Both Northern abolitionists and Southern fire-eaters opposed the compromise.

            In the United States Senate, John C. Calhoun’s last speech, written on his deathbed, urged Southerners to reject compromise.  Calhoun’s most devoted disciple in Arkansas was Democratic Congressman Robert Ward Johnson.  In a public letter to voter, Johnson expressed his hostility to compromise and endorsed the secession-minded convention of radicals meeting in Nashville, Tennessee.  On Johnson’s view, the North had fallen into the hands of fanatics, his proof being an abolitionist letter that Johnson had reprinted in the Banner.

            Johnson’s extremism caught people by surprise in Arkansas. Democratic Senator Solon Borland, who initially had been sympathetic to Calhoun’s position, even to exchanging blows with compromiser Henry S. Foote of Mississippi, returned to Arkansas.  Democratic Senator Solon Borland, who initially had been sympathetic to Calhoun’s position, even to exchanging blows with compromiser Henry S.Foote of Mississippi, returned to Arkansas because of family sickness even as the crucial vote were being tailed.  This did not keep him from giving several speeches around the state in which he affirmed a strong devotion to the Union but urged delay so that the South could get better terms.  Borland’s views got vaguer and vaguer in each succeeding speech, and his critics cogently suggested that he ought to be in Washington at this crucial juncture.

            Newspaper readers accustomed to considering politics as personality were confused.  Democrat owner William E. Woodruff hired two successive editors, only to find that their views were substantially different from his own.  Those who looked to Woodruff’s paper to see where dissident Democrats stood got little enlightenment.  In addition, a number of nationally minded Democrats revolted against Johnson’s extremist position.  “Family” Democrat Thompson B. Flournoy, who had fought hard for Sevier’s renomination in 1848, supported compromise, as did Van Buren’s dissident Democrat, George W. Clark.  Popular sentiment ran so strongly in their favor that Johnson soon sounded retreat: “No one,” he replied to his critics, “would have misconstrued me to be disorganizer per se, except one whose appetite was sharpened by some feeling of prejudice or hostility.”  Johnson then announced that he would not seek reelection in 1851 and voted only for the new Fugitive Slave Law among the individual compromise measures.

            Johnson’s decision to withdraw caught his opponents unprepared, and after reconsideration, the wily veteran let it be known he would accept to a draft.  With Flournoy’s support and garbed as a moderate, Johnson defeated George W. Clarke at the Democratic convention.  Meanwhile, elsewhere in the South, dissident Democrats joined with Whigs to form Union Party tickets, often successfully unseating anti-compromise Democrats.  Arkansas Whigs, however, ran one of their own, Colonel John Preston of Helena, thereby failing to capitalize on potential Democratic discontent.  Woodruff gave lukewarm support to Johnson, and without internal division among Democrats, Johnson won with 54.4 percent of the vote.  He moved on to the Senate the next year.  Johnson kept his sectionalist sentiments throughout the decade, but he practiced studied moderation in controlling the state’s patronage.

            The Whigs, having failed to divide the Democrats in the House race, applied the tactic to the 1852 gubernatorial contest.  The incumbent John S. Roane was retiring, and the Democratic convention chose Elias Conway to carry the Party’s banner.  “Anti-family” men put for the General Bryan H. Smithson as an independent, and Whigs refrained from making a nomination.

            Smithson garnered the support of Woodruff, who called him the “Democratic and Internal Improvements Candidate for Governor,” as opposed to “Dirt Road” Conway.  Smithson argued cogently that the state had wasted its internal improvement fund and should concentrate on one project.  “One work of internal improvements,” he said, “ will test the advantages and value of the system and will promote the construction of others.”  He hoped the project would be the Memphis and Little Rock Railroad.  Instead, the Banner endorsed building three roads, even as Conway appealed to farmers by calling for good dirt roads.  Conway’s tactic succeeded, and amidst sectional recriminations, the “family” won again.

            Conway’s victory also buried the Whig Party.  Years of failure had left them, as one historian observed, “a political mule [lacking] either the pride of ancestry or hope of posterity.”  The national alliance with prop compromise Democrats broke up by 1852, a presidential candidate Winfield Scott went down to defeat, primarily because Northern “conscience” Whites and their Southern cohorts no longer could associate agreeably. In Arkansas, Whigs form plantation counties had failed to support Smithson, and as usual, the Democratic presidential nominee, Franklin Pierce, carried the state.  Opposition to the “family” did not vanish, but it ceased to come from the Whigs.

