Seeding Chicot: The Isaac H. Hilliard Plantation and the Arkansas Delta

Abstract

THE TOWN OF GRAND LAKE, ARKANSAS lies in the southern reaches of Chicot County, just north of the lake from which it takes its name. First glance might not warrant a second. Yet for those who want to know all that the delta in the last century, from slavery to the heartbeat of river life, there are few better places to look. Modern romantics, pining for the mythic Old South, might find themselves well at home in antebellum Chicot. The men who came to this low and humid place controlled life in ways few planters ever did. It here, near Grand Lake, that Isaac and Miriam Hilliard began their lives together in the 1840s. They were no ordinary family. Isaac and Miriam were pioneers with means, the term James Cobb employs for second sons and their wives who moved west and south along the Mississippi River, looking for new lands and expanded opportunities.1 They and other migrants from the Upper South represented a true colonization of southeast Arkansas. In the original meaning of the word, an English plantation the literal establishment of an overseas colony-the cultural, social, and economic seeding of a foreign soil. Like those seventeenth-century settlements, Chicot more oriented toward the water and the lands from which settlers had come than toward the interior of the territory on which they established themselves. Chicot County's early culture and economy reflected its settlers' colonial attitudes toward the delta. It more a beachhead of a river economy and culture than an integral part of Arkansas. One of the most promising methods of analyzing what happened in southeast Arkansas during the mid-nineteenth century is historical geography. It is, at heart, an effort to understand human activity on (or near) the land. Since much of the experience of the Arkansas delta defined by agriculture and associated institutions created to support agriculture (e.g. slavery and tenancy) historical geography is method of high promise for delta history.2 Throughout the course of this essay, the major events in the lives of the Hilliards (and other families), in addition to regional and state politics, will be examined in the context of the somewhat unique historic geographical experience of the Arkansas delta. The idea that there is a distinct delta culture within Arkansas, however, should not lead readers to assume the area's cultural and geographic isolation. The Arkansas delta is part of a larger regional experience that cannot be described without reference to other regional cultures. The delta, like all American regions, cannot be understood as an insular environment, but rather part of a larger mosaic of regions and cultures that are constantly interacting with and being changed by others. In the first half of the nineteenth century, for example, the Mississippi River more than just a means of transportation, a highway from one point to another. It the heart of a community. Families like the Hilliards belonged more to the river than they did to any point along its banks. The river tied together families from New Orleans to Louisville and beyond. It the lifeblood of a community that spanned half a continent. The sons of eastern planters knew where prosperity lay. Wealth and independence beckoned in the West. Migration, as one student of this period writes, was a prerequisite to success, a requirement Isaac and Miriam knew only all too well.3 Isaac Henry Hilliard, Jr. born in 1811 in Halifax County, North Carolina. His maternal grandfather, Colonel Hardy Murfree, lived in Williamson County, Tennessee and his paternal great grandfather, William Hilliard, lived in Granville County, North Carolina. Little is known about his early life. His formative years were spent in North Carolina and Virginia. Isaac attended the University of Nashville, graduating in 1832. He married early and widowed just the same. His wife of one year, Lavinia Leinan, died in childbirth during the summer of 1837. …