Klan War: Ulysses S. Grant and the Battle to Save Reconstruction by Fergus M. Bordewich Knopf (2023) 480 pages $35.00
In the immediate months after the Civil War ended, the defeated Confederates returned to their homes with a real concern about their fate. As the Spring of 1865 ended, most of them were offered an amnesty and the new legislatures in former Confederate states were elected by the same voters who had elected the legislators in 1860. The enemies of the United States were the voters and these men decided to keep the allies of the United States from voting! In the months after Appomattox the Southern assemblies did not try to rebuild the physical infrastructure destroyed by war. Instead, they passed Black Codes designed to keep African Americans in a permanently subordinated position.
As Northern reaction to the widening swarth of repression began to take shape, the Civil Rights Act of 1866, the 14th Amendment, and other Reconstruction acts were passed by Congress to contain the outrages committed by Southern state governments against the freedpeople. With tight constraints put on the all-white state legislatures, armed bands started a violent campaign against Black people having an equal share in their states’ power.
By 1866, the Ku Klux Klan was already founded and in 1868 its terrorist tactics were widely reported on. Other groups took up its strategy and by 1871 hundreds of Blacks were being killed every year in the old Confederate states. Meanwhile, contrary to the impression many people have today, there were virtually no United States troops occupying the South. For example, South Carolina, in which the majority of people there were Black, had grotesque incidents of racially-motivated violence there from the Klan, yet the total number of Federal troops in the state was less than 500 men in February 1871. Grant had seen the Democrats make political gains there and in neighboring North Carolina and Georgia as Blacks were frightened into staying home from the polls.
Klan War: Ulysses S. Grant and the Battle to Save Reconstruction by Fergus M. Bordewich tells a gripping tale of how President Grant responded to wage a counterinsurgency war on the terrorists who hopes to subvert democracy. Grant had seen efforts to reach out to the former-Confederates nonviolently had been met with ever broadening violence. He was also concerned that within his own party, a new “Liberal Republican” faction had arisen calling for the party to stop making civil equality of Black people its main program. The “Liberal Republicans,” under the leadership and Carl Schurz and Horace Greeley, believed the party should focus on civil service reform rather than civil rights.
With Grant pressing through the Enforcement Act of 1870, he had the statutory power to enforce the 14th Amendment’s recognition of Black citizenship. According to Bordewich, “It was a dramatic departure: until now, Klan crimes had been treated strictly as state, not federal, offenses despite the fact that southern courts almost everywhere refused to convict Klansmen of anything at all.”
Grant did have some powerful helpers in his campaign against the Klan. Ben Butler, an old Democrat, had been a “Political General” in the war and a strong advocate of Black Civil Rights. Butler’s son-in-law Brigadier General Adelbert Ames, was a governor of Mississippi and by the time of the Klan War, he was a senator. He was as dedicated as any man in the Senate to expanding the civil rights of Black people. According to Bordewich, Ames told his Senate colleagues that; “Senators, he said, had all heard about crimes perpetrated against the freed people, but only a fraction of their suffering had yet been told. Too many whites still refused to face the new reality, that former slaves were now citizens with rights. Too many were still ‘the blind instruments’ of reactionary leaders who had sent them to war and still continued to manipulate them.”
The war was brought to the Klan in York County, South Carolina. After a Klan massacre of eight Black men there in 1871, Maj. Lewis Merrill led three companies of the 7th Cavalry to the rural county. At least five hundred armed Klansmen there greatly outnumbered the cavalrymen. Merrill built up a network of informants, including some dissident members of the Klan, who reported on which men were involved in terrorist “night riding”, and what their crimes were.
Much of the strategy for suppressing the Klan came from the highest levels of Grant’s administration. For example, Amos Akerman, Grant’s Attorney General, said “This disaffection is not thing to be won by wooing…Enough of that has already been done in vain. Six years have not melted it. It will only disappear before an energetic exercise of power.” In York County, Maj. Merrill had arrested or made to flee 800 suspected Klansmen before the year was out.
The war against the Klan in South Carolina was so effective that even the Klan’s own leaders ordered their followers to stand down. Unfortunately, when terrorism again arose in Mississippi three years later, neither the Federal nor State authorities used the same tactics again. The Mississippi Plan was adopted by White Supremacists all over the South to prevent Blacks from voting, and, by 1877, the region was won by violence, not votes, by the supremacists and their party, the Southern Democrats.
Bordewich does a fine job of telling the story of the brave ex-slaves whose testimony forced Grant to take action, the determination by Grant to defend democratic norms, and the intelligent tactics adopted by Major Merrill. Bordewich also provides historical context for the campaign of 1871. He also disturbingly relates the changes in strategy by leading white supremacists that later deprived millions of African Americans of their basic rights that their sacrifices had won.
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