Many Americans would agree with Henry Ford’s famous statement that “History is bunk.” Do the events of a century and a half ago really have any relevance to our daily lives in the twenty-first century? Fergus Bordewich, in his new book Klan War: Ulysses S. Grant and the Battle to Save Reconstruction, argues that America’s critical missed turning point in the 1860s and ‘70s continues to haunt the present.
In the wake of the Confederacy’s defeat in the Civil War in 1865, federal forces attempted to rebuild the post-slavery South as an industrial, biracial democracy. The policy of this Reconstruction was made in Washington by a Congress dominated by Radical Republicans — members of the Republican Party who were committed to a thoroughgoing transformation of the South. Former Union general Ulysses S. Grant, elected as president on the Republican ticket in 1868, was equally committed to this revolutionary transformation. But Reconstruction increasingly was thwarted by the Ku Klux Klan – a secret paramilitary group formed in late 1865 in Pulaski, Tennessee – which morphed into what Bordewich calls “the first organized terror movement in American history.” The Klan used threats, abuse, arson, rape, torture, and lynching to terrorize African Americans into servility and to destroy the Republican Party in the South.
In this podcast discussion, Bordewich discusses how Grant pushed Congress to grant him the powers he needed to combat the Klan, and how he used these powers to shatter the “Invisible Empire.” But Grant’s efforts were largely undone by members of his own party who formed the so-called Liberal Republican faction, largely because they distrusted strong central government. In the aftermath of Grant’s presidency, the Klan faded away because Democratic-controlled legislatures in the South increasingly were able to enforce white supremacy on the region through legal means. One of the lessons from this episode of history, in Bordewich’s view, is “the danger of politically crippling what is necessary for government to do to sustain what’s best in society and to sustain the rights and protections of Americans.”
Transcript
Fergus Bordewich: Americans tend to think of terrorism as something that happens in faraway countries, perpetrated by organizations with odd, odd names. Nothing that those groups have done in recent times is that different from what Klansmen perpetrated against Americans.
Geoff Kabaservice: Hello! I’m Geoff Kabaservice for the Niskanen Center. Welcome to the Vital Center Podcast, where we try to sort through the problems of the muddled, moderate majority of Americans, drawing upon history, biography, and current events. And I’m delighted today to be joined by Fergus Bordewich, whom I frankly consider to be a national treasure. He’s a writer, editor, journalist, and historian who is the author of nearly a dozen books, many of which have received enormous critical and popular acclaim. The most recent of these books, published this fall, is Klan War: Ulysses S. Grant and the Battle to Save Reconstruction. Jennifer Szalai, writing in the New York Times, called it “a vivid and sobering account” of President Grant’s attempt to give force to the post-Civil War Reconstruction of the American South by crushing the Ku Klux Klan. Welcome, Fergus!
Fergus Bordewich: Hi, Geoffrey. It’s very nice to see you again.
Geoff Kabaservice: And you. And congratulations again on your new book. It really is a marvelously written and incredibly readable work about an era that seems to haunt the present day, and at least haunts this podcast. I’ve previously interviewed Jeremi Suri on his book on America’s unfinished Civil War and Jeff Cowie on Freedom’s Dominion, both of which, like Klan War, delve into the continuing legacy of the unfinished Reconstruction. So Fergus, to get us started, can you just tell me two things… First of all, for readers or listeners who may not know, what was the Reconstruction? And why does this period from 150 years ago, which few Americans really know about in detail, continue to matter so much?
Fergus Bordewich: Well, I will try to be concise, Geoffrey, since we could spend until next morning answering that question. But Reconstruction runs from approximately 1865 to approximately 1875-76. People would define the timeframe differently, but for simplicity’s sake I’ll say it’s about a ten-year period. And it is the period following the Civil War that defeated the Confederacy, leaving economic ruin and political uncertainty and indeed even chaos in its wake. Economic ruin not because federal forces damaged so much of Southern infrastructure — that’s true in a few places but generally not so. Economic ruin because the South’s greatest repository of wealth — slaves, human beings — has been wiped out. And if many white Southerners feel (and some often are) impoverished, it’s because they’ve lost the value of the human beings they’ve owned, not because the federals have burned their apple orchards, so to speak.
Reconstruction policy was made in Washington by the heavily Republican Congress, with its cutting edge made up of Radical Republicans — and when we talk about the word “radical” in this context, we’re not talking about socialism or anything of the sort. We’re talking about men — of course they all were men — who were committed to a vigorous and even revolutionary rebuilding of Southern society and Southern economy, a transformation from that ruined pre-war slave economy into an economy based on free white labor and industry, more or less on the Northern pattern. But also, and very radically, the empowerment, the political empowerment, of African Americans.
There were almost 4 million enslaved people before the war. Approximately half of those are men, or males, anyway, and something slightly under a million are men of voting age. And that huge new component of the political culture in the South has the potential to utterly revolutionize, transform the political landscape of the South, especially in these years when Republican state governments controlled most of the Southern states. This is a patchwork; not every state’s story is the same. But many former Confederates have been disenfranchised —temporarily, as it turns out — and others are too angry and disgusted to actually vote in elections. Many hundreds of thousands of African Americans, hundreds of thousands, are enfranchised by the states well before the 15th Amendment makes it national.
I want to interject here that it’s a misnomer to echo the old “lost cause” slogan of “Black Rule,” which was denounced universally by the Reconstruction-era Democratic Party, which is essentially post-Confederate; it has nothing to do with today’s Democratic Party except its name. There was no “Black Rule” in the South. It didn’t exist anywhere. There were Blacks who were elected to office, who participated in government, usually in fairly modest numbers but significant in a few states: South Carolina, Mississippi, Louisiana. Significant numbers but always a minority and — perhaps I’ll end with this point — always in a biracial Republican Party.
