Nearly a third of Murphy's inaugural address on April 18, 1864, extolled the virtue of public education:
"The government is intended for the protection of all, and to aid in the general happiness and prosperity. The policy of the government should be such as to provide these ends.
"One of the most efficient agencies to make a community great, happy, and prosperous is through education of all of the citizens…. The form of government may be thoroughly democratic, yet if it the masses of the laboring citizens are uneducated, their influence and participation therein is only in name, real directing power is possessed by the educated classes…. Had the laboring population of the slave states been educated and informed, a rebellion could not have taken place…."
Four days earlier, in an address to a joint session of the legislature, Murphy had urged reconciliation:
"The demoralized condition of society, induced by three years of internal war, has created an inordinate appetite for revenge and plunder. The protection of the people requires that these retaliatory passions be restrained….
"Put your trust in the Great Dispenser of events, and let us all earnestly implore His goodness to free us from all malice, revenge, and evil speaking, and that the laws of kindness may rule our hearts, and that we may set an example worthy to be followed by the world."
While Lincoln affirmed his support for the Murphy government in a letter to General Steele, Congress refused to admit its delegates to Congress. This effectively robbed Murphy of federal funds he desperately needed to defend his administration and its supporters.
Early in 1864 federal troops were withdrawn from western and northern Arkansas to reinforce Grant and Sherman. This left the loyalist minority in north Arkansas at the mercy of Confederate guerillas and sympathizers. Harrison Stanfield, a state senator representing Dallas and Bradley Counties, was killed by guerillas on his way home from the legislature. With sufficient funding the loyalists might have organized their own militias for protection, but no money was forthcoming from Congress. Many of the Confederate atrocities against Union sympathizers that Powell Clayton would report during Reconstruction actually occurred during this period.
Next: The Failure of Reconciliation
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