| abstract | - The Frankfort Incident was a terrorist attack carried out on a Frankfort, Kentucky police station in the spring of 1941. Soon after the bombing, a group of men calling themselves "American Patriots" took credit for the attack and proclaimed allegiance to the United States, which had recently returned Kentucky to the Confederate States after a popular referendum held on January 7, 1941. In truth the perpetrators of the attack weren't anti-Confederate dissidents, but Freedom Party Guards acting under direct orders from Confederate President Jake Featherston and his communications director, Saul Goldman. A week before the attack, Featherston had told Goldman to keep the incident "simmering" until after US President Al Smith had responded to Featherston's demands to return all remaining ex-Confederate territories. Smith had refused, so Featherston used his refusal, along with the false-flag incident at Frankfort, to move the Army of Kentucky into Kentucky to "keep the peace," breaking the Richmond Agreement and setting the two countries on the final path toward war, which would break out a few months later on June 22, 1941.
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