Aaron Burr Arrested – Today In Southern History

Feb 19, 2026

U.S. Vice-President Aaron Burr was arrested in Alabama for treason in a plot to steal and become dictator of a large swath of the Louisiana Purchase.

1778 – Virginia Governor Patrick Henry wrote a letter to Colonel William Fleming suggesting that the murderers of Shawnee Chief Cornstalk were British agents trying to instigate a fight with the Indians to divert Virginia troops away from the Revolutionary War.
1846 – Texas formally installed a state government in Austin, Texas.
1917 – Novelist Carson McCullers was born in Columbus, Georgia.
1942 – President Franklin Roosevelt signed an executive order that resulted in the internment of Japanese-Americans living on the West Coast. Thousands were relocated to concentration camps built in the rural South and West.
1950 – A ground-breaking ceremony was held for Mississippi Vocational College, which later became Mississippi Valley State University.
1953 – Georgia approved the first literature censorship board in the U.S.
1966 – Janis Joplin debuted as the lead singer of Big Brother and the Holding Company.
1968 – The first U.S. teachers strike started in Florida.
1998 – Grand Old Opry star, Louis Marshal “Grandpa” Jones died at the age of 84 from the effects of a stroke in Nashville, Tennessee.

Today In Southern History