Spurred by the rising price of cotton, the state prospered in the 1850s.
But this small group of slave owners, most of whom lived in the southern and eastern lowlands, possessed a disproportionate share of the state’s wealth and political power. Only twelve percent owned twenty or more slaves, the benchmark of “planter” status. The majority of these held only a few slaves. By 1860, Arkansas was home to more than 110,000 slaves, and one in five white citizens was a slave owner.
The growth of slavery in the state was directly linked to this expansion. By 1850, Arkansas produced more than twenty-six million pounds of cotton, the majority of it in the Delta, and the expansion of cotton production seemed certain to continue throughout the next decade. Cotton was the driving force behind the transformation from subsistence to plantation agriculture in this region. In the fertile lands along the rivers of the state’s southern and eastern lowlands, however, a slave-based, plantation-style system of agriculture had developed.
Most Arkansans, especially those who lived in the highlands of the north and west, were farmers engaged in subsistence agriculture on small parcels of land. In the 1850s, Arkansas was a frontier state. The conflict brought death and destruction to the state on a scale that few could have imagined, and the war and the tumultuous Reconstruction era that followed it left a legacy of bitterness that the passage of many years did little to assuage. But in the years between 18, the bloody and destructive Civil War destroyed that prosperity. In the last years of the 1850s, Arkansas enjoyed an economic boom that was unparalleled in its history.
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