The American Narrative: Histories of a Nation

The Brooks-Baxter War

The Brooks-Baxter War was not a mere accident that arose from Arkansas’s contentious 1872 gubernatorial election. Rather, it was a cataclysmic consequence of intense political infighting and systemic corruption that defined Reconstruction. Although the conflict is named after its principal disputants, it was anarchy that ultimately prevailed. This thirty-day struggle in 1874 would ultimately reshape Arkansas's political trajectory for the next nine decades.

The Battle of Liberty Place

On September 14, 1874, New Orleans witnessed a violent confrontation that left lasting implications across the post-Civil War South. Approximately 8,000 armed members of the Crescent City White League—a white supremacist paramilitary organization—clashed with 3,500 state militiamen and Metropolitan Police in a bloody street fight known as the Battle of Liberty Place. The White League succeeded in ousting Republican Governor William Pitt Kellogg for three days, until federal troops intervened and reinstated his administration. Far from an isolated incident, this attempted insurrection was a flashpoint of the broader struggle between Radical Republicans and Democratic-Conservatives during Reconstruction—emblematic of the deep divisions concerning political authority, race equality, and perceptions of government corruption. The Battle of Liberty Place marked a turning point in Louisiana's sociopolitical landscape, foreshadowing the collapse of Reconstruction and emergence of the Jim Crow South.

The St. Albans Raid

On October 19, 1864, the tranquility of the Northern home front was shattered when a gang of marauding Confederate raiders ransacked the town of St. Albans, Vermont. While recognized as the northernmost land action of the American Civil War, the significance of the St. Albans Raid extends far beyond this distinction.  This international incident posed serious implications regarding Canadian neutrality and raised the prospect of European involvement—developments that had the potential to alter the broader course of the war.

The Fishing Creek Confederacy

During the summer of 1864, hundreds of Confederate sympathizers had allegedly constructed a fortress deep within the mountains of Columbia County, Pennsylvania. Nearly 1,000 Union soldiers scoured the forested landscape looking for these perpetrators. However, there was no Confederate stronghold, rather a larger conspiracy that inflamed tensions along the home front. This is a story of political repression, armed draft resistance, and a murder that sent the Keystone State reeling. This is the Fishing Creek Confederacy.