Arkansas becomes the twenty-fifth U.S. state.

Slavery has become a wedge issue in Arkansas, forming a geographic divide that will remain for decades.

Owners and operators of the cotton plantation economy in southeast Arkansas firmly support  slavery, as they perceive slave labor as the best or "only" economically viable method of harvesting their commodity crops.

The "hill country" of northwest Arkansas is unable to grow cotton and relies on a cash-scarce, subsistence farming economy.

As European Americans settle throughout the East Coast and into the Midwest, in the 1830s the United States government forces the removal of many Native American tribes to Arkansas and Indian Territory west of the Mississippi River.

Additional Native American removals had begun in earnest during the territorial period, with final Quapaw removal complete by 1833 as they were pushed into Indian Territory.

The capital had been relocated from Arkansas Post to Little Rock in 1821, during the territorial period. 

When Arkansas applied for statehood, the slavery issue was again raised in Washington, D.C..

Congress had eventually approved the Arkansas Constitution after a twenty-five-hour session, admitting Arkansas on June 15, 1836 as the twenty-fifth state and the thirteenth slave state, having a population of about sixty thousand.

Arkansas will struggle with taxation to support its new state government, a problem that will be made worse by a state banking scandal and worse yet by the Panic of 1837.

Texas entertains the idea of joining the United States entirely of its own volition, because Anglo American immigrants had greatly assisted the conduct of the Texas rebellion.

The Texas voters, after gaining their independence, elect a congress of fourteen senators and twenty-nine representatives in September 1836.

The Constitution of the Republic of Texas allows the first president to serve for only two years, setting a three-year term for all later presidents.

Sam Houston serves as the first president of the new republic.

The Texans, whose republic is also recognized by Britain, France, The Netherlands and Belgium, hold Antonio López de Santa Anna captive for six months, during which time they struggle with raids by Mexican forces, wars with the Amerindians, and financial insolvency.

In September 1836, Texans vote for annexation by the United States.

The northern states, opposing the extension of slavery, refuse to approve statehood, having just acquiesced to the admission of Arkansas, a slave state.

Michigan, sans the Toledo Strip, is finally admitted to the Union on January 26, 1837, as the twenty-sixth state.

Congress has thus balanced the 1836 admission of Arkansas, a slave state, with the admission of a free state.

Anti-slavery Congressmen continue to block the admission of Texas, a slave-holding republic, so as not to tip the scales in favor of slave states.

The American South has around four million enslaved people in 1860.

The Kaw and other native groups in Kansas suddenly became an asset with the coming of the American Civil War in 1861, as the state recruits them as soldiers and scouts to stave off invasions by slave-holding tribes and Confederate supporters in Indian Territory.

Seventy young Kaw men are persuaded—or forced—to join Company L, Ninth Kansas Cavalry.

They will serve in Indian Territory (Oklahoma) and Arkansas during the war and twenty-one of them will never come home—a large loss to the already diminished numbers of the tribe.

Arkansas secedes on May 6.

The southeast Arkansas slave-based economy had developed rapidly in early antebellum Arkansas.

On the eve of the Civil War in 1860, enslaved African Americans numbered 111,115 people, just over twenty-five percent of the state's population.

Plantation agriculture set the state and region behind the nation for decades.

The wealth developed among planters of southeast Arkansas has caused a political rift to form between the northwest and southeast.

Many politicians are elected to office from the Family, the Southern rights political force in antebellum Arkansas.

Residents generally want to avoid a civil war.

When the Gulf states seceded in early 1861, Arkansas had voted to remain in the Union, and does  not secede until Abraham Lincoln demands Arkansas troops be sent to Fort Sumter to quell the rebellion there.

On May 6, a state convention votes to terminate Arkansas's membership in the Union and join the Confederate States of America.

Union Army troops, led by General John Blunt, push back Confederate troops, commanded by General John Marmaduke, into the northwestern Boston Mountains of Arkansas in the Battle of Cane Hill on November 28, 1862.

General John McClernand and Admiral David Dixon Porter capture the Arkansas River for the Union in the Battle of Arkansas Post on January 11, 1863.

Grierson's Raid, a Union cavalry raid during the Vicksburg Campaign, runs from April 17 to May 2 as a diversion from Grant's main attack plan on Vicksburg, Mississippi.

Starting from La Grange, Tennessee, the raid ends in Baton Rouge, Louisiana.

Early in 1863, Major General Charles Hamilton, the commander of the Corinth section of Grant's division, had suggested what would eventually become Grierson's Raid.

Subsequently, due to Hamilton's insistence on procuring a command that would garner him more glory, Hamilton had offered his resignation.

Grant had quickly accepted.

Until this time in the war, Confederate cavalry commanders such as Nathan Bedford Forrest, John Hunt Morgan, and J.E.B. Stuart had ridden circles around the Union (literally, in Stuart's case, in the Peninsula Campaign), and it is time to out-do the Confederates in cavalry expeditions.

The task had fallen to Colonel Benjamin Grierson, a former music teacher who, oddly, hates horses after having been kicked in the head by one as a child.

Grierson's cavalry brigade consists of the 6th and 7th Illinois and 2nd Iowa Cavalry regiments.

Union forces begin the siege of Port Hudson, Louisiana, on May 21.