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SLAVERY WAS RARELY, IF EVER, what struck visitors about antebellum Arkansas. In 1818 and 1819 Henry Schoolcraft romanticized a near savage population of hunters in the Ozarks while Thomas Nuttall found only incipient agricultural activity along the more settled banks of the Arkansas River. Traveling down the Southwest Trail in the mid-1820s, Joseph Meech worried about robbers and murderers. George Featherstonhaugh, in an oft quoted comment of 1834, described Arkansas Territory as a crude and violent place whose population consisted of debtors, gamblers, forgers, horse thieves, and murderers; all of them immigrants from the East attracted by Arkansas's flexible attitude toward "such fundamental points as religion, morals, and property." A few years after statehood, Friedrich Gerstacker experienced the place as a vast wilderness, made up largely of swamps and forest, filled with game, and sparsely populated, mostly with subsistence farmers. As late as 1860 Henry Merrill marveled at the poverty-stricken and uncivilized mountain folk of Polk County in the Ouachita Mountains, making them sound like a fallen version of Schoolcraft's noble woodsmen of three decades earlier.1
While Orville W. Taylor published a comprehensive survey of slavery in Arkansas in 1958, most recent scholars have de-emphasized that institution. Among modern interpreters, Malcolm J. Rohrbough saw Arkansas as a product of frontier and western influences; Lonnie White, Margaret Ross, and James M. Woods stressed the importance of politics; Michael B. Dougan was impressed with the lack of economic development, while this author argued for the importance of ambition and opportunity. Carl H. Moneyhon is an exception to this trend, but his work begins with the 1850s, when the significance of slavery is more obvious. The general lack of attention, however, is neither surprising nor entirely unwarranted; slavery was less dominant in Arkansas than in other states where planters and plantations were better established.2
In his recent and magisterial work, Many Thousands Gone, Ira Berlin distinguishes between societies with slaves and slave societies. In the former, slaves were simply one source of labor, and slavery had a relatively small impact on society; in the latter, "slavery stood at the center of economic production, and the master-slave relationship provided the model for all social relations." With slaves representing only 26 percent of its population in 186-the second smallest proportion...