The Impact Of The Civil War And Reconstruction On Arkansas

This groundbreaking study, first published in 1994, draws on a rich variety of primary sources to describe Arkansas society before, during, and after the Civil War. While the Civil War devastated the state, this book shows how those who were powerful before the war reclaimed their dominance during Reconstruction. Most importantly, the white elite's postwar commitment to a cotton economy led them to set up a sharecropping system very much like slavery, in which workers had little control over their own labor. In arguing for both change and continuity, Moneyhon reconciles contemporary accounts of the war's effects while addressing ongoing debates within the historical literature.

This groundbreaking study, first published in 1994, draws on a rich variety of primary sources to describe Arkansas society before, during, and after the Civil War. While the Civil War devastated the state, this book shows how those who were powerful before the war reclaimed their dominance during Reconstruction. Most importantly, the white elite's postwar commitment to a cotton economy led them to set up a sharecropping system very much like slavery, in which workers had little control over their own labor. In arguing for both change and continuity, Moneyhon reconciles contemporary accounts of the war's effects while addressing ongoing debates within the historical literature.

Moneyhon looks at the reasons Reconstruction failed to live up to its promise.

Reconstruction has been called one of the most tumultuous and controversial periods of Arkansas's history, an era in which African Americans sought to secure the benefits of their hard-won freedom, the former leaders of the state pursued restoration of their pre-war economic and political status, and the U.S. Army and the Freedmen's Bureau sought to maintain a balance between these competing interests. By the time Reconstruction ended in 1874, Arkansas had been wracked by brutal political violence, black legislators had experienced their first opportunities for service, and the Republican Party was embroiled in the tragicomedy of the Brooks-Baxter War, setting the stage for the rise of the Democratic "Redeemers." While thousands of books have been written about the American Civil War, the tense period that followed the war has received relatively little attention. In light of this, the Old State House Museum in Little Rock brought a distinguished group of experts together for a day-long seminar in 2017 to discuss Reconstruction in Arkansas and its aftermath. Speakers discussed the greater issue of Reconstruction across the South, the political situation in Arkansas during the period, the activities of African American legislators in the state, political and military violence during Reconstruction, the long-lasting effects of the 1874 state constitution, and the bizarre affair in which two men with claims to the governor's office fought over control of the state capitol. In this collection of essays written by the event's speakers, Carl H. Moneyhon provides an overview of Reconstruction in the United States, Jay Barth explores post-Civil War politics, Blake Wintory discusses the African Americans who served in the Arkansas General Assembly, Damon Cluck delves into the Arkansas militias that provided the firepower for Reconstruction violence, Kenneth Barnes gives insights into the political violence that convulsed the state, Thomas DeBlack unravels the Brooks-Baxter War, and Rodney Harris visits the 1874 Constitution and its effects on Arkansas's future. The writings collected in this volume offer valuable insights into Reconstruction in Arkansas and how its effects still resonate today.

When Arkansas seceded from the Union in 1861, it was a thriving state. But the Civil War and Reconstruction left it reeling, impoverished, and so deeply divided that it never regained the level of prosperity it had previously enjoyed. Although most of the major battles of the war occurred elsewhere, Arkansas was critical to the Confederate war effort in the vast Trans-Mississippi region, and Arkansas soldiers served—some for the Union and more for the Confederacy—in every major theater of the war. And the war within the state was devastating. Union troops occupied various areas, citizens suffered greatly from the war's economic disruption, and guerilla conflict and factional tensions left a bitter legacy. Reconstruction was in many ways a continuation of the war as the prewar elite fought to regain economic and political power. In this, the fourth volume in the Histories of Arkansas series, Thomas DeBlack not only describes the major players and events in this dramatic and painful story, but also explores the experiences of ordinary people. Although the historical evidence is complex—and much of the secondary literature is extraordinarily partisan—DeBlack offers a balanced, vivid overview of the state's most tumultuous period.

Within two months of Confederate General Robert E. Lee's surrender at Appomattox Court House on 9 April 1865, the Confederacy had collapsed, and its armed forces had ceased to exist. In the spring of 1865, the U.S. Army faced the unprecedented task of occupying eleven conquered Southern states and administering "Reconstruction"-the process by which the former rebellious states would be restored to the Union. But a rapid demobilization of the Army placed the remaining occupation troops at a disadvantage almost from the start.This brochure traces the Army's law enforcement, stability, and peacekeeping roles in the South from May 1865 to the end of Reconstruction in 1877, marking a unique period in American history. During that time, the Southern states remained under military occupation, and for several years, they were also ruled by military government. Veteran Army commanders such as Philip H. Sheridan, John M. Schofield, Daniel E. Sickles, Edward R. S. Canby, and Winfield S. Hancock may have found the work of Reconstruction less dangerous than fighting the Civil War had been, but they also found it no less challenging.

In the first book-length study of Arkansas slavery in more than sixty years, A Weary Land offers a glimpse of enslaved life on the South’s western margins, focusing on the intersections of land use and agriculture within the daily life and work of bonded Black Arkansans. As they cleared trees, cultivated crops, and tended livestock on the southern frontier, Arkansas’s enslaved farmers connected culture and nature, creating their own meanings of space, place, and freedom. Kelly Houston Jones analyzes how the arrival of enslaved men and women as an imprisoned workforce changed the meaning of Arkansas’s acreage, while their labor transformed its landscape. They made the most of their surroundings despite the brutality and increasing labor demands of the “second slavery”—the increasingly harsh phase of American chattel bondage fueled by cotton cultivation in the Old Southwest. Jones contends that enslaved Arkansans were able to repurpose their experiences with agricultural labor, rural life, and the natural world to craft a sense of freedom rooted in the ability to own land, the power to control their own movement, and the right to use the landscape as they saw fit.