The Mechanics of Little Rock: Free Labor Ideas in Antebellum Arkansas, 1845-1861

The Mechanics of Little Rock: Free Labor Ideas in Antebellum Arkansas, 1845-1861Author(s): Michael PierceSource: The Arkansas Historical Quarterly, Vol. 67, No. 3 (Autumn, 2008), pp. 221-244Published by: Arkansas Historical AssociationStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/40543008 .

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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.

2The Mechanics' Institute's campaign is briefly treated in Orville Taylor, Negro Sla- very 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 His- torical 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 His- tory 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 Fones- Wolf, Alex Lichtenstein, and Kurt Newman. The author also thanks the AHQ's two anonymous refer- ees for their thoughtful and helpful reviews.

THE ARKANSAS HISTORICAL QUARTERLY VOL. LXVII, NO. 3, AUTUMN 2008



222 ARKANSAS HISTORICAL QUARTERLY

During the two-month campaign, the Mechanics' Institute enunci- ated 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 Amer- icans 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

3The 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 Econom- ics of the American Dream (Memphis: Memphis State University Press, 1978); Robert J. Steinfeld, The Invention of Free Labor: The Employment Relation in English and Ameri- can Law and Custom, 1 350-1870 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1991).

See, for example, James M. Woods, Rebellion and Realignment: Arkansas s Road to Secession (Fay ette ville: 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: Univer- sity 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 degra- dation 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 vo- racious 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 contribu- tor 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 conse- quences the moment that Black-republicanism becomes triumphant in the Union."6

In his study of workingmen in the South's largest cities, Frank Tow- ers confirms Python's worst fears, linking white workingmen's adoption of free labor ideas to their resistance to secession and Confederate na-

5Fred 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, 1 789- 1860 (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.

°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.




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 southern- born 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 Eu- rope or the North, they brought with them "ideas and traditions about

7Towers, 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. 9Manuscript 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 Immi- grants, Free Men and Slaves," 1180nl0.




the meaning of work and its relation to liberty" that made them "suspi- cious of chattel bondage" and other forms of unfree or degraded labor.10

The Mechanics' Institute of Little Rock traced the origins of the 1 858 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 reha- bilitation 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' Associa- tion 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 ex- plained, "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 Me-

10Berlin and Gutman, "Natives and Immigrants, Free Men and Slaves," 1195. Arkansas State Gazette and Democrat, October 16, 1858, p. 2. 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.




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 1 840s 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.

14Manuscript 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.

Manuscript census returns, Seventh Census ot the United States, 1ö50, 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 thirteen- year-old female; and Margarett Martin, a fifty-year-old deaf female. Frederick Gers- taecker, 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 Freder- ick Gerstaecker," Arkansas Historical Quarterly 32 (Autumn 1973): 264-266, quotation on p. 266.




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 inclu- sion 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 ca- reers 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 ofthat 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 ma- jor political party was Charles O. Haller, who in 1848 would receive the

16Manuscript 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. 11 Arkansas State Gazette, December 11, 1839, p. 2; November 25, 1840, p. 3; March 17, 1841, p. 2.




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-con- trolled 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 combi- nation of mechanics of the City and vicinity of Little Rock" had placed the institution in a "helpless condition," forcing it to rely on state sub- sidies 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

™ 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 con- sent 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. ™ Arkansas Banner, June 18, 1845, p. 2. L" Arkansas State Gazette, June 16, 1845, p. 2; August 18, 1845, p. 2.

^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.




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 im- politic 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 live- lihood 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 1 846, 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 out- side 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 Repre- sentatives, 1846, 48.

Arkansas State Gazette, July 13, 1846, p. 3; Arkansas State Gazette and Democrat, January 5, 1 855, p. 2; Arkansas State Democrat, July 14, 1 848, p. 2; Woods, Rebellion and Realignment, 36.




a report by the penitentiary's inspectors, "[Everything pertaining to the institution, was consumed in a short time."25

The state took the concerns of the Mechanics' Association into con- sideration when planning reconstruction. A select committee of the Ar- kansas 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 Seiden 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.

20 Journal of the Arkansas Senate, 1846, 121. 27"Penitentiary Report," 51. Z8"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 Superin- tendent of the Penitentiary" in ibid., appendix, xi-xv; John Seiden 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 23 1

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 1 858, 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 perma- nent "suppression or removal of these evils" could only be achieved through legislative action. The Mechanics' Institute called on the Arkan- sas 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 enlight- ened and civilized nations," but that the state was denigrating labor by forcing the mechanics and artisans of Little Rock to "meet with an end- less 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, 1 856-1 857, 128; Elias Conway to the General Assembly, Novem- ber 3, 1858, in Journal of the Arkansas House of Representatives, 1858-1859, 22-23; Arkansas State Gazette and Democrat, June 5, 1858, p. 2.

"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.




