The selection of officers for Arkansas’s volunteer companies quickly became a matter of politics: Democrat versus Whig. The Whigs, the minority party in Arkansas, found themselves shut out of the officer elections.

Before the Arkansas Regiment left Little Rock, Congressman Archibald Yell, a close friend of President Polk, joined the ranks as a private although he aspired to be colonel. A Little Rock newspaper noted that Yell was "baking bread, wearing old hats, footing it through mud" with the privates when he should be serving in Congress. At the July 4, 1846 election of officers at Washington, Arkansas, Yell was elected colonel, but suffered criticism for his lack of military bearing. General John E. Wool complained later that Yell's men were "wholly without instruction and Colonel Yell is determined to leave them in that condition."

John Selden Roane, a member of the state legislature, was elected lieutenant colonel (second in command). Third in command was Major Solon Borland, a doctor and former Little Rock newspaper publisher. Albert Pike, captain of the Little Rock Guards, and a Whig, was overlooked in the voting.