By Fergus M. Bordewich

Amos Akerman may be the most consequential attorney general you've never heard of. Under President Ulysses S. Grant he gave federal teeth to the new 14th Amendment, personally leading a successful judicial battle against the Ku Klux Klan's war of terror across the Reconstruction-era South.

Akerman was an unlikely hero. Originally from New Hampshire, he built his legal career in Georgia, owning 11 slaves and serving as a Confederate supply officer, though he harbored moral qualms about slavery and repudiated it after the Confederate defeat. He joined the Republican party and came to Grant's attention as a staunch advocate of biracial government. Guy Gugliotta's briskly written "Grant's Enforcer" retrieves him from generations of unfair neglect.

After the Civil War the South experienced a racial revolution; freed people became citizens in 1868 amid a grassroots surge of political engagement. At least 2,000 blacks held public office, from small towns to state legislatures and the U.S. Congress. From the beginning, they were subject to attack by embittered whites; by the end of the decade, revanchists had formed the nation's first organized terrorist group, the Ku Klux Klan.

The Klan's origin is well-documented. Founded in Tennessee in late 1865 as a sort of Confederate veterans' fraternity that favored grotesque costumes and rituals, it was soon taken over by a formidable group of former officers who recognized its political potential. By 1868, it had spread across most of the South to become the de facto paramilitary arm of the Democratic party, and what started out as racist foolery became a systematic strategy of terror. Flogging, lynching and rapes were employed to scare Republicans away from the ballot box, destroying the South's embryonic two-party system and restoring white political control. It was highly effective: Intimidated juries wouldn't convict, frightened witnesses refused to testify. Almost everywhere, the organization was helmed by leading citizens -- property owners, doctors, lawyers, even ministers. The few thousand federal troops who remained in the South were far too thinly spread to maintain the peace.

Although the total number of the Klan's victims will never be known, it is likely that at least 2,000 men and women were murdered in the years after the war, and many times that number brutalized and tortured. Grant was profoundly affected by the heartbreaking letters he received from the families of Klan victims and by the steady stream of official reports describing a hellscape of lawlessness across the South. According to Mr. Gugliotta, a journalist and historian, Grant "understood violence as well as anyone then living, and when he named Akerman as his attorney general he picked a man who had as much or more experience with white terrorism as anyone he might have chosen." Akerman came into office hoping that Southern whites could be persuaded to adapt to the new reality. His optimism quickly faded. "I doubt whether from the beginning of the world until now [that] a community, nominally civilized, has been so fully under the domination of systematic and organized depravity," he wrote.

Grant saw the need for legislation enabling the federal government to intervene where officials either refused or were too weak to enforce the 14th Amendment, which guaranteed the protection of former slaves' lives, liberty and property. "It was not enough," says Mr. Gugliotta, "to have civil rights on the books; the law needed to be effectively applied." So Akerman, working with congressional radicals, helped pass a series of federal-enforcement acts that criminalized the wearing of disguises intended "to terrify, frighten, or overawe"; joining a secret organization that required the commission or concealment of an act of terror; or attempting to rescue someone jailed for such a crime. In addition, the president was granted the authority to suspend habeas corpus where he believed public safety required it. Mr. Gugliotta rightly deems this legislation "one of the most ambitious expansions of federal legal power ever attempted." Democrats cried that it would deliver the states "over to the federal government, subjugated and helpless." But Grant was committed to the destruction of the Klan.

In October 1871 he suspended habeas corpus in nine South Carolina counties and called in troops to suppress the Klan. For several weeks Akerman took personal command, working with Lewis Merrill, a like-minded major of the Seventh Cavalry whose troops scoured the countryside for Klansmen. Under simultaneous pressure from the Army and from federal prosecutors, the Klan collapsed. Hundreds were arrested in South Carolina alone, and thousands across the South. By the end of the year, more than 5,000 Klan cases were under prosecution; by 1873, the Klan was a spent force.

Mr. Gugliotta narrates the story of the South Carolina campaign in vivid, anecdote-rich detail. He strangely overlooks the Klan war across the rest of the South, a significant omission that undermines a full understanding of Grant's policy. However, he is especially deft when steering the reader through the tangled politics of Reconstruction, making good use of diaries and letters, contemporary newspaper accounts and congressional hearings.

The Ku Klux Klan created for later generations a model for secretive nativism and a belief that terrorism can work as an instrument of political control. Mr. Gugliotta's often inspiring account shows that it is possible for well-crafted policy and courageous politicians to prevail over extremism.

--Mr. Bordewich is the author of "Klan War: Ulysses S. Grant and the Battle to Save Reconstruction."

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July 07, 2025 10:58 ET (14:58 GMT)

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