The Civil War was over, but now Arkansas and Augustus Hill Garland had many decisions to make about the future.  Like the land his family adopted, Garland had a promising future but lost everything with the end of the war and had to rebuild.

Garland, who had spent several years building a successful law practice in Little Rock in the 1850s, had risen to become a Confederate Congressman and Senator during the war.  As the Confederacy collapsed, he returned to an Arkansas bankrupted and ruined by years of neglect and warfare.  Not only was Garland’s ability to practice law in doubt, but he could not even be sure he would avoid prison for his service in the Confederate government.  Many Union officials and northern politicians, incensed at the immense losses suffered by the nation during the Civil War, were calling for the imprisonment of all Confederate officials and senior officers.

Not long after the assassination of President Abraham Lincoln, President Andrew Johnson unveiled a conciliatory Reconstruction policy for the South that offered full pardons to many Confederate officers and politicians.  As a result, Garland received a full pardon in July 1865.  Garland quickly resumed his law practice.  In one case, he tried to contest the constitutionality of congressional Reconstruction acts and won a case that allowed him and others to continue appearing before the U. S. Supreme Court in spite of an injunction against Confederate officials and veterans.

Garland had earned the respect of Arkansans across the political spectrum for his integrity and dedication to the state.  Though a Reconstruction government was in charge in Arkansas, one hostile to secession and to everything the Confederacy represented, the legislature nevertheless elected Garland to represent Arkansas in the U. S. Senate in 1867.  However, the Senate refused to let Garland take his seat as Arkansas had not yet regained its rights as a state as part of Radical Reconstruction.  In 1873, though only 40 years old, legislators named the newly created Garland County after him.

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As a result of the disastrous 1872 election, two factions of the state Republican Party fought over the results of an election riddled with ballot box stuffing.  The dispute eventually erupted into the Brooks-Baxter War.  Nearly three weeks of street fighting, demonstrations, and court fights in 1874 left nearly a dozen dead and the people desperate to end the violence and corruption.  Garland led a call to create a whole new state constitution.  The 1874 Constitution that resulted is the document used by Arkansas today.

Garland was the sole choice for governor after ratification, and the Democrat was inaugurated in November 1874.  The state faced a debt of $17 million ($360 million in 2017 dollars), $13 million of which had been run up since 1865 from years of corruption and mismanagement, a sum crushing Arkansas.  Garland immediately unveiled a plan of spending cuts and a board to renegotiate the interest on state debts, bringing the debt crisis under control.  He was a strong supporter of the state’s new universities in Fayetteville and Pine Bluff as well as the new public education system.  He ensured that schools got the funding they needed as part of his attempts to bring new people and new investment to Arkansas.

In 1877, the legislature elected him to the U. S. Senate.  As a Senator, Garland was a strong supporter of civil service reforms and anti-corruption measures.  He supported federal aid for education to help improve the growing school and college system in Arkansas.  He also successfully pushed through a bill giving the Mississippi River Commission the ability to build and maintain levees, a desperate issue for flood-prone eastern Arkansas.

In 1885, after the election of President Grover Cleveland, Garland was named attorney general.  He was one of only two Arkansans to ever serve in a presidential cabinet.

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Though Cleveland won the popular vote in 1888, he lost the electoral college.  Garland returned to Arkansas and retired from politics.  He began writing and resumed his law practice.  He continued up to the end.  In January 1899, Garland collapsed as he argued a case before the U. S. Supreme Court and died shortly afterward at the age of 66.

The study of American History is often neatly divided between the period of the Civil War and before and the period after the war.  The changes that occurred in the nation due to the war were momentous, forever altering the course of the people and the government.   In Arkansas, one of those important figures who created this shift was Augustus Garland.

Augustus Hill Garland was born in Covington, Tennessee, a community not far from the Mississippi River, in 1832.  He was the youngest of three children.  Not long after his birth, his father moved the family to Miller County in the far southwestern corner of Arkansas.  His father hoped to run a store along the Southwestern Trail to serve settlers moving into Texas.  But those dreams were dashed when he died just a few months later.

Garland’s mother remarried in 1836 and the family moved to Washington in nearby Hempstead County.  Garland attended several boarding schools as a youth before he graduated from St. Joseph’s College in Kentucky in 1849.  He returned to teach school for a brief time in Sevier County and began studying the law along the way.

Life moved fast for Garland.  In 1853, at the age of 21, he was admitted to the bar and formed a successful law firm with his stepfather in Hempstead County.   That same year, he married Sarah Saunders, with whom he would have nine children.  Three years later, he moved to Little Rock to begin a law firm with Ebenezer Cummins, one of the most respected attorneys in Arkansas.  This partnership, coupled with Garland’s own legal skills, brought him a lot of attention and respect in the state.   He was even admitted to practice before the US Supreme Court.