It’s one of the significant facts of the Reconstruction era that the Republican Party in the South, from an embryo — it didn’t exist before the Civil War, it’s being built from the ground up — is biracial. You have Blacks and whites together. And I want to add one last thing here, that it’s also a misapprehension that was inculcated into Americans for almost a hundred years by Lost Cause defenders that former slaves are completely incompetent to participate in public life and government. And the deeper you dig into the kinds of African American men who became officeholders, the more impressed you are at the caliber of leadership — not incapacity but remarkable capacity of people who were clearly leaders within their own communities even during slavery times, but very quickly rose to the top, sought out schools in order to become literate as quickly as possible. So in a great many cases, the African Americans who are in government in the Southern states in Reconstruction governments are very impressive individuals. They’re not pawns of so-called carpetbaggers. So, Geoffrey, that is a not-so-quick overview of Reconstruction.
Geoff Kabaservice: I would agree with everything you just said, but I would point out that there were many people in the North who were not Lost Cause adherents who took part in and pushed forward a kind of national forgetting of this time, who really sunk Ulysses Grant’s reputation as president, and who also obliterated the memory of these extremely capable and interesting Black political figures from that period whom you had mentioned. One thinks, for example, of William Dunning, who was a Columbia historian who gave his name to a whole school of American historiography about the Reconstruction era that persisted well into the 1980s.
Fergus Bordewich: You’re absolutely correct. Even during Reconstruction, beginning in the very late 1860s, beginning of the ’70s, you have a fissure developing within the Republican Party. Radicals may be the cutting edge of the Republican Party, but a faction which becomes quite significant who described themselves as the Liberal Republicans… Again, the word shouldn’t be read as we read it today. They were, within the context of the time, comparatively conservative, and on Reconstruction they were quite conservative. They had various issues on which they differed from the Grant administration. The one that is most prominent in the history books has to do with good government: civil service reform and real and alleged corruption. Okay. There’s a class element too. They tended to be more elite types than many of the men who supported Grant. I don’t think I want to get too deep into that specific aspect of it unless we come back to it.
But at any rate, they sought to deny Grant the renomination for the presidency in 1872 and created a mentality of discontent, even a degree of subversive politics within the Republican Party, and strongly opposed Reconstruction in the name of a rapid reconciliation with the South. This reflected a gross misapprehension of what white Southerners really were interested in, which was restoring white rule in its entirety as quickly as possible. Reconciliation in the South to whites only meant reconciliation on white terms.
You mentioned William Dunning… Yeah, the Dunning School really develops in the early twentieth century. It’s reflecting what are already the commonplace perceptions of the post-Reconstruction South, restoration of white rule and white power in the South, by the turn of the twentieth century: almost total exclusion of African Americans from politics and public life in the South, an assertion of legalized segregation, and so on.
Dunning was a Northerner, as you said. He was from New Jersey. He taught at Columbia University. He and his own students taught generations of American historians, so that by the 1940s and ‘50s you have even Northern historians, like Alan Nevins and Bruce Catton, reflecting a Dunning School perception that Reconstruction was a total failure, it was just saturated with corruption, it was a mistake to incorporate freed Blacks so quickly, former slaves, into public life.
You find this in Allan Nevins, running in the ’40s and ’50s. He was New Englander, teaching at Amherst, unless I’m mistaken. And I would say it was still the standard perception of Reconstruction when I was a kid growing up in New York state in the ’50s, even into the early ’60s. It’s changed. I wouldn’t say that there’s a revision underway, I would say we’re returning to an accurate understanding of what was actually happening during Reconstruction. The Dunning School, the denial of reality, was the revision. So the revisionists were those led by Dunning and many like him who wanted to erase both the idealism, the pragmatism, and the African American participation in Reconstruction.
Geoff Kabaservice: Quite so. Before we get into the book… During the pandemic I found myself on a Zoom call, as one did in those days, with a number of grant officers at the Hewlett Foundation, and one of them had the distinctive name of Jean Bordewich. I thought to myself, “Where have I heard that name before?” And then I remembered that she was your wife, and we had all met at the Los Angeles Times Book Prize award ceremony in April 2013, where you very deservedly won the prize for best history book for America’s Great Debate: Henry Clay, Stephen A. Douglas, and the Compromise That Preserved the Union. I was very pleased to make that connection.
Fergus Bordewich: Well, thank you. As it happens, my wife is also a playwright, quite apart from her political life, and she happens to be writing a play about the election of 1876 at the moment, which coincidentally is what my next book will be about. We don’t need to talk about that, but for the first time ever our professional lives are converging.
Geoff Kabaservice: That’s terrific. I think I have some insight into some of your success. You’re one of the chieftains of the small tribe of independent historians, and much of your scholarship has concentrated on the hundred years or so after the American founding. You haven’t worked your way chronologically through this period exactly, but I’m thinking of your book The First Congress, which obviously was about framers like Washington and Madison after the Revolutionary War. America’s Great Debate, like I said, is about the Compromise of 1850. Congress at War is about the Civil War period, and now Klan War is about the Reconstruction. So it’s a two-pronged question, but what has accounted for your interest in this period and the success with which you’ve been able to write about it as a historian mostly working outside of the academic history profession?
Fergus Bordewich: Well, as you say, I’ve rather zigzagged back and forth through that century of American history. I also wrote a book about the creation of Washington D.C., of the national capital, and the politics behind it. I mention that only because that too is located pretty much in the 1790s and early 1800s. I rather dream of the day, Geoffrey, when I will move far enough forward in time where people are using typewriters and I don’t have to parse out nineteenth- or eighteenth-century cursive in my research. But that’s by the by.
