The Mechanics of Little Rock:
Free Labor Ideas in
Antebellum Arkansas, 1845-1861
MICHAEL PIERCE
IN LATE 1858, CHARLES O. HALLER, a longtime resident of Little Rock,
wrote to the Arkansas State Gazette and Democrat, complaining about
slaves taking jobs normally done by white workingmen and demanding
that the Arkansas General Assembly take steps to curb the practice: “As
artisans we suffer materially, when hired slave labor . . . is brought into
competition with us; and—what is still worse—we find ourselves morally degraded by seeing ourselves yoked with hired slave mechanics in
the public streets and thoroughfares of the towns or being confined in the
same rooms (shops) with a lot of sweating and puffing hired black slave
mechanics.”1 Haller’s complaint was part of a larger campaign by the
Mechanics’ Institute of Little Rock, a group of white workingmen, to rid
the city of all types of unfree and degraded labor, including not only
slaves who competed with whites but also convicts and free blacks.2
1
Arkansas State Gazette and Democrat (Little Rock), November 13, 1858, p. 2, col.
2.
2
The Mechanics’ Institute’s campaign is briefly treated in Orville Taylor, Negro Slavery in Arkansas (Durham: Duke University Press, 1958), 111-112; Ira Berlin, Slaves
without Masters: The Free Negro in the Antebellum South (New York: Pantheon, 1974),
373; Paul D. Lack, “An Urban Slave Community: Little Rock, 1831-1862,” Arkansas Historical Quarterly 41 (Autumn 1982): 263-264, 283-284; Ira Berlin and Herbert Gutman,
“Natives and Immigrants, Free Men and Slaves: Urban Workingmen in the Antebellum
South,” American Historical Review 88 (December 1983): 1198.
Michael Pierce is assistant professor of history at the University of Arkansas, Fayetteville. He came
across much of the material in this essay while writing an entry for the Encyclopedia of Arkansas History and Culture. He wishes to thank Tom Dillard and the encyclopedia’s staff for that opportunity. An
earlier version of this essay was presented at the North American Labor History Conference at Wayne
State University in Detroit, MI, where it benefited from the criticisms and suggestions of Ken FonesWolf, Alex Lichtenstein, and Kurt Newman. The author also thanks the AHQ’s two anonymous referees for their thoughtful and helpful reviews.
THE ARKANSAS HISTORICAL QUARTERLY
VOL. LXVII, NO. 3, AUTUMN 2008
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ARKANSAS HISTORICAL QUARTERLY
During the two-month campaign, the Mechanics’ Institute enunciated its own version of a free labor ideology more commonly voiced in
the antebellum North, where it fueled the growth of the Republican party.
At the heart of this ideology was the belief that free workers, if forced to
compete with slave or other forms of unfree labor, would themselves become something akin to slaves—forced to accept low wages and brutal
working conditions and stripped of the ability to achieve the economic
independence considered necessary for true citizenship. Although free
labor ideas could foster sympathy for those held in bondage, most free
laborites—both in the North and in Little Rock—viewed African Americans as economic threats and denigrated them as morally, socially, and
intellectually inferior to whites.3
The Mechanics’ Institute’s free labor campaign had mixed results.
Although the state of Arkansas took steps to remove convicts and free
blacks from competition with free white workingmen in early 1859, the
mechanics could not convince the state to prohibit the working of slaves
at non-agricultural pursuits. But even those who led the opposition to the
Mechanics’ efforts conceded the principle that free white workingmen
should not be forced to compete with unfree labor; they simply insisted
that those with African blood could never possess the knowledge, skill,
or work ethic necessary truly to replace white mechanics and artisans.
Free labor ideas resonated in Little Rock and Arkansas much more than
historians have realized.4
Debates over free labor were at the heart of the sectional conflict
that erupted into civil war in the spring of 1861. Many northerners, especially those belonging to the Republican party, insisted that the nation’s western territories should be a place where humble whites could
move in order to improve their lot. They feared if whites in these territories were forced to coexist with slave labor that they could never save
enough money to escape the indignities of wage work. These northerners saw the opportunity to secure economic independence—owning
3
The best work on the development of free labor ideology is Eric Foner, Free Soil,
Free Labor, Free Men: The Ideology of the Republican Party before the Civil War (New
York: Oxford University Press, 1970). Also see Gabor S. Boritt, Lincoln and the Economics of the American Dream (Memphis: Memphis State University Press, 1978); Robert J.
Steinfeld, The Invention of Free Labor: The Employment Relation in English and American Law and Custom, 1350-1870 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1991).
4
See, for example, James M. Woods, Rebellion and Realignment: Arkansas’s Road to
Secession (Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press, 1987); Carl H. Moneyhon, The
Impact of the Civil War and Reconstruction on Arkansas: Persistence in the Midst of Ruin
(Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1994), 75-99; Thomas A. DeBlack, With
Fire and Sword: Arkansas, 1861-1874 (Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press, 2003),
1-28; S. Charles Bolton, Arkansas, 1800-1860: Remote and Restless (Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press, 1998), 167-186.
MECHANICS OF LITTLE ROCK
223
one’s own shop or farm—as the cornerstone of both citizenship and the
republican system of government and worried that slave labor’s degradation of free white labor was a step along the path to aristocracy. They
wanted the West to be “free soil”—that is the land reserved for free labor
and available at little cost to those whites who wished to settle it. Large
numbers of white southerners, though, asserted that slaveholders had an
absolute right to take their slaves into the western territories and
claimed that Congress was constitutionally obliged to protect their slave
property in these areas. These southerners feared that, if slavery was
banned from the western territories, plantation agriculture—with its voracious appetite for land—and the ways of life it supported would collapse and their region would become increasingly impotent in national
affairs.
For all its importance to northern anti-slavery sentiment, historians
have located pockets of free labor thought among workers in the cities of
the antebellum urban South.5 So it is little wonder that by the late 1850s
many partisans of the pro-slavery cause viewed the region’s urban workingmen with suspicion and feared that they would not remain loyal if the
sectional crisis continued to worsen. For instance, “Python,” a contributor to De Bow’s Review, complained that slaveholders’ practice of allowing slaves to hire their own time had transformed the urban mechanic in
the South into an “enemy of negro slavery.” The only way to secure the
loyalty of southern white workingmen, Python continued, was by “confining the negro to the soil.” This would make the white workingman
“feel himself lifted up in the scale of social respectability, and maintained
in that position by the subordinated negro confined exclusively to menial
services.” He warned that, if these changes were not made, white workingmen would remain angry and the South would face “serious consequences the moment that Black-republicanism becomes triumphant in
the Union.”6
In his study of workingmen in the South’s largest cities, Frank Towers confirms Python’s worst fears, linking white workingmen’s adoption
of free labor ideas to their resistance to secession and Confederate na5
Fred Siegel, “Artisans and Immigrants in the Politics of Late Antebellum Georgia,”
Civil War History 27 (September 1981): 221-231; Bruce Laurie, Artisans into Workers:
Labor in Nineteenth Century America (New York: Noonday, 1989), 105-109; Michelle
Gillespie, Free Labor in an Unfree World: White Artisans in Slaveholding Georgia, 17891860 (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2000); Frank Towers, The Urban South and
the Coming of the Civil War (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2004); Berlin
and Gutman, “Natives and Immigrants, Free Men and Slaves,” 1175-1200.
6
Python, “The Issues of 1860,” De Bow’s Review 28 (March 1860): 245-272, quotations on p. 255. See also Berlin and Gutman, “Natives and Immigrants, Free Men and
Slaves,” 1197-1198; Siegel, “Artisans and Immigrants,” 221-231.
224
ARKANSAS HISTORICAL QUARTERLY
tionalism. According to Towers, workingmen in “Baltimore and St.
