Arkansas Civil War

Note: This lecture was based on Dr. Shea’s recently-published “The War We Have Lost” in the Arkansas Historical Quarterly:

Now that brings us to my final point which will cause you to break out into applause, as no presentation of this sort complete without a rhetorical question. Let me ask the mandatory rhetorical question: Why has the Civil War in Arkansas received so little attention from historians and everybody else? And why has that attention been so uneven so irregular?

The New York Historical Society, the Denver Public Library, The University of California at Berkley, the Wisconsin Historical Society, the National Archive sin Washington, the Illinois Historical Library and dozens and dozens of other institutions scattered all across the country contains thousands of pages of documents and photographs, reports, maps, letters, diaries, memoirs- that tell the story of the Civil War here in Arkansas and the Trans-Mississippi. And they tell it in rich detail, but today few historians have attempted to burrow through this mass of material.

Pioneering research- going where no scholar has gone before, beating the bushes, in other words, is really difficult. Blazing your own research trail, ransacking dozens of archives- large and small, without any clear idea of what you may find, or if you find anything at all. It is a task that requires a substantial investment of time, of energy, and above all- of money. And it is an investment that not every historian is willing or able to make. In other words, anyone can be a historian, but not everyone can afford to be a historian; it costs money to do this kind of stuff.

I hate to add that state and local archives and libraries here in Arkansas contain valuable information and they are stamped by dedicated professionals but the simple fact remains that the full story of what took place here in Arkansas can’t be discovered, it can’t be told without casting a research net really all across North America to the Atlantic Coast to the Pacific Coast and that is no small undertaking.

Nevertheless, during the past 20-30 years a handful of intrepid Arkansas historians- they have begun to mine this rich load of material- this vain of overlooked and forgotten facts, and doubtless many other people will follow. Microfilm being supplanted by digital downloads of one sort or another. It is gradually becoming easier to access, say, a diary of a Union soldier who was stationed at Pine Bluff. His children moves west after the war. The diary is now in the hands of, say, a women who his living in the suburbs of Seattle and she has donated it to a local library and it is digitized and you can access it now. Again, this is a slow process but at least you don’t have to take a plane to Seattle and maybe the information will come to you.

We have not really lost the Civil War in Arkansas, but we have misplaced a good deal of it from popular memory. In addition to forgetting so much of the Civil War in Arkansas, what we do remember is sometimes not right. We have a kind of mangled memory that is getting better, things are coming into focus and we know more about the truth now more than 30-40 years ago, but it is still hard to wrap our minds around it. Times are clearly changing and after being ignored and misunderstood for more than a century, the Civil War in Arkansas and surrounding states, whatever you want to call it, is emerging from obscurity ; that’s really good news.

Once it was dismissed as a meaningless sideshow, it’s now gaining respect as a legitimate area of study, public interest is increasing here today. New books on the subject are appearing with heartily regularity. The national battlefield parks in Arkansas and neighboring states: Wilson’s Creek, Pea Ridge- have invested millions of dollars in new museum displays and new battlefield interpretations. State battlefield parks, particularly our own Prairie Grove State Battlefield Park near Fayetteville is also experiencing a similar Renaissance with a fabulous new museum and so forth.

Efforts to preserve and improve other historic sites, activities like this one today, are seeking to expand public awareness. I urge all of you to continue to seek out your local sesquicentennial events and not to waste any time.

Note: This lecture was based on Dr. Shea’s recently-published “The War We Have Lost” in the Arkansas Historical Quarterly:

Just like everybody else, I am a victim of time, finances, and I have to do other stuff or I’d be on my way. But when you start beating the bushes, as we will see in a moment there is no telling what the bushes will yield.

What about the rapid dissolution of slavery? What about the experiences of these people in Helena? In Fayetteville and elsewhere? What about the role played by the slaves themselves in the end of slavery?

In one sense, these people couldn’t do anything until the Union Army reached them, but it was clear that when they heard through whatever grapevine that Union military forces were 20, 30, 40, 50 miles away , they packed up the women and children, the chicken and goats- everything they could grab and they set out for the Union army as recounted by a Union officer- a Lieutenant, a young man: General Blount’s Army of the Frontier was camped near where Siloam Springs is today- extreme North West Arkansas. And one night he was on picket duty with his men when, thrashing around in the bushes, no shots were fired, thank goodness, and a young woman, a teenage girl. He said she was about seventeen, but he didn’t know how old she was- she suddenly burst out of the bushes. She was a runaway slave and she had walked all the way from Fayetteville, which I gather was at least 40-45 miles by the roads of that time, moving only at night ,because of course at daylight she would be spotted, and in asking people, I assume other slaves, where the Union army was, and finally she found it; she almost got herself shot in the process.

