The Fatal Stroke

Jefferson Davis had sent a commission to Washington to negotiate for the evacuation of Fort Sumpter by a federal garrison. It seems that the Secretary of State Seward, without authority from Lincoln led the commissioners to believe their demand would be granted.

Then Lincoln ordered a ship to take ammunition and supplies to Captain Anderson at Fort Sumpter. General Beauregard, in command of the Southern forces in Charleston, demanded that the Fort be surrendered. Capt. Anderson refused. And with the roar of that first cannon fired in the early morning of April 12, 1861, the problem that for so long had agitated the country was thrown into the red field of battle for solution.

Arkansas troops serving with Beauregard in the Campaign of Virginia.

In Little Rock, on that portentous March 4, 1861 when Lincoln took office, there assembled a convention, voted for by the state to consider the question of secession . A resolution was introduced, March 7, declaring that Lincoln’s inaugural message should be regarded as a “menace, involving the inhuman doctrine of coercion.” But the convention refused to adopt it.

The governor of the state was Henry M. Rector, elected in 1860, following Elias N. Conway. Governor Rector sent the convention a message in which he was justified secession, and declared slavery was at the root of the trouble. He said slavery must be extended, or it would perish. He argued that the soil and climate of Arkansas were such as made impossible the cultivation of the best part of it by white labor.

Old State House