I’m going to answer that question. It’s an interesting question because it reflects the kind of question I ask myself. I have had — I still have — pretty much bottomless curiosity about this period. It’s a truism to say we can’t understand ourselves unless we understand history. We can’t understand the present without understanding the past. We can’t do it. And the price of not knowing history is around us all the time, in any number of issues you could cite, in which Congress stumbles or the American public misjudges events in our own time because they have no broad sense that the Republic has dealt with similar (if not exactly the same) troubles before. This country has weathered a lot of crises, and each one has felt fatal at the time. But anyway, not to digress into that…
I write history. I don’t write present-day polemics. I am interested in what made us as a country. And the more I’ve written about American history, the more — I was about to say awe, but certainly the more profound respect I have for what the founders created here, for the institutions that exist. As we speak, I’m looking out the window of my office toward the Capitol dome. It’s right out there. And I never tire of looking at it, both as a piece of architecture and as the great single, physical national symbol of what our forerunners crafted 200-odd years ago. They did a good job. They created remarkably flexible institutions. There are structural reforms that the country probably ought to have, but we’ve done quite well. I find that remarkable.
Americans used to be very fond of saying, “We’re a new country.” Well, we’re a new country, but we’re not a new government. Our government is actually old; in terms of democracies, just about the oldest. So if you look at Henry Clay… You’ve mentioned a couple of times America’s Great Debate, my book about the Compromise of 1850. Unless you’ve seriously read history at some point in your life, you’d be a little vague on what that actually was. I’m not going to explain it here.
But the politics of the time was brilliant, and something that was characteristic of mid-nineteenth century politicians. And I will say also of of the founding period that by and large men in politics said what they meant and meant what they said. The caliber of political discourse was extraordinary. I don’t think they were greater men than those who are in our politics today, but certainly they were greater communicators and more public in their thinking. And I found that illuminating to examine. You read a speech by Henry Clay, or Daniel Webster, or any number of lesser-known names of that era, and you’re reading a kind of oral literature — highly readable, as you know. Read the Congressional Globe. You get these speeches if you can read the tiny print — that’s another problem.
Geoff Kabaservice: I think that actually a common element of a lot of your books, certainly including Klan War, is that you’re very generous in taking the reader through a chronological narrative. You also have a real talent for storytelling and portraiture, but you’re also very generous in giving the reader access to the voices of people from our past through those speeches you’re mentioning, or through books and newspapers, court testimony, or just ordinary speech.
Fergus Bordewich: Yeah, that’s something that’s very important to me to do on the page. On one hand, in all of my books, I try to take the reader into the historical present. That’s to say, I don’t want you to know more than the people I’m writing about knew at the time. Well, that’s a challenge. I think I succeed sometimes, and other times maybe not as well as I would like. We don’t know what’s going to be the outcome of the Compromise of 1850. We don’t know, in Congress at War, the last book I wrote, who’s going to win the war. The men of 1861 and ’62 and ’63 did not know what the outcome was going to be. And they were making policy not knowing the outcome, struggling to find a political path to sustaining the Northern war effort.
And similarly, in this book Klan War, we don’t know the outcome. The Klan is ascendant in the South. There are hundreds of thousands of members of the Ku Klux Klan riding — essentially terrorizing with impunity Southern states, African Americans, and white Republicans. But yes, I want you to hear the voices of the people who live, whether it’s Henry Clay or whether it’s a Black dirt farmer in Georgia in 1870 writing to President Grant. And in this book, Klan War, I felt even greater urgency to that because so many of the people who you will hear in the book are people whose voices were never heard much in their own day. I’m talking about mostly African Americans but not only, because white Republicans were victims of the Klan as well.
Geoff Kabaservice: So your book, for example, starts in the Preface with the 1870 lynching of Wyatt Outlaw in Graham, North Carolina at the hands of the Ku Klux Klan. And it’s a grim story. He is one of those figures who have been almost completely forgotten by history, and yet recovering him is, I think, important. So tell me why you started to start your book with that episode?
Fergus Bordewich: Wyatt Outlaw was an extremely interesting man of a type that I referred to earlier. He had been enslaved before the Civil War. He walked off and made his way to a Union army base and became a soldier and fought in the last year or so of the war in North Carolina. He was a skilled craftsman by training; a carpenter primarily but not only that. But clearly a man with leadership ability who was respected within his own sphere, even as a slave. Because very rapidly after the war, he participated in discussions that led to the new North Carolina Reconstruction Constitution — a very, very forward-looking small-d democratic constitution — and was very soon elected to local office in Graham. And he was remarkably committed to, I’m going to say conciliation, but that’s not quite the right word…
Geoff Kabaservice: In your book, you wrote that “When others called for retaliation, he counseled restraint, urging Blacks to ‘be as industrious as possible, give no cause for complaint, and trust in the law.’”
Fergus Bordewich: Thank you, Geoffrey, that is precisely what I was reaching for. Yes, and it was for that he was murdered by the Klan, precisely for that — precisely because he did urge restraint and because he was a builder of unity in his community. And the Republican Party in Graham… It’s a small town. The place where he was lynched is still there — there’s no monument to him, unfortunately, as there should be. It was right in front of the county courthouse in Graham. It’s rather handsome courthouse, not very far from Raleigh-Durham. And the lynch mob dragged him out of his home where he lived with his mother and his two small children, dragged him about half a mile to that square, and specifically lynched him so that his body would hang in front of the courthouse — obviously in defiance of the law. Nobody was ever punished for it.
