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Published Oct 2023
480 pages
Genre: History, Current Affairs and Religion
Publication Information
A stunning history of the first national anti-terrorist campaign waged on American soil - when Ulysses S. Grant wielded the power of the federal government to dismantle the KKK.
The Ku Klux Klan, which celebrated historian Fergus Bordewich defines as "the first organized terrorist movement in American history," rose from the ashes of the Civil War. At its peak in the early 1870s, the Klan boasted many tens of thousands of members, no small number of them landowners, lawmen, doctors, journalists, and churchmen, as well as future governors and congressmen. And their mission was to obliterate the muscular democratic power of newly emancipated Black Americans and their white allies, often by the most horrifying means imaginable.
To repel the virulent tidal wave of violence, President Ulysses S. Grant waged a two-term battle against both armed Southern enemies of Reconstruction and Northern politicians seduced by visions of postwar conciliation, testing the limits of the federal government in determining the extent of states' rights. In this book, Bordewich transports us to the front lines, in the hamlets of the former Confederate States and in the marble corridors of Congress, reviving an unsung generation of grassroots Black leaders and key figures such as crusading Missouri senator Carl Schurz, who sacrificed the rights of Black Americans in the name of political "reform," and the ruthless former slave trader and Klan leader Nathan Bedford Forrest.
Klan War is a bold and bracing record of America's past that reveals the bloody, Reconstruction-era roots of present-day battles to protect the ballot box and stamp out resurgent white supremacist ideologies.
"A critically important revisionist history...A penetrating examination of the rise of the KKK...For Bordewich, Grant's decisive move proved that 'forceful political action can prevail over violent extremism.' Yet, as he makes clear in this significant work of scholarship, it did not stop the future systematic stripping away of Blacks' civil rights." —Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
"By documenting what really happened in the bloody and vicious post–Civil War South and how it nullified official government policy, this history resonates on many levels...Bordewich introduces readers to Black leaders and white supremacist ideologues, sparing no fact, however grim, in his devastating history of how domestic terrorism tore apart the social, political, and other promises of emancipation." —Booklist (starred review)
"Historian Bordewich serves up a riveting chronicle of America's Reconstruction-era campaign against the Ku Klux Klan...Drawing from his source material to devastating effect, Bordewich catalogs many appalling Klan atrocities. It's an astute assessment of an often overlooked episode in American history." —Publishers Weekly
"A gripping, haunting story of how America's original white supremacist movement used terrorism to crush multiracial democracy—and how, for a time, progressive elected officials in Washington allied with grassroots African Americans and their white allies to rout the reactionaries. This is history we need to vanquish violent intimidation in our own time, this time without quitting before the work is done." —Nancy MacLean, author of Democracy in Chains and Behind the Mask of Chivalry
"An urgent history, in which the conception and spawning of the Klan