Knopf
Review by Brian Tanguay
The demise of John W. Stephens is emblematic of the challenge that faced Ulysses S. Grant and the proponents of Reconstruction. In the eyes of North Carolina’s planter elite, Stephens was a middling white man who before the Civil War spent his time as a harness-maker and small-time tobacco trader. Stephens was a reluctant servant of the Confederacy, but his real crime happened after the war when he went to work for the Freedmen’s Bureau, and then, with the support of a strong Black vote, was elected to the state Senate where he championed public education and the rights of the formerly enslaved. By 1870, Stephens was marked as a race-traitor by the Ku Klux Klan.
Stephens, a Republican, was inside Yanceyville’s courthouse in May 1870, observing a convention of Caswell County’s Democratic Party, when he was tapped on the shoulder by the county sheriff and told he was needed downstairs to resolve some issues with Republican voter registrations. That was the last time the Senator was seen alive. A little after dawn the following morning, Stephens’s horribly mutilated body was discovered in the unused “lumber” room of the courthouse, a rope around his neck and stab wounds in his heart and neck; his windpipe was severed. The walls were splattered with blood. Although an inquest was conducted, no one in Yanceyville was surprised when the murder was deemed to have been committed by persons unknown.
Historian Fergus M. Bordewich is the author of numerous books, including Congress at War which is also about the Reconstruction era. In Klan War he examines the all-out campaign of terror waged by ex-Confedrates determined to reassert white supremacy and the actions taken by Ulysses S. Grant and his administration to stop them. As Bordewich meticulously documents, this continuation of the Civil War was not fought by armies executing tactical maneuvers, but by bands of white men whose primary weapon was sadistic terror directed against the newly emancipated and their supporters, Black and white, voters, and elected office holders like John W. Stephens.
“While there was sometimes an element of frightening randomness to Klan terror,” writes Bordewich, “its overall strategy was unambiguous: to subvert trust in government, prevent freedmen and white Republicans from voting, reverse the Union victory in the Civil War as thoroughly as possible, and cripple the great social experiment that was born from that victory. The Klan’s goal, in short, was a counterrevolution.”
Public and political support for Reconstruction was already waning by the time Ulysses S. Grant assumed office in March 1869. Although the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Amendments had been ratified, Grant’s predecessor, Andrew Johnson, had done everything in his power to uphold white supremacy and reinstate the prewar ruling elite, including drastically reducing the number of federal troops in the South. No wonder that by 1868 the Klan had spread across the South and in many areas served as a de facto military wing of the Democratic Party’s most reactionary and violent elements. In these circumstances passage of the Fifteenth Amendment, which ensured the right to vote for Black men, was hardly a foregone conclusion, and for months Grant employed all the powers of his person and office to shepard the process along. On March 30, 1870, a triumphant Grant signed a bill which both restored Texas statehood and ratified the Fifteenth Amendment.
This victory was short-lived and very nearly pyrrhic. Republican officials in Alabama, North Carolina, South Carolina, and Kentucky were under siege and sent Grant an “unrelenting tide of panicky letters” begging for federal troops to protect them from the Klan’s brutal depredations. So dire was the situation in one Alabama county that all the Republican officials fled for their lives. The audacity of John W. Stephens’ murder forced Congress to give Grant the power to act by passing the first of three Enforcement Acts. Grant could now uphold the provisions of the Fifteenth Amendment by force of arms because interfering with voting became a federal crime as opposed to a state crime, a critical development because southern juries and courts had almost everywhere refused to convict Klansmen of anything. The authority granted by the Enforcement Acts gave Grant and his Justice Department the tools to take on the Klan.
Bordewich captures the tension between those in Congress who believed the use of federal power was justified and necessary, and those who saw it as a dangerous overreach. The remaining Radical Republicans in Congress argued that protecting Black voters was not only politically imperative but morally right, and the best way to preserve federal authority in the South. Opponents argued against federal overreach into the affairs of state governments, and conjured images of federal soldiers with fixed bayonets surrounding southern polling places. The real fear in the South was about sharing political power with Black citizens. Senator William Hamilton of Maryland declared it his solemn duty to keep Blacks as distinct and separate “from the white race as the material interests of the country will justify.”
Ulysses S. Grant wasn’t a natural politician, but as Bordewich shows he was a steady and consistent leader possessed of a moral sensibility and code of honor that served him — and the nation — admirably in a time when the unity of the country hung in the balance. Frederick Douglass observed that Grant was a great man who could adjust himself to new conditions and adopt the lessons taught by the events of the hour. Perhaps because the political will to sustain the progress of Reconstruction evaporated, and southern states succeeded (with the help of several Supreme Court decisions) in excluding Blacks from voting, holding office, or challenging white supremacy until the Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s and 1960s, Grant is typically perceived more as the resolute general who led the Union to victory on the battlefield than as a deft political leader who championed Blacks’ rights and broke the Ku Klux Klan’s reign of terror. Klan War stands as a significant contribution to altering this far too narrow perception of America’s 18th president.
While Bordewich makes clear that Klan War is a work of history and shouldn’t be read as a prescription for meeting our present-day challenges, I couldn’t help but linger over this passage: “But the story it tells shows that forceful political action can prevail over violent extremism. It also shows that when political courage succumbs to partisan self-interest the darker impulses that are always present in America inherit a fertile ground in which to thrive.”
