Klan War
Ulysses S. Grant and the Battle to Save Reconstruction
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A NEW YORKER BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR • A stunning history of the first national anti-terrorist campaign waged on American soil—when Ulysses S. Grant wielded the power of the federal government to dismantle the KKK
The Ku Klux Klan, which celebrated historian Fergus Bordewich defines as “the first organized terrorist movement in American history,” rose from the ashes of the Civil War. At its peak in the early 1870s, the Klan boasted many tens of thousands of members, no small number of them landowners, lawmen, doctors, journalists, and churchmen, as well as future governors and congressmen. And their mission was to obliterate the muscular democratic power of newly emancipated Black Americans and their white allies, often by the most horrifying means imaginable.
To repel the virulent tidal wave of violence, President Ulysses S. Grant waged a two-term battle against both armed Southern enemies of Reconstruction and Northern politicians seduced by visions of postwar conciliation, testing the limits of the federal government in determining the extent of states’ rights. In this book, Bordewich transports us to the front lines, in the hamlets of the former Confederate States and in the marble corridors of Congress, reviving an unsung generation of grassroots Black leaders and key figures such as crusading Missouri senator Carl Schurz, who sacrificed the rights of Black Americans in the name of political “reform,” and the ruthless former slave trader and Klan leader Nathan Bedford Forrest.
Klan War is a bold and bracing record of America’s past that reveals the bloody, Reconstruction-era roots of present-day battles to protect the ballot box and stamp out resurgent white supremacist ideologies.
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Historian Bordewich (Congress at War) serves up a riveting chronicle of America's Reconstruction-era campaign against the Ku Klux Klan. According to Bordewich, Reconstruction faltered after Abraham Lincoln's assassination because his successor, President Andrew Johnson, was a blatant racist ("His racism was crude, and shocking even then") who had no desire to enforce freed peoples' rights. As a result, "white violence churned across the South," with its most potent manifestation in the secretive and far-flung association known as the Ku Klux Klan. Most of the Klan's members belonged to the "prewar elite," and by 1867 it had become a "semi-military structure" with a clear hierarchy. Ex-Confederate general Nathan Bedford Forrest played a significant role; Bordewich asserts that Forrest "pioneered the organized application of terror" against freed Black people. After a resounding election victory in 1868, President Ulysses S. Grant ushered in the first of three Enforcement Acts in 1870 that empowered him to "sustain the provisions of the Fifteenth Amendment by force of arms" to ensure the voting rights of all citizens. Each Act targeted the Klan, enabling the use of military force and suspension of habeas corpus to detain tens of thousands of Klan members across the South. Drawing from his source material to devastating effect, Bordewich catalogs many appalling Klan atrocities. It's an astute assessment of an often overlooked episode in American history.
