A History of Southland College: The Society of Friends and Black Education in Arkansas

Chapter 1: Worlds Apart: Phillips County and Wayne County

Chapter 1 Worlds Apart Phillips County and Wayne County I. The Setting Sometime before sunset on  April  the Argyle, a side-wheeling steamer of  tons,1 slipped into its mooring at the Mississippi River port of Helena, Arkansas. Among the passengers disembarking at this vital Federal outpost in the midst of the hostile Arkansas Delta were four somberly dressed civilians, a forty-ish couple, and two younger women. Residents of Wayne and Henry counties in Indiana, all were members of the Religious Society of Friends who, intent upon a wartime mission of mercy, had endured an arduous two-week passage from Cincinnati: Braving the dangers and difficulties of war, sometimes anchoring in the middle of the river, occasionally running the gauntlet between hostile forces on either side, landing on the way at Fort Pillow, only two days before the fearful massacre.2 These Quakers—Calvin and Alida Clark, Susan L. Horney, and Martha Ann Macy—would have been made aware of their impending their arrival at Helena by the sight of “contraband” camps full of escaped slaves that stretched along the Arkansas side of the river. Helena’s prewar population had been scarcely two thousand, but after it was occupied in July  by a force of thirteen thousand Union troops under Gen. Samuel Curtis, the town became a magnet for fugitive slaves, thousands of whom crowded within Union lines around the town. By all accounts the result was exceedingly unpleasant: “You never saw so wretched a place  as Helena” filled with “wretched, uncared for, sad-looking creatures,” living in a “dwelling-place of fever and argue.”3 Although legally freed by Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation, the former slaves who gathered at Helena and elsewhere were still generally perceived by Union commanders as “contraband of war” for their obvious value to the economy and military forces of the South if permitted to fall back into Confederate hands.4 By mid- an estimated , freedmen had converged on Helena and their dismal situation, “eaten up with vermin ” and prostrate from diarrhea, was made more miserable by the usually “barbarous” treatment they received from Union soldiers. John Eaton, an army chaplain handed the monumental task of organizing relief for freedmen in the Mississippi Valley, later noted that it was nearly impossible to find a Union soldier who would show compassion for black people, whatever their condition.5 Maria Breckenridge reckoned that Northern soldiers harbored a “latent notion” that the freedmen were the cause of the war and, thus, the cause of the “monstrous outrage” of their being posted to such a “malaria-stricken, disease-fostering hole” as “Hellin -Arkansas,” the ordinary soldiers’ name for the town.6 Such was the physical environment into which the four Indiana Friends had placed themselves. If these circumstances were not sufficiently daunting, the threat of bodily harm being inflicted upon civilians working among the freedmen had been dramatically accentuated by the fate of Dr. Fahenstock, a fellow Indianan come South to give medical aid to freedmen who was killed by Confederate raiders near Vicksburg at about the time the Clarks and their young assistants arrived at Helena. As Elkanah Beard, the chief field agent in the Mississippi valley for the Freedmen’s Committee of the Indiana Yearly Meeting of Friends,7 wrote at the time, “Dangers seen and unseen are crowding round us, we shudder at the thought of remaining. All have concluded best to go north except my wife and I. We do not feel it right to abandon the field at present.”8 This young couple (Elkanah was thirty and his wife, Irena, twentyeight ) stayed to work among freed slaves because they continued to see “suffering here . . . [too] horrible to relate” and because no one else seemed willing or able to give succor to “these poor people.” In early March  while the Beards were working among black refugees at Vicksburg, they were summoned to Helena by Maj. Gen. Napoleon Bonaparte Buford, commander of the Union forces in the District of  Worlds Apart Arkansas. Buford, who one Quaker worker called “a very kind old man,” and his wife were esteemed by relief workers for the humane concern they exhibited on behalf of distressed freedmen.9 The Bufords were particularly moved by “the sad condition of a large number of colored orphan children . . . suffering greatly from neglect and exposure.” When Beard arrived at Helena, he was, according to one Quaker version of events...