Klan War: Ulysses S. Grant and the Battle to Save Reconstruction

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. (Oct.)