Geoff Kabaservice: One of the many controversies that erupted over this past year over racial issues… This country singer Jason Aldean had this song “Try That in a Small Town,” a resentful, Trumpian kind of song that he filmed a video for in front of the Maury County Courthouse in Tennessee. It was pointed out this was the site of a notorious lynching, but almost every county courthouse in the South has been the site of some racial atrocity or other.
Fergus Bordewich: Yes. Two months ago, on a book tour that I did through the South, among other places, I spoke in Montgomery, Alabama. My wife Jean and I took a couple of hours and we went up to see the now-famous (I hope) lynching memorial.
Geoff Kabaservice: It’s technically the National Memorial for Peace and Justice. But yeah, it is a phenomenal sight to see.
Fergus Bordewich: It is phenomenal. I won’t describe it; anybody can Google the description. But it’s an extremely powerful memorial with a plinth suspended from above marking every county in the South where there had been a lynching, and including the names of those people who’ve been identified. It by no means identifies all the people who were lynched; these are the ones who have been fully documented. By the way, it memorializes lynchings from the end of the Civil War all the way up well into the twentieth century.
My book covers that ten-year period of Reconstruction, pretty much. The Klan committed, documentably, about two thousand murders during that period. There were undoubtedly far more people murdered, the vast majority of them Black American citizens. Why don’t we know about the rest? Because so many were killed. There was only a vague reference to “some Negro killed on the road in the next county” — so vague, without a name, never reported properly in the newspapers or public record. So the number actually killed was substantially more, but no one can say how many more.
And those who were tortured — and I do mean tortured. I don’t just mean threatened, bullied, abused, slapped, but tortured physically, flogged until their backs were in shreds, women raped, children abused in the most grotesque ways. When you think of terrorism elsewhere in the world today… Americans tend to think of terrorism as something that happens in faraway countries perpetrated by organizations with odd names like Hamas or ISIS or Al-Qaeda and so on. Nothing that those groups have done in recent times is that different from what Klansmen perpetrated against Americans.
Geoff Kabaservice: You called the Klan “the first organized terror movement in American history.” And something that strikes me about this is that although the Klan a very recognizable nineteenth-century phenomenon, in some sense it actually looks forward to some of the totalitarianism of the twentieth century and even genocide. So you mentioned that the Klan was established in late 1865 in Pulaski, Tennessee, which is a small town in the south-central part of the state. It seems to have begun as a theatrical or musical or fraternal group that then morphed into something far more sinister.
Fergus Bordewich: Yeah, it was a wacky little outfit at the beginning. A small number, half a dozen young Confederate veterans…
Geoff Kabaservice: All of them college-educated, by the way.
Fergus Bordewich: All of them college-educated. They were professionals: a couple of lawyers, a newspaper editor, and such. They were sitting around. They were bored. Pulaski had suffered some damage in the war. There was not much going on. People were depressed, they were angry. Newly emancipated African Americans were acting like free people: in other words, not getting off the sidewalk in front of white people, not hanging their heads, and so on, and were beginning to assert themselves like normal people rather than slaves, which is of course deeply troubling, upsetting to former Confederates.
But initially, this organization was just a wacky male fraternity searching for amusing things to do to entertain themselves and their fellow white citizens. And they hit on this idea of putting on wild costumes and masks with long mustaches, and cow’s tails in back, and any sort of crazy disguise. And they would pop up at gatherings, picnics and whatnot, just prancing around or literally playing the banjo. And they invented this name, Ku Klux Klan. It doesn’t mean anything,
Geoff Kabaservice:
Although you point out that it might be related to the college fraternity Kyklos Adelphon, or “Circle of Brothers” from the Greek.
Fergus Bordewich:
Yeah, it might. They perhaps picked up on those words. These guys, at least some of them, had classical educations, so they knew some Latin and Greek. I don’t think it’s unlikely that they’d heard of that fraternity — hence I mentioned it in the book. On the other hand, one of the sources for its founding, somebody who was a very early Klansman writing a bit later, was talking about the naming and he makes the point that “Well, they just made it up.” It isn’t a translation of some other thing that makes sense. And he cites the fact that a number of similar kind of nutty fraternities were being founded around the same time, one of them with the name Guiasticutus. And he says, unless I’m mistaken, that if they’d called this thing “Guiasticutus,” the history of America would’ve been different. “Ku Klux Klan” had this spooky resonance that really caught on.
But at any rate, to cut to the chase here, about six months later, even as these fraternity antics were imitated by similar groups elsewhere in the county and surrounding counties… And I should say parenthetically here, because it’s important, that one of the games they used to play — that’s how they thought of it, as a game — was using their costumes to scare African Americans. Given that Black people had had no rights and no appeal to the law, and were always vulnerable to abuse by white people, scaring African Americans may not have been all that hard, at least in some cases. They weren’t doing physical harm to people, it should be said, at this point. But about six months later, a group of high-ranking former Confederate officers met in Nashville, Tennessee, well aware of this metastasizing of the funky Ku Klux Klan. And they took it and co-opted the original trappings of the Klan and that last custom, and turned it into a political movement. And the Klan was political.
I think most Americans who know anything about the Ku Klux Klan tend to see the Klan through a lens of the twentieth century, the Ku Klux Klan of the 1920s (which was largely northern by the way) and the later Klan of the post-World War II era. The first Klan, the original-model Klan, was distinctive. It’s not the same. Later Americans of our own time are inclined to think of Klansmen as being, dare I say, losers and louts and hooligans and wackos and so on. That was not the case by any means in the original Klan. The founders, as you pointed out and I want to underscore — they were college-educated. Everywhere where the Klan was founded, the leadership was elite. They were professional people, they were landowners, they were sometimes ministers, they were journalists, they were white officeholders, and so on.
