Copyright 2019 by S. Charles Bolton
All rights reserved
Manufactured in the United States of America
ISBN: 978-1-55728-284-2 (cloth)
ISBN: 978-1-68226-128-6 (paper)
eISBN: 978-1-61075-687-7
23 22 21 20 19 5 4 3 2 1
The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of the American National Standard for Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials Z39.48-1984.
Bolton, S. Charles.
Territorial ambition: land and society in Arkansas, 1800-1840 / S. Charles Bolton.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 1-55728-284-6
1. ArkansasHistory. 2. ArkansasEconomic conditions.
I. Title.
F411.B73 1993
976.703dc20
92-39501
CIP
In Memory of Mom and Dad, and Jeff
Authors Note
This is a reprint of the 1993 book with no changes to the text except to correct typographical errors. The only significant one of these is in , in which a transposition of numbers has been corrected and ratios adjusted. This edition also has a new index.
Acknowledgments
During the more than a decade in which I have been working on aspects of this book, a number of institutions and individuals have given me generous help for which I am very grateful. The University of Arkansas at Little Rock provided a semester of research time at the beginning of the project that allowed me to collect the original quantitative data; much later, another semester off gave me the opportunity to write a draft of the book. The staff of the Ottenheimer Library and especially its Archives and Special Collections have been unfailingly helpful and pleasant. The same is true of the people in Academic Computing Services. I have spent many hours at the State History Commission in Little Rock, my work there made easier by Archivist Russell Baker and the staff who handle microfilm and manuscripts. The National Archives in Washington, D.C., was also very helpful on both of my visits to that institution.
My friends and colleagues may well feel relieved to see this book in print. Vince Vinikas read all the chapters more than once, usually asking me to be a better historian than was my inclination and always improving my work. Harri Baker gave me much encouragement and a careful critique of the final draft. Carl Moneyhon, Frances Ross, and Fred Williams shared their considerable knowledge of Arkansas history and listened to my own anecdotes with indulgence. Stephen Recken provided warm encouragement and sage advice, often while running or riding a bicycle. Gerry Hansons map-making skills and generosity I have exploited. David Sloan and Elliot West of the University of Arkansas, Fayetteville, have also been very helpful to me.
I also wish to thank the Arkansas Historical Association for permission to use portions of S. Charles Bolton, Inequality on the Southern Frontier: Arkansas County in the Arkansas Territory, Arkansas Historical Quarterly 41 (Spring 1982): 5166, and the Journal of Interdisciplinary History for similar use of S. Charles Bolton, Economic Inequality in the Arkansas Territory, 14 (Winter 1984): 61933, copyright 1984 by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the editors of The Journal of Interdisciplinary History.
Introduction
Territorial Arkansas has been most frequently symbolized in the Arkansas Traveler, that charming tale that has as its central figure a squatter who is canny and witty but hopelessly improvident. In Edward P. Washburns famous depiction of the scene, the squatter sits on a barrel in his coonskin cap, holding a fiddle as he talks to the well-dressed traveler astride a fine horse. The squatters home is a badly shingled, doorless cabin, decorated with an animal pelt and a misspelled sign indicating that whiskey is for sale; his wife smokes a corncob pipe while she, five children, and a lounging dog listen to the conversation. A memorable portion of the dialogue is the squatters assertion that he hasnt repaired the roof because the job is impossible in the rain and unnecessary in dry weather.
Unknown to most beholders of this powerful image is the fact that the traveler was not an eastern visitor but an Arkansan himself. Sandford Faulkner, who created the tale based on his own experience while electioneering in 1840, was a prominent planter and politician whose wealth and social graces made him as welcome in New Orleans as in Little Rock. Thus, if the squatter demonstrates the existence of rural poverty and indolence in early Arkansas, then the traveler shows the presence of southern gentility. In reality, the poor-but-proud squatter of the Arkansas Traveler is a stereotype, displaying some characteristics of his society but exaggerating their importance.
If shiftlessness is associated with Arkansas Territory, so also is lawlessness. Hiram Whittington, who had arrived in Arkansas from Massachusetts in 1827, chided his brother back home in Salem because the people there were making a great fuss about the murder of one man. Whittington claimed that there had been twenty or thirty killings in Arkansas during the past year and only three murderers had been hanged. A few years later, George Featherstonhaugh, an English-born traveler, claimed that criminal-types were attracted to Arkansas and vice versa: Gentlemen who had taken the liberty to imitate the signatures of other persons; bankrupts who were not disposed to be plundered by their creditors; homicides, horse-stealers, and gamblers; all admired Arkansas on account of the very gentle and tolerant state of public opinion which prevailed there in regard to such fundamental points as religion, morals, and property.
Whittington and Featherstonhaugh both seem to have exaggerated for the sake of humor and probably also out of culture shock. Nonetheless, there is no reason to doubt the essence of what they wrote. Arkansas Territory was a violent place where duels occurred frequently, brawls were commonplace, and murder was something about which the average citizen might reasonably worry. Moreover, there was a significant population of counterfeiters, horse thieves, and other professional criminals. In truth, both lawlessness and shiftlessness were important parts of Arkansas Territory. They are not, however, the whole story.
The following chapters examine Arkansas as an economic resource utilized by American society in the process of its expansion and self-definition in the early nineteenth century. This study begins with the arrival of the Spanish explorers and discusses both Native American and European colonial society, but it focuses on the activities of American pioneers in the decades of the 1820s and 1830s when Arkansas Territory grew into statehood. The underlying hypothesis is that those Americans were ambitious to improve their lives in a material sense and that in large measure they succeeded. Arkansas Territory was more economically successful than the Arkansas Traveler would suggest or than historians have hitherto realized. It was a crude and sometimes brutal place, but it was also the scene of economic development as settlers moved from hunting and subsistence farming into market-oriented agriculture. The former quality has been exaggerated, and the latter largely has been ignored.