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 car- riage maker born in Connecticut who had spent several years in Mem- phis, 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 car- riages "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 Mary- land. 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 coinciden- tal 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 elec- toral power and probably had to rely more on cajoling and pleading than on more forceful types of political pressure.34 The Mechanics' efforts

^Arkansas State Gazette and Democrat, October 16, 1858, p. 2. 32 -Arkansas True Democrat, September 29, 1858, p. 2. Manuscript census returns, Eighth Census of the United States, 1 860, Population

Schedules, Pulaski County, Arkansas; Roster of Confederate Soldiers, 1861-1865, 17 vols. (Wilmington, NC: Broadfoot, 1995), 4: 87.

James L. Huston, Calculating the Value oj the Union: Slavery, Property Rights, and the Economic Origins of the Civil War (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003), 79.




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 Ameri- cans - is also the most curious. Historian Ira Berlin attributes the Me- chanics' 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 1 840s, 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 re- quiring 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 Lit- tle 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

35See, 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.

36Berlin, Slaves without Masters, 373; J. Gould, Digest of the Statutes of Arkansas, 1858 (n.p., n.d.), 553-556.

Margaret Smith Ross, "Nathan Warren, a Free Negro for the Old South," Arkansas Historical Quarterly 15 (Spring 1956): 53-61.




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 un- defiled African ancestor." Free black men, on the other hand, were "use- less 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 align- ing 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 pe- titioners 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 insubordina- tion, 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-

38Manuscript census returns, Seventh Census of the United States, 1850, Popula- tion Schedules, Pulaski County, Arkansas; Seventh Census of the United States, 1850 (Washington: Robt. Armstrong, Public Printer, 1853), 553, 535, 544; Ross, "Nathan Warren," 56. * Arkansas State Gazette and Democrat, October 16, 1858, p. 2.

40Ibid., November 13, 1858, p. 2, col. 5.




pie 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 Af- rican 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, black- smiths, 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 run- ning the penitentiary, but they insisted that convicts be put to labor producing goods that were not being made in Little Rock.43

^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.

^tsatesville Independent Balance, December 1U, lo!) 8, p. 3; Journal oj 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 Sched- ules, Pulaski County, Arkansas; "Report of the Superintendent and Keepers of the Arkan- sas 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.

^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.




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 $1 10,000 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 Me- chanics' 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,

^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 Com- mittee on the Penitentiary," Journal of the Arkansas House of Representatives, 1860, 437- 438.

46"Report of the Joint Legislative Committee on the Penitentiary," 438.




these leaders - many of whom would loudly advocate secession - be- stowed 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-eat- ing member of Arkansas's Democratic party, echoed the Mechanics' Insti- tute'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. A* Arkansas State Gazette and Democrat, October 16, 1858, p. 2.

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.




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 fer- rymen, 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 1 838, the General As- sembly 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 Ar- kansas 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' Insti- tute'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,

50Lack, "Urban Slave Community," 262; George E. Lankford, ed., Bearing Witness: Memories of Arkansas Slavery Narratives from the 1930s WPA Collections, 2nd ed. (Fay- etteville: University of Arkansas Press, 2006), 320, 335, 342, 348, quotations on p. 337. 51 Arkansas State Gazette and Democrat, October 16, 1858, p. 2. • Arkansas Gazette (Little Rock), February 1, 1832, p. 2; Taylor, Negro Slavery in Arkansas, 90-91.




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 Afri- can 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 Me- chanics 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 per- formed 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.

5A Arkansas State Gazette and Democrat, October 16, 1858, p. 2. 55Ibid., October 9, 1858, p. 2.




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 re- pudiate . . . 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 1 86 1 , a ref- erendum 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 main- taining 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

56Ibid., November 13, 1858, p. 2, col. 2. J'Ibid., col. 5. Woods, Rebellion and Realignment, 133-152, quotation on p. 140.



MECHANICS OF LITTLE ROCK 24 1

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 pe- culiar 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 insurrec- tion 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. Lin- coln" 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 specif- ically 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

59The best account of southern white workingmen and secession is Towers, Urban South and the Coming of the Civil War, 149-218.

The War of the Rebellion: A Compilation oj the Official Records of the Union and Confederate Armies, 128 vols. (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1890- 1901), 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 Gers- taecker suggested that Haller and the rest of his family died in Arkansas sometime before 1867; Bukey and Bukey, "Arkansas after the War," 266.




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

62Roster 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.

"'Arkansas True Democrat, October 31, 1861, p. 2; November 21, 1861, p. 2; Arkan- sas State Gazette and Democrat, May 11, 1861, p. 2; Harry Williams Gilmore, "The Con- vict 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 qual- ity, 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 atten- dant 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.




the institution of slavery.64 The reasons for this divergence were not ideo- logical - 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 Balti- more 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 Balti- more, 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 Balti- more 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

^Towers, Urban South and the Coming of the Civil War. 65Campbell 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).




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 Mary- land 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 I860.67

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.

66Huston, Calculating the Value of the Union, 79. 61 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 Repub- lic: 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.



The Mechanics of Little Rock: Free Labor Ideas in Antebellum Arkansas, 1845-1861

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Transcript of The Mechanics of Little Rock: Free Labor Ideas in Antebellum Arkansas, 1845-1861