Louis played vital roles in keeping their respective states in the Union,
and in New Orleans the same group flocked to the federal banner when
the Confederacy lost the city in 1862.”7 In Little Rock, though, workingmen never organized to keep Arkansas in the Union, and those who had
led the Mechanics’ Institute’s 1858 campaign embraced secession and
the Confederate cause, though some more slowly than others. In other
words, the adoption of free labor ideas did not necessarily translate into
support for the Union or Abraham Lincoln, the leader of the so-called
“Black-republicans.”
Like its counterparts in older, larger, and more industrialized southern cities, Little Rock’s white, male working population was composed
of a mix of those who had been born in foreign lands, migrants from the
free states of the North, and native-born southerners.8 According to the
1860 manuscript census, foreign immigrants were clearly the senior
partners, though, constituting 54.8 percent of the city’s unskilled free
workers, 32.1 percent of skilled free workers in the building trades, and
46.6 percent of general skilled free workers in 1860. Of the city’s 535
free workingmen—both skilled and unskilled—45.2 percent were born
in either Europe (nearly all Irish, English, or German) or Canada. The
high percentage of foreign-born workingmen in Little Rock set the city
apart from the rest of the state. Of the 324,335 free Arkansans identified
in the 1860 Census, only 3,600 (1.1 percent) were foreign born.
Those born in the South made up only 35.0 percent of Little Rock’s
free workingmen—31.8 percent of the unskilled, 42.7 percent in the
skilled building trades, and 32.8 percent in the general skilled trades.
Census records suggest, though, that a good number of these southernborn workers were the sons of migrants from either the North or foreign
lands. 17.4 percent of Little Rock free workingmen had migrated from
free states north of the Mason-Dixon line or the Ohio River—10.8 percent of the unskilled, 22.1 percent of the skilled building trades, and
19.0 percent of the general skilled.9 According to historians Ira Berlin
and Herbert Gutman, when workers moved to southern cities from Europe or the North, they brought with them “ideas and traditions about
7
Towers, Urban South and the Coming of the Civil War, 3.
For the mix of migrants and native-born workers in other southern cities, see Berlin
and Gutman, “Natives and Immigrants, Free Men and Slaves,” especially 1183.
9
Manuscript census returns, Eighth Census of the United States, 1860, Population
Schedules, Pulaski County, Arkansas; Joseph C. G. Kennedy, Population of the United
States in 1860 (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1864), 20. The classification
system of skilled and unskilled labor is from Berlin and Gutman, “Natives and Immigrants, Free Men and Slaves,” 1180n10.
8
MECHANICS OF LITTLE ROCK
225
the meaning of work and its relation to liberty” that made them “suspicious of chattel bondage” and other forms of unfree or degraded labor.10
The Mechanics’ Institute of Little Rock traced the origins of the 1858
campaign to earlier efforts to rid the city of convict labor.11 These efforts
had begun in June 1845, soon after completion of the state penitentiary
at a site abutting the western edge of the city. Work on the penitentiary
had started in 1839, just three years after Arkansas had become a state.
Designed during a wave of penal reform that emphasized prisoner rehabilitation over physical punishment and mass confinement, Arkansas’s
penitentiary included workshops in which inmates would be trained in
the manual arts. Not only would the sale of inmate-produced goods offset
the costs of operating the penitentiary, the skills acquired in the workshops would encourage inmates to become productive members of society upon their release rather than returning to lives of crime.12
As inmates began to man the blacksmith forges and shoemakers’
lasts in the penitentiary’s new workshops in 1845, some of Little Rock’s
artisans and mechanics organized in an attempt to direct the labors of the
inmates away from pursuits that would put the prisoners in direct competition with free white workers. Calling itself the Mechanics’ Association of Little Rock, the organization declared, “That to learn men trades
in the Penitentiary and send them out to disseminate their villainous
tricks among Mechanics, tends greatly to degrade and demoralize that
class, and to bring honest labor in competition with convict labor is what
no generous community should desire.” The employment of convict labor, the Mechanics argued, had already lowered wages, causing “a number of enterprising citizens” to leave the city and state or to “resort to
some other employment.” The Mechanics’ Association insisted that it
was unfair that prisoners from all over the state and from all walks of life
were transformed into Little Rock workingmen and complained that such
training stigmatized mechanical and artisanal pursuits.
The Mechanics’ Association wanted the directors of the penitentiary
to “obviate the evils” of prison labor by setting the inmates to work producing items that were not being made locally. The organization explained, “The little skill required in the production of bale-rope and
bagging leaves little room to doubt but that the convicts could be employed in the production of those articles to great advantage.” The Me10
Berlin and Gutman, “Natives and Immigrants, Free Men and Slaves,” 1195.
Arkansas State Gazette and Democrat, October 16, 1858, p. 2.
12
Hiram U. Ford, “A History of the Arkansas Penitentiary to 1900” (master’s thesis,
University of Arkansas, 1936), 9-51; David J. Rothman, The Discovery of the Asylum:
Social Order and Disorder in the New Republic (Boston: Little, Brown, 1971), 79-108.
The state capitol now stands on the site of this penitentiary.
11
226
ARKANSAS HISTORICAL QUARTERLY
chanics pointed out that such production would help cotton planters who
could purchase the rope and bagging at lower prices, the farmers of
northern Arkansas who could add hemp to the list of crops they could
grow profitably, and the state as a whole by ensuring that scarce currency
remained within its borders.13
The Mechanics quickly perfected their new organization, electing
officers and selecting standing committees on the penitentiary and other
pertinent subjects. The two men to serve as president of the Mechanics’
Association in the mid 1840s were Henry F. Shaw, a forty-year-old carpenter born in Washington, D.C., and John Davis, a thirty-one-year-old
hatter who had migrated from Pennsylvania. Fourteen other men were
identified as members of the Mechanics’ Association in 1845 and 1846,
serving as lesser officers or committee members. Four of them had been
born in the South (Virginia, Tennessee, Kentucky, and North Carolina),
one had migrated from the North (Pennsylvania), and four had come
from foreign lands (England, Italy, and Ireland). The nativity of the
other five members could not be determined, as their names do not appear in the manuscript censuses of 1840 or 1850.14 Only one of the men
active in the Mechanics’ Association in the mid 1840s played an important role in the 1858 campaign, and that was Charles O. Haller, who in
1845 was a thirty-six-year-old farmer and mechanic of German heritage
born in Naples.15
13
Arkansas State Gazette (Little Rock), June 16, 1845, p. 2; Arkansas Banner (Little
Rock), June 11, 1845, p. 2; June 18, 1845, p. 2.
14
Manuscript census returns, Seventh Census of the United States, 1850, Population
Schedules, Pulaski County, Arkansas; Manuscript census returns, Sixth Census of the
United States, 1840, Population Schedules, Pulaski County, Arkansas; Arkansas State
Gazette, June 16, 1845, p. 2; August 18, 1845, p. 2; December 8, 1845, p. 2; June 8, 1846,
p. 3; July 13, 1846, p. 3; August 10, 1846, p. 2; November 30, 1846, p. 2; December 5,
1846, p. 2; Arkansas Banner, June 18, 1846, p. 2.
15
Manuscript census returns, Seventh Census of the United States, 1850, Population
Schedules, Pulaski County, Arkansas. Haller had arrived in Arkansas in January 1841,
accompanied by the German traveler, sportsman, and writer Frederick Gerstaecker.
Haller settled along the Fourche la Fave River near Perryville, and Gerstaecker lived with
him, “his wife, her somewhat deaf sister, [and] his sweet, charming little girl” for several
months. Gerstaecker described Haller as someone who made fast friends and got along
with difficult people. Gerstaecker did not mention Haller’s given name, referring to him as
simply “Haller.” But his description of Haller and his family matches the one for the
Charles O. Haller household in the 1850 manuscript census for Pulaski County, which lists
Haller as living with: U. Haller, a forty-three-year-old female; Catherine Haller, a thirteenyear-old female; and Margarett Martin, a fifty-year-old deaf female. Frederick Gerstaecker, Wild Sports in the Far West (Boston: Crosby, Nichols, and Co., 1859), 210-229;
Anita Bukey and Evan Burr Bukey, “Arkansas after the War: From the Journal of Frederick Gerstaecker,” Arkansas Historical Quarterly 32 (Autumn 1973): 264-266, quotation
on p. 266.
