Grant's Enforcer - Taking Down the Klan

Grant's Enforcer: Taking Down the Klan

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English | 2025 | ISBN: 0820373362 | 296 pages | True EPUB | 7.83 MB

Grant's Enforcer offers a gripping story of the early years after the Civil War and the campaign led by President Grant’s attorney general Amos T. Akerman to destroy the Ku Klux Klan. Akerman, a former Georgia slaveholder and the only Southerner to serve in a Reconstruction cabinet, was the first federal lawman to propose using the Fourteenth Amendment to prosecute civil rights violations.

In 1871 Akerman and his allies brought the KKK to trial in South Carolina, choosing York County as their principal target. They believed that if they could break the Ku Klux in one small corner of the former Confederacy, they could break it everywhere. Within six months, the prosecutions and convictions in federal court of key Klan leaders and foot soldiers effectively eradicated the Klan for half a century.