She stumbled into camp, hugged everybody in sight, including the officer and she talked with him a minute . There already was a refugee camp inside the Union army camp and he sent her on her way, or likely he escorted her there and she told him all about where she come from and he wrote some of this down and then he said, “As we moved closer to the refugee camps and in the lights of the camp fires, she saw more of her people there.” She was as happy as a cricket, jumped in the air and went forward to embrace them and began a new life and a week later when a supply train from Ft. Scott, Kansas arrived, 200 wagons, which went unloaded and of course was empty when it turned around and returned to Ft. Scott, this young woman along with the hundreds and hundreds of other Black people: men, women, and children, who had made their way to the Union army camp, were put in the wagons and were sent North, and this officer, as the wagons passed, he saw this young woman in one of the wagons.

She recognized him and walked alongside and they chatted a bit and he said, “Where are you going?” and she said, “North!”
And he said, “Where North?”
And she just repeated, “North! North!”
And he asked her again persistently “What do you expect to find up North?”
And she said “Nothin’ but freedom.”

And she was on her way. Perhaps her descendants are in Kansas City or Topeka or Lawrence- who knows. But all of this was happening months before the Emancipation Proclamation, all of this was happening before government bureaucracy and laws kicked in and the role of the Union army is clearly the great liberating force in American politics. It was not abolitionists, it’s not politicians in Washington, it’s not William Garrison and his newspaper The Liberator, it is large, heavily armed powerful military forces crashing through the Southern countryside and, in effect, like a beacon radiating the message that if you can reach us, your days as a slave were over- no guarantees as to what comes next, but at least no more slavery.

So this is something we need to look at. The situation is complex. It’s like anything in history, right? The more you look at it, the more complicated it gets.

Some other topics that might be of interest. How about the experiences of women- all women: rich, poor, black, white, slave, free- in a society that was progressively bereft of its men. Each year that passed, women had to assume ever-larger, more complicated, and often more difficult roles to keep society functioning. No one’s ever looked at that in Arkansas.

What about the peculiar phenomena of a state- Arkansas- without a state government. Arkansas was effectively government less for about two and a half to three years. How did things function during that time period when you had to rely entirely on yourself?

What about the circumstances of everyday life in the cities, like Pine Bluff, that were occupied by Union military forces. Little Rock was a boomtown once the Union army got there, set up shop and began pumping in today’s money millions of dollars into the local economy every year. Pine Bluff was a much smaller place with a much smaller garrison, but what was it like, regardless of your political affiliations?

We can only hope that historians will be encouraged by the hoopla of the 150th anniversary will be getting to work on this. After all, we need to remember that history is not rocket science. No fancy degrees or credentials are needed. A certain degree of literacy, a great deal of persistence and curiosity and a certain amount of judgment and you are on your way. Anybody can jump in and if nothing else, focus on local events. Beat the bushes. What is here in the library? What is in the Court House? What is available in Little Rock?

Note: This lecture was based on Dr. Shea’s recently-published “The War We Have Lost” in the Arkansas Historical Quarterly:

I could go on for several hours about topics, other topics that need to be explored besides leadership, besides the destruction caused by both armies despite the horrendous impact of guerilla warfare, despite the multi-racial, multi-cultural nature of the war here, but lucky for you, I have a time limit , and so all I would do now is just throw out a few topics , other aspects of the Civil War in Arkansas and surrounding states that really cry out for attention. These are fascinating topics.

When I focus on military events, which there is nothing wrong with, I am a military historian, but our focus on military events most of the past century and a half as obscured the fact that this was a Civil War, this was a revolutionary social and demographic experience . Here are some of these examples.

What about someone exploring the long-obscured role of that sizable white Unionist population in Arkansas. Why did they believe what they believed? Why did they hold on to these beliefs? What was their role in the war and so forth.

We need someone to look at the rapid, in fact, the surprisingly rapid dissolution of slavery in Arkansas during the Civil War- the fact that organized military campaigns, by General Curtis and General Blount of the Union Army, to end slavery in the points in Arkansas where they could reach and to do so months before Abraham Lincoln even considered the possibility of issuing the Emancipation Proclamation or anything like that. This has just gotten lost in the shuffle. There were thousands and thousands of newly-freed black men, women, children assembling in places like Fayetteville and Helena where Union Armies were present in 1862 before the Emancipation Proclamation. Refugee camps were being set up and the men at least were actively being encouraged to make a few dollars, get a new set of blue clothes, pick up a rifle, and join the fight. No one has ever documented that in Arkansas.

