Although historians have detailed the exploits of desperadoes and outlaws in the latter part of the nineteenth century, those who emerged in the immediate post-Civil War era have been largely overlooked. These outlaws, who were most active in the tri-state area of Texas, Louisiana, and Arkansas, harassed the Union army and Freedmen's Bureau agents and terrorized the black population. None spread more fear than Cullen Montgomery Baker (1835?-1869).In this engrossing biography, Barry A. Crouch and Donaly E. Brice sift through local folklore, legend, and fact to provide an accurate account of this southern desperado, whose exploits, if more widely publicized, "would (make) Jesse James and all the gunmen of pioneer days pale into insignificance", according to one promoter of the Baker legend. Nicknamed "Swamp Fox of the Sulphur", Baker has intrigued writers for more than one hundred years and was immortalized in The First Fast Draw, an early Louis L'Amour western.
A disillusioned former Confederate soldier, Baker gained fleeting national notoriety promoting a defeated dream in the occupied South. Sharing many white southerners' resentment toward the North, he took to murdering individuals who cooperated with the South's reconstruction. His actions encouraged the rise of outlaw bands and indirectly assisted in the formation of the Ku Klux Klan.
Encouraged and led by men like Baker, the violent gangs brutalized Union agents and freedmen. Local cooperation in concealing and aiding the outlaws made it difficult for police forces, politicians, and news agencies to gather reliable information on the "New Rebellion", as it was called by the New York Tribune in 1869. Numerous problems, fromthe powerlessness of the civil authorities to the insufficient numbers of the military, continued to weaken the Reconstruction government. Baker and his ilk, in effect, incited a second civil war.
Cullen Montgomery Baker, Reconstruction Desperado is essential to understanding how deeply class and race divided the South during the Reconstruction era.
- ISBN10 0807121401
- ISBN13 9780807121405
- Publish Date August 1997
- Publish Status Out of Print
- Out of Print 19 October 2003
- Publish Country US
- Imprint Louisiana State University Press
- Format Hardcover
- Pages 240
- Language English