Every student of Arkansas history — and anyone interested in sectional conflict and the Civil War more generally — will welcome Slavery and Secession in Arkansas: A Documentary History… This superb anthology doesn’t cherry-pick but instead offers readers the entire tree, with generous excerpts of speeches, debates, newspaper commentary, and private correspondence bearing on Arkansas’s decision to secede. The collection begins with a speech Rep. Thomas Hindman delivered in Little Rock in February 1859 and ends with a Searcy County delegate’s account of the secession convention taking the state our of the union on May 6, 1861. All sides are heard from as Arkansas debates, hesitates, and then takes the plunge. It will shock few readers of this journal that slavery—and not something more abstract or less momentous—was at the center of the discussion. But many might be surprised to find Arkansas secessionists adamantly opposing states’ rights. What seemed to concern a lot of them was defending their federally guaranteed right to the return of fugitive slaves against ‘nullification’ by northern states’ personal liberty laws. The volume’s source material is accompanied by an introduction, commentary, and expert annotations by Gigantino…
—Arkansas Historical Quarterly, Summer 2016
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