Twenty years ago I was researching the Battle of Pea Ridge at the National Archives in Washington. I had an interesting time because no one had explored the Civil War in Arkansas there and every time the archivist would lift open the top of a cardboard box of Union or Confederate records, not only would there be billows of dust, but I swear on occasion bats would fly out. I don’t think, in fact, when I was undoing one bundle of documents, I believe it was letters bound up in a ribbon. When I pulled on the ends of the ribbon, it simply disintegrated, and he said that we were probably the first people to look inside this box at the records of the Union Army of the South West since the records had been put there in the 1880s. In the process of rummaging through box after box of stuff, I found in one box three huge old fashioned ledger books- the kind that merchants used to keep their accounts in, and there was actually stamped on the cover “such and such mercantile company”, either Clarendon or Newport , Arkansas. It was when the Union Army was marching through the Delta to Helena in 1862, and I thought, “What’s this?” and I began flipping them over and I realized what I was looking at. It was some officer in the Union Army had been given the task of interviewing every runaway or refugee and family members that arrived within the reach of the Union Army as it moved through the Delta.

As people would show up they would be sent to his tent and he would get their names, where they were from, ages, who they had belonged to (the family of ownership) and so forth, and then he would write out what were called “Freedom Papers”. Unofficially, done entirely by the Army, no politicians in Washington, Abe Lincoln nor anybody else was involved. The Union Army, as it was crashing through Arkansas during the Summer of 1862, was ending slavery as it proceeded, and this has gotten very little attention.

What’s also gotten very little attention is that there exists in Washington a cardboard box with these ledger books with the names of these people- often first names only: Jupiter, Sam, sometime family names but always the names of the owning family. Again, as far as I know, I am the only person from Arkansas ever, or any historian, to have even seen them since they were put in those boxes a hundred and thirty years ago. Unfortunately, I didn’t do anything with them; I was there looking for military records as I flipped through and said, “Man this is amazing stuff! Some genealogist would kill for this!” Then I put it back, closed the box, and they disappeared into the vault of the National Archives.

Note: This lecture was based on Dr. Shea’s recently-published “The War We Have Lost” in the Arkansas Historical Quarterly:

It seems complex, but in fact, there is another level of complexity about the Civil War in Arkansas and the surrounding states, that, again, is only now beginning to be touched on. Another sensitive topic that people shied away from , and historians being people, they shied away from it as well. And this was the complex ethnic and racial makeup of the population in the Trans-Mississippi. Nowhere was this more true than in Arkansas.

Indians fought on the Confederate side at Pea Ridge and Poison Spring. On the Union side at Prairie Grove and on all sides in the irregular war that consumed the state. Now some thought it was utter folly to attempt to incorporate Indians into civilized warfare. A Union officer who was assigned to an Indian regiment was one such skeptic be he soon changed his mind as he told his wife:

“The Indians are a fine looking set of men. They appear somewhat fantastic at times with their mixed uniforms, their war paint, and they tawdry refinery, but they make good soldiers. They obey orders, they endure hardships without complaint, and they fight like the very devil.”

The end result of this policy was the formation on the Union Indian Brigade, which is finally getting the credit it deserves, for it was a powerful and highly mobile mounted force that wreaked havoc on Confederate in Arkansas and the Indian Territory. In fact Union generals not only put thousands and thousands of Indians into uniform, of course they also put black men into union ranks before anyone else did- long before Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation, long before the governor of Massachusetts ordered the creation of the 54th and 55th Massachusetts Colored Infantry, the regiment featured in the movie “Glory” about fifteen years ago. Long before any of that, in Kansas, the 1st and 2nd Kansas Colored Infantry composed in large part of former slaves from Arkansas. They were the first black regiments in the Civil War and the first black units to engage in combat.

As war progressed and Union armies punched deeper and deeper into Arkansas they formed black regiments here in the state, primarily in Helena and in Little Rock. In fact, Helena during the Civil War and for many years afterwards, Helena was one of the primary recruiting stations, not only for so-called colored troops in the Civil War but also for all black regiments that were formed in the regular army after the civil War and went to fight the Indians- the 9th and 10th Cavalry and the 24th and 25th Infantry all were collectively known as Buffalo Soldiers in the Wild West. If you have any interest in the Buffalo Soldiers at all I would imagine at least a third of them can trace their ancestry here to Southern and Eastern Arkansas.

That, too, is a subject that only now begins to be explored by historians.

