Arkansas

ARKANSAS

Arkansas has maintained a certain backwoods reputation in spite of its attempts to modernize and industrialize. At first totally dependent on the cotton crop grown on slaveholding plantations, the state was forced to diversify its agriculture after the Civil War. Today agriculture is only a small part of the state's economic output; such sectors as manufacturing, mining, and services are far more important to the state's economy. Arkansas continues to struggle to provide employment for its poorest citizens, many of whom lack education and job skills.

Hernando de Soto (c.1496–1592) led the first Spanish expedition into Arkansas in 1541. In 1673 a French expedition headed by Father Jacques Marquette (1637–1675) and Louis Jolliet (1645–1700) entered the territory, as did Robert Cavelier, Sieur de la Salle (1643–1687) in 1682. La Salle claimed the whole Mississippi valley for France. The first permanent European settlement was at Arkansas Post, at the confluence of the Arkansas and White Rivers. France held onto the territory until 1762 when it was ceded to Spain, although it was later returned to French control. The French sold Arkansas to the United States as part of the Louisiana Purchase in 1803. Initially, part of the Missouri Territory, Arkansas, became an independent territory in 1819 and entered the Union as a slave state in 1836.

Southern and eastern Arkansas fast became cotton-growing areas, with the large plantations run by slave labor which characterized other southern states. The northern and western counties in the Ozark and Ouachita mountains were populated by smaller, poorer white farmers.

In the mid-nineteenth century the state was beset by credit problems. The state's two largest banks failed in the 1840s, the government defaulted on bonds issued by one of the banks. A measure of the fatalism and distrust of banks on the part of the rural population is evident in the fact that the state constitution was amended to prohibit all banking in the state. After the American Civil War (1861–1865) banking was restored, but the state again defaulted on its obligations to pay off railroad bonds. Until 1917 Arkansas securities were not honored by New York banks.

Transportation was slow to develop in Arkansas. Before the Civil War, commerce developed along the rivers where freight was shipped by hand-propelled keelboats and later, by steamboat. Thus the major towns in the state, such as Little Rock, Camden, Fort Smith, and Pine Bluff, grew along the waterways. Little Rock boasted over 300 steamboats docking in 1859. In the later nineteenth century towns were founded not only by the rivers but also in the interior. This happened in the 1870s, when the railroads begin to traverse the state, laying 2,200 miles of track by 1890.

In 1861 after a period of hesitation the state voted to secede from the Union. After the South's defeat in 1865 a Reconstruction (1865–1877) government was established that was led by Governor Powell Clayton and other northern Republican politicians. The people in Arkansas hated the corruption and exploitation they suffered under these profiteering outsiders, whom they called carpetbaggers. They ruled the state until 1874 and left such a bad reputation that after Reconstruction, the Democratic Party was in power for many decades to come.

When the Confederacy collapsed property values in the South deflated rapidly. In order to restore agricultural productivity in Arkansas after the war a system of "sharecropping" was developed. According to historian Harry S. Ashmore "It would prove a blight to whites and blacks alike in the years to come, and at its worst it properly could be condemned as the replacement of slavery with a form of peonage. But it provided a means of survival for both races in a desperate time. . . ."

After Reconstruction Arkansas railroads promoted immigration from other states and from abroad, hoping for settlers to establish themselves on the land the railroads had received through government grants. The railroads also controlled large stands of virgin timber. By the 1880s the two largest landowners in Grant County were the St. Louis and Iron Mountain Railroad and the Muskegon Lumber Company of Michigan—the latter evidence that most of the lumbering profits were going out of state.

Arkansas was slow to modernize and did not really emerge from its agricultural past until after the Great Depression (1929–1939). Its farm economy gradually changed from total dependence on cotton to the growing of crops like rice and soybeans and the production of poultry. Cotton, formerly grown only on large plantations, began to appear in the northwest hill country. Tenant farming was the norm for several decades after the Civil War. Coal mining began in the late nineteenth century; the state also mined bauxite and produced oil. Lumbering was important until around 1909, when it decreased until reforestation began in the 1920s. Pulaski County's industrial development was slowed down by the controversy over school integration in Little Rock in 1957, but development continued in the following decades.

In 1966 Winthrop Rockefeller became the first Republican governor since Reconstruction, bringing a new, businesslike image to the state. Though he warred constantly with a Democratic legislature he did encourage investment in the state. In the early 1970s the Arkansas River navigation system opened up a water route between the Mississippi River and Oklahoma, helping to promote industrial expansion in several river ports along the Arkansas River. By this time the tenant farmer economy had been virtually eliminated by farm mechanization and industrialization.

A later governor, William Jefferson Clinton, who became U.S. President in 1992, brought a number of reforms to the state in areas such as health insurance, education funding, and investment tax credits for corporations. Arkansas's constitution, however, requires a two-thirds majority vote of the legislature for new state income taxation and this had hampered the state government's efforts to improve the state's standard of living.

In the mid-1990s Arkansas's important industries were manufacturing, especially lumber and wood products, agriculture, forestry, and tourism. Over 40 percent of the state's annual gross product was now based on commercial, financial, and professional services. Some industries such as chicken processing, enjoyed close relations with the state's regulatory system. The state's per capita income was under $17,000 in 1996, ranking it only 47th in the nation. Although a number of important labor reforms were passed at the beginning of the century Arkansas is not a strong union state, with only eight percent of workers claiming union membership.

See also: Keelboats, Reconstruction, Sharecropping, Steamboats

FURTHER READING

Ashmore, Harry S. Arkansas: A Bicentennial History. New York: Norton, 1978.

Du Vall, Leland. Arkansas: Colony and State. Little Rock, AR: Rose, 1973.

Fletcher, John Gould. Arkansas. Fayetteville, AR: University of Arkansas Press, 1989.

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

Whayne, Jeannie M. A New Plantation South: Land, Labor, and Federal Favor in Twentieth-Century Arkansas. Fayetteville, AR: University of Arkansas Press, 1983.

deep in the arkansas consciousness is a tragic sense that across three centuries of existence as a colony, territory, and state its people have been misunderstood and put upon.

harry s. ashmore, arkansas: a bicentennial history, 1978