Constitutional Reform

            The failure of the internal improvements campaign led some to view the old 1836 Constitution as an obstacle to progress.  Gazette editor C.C. Danley observed in early 1854: “Nearly twenty years have elapsed since the adoption of our present constitution and time and experience have developed and clearly marked its defects.”

            Supporters of reform wanted to simplify the law by abolishing the distinction between common law and equity courts (now circuit and chancery courts), decreasing the number of legislators, expanding the jurisdiction of the justices of peace, and electing all state officers, including judges.

            Although the announced rationale behind constitutional reform was democratic, supporters of reform probably had a hidden purpose.  The ban on banking, still in effect as Amendment One, applied even to private banks. Danley called a free banking law necessary for a commercial economy and said they were totally unlike the privileged, state chartered banks of the past.  

            Opponents of reform were mostly “family” Democrats and those Whigs who disliked electing judges.  The True Democrat called the 1836 Constitution ”perfect and faultless,” and noted that  “experience teachers that banks are injurious to the community in which they are established.”  Attacking a constitutional convention as “ a mere scheme to fasten upon us another system of banks, “ opponents asserted that a convention would cost anywhere from $50,000 to $100, 000.  In August 1854, voters rejected the convention by a vote of 10,997 for to 15,897 against.  As with so many such votes, county totals offered little rationale as to what motivated voters.

The Know-Nothing Party  Know Nothing Party

  A new party arose in the aftermath of the Whig debacle of 1852. Its official name was the American Party, but it was universally called Know-Nothing because of the secrecy that at first bound its members to refrain from discussing Party affairs. Xenophobic in ideology, its goal the elimination of foreigners, particularly the Catholic Irish; from American political life.
 

  Arkansas had only 1,468 foreign-born residents and only seven Catholic churches, making it hard to arouse the voters to these issues.  Therefore, it was not surprising those historians.  To a large extent, local Know-Nothingism was merely Senator Borland’s revolt against the “family” 
 Borland’s involvement with the movement began indirectly in Washington, where he smashed in the nose of Joseph C.G. Kennedy, eh Superintendent of the Census Bureau, who had annoyed the senator.  Shortly thereafter, in 1853, Borland resigned his Senate seat to undertake a diplomatic mission to Central America.  He intervened in a dispute about certain Americans accused of crimes in Nicaragua, touching off a riot in which her barely escaped serious injury for a thrown bottle.  Returning to the United States, Borland filed a report that prompted the Pierce bombard and destroy Greytown, Nicaragua.  Meanwhile, Robert Ward Johnson took Borland’s vacant seat, and in late 1854, the unemployed ex-ambassador was back in Arkansas editing the Gazette and Democrat, which comrade, C.C. Danley.

            When Know-Nothingism appeared on the national scene, Borland rushed to embrace it.  His main argument was that he was remaining true to principles of the Democratic Party, but that the national Democratic Party leaders had become abolitionist.  In short order, an alliance of “anti-family” Democrats under Borland’s lead and some Whigs such as Albert Pike organized a state Party.  Pike contributed a pamphlet attacking Catholicism, and in 1855, acts of violence against Little Rock Catholics barely stopped short of riot.  The Know-Nothings captured the city elections the next year.  The most insidious part of the movement was that the secrecy oath made it impossible to know in the beginning that really was involved.  Thus, rumor and innuendo took the place of debate until the Party decided to come out into the open. 

            The state Party nominated James Yell for governor in 1856.  The nephew of Archibald Yell, James was a rough and forceful individual with none of his uncle’s charisma.  At the national level, the Party nominated Millard Fillmore, but Party hopes collapsed when Southerners led by Albert Pike walked out of the convention, claiming that the platform was not sufficiently pro-slavery.  Incumbent Governor Conway easily defeated Yell, and James Buchanan won Arkansas’s electoral votes.           

            The Party quickly disappeared in the aftermath of defeat.  Solon Borland left Little Rock for Memphis, where he edited the Memphis, Enquirer for the rest of the decade.  Danley took editorial charge of the Gazette, dropping and Democrat as part of the title because he saw it as inconsistent with his unaffiliated status.  Despite Danley’s continued hostility toward the “family,” the anti- Democratic element in the legislature was reduced by 1859 to calling itself the “Opposition.”