Needless to say, this subject , this aspect of the Civil War – the recruitment, the enrollment, and the deployment of people of color- be they Indians or be they Americans of African descent- in the ranks in the whole Union or Confederate Armies in different ways, is something that is just now being explored by historians, particularly the subject of Black troops because this is a topic which for obvious reasons, h ere in Arkansas and other Southern states has been strenuously ignored until just recently. As an example of how desperate ex-Confederates were to stamp out the memory of Black men in ranks and carrying weapons , in the years after the Civil War the former Confederates gained control of the Arkansas state government, one of the first things they did was to locate the battle flags, the regimental flags, the colors of both the Black Union regiments raised in Arkansas and for that matter, the white regiments raised in Northern Arkansas – bring those flags back to the Old State House on the banks of the Arkansas River in Little Rock and burn them so that there would be no evidence that black men had stood up and fought against white men and no evidence that other white men had fought on the same side as Black men. Te myth of the solid South- the all white united South had to be maintained at all costs.

Consequently when you go to the Old State House today and see the exhibit of Civil War flags from Arkansas regiments, there is a distinct imbalance there; they are effectively Confederate flags. Arkansas’ dozen or so , depends on how you count the Union regiments, half white, half Black, have not passed into obscurity but that was not from a lack of trying on the part of the ex-Confederates after the Civil War, who engaged, of course as we all know, in any number of activities designed to rewrite the history of the war to suit their political purposes.

Note: This lecture was based on Dr. Shea’s recently-published “The War We Have Lost” in the Arkansas Historical Quarterly:

In the first year of the war law and order generally prevailed. Not only here in Arkansas but elsewhere in the Trans-Mississippi, things went wrong pretty much as normal. But thereafter, by 1862 and afterwards, the fabric of society unraveled. State, county, and local governments ceased to function. As judges, sheriffs, constables, clerks, and other officeholders fled or failed to carry out their duties. Taxes went uncollected, lawsuits went unheard, and complaints went unanswered. The courts closed jails opened and obviously incidents of murder, torture, rape, theft, and wanton destruction increased dramatically. Commerce and communications broke down. Newspapers ceased to publish. The mail was no longer delivered. Thousands of citizens abandoned their homes, businesses, and farms and fled.

Dozens of counties here in Arkansas and Missouri were simply depopulated; people couldn’t take it anymore. Death was everywhere. Refugees from Arkansas collected in cities as far away as Cincinnati and Houston. Toward the end of the war, I believe this was 1865, a woman her in Southern Arkansas- not too far from Pine Bluff, who was once an avid supporter of secession to the Confederacy, had changed her mind. And it’s easy to understand why. She described her plight in a hastily-scribbled note to her sister:

“Things here are far worse than they have ever been. The whole county is full of bands of robbers and murderers. Our neighbors have been shot down on their doorsteps or hanged in their yards or burned to death inside their homes. We have been living on corn for two weeks but it is almost gone. We will have to leave our house soon but our horses and mules were taken away from us and so we will have to walk with whatever we can carry. How the children will survive I cannot say. They cry night and day. Oh Lord! Oh Lord! Anything for peace and established laws again.”

Conditions in Arkansas became so bad that in some counties pro Union and pro Confederate guerillas actually joined forces to exterminate the criminal packs that were terrorizing their neighbors. In other counties, and this is somewhat better known and better documented: regular Confederate Cavalry forces were ordered to hunt down and annihilate, supposedly, pro-Confederate guerillas because these gangs were doing nothing but raiding and destroying the civilian population.

All of this was a war within a war. And because few of these people, for obvious reasons, ever bothered to write down exactly what happened. It was so appalling that we have largely eliminated irregular warfare from our collective memory of the Civil War. It may be the most remarkable act of mass amnesia in Arkansas, even in American history. The collective decision of our forebears, our ancestors, to disremember the breakdown of civilization in Arkansas and surrounding states during the Civil War is an almost unique event- maybe it is a unique event in American history. I imagine it was just too burdensome, too painful, too awful to pass the memories of such horror from one generation to the next.

Perhaps it was better for our ancestors to pretend that it never happened; it was better for them to celebrate regular warfare with bronze statues, with marble monuments, with neatly manicured cemeteries and battlefield parks. In this way in the 1870s-1880s-1890s, our ancestors took the memory of the Civil War, the true, the accurate, and the real memories and they sanitized, deliberately sanitized, distorted, diminished these memories until they had by the end of the century essentially recreated a socially acceptable popular memory of the Civil War- something that fit well with the gentlemanly higher notions of Victorian society. Gallant officers, heroic soldiers waving battle flags, drums beating and bugles blaring- can all this nasty business about Americans slaughtering each other in the night – well, let’s just put that aside. Leave it alone.

In fact that it is only now, within the last 20 to 30 years that historians have begun to lift the shroud of willful ignorance and exposed a horror of what our ancestors experienced, and let’s not forget, not just what they experienced, but w hat they did to one another, because these guerillas did not just pop out of the ground like mushrooms- they were Arkansans and Missourians and so forth, just as were their victims.