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Garland was increasingly active in the political realm.  As tensions between North and South intensified in the late 1850s, he began speaking out more forcefully in defense of the Union.  In the 1860 election, he publicly supported and campaigned for former US Senator and former cabinet secretary John Bell of Tennessee, who ran on the Constitutional Union ticket.  The simple platform of Bell and his supporters was the preservation of the country and the constitution, no matter the cost.

Bell lost, the Civil War came, and Arkansas seceded.  In spite of the feelings of many in Arkansas who favored secession, respect for Garland had only increased.  In 1861, he was elected as a delegate to the Secession Convention in Little Rock.  He fiercely defended the Union, and Arkansas initially voted to stay with the United States.  After the fall of Ft. Sumter in South Carolina to Confederate forces in April and President Abraham Lincoln’s call for troops, the secession convention was recalled into session.  Garland still believed that secession was a mistake, but he accepted the inevitable and reluctantly voted for secession.

Though only 29, Garland was elected as one of three members of the Confederate House of Representatives, the youngest of all the Confederate Congressmen.  The Confederate Constitution was similar to the US Constitution in many ways, and Garland worked to establish a Supreme Court for the Confederacy and to preserve the legal right of habeas corpus in the South, even in wartime.  In 1864, Garland was named to the Confederate Senate.

He realized by late 1864 that the war was lost.  The Confederate capital of Richmond, Virginia, was under siege and Confederate forces were falling back on all fronts.  In Arkansas, Confederate Gov. Harris Flanigan was attempting to negotiate a surrender while Union officials in Little Rock insisted on surrender without condition.  Garland left Virginia in February 1865 and returned to Arkansas to help oversee the transfer of state records from the Confederate government in Washington to the Union government in Little Rock.

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Garland’s next task was to help the state adjust to the new reality.  Difficult years lay ahead for Arkansas.  Though he stayed out of formal politics for the next few years, Garland would soon play a crucial role in shaping the post-war future of Arkansas and the nation as he would soon take the roles of governor and US Attorney General.​​

“The supreme quality for leadership is unquestionably integrity. Without it, no real success is possible,” said Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower.  Such words describe the life of Gen. William O. Darby, a hero of World War II and an Arkansas native.  The integrity and courage of Darby was an important contribution to the American victory and the future of the U. S. Army through his efforts leading the Army Rangers.

William Orlando Darby was born in 1911 in Fort Smith.  His father made a respectable living as a printer.  He attended local schools as a child, and graduated Fort Smith High School in 1929.  Darby earned an appointment to the U. S. Military Academy at West Point, where he was respected among his fellow cadets.

After his graduation from West Point in 1933, he was assigned as a supply officer with a field artillery unit at Fort Bliss, Texas.  A year later, he was assigned to command a mounted artillery unit in New Mexico.  He attended the field artillery school at Fort Sill, Oklahoma, in 1937, and spent the next several years moving from post to post.  In 1940, he was promoted to captain.

The entry of the United States into World War II in December 1941 led to a massive reorganization of the army.  The success of British commandos early in World War II had inspired American leadership to similarly create a new, specialized fighting unit.  Ranger units were part of an army tradition that found its roots in the American Revolution.  Sometimes called “partisans,” these early Ranger units were known for their mobility and relative self-sufficiency.  The army, however, had not had a formal Ranger unit since the Civil War.   Having worked with the commandos starting after his arrival in January 1942, Darby was tapped to organize and train an American unit with a promotion to major.  He organized the 1^st Ranger Battalion in Northern Ireland in July.

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‘“Darby’s Rangers,” as they came to be called, which was also the title of the 1958 James Garner film on their exploits, saw their first combat in North Africa.  They conducted a series of daring night raids in November 1942 as American forces stormed into Nazi-occupied Algeria.  Darby led the raid himself, braving machine gun fire and grenades to win the day.  He was awarded the Distinguished Service Cross for his actions.  A few months later, as American and British forces in neighboring Tunisia linked up, Darby’s Rangers were sent to the new front lines.  The success of the 1^st Ranger Battalion prompted the army to expand these units.  As a result, by early 1943, Darby, now a lieutenant colonel, had organized and trained the 3^rd and 4^th Ranger Battalions.  These Ranger units played important roles in the last battles that swept the Nazis out of Africa.

With the invasion of Sicily months later, the Rangers played a crucial role in the landing at the beaches.  Darby’s Rangers were also the first to land on the mainland of Italy in September 1943.  His forces continued their push through Italy.  At Cisterna, just south of Rome, they battled the Nazis for days.  The Americans would not give in, and the city fell to the Allies in March 1944.  The battle was won, but 96% of the city lay in ruins.  The people of Cisterna, so grateful for American efforts to liberate their city, would later name a school after Darby, and in 1984 became a sister city to Fort Smith, Darby’s hometown.