MECHANICS OF LITTLE ROCK
227
The Mechanics’ Association resembled antebellum workingmen’s
organizations throughout the nation in that its leadership was dominated
by skilled workers—four carpenters, two cabinet makers, a brick maker,
a mason, a blacksmith, a hatter, and someone listed as either a painter or
a printer (the enumerator’s handwriting is unclear). Census records suggest that the leadership included both those who owned their own shops
and employed others and those who labored for wages. Of the eleven
Mechanics’ Association leaders identified in the 1850 manuscript census, five were listed as owning no real estate and three of those boarded
with others, both of which are indicative of waged labor. The census
enumerator listed the other six as owning real estate, the value of which
ranged from $450 to $2,000. At this level of property ownership, these
workingmen were comfortable, but none ranked among the city’s economic elite. Two of the property owners also had what appear to be their
own wage workers or apprentices living in their households. The inclusion of both those who employed skilled workers and the skilled workers themselves in the same organization was not unusual in antebellum
America. As most wage workers aspired to open their own shops and
employ others and most of those who owned shops had begun their careers as apprentices or waged workers, workingmen generally believed
that common interests united them, regardless of status. It should be
noted that only one of those identified with the Mechanics’ Association
was a slaveholder. C. L. Sullivan, a painter or printer who had migrated
from Ireland, owned a single slave, but that slave, a ninety-year-old
woman, was probably not much of a financial asset.16
Unlike previous attempts to organize the workingmen of Little
Rock, the Mechanics’ Association’s campaign avoided partisan entanglements. The earlier efforts had been launched in close association
with the Whig party and faded from existence soon after endorsing
prominent candidates of that party for office.17 There were no important
elections in 1845 or signs of Whig involvement. In fact, the only leader
of the Mechanics’ Association who would be associated with either major political party was Charles O. Haller, who in 1848 would receive the
16
Manuscript census returns, Seventh Census of the United States, 1850, Population
Schedules, Pulaski County, Arkansas; Manuscript census returns, Seventh Census of the
United States, 1850, Slave Schedules, Pulaski County, Arkansas. On antebellum labor
movements, see Foner, Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Men, 15; Steven J. Ross, Workers on
the Edge: Work, Leisure, and Politics in Industrializing Cincinnati, 1788-1890 (New
York: Columbia University Press, 1985), 25-42; Towers, Urban South and the Coming of
the Civil War; Alan Dawley, Class and Community: The Industrial Revolution in Lynn
(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1976), 42-72.
17
Arkansas State Gazette, December 11, 1839, p. 2; November 25, 1840, p. 3; March
17, 1841, p. 2.
228
ARKANSAS HISTORICAL QUARTERLY
Democratic nomination to represent Pulaski County in the lower house
of the Arkansas General Assembly.18 At least early on, the Mechanics’
Association’s directed its campaign against those who oversaw the penitentiary rather than elected officials.
The Mechanics’ Association’s plan received support from across the
political spectrum. Solon Borland, a physician and newspaper man who
would be elected to the U.S. Senate as a Democrat in 1848, endorsed the
plan, giving the main address at a Mechanics’ Association meeting. The
Arkansas Banner, published by the Democratic Central Committee of the
state of Arkansas, also got behind the Mechanics’ plan, praising it as full
of “good practical sense.”19 The Arkansas State Gazette, the state’s most
important Whig newspaper, lent its support as well, insisting that the plan
would relieve Little Rock’s workingmen of “that debasing competition
of which they justly complain.” The paper went on to call the idea that
the state should protect workers from “unjust” competition a “principle
to which we have long ago given our assent.”20 The Democratic-controlled Arkansas Senate even passed a resolution favoring the plan and
asking penitentiary officials “to direct the labor of the convicts in such a
channel as not to interfere with the industrial pursuits of the mechanics
of the neighborhood.”21
For the next year, the Mechanics’ Association sparred with the inspectors of the penitentiary over the proper method to work the inmates.22 The Mechanics must have had some success in convincing the
city and state’s population of the worthiness of their cause, because the
inspectors complained in their annual report that a “systematic combination of mechanics of the City and vicinity of Little Rock” had placed
the institution in a “helpless condition,” forcing it to rely on state subsidies to keep inmates clothed and fed. The officials claimed to have
been unable to obtain the machinery and materials needed to engage in
the manufacturing of hemp rope and bagging, “which seems to be the
18
Arkansas State Democrat (Little Rock), June 30, 1848, p. 2; July 7, 1848, p. 2; July
14, 1848, p. 2. Soon after receiving the nomination, Haller faced accusations that some
sort of moral impropriety had occurred among those who boarded at his home. The exact
nature of the charges is unknown, but Haller defended his wife and himself in the most
vigorous terms, asserting, “No wrong has ever been committed in our house with our consent and knowledge”; ibid., July 21, 1848, p. 3. For more on the charges against Haller, see
notes in box 54D, file 1, Margaret Smith Ross Papers, Special Collections, University of
Arkansas Libraries, Fayetteville.
19
Arkansas Banner, June 18, 1845, p. 2.
20
Arkansas State Gazette, June 16, 1845, p. 2; August 18, 1845, p. 2.
21
Journal of the Arkansas Senate, 1846, 105, 120, quotation on p. 287.
22
Arkansas State Gazette, August 18, 1845, p. 2; December 8, 1845, p. 2; June 8,
1846, p. 3; July 13, 1846, p. 3.
MECHANICS OF LITTLE ROCK
229
only admissible species of labor.” Yet, the inspectors’ report also made
clear that the penitentiary continued working inmates at the blacksmith
forges. The report boasted, “This branch of business was carried on successfully and with profit to the institution.”23
The conflict carried over into the legislative elections of the summer of 1846, when the Mechanics’ Association secured pledges from
both the Whig and Democratic candidates in Pulaski County to work to
remove penitentiary inmates from competition with Little Rock’s white
workingmen. The candidates affirmed the principle that free white mechanics should not be forced to compete with the unfree labor of convicts. State senator Thomas Willoughby Newton, who a year later
would become the only Whig from Arkansas ever to serve in the U.S.
House of Representatives, insisted that it was “not only unjust but impolitic for the State to erect the Penitentiary into a school for teaching
the mechanic.” State representative Charles P. Bertrand, a Whig who
would later be elected mayor of Little Rock on the American party
(Know Nothing) ticket, claimed, “It was never contemplated . . . that the
labor of a man whose crimes banished from society and made him an
inmate of a Penitentiary, should successfully compete (if compete at
all) with the labor of the free, honest and industrious.” State representative Peter Crutchfield, a Democrat whose connections had led to a
plum appointment as head of the Public Land Office in Little Rock during James K. Polk’s administration, declared, “[I]f the present system
be allowed to continue . . . no honest mechanic, who obtained his livelihood at the sweat of his brow, will ever think of settling among us, and
those already here . . . will be constrained, from necessity, to either
leave us or abandon their respective trades.”24
The fight over convict labor at the Arkansas penitentiary ended, at
least temporarily, in August 1846, when a fire consumed the facility. On
August 5, inmates captured two armed guards and quickly took control
of the inside of the prison. After guards and loyal convicts shut the outside gates, some of those trying to escape set the buildings and workshops ablaze in hopes that the gates would open to allow fire fighters to
enter. No prisoners made it out, except for one of the instigators who
was promptly killed. But the penitentiary was a total loss. According to
23
“Penitentiary Report,” in the appendix to Journal of the Arkansas House of Representatives, 1846, 48.
24
Arkansas State Gazette, July 13, 1846, p. 3; Arkansas State Gazette and Democrat,
January 5, 1855, p. 2; Arkansas State Democrat, July 14, 1848, p. 2; Woods, Rebellion and
Realignment, 36.
