SHREVEPORT, La. (KTAL/KMSS) - A former Union Army officer who came to Northwest Louisiana as a carpetbagger after the Civil War lost both of his arms after a failed assassination attempt in the mid-1870s. Many of his family members were killed in the region's Reconstruction-era violence. On Oct. 1, 1870, the Bossier Banner-Progress stated that the Republicans had nominated Hon. Harvey Marshall Twitchell as the State Senator of the District encompassing Natchitoches, DeSoto, and Sabine parishes. The nomination would eventually cost Marshall Twitchell his arms. Harvey Marshall Twitchell was born in Townshend, Vermont in 1840 and raised on a maple syrup farm. Clever and conscientious, Twitchell attended Leland Seminary before becoming a schoolteacher in Wardsboro, Vermont. In September 1861, Twitchell, who was 21 years old, left his teaching career behind him and enlisted in the Union Army. Within three years, he became a commissioned officer in the 109th Colored Troops in Virginia. This clipping from the Morning World in Monroe, Louisiana, Mar. 27, 1966, shows Twitchell family members donating historical records from their family to the Louisiana Tech library. After the war Twitchell became a carpetbagger and moved to Louisiana, where he worked for the Freedmen's Bureau. ‘Bloody Caddo’: Research uncovers post-Civil War racial violence The Rutland Daily Herald in Vermont wrote the following about carpetbaggers: "For decades, the accepted characterization of the carpetbagger was an official who exploited both the freed slaves and the white citizens of the South. Indeed, even Northern newspapers believed the stereotype." Marshall Twitchell image courtesy of the Vermont Historical Society Here's what Twitchell had to say about carpetbaggers: "It has always seemed to me very strange that the northern people should so readily believe their young men the infamous wretches which the South represented them to be, on the testimony of men reared under the demoralizing influence of slavery, traitors to their government for four years, and then gamblers and barroom loafers." Twitchell carried a cane that turned into a sword, but by the time he left the Red River Valley in Louisiana he could no longer pick up the cane. Twitchell in Northwest Louisiana Marshall Twitchell had only been in Northwest Louisiana for six months when he met a young woman named Adele Coleman in Bienville Parish. Adele taught at Sparta Academy and came from a Southern family that didn't care for the idea of her marrying a Yankee, but she married him anyway. Twitchell worked hard on the family plantation in Bienville Parish and saved it during the Reconstruction era. Twitchell then bought the Starlight Plantation on the Red River, presumably in Red River Parish, and moved his Vermont-born brother and his three sisters, with their spouses, to the Red River Valley. "Pa says he don't know what in the world he would have done without his Yankee son-in-law to help him out," wrote Adele in a letter to her sister in 1868. Twitchell and his family became powerful in Northwest Louisiana. Because they were Lincoln Republicans in the years after Confederate Democrat rule in Louisiana, getting a government job during Reconstruction was easy. Twitchell was elected to the state senate, and life was pretty good for a while. But then hell broke loose. Early Louisiana civil rights pioneer W. Jasper Blackburn Louisiana State Senators W. Jasper Blackburn (Cliaborne Parish) and Harvey M. Twitchell (Bienville/Red River Parish) served together on the Senatorial Committee on Printing in the mid-1870s) White supremacy groups formed, and many of groups' members had PTSD from their days in the Confederacy. They became enraged when the new Louisiana constitution, written in 1868, disenfranchised former Confederates and gave formerly enslaved men the right to vote. Suddenly, the new voting system was the complete opposite of what it had been like in pre-war Louisiana. Instead of white men voting and women not being allowed to vote, the majority of voters were black in Louisiana--a state that had not allowed the enslaved to learn to read or write. For a while, Twitchell was protected from violence because he married into a Southern family. But when Louisiana's Democrats lost the election in 1872, Reconstruction in NWLA slammed into a brick wall. In Colfax, only 50 miles south of Starlight Plantation, on Easter Sunday in 1873, more than 100 freedmen were murdered. While Senator Twitchell was out of town on a trip to New Orleans in 1874, his brother (Homer) and two of his brothers-in-law were killed in the Coushatta Massacre. A total of six white men and more than a dozen freedmen were murdered during the Coushatta Massacre, and Federal troops were called in