Many of the rank and file are made up of all kinds of people, all kinds across the whole social spectrum, from poor dirt farmers to wealthy people, justices of the peace, and so on — and with a very, very large component of former Confederate soldiers and Confederate officers. These men in Nashville systematically set out to create a political movement. And they did. They set out to exploit the terrorist potential of the disguises. They armed the Klan. The first bunch of guys in Pulaski, as far as I know, didn’t even carry weapons particularly.
And the Nashville group recruited a significant figure, Nathan Bedford Forrest, a charismatic former Confederate cavalry general. He was a pre-war slave trader, made a fortune trading in human beings before the war. During the war, he was a very talented cavalry officer. He was also responsible for the worst war crime committed on American soil outside the Indian Wars: the massacre of Black federal troops at Fort Pillow in 1864. He was ruthless, he was violent.
There are debates about precisely what Forrest’s role was in the early Klan. He wasn’t the founder. He was recruited to the Klan for his charismatic power and his military ability. Once Forrest and some of the others who were his former officers got hold of the Klan, they transformed it into a kind of guerrilla force. It became, in effect, the paramilitary wing of the Southern Democratic Party and functioned that way. In some places, Democratic clubs were in fact the Klan, though not everywhere; it’s not completely congruent.
Geoff Kabaservice: And the overall aim essentially was to wage the Civil War by other means; not to necessarily overturn the war or revive the Confederacy, but at any rate to maintain and protect white supremacy in the South.
Fergus Bordewich: Yeah, absolutely. I should say here… By the way, the word “white supremacy” — there’s no anachronism in this conversation. That is precisely what Klansmen and not only Southern white Democrats but in large part Northern white Democrats used as a slogan.
Geoff Kabaservice: The Alabama Democratic Party, if I’m remembering this correctly, also adopted “white supremacy” as its official motto in the early twentieth century, and it appeared on the top of every ballot on election day until 1966.
Fergus Bordewich: You are exactly right. So the term is inescapable if you’re talking about the Reconstruction era, and not only the Reconstruction. But it’s not as if you and I are projecting this term back into the past. Nor are the words “terror” or “terrorism” anachronisms. They were used at the time to describe what the Klan was doing. There was other language applied as well, but again we’re not projecting back present-day concepts into the past here.
The Klan’s goal was twofold, as you’ve indicated. One, it was to terrify Black Americans as far back into a state resembling slavery as they could, into servility, to establish white control everywhere, to scrub Black participants out of politics and public life at any price, at any cost in violence. And related to that, as if implied, to destroy the Republican Party in the South, because it was biracial. And the only repository for Black aspirations during that period was in the Republican Party. It didn’t exist as an option within the Democratic Party, except here and there as token individuals who Democrats managed to co-opt but who had no power.
Geoff Kabaservice: And that’s why Wyatt Outlaw’s lynching struck me as so representative of the Klan’s method. Because as you say, their most frequent victims were the most able, most educated, and most assertive members of the African American community. And Wyatt Outlaw was really the kind of natural leader of the community who could have led America, in this Reconstruction era, into a multiracial, cross-class democracy. And that was precisely what the Klan sought to forestall.
Fergus Bordewich: Absolutely right. And similarly, there’s another story, which happens also to be from North Carolina, about the Klan murder of John Stevens, who was a white state senator, a Republican, in Caswell County, North Carolina — that’s up near the Virginia state line. He was very representative of whites who became Republicans after the war — who are quite varied, I should say, socially from every class. There were elite whites who became Republicans; one of them became Grant’s crusading Attorney General, Amos Akerman. But also working-class whites, poor farmers, who had themselves been in effect disenfranchised by white elites before the war. And the Republican Party of this era, the post-Civil War era, especially in the South… The South was a repository of Radical Republican politics; New England, interestingly, parts of the upper Midwest, and the South. But it was the engine, it was the agency by which poorer whites could also participate as citizens and reach elected office.
And John Stevens was a man like that. He was a harness maker before the war. He was literate, but I would say just barely. But he was a very smart and, in his own sphere, a charismatic man, a very determined man. He became a Republican and was elected to the state Senate by a largely African American electorate — not entirely but largely African American. And he too was indicative, like Wyatt Outlaw, of somebody who was committed to bridging that racial divide, and had great leadership, natural leadership ability. And his murder is quite a story, which I won’t tell at length here, but he was murdered by Klansmen in the basement of the county courthouse in Caswell County. He was lured there, even though he carried by this point three guns on him. He was disarmed very quickly because he was much outnumbered. He trusted somebody he shouldn’t have trusted. And he was stabbed, strangled, and stomped to death in the basement of the courthouse while a Democratic Party meeting was taking place on the floor above.
Geoff Kabaservice: And it’s also worth pointing out for that episode that it shocked the conscience of Northerners —because this was the murder of a white person by the Klan — but also that since the Klan had so thoroughly infiltrated every civic institution in the South, there was never any punishment for his murder. I also want to say that part of what I like about the book is that you do have these vivid portraits of people like Stevens, but also Thaddeus Stevens, for example, a Republican representative, a Radical Republican from Pennsylvania, who probably did more than anyone else to shape the 14th Amendment. There’s a quote from him that I particularly like, given that I am a longtime student of meritocracy. Stevens said: “Let him who is the most worthy, who climbs the highest upon the ladder of merit, of science, of intellect, of morality — let him be the ruler, according to law, of all his sluggard neighbors, no matter what may be their color, no matter who they are, whether they be men of nobility or whether they be of common rank.”
