Introduction

In December 1860, following the November election of Abraham Lincoln to the office of President of the United States, South Carolina became to first slave-holding state that seceded from the Union. By February 1, 1861, six more Southern slave-holding states seceded. On February 8, 1861, the seven rebel states (Alabama, Florida, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, South Carolina, and Texas) formed the Confederate States of America, known also as the Confederacy. After the first shots at Fort Sumter were fired on April 12, 1861, four other states joined Arkansas, North Carolina, Tennessee, and Virginia. The eleven states were determined to preserve their slave-holding privileges.

That does not mean, however, that all white Southerners supported the Confederacy and its cause. While some did not agree with the official stand of the Confederacy but remained passive, others engaged in secret activities to fight against the Confederacy in the seceded South. One such initiative was the Arkansas Peace Society, a loose affiliation of anti-Confederate groups established shortly after Arkansas seceded from the Union. Those groups were usually secret because Confederates, who represented the majority of white Southerners, believed their members were traitors. The secret anti-Confederate groups in Arkansas were particularly popular in northern counties, where slavery was not as crucial to the economy as in other parts of the state. They did not last long, however. Most were disbanded already at the end of 1861 when the persecution of their members resulted in large-scale arrests.

In this activity, you will examine a letter that John Rice Homer Scott wrote to one of his fellow Confederate officers. In it, Scott discusses how the Arkansas Peace Society operated and what men like Scott – loyal to the Confederate cause – thought of anti-Confederate organizations. Although Scott was the great enemy of anti-Confederates, his letter allows us to reconstruct how these secret societies functioned in the South, where their activities were considered, in Scott’s words, “treason and insurrection.”