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The history of slavery in Arkansas began in the 1790s, before the Louisiana Purchase made the land territory of the United States. [1] Arkansas was a slave state from its establishment in 1836 until the Thirteenth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution was ratified in 1865. [ 1 ]
Beginning around 11,700 B.C.E., the first indigenous people inhabited the area now known as Arkansas after crossing today's Bering Strait, formerly Beringia. [3] The first people in modern-day Arkansas likely hunted woolly mammoths by running them off cliffs or using Clovis points, and began to fish as major rivers began to thaw towards the end of the last great ice age. [4]
Arkansas was a member of the Confederacy during the war, and provided troops, supplies, and military and political leaders. Arkansas became the 25th state of the United States on June 15, 1836, entering as a slave state. Antebellum Arkansas was still a wilderness in most areas, rural and sparsely populated.
On Jan. 1, 1863, President Abraham Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation—but despite popular cultural opinion, it did not actually end slavery in the United States.
With the statehood of Arkansas in 1836, the number of slave states grew to 13, but the statehood of Michigan in 1837 maintained the balance between slave and free states. The Northwest Ordinance of 1787, passed just before the U.S. Constitution was ratified, had prohibited slavery in the federal Northwest Territory .
Arkansas (/ ˈ ɑːr k ən s ɔː / ⓘ AR-kən-saw [c]) is a landlocked state in the West South Central region of the Southern United States. [9] [10] It borders Missouri to the north, Tennessee and Mississippi to the east, Louisiana to the south, Texas to the southwest, and Oklahoma to the west.
Ultimately, a massive and devastating four-year-long war resolved the interstate conflict over slavery, and when rebel state governments were finally overwhelmed by force of arms, various civilian and military representatives of the U.S. government emancipated those people who remained legally enslaved.
The Republican Party was dominant in Arkansas, and nearly all African Americans supported the party as it was seen as the party of abolition and emancipation. In 1868, the Arkansas State Constitution was rewritten to give Black people the right to vote and hold office, making Arkansas the first former Confederate state to do so.