Little Rock Pulaski Arkansas United States

Arkansas becomes the twenty-fifth U.S. state.

Slavery has become a wedge issue in Arkansas, forming a geographic divide that will remain for decades.

Owners and operators of the cotton plantation economy in southeast Arkansas firmly support  slavery, as they perceive slave labor as the best or "only" economically viable method of harvesting their commodity crops.

The "hill country" of northwest Arkansas is unable to grow cotton and relies on a cash-scarce, subsistence farming economy.

As European Americans settle throughout the East Coast and into the Midwest, in the 1830s the United States government forces the removal of many Native American tribes to Arkansas and Indian Territory west of the Mississippi River.

Additional Native American removals had begun in earnest during the territorial period, with final Quapaw removal complete by 1833 as they were pushed into Indian Territory.

The capital had been relocated from Arkansas Post to Little Rock in 1821, during the territorial period. 

When Arkansas applied for statehood, the slavery issue was again raised in Washington, D.C..

Congress had eventually approved the Arkansas Constitution after a twenty-five-hour session, admitting Arkansas on June 15, 1836 as the twenty-fifth state and the thirteenth slave state, having a population of about sixty thousand.

Arkansas will struggle with taxation to support its new state government, a problem that will be made worse by a state banking scandal and worse yet by the Panic of 1837.

Arkansas secedes on May 6.

The southeast Arkansas slave-based economy had developed rapidly in early antebellum Arkansas.

On the eve of the Civil War in 1860, enslaved African Americans numbered 111,115 people, just over twenty-five percent of the state's population.

Plantation agriculture set the state and region behind the nation for decades.

The wealth developed among planters of southeast Arkansas has caused a political rift to form between the northwest and southeast.

Many politicians are elected to office from the Family, the Southern rights political force in antebellum Arkansas.

Residents generally want to avoid a civil war.

When the Gulf states seceded in early 1861, Arkansas had voted to remain in the Union, and does  not secede until Abraham Lincoln demands Arkansas troops be sent to Fort Sumter to quell the rebellion there.

On May 6, a state convention votes to terminate Arkansas's membership in the Union and join the Confederate States of America.

The Southern Plains campaign leads the Comanches to sign the Little Rock Treaty of 1865.

In October of this year, General Carleton recommends that Carson be awarded the brevet rank of brigadier general, "for gallantry in the battle of Valverde, and for distinguished conduct and gallantry in the wars against the Mescalero Apaches and against the Navajo natives of New Mexico.”

Internal strife in Arkansas has approached open warfare in the years since the imposition of Reconstruction.

The state returns in 1874 to the fold of the Democratic Party (where it will remain until Winthrop Rockefeller, a Republican, is elected governor in 1966.)