230
ARKANSAS HISTORICAL QUARTERLY
a report by the penitentiary’s inspectors, “[E]verything pertaining to the
institution, was consumed in a short time.”25
The state took the concerns of the Mechanics’ Association into consideration when planning reconstruction. A select committee of the Arkansas Senate, citing the need to provide “justice to the Mechanics of
Little Rock,” recommended that the penitentiary find a “system of labor”
that would allow it “to defray its expenses” and avoid conflict with the
free white workingmen.26 The inspectors of the penitentiary agreed, calling for the new penitentiary to be designed in such a way that it would be
“suited to that kind of labor that must become the entire business of convicts, viz.: manufacturing cotton and hemp.”27
In March 1850, though, just as the rebuilding was nearing completion, inmates again set fire to the penitentiary during another escape attempt. Again, the penitentiary was a near total loss. At this point, Gov.
John Selden Roane asked the general assembly to reconstruct the penitentiary in such a way as to render it “beyond the power of the inmates
either to destroy the buildings or make their escape.” But, unlike the earlier rebuilding effort, there was little concern expressed about the penitentiary’s workshops competing with free labor in Little Rock. The
primary concern, instead, was the state’s financial health. The collapse
of the State Bank and the Real Estate Bank had saddled Arkansas with
massive debt, and the prospect of building yet another penitentiary
seemed destined to add to the already staggering burden. Penitentiary
planners hoped to put the inmates to work at the most profitable pursuits
possible so that they might generate enough revenue not only to pay for
the operation of the prison but also to offset the costs of construction.28
The state’s financial straits and the use of fireproof material instead
of wood slowed the pace of construction, most of which was done by the
inmates. This gave the workingmen of Little Rock some respite from the
competition of convict labor, and the Mechanics’ Association appears to
25
“Penitentiary Report,” 48-49; Arkansas State Gazette, August 10, 1846, p. 2;
November 30, 1846, p. 2; December 5, 1846, p. 2; Arkansas Democrat (Little Rock),
August 7, 1846, p. 2; William F. Pope, Early Days in Arkansas: Being for the Most Part
the Personal Recollections of an Old Settler (Little Rock: Frederick W. Allsopp, Publisher,
1895), 284-287; Ford, “History of the Arkansas Penitentiary,” 18-19.
26
Journal of the Arkansas Senate, 1846, 121.
27
“Penitentiary Report,” 51.
28
“Report of the Arkansas General Assembly Joint Committee on the Penitentiary” in
Journal of the Arkansas House of Representatives, 1850, 238-242; “Report of the Superintendent of the Penitentiary” in ibid., appendix, xi-xv; John Selden Roane, “Inaugural
Address, November 5, 1850” in Dreams of Power & the Power of Dreams: The Inaugural
Addresses of the Governors of Arkansas, ed. Marvin E. De Boer (Fayetteville: University
of Arkansas Press, 1988), 57; Ford, “History of the Arkansas Penitentiary,” 21-22.
MECHANICS OF LITTLE ROCK
231
have ceased functioning by the early 1850s. But in January 1857, the
General Assembly appropriated funds to build a brick blacksmith shop
with six forges to be used by inmates.29 In September 1858, three months
after the completion of this workshop, the city’s artisans and mechanics
created a new organization, the Mechanics’ Institute of Little Rock,
which launched a campaign to relieve free labor from competition from
all forms of unfree and degraded labor, not only of prisoners but both enslaved and free African Americans as well.
The Mechanics’ Institute kicked off the campaign with a mass meeting at which the organization denounced those “bringing free and slave
negroes [and]. . . convict’s labor in[to] direct competition with the labor
of southern white mechanics.” The Mechanics’ Institute announced a
short-term solution: they would no longer “instruct free and slave negroes in the mechanical arts . . . nor will we work on any building with
them as mechanics—nor for any mechanic that gives them employment
to the exclusion of whites.” But the mechanics realized that the permanent “suppression or removal of these evils” could only be achieved
through legislative action. The Mechanics’ Institute called on the Arkansas General Assembly to “stop permitting free negroes to reside among
us,” limit the work of slaves to agricultural and domestic pursuits, and
convert “the employment of convicts in our State prison more exclusively to the manufacture of such goods and articles as are not manufactured here.”30
The Mechanics’ Institute grounded its campaign in claims of citizenship, racial supremacy, and the dignity and honor of labor. It reminded
Arkansans that those who built structures and manufactured goods have
been “held in high esteem by the wise men and benefactors of all enlightened and civilized nations,” but that the state was denigrating labor by
forcing the mechanics and artisans of Little Rock to “meet with an endless variety of competitors.” This competition not only hurt the mechanics materially but also socially by forcing them to associate with African
Americans (both free and enslaved) as well as convicts. The Mechanics’
Institute insisted on a simple solution—that the state’s free white workingmen be treated the same as other white male citizens. They noted that
the state gave the lawyer “immunity from competition with those who
are morally and professionally his inferior” and protected the physician
from competitors who were full of “knavery and ignorance.” If Arkansas
29
Acts of Arkansas, 1856-1857, 128; Elias Conway to the General Assembly, November 3, 1858, in Journal of the Arkansas House of Representatives, 1858-1859, 22-23;
Arkansas State Gazette and Democrat, June 5, 1858, p. 2.
30
Arkansas State Gazette and Democrat, September 25, 1858, p. 2; Arkansas True
Democrat (Little Rock), September 22, 1858, p. 3, September 29, 1858, p. 2.
232
ARKANSAS HISTORICAL QUARTERLY
was going to live up to its promise of equal treatment—at least equal
treatment for white men—the state needed to protect workingmen just as
it protected lawyers and physicians.31
There are no membership rolls for the Mechanics, and the names of
only a few members active in 1858 are known. The clear leader, though,
was A. J. Ward, who served as the labor organization’s president. A carriage maker born in Connecticut who had spent several years in Memphis, Ward quickly built a prosperous shop after arriving in Little Rock
in 1857. According to the Little Rock True Democrat—which would
emerge as the sharpest critic of the Mechanics’ campaign—Ward’s carriages “vie with anything we have seen come from the north as regards
lightness, strength and finish. His workmen are said to be among the
best wrights in the south and are eminently capable of changing wood
and iron into any shape.”32 The other officer was Recording Secretary
E. Waugh Crowl, a prosperous carpenter who had been born in Maryland. The four other known leaders of the Mechanics’ Institute were
Haller, F. M. Conway, A. J. Wagner, and R. E. Stack, the latter three
forming the resolutions committee. Conway, Wagner, and Stack’s names
do not appear in the 1860 manuscript census returns for Pulaski County.
Conway, though, reappeared in the historic record in 1861, when he enlisted in a local militia and helped secure the federal military post at Fort
Smith after the United States troops fled.33 Although the size of the
movement remains unknown, critics never questioned the right of Ward,
Haller, or the others to speak on the behalf of the city’s white workingmen in general.
The Mechanics’ Institute launched its campaign in the period between the state legislative elections in early August 1858 and the opening
of the Twelfth Arkansas General Assembly on the first day of November.
There is no direct evidence indicating whether this timing was coincidental or intentional, but it is consistent with a strategy of non-partisan political activism. Since workingmen made up such a small percentage of
the state’s population, the Mechanics’ Institute did not wield much electoral power and probably had to rely more on cajoling and pleading than
on more forceful types of political pressure.34 The Mechanics’ efforts
31
Arkansas State Gazette and Democrat, October 16, 1858, p. 2.
Arkansas True Democrat, September 29, 1858, p. 2.
33
Manuscript census returns, Eighth Census of the United States, 1860, Population
Schedules, Pulaski County, Arkansas; Roster of Confederate Soldiers, 1861-1865, 17 vols.
(Wilmington, NC: Broadfoot, 1995), 4: 87.
