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HE DIDN'T KNOW WHEN OR WHERE IT WAS COMING, but he suspected he knew how. Sometimes a fellow just knows he's not long for this world. Simpson Mason knew. The when turned out to be the morning of September 19, 1868. The where was the western part of Fulton County, Arkansas, just a few miles south of the Missouri state line, a border that had separated warring nations just three-and-a-half years earlier. The war was supposed to be over, but the fight wasn't. Mason, a Freedmen's Bureau agent accompanied by a few local militiamen, was on his way to register voters for the upcoming presidential election in the vicinity of the rural community of Bennetts Bayou when unseen assailants fired from a roadside thicket, knocking him from his horse. Murder-just how he suspected.1 It ended there for Mason, but his death served as a pivot upon which events in postwar northern Arkansas turned. Not only did the murder cap off a period of growing tension and violence, it also triggered killings and calamities that thrust an almost lily-white section of the Ozarks squarely into the saga of Arkansas's "Militia War." The assassination of Simpson Mason was just the most notable event in the story of Reconstruction in the Ozarks-the story of a war that refused to end.
At first glance, the story of Simpson Mason and the struggle for political control of the postwar Ozarks does not appear to fit the standard narrative of Reconstruction. While their interpretations vary widely, historians from the Dunning school all the way to Eric Foner agree that race and the struggle to maintain and define black freedom should be central to our understanding of the dozen years following the end of the Civil War.2 Most of the Ozark region would seem to have little to contribute to this discussion. The five-county region that Mason's Freedmen's Bureau office served had been less than 5 percent slave in 1860. By 1870, blacks would constitute less than 3 percent of the area's population.3 Yet freedpeople and the Freedmen's Bureau faced the same kinds of challenges in places like Izard and Fawrence Counties that they did in areas with much larger black populations. Blacks in the postwar Ozarks struggled to preserve their freedom,...