Secessionist Senator saw political hopes diminish
Sen. Robert Johnson was once one of Arkansas’s most powerful politicians. In a time when the nation was pulling itself apart, Johnson became one of those men pulling hardest of all to bring Arkansas out of the Union, a move that led to the Civil War. As a result, his once-promising career was reduced to ashes.
Robert Ward Johnson was born in Kentucky in July 1814. His father, Judge Benjamin Johnson, was a wealthy planter. In fact, his family had a lot of powerful political connections. His uncle, Richard M. Johnson, was a hero of the War of 1812, a U. S. Senator, and eventually vice-president under President Martin Van Buren from 1837 to 1841. Two of his father’s other brothers were also prominent Kentucky congressmen.
In 1821, Judge Johnson was appointed by President James Monroe to serve as a federal judge in the Arkansas Territory. The future senator, now 7, moved with his family to the newly established territorial capital of Little Rock. Johnson County, in western Arkansas, would be named for the judge when it was created in 1833. Judge Johnson enjoyed a great deal of political popularity and sent the younger Johnson back to Kentucky to attend the Choctaw Academy, a boarding school run by his uncle that included many young Choctaws. He later attended St. Joseph’s College and returned to Little Rock.
In 1835, after apprenticing himself to a local attorney, he became a member of the bar and began practicing law. He would marry in 1836, a union that produced six children. He became active in local Democratic politics, and his sister would marry Sen. Ambrose Sevier, one of Arkansas’s first two U. S. Senators.
In 1840, Johnson, now only 26, became the prosecuting attorney for Pulaski County. In 1843, the state legislature created the new position of state attorney general. Gov. Archibald Yell selected Johnson to serve in this new post. After a few months, Johnson stepped down and moved his family and law firm to Helena, a growing and thriving port city on the Mississippi River.
In 1846, he was elected to Congress. He came to chair the Committee on Indian Affairs while his brother-inlaw, Sen. Sevier, chaired the Senate counterpart. Johnson was re-elected easily in 1848. In 1850, with sectional tensions over slavery threatening to split the nation, Johnson opposed efforts to compromise with the North, rejecting California’s bid to become a free state and rejecting the creation of new territories in the Southwest. He did, however, support newer, stronger federal legislation to capture slaves who had run away to the North. Johnson was re-elected in 1850 and 1852.
After Sen. Solon Borland was appointed to become ambassador to Nicaragua in 1853, the state legislature chose Johnson to finish his term in the Senate. Issues surrounding slavery increasingly dominated the American political scene. Though Johnson initially supported legislation to encourage settlement of the High Plains, he soon turned sharply against it as he saw such laws as an attempt to bring in more northern settlers opposed to slavery to the territories and thus create more free states.
As a bid to counter that, he and other southern senators supported the Kansas-Nebraska Act in 1854,
an act that would open the unorganized territories of the Louisiana Purchase from the Indian Territory to the Canadian border to slavery. Northerners believed the cooler and drier climate of this area would make the area unlikely to support cotton or tobacco production, so slavery was unlikely. However, the legislation instead created a political firestorm across the country, ripping apart the nation’s political institutions. Johnson himself was re-elected by the legislature in 1854 and came to chair the Senate Committee on Public Land and the Committee on Military Affairs. He declined to run for another term in 1860.
With secession on the horizon, Johnson worked with Congressman Thomas Hindman to convince leaders to pull Arkansas out of the Union. When Arkansas seceded from the Union in 1861, he was one of five Arkansans sent to the provisional Confederate capital in Montgomery, Alabama, to set up the new Confederate government. The secessionist legislature in Little Rock then elected him to serve in the Confederate Senate as it convened in the new capital in Richmond, Virginia, in 1862. However, the political fortunes of Johnson and the Confederacy fell apart after that. With shortages of food, supplies, and manpower, spiraling hyperinflation, and a lack of foreign support, the Confederacy faced increasing disasters on both diplomatic and political fronts. The government that Johnson created had little power to combat any of these problems.
By late 1864, with most of Arkansas under Union control and Confederate forces facing one defeat after another, he realized the war was lost. He declined to return to the Confederate Senate in its last months until it adjourned for the last time in March 1865.
The war cost him everything. He lost his home, his wife had died, his slaves were freed, his political influence was shattered, and he was left bankrupt. He spent the next ten years after the Civil War as an attorney in Washington, DC, slowly paying off his debts and rebuilding his finances. Afterward, he decided to return to Arkansas. He met up with his old political adversary, Albert Pike, who had led Whig Party opposition to him in the years before the Civil War and who had later become a Confederate general himself. The two put aside their old differences and began a prominent law firm in Little Rock.
In 1878, with the state legislature back under control of the Democrats, Johnson attempted to regain his old Senate seat and lobbied legislators. Johnson still found that he had many political allies and rallied them to his cause. Rumors, however, circulated that Johnson’s allies were attempting to bribe legislators. No concrete evidence emerged, and nothing more became of the charges. Nevertheless, legislators elected judge and former Confederate colonel James D. Walker to the Senate instead.
Disappointed, Johnson continued practicing law and his health declined. Less than a year later, he died at age 65.