34
James L. Huston, Calculating the Value of the Union: Slavery, Property Rights, and
the Economic Origins of the Civil War (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press,
2003), 79.
32
MECHANICS OF LITTLE ROCK
233
were made easier by the fact that both political parties in Arkansas—
Democratic and American (Know Nothing)—portrayed themselves as
friends of the workingman and sought the support of the state’s mechanics.35 So to have aligned the Mechanics’ Institute with one political party
or to have endorsed candidates would have risked alienating potential
supporters in the legislature and angering partisans among the workingmen. Instead, the Mechanics’ Institute seems to have avoided taking part
in the elections and focused their efforts on lobbying those already
elected, regardless of party. Avoiding partisan entanglements also made
sense in that Little Rock voters had regularly elected Whigs or Know
Nothings, while the state as a whole was decidedly Democratic, and the
workingmen of Little Rock needed allies at both the state and municipal
levels.
The least controversial of the Mechanics’ Institute’s demands—the
call to rid the city and state of competition from free African Americans—is also the most curious. Historian Ira Berlin attributes the Mechanics’ Institute’s support for the eviction of free blacks from Arkansas
to the desire of workingmen “to rid themselves of unwanted black competitors.” But free white workingmen of Little Rock had little to fear
from the competition of free blacks—largely because there were so few
of them. Starting in the 1840s, the Arkansas General Assembly had
taken steps to ensure that the state’s free black population remained
small—prohibiting free blacks from migrating into Arkansas and requiring those already living in the state to post $500 bonds.36 Likewise,
the city of Little Rock had passed ordinances circumscribing the activities of free blacks in an effort to discourage them from putting down
roots.37 These measures worked. According to the 1850 manuscript census, only five free black men and sixteen free black women lived in Little Rock, a city of 2,167 inhabitants. Four of the five men worked in
skilled trades—two were barbers and two were confectioners. But these
occupations did not place them in competition with many white workers. According to aggregated census figures, there were only two other
barbers in the whole state and only one other confectioner. Only the fifth
free black, Harry Spring, a fifty-year-old mulatto, competed with white
labor. The census enumerator classified him as a common laborer. The
number of free blacks in Little Rock in 1858 is unclear, but, of the five
35
See, for example, Arkansas State Gazette and Democrat, July, 12, 1856, p. 2; July
31, 1858, p. 2; Arkansas True Democrat, July 8, 1856, p. 2.
36
Berlin, Slaves without Masters, 373; J. Gould, Digest of the Statutes of Arkansas,
1858 (n.p., n.d.), 553-556.
37
Margaret Smith Ross, “Nathan Warren, a Free Negro for the Old South,” Arkansas
Historical Quarterly 15 (Spring 1956): 53-61.
234
ARKANSAS HISTORICAL QUARTERLY
identified in the 1850 census, at least two, Nathan Warren and his
brother James—the confectioners—had left the city before the start of
the Mechanics’ campaign. According to his biographer, Nathan Warren
fled the city as “the feeling against free Negroes grew stronger.”38
The Mechanics probably supported the eviction of free blacks not
for fear of competition but out of a profound sense of racism—the belief
that enslavement was the natural condition for African Americans and
that free blacks threatened the well being of Little Rock. According to a
Mechanics’ Institute resolution, free black women endangered the personal virtue of white men: “Their presence here induces a departure
from moral rectitude amongst our young men, producing a mongrel and
mix blooded race . . . in a worse condition every way than their most undefiled African ancestor.” Free black men, on the other hand, were “useless drones,” performing work and consuming resources but adding
little to the wealth and civic life of the city. Although a few free African
Americans might become productive members of the community in the
right circumstances, the majority never could.39 One mechanic probably
summed up the feelings of his colleagues, asserting, “Had I the say so .
. . there would not exist one free nigger on earth, in heaven, in hell, or
any other place.”40
The Mechanics’ Institute also might have called for the eviction of
free blacks in an effort to win support for their larger campaign by aligning it with a powerful movement already underway. Earlier that summer,
several prominent slaveholders and politicians called for the state to
evict the approximately 700 free blacks living within its borders. The petitioners cast free blacks as a threat to the state’s slave population: “They
. . . console with them when they complain, harbor them if they escape,
tell them they are entitled to be free, and encourage them in insubordination, and to pilfer and defraud, if not commit offenses more serious and
do acts more dangerous still.” This was not the first time that Arkansas
considered evicting free blacks, but earlier attempts had been stymied by
fears that such a move would violate their constitutional rights. But the
U.S. Supreme Court’s Dred Scott decision in 1857, suggesting that peo-
38
Manuscript census returns, Seventh Census of the United States, 1850, Population Schedules, Pulaski County, Arkansas; Seventh Census of the United States, 1850
(Washington: Robt. Armstrong, Public Printer, 1853), 553, 535, 544; Ross, “Nathan
Warren,” 56.
39
Arkansas State Gazette and Democrat, October 16, 1858, p. 2.
40
Ibid., November 13, 1858, p. 2, col. 5.
MECHANICS OF LITTLE ROCK
235
ple of African origins could never possess the rights of citizenship, put
those fears to rest. 41
Given that the eviction of free blacks was supported by Gov. Elias
Conway, influential slaveholders, nearly all of the state’s newspapers,
and the Mechanics’ Institute of Little Rock, it is not surprising that, as
soon as the General Assembly convened in the fall of 1858, legislators
introduced four separate measures to evict African Americans from the
state. Delays in passage arose not from opposition to the idea but from
debates on the exact terms of expulsion. On February 12, 1859, though,
the governor signed a measure giving free blacks six months to leave the
state and punishing those who refused to so with enslavement. Although
the state would postpone enforcement of this law and it would never
take effect, its passage caused a large percentage of the state’s free African Americans to sell their property and leave the state. According to
the 1860 Census, there were no free black men in Little Rock.42
The approximately 100 inmates at the Arkansas penitentiary in 1858
offered more competition to the free white workers of Little Rock than
did free blacks. The Mechanics’ Institute complained that the directors
of the penitentiary were working the inmates as “carpenters, blacksmiths, masons, shoemakers, upholsterers, coopers, wheelrights, painters, carriagemakers” and that the penitentiary’s workshops were
“producing every variety of article for sale or barter in town.” Not only
did the presence of prison labor lower wages and drive out productive
citizens, but it scared away good, honest, hardworking people who otherwise might move to Little Rock and improve the city. The Mechanics
understood the need to work the inmates to help defray the cost of running the penitentiary, but they insisted that convicts be put to labor producing goods that were not being made in Little Rock.43
41
Circular to the People of the State of Arkansas, dated July 21, 1858, reprinted in
Batesville Independent Balance, September 2, 1858, p. 1; Berlin, Slaves without Masters,
372-374; Taylor, Negro Slavery in Arkansas, 255-258.
42
Batesville Independent Balance, December 10, 1858, p. 3; Journal of the Arkansas
House of Representatives, 1858, 255-256; Acts of Arkansas, 1858-59, 175-177; Berlin,
Slaves without Masters, 372-374, 380; Taylor, Negro Slavery in Arkansas, 255-258;
Manuscript census returns, Eighth Census of the United States, 1860, Population Schedules, Pulaski County, Arkansas; “Report of the Superintendent and Keepers of the Arkansas Penitentiary, made to the Governor, for 1859 and 1860” (Little Rock: Johnson &
Yerkes, Public Printers, 1860). The manuscript census returns for 1860 lists a few black
men in the Arkansas State Penitentiary. These men were not enslaved, but they were
hardly free.
43
Arkansas State Gazette and Democrat, October 16, 1858, p. 2; “Report of the
Superintendent and Keepers of the Arkansas Penitentiary, made to the Governor, for 1857
and 1858” (Little Rock: Johnson & Yerkes, Public Printers, 1858), 6-8.