After the battle, he was promoted to full colonel.  He was reassigned to the general staff at the Pentagon.  He returned to Italy a year later in 1945 on an inspection tour in the war’s final weeks.  On April 23, Gen. Robinson Duff of the 10^th Mountain Division was injured, and Darby assumed command.  The Nazis put up bitter resistance as they retreated.  Darby in response was planning to cut off their retreat and capture their remaining forces.

On April 30, in the midst of the fight, an artillery shell exploded, killing Darby instantly.  The last Nazi forces in Italy surrendered two days later.  The entire Nazi regime surrendered on May 7.

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On May 15, the army posthumously promoted Darby to brigadier general.  His bravery and contributions to the military were not forgotten.  In 1955, Fort Smith’s junior high school was renamed in honor of Darby, with the mascot changing to the Rangers to further honor the general.  The army itself bestowed many honors on Darby.  Army camps in Italy and Germany were named for him after World War II as well as a Ranger camp at Fort Benning, Georgia.  Ranger training would continue after the war, producing generations of elite army troops. The Ranger School now offers the William O. Darby Award for Ranger trainees who show the best leadership qualities.

Sen. Robert Johnson was once one of Arkansas’s most powerful politicians.  In a time when the nation was pulling itself apart, Johnson became one of those men pulling hardest of all to bring Arkansas out of the Union, a move that led to the Civil War.  AS a result, his once-promising career was reduced to ashes.

Robert Ward Johnson was born in Kentucky in July 1814.  His father, Judge Benjamin Johnson, was a wealthy planter.  In fact, his family had a lot of powerful political connections.  His uncle, Richard M. Johnson, was a hero of the War of 1812, a U. S. Senator, and eventually vice-president under President Martin Van Buren from 1837 to 1841.  Two of his father’s other brothers were also prominent Kentucky congressmen.

In 1821, Judge Johnson was appointed by President James Monroe to serve as a federal judge in the Arkansas Territory.  The future senator, now 7, moved with his family to the newly established territorial capital of Little Rock. Johnson County, in western Arkansas, would be named for the judge when it was created in 1833.  Judge Johnson enjoyed a great deal of political popularity and sent the younger Johnson back to Kentucky to attend the Choctaw Academy, a boarding school run by his uncle that included many young Choctaws.  He later attended St. Joseph’s College and returned to Little Rock.

In 1835, after apprenticing himself to a local attorney, he became a member of the bar and began practicing law.  He would marry in 1836, a union that produced six children.  He became active in local Democratic politics, and his sister would marry Sen. Ambrose Sevier, one of Arkansas’s first two U. S. Senators.

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In 1840, Johnson, now only 26, became the prosecuting attorney for Pulaski County.  In 1843, the state legislature created the new position of state attorney general.  Gov. Archibald Yell selected Johnson to serve in this new post.  After a few months, Johnson stepped down and moved his family and law firm to Helena, a growing and thriving port city on the Mississippi River.

In 1846, he was elected to Congress.  He came to chair the Committee on Indian Affairs while his brother-in-law, Sen. Sevier, chaired the Senate counterpart.  Johnson was re-elected easily in 1848.  In 1850, with sectional tensions over slavery threatening to split the nation, Johnson opposed efforts to compromise with the North, rejecting California’s bid to become a free state and rejecting the creation of new territories in the Southwest.  He did, however, support newer, stronger federal legislation to capture slaves who had run away to the North.  Johnson was re-elected in 1850 and 1852.

After Sen. Solon Borland was appointed to become ambassador to Nicaragua in 1853, the state legislature chose Johnson to finish his term in the Senate.  Issues surrounding slavery increasingly dominated the American political scene.  Though Johnson initially supported legislation to encourage settlement of the High Plains, he soon turned sharply against it as he saw such laws as an attempt to bring in more northern settlers opposed to slavery to the territories and thus create more free states.

As a bid to counter that, he and other southern senators supported the Kansas-Nebraska Act in 1854, an act that would open the unorganized territories of the Louisiana Purchase from the Indian Territory to the Canadian border to slavery.  Northerners believed the cooler and drier climate of this area would make the area unlikely to support cotton or tobacco production, so slavery was unlikely.  However, the legislation instead created a political firestorm across the country, ripping apart the nation’s political institutions.  Johnson himself was re-elected by the legislature in 1854 and came to chair the Senate Committee on Public Land and the Committee on Military Affairs.  He declined to run for another term in 1860.

