By Emma Bracken

After months spent studying inside by the fireplace, spring weather has arrived in the Ozarks. Students are tying up hammocks and taking hikes as they soak up the last stretch of the spring semester. Northwest Arkansas is home to many hiking trails, state parks, and lakes for locals to explore when the weather is nice. In the South, often venturing out to state parks and landmarks means facing traces of the state’s history, particularly in the form of Civil War memorials and battleground sites. While sometimes the history is just written on a plaque that is easy to pass, other times locals create full-scale battle reenactments and informational battle anniversary events. The state of Arkansas recognizes 17 of these Civil War battlefields, including Pea Ridge and Prairie Grove, which host annual events around their part in the Civil War.

Pea Ridge National Military Park in Benton County is home to several Civil War weapon demonstrations, where volunteers will don period-accurate garb and demonstrate the use of pistols, rifles, and cannons in the war. This past March marked the 163rd anniversary of The Battle of Pea Ridge, which opened the door for demonstrations and memorial events to remind people of the region’s history. Travis Cott, chief of interpretation and education at Pea Ridge, explained the park has moved in the direction of demonstrations rather than full-scale reenactments because of the safety hazards. Prairie Grove Battlefield State Park participates in reenactments every other year, giving locals the ability to experience this history in numerous ways. 

Though both parks also host field tours and informational events, it is often these big productions that draw crowds and stick in people’s minds when they picture the Civil War. Demonstrations and reenactments are exciting and easily capture the attention of people taking a stroll through a park. However, it is important to remember when attending these types of events that they only tell a small part of a much larger story. 

“Because collective remembering always involves some degree of collective forgetting, mythologizing the Civil War has typically gone hand-in-hand with the popular forgetting of slavery and especially reconstruction,” University of Arkansas professor Matthew Stanley said. 

UA professor Patrick Williams explained that these types of simple conflict demonstrations perpetuate the narrative of North versus South, with Arkansas often fighting for the Confederacy. According to Williams, this does a disservice to the reality of Civil War history in Arkansas because much of it was guerilla warfare between Arkansans. For the Natural State, the war was personal and between neighbors.

“I don’t see reenactments of guerrilla fighting, and I don’t see many reenactments involving Black troops,” Williams said. 

Despite not being represented often in historical memory and reenactments, Williams said there were 5,500 Black troops in Arkansas fighting for the Union army. Because the war was centered on upholding slavery as an institution in the South, it is important to highlight the history of enslaved people who fought alongside the white Arkansans we typically see in history books. It is also impossible to create clear boundaries between the North and South as well as the Union and Confederate. Pea Ridge, for example, was a battle between Missouri citizens and Arkansans, not between Arkansas and Missouri. 

“While most white Arkansans would remember the Confederate history of the state, as exemplified in the fact that one of the stars on the Arkansas flag represents the Confederacy, few know that over 8,000 men served in the Union Army during the Civil War,” U of A Professor Eric Totten said. 

The lack of order and concentrated power in Arkansas led to chaos and sporadic, violent battles across the state. Cott explained that it is important to remember the lives lost and the lasting impact that the war made on Arkansas. Understanding the conflict that caused the war is also crucial in understanding the existing culture divisions in different regions of the country. As a divided state during the war and a border state between the South and the Midwest, Arkansas’ sense of identity and culture is complex. 

The Confederacy is often associated with or grounds for what it means to be a Southern state, but in reality, there are not as many distinct boundaries between armies. The rhetoric that mythologized a purely Confederate South ending in Arkansas and a fully Unionist North beginning in Missouri seeps into the cultural divides we see today. There is not such a cohesive Southern attitude, especially when it comes to the racial politics of the Civil War and its lasting effect on Black people in America.

“Anybody who studies the South and lives in the South will tell you that this is a remarkably diverse region,” Williams said. “Whether we’re talking about politics, whether we are talking about accents, whether we’re talking about barbecue—anybody who thinks there’s a homogeneous, unitary South that can be characterized in a certain way is misleading you.”

Williams also explained that Southern culture is so influenced by African American history in the region and that there is no “South” as we know it without the coalescence of Black culture, abolition, and even Unionism into the more recognized Evangelical Confederate South.

Arkansas is not a white state, nor a Confederate state; rather, it seems to represent the heart of what the modern South truly is, which is a diverse and complicated region plagued by the footing on which it was founded. Most of all, Arkansas as a Southern state serves a reminder that there is no permanent synthesis of ideology in American history, and every region has the ability to adapt and progress beyond their inherited regional dogma.