            The Rise of Southern Nationalism 

            Southern nationalism began creeping into Arkansas during the late 1850s.  When Robert Ward Johnson opposed the Compromise of 1850, Albert Pike penned a poem denouncing disunionism.  Six years later, Pike decided that the American Party was unsound on slavery, and by 1860, this Massachusetts native had become a confirmed secessionist.  Pike had remained abreast of sectional trends, but most Arkansas lacked his sophistication.  Yet on certain issues, evidence of a growing sectional feeling began to surface.

            The Arkansas Gazette promoted a “buy Southern” campaign.  Editor Danley seemed to have had a fixation on the evils of trading with Cincinnati merchants, which one fellow editor attributed to Danley’s over consumption of Cincinnati rotgut.  At any rate, Danley promoted Southern trade and urged his fellow Arkansans to invest was the reopening of the slave trade, closed since 1808.  Editor Danley’s rationale was that Arkansas’s development was being held back by a shortage of slave laborers.  Some Democratic papers agreed and added reasons of their own, but others claimed the idea was impractical and disunions.  Danley sat back and enjoyed the fracas.

            The language of Southern nationalism remained confined to the upper reaches of society and served mostly as a rhetorical device.  When trouble arose in nearby Kansas, and Southern fire-eaters called for positive action, Arkansas, even those of the planter class, sat back and let the free soilers win.  Expelling free blacks appealed to widely hold racist attitudes and represented the limit Arkansans were prepared to go.           

The Revolt Against the “Family” 

            On the eve of the Civil War, Arkansas was in the midst of a major political uprising, one that greatly influenced the history of the state during the war years.  Behind the turmoil lay two factors.  First, the rapid increase of population in the late 1850s brought in thousands of voters who were both better educated than the state average and less inclined to follow the old elite.  Second, designing men, sensing these realities, planned an elaborate revolt.

            The first key figure in the new politics of the late 1850s was Thomas C. Hindman.  A Mississippi planter’s son and a Mexican War veteran, Hindman had been a follower Jefferson Davis and a member of the Mississippi legislature before moving to Helena in 1854.  There he married the daughter of prominent land speculator Henry L. Biscoe.  Although a lawyer by profession, Hindman’s real love was politics, and the young couple spent their honeymoon in Little Rock, where Hindman, a Democrat, surveyed the political scene.

            Hindman began his career as a violent critic of Know-Nothings.  On one occasion he came to Little Rock, and although not a member of the legislature, boldly entered the floor to manage a bill.  His high-handed methods led to a fight before the session adjourned.  Back in Helena, he and friend Patrick Cleburne were assaulted on the main street of town at midday in an affray that left one attacker dead and both men seriously wounded.  As his reward for this Democratic fealty, Hindman in 1858 placed Bentonville’s A.B. Greenwood as the congressman for the northern district.           

In Washington, Hindman fully articulated fire-eater rhetoric in displaying all the characteristics of Southern extremism.  “He was perpetually anxious to have a duel,” one Northern colleague recalled, and in pursuit of disruption in1859, fought long and hard to keep the House of Representatives from electing a speaker.  He advocated adoption of proposed constitutional amendments to reopen the slave trade, allowing a state to veto federal appointments, denying representation to any state interfering with the recovery of fugitive slaves, and establishing slavery in all territories.           

            Hindman was not at philosophical odds with the “family” in his quest for power, but he was determined to take control over patronage away from them.  After establishing his first newspaper at Helena, Hindman in 1859 set up the Old Line Democrat in Little Rock to counter the hostile “family” run True Democrat.  Thomas C. Peek, a former pro-Douglas editor from Illinois, became its editor and managed to mention Hindman thirty-eight times in the first issues.

            The first test of Hindman’s power came when Senator William K. Sebastian came up for reelection.  This “milk and cider” politician had offended no one.  Unfortunately for Hindman’s ambitions, Sebastian was also a resident of Helena.  Hindman’s failure to block Sebastian renomination cut off one avenue of advancement, for the legislature would never select two senators from the same town.

