In 1860, the population of Arkansas was 435,450. Of those, 111,115 were enslaved people and 144 were free Blacks. The free Black population is believed to have been close to 700 a few years earlier, but in 1859 the Arkansas General Assembly passed an act banning manumission (the freeing of slaves), expelling free Blacks from Arkansas, and threatening them with enslavement if they remained.
The accepted estimate of the number of freedmen (former slaves) in Arkansas in 1865 is 110,000, clearly based on the 1860 figure. I wonder if the number of Black Arkansans surviving the Civil War might have been lower, since the trauma of the war and dislocation took a toll on everyone. The overall population of Arkansas declined significantly during the war, and we know that many planters sent enslaved people to Texas.
In February 1865, plantation mistress and former slave owner Amanda Beardsley Trulock made a telling remark, albeit cold and paternalistic: She had heard that "18 of our servants died since they left the place; that is more than have died in 20 years before, so you see they are freeing them very fast."
Trulock enslaved 62 people in 1860, so a death count of 18, if true, would represent almost a third of the Tru- lock slave community. And even if true, that near-third might be an outlier; but if it were typical, it would suggest that the number of freedmen in 1865 might have been lower than the estimate of 110,000.
In any case, let's accept the estimate of 110,000 freedmen to begin our consideration of changes in the Black population of Arkansas during the late 1800s. According to Carl Moneyhon's 1985 study "Black Politics in Arkansas During the Gilded Age, 1876-1900," by 1870, the Black population had increased only to 122,169, but by 1900 it had increased to 366,856. The Black population grew over 200 percent from 1870 to 1900, while the white population grew 161 percent.
Most of us are familiar with the Great Migration; dates and definitions vary, but it refers to a massive shift of the population of the United States during the middle of the 20th century from rural to urban areas and from the South to the North and West. From 1920 to 1970, about 1.2 million people left Arkansas.
In a 2005 study, Donald Holley found that the starkest shifts were from 1940 to 1960, when one in five white residents and one in three Black residents left Arkansas; the most popular destination was California, followed by Texas, Oklahoma, and Missouri.
But a mass voluntary movement of African Americans took place earlier, from 1870 to 1910, out of former slave states in the Southeast (especially Georgia and the Carolinas), in what Story Matkin-Rawn and others call the "other Great Migration." During that period, Matkin-Rawn notes in a 2012 article in the Arkansas Historical Quarterly, something like one out of every 10 Black southerners moved to another state in the South. About three-quarters of them moved to the Mississippi Delta and to the "old Southwest": Arkansas, Louisiana, Texas, and Oklahoma. Hence the 200 percent increase in the Black population of Arkansas from 1870 to 1900.
Why did 200,000 African Americans choose to come to Arkansas? Given what we know now about sharecropping, tenant farming, convict leasing, lynching and other forms of coercive violence, and the aggressive program of legally enforced segregation that began in the 1890s, it would be easy to assume that many Black people must have been lured here with false promises.
But, Matkin-Rawn argues, migrants' decisions "were based on a vision of what they could create in a new land, as well as information and encouragement from a rich network of family members, Black newspapers, ministers and missionaries, political activists, government agencies, and labor agents." For an aspiring Black landowner, Arkansas was a better prospect than, say, Georgia.
Wages were higher here. In the late 1860s, farm laborers could earn a dollar per day, compared to 50 cents in Georgia, Virginia, and the Carolinas. The difference diminished some in the 1880s and 1890s, but remained substantial.
Land was cheaper here, in part because undeveloped land was more abundant. Matkin-Rawn writes that by the end of the Civil War, "less than 6 percent of the land in Arkansas had been improved, i.e., used for forestry, farming, mining, or other commercial ends. By contrast, developed land covered 21 percent of Georgia."
Cheap land and high wages, along with organized recruitment efforts by the railroad companies and state government, helped make Arkansas "the primary destination of choice for Black Southern settlers for nearly half a century," says Matkin-Rawn, even if it did not live up to the claim of Bishop Henry McNeal Turner that it was "the great Negro State of the country."
The opening of the Memphis and Little Rock Railroad (Arkansas' first) in 1871 enabled Black migrants to settle along its line. Consequently, the Black population of St. Francis County tripled from 1870 to 1890.
The Cairo and Fulton railroad opened in 1874, running along Arkansas' southwest-northeast diagonal. Extensions from that line and the Memphis and Little Rock line meant that settlers as well as extractive industry could access deeper parts of the Arkansas country, that railroads as well as timber and mining companies needed more labor, and that railroads were eager to sell off their land grants.
And so industrial development combined with worsening conditions back east to drive yet more Black settlement. Soon we will zoom in to Little Rock, where the Black population increased tenfold from 1860 to 1900, producing a cultural elite and a bourgeoisie.