to squash the rebellion. By 1876, violence had reached a fever pitch in the region. Twitchell family members who were still alive were threatened--often in writing. Excerpt from The People's Vindicator, July 1, 1876, Natchitoches, La., tells of the Coushatta Affair. One note from Apr. 13, 1873, said, "Mr. Twitchell Sir, I must inform you that on court week your town is to be overrun and all your (racial slur) officers and sum of your white men are to be killed." The author then claimed to have been one of the shooters at the Colfax massacre. That's when the goggle-eyed man made his appearance in Twitchell's life. The goggle-eyed man Sometime around the end of the year in 1875 another note appeared at Twitchell's Starlight Plantation. "I have bin maid to leave my home & friends & family on account of you & your crowd. This part of the country has become unhealthy that you can't stay here," wrote the Goggle Eyed Man. And yes, that's how he signed the note. The Goggle Eyed Man also wrote that he would "come again at the proper time." Twitchell ignored the note, of course, and went on about his business. But on the morning of May 2, 1876, a stranger rode into town. He was wearing a coat made of rubber which reached almost to his feet. He was wearing what appeared to be a fake beard, and he had on a pair of goggles. His hat was pulled down low to cover his face. Twitchell was crossing the Red River on a ferry when the Goggle Eyed Man appeared and raised his rifle. "The first shot went over us," wrote Twitchell later, though someone else had to write down his words for him. "The next shot passed through the skiff and entered my left thigh. I immediately went over into the water, passing under the skiff and caught hold of the lower edge with my hand, keeping the skiff much between myself and the assassin." Twitchell's brother-in-law George King was on the ferry with Twitchell. He fired at the Goggle Eyed Man, and the Goggle Eyed Man shot King in the head. King dropped dead. A local named Benjamin Wolfson wandered into the area on horseback, and the Goggle Eyed Man immediately told him to leave, which he did. Then the Goggle Eyed Man aimed at Twitchell's arms and fired at them one at a time, shattering bones. Twitchell was also shot in at least one leg. An African American ferryman, who was not named in later news reports, was also shot in the hand. As soon as the Goggle Eyed Man left the scene, locals rushed to the river and helped the wounded. They wanted to hunt down the Goggle Eyed Man and bring justice to the area, but even the sheriff backed down after following the Goggle Eyed Man's trail for a few miles. Clipping from the New Orleans Republican, May 3, 1876, Twitchell was taken to Springville and his testimony was written down. Twitchell's arms had to be amputated, and as soon as he healed enough to get out of NWLA he did, never to return. For two years Twitchell stayed in New Orleans, fulfilling his obligations as a senator, then he was appointed as the U.S. consul to Kingston, Canada. He died there in 1905. Twitchell's surviving family members in Louisiana moved back to Vermont, and Twitchell took care of young relatives who lost their parents in NWLA reconstruction-era violence. "The assassin was one of the coolest of the kind which the South has ever produced, and as a marksman he was expert," stated Twitchell years later. "The evidence shows that Mr. Twitchell had made a number of personal enemies within his own political party, and that threats against his life had been made by one or more of these parties," we read in The Times-Picayune from June 15, 1876. "...but the evidence was not of a character to create a reasonable ground of suspicion against any particular person, even among his personal enemies. It may be well to state that it was undoubtedly the sole purpose of the assassin to kill Mr. Twitchell, and that Mr. King was shot after he had very properly fired at him." "Since the rules were brand new because of the new constitution in the state, and the power that Twitchell had as a Senator covering three parishes, Twitchell ran the new Red River Parish almost like a personal fiefdom, and he had the army to back him up," said Dr. Gary Joiner, Professor of History at LSU Shreveport. Joiner also said that the history of this story is so complicated that no single account can truly be written. "This is a case in which using federal records alone will not tell the story." In 1966, Twitchell's grandson donated documents, bonds, personal and public correspondence, newspaper clippings, and a 250-page unpublished autobiography of Harvey Marshall Twitchell's life. They also donated twenty-four issues of the Sparta Times, a newspaper printed weekly for two years in Bienville Parish.