Arkansas Territory in the context of "Sam Houston"

The Missouri Compromise (also known as the Compromise of 1820) was federal legislation of the United States that balanced the desires of northern states to prevent the expansion of slavery in the country with those of southern states to expand it. It admitted Missouri as a slave state and Maine as a free state and declared a policy of prohibiting slavery in the remaining Louisiana Purchase lands north of the 36°30′ parallel. The 16th United States Congress passed the legislation on March 3, 1820, and President James Monroe signed it on March 6, 1820.

Earlier, in February 1819, Representative James Tallmadge Jr., a Democratic-Republican (Jeffersonian Republican) from New York, had submitted two amendments to Missouri's request for statehood that included restrictions on slavery. While the slave states earlier claimed Federal protection for slavery, they now objected to any bill that imposed federal restrictions on slavery and claimed that it was a state issue, as settled by the Constitution. However, with the Senate evenly split at the opening of the debates, both sections possessing 11 states, the admission of Missouri as a slave state would give the South an advantage. Northern critics including Federalists and Democratic-Republicans objected to the expansion of slavery into the Louisiana Purchase territory on the Constitutional inequalities of the three-fifths rule, which conferred Southern representation in the federal government derived from a state's slave population.

The Arkansas Post (French: Poste de Arkansea; Spanish: Puesto de Arkansas), officially the Arkansas Post National Memorial, was the first European settlement located along the Mississippi River, in the Mississippi Alluvial Plain, and in the present-day U.S. state of Arkansas. In 1686, Henri de Tonti established it on behalf of Louis XIV of France for the purpose of trading with the Quapaw Nation.

The French, Spanish, and Americans, who acquired the territory in 1803 with the Louisiana Purchase, considered the site of strategic value. It was the capital of Arkansas from 1819 until 1821 when the territorial government relocated to Little Rock.

The Quapaw (/ˈkwɔːpɔː/ KWAW-paw, Quapaw: Ogáxpa) or Arkansas, officially the Quapaw Nation, is a U.S. federally recognized tribe comprising about 6,000 citizens. Also known as the Ogáxpa or “Downstream” people, their ancestral homelands are traced from what is now the Ohio River, west to the Mississippi River to present-day St. Louis, south across present-day Arkansas and eastern and southern Oklahoma. The government forcibly removed them from Arkansas Territory in 1834. The tribal capital is Quapaw, Oklahoma.

Little Rock is the capital and most populous city of the U.S. state of Arkansas. The population was 202,591 at the 2020 census, while the Little Rock metropolitan area with an estimated 770,000 residents is the 81st-most populous metropolitan area in the United States. The city lies on the south bank of the Arkansas River close to the state's geographic center in central Arkansas. It is the county seat of Pulaski County.

Little Rock was founded in 1821 as the capital of the Arkansas Territory. It is named for a rock formation along the Arkansas River named the "Little Rock" by the French explorer Jean-Baptiste Bénard de la Harpe in 1722. The city played a notable role in U.S. history during the 1957 desegregation of Little Rock Central High School, a key event in the Civil Rights movement. Little Rock is a cultural, economic, government, and transportation center within Arkansas and the American South.