Allegations of an Arkansas insurrection
“In the interest of peace and good order, I request and command all persons who may have been deluded into rallying to the standard of a pretender to lay down their arms and return to their homes within 24 hours.”
— Joseph Brooks, April 18, 1874
Ohio native Joseph Brooks was an abolitionist and Methodist circuit rider who came to Helena as a U.S. Army chaplain in 1862. After the Civil War, he operated a cotton plantation in Phillips County. He helped to found the Republican Party in Arkansas and supported full civil rights for African American men and a radical redistribution of wealth.
Brooks’ voice reminded one of his fellow Liberal Republicans of the bellow of a brindletail bull, so “Brindletail” was the name given to Brooks’ followers when he broke from Gov. (and former Union general) Powell Clayton, a Regular Republican. (Another Regular Republican had once been a minstrel, the basis for the Clayton faction’s nickname.)
New York native Ozro Hadley succeeded Powell Clayton as governor after the Arkansas Legislature sent Clayton to the U.S. Senate in 1871. Brooks, as the Liberal Republican nominee for governor in 1872, accused Clayton and his administration of various crimes and threatened investigation.
In “Brindletails, Minstrels, Hercules, and Lady Baxter: The Brooks-Baxter War and the End of Reconstruction in Arkansas” (a chapter in “A Confused and Confusing Affair: Reconstruction in Arkansas,” edited by Mark Christ), Thomas DeBlack quotes Brooks’ first campaign speech, delivered from the grounds of the State House: If able to have members of Clayton’s administration indicted and prosecuted, Brooks claimed, “I will fill the penitentiary so full of them that their legs and arms will be sticking out the doors and windows.”
Perceiving a real challenge from Brooks, the Regular Republicans, in DeBlack’s words, “dumped the colorless Ozro Hadley” and nominated Elisha Baxter. A native of North Carolina, Baxter settled in Batesville in 1852. John Gould Fletcher is sympathetic to Baxter, who remained loyal to the Union though he refused a commission during the federal occupation of Batesville in 1862.
Instead (I am following DeBlack’s narrative closely), when Batesville fell back to the Confederates, Baxter fled to Missouri and was caught by Col. Robert C. Newton, who returned him to Arkansas to be tried for treason. Then, with the help of a friend’s wife, he escaped to Missouri, where he recruited and led a mounted infantry. He finally returned to Little Rock after its fall to the Union in September 1863 in order to join the government of Isaac Murphy.
Baxter officially won the election in November 1872, but the election was, in DeBlack’s words, “marred by the … all-too-familiar pattern of fraud, intimidation, and stuffed ballot boxes.”
If we want to be generous, we can say that Baxter offered a program of reconciliation, meaning he paved the way for the re-enfranchisement of ex-Confederates, allowing the Democratic Party to capture the Arkansas Legislature in a special election in November 1873.
Powell Clayton and other Regular Republicans joined forces with Joseph Brooks in early 1874 after Baxter refused to issue any more railroad bonds. (Economic development plans as well as the personal fortunes of key Republican leaders depended upon railroad bonds.) They pressed the case of Brooks vs. Baxter with a Pulaski County circuit judge, who declared Brooks governor on April 15, 1874, 18 months after the election.
Baxter was in his office in the west wing of the State House when Brooks and a group of armed men arrived to expel him. He left for St. John’s Academy (in the area where Interstates 30 and 630 now converge). The next day he returned to the neighborhood of the State House with
200 armed men. They gathered at Anthony House, a nearby hotel that would become the headquarters for the Baxter faction.
Brooks’ oath of office is in the J.N. Heiskell historical collection at the Butler Center. He swears that he is “not disfranchised” and that he has never been a member of the “Klu [sic] Klux Klan or the Knights of the White Camelia.”
Following his oath in the same collection is Brooks’ proclamation that Baxter is “pretending to be governor.” Baxter, he says, “on the 16th [of April] issued a proclamation placing the county of Pulaski under martial law and has called … upon the militia of the State to aid him in resisting and setting the law at defiance.”
On April 20, 1874, Brooks wrote President Grant, claiming that Baxter had “called out armed bodies of men for the avowed purpose of attacking and capturing the Capital of the state by military force and forcibly installing himself as Governor of said state.” Technically true but outrageous, given that Brooks had forcibly installed himself as governor five days earlier.
His plea to Grant continues: “Large bodies of armed men have assembled … in proximity to the State House and have this day actually advanced on the State House and confronted a body of federal troops stationed in front of the State House.”
Baxter’s “large body” consisted of about 1,000 men; almost as many Brooks supporters had gathered in Little Rock by April 20, while federal troops tried to keep peace. By one account, the only man to die in the streets of Little Rock during the Brooks-Baxter War was a bystander.
Most of the deadly fighting of the war occurred in Jefferson, Lincoln, and Arkansas counties. At the battle at New Gascony, Baxter supporter Hercules King Cannon White led 50 Black infantrymen against some 200 troops, also Black, who had assembled in support of Brooks; seven to nine of the latter group died there.
Kenneth Barnes writes that historians have avoided the Brooks-Baxter War “because it was indeed so complicated, not because of a lack of source material. In fact, the problem lies in the glut of information.” Newspapers provided “blow-by-blow accounts,” but those were written “in such a partisan way that a historian does not know quite what to believe.”
It is, in the words of Pee-wee Herman, like you’re unraveling a big cable-knit sweater and someone just keeps knitting, and knitting, and knitting.
On April 20, the Arkansas State Archives, the Historic Arkansas Museum, and the Old State House Museum will host “Anarchy in Arkansas” at the Old State House to commemorate the 150th anniversary of the Brooks-Baxter War. Information can be found at