            A second setback came when Hindman was forced by illness to cancel a Little Rock appearance at which he had promised to denounce the “family” to their faces.  Senator Johnson took full advantage of the situation, labeling Hindman “ a bully and an impostor to the ranks of honor.”  Stopped in his direct quest for power, Hindman turned underground to overthrow the “family.”

            A typically handpicked Democratic state convention nominated Richard H. Johnson to succeed Governor Elias N. Conway in the spring of 1860.  Hindman’s supporters, although not fielding a candidate, nevertheless protested mightily.  Encouraged by the uproar and fairly certain that no “Opposition” candidate planned to enter the race, Henry Massie Rector announced as an independent candidate for governor.

            Rector was no newcomer to Arkansas politics.  Since his arrival as a youth to defend his father’s numerous land claims, including one at Hot Springs, Rector had held a variety of positions:  teller at the State Bank, United States Marshal during the Tyler administration, state surveyor-general and state senator and judge on the state Supreme Court.  Often financially overextended, Rector once argued in court that he and “H. M. Rector” were not one and the same person, and he had quarreled with his cousin, Elias N. Conway, and his other Rector kin.  Hence, although Rector was “family,” the ties had been surveyed by 1860.  He could count on the support of his brother-in-law, Ben T. DuVal of Fort Smith, a prominent legislator, and Edmund Burgevin, a Little Rock merchant of dubious reputation.           

            Rector posed as a political outsider despite his background.  Thomas C. Peek of the Old Line Democrat, who during the campaign married Rector’s niece, asked:  “Who is Henry M. Rector?  A poor honest farmer of Saline County, who toils at the plow handles . . . earning his bread by the sweat of his brow.”  Convinced that governmental inactivity was no longer popular, Rector borrowed from General Bryan Smithson’s 1852 rhetoric and campaigned in favor of internal improvements.  Wiser than Smithson, he refused to endorse any particular plan, but instead proposed that state aid be given to railroads, which in turn would then pay off the state debt.           

            While Rector’s plans grew less specific and more ambiguous with each speech, the Johnson platform, inherited from Governor Conway, promised to liquidate the remaining Real Estate Bank assets.  An independent auditor’s report had shown great abuses and favoritism in the trustees’ handling of the debt, and Hindman’s father-in-law, Henry L. Biscoe, was one of the trustees.  Johnson’s plan to force the trustees to settle up and have the state meet its legal obligations threatened those rich men still in debt to the Bank who thus threw their support to Rector.          

            Rector also tested the support for public education.  When planters objected to paying for poor people’s children, Rector abandoned this issue, substituting in its stead a call for a tax cut.

            Despite the obvious defects in his platform, Rector took the offensive.  “He is an orator of the ka-larruping style,” one commentator noted, offering in evidence the following sample:  “I stand on my pedestal, shorn of abominations and malpractices where on they relied to cast the nomination upon the present nominee of the Democratic party.”  Richard H. Johnson, the former True Democrat editor, was by contrast “slow, dry, and prosy.”  A Whig editor, M. Shelby Kennard of Batesville, called Johnson “about the poorest stump speaker we ever listened to,” but Johnson did claim sympathy as the first gubernatorial candidate to be born in Arkansas, and “if you don’t elect me governor.  I’ve no whar to go.”  Artist William Queensbury, who contributed a cartoon satirizing the candidates, privately expressed doubts about Rector:  “Henry is a violent man and fights people.”

            The 1860 gubernatorial election resembled some of the territorial contests in its vulgarity and dirty politics.  Peek of the Old Line Democrat accused True Democrat editor Elias C. Boudinot, an Eastern-educated lawyer and part Cherokee of not being a citizen.  In return Boudinot refused to deal with a "skulking poltroon" whose words were "well worthy of a man who was purchased in Illinois shipped to Arkansas, and bid by his owner to heap slander and abuse upon strangers and gentlemen."  In the southern Arkansas congressional race where "old swamp doctor" C.B. Mitchel, with "family" support, fought E.W. Gantt, an extremist on the Hindman model.  The  "family" suffered its first election defeat in the August state elections.  Rector beat Johnson by some 3,000 votes and Gantt defeated Michel.  Because this election took place during a climactic presidential race, some voters wanted to know where the candidates stood on national issues.  Both Johnson and Rector did their best to confuse the issue.  A Batesville editor reported that Johnson took "the true Southern ground", but that Rector was the "most ultra" and a Unionist testified that in Bentonville, Rector swore that "though Seward himself were elected to the Presidency of the United States, it were no justifiable grounds for secession and nothing short of an overt act on the part of the North would justify such a step".  As for the Johnson, they "were know to be disunionists."

