At this time 150 years ago, residents of Little Rock were beginning to exhale after an incredibly rapid surrender of the city to U.S. Army Gen. Frederick Steele. On Sept. 10, 1863, Gen. Steele threw a pontoon bridge across the Arkansas River a few miles south of Little Rock, flanking the withdrawing Confederates and threatening to cut off their retreat toward Arkadelphia. Within hours Little Rock was within range of numerous Union artillery batteries-and a level-headed city councilman stepped forward and surrendered the city.
Rumors had circulated for several days about Gen. Steele’s expedition to capture the state capital. The city council held an emergency meeting on the evening of Sept. 9 and decided to surrender the city to save it from artillery bombardment. This is not surprising since several members of the city council, including Mayor Charles P. Bertrand, had opposed secession in the first place.
Sources differ as to why Mayor Bertrand did not surrender the city himself; perhaps he was ill, or perhaps he had fled the city. Alderman James Austin Henry raised a white flag of capitulation on the river at the foot of Ferry Street near his home. He was soon confronted by a young Confederate officer who demanded that the flag be removed. Later, as the first Union soldiers made their way into town, Henry raised the flag again.
Gen. Steele acted quickly to get Little Rock back on its feet. He helped feed the citizenry, in part by opening a city market. He appointed a provisional military government to run the city. Steele had the two local newspapers closed and established a Union newspaper called the National Union. It was soon joined by two more unionist newspapers. Steele enforced law and order, prevented pillage, and within a week after occupying the city announced that President Lincoln had named Isaac Murphy as Arkansas’ provisional governor.
Little Rock had managed to come through the war with relatively little destruction. As the state capital with an 1860 population of 3,127, Little Rock was the only town of any real size in Civil War Arkansas. The city suffered no major setbacks under either the Confederates or the occupying Federals. Throughout the war, the presence of military forces within the city protected it from marauding irregular partisans who caused such destruction and dislocation in northern Arkansas.
Little Rock lawyer Nate Coulter, who has a history degree from Harvard, has written that “the war’s impact converted a mild prewar expansion into a bustling postwar expansion.” His evidence is impressive: The city’s population grew by nearly 300 percent during the 1860s, county livestock values grew by 60 percent, industry multiplied, and the Reconstruction era was good for the city.
The capture of Little Rock made the city a magnet for black Arkansans. Coulter has written that “for many former slaves the first use of their new freedom was to exercise their right to move their residences.” In 1870 the black population of Little Rock was 300 percent larger than it was 10 years earlier. Gen. Steele established a camp for the freedmen, which soon became known as “Blissville.”
Many of the former slaves who came to Little Rock were young men. An example of this was Green Thompson. Born about 1848 to a slave mother on the Robert Elliott farm in Ouachita County, young Green went by the name Elliott until his mother married a man named Thompson, whereupon he assumed the name of his stepfather.
Upon settling in Little Rock, Thompson quickly established himself as a businessman, first opening a grocery, then a saloon, and still later a feed store. Like many of the emerging black elite, Thompson invested in real estate and eventually owned his own real estate business. One of his major assets was Thompson Hall, a large brick building with a public meeting room that was the scene of many black social and political events in the capital city. He also served for more than a decade on the Little Rock city council.
A surprisingly large number of Union soldiers decided to stay in Little Rock once the guns fell silent. A good example of this is Logan H. Roots, an Illinois native who, along with his brother P. K. Roots, settled in Little Rock and was active in Republican politics and a myriad of businesses.
As Coulter has written, Little Rock and Pulaski County came through the Civil War in remarkably good shape: “Recovery in this area was speedy and the development and growth of Pulaski County resumed; and indeed, the national tragedy probably served as an impetus to that expansion.”
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Tom Dillard is a historian and retired archivist living in rural Pulaski County. Email him at [email protected].
Editorial, Pages 88 on 09/29/2013