A Weary Land: Slavery on the Ground in Arkansas by Kelly Houston Jones

Abstract

Reviewed by: A Weary Land: Slavery on the Ground in Arkansas by Kelly Houston Jones John S. Sledge A Weary Land: Slavery on the Ground in Arkansas. By Kelly Houston Jones. Athens: The University of Georgia Press, 2021. 284 pp. $59.95. ISBN 9–780–8203–6020–1. In his monumental Bancroft Prize-winning book Roll, Jordan, Roll: The World the Slaves Made (New York, NY, 1972), Eugene D. Genovese provided just two references after his index entry for Arkansas. Every other Confederate state got more, as did Kentucky, Maryland, and Missouri. While but one example of Arkansas’s coverage in the truly vast literature on American slavery, Genovese’s neglect was typical. At the time that he was researching and writing, southern historians paid scant attention to slavery in the trans-Mississippi. There was only one book that addressed the Toothpick State’s situation in depth, Orville W. Taylor’s Negro Slavery in Arkansas (Durham, NC, 1958). Modern scholars rate Taylor’s study higher than James Sellers’s woefully biased Slavery in Alabama (Tuscaloosa, AL, 1950), but it antedated a deluge of research and writing that have significantly altered and expanded our understanding of antebellum slavery, on both sides of the Big Muddy. Comes now Kelly Houston Jones, whose new work, A Weary Land: Slavery on the Ground in Arkansas, advances beyond Taylor and provides a keener understanding. Jones, an assistant professor of history at Arkansas Tech University, has produced a “bottom-up study” (4) that pays especial attention to place and environment in the lives of Arkansas’s enslaved people. Her sources include census reports, court records, tax rolls, territorial records, family papers, diaries, pension files, Works Progress Administration slave narratives (used with appropriate caution), and books. Newspapers, however, are notably absent. This volume presents dissertation research, and, as is common with such efforts, employs an academic vocabulary. That, combined with the hefty cover price, will limit its popular appeal. But the research is important, and anyone with an interest in the subject should attend. As Jones demonstrates, antebellum Arkansas was not like the older southern states. Admitted to the Union in 1836, it remained thinly [End Page 336] populated twenty-four years later, with the capitol, Little Rock, home to less than 4,000 residents. This was tiny compared to most other southern capitols, not to mention the big seaports like New Orleans (168,000 inhabitants), Charleston (70,000), and Mobile (30,000). Most of Arkansas’s people lived along the agriculturally rich river bottoms, with only a smattering toward the West and Indian Territory. As for the landscape itself, not for nothing was it referred to as “the morass.” Brooding swamps and forests needed clearing for fields and homes, and the rugged uplands were unappealing to Texas-bound immigrants. Nonetheless, Jones contends, Arkansas held great appeal to the white plantocracy “as a haven for slavery” (16) from the beginning. Absentee owners were not uncommon, including James Sutherland Deas of Mobile, who held land near New Madrid, Missouri. While men like Deas enjoyed their profits, enslaved people labored under the overseer’s lash against sucking bogs, scrub thickets, and old growth trees. New owners hastened to put their chattel to the plow. According to one slave, he made the long journey from Alabama chained to his fellows in a coffle, and as soon as they arrived, “was put right to work clearin’ land and buildin’ cabins...they just slashed the cane and deadened the timber and when cotton plantin’ time come the cane was layin’ there on the ground crisp and dry and they set fire to it and burned it off clean and then planted the crops” (39). A remarkable photograph included in the book’s black-and-white picture gallery illustrates the ordered landscape made possible by such forced labor. Taken in 1865, it shows the Tappan plantation near Helena from an elevated perspective some distance away. A two-story columned mansion dominates the view, surrounded by a large yard and white picket fence. Trending up a hillside but within a stone’s throw are two broadly separated rows of neat slave cabins featuring wide shed-roof porches. A variety of outbuildings completes the spread...