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With secession on the horizon, Johnson worked with Congressman Thomas Hindman to convince leaders to pull Arkansas out of the Union.  When Arkansas seceded from the Union in 1861, he was one of five Arkansans sent to the provisional Confederate capital in Montgomery, Alabama, to set up the new Confederate government.  The secessionist legislature in Little Rock then elected him to serve in the Confederate Senate as it convened in the new capital in Richmond, Virginia, in 1862. However, the political fortunes of Johnson and the Confederacy fell apart after that.  With shortages of food, supplies, and manpower, spiraling hyperinflation, and a lack of foreign support, the Confederacy faced increasing disasters on both diplomatic and political fronts.  The government that Johnson created had little power to combat any of these problems.

By late 1864, with most of Arkansas under Union control and Confederate forces facing one defeat after another, he realized the war was lost.  He declined to return to the Confederate Senate in its last months until it adjourned for the last time in March 1865.

The war cost him everything.  He lost his home, his wife had died, his slaves were freed, his political influence was shattered, and he was left bankrupt.  He spent the next ten years after the Civil War as an attorney in Washington, DC, slowly paying off his debts and rebuilding his finances.  Afterward, he decided to return to Arkansas.  He met up with his old political adversary, Albert Pike, who had led Whig Party opposition to him in the years before the Civil War and who had later become a Confederate general himself.  The two put aside their old differences and began a prominent law firm in Little Rock.

In 1878, with the state legislature back under control of the Democrats, Johnson attempted to regain his old Senate seat and lobbied legislators.  Johnson still found that he had many political allies and rallied them to his cause.  Rumors, however, circulated that Johnson’s allies were attempting to bribe legislators.  No concrete evidence emerged, and nothing more became of the charges.  Nevertheless, legislators elected judge and former Confederate colonel James D. Walker to the Senate instead.

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Disappointed, Johnson continued practicing law and his health declined.  Less than a year later, he died at age 65.

George Lloyd Spencer lived the life of a simple farmer, businessman, and patriot.  Though his career was overshadowed by more famous figures, he served in two world wars and in the United States Senate, always willing to do his duty for the country he loved.

Spencer was born in 1893 in Sarcoxie, in the far southwestern corner of Missouri.  His family moved to Okolona in western Clark County in 1902.  He would later attend Henderson-Brown College (the present-day Henderson State University) in nearby Arkadelphia.

In 1918, in the midst of World War I, Spencer enlisted in the navy.  He served an honorable tour and returned to Arkansas not long after the war ended.

He and his new wife moved to Hope in 1921 where he bought a farm and served as cashier for both the Hope National Bank and the Hope Savings Bank.  As his banking career became increasingly successful, he still wanted to serve his country.  In 1931, he joined the naval reserves, eventually rising to the rank of lieutenant commander.

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Despite the difficulties of the Great Depression in the late 1920s and early 1930s, Spencer’s careful management of the banks in Hope helped them stay afloat, something many banks were unable to do at the time.  In 1938, he became president of the newly combined First National Bank of Hope.  The next year, he was elected president of the Arkansas Bankers Association.

In early 1941, President Franklin D. Roosevelt appointed U. S. Sen. John Elvis Miller as federal judge for the Western District of Arkansas.  Miller, a Missouri native like Spencer, resigned his seat on March 31.  Knowing the vacancy was coming, Gov. Homer Adkins appointed Spencer to fill the U. S. Senate seat for the remainder of Miller’s term.  As a result, Spencer was sworn in on April 1.

Spencer served on several different committees, including the Banking and Currency Committee and the Post Office Committee.  However, most of his time in the Senate was consumed by World War II.  The United States was slowly building up its defenses as war approached.  In summer of 1941, the army began engaging in a series of large-scale war games and training maneuvers in South Arkansas and North Louisiana.  Thousands of troops participated.  Spencer returned to Hope to help organize efforts by the American Legion to provide extra food, drinks, lodging, and entertainment while the troops were in the area.

After the Japanese attack on the American naval base at Pearl Harbor in December, Spencer voted to declare war on Japan and Germany.  He became part of the War Plant Inspection Committee, helping to oversee the transition of civilian manufacturing for military use as well ensuring plant safety and production quotas.

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He continued to serve in the naval reserves during this time.  Though approaching the age of fifty, Spencer decided that he could better serve the country in the armed forces than in the Senate.  He decided not to seek a full term for the 1942 election and entered the navy full-time when his term ended in January 1943.   Spencer’s decision not to run for re-election ultimately paved the way for Sheridan native and attorney John L. McClellan to enter the U. S. Senate and his influential 34-year career in that body.

After World War II, Spencer returned to Hope and resumed his active business and civic career.  He was later appointed director of the Arkansas-Louisiana Gas Co. and commissioner for the Southwest Arkansas Water District.  In his later years, he served as president and chairman of the board of the First National Bank of Hope until his retirement in 1977.  In his later years, he served as an advisor and political mentor to another Hope native, Bill Clinton, future governor and president.

Spencer died in Hope in January 1981.

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