Powell Clayton was born on August 7, 1833, in Bethel County, Pennsylvania, into a family whose ancestors had come to America with William Penn. His mother was the daughter of a British army officer. His father was a carpenter who was active in Whig politics. Although he had never held public office, John Clayton delivered the nominating speech for William Henry Harrison in 1840.
Young Clayton attended Partridge Military Academy in Bristol, Pennsylvania, and studied engineering at Wilmington, Delaware. In 1855 he moved to Leavenworth, Kansas, where he was elected civil engineer and surveyor as a Democrat. He voted for Stephen A. Douglas in 1860.
Clayton joined the Union army at the outbreak of the war. He served in the First Kansas Infantry and later as colonel in the Fifth Kansas Cavalry. He came to Arkansas in 1863 and distinguished himself at the Battle of Pine Bluff. Clayton began speculating in cotton while the war was still raging and acquired sufficient funds to purchase a plantation. After the war he married Adaline McGraw of Helena in 1865. The Claytons had five children, including one who died in infancy.
Clayton initially approached Pine Bluff's Democrats, but was rebuffed. He went instead to help found the state's Republican Party in 1867. He was elected to the party's nominating committee in 1868 and came away with its gubernatorial nomination. Clayton's military connections gave him the inside track with the transplanted Union soldiers and sutlers that made up the backbone of the so-called "carpetbaggers" who would come to dominate the party in Arkansas. Clayton had also closely aligned himself with Benjamin F. Rice and Alexander McDonald. Together they had the deepest pockets among Republicans and were the driving force behind the Republican, the party's newspaper.
Clayton's wing of the party has generally described as the "Radical Republicans," a reference to the wing of the national party most militantly for Reconstruction. In Arkansas the Claytonites were arrayed against more moderate Republicans comprised mainly of native Unionists. The term Radical would seem a stretch for Clayton, an ex-Democrat and an Arkansas planter. There is also evidence that Clayton took pains to isolate the abolitionists within the party, men such as Joseph Brooks and James Hinds, and to keep them outside the inner circles of power. No blacks were included in his Administration initially. It was only in the face of the factional threat posed by Brooks that Clayton began to dispense patronage to blacks in order to shore up their support. The civil rights act passed in July of 1868 was as much to allay black misgivings about Clayton as to wrest rights from their former masters. The main test the law was put to was to gain access to the saloon that was the watering hole of Clayton and his circle. Once Clayton sought an alliance with African Americans, however, he did so in earnest. Clayton would maintain his loyalty to his black supporters long after the rest of his party sought to cast them out as a political liability.
There were two distinct areas in which Clayton could be regarded as a true Radical, however. The first had to do with the lengths he was willing to go to defeat his ex-Confederate enemies. The second was his earnest belief in the economic agenda of Reconstruction.
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