U.S. Grant was stumped: “The muddle down there is almost beyond my fathoming,” the president told the New York Herald in the summer of 1871. What had him flummoxed was the recently adjourned “Gatling Gun Convention” in New Orleans, a Republican state nominating gathering that reads like a passage from a novel by Gabriel Garcia Marquez. The run-up was punctuated by open combat in the trenches and foxholes of countless ward clubs and party conventions—the so-called “War of the Factions.” When the sitting Republican governor, the colorful and roguish Henry Clay Warmoth, hobbled by a boating accident earlier in the summer, led delegates supporting his candidacy to the designated meeting place inside the U.S. Customhouse on Canal Street, federal soldiers manning the latest in automatic weaponry turned him and his followers away when they tried to barge into a rival group's caucus. Warmoth thereupon guided his followers to another meeting hall. For the next 18 months, warring Republican factions moved in and out of opportunistic alliances with Conservative-Democrats. They divided into rival legislatures, used force to achieve quorums, and arrested and impeached their own senior leaders. If some of the more scurrilous allegations are to be believed, they even poisoned their lieutenant-governor. Were Louisiana politics on the verge of becoming “Mexicanized”—plunged into chronic crisis and political tumult? That was the question beginning to trouble Republican observers north of the Ohio River.