The Republican Party of Arkansas is the affiliate of the US Republican Party in Arkansas.
Founded during the 1800s as a liberal and abolitionist party, the Republicans won control of the state government in 1868 and maintained its majorities in the legislature through 1874, when intra-party clashes helped the Democrats regain control. The Republican Party originated as a coalition of local Unionists ("scalawags"), newcomers to the state ("carpetbaggers"), and African-American freedmen. Powell Clayton actively sought to foster a biracial GOP in the state, as well as to industrialize the state and build railroads and levees via a state bond issue.
In the spring of 1868, Ku Klux Klan chapters sprang up in various counties as militant white Arkansas sought to disrupt the new Republican government, murdering the Republican congressman James M. Hinds. Clayton responded by declaring martian law in fourteen counties while nullifying or disallowing voter registration,and Ulysses S. Grant won Arkansas in the 1868 presidential election with 53.7% of the vote. By March 1869, the new state militia had brought the Klan to heel. However, factionalism soon developed within the party between his predominantly-"carpetbagger" "Minstrel" faction and the predominantly "scalawag"-"Brindletail" faction, which criticized Clayton's use of patronage to disproportionately benefit the carpetbaggers, and attacked the state's rising debt and the government's questionable dealings.
In the 1872 gubernatorial election, the Brindletail candidate Joseph Brooks ran against the Minstrel candidate Elisha Baxter. Brooks was a supporter of the national Liberal Republican movement and thus became the candidate of conservative Republicans and Democrats (who ran no candidate of their own), while Baxter was a scalawag and a local supporter of Clayton. Baxter narrowly defeated Brooks, but Brooks refused to accept defeat, reaching out to the Democrats for support. He also supported a constitutional amendment to restore voting rights to ex-Confederates, which was adopted by referendum in March 1873. In April 1874, the Arkansas Circuit Court ruled that Brooks was the legal governor of Arkansas and ordered Baxter to pay back his governor's salary (with interest) to Brooks. Brooks then led a band of armed followers to the State House to accompany the sheriff who served the writ; while Baxter surrendered the building, he refused to surrener his right to the governorship. The next month, the militias formed around the two rivals engaged in sporadic fighting that produced more than 200 casualties in the "Brooks-Baxter War". On 15 March 1874, President Ulysses S. Grant ruled that Baxter was the rightfully elected Governor, settling Arkansas' political situation.
In June 1874, however, the citizenry passed a referendum by a ten-to-one margin to call for a new constitutional convention which enfranchised ex-Confederates, enabling a majority of Democrats to be elected to the state legislature. By the fall of 1874, the ex-Confederate "Redeemers" had effectively "redeemed" the state, although they honored Black voting rights as long as they were secure in Democratic dominance. The small number of Republican election victories to the State House were led by Black-majority districts in the eastern part of the state, with most of those victories being achieved by Black candidates. Black delegates from Arkansas to the Republican National Convention increased from 39% to 45.5% from 1884 to 1888. Clayton remained the Arkansas Republican boss through the early 1910s, backed by his chief lieutenant Harmon Remmel. Their faction, which became affiliated with the "Black-and-Tans", faced insurgents, including former Brindletails, and, in July 1888, the first "Lily-White" organization formed in Pulaski County.
By the mid-1880s, discontented white farmers organized into the "Agricultural Wheel" (its members known as "Wheelers") and coordinated with the Republicans, leading to an increased number of Republican and Union Labor victories in local elections. The Democrats responded with violence, intimidation, and vote rigging, and, while white militias formed in some areas of the state, the Klan reemerged in Conway County. Democratic sheriffs and their deputies dismissed Republican election judges and supervisors and frightened Black voters away from the polls, and masked men stoll poll books and ballot boxes. In 1888, Clayton's younger brother John Clayton was murdered while contesting a narrow defeatduring his US House of Representatives bid. In 1891, the Democrats adopted a secret ballot law to make it difficult for illiterates to vote, authorized a referendum for a poll tax amendment to the state constitution (which passed by a sizable majority in September 1892), and thus crippled challenges to Democratic rule at the state or local level, even as the Populist Party gained strength in the South.
The number of Blacks in the state legislature dropped from 12 in 1891 to 5 in 1893 and again to zero in 1895, and it would not be until 80 years later that an African-American was elected to the Arkansas General Assembly. At the same time, the Lily-White movement grew, as many white Republicans saw African-Americans as costly burdens on the struggling party. Clayton ceded control of the Black-and-Tans to Remmel in 1913 before dying a year later, and Remmel continued Clayton's policy of a biracial Republican Party. However, his nephew Gus Remmel pushed for Lily-Whiteism because of his belief that Black voters were an unreliable source of support, and, in 1916, no Blacks would be regular national convention delegates. By 1920, the Lily-Whites had consolidated their power, sending an all-white slate to the Republican National Convention. Remmel later returned to the Black-and-Tan faction after Gus Remmel's death in 1920, and Blacks were again represented at the 1924 Arkansas delegation to the RNC wia an alternate. He died in 1927, and, in 1928, white and Black leaders compromised and sent Pulaski County Black-and-Tan leader Scipio Jones to the Republican National Convention as a regular delegate, along with a Black alternate. This cooperation between white and Black Republicans continued through the 1930s and into the 1940s, even as Blacks in Arkansas began to move wholesale into the Democratic Party.
By the early 1950s, the Arkansas GOP, while Lily-White in name, remained a biracial coalition. The Republican Party electedWinthrop Rockefeller as Governor of Arkansas in 1966, and the party won a few seats in the state legislature and recruited its first paid executive director in 1970. After Rockefeller left office, the Republican Party in the state became more and more conservative as the liberal Rockefeller family's influence on the party decreased, and the party ceased to support integration in favor of social conservatism and fiscal conservatism. The party held 24/35 State Senate and 64/100 State House of Representative seats in 2017, overpowering the rival Democratic Party of Arkansas.
Gallery[]