Fergus Bordewich: Yes. Thaddeus Stevens is a marvelous figure, way ahead of his time, I think, in his bedrock confidence and belief in democracy and his tough, pragmatic idealism. And there are a couple of good biographies of Stevens out there, one by Hans Trefousse, and others. I urge anybody listening to this who isn’t quite clear on who Stevens was to read one of the biographies. He’s an absolutely fascinating individual.
Geoff Kabaservice: But you’re also helping to recover figures like Robert B. Elliott of South Carolina, who was an African American journalist, Republican Party activist and organizer, the creator of the country’s first known African American law firm, the commanding general of the state National Guard, and a two-term member of the U.S. House of Representatives. You called him “a type of Black man who was never seen in South Carolina before the war: polished, self-confident, ambitious, and utterly uncowed by privileged whites.”
Fergus Bordewich: Yes. He was another wonderful, wonderful figure who lived large, I would say. He had modest origins but he was quite well-educated. He may in fact have been British. His actual birthplace is unknown; it may have been Britain. He very likely was a British sailor who jumped ship in Boston and there became a printer, and a writer, and so on, and came South after the war. He was very charismatic. Thank you for mentioning him, because I’ve tried to introduce people in this book whose names are not at all familiar but were very significant. They were shapers of their time, whether politically or socially. And when you see individuals like Robert Elliott up close, or Wyatt Outlaw up close, you think: Our country could have benefited so well… Imagine if, instead of a hundred years of Jim Crow, people like this had been part of our political system rather than suppressed by it.
Geoff Kabaservice: Absolutely. To talk about one much more familiar figure… Ulysses S. Grant, the general who had done so much to help the Union win the Civil War, won the presidency in 1868 and took office in March 1869. How did you come to feel about Grant in the course of researching and writing about him?
Fergus Bordewich: I’m starting from a base of great fondness for Grant. My grandmother, who was born in 1882 in New York, was actually at the dedication of Grant’s Tomb. She grew up surrounded by men who were veterans of the Civil War and absorbed their war stories. I was a small kid before television, and my grandmother would entertain me by telling me their Civil War stories in 1950s New York. And I grew up with the notion the Civil War had sort of just happened. It’s one of the roots of my engagement with the whole era. Grant was a living figure for my grandmother, and he never felt all that remote to me.
But at any rate, I think when we’re talking about Grant, we need to first just peel away the encrustation of negative mythology that has lain atop the public memory, the historical memory, of Grant’s presidency. He was accused by the breakaway Liberal Republican faction of the Republican Party, and ever after by historians who wanted to discredit Reconstruction, and of course in the generation after his own time by those who shaped the public memory of the Lost Cause — all focused on corruption during Grant’s presidency, during the Gilded Age.
I don’t want to digress into that too much. I mean, were there corrupt members of his administration? Sure there were. Were there corrupt members of other administrations of the era? Sure there were. Was it a matter of degree? A little, a little. But his administration was not more distinguished by corruption than others. Grant was himself was never tarred with that, never accused of personal corruption, but rather with protecting people who were corrupt. There’s some truth to that, okay.
But what do you see, looking at Grant, if you just put that off to the side for the time being? If you look at the man’s entire life, here he is… His father was an abolitionist. Grant himself was not as a young man; he was essentially non-political. In the pre-war army, if he voted and when he voted, he may have voted Democratic as most senior officers did. The Democratic Party was the party of power in pre-war America and the military tended to vote that way when they voted. But something happens during the war.
Grant, I should say, briefly, for about a year owned one enslaved man. He wasn’t happy about it. That man was a gift to him and his wife from his wife Julia’s slave-owning parents. Grant did not like slavery. He never liked it. He never supported it. He couldn’t afford to not use that man’s labor for a year. At the end of a year, he emancipated that man. He did not sell him. He could have sold him for probably about $1,500, which would’ve been a nice piece of change. He couldn’t and wouldn’t do it, because it was morally repugnant to him.
So during the war, Grant welcomes fugitive slaves into his camps. He doesn’t send them back to their masters, as a great many other Union officers unfortunately did. He gave them jobs. Second, he very early welcomes the recruitment of Black volunteers into the federal army, unlike many other officers. And he, especially in 1864-65, has a substantial number of Black troops under his command in Virginia, unlike even his best military friend, William Tecumseh Sherman, who will have nothing to do with Black troops and is deeply racist. But Grant welcomes them and he appreciates the tremendous fighting power of Black troops, who fight extremely well.
Geoff Kabaservice: And these are indications of the way that Grant will behave as president. He actually, I believe, is the first president to dine with an African American public official in the White House. And he also welcomes African Americans on equal terms with whites to the White House as visitors. He also then gives his support to the 15th Amendment and then the three Enforcement Laws that help break the Klan. So since this is one of what had been historically Grant’s overlooked accomplishments, can you tell more about how Grant was able to suppress the Klan during the 1870s?
Fergus Bordewich: Grant has evolved by this point, through the Reconstruction years when he was general of the armies. Then he’s nominated for president and elected 1868, takes office in ’69. He has essentially become a Radical. His allies are the Radicals in Congress. Grant supports Radical Reconstruction — that’s a vigorous, forceful Reconstruction policy, transformation of the South, and rights for African Americans. He is a strong supporter of the 14th and 15th Amendments, and of course the 13th as well. But once he’s figured out how to be president… Bear in mind that he was not a natural politician. He was not a backslapper like Bill Clinton or Lyndon Johnson at all. He was a rather shy, even introverted man, not a natural politician. So he’s learning it. And he’s also learning that the federal government doesn’t operate exactly like the U.S. Army. But he learns. He does learn.
