James J. Gigantino - Slavery and Secession in Arkansas: A Documentary History

In the 1850s, Arkansas had seen massive economic growth, which had vastly increased the number of Arkansans with a direct stake in slavery, strengthened the power of planters in Eastern and Southern Arkansas, and further entrenched slavery into the economic life of the state. Even though slavery had become increasingly more important in the two decades after statehood, Arkansans took little interest in pursuing national issues related to slavery. Congressman T. C. Hindman, the first politician to actively use a pro-states rights platform in Arkansas, would eventually come to the forefront of the secession movement and is indicative of the growing power of slaveholding newcomers in Arkansas. This chapter contains two of Hindmans speeches from 1859 and 1860 both of which challenge northern abolitionism and the Republican Partys accession to national power.

DOCUMENT 1

Thomas C. Hindman on Federal and Arkansas Politics

Source: Thomas C. Hindman, Federal and State Politics: Speech at Little Rock, February 15, 1859 (Little Rock: James Butter, 1859), 317.

In this speech, Hindman provides a historical context for how he understood his role as a states rights Democrat.He indicates that the debate over the rights of the states and the centralization of the Federal government had as its most formidable development... the agitation of the slavery question.

FELLOW-CITIZENS: As a freeman, born and bred in our southern land of independence, and as a State-Rights Democrat, without fear and disdaining concealments, I have not felt at liberty to decline the invitation to address you here to-night. I have had no wish to decline. On the contrary, gratified by the compliment of the original request and at its endorsement by such an audience as this, I rejoice that I am enabled, under such auspices, to proclaim boldly, in this metropolitan heart of Arkansas, whose pulsations are reputed to reach the uttermost borders of the State, words of truth and honest counsel to the peoplewords of warning and brotherly entreaty to the Democracywords of rebuke and stern defiance to the enemies of both....

FEDERAL POLITICSCENTRALISM AND STATE RIGHTS.

In the consideration of federal politics, I shall leave out of view those questions which, however great in their consequences, are but secondary in their nature, and will go beyond them to the principles from which they emanate and which underlie the system. Every government is the seat of a conflict, lasting during its life-time, based on the efforts made to enlarge its powers and the struggles to confine it to its appropriate functions. The pages of history are one unbroken record of these contests, which are as continuous and implacable as the moral war between good and evil.... The history of our own country affords evidence enough, and that evidence is the only elucidation of our politics. It is therefore proper, and I trust will not be tedious, for me to discuss some of its leading facts.

After the war of the revolution, its blood-dyed articles of confederation were laid aside, like a dismantled battle-ship, on the score of non-adaptation to the needs of the constituent States. The parties to that league had made the government resulting from it their agent, giving it such powers as the articles expressed. When those powers were resumed by the principals, the agency ceased and the agent died. That resumption of powers was a separate act of each State, as an independentsovereign, and, on the part of each State, amounted to what is termed secessiona right then deemed clear and unquestionable, but since vehemently denied. Simultaneously with the demise of the old confederation, a new compact, called the Union, was formed, with the constitution of the United States for its organic law. It still exists, holding its lease of life and all its powers by the same tenure its predecessor didthe consent of each sovereign State whose agent it is.

The men of that generation, who were eye-witnesses to this summary destruction of one government and creation of another, by separate State action, could not reasonably question the right of a State to imitate that precedent in the future. They would naturally incline, one would think, to respect the creative power as first in dignity and importance, and to regard the creature as subordinate and dependent. The Union had been too recently made to be exalted above its makers. The facts within their own personal knowledge established, as the true theory, the doctrine that each State is a star of the first magnitude, and the Union the satellite of them all. Had this wholesome teaching been universally concurred in and carried outhad it been made the touchstone of every act and questionthe shibboleth for all parties and politicianscomparatively few of the internal troubles that have been the bane of the confederacy would have been known. The same fraternal love that bound the States together in their early struggle for freedom would still unite them with its strands of gold. There would be no geographical partiesno sectional enmities and dissensionsno alienation of the North and South. As one harmonious band of brothersanimated by like impulses of patriotismprotected equally, in all our rights, by a just and well administered governmentwe would now be marching on, irresistibly, to unbounded greatness and prosperity.

But, unhappily, this was not to be. That same fierce thirst for power that had displayed itself elsewhere was destined to exert its baleful influence here. By an error of education, of temperament, or of the items, many leading spirits of the revolution honestly doubted the capacity of the masses for self-government. It was this sentiment, at the close of the war of independence, that seized on accidental discontents in the army and shaped them into a movement for the erection of a monarchy, with Washington for kingwhich movement the father of his country annihilated by a frown. The same sentiment magnified the defectsof the old confederation and contributed largely to its displacementchiefly because of the jealous strictness with which its articles guarded State Rights. The same sentiment, in the convention of 1787, proposed a monarchical plan, in lieu of the system adopted by the convention and acceded to by the States. The same sentiment, when the Union had been established, induced those entertaining it to desire the absorption by that agent of all the sovereignty of its principals, as the only preventative of anarchy and a relapse under European control. The part these men had taken in the revolutionary contest was dictated by a sincere hatred of tyranny, and they were as true to the cause as the most faithful soldiers of liberty; but they had no enmity towards the British form of government, administered according to its usages, customs and laws, denominated the British constitution. With very slight changes, they wished to assimilate our government as nearly as possible to that. Central strength, in the hands of the favored few, was their ruling idea; State Rights and popular self-government their aversion.