236
ARKANSAS HISTORICAL QUARTERLY
The effort to rid the city of competition from convict labor seems to
have paid off quickly. Soon after the Mechanics’ Institute launched its
campaign, Governor Conway announced his intention to change the penitentiary’s policy. Instead of inmates working on the just-completed
blacksmithing forges, they would only make “coarse cotton cloth,” an article that was normally imported from the North and used to make
clothes for slaves.44
The next month, legislators, wanting to transform the penitentiary
into a revenue producer, proposed changes that would reverse the decision of the governor. Up until this time, a state official had overseen the
operation of the penitentiary, but the legislators suggested leasing the facility to an individual who would clothe and feed the inmates, maintain
the buildings and grounds, employ the proper guards, and pay the state a
portion of the profits derived from working the inmates. The legislators
noted that the penitentiary contained “ninety convicts, most of whom are
able bodied men, engaged in lucrative trades, and many of whom are the
best of mechanics” and claimed that the leasee “could pay the state several thousand dollars per year, and then make money for himself.” With
operational expenses for the penitentiary amounting to $16,000 per year
and expected to increase, legislators estimated that an eight-year lease
would save the state between $110,000 and $250,000 beyond any money
paid by the leasee.45
The state legislature enacted a convict lease system in early 1859 but
ended up leasing the penitentiary to none other than A. J. Ward, the president of the Mechanics’ Institute of Little Rock. The reasoning behind
the choice of Ward remains unclear, but a report of the joint legislative
committee on the penitentiary noted, “Mr. Ward agrees to introduce machinery in the prison, and direct the labor of convicts so as to compete
with northern manufactories, to manufacture rope and bagging, negro
shoes, etc.”46 What is clear, though, is that Ward’s leadership of the Mechanics’ Institute and its efforts to restrict the ways that slaveholders
could employ their slaves and embrace free labor ideas did not render
him an outcast in the eyes of the political leaders of Arkansas. In fact,
44
Elias N. Conway to Arkansas General Assembly, November 3, 1858, in Journal of
the Arkansas House of Representatives, 1858-1859, 23. The letter was also reprinted in the
Des Arc Citizen, November 18, 1858, p. 2.
45
“Senate Report of the Committee on the Penitentiary, made Dec. 21, 1858” (Little
Rock: Johnson & Yerkes, State Printers, n.d.), 4-5; “Report of the Joint Legislative Committee on the Penitentiary,” Journal of the Arkansas House of Representatives, 1860, 437438.
46
“Report of the Joint Legislative Committee on the Penitentiary,” 438.
MECHANICS OF LITTLE ROCK
237
these leaders—many of whom would loudly advocate secession—bestowed their patronage upon him.
Ward took control of the inmates on February 7, 1860, beginning the
shift of convict labor away from general manufacturing toward pursuits
that did not compete with Little Rock’s workingmen. When Henry Rector
became governor later that year, he praised Ward for his management of
the penitentiary and made clear that he thought that convicts should never
compete with the mechanics and artisans of Little Rock. Rector, a fire-eating member of Arkansas’s Democratic party, echoed the Mechanics’ Institute’s claims for equal treatment under the law, insisting that the
workingmen were entitled to the same “immunity and protection as those
skilled in law or physic.”47 Rector, though, did not extend his equal treatment argument to include protection from competition from slave labor.
This latter demand proved a much harder sell among the state’s political leaders. But the Mechanics’ Institute considered slaves hiring their
own time—that is slaves paying their masters set sums in return for being
allowed to find their own work, support themselves, and keep any excess
wages—to be a much greater threat than competition from convicts, calling the former “an incubus blighting . . . the prosperity of Little Rock.”48
It is impossible to determine how many of the 373 male slaves in Little
Rock hired their own time, but the Mechanics’ Institute insisted that it
had become a “settled practice” by the late 1850s. Urban slaveholders
throughout the South, especially widows, often preferred to allow their
slaves to hire their own time because the practice provided a steady
source of income and relieved them of the burden of daily supervision of
their chattel. Slaves, of course, were eager to hire their own time because
the practice provided a degree of freedom and the opportunity to profit
from their labor. Little Rock slaves, as historian Paul D. Lack has pointed
out, took advantage of such arrangements to create and maintain a separate slave community, one that allowed them “a greater chance to care for
themselves and their families independent of white supervision.”49
Anecdotal evidence suggests that in Little Rock hired-out slaves
were not confined to unskilled vocations. Advertisements for runaways
47
“Report of the Superintendent and Keepers of the Arkansas Penitentiary, made to
the Governor, for 1859 and 1860,” 4; Arkansas State Gazette and Democrat, November
24, 1860, p. 1; Henry Massie Rector, “Inaugural Address, November 15, 1860,” in De
Boer, Dreams of Power & the Power of Dreams, 89-90.
48
Arkansas State Gazette and Democrat, October 16, 1858, p. 2.
49
Population of the United States in 1860, 19; Arkansas State Gazette and Democrat,
October 16, 1858, p. 2; Lack, “Urban Slave Community,” 265; Taylor, Negro Slavery in
Arkansas, 149; Richard C. Wade, Slavery in the Cities: The South, 1820-1860 (New York:
Oxford University Press, 1964), 46-54.
238
ARKANSAS HISTORICAL QUARTERLY
mentioned slaves who worked as butchers, house painters, and shoemakers, and former Little Rock slaves interviewed by the Works Progress
Administration (WPA) in the 1930s recalled their fathers working as ferrymen, porters, and cabinet makers. Most slaves hiring their own time,
though, worked in the building trades. Former slave Charlotte Stephens
told a WPA interviewer that she remembered slaves working as “brick
layers, stone masons, lathers, [and] plasterers.” Although the Mechanics’
Institute’s protests suggest otherwise, Stephens insisted that “slaves were
the only ones who did this work.”50 The Mechanics’ Institute directed
most of its anger at a “corporation” that had hired slave carpenters, an action that had “rapidly supplanted and driven out of employment” a number of white craftsmen.51
The practice of allowing slaves to hire their own time was actually
illegal in both Little Rock and Arkansas. In January 1832, Little Rock’s
town council enacted an ordinance making it illegal to allow a slave to
“hire him or herself out.” During its first session in 1838, the General Assembly followed suit, prohibiting such arrangements on the grounds that
it was the master’s duty to constantly supervise and instruct slaves in order to prevent crime and immorality. But such laws were hard to enforce
and easy to evade, and historian Orville Taylor found “no instances of
trial or conviction” under the Arkansas statute.52 So rather than calling
for the enforcement of existing laws, the Mechanics’ Institute demanded
a new one confining slaves to agricultural and domestic pursuits.
The Mechanics’ campaign to restrict the sort of work that slaves could
do generated heated opposition. At the center of opposition stood the Arkansas True Democrat, a paper aligned with the ruling faction in Arkansas
politics and edited by Gov. Elias Conway’s executive secretary, Richard H.
Johnson. Johnson, who, like Conway, had supported the Mechanics’ Institute’s demands pertaining to convict labor and free blacks, took pains not
to cast aspersions on the group. His paper even ran a piece flattering A. J.
Ward in the very issue that it first criticized the Mechanics’ Institute’s proposal. Johnson conceded the principle that free white labor should not be
forced to compete with slave labor, but he denied that slaves were capable
of mounting such competition: “Slave labor cannot compete successfully
with white labor in any of the trades. The slave lacks the intelligence. The
mechanics of the south have never suffered by such competition.” In fact,
50
Lack, “Urban Slave Community,” 262; George E. Lankford, ed., Bearing Witness:
Memories of Arkansas Slavery Narratives from the 1930s WPA Collections, 2nd ed. (Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press, 2006), 320, 335, 342, 348, quotations on p. 337.
51
Arkansas State Gazette and Democrat, October 16, 1858, p. 2.
52
Arkansas Gazette (Little Rock), February 1, 1832, p. 2; Taylor, Negro Slavery in
Arkansas, 90-91.