Radicals in Congress have been pressing — even under Andrew Johnson, the non-Republican president who preceded Grant — for strong measures against the Klan and to protect Southern Republicans. A couple of things are obvious. One, if white revanchists — white “redeemers,” as they call themselves — recover control in the Southern states, the Reconstruction amendments are going to be dead letters. The embryonic Republican Party will be wiped out and to a large degree the fruits of the Union victory are likely to be lost. Radicals all see this. Grant sees it and he is determined to protect those interests, from the Republican Party right up to the loftiest idealistic elements of Reconstruction.
So in 1870-71, Grant, using his own prestige, putting it on the line to the extent of going up personally to Capitol Hill… Quite an event. Grant never begs, so I’m not going to use that word, but strongly urging, with all the strength that he could muster, for votes to enact especially the Third Enforcement Act, known as the Ku Klux Klan Act. These three acts, passed several months apart, specified, made illegal as federal crimes — and this is the key point, defined as federal crimes — the behaviors of the Klan.
It’s important to remember, and I don’t think most of us in our own day would realize this, that the federal government up to this point had not had the authority to enforce the Bill of Rights in the Southern states. Those were regarded as state responsibilities. And insofar as those states were increasingly, one by one, falling into the hands of white reactionaries, those laws were not enforced, even where there were Reconstruction Republican governments in the South. Local governments, local courts, sheriff’s offices, constabularies, and so on were either co-opted by the Klan or cowed by the Klan. So even where there might be will at the top, there wasn’t will at the bottom to enforce laws at the state level. The Enforcement Act gave the federal government that authority. It gave Grant the authority to send troops into the South.
I should pause here to say another trope of the Lost Cause mythology is that the South was under military occupation all these years — un-American! Well, it’s a myth. Rhetorically I’m going to say: Do you know how many federal troops there were in the entire former Confederacy in 1868? 12,000. It’s nothing, spread over eleven states, nearly all of them only in population centers. North Carolina had 160 federal troops. Mississippi at one point had 65 — that’s not 6,500, that’s 65 individuals. And they were nearly all infantry. And if you think about it, it’s kind of hard for infantrymen to catch men on horseback; the Klan were always mounted.
So there’s no military occupation. Therefore giving Grant the personal authority as president to dispatch troops into the South was critical. And also the new Department of Justice was empowered to go out and prosecute the Klan for these federal crimes. Grant benefited from having an extremely committed attorney general, Amos Akerman, a Republican from Georgia. Though he’d been born in the North, he’d made his life in Georgia. And he was very committed… He was deeply religious and he saw his role during Reconstruction, in supporting federal law and emancipating African Americans, as almost a religious cause. But a very decisive, committed individual.
So Grant pursued a two-pronged policy: one prosecutorial, the second military. The military targeted most specifically upcountry South Carolina, a massive epicenter of Klan activity. Troops are sent elsewhere too, but I read a lot about South Carolina. The military ultimately broke the Klan in South Carolina and elsewhere. More than 5,000 Klansmen were arrested in South Carolina. And most of them were indicted, some were prosecuted. Many in the end were not prosecuted, and that would lead to another question we might talk about: Why not?
But at any rate, it did shatter the Klan. The Klan was exposed. Federal spies… I tell this story in great detail in the book and I won’t do it here, but at any rate federal spies penetrated the Klan. They identified who the members were, where they lived, who the leadership was, who had committed what kinds of crimes — terrible atrocities in many cases. And the Klan was in such chaos as a result of this exposure that entire dens (or small-k klans) surrendered en masse — tens, twenties, thirties, forties at a time — to the federal administration in upcountry South Carolina. So by 1872, ’73, the Klan is pretty much finished as a movement.
Geoff Kabaservice: That’s a good story. And yet, as I was reading your account of it, I found myself feeling much more ambivalent about what I had always thought was one of Grant’s great successes. On the one hand, again, you are recovering people like Major Lewis Merrill, who did an extremely able job of combating the Klan and bringing about this result. On the other hand, I think it’s also true in your account that the Klan fades away because it’s not needed anymore, in some sense. These secretive paramilitary groups are not needed because the Democratic parties are starting to take over in these states, and they are able, legally, to enforce white supremacy upon all of the jurisdictions that they control. And there’s this unfortunate turn where Grant’s triumph really is squandered in so many ways.
And I just have to mention this because I found it such a vivid piece of writing… There is a vignette you describe from Grant’s second inauguration in March 1875 here in Washington. This immense wooden building is erected, the single largest room ever constructed in the United States, and a huge feast laid out to celebrate this occasion. But it’s one of the coldest days on record in Washington, D.C., and this building had not been heated. So the drinks and the food froze. People couldn’t dance because they’re so bundled up. The band can’t stay in tune because its instruments are warped with the cold. And you write: “A tour de force had been planned to charm the guests: hundreds of canaries had brought in to serenade the dancers from perches overhead. But they were too cold to sing, and instead tucked their beaks into their feathers in a pathetic effort to keep warm. Then they began to die, falling like little lumps of frozen yellow fruit on the diners and dancers below.” I think that is what the ancients would regard as a portent.
Fergus Bordewich: Inescapably so. Yes, it’s an extraordinarily poignant scene. To be fair to Grant — I do want to be fair here — Grant won that war against the Klan within the powers that Congress had given him to do so. That’s to say it was destroyed by his efforts. You’re quite right to say that the epilogue to that is not a happy one, precisely because reactionary Democrats had regained — by 1877 in South Carolina — control of all the former Confederate states and were able to accomplish through legislation what they had used terrorism to do before. But I think there are a couple of, I would say, benchmark points, landmark points here to note.
