Excitement of the Sixties

The newspaper advertisements of 1860 seem to have run heavily to steamboat announcements and lawyers’ cards. National events occupied a large part of the space. We read, early in ’61 that 50 ships laden with 110,500 bales of cotton cleared from New Orleans in one day…That Barnum was opening a museum in Philadelphia like the one he had in New York…That a pony express rider, bound across the plains to California, had ridden 225 miles in 24 hours – 40 miles being the usual distance for one rider…That railroads were pushing out their lines…That somewhere on the rivers another steamboat had made record time, or had sunk, or burned, or blown up.

Harper's Weekly - View of steamers sunk by Confederate troops between Island Ten and New Madrid.

The hearty good humor of that day flashes out of the yellowed old newspaper pages in many a chuckle. Even when the threat of war loomed so near, and the South was banking heavily on the world need of cotton to aid its cause, a Des Arc editor quoted – with a grin, one is certain – this quip from a Northern paper: “Cotton is convenient to be sure, but corn is a necessity.” A man may live without a shirt, but what can he do without whiskey?”

Throughout the four bitter years of the war, Arkansans managed to retain a saving dash of the humor which, philosophers tell us, is one of the hallmarks of generous and brave spirits. A man went into a store to buy some candles, after values had become to mount skyward, with the depreciating currency of the Confederacy. When he was told how high the price had gone, he asked, “Are they going to fight by candle light now?” And a young lady, deploring that she couldn’t serve her country on the battlefield, added brightly: “But I am willing for all the young men to go, and leave me to die an old maid, and I think that’s quite a sacrifice.”

Something of the stately old social life of the pre-war South also continued through the gloom of the titanic struggle. We read in the annals of a Southern historian that the arsenal grounds in Little Rock, which became a camping ground for volunteers until the Federals took over the city, on September 10, 1863, was “the animated scene of social diversions, engaged in by the young officers, and society belles of the capital.”

The same historian tells us that when, following the loss of Little Rock to the Union forces, the state government was moved to Washington, in Hempstead County, that fine old Southern town became the center of courtly social affairs. Arkansas hearts beat high in that calamitous time. Danger might press hard, and poverty lay its pinching grip on wardrobe as well as table – but no matter. Somehow that dauntless generation managed to wrestle a little joy from the heavy, precarious days.

Arkansas Capitol in Old Washington during the "War Between the States"