MECHANICS OF LITTLE ROCK
239
Johnson claimed, the existence of slavery had materially benefited the
southern workingman, comparing the “starving multitude” roaming the
streets of the North to the prosperous workingmen of the South.
Conflating free labor ideas with abolitionism—the belief that slavery
should be abolished on the grounds that the institution was unjust to African Americans—the True Democrat noted the similarity of the Mechanics’
Institute’s proposal to the “abolitionist” ideas circulating in the North:
“The movement, carried to its full extent, would abolish slavery in the
south. If the mechanics can justly complain of the competition of slave labor, those engaged in every other form of industrial pursuit can complain
of the same with equal justice—there are even those who can complain of
the negro upon the farm.”53
The Mechanics’ Institute responded that their call for the removal of
hired slaves was in keeping with “every principle and argument advanced
by southern men.” Ignoring the substance of Johnson’s argument, the Mechanics declared that they were not abolitionists. Abolitionists, they insisted, thought “the negro to be the equal in any thing, fit for any thing and
entitled to all the white is,” but the Mechanics’ demands were based on the
premise that African Americans were “fit only for menial services performed in sugar, rice and cotton fields.”54 Likewise, Charles O. Haller
wrote to the Arkansas State Gazette and Democrat, insisting that there was
no similarity between the Mechanics’ demands and “free soilism” but
never really explaining why. Instead, he disputed the contention that slaves
could not compete with white workingmen and closed with a statement
with which most northern free laborites would readily agree: “By coupling
and yoking the hired slave mechanic with the white mechanic, you elevate
the former to a white artisan [and] . . . you degrade the latter to a hired
slave mechanic.”55
While political leaders of all stripes had stepped up to support the
campaigns to alleviate the city’s workingmen of competition from convict labor and free blacks, the mechanics’ fight against competition from
slaves elicited no such backing. The white workingmen of Little Rock
were small in number as a portion of the state’s voting population, and
the state’s politically powerful planters opposed all efforts to limit what
they could do with their human property. The Mechanics’ Institute
quickly realized that its proposal stood no chance of passage during the
53
Arkansas True Democrat, September 29, 1858, p. 2. Also see, ibid., October 6,
1858, p. 2; November 10, 1858, p. 2.
54
Arkansas State Gazette and Democrat, October 16, 1858, p. 2.
55
Ibid., October 9, 1858, p. 2.
240
ARKANSAS HISTORICAL QUARTERLY
legislative session to begin later that fall, and with the end of the legislative session the organization disappears from the historical record.56
The debate over confining slave labor to the plantation ended with a
letter from Haller defending himself against charges that his ideas were
a threat to a “slaveholding community.” Haller predicted that the day
would soon come when the United States would be divided into “two
great republics, one an Anti-slavery, and the other a Pro-slavery republic.” The anti-slavery republic would include the grain producing states
of the North, while the pro-slavery one would expand from its base in the
southern states to include the cotton, rice, and sugar producing areas of
Central and South America. Haller also made it clear that his sympathies
were with what he called the “Southern Republic,” insisting that slavery
was the natural status for African Americans. As he crudely put it, “I repudiate . . . every idea of free niggerdom in any country.”57
By late 1860, it appeared as though Haller’s prediction (as least as it
pertained to the area north of the Rio Grande) was coming true. Soon after
Abraham Lincoln’s election to the presidency in November, seven southern states seceded from the Union. The most powerful of Arkansas’s political leaders thought that their state should do the same, convincing the
legislature to place the issue before the voters. In late February 1861, a referendum on the question of calling a state secession convention went before Arkansas voters. Although voters decided to hold a secession
convention, the majority of delegates they selected were pledged to maintaining Arkansas’s place in the Union at least for the time being. Influential
political leaders, though, urged the convention to vote for immediate secession. Governor Rector, for instance, told the delegates that northerners
“believe that slavery is sin, and we do not, and there lies the trouble,” before concluding that “separation must come sooner or later.” But the convention’s unionist majority held firm, voting against immediate
secession.58
Those who had been the leaders of the Mechanics’ Institute remained
quiet throughout the initial stages of Arkansas’s secession crisis, likely
reflecting the deep ambivalence of Little Rock’s white workingmen. The
prospect of remaining in the Union brought with it a number of fears for
urban workingmen in Little Rock and throughout the South, including abolitionism and “negro equality,” both of which threatened to degrade the
labor of white workingmen, undermine their economic prosperity, and destroy their racial privileges. Worries about the ability of white southerners
56
Ibid., November 13, 1858, p. 2, col. 2.
Ibid., col. 5.
58
Woods, Rebellion and Realignment, 133-152, quotation on p. 140.
57
MECHANICS OF LITTLE ROCK
241
to have voices in a national political system increasingly dominated by
northern voters only added to the concerns. On the other hand, secession
and joining the Confederate nation carried risks for the South’s workingmen, not the least of which was the increasing political and economic
power that slaveholders would have in a nation founded to protect the peculiar institution. Not only did this raise concerns about the prospects of
aristocracy, but it also decreased the likelihood that slaves would ever be
confined to the agricultural sphere.59
But the turn in public opinion generated by the fall of Fort Sumter and
anger over Lincoln’s call for troops to put down South Carolina’s insurrection prompted the leaders of the Mechanics’ Institute to join the growing
chorus in favor of secession. In April 1861, A. J. Ward and E. Waugh
Crowl, who had served as officers in the Mechanics’ Institute, along with
several other prominent citizens of Little Rock, signed a resolution in support of secession and southern nationalism. The signers insisted that they
had initially opposed secession and supported the unionist cause but that
the “recent action of the weak and perfidious Administration of Mr. Lincoln” had changed their minds. They criticized the federal government’s
use of “its military power and material resources” to trample on the political rights of southerners, a situation “to which anarchy itself would be
preferable.” Therefore they declared, “We are ready to embark ‘our lives,
our fortunes, and our sacred honors’ in the rebellion.”60
Although the resolution signed by Ward and Waugh did not specifically mention slavery or abolitionism, those issues were at the forefront
of Charles Haller’s concerns when he called for Arkansans to support
secession. Raising the specter of an invasion by an army of “John
Browns” and “Black Republicans” and invoking his status as an “old
citizen of this town,” Haller insisted that secession and civil war were
the only ways for Arkansans to protect both their rights as citizens and
the institution of slavery. Predicting that in the upcoming conflict “[o]ur
Arkansas boys will give a good account of themselves,” he called on the
state’s troops to kill “Northerners . . . as fast as you can lay your hands
upon them.”61
59
The best account of southern white workingmen and secession is Towers, Urban
South and the Coming of the Civil War, 149-218.
60
The War of the Rebellion: A Compilation of the Official Records of the Union and
Confederate Armies, 128 vols. (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 18901901), ser. 1, vol. 53, pp. 672-673.
61
Arkansas State Gazette and Democrat, May 4, 1861, p. 2. In this letter, Haller
announced that, in spite of the rebellion, he was going to follow through with his plans to
move to the West Indies. Whether he made this move is unknown, but Frederick Gerstaecker suggested that Haller and the rest of his family died in Arkansas sometime before
1867; Bukey and Bukey, “Arkansas after the War,” 266.
242
ARKANSAS HISTORICAL QUARTERLY
Those who had led the Mechanics’ Institute quickly got behind the
Confederate effort. F. M. Conway, who had served on the resolutions committee, enlisted as a private in the state militia for its campaign against the
federal post in Fort Smith in April 1861. Conway would serve the duration
of the war, eventually becoming a second lieutenant in the Third Arkansas
Cavalry.62 Ward transformed the penitentiary into the state’s most important producer of war materiel. In November 1861, Ward reported to the
General Assembly that inmates had produced 3000 military uniforms,
8000 pairs of shoes, 250 wagons, 100 sets of harnesses, 500 drums, 200
tents, 600 knapsacks, and 500 cartridge boxes for Arkansas regiments.
