“CHAIN GANG: THE ARKANSAS PEACE SOCIETY

By James J. Johnston

… Jehoiada J. Ware, a Peace Society leader, was Fulton County’s representative to the Thirteenth General Assembly in 1861. He had been in Little Rock at a Special Session of the legislature the second week in November, and was going home through Van Buren County, when he learned that Colonel Lewis was arresting Peace Society members. In one day he rode the seventy-five miles from Clinton to his home where he spent five hours warning fellow society members in Fulton, Marion and Izard counties that they were discovered. Then he and forty men who felt threatened by the discovery of the society fled to Rolla, Missouri. Ware and thirty-five of his fellow Arkansans joined Colonel John S. Phelps’ Six-Month Missouri Infantry Volunteers and were sworn in December 1 as Company G. Ware was made captain. The Arkansas volunteers said that a Union society in Izard, Fulton, Independence and Searcy counties was betrayed by a recent member, and was broken and scattered. Other Arkansas Unionists continued to join Ware’s company so that by the end of the year his company counted seventy-eight men, sixty-three identified from Fulton and neighboring Arkansas counties. After Ware and company left Fulton and Izard counties, those left behind fell under the scrutiny of loyal Confederate citizens. Two vigilante companies began arresting suspected Peace Society members, even pursuing them twenty or twenty-five miles into Missouri as they fled, and hanging two of them.. The vigilantes sent their prisoners, whom they did not hang, to Little Rock. …”

Source:  BRAMBLE BUSH
THE QUARTERLY NEWSLETTER
OF THE HISTORIC GENEALOGICAL SOCIETY
OF MARION COUNTY ARKANSAS

Vol. 5, No. 3         July 2000         Yellville, Arkansas 72687