Generally speaking, I think most historians will cite 1877 as the end of Reconstruction. I’ve tried to suggest in the book that the year 1874 is significant. Because in 1874, the Republicans lost control of the House of Representatives, for the first time since before the Civil War. And the Democrats who were elected, quite a few of them by now, were former Confederates, sitting in Congress — including Alexander Stephens, who was the former vice president of the Confederacy. Money bills originate, as we all know, in the House Ways and Means committee. And this Democratic Congress was not going to appropriate another nickel to support federal troops in the South, or to enlarge the number of federal prosecutors. There were only twelve federal prosecutors, maximum, operating in the Southern states. Twelve! And they were so strapped for funds that several of them were paying for prosecutions out of their own pockets. That obviously couldn’t be sustained. So after 1874, the federal arms of Justice and the army are restrained — I was about to say choked, but that would be a misnomer.
Geoff Kabaservice: But not just by the Democrats. And here’s where your book to me reads as a kind of cautionary tale for moderates and center-right people nowadays. You have this vivid portrait of Senator Carl Schurz of Missouri. He’s a very interesting character. He arrived in the United States in 1852 as a fugitive from the thwarted German revolution of 1848. He’s a kind of public intellectual. He’s an ambassador, a general in the Civil War, an editor of a paper in St. Louis. He gets made a senator from Missouri in 1868. And he had begun as a Radical Republican, but he turned against it, partly because, as you say, maybe he had too much faith in the basic decency of human beings. But it’s also that, like a lot of moderate Republicans of a more modern era, he’s very distrustful of strong central government. And this, in some sense, leads him to swallow this ideology of reconciliation with what you call “credulous enthusiasm.” And so he joins with the Liberal Republicans, including some of those people who would become future Mugwumps, like the Adams family. And he campaigns against Grant, and he paints Grant as this horribly corrupt person, which I think is an exaggeration at best.
But he’s also really undermining the idea of a strong central government. And yet a lesson that really clearly shines through your book is that it’s only a strong central government that actually can act to enforce equal rights upon all of its citizens. In fact, you have this great quote, which I’m not sure I can actually find or come up with, but it was from the Mississippi African American Senator Hiram Rhodes Revels, who said in his maiden speech: “I stand today on this floor to appeal for protection from the strong arm of the government for her loyal children, irrespective of color and race.” And I think that when the faith in that strong central government disappears, so too do equal rights in this country.
Fergus Bordewich: Yes, Geoffrey, I couldn’t agree more. You put that extremely well. And I think that is one of the lessons to draw. This book wasn’t written to give you a lesson exactly, but inescapably we draw lessons from history: “What does this mean for us?” And I think that certainly is a key one. And yes, Reconstruction was ultimately betrayed by Northerners and by that moderate wing — I would say the conservative wing, in the context of the time — of the Republican Party, the Schurz wing. Fascinating guy, Schurz, fascinating. One even likes him, in spite of himself and the terrible political mistakes he made, because he’s so unusual in American politics. And yeah, I would say this book, like most of my books, is ultimately an argument for government — for the value of government, the urgency of government, and the importance of understanding and respecting government and these extraordinary institutions that we’ve created. Our government is not a failure because it doesn’t function as efficiently as some imaginary piece of private enterprise. Private business isn’t all that efficient either, for those who’ve been in it.
Geoff Kabaservice: And curiously, Schurz also spoke out against big business in a very prescient way.
Fergus Bordewich: Yes. Schurz is a very interesting guy. And by the end of the nineteenth century — he lives into the twentieth century — he is the icon of anti-imperialism during the Spanish-American War. And he’s again, at the end of his life, a liberal.
Geoff Kabaservice: Most people will remember him for his phrase, “My country, right or wrong. If wrong, to be set right; and if right, to be kept right.”
Fergus Bordewich: So I hope people who read this will come away with… You’re going to see government doing what’s necessary, doing it pretty well, although ultimately hobbled by politics. And you’ll see the danger of politically crippling what is necessary for government to do to sustain what’s best in society and to sustain the rights and protections of Americans.
Geoff Kabaservice: And of course, you’ve written eloquently about Madison, who had that passage in The Federalist that if men were angels, there would be no need for government. But again, something that comes out here is that civilization is in so many ways a veneer over a kind of barbarism that’s always present and has to be kept in control.
Fergus Bordewich: I think that quite right. At the end of the book, one of the truths that’s inescapable from the story of the Klan is that the line between civilization and barbarism is very thin. It’s very thin. And in talking about Klansmen, we’re talking about respectable Americans. We’re not talking about a bunch of hoodlums and louts, we’re talking about ordinary respectable Americans who commit horrible crimes against ordinary, decent people because they’ve been swayed by an ideology that is essentially totalitarian. I’m projecting that word back, but it is totalitarian and it is American. We’re not spared the threat of that, like other countries. We are not as unique as we think we are, I think. Americans are as capable of appalling misjudgments as peoples anywhere else.
Geoff Kabaservice: Well, Fergus Bordewich, your book is a wonderful read, but also is the kind of book that has lessons that will stay with the reader for a long time, and a lot to think about. So congratulations on the publication of Klan War: Ulysses S. Grant and the Battle to Save Reconstruction, and thank you so much for joining me here today.
Fergus Bordewich: Well, thank you, Geoffrey. I’ve enjoyed it a great deal. Thanks.
Geoff Kabaservice: And thank you all for listening to the Vital Center Podcast. Please subscribe and rate us on your preferred podcasting platform. And if you have any questions, comments, or other responses, please include them along with your rating, or send us an email at contact@niskanencenter.org. Thanks as always to our technical director, Kristie Eshelman, our sound engineer, Ray Ingenieri, and the Niskanen Center in Washington, D.C.