High Quality Content by WIKIPEDIA articles! The Brooks–Baxter War (or sometimes referred to as The Brooks-Baxter Affair) was an armed conflict in Little Rock, Arkansas, in the United States, in 1874 between factions of the Republican Party over the disputed 1872 election for governor. It came at the end of a long and often violent struggle between white Republican residents in the state before the War, known as scalawags, and newer Republican arrivals called carpetbaggers, over power in the state government during Reconstruction after the Civil War.