Slavery and Secession in Arkansas: A Documentary History

The absorbing documents collected in Slavery and Secession in Arkansastrace Arkansas’s tortuous road to secession and war. Drawn from contemporarypamphlets, broadsides, legislative debates, public addresses,newspapers, and private correspondence, these accounts show theintricate twists and turns of the political drama in Arkansas betweenearly 1859 and the summer of 1861. From an early warning of whatRepublican political dominance would mean for the South, through theinitial rejection of secession, to Arkansas’s final abandonment of theUnion, readers, even while knowing the eventual outcome, will find thejourney both suspenseful and informative.Revealing both the unique features of the secession story in Arkansasand the issues that Arkansas shared with much of the rest of the South,this collection illustrates how Arkansans debated their place in the nationand, specifically, how the defense of slavery-as both an assurance ofcontinued economic progress and a means of social control-remainedcentral to the decision to leave the Union and fight alongside much ofthe South for four bloody years of civil war.