Ward would run the penitentiary and its workshops until September 1863,
when he fled in advance of the arrival of the Union army.63 There is no
record of the workingmen of Little Rock protesting this use of convict labor. Concerns over competition from unfree labor evidently yielded to the
necessities of war.
By the eve of the Civil War, white workingmen in St. Louis, Baltimore,
New Orleans, and Little Rock had developed fears of both the institution
of slavery and the African Americans who would be set free should it be
abolished. Only the workingmen in St. Louis and Baltimore openly
worked to keep their states in the Union. The workingmen of New Orleans
and Little Rock, on the other hand, came eventually to support their states
joining the Confederate States of America, a nation established to protect
62
Roster of Confederate Soldiers, 1861-1865, 4: 87. There is no evidence that F. M.
Conway was a member of the Conway family that played a leading role in Democratic
politics in Arkansas from the 1820s until the Civil War. That he entered the military as a
private and spent most of the war in the enlisted ranks suggests that he had little in the way
of political connections.
63
Arkansas True Democrat, October 31, 1861, p. 2; November 21, 1861, p. 2; Arkansas State Gazette and Democrat, May 11, 1861, p. 2; Harry Williams Gilmore, “The Convict Lease System in Arkansas” (master’s thesis, George Peabody College for Teachers,
Nashville, TN, 1930), 1. After the Civil War, A. J. Ward would become a prominent
Republican and businessman in Galveston, Texas, and use his political connections to
secure a fifteen-year lease of the state’s convicts for him and his partners. During the five
years Ward, Dewey & Company held the lease, 1871-1875, Ward came under increasing
criticism for the mistreatment of prisoners. The leading historian of the Texas prison system describes conditions under the lease in horrific terms: “The prisoners themselves
described their treatment in Texas as brutal. The food they had received was of poor quality, often spoiled, and in short supply. They never had adequate clothing to protect against
extremes of weather, and were forced to work all day long despite rain, cold, or their physical condition . . . . The principal culprits included not only guard and sergeants, but the
leasees themselves, especially Ward. One inmate told of Ward’s ordering a hospital attendant not to feed a sick prisoner. Another said that Ward instructed a prison guard to kill a
particular inmate who recently had attempted to escape;” Donald R. Walker, Penology for
Profit: A History of the Texas Prison System, 1867-1912 (College Station: Texas A&M
University Press, 1988), 29-45, quotation on p. 37. For more on the Ward, Dewey lease,
see Matthew Mancini, One Dies, Get Another: Convict Leasing in the American South,
1866-1928 (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1996), 170-173.
MECHANICS OF LITTLE ROCK
243
the institution of slavery.64 The reasons for this divergence were not ideological—workingmen in all four southern cities had come to embrace a
similar version of free labor ideology—but appear to be circumstantial.
Although the white workingmen in all four cities certainly feared the
institution of slavery, the economies of Louisiana and Arkansas were sustained by cotton and other plantation crops produced by slave labor. Unlike
their counterparts in St. Louis and Baltimore, workingmen in New Orleans
and Little Rock were materially bound to an institution that they feared—
getting rid of slavery would have brought economic misery. The white
workingmen of New Orleans and Little Rock also had more to fear from
those who were enslaved than workers in Baltimore and St. Louis. Slaves
were just over 1 percent of Baltimore’s 1860 population and just under 1
percent of St. Louis’s, but 7.9 percent of New Orleans’ and 22.7 percent of
Little Rock’s. Although workingmen in all four cities certainly worried
that the end of slavery would cause African Americans to leave the plantation fields for urban areas, the white workingmen of New Orleans and
Little Rock had more to fear on this front. Maryland’s population was 12.7
percent enslaved, Missouri’s 9.7 percent, Louisiana’s 46.9 percent, and Arkansas’s 25.5 percent.65 The emancipation of slaves would have been less
likely to substantially affect the lives of white workingmen in Baltimore or
St. Louis, but it could have threatened the economic security and racial
privileges of those in Little Rock and New Orleans. In the end, the white
workingmen of Little Rock and New Orleans needed slavery and feared
emancipation more than their counterparts in St. Louis and Baltimore, and
thus they tended to support the Confederacy.
The white workingmen’s movement in Little Rock achieved neither
the size nor the political clout that its counterparts in St. Louis and Baltimore did, and this also might have contributed to the reluctance of the leaders of the Mechanics’ Institute to go against the political grain in Arkansas
to oppose secession. Although it was Arkansas’s largest city, Little Rock
with its 2,874 white people was tiny when compared to Baltimore’s
212,418 and St. Louis’s 157,476. More importantly, as historian James L.
Huston has calculated, a lower percentage of white males over the age of
fifteen worked as skilled artisans and common laborers in Arkansas than
64
Towers, Urban South and the Coming of the Civil War.
Campbell Gibson and Kay Jung, “Historical Census Statistics on Population by
Race, 1790 to 1990, and by Hispanic Origin, 1970-1990, for Large Cities and Other Urban
Places in the United States,” Population Working Paper No. 76 (Washington, DC: United
States Bureau of the Census, 2005), available online at www.census.gov/population/www/
documentation/twps0076.html (accessed November 26, 2007); “Historical Census
Browser,” Fisher Library, University of Virginia, Charlottesville, http://fisher.lib.virginia.edu/collections/stats/histcensus/ (accessed November 26, 2007).
65
244
ARKANSAS HISTORICAL QUARTERLY
in any of the other thirty states. In Arkansas, just 5.7 percent of those males
were skilled artisans compared to 20.0 percent in Maryland and 15.4 percent in Missouri. In Arkansas, common laborers constituted 6.8 percent of
the white male population over fifteen compared to 21.9 percent in Maryland and 9.6 percent in Missouri.66 The relatively small size of the workingman population in Little Rock probably circumscribed its political
activities and willingness to oppose the political dominance of the planter
class.
The Mechanics’ Institute of Little Rock’s campaigns against unfree
and degraded labor reveal, nevertheless, that free labor ideas had more purchase in antebellum Arkansas than existing discussions of the sectional
conflict might suggest. Not only did the state take action to protect white
workingmen from competition from free blacks and convicts, but even
those who opposed confining slaves to agricultural or domestic pursuits often conceded the principle that white workingmen should not be forced to
compete with unfree labor. And the Little Rock movement was far from
unique. Workingmen’s organizations in Alabama, Georgia, and South
Carolina—states that embraced secession with decidedly more enthusiasm
than Arkansas—launched similar movements in the 1850s, pushing for
laws to protect free white workingmen from competition from slave labor.
In these states, too, workingmen threw in with the secessionists after the
election of 1860.67
The free labor ideas of the Mechanics’ Institute of Little Rock did differ
from those found in the North in one important way. Many northern free laborites considered the very existence of slavery to be a threat to economic security and thus the freedom of white workingmen and farmers. The
Mechanics, on the other hand, believed that slavery and free labor could coexist as long as they were relegated to separate economic spheres—slaves to
fields of cotton, rice, or sugar, and white workingmen to the mechanical and
industrial trades. This just highlights the fact that free labor ideas, like the republican ideology that sustained both sides during the sectional crisis, were
malleable enough—depending on circumstances—to foster support for either
unionism and the federal government or rebellion and the Confederacy.
66
Huston, Calculating the Value of the Union, 79.
Sugar Planter (West Baton Rouge, LA), April 7, 1860, p. 2; Arkansas State Gazette
and Democrat, July 15, 1858, p. 2; Michael P. Johnson, “Wealth and Class in Charleston in
1860,” in From the Old South to the New: Essays in the Transitional South, ed. Walter J.
Fraser, Jr. and Winfred B. Moore, Jr. (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1981), 74; Gillespie,
Free Labor in an Unfree World, 135-163; Michael P. Johnson, Toward a Patriarchal Republic: The Secession of Georgia (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1977), 73-78;
Laurie, Artisans into Workers, 108-109; Siegel, “Artisans and Immigrants,” 221-231.
67