Half of Voters Go to War

Arkansas poured its vigorous manhood into the Southern army without stint or question. It had 21,500 troops enrolled by the end of 1861. That was nearly half the number of voters in the election of the year before. Among the Confederate states, only South Carolina and Virginia gave more soldiers to the cause in proportion to population than Arkansas did.

The state raised one regiment before it seceded, in response to an appeal from the Confederate government. All of the regiments, battalions and cavalry units Arkansas sent into the Southern service cannot be accurately listed. Nor can the number of lives the state laid on the altar of the Lost Cause be given with any exactness. Some of the records were lost. Others were incomplete. And the matter is further confused by the reorganization of regiments and the occasional merging of those decimated in battle, or reduced by the expiration of enlistments.

In the fall of 1864 the Confederate secretary of war reported that 26 Arkansas regiments, consisting of 10,400 men, were serving east of the Mississippi, while there were nine more, counting 3,000 men, west of t he Mississippi. The state also had a number of artillery companies in the Southern forces. And by 1864 a huge death toll had been taken of the Arkansas enlistments.

The valor of the state’s soldiers is a story that needs no detailed retelling here. It is a glowing page of history, familiar, let us hope, to every Arkansan. In victory and defeat alike, the heroism of that generation of Arkansans sets a deathless luster on the young state of those devouring, sacrificial years.

Along a thousand flaming miles of battle from Oak Hills to the Arkansas last grim stand before Richmond, Arkansas troops bore the fury of strife with the legions of the other Southern states. They were at Shiloh, Vicksburg, and Forts Henry and Donelson. They were at Perryville, Murfreesboro, Chickamauga, Kenesaw Mountain, Gettysburg and Missionary Ridge. They were at Bentonville and Corinth. They followed the stars and bars through the withering engagements of the Atlanta campaign. In all of those encounters, and on many another field of carnage, the men of Arkansas played in intrepid part in the ever thinning gray lines. Wherever the proud bugles called they went, and left an eternal testimony to their courage in their imperishable dead

Often the soldiers had no proper equipment for their stern task. Men went into battle lines with any kind of weapons owned, or could get – old squirrel rifles, shotguns, or whatever other firearm was at hand. Food, even the plainest, was often deficient. The South faced a tremendous task in transporting supplies over its few railroads and rude highways. Drugs and medicines for sick and wounded men were seldom to be had in proportion to the need.