When the board of directors of the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis held a meeting in Little Rock last year, I was asked to give a dinner speech at the Clinton Presidential Center. This was my assignment: Provide an overview of the state's history for those in attendance, most of whom aren't from Arkansas. Do it in 30 minutes.
That's a difficult task. Arkansas is complex; a state of contradictions. It's not easy for outsiders to understand. We're mostly Southern, but also a tad Southwestern and a bit Midwestern. The Delta region is far different from the mountain regions of the state. Even the Ouachita Mountains and the Ozark Mountains have their differences.
As I contemplated the history of this fascinating state, I decided to title my speech "A State of Disaster." Boil down Arkansas history and you wind up with a place whose residents have experienced a series of natural and man-made disasters that limited population growth and held down wages.
Let's start with a natural disaster, the New Madrid Earthquakes of 1811-12. The series of earthquakes began in December 1811 and continued until April 1812. On Monday, Dec. 16, 1811, a huge earthquake began about three miles beneath what's now Blytheville. New Madrid, Mo., was the only place in the area with a sizable population in those days, which is why the earthquake was named for that town.
"In what are now Craighead, Mississippi and Poinsett counties in northeast Arkansas, land near the St. Francis River sank into the earth, creating the St. Francis Sunken Lands where great forests had stood moments before," Nancy Hendricks writes for the Encyclopedia of Arkansas History & Culture. "In northwest Tennessee, uplifted land dammed Reelfoot Creek as other lands sank, creating Reelfoot Lake, 18 miles long and five miles wide. In Arkansas, the earthquake created what's now Big Lake in Mississippi County. . . . Major quakes continued to occur through the winter of 1812. The worst of these came on Jan. 23 and Feb. 7 with about 2,000 tremors and aftershocks continuing into April 1812. Some reports say that the earth was in constant motion between Jan. 23 and Feb. 4."
The westward expansion of the United States was beginning, and Arkansas already was a hard place for settlers to get into with an eastern border made up of swamps and impenetrable bottomland hardwood forests. With tens of thousands of acres of downed timber due to the earthquakes, Arkansas became even tougher to enter from the east. Settlers found it much easier to go north to Missouri or south to Louisiana. To this day, Missouri and Louisiana have far larger populations than Arkansas.
Most parts of Arkansas remained frontier areas until the start of the Civil War. Education was rare and laws often weren't enforced. Development was further hampered by the scandals surrounding the Arkansas Real Estate Bank, which the first Arkansas Legislature established in 1836. The bank was marked by almost constant financial mismanagement and political corruption from 1836-55. The state took control of its assets in 1855. The first of the great man-made disasters came just six years later when a group of men chosen by Arkansas voters decided to secede from the Union.
Secession wasn't pre-ordained in Arkansas. Large parts of the state were covered by mountains, and most of the mountain residents owned no slaves. Union sentiment remained strong there. On Feb. 18, 1861, Arkansas voters elected delegates to a secession convention. Unionist David Walker became the convention president, and Unionists held the majority through the convention's first session. The Confederate firing on Fort Sumter in South Carolina in April 1861 changed sentiment, however. On May 6, 1861, Arkansas Secession Convention delegates voted to secede.
"The Secession Convention's two-fold roles in passing an ordinance of secession and in trying to put Arkansas on a war footing set the stage for the next five years," writes historian Michael Dougan of Arkansas State University. "In the Ozarks and Ouachitas, many rejected secession, especially once the Confederacy began drafting men into its army. Gov. Henry Massie Rector, although wounded, remained in power, and his subsequent actions, which included a threat to have Arkansas secede from secession, did not further the Confederate cause."
How much better off would Arkansas have been had it not fought on the losing side? The state suffered the ravages of the war and Reconstruction, setting back development by decades. In the years after the war, Arkansas was like a colony as outside investors stripped it of its timber and minerals. Congress passed the Southern Homestead Act in 1866 to provide free land from the public domain in former Confederate states. Among those 11 states, Arkansas was second only to Florida in the number of acres in the public domain. About 27 percent of the state's acreage was unclaimed. More than 80 percent of that unclaimed land was in the swampy Delta.
The late historian C. Fred Williams of the University of Arkansas at Little Rock wrote: "Congress' amending the Southern Homestead Act led to a wave of speculation as representatives of timber and railroad companies descended on the South to buy millions of acres from the public domain. Buyers representing seven Northern companies bought 114,334 acres of Arkansas between 1876 and 1888. Additional purchases by Arkansans pushed the acquisition of public lands to 628,744 acres.
"By the time Congress took steps in 1888 to again limit access to the public domain, Arkansas had few public lands left. Thousands of acres were now under the control of private companies that saw little reason to assess the land for its true market value. Not only did these companies deny the state tax revenue by taking land off the market, they deprived the state of even more revenue by transporting resources out of state for processing."
Arkansas began to make economic strides in the early 1900s before a series of disasters came along in quick succession--the Great Flood of 1927, the start of the Great Depression in 1929, the Great Drought of 1930-31, the Great Flood of 1937. Those events led to population losses. With the rapid mechanization of agriculture from 1940-60, the work of tens of thousands of sharecroppers and tenant farmers was no longer needed. That led to Arkansas being the state that lost the largest percentage of its population in that 20-year period.
Throw in the next great man-made disaster--a fateful decision by Gov. Orval Faubus--and you have a bleak period for Arkansas. That will be the subject of Wednesday's column.
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Rex Nelson is a senior editor at the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette.
Editorial on 01/06/2019