Today, the Wall Street Journal has a review by Roger Lowenstein the new book Klan War: Ulysses S. Grant and the Battle to Save Reconstruction by Fergus M. Bordewich. I have read two recent books by Bordewich, so I read this review with a great deal of interest. Here are some excerpts.
No period in American history is hotter than Reconstruction, when civil rights for emancipated slaves were established in law and deed only to be tragically eviscerated. In “Klan War: Ulysses S. Grant and the Battle to Save Reconstruction,” Fergus Bordewich focuses on an especially violent chapter of the late 1860s and ’70s.
In the aftermath of the Civil War, freed blacks in the Southern states were elected to local as well as federal offices, and they voted in large numbers, giving the Republican Party a hammerlock over the South. But white Southerners would not accept Republican rule; indeed, for ex-Confederates, Mr. Bordewich observes, “the war had not ended.” With their economy in tatters and their society uprooted, defeat “stung like bitter smoke in the air.” The sight of former slaves drilling in state militias “inflamed” Southern sensibilities. And so a new organization arose: the Ku Klux Klan.
Mr. Bordewich, whose previous book profiled Republican reformers in the Civil War Congress, begins his compelling chronicle by detailing the astonishing brutality of the Klan, which wantonly beat and murdered blacks—as well as sympathetic whites—to intimidate voters, frighten Republican officials and reclaim power for Democrats.
This makes for gruesome reading. Right away we meet Wyatt Outlaw, a former slave who had escaped and fought in the Union Army and after the war opened a woodworking shop in North Carolina. He was, what’s more, a Republican activist and outspoken defender of black rights.
In 1870 a score of masked, robed Klansmen burst into his house, assaulted him, dragged him to an elm and strung him up, not neglecting to slash the mouth that had spoken so freely. His killers were never punished. Mr. Bordewich quotes the appalling boast of a former Tennessee congressman: “The negroes are no more free than they were four years ago, and if anyone goes about the country telling them that they are, shoot him.”
Nobody knows how many blacks suffered the fate of Wyatt Outlaw, but one civil-rights organization has determined that between 1865 and 1876 at least 2,000 were killed. Countless others were whipped, beaten and raped. Mr. Bordewich is especially good on the origins of the Klan. It emerged in the late 1860s in Tennessee as a mildly jokey secret society that (in disguise) performed comic street theater and communicated via codes and gestures.
It quickly evolved into something more sinister: a hierarchically structured white-supremacist organization. In each district, a “Grand Cyclops” presided over division chiefs—in effect, a shadow Democrat government. Indeed, its aim was overtly political—that is, anti-Republican—and it spread like wildfire. Although cross burnings came only in the 20th century, masked night riders were common in the Reconstruction era. In many communities, virtually all the white men joined—on pain of a whipping, and the Klan’s leaders sprang from the upper crust of white society.
Having established the Klan’s aims and means, Mr. Bordewich shifts to the political struggle waged by former abolitionists such as Rep. Thaddeus Stevens to preserve black Americans’ newly won freedoms. The hero in this drama is President Ulysses S. Grant, who despite mounting pressures for an end to federal intervention in the South and for fiscal restraint, launched a war on the Klan.
Not a natural crusader or politician, Grant in 1862 professed to have “no hobby of my own with regard to the negro.” But he slowly but surely developed a sense of racial justice. In the White House he was horrified by mail from ordinary citizens decrying the South’s brutal lawlessness. The widow of a white reformer in Georgia—murdered on a public road—begged for federal intervention. She wrote the president that the state government was “a sham, a mockery, a mere modification of the Confederacy.” Grant responded to such appeals forcefully, not only with troops but also with prosecutors, thanks to legislation that enabled federal enforcement of civil-rights laws. By 1872 the Klan was disabled as a serious threat (20th-century versions bore only a tenuous link to the original).
Even so, the South, true to the Klan’s designs, eventually became a one-party fiefdom in which blacks were reduced to virtual serfdom. A combination of Northern fatigue, Supreme Court hostility to federal intervention, and racism in the North and South undermined the freedmen’s civil rights. Recounting the failure of Reconstruction, Mr. Bordewich spares no venom for apostate abolitionists such as Horace Greeley who—willfully deluded about the supposed good intentions of former rebels—were too quick to disown a national interest in civil protections in the South….
Certainly Mr. Bordewich presents a convincing case that, left to their own devices, Southern whites were not about to confer real freedom on the freedmen. He is equally persuasive that by the end of Grant’s second term, Northerners were unwilling to commit the guns to police the South, much less the butter to rebuild it.