The most obvious conclusion is that voters wanted a change.  Rector's greatest support came from newcomers unfamiliar with Arkansas politics.  Knowledgeable ex-Whigs refused to stomach Rector, who carried only eight of the 22 tradtional Whig counties.  No organizer and incapable of working in harmony even with Hindman, Rector was a maverick.  The highlight of term term as governor was his inauguration, "one of the grandest explosions of popular enthusiasm ever witnessed in Arkansas."

Arkansas and the Presidential Election of 1860

Even as state affairs turned topsy-turvy, the nation witnessed the death agony of the Democratic party.  Stephen A. Douglas, the author of the Kansas-Nebraska Act, had opposed the Buchanan administration's violation of the doctrine of popular sovereignty in Kansas and survived both an administration-inspired purge and the challenge of Republican Abraham Lincoln to win re-election to the Senate in 1858.  He stood as the Northern Democrats' logical choised i 1860 ro replace the retiring Buchanan.  Although Douglas  commanded national support, the fire-eaters remembered his 1858 state at Freeport that the Dred Scot decision of the United States Supreme Court did not guarantee slavery in a territory if the people did not want it.  This positions was unacceptable to extremists.  Extremists now insisted that Congress enact a slave code for every territory.

Lacking an obvious alternative to Douglas, national extremists chose to defeat Douglas by destroying the Democratic Party.  Elements of this strife spilled over into Arkansas.  Congressman Hindman was on the front one of extremism in his tirades and Senator Johson, somewhat tamed by his 1850 experience, predicted the demise of the Union and was unwilling to save it. 

When the state convention met in the spring of 1860 and elected delegates to the natinal convention at Charleston, a compromise slate was chosen.  An effort failed to instruct the delegates to walk out if a pro-slavery plataform was not adopted.  Some of the delegation did join the Southern walkout, claiming to be acting on the authority of the convention. A bitter split in the state Party followed with Albert Rust and Thompson B. Flournoy continuing to support Douglas.  The Southern bolters held their convention in Richmond at which John C. Breckinridge of Kentucky was nominated.  In Arkansas, both the "family" and the Hindman faction united behind Breckinridge who was sanctioned as the regular Democratic nominee.

Southern Whigs responded to the impending Democratic collapse by organizing the Constitutional Union Party .  C.C. Danley of the Arkansas Gazette, who had never been  a Whig, supported the nomination of Texas Governor Sam Houston, but the new group chose Tennessee's John Bell.  Committed to saving the Union the Party ran on the Platform "The Constitution, The Union, and the Laws"  The Republicans  nominated Abraham Lincoln who was not on the ballot in Arkansas.

The 1860 election was perhaps the hardest fought in Arkansas since the 1840s.  The Douglas effort was the weakest but did editorial support in Van Buren, Pine Bluff, Pocahontas. and Little Rock.  The other Democratic papers took the line that Breckinridge was the true party candidate and that he stood a good chance to win and large Breckinridge vote would give the South a better bargaining position.

While Breckinridge supporters played down the seriousness of the splite, the Constitutional Unionists emphasize it.  Paper in Helena, Little Rock, Washington and Batesville  warned of the threat of Civil war.

Some 7,000 fewer voters participated in the November presidential election than in the August state election and they ignored the  alarmist warnings.  Breckinridge carried the state with 28,732 votes , followed by Bell with 20,094 and Douglas with 5,277.  Judge John Brown of Camden found Breckinridge support among people who did not read.  Breckinridge ran best in the Ozark and Ouachita counties far removed from influence of newspapers.  The planter counties were areas of Bell's strength, partly because of their Whig tradition and because any disruption of the national market would hurt the planters immediately.  Breckinridge strength was also found in the southwest where the plantation system was expanding.  An apparent indication that those on the lower end of the slave ownership scale were more extreme politically than the large planters. If voter behavior in this election gives any clue to the degree to which Arkansas  voters accepted Southern nationalism then less than 20 percent were in sympathy with Hindman's extremism.  Significantly t5his figure included a disproportionately large number of elected officials and those of the local elite to whom many plain folk turned to for political guidance.