After the admission of the State in 1836 affairs became more tranquil. The strong men gradually learned to dwell together in peace; but their rivalries, though less bloody, were not less strenuous. [Illustration: THE HOUSE WHERE THE ARKANSAS LEGISLATURE WAS HELD IN 1835.] [Illustration: ALBERT PIKE.] All parts of the country contributed their quota. From Massachusetts there came perhaps the two ablest men, Chester Ashley and Albert Pike, men who would have been remarkable in any age or place. Connecticut sent Samuel H. Hempstead; Virginia, Henry W. Conway and Solon Borland; Kentucky, the State’s most accomplished orators, Robert Crittenden and Frederick W. Trapnall, besides William and Ebenezer Cummins and George C. Watkins; North Carolina, Archibald Yell; Tennessee, Absalom Fowler and Ambrose H. Sevier; and there were many others from various sections worthy to enter the same arena. [Illustration: ROBERT CRITTENDEN.] And not at home alone were the great abilities of these men acknowledged. Arkansas’ first two senators were Ashley and Sevier, and the former was the chairman of the Judiciary Committee of the Senate, while the latter was the chairman of its Committee on Foreign Relations, the only time when the chairmanship of both those great committees has been lodged in the hands of a single State,--and that a State whose population consisted of a few frontiersmen almost lost in the primeval forest. [Illustration: THE OLD FOWLER MANSION. NOW THE RESIDENCE OF JOHN M. GRACIE.] And when the Mexican War was over and the time came to reap the fruits of victory, it was Mr. Sevier who, together with Mr. Justice Clifford, negotiated the treaty of peace. [Illustration: THE CRITTENDEN RESIDENCE. THE FIRST BRICK HOUSE BUILT IN LITTLE ROCK. NOW THE HOME OF GOVERNOR JAMES P. EAGLE.] The leaders of the infant commonwealth were all lawyers. In the early days of the Republic the position of lawyers was much more commanding than it is at present. Their social influence has waned before the aristocracy of wealth; and their political power has largely passed to the “boss” and the machine, whose authority rests on a more material basis than eloquence and reason. And never was there a city so dominated by its bar as Little Rock in the olden times. Everything circled around the great lawyers. Even the wealth of the community was mostly in their hands. The houses of the citizens were generally of wood, and usually stood upon the street; but scattered about there arose the stately mansions of the leaders of the bar,--of Ashley, Pike, Trapnall, Fowler, Crittenden, Hempstead and others, encircled by extensive grounds and shaded by patriarchal trees, dominating the surrounding dwellings almost like feudal châteaux. In these mansions were concentrated the social and intellectual life of the community, and its history was the story of their daily struggles for pre-eminence. [Illustration: THE OLD PIKE MANSION. NOW THE RESIDENCE OF COLONEL JOHN G. FLETCHER.]