Fishing Creek Confederacy

In August of eighteen sixty-four, the federal government sent hundreds of soldiers into this valley. Their mission was to crush what officials called the Fishing Creek Confederacy, a loose network of rural Democrats opposed to the Civil War draft. Forty-four men from this community were arrested at the Christian church near this site and locked up at Fort Mifflin in Philadelphia without access to civilian courts.

Most of them simply opposed Lincoln's wartime policies, not the Union itself. Two years later, in eighteen sixty-six, the United States Supreme Court ruled in Ex parte Milligan that military arrest and trial of civilians in areas where civil courts were still functioning was unconstitutional. The Milligan case came from Indiana, but it settled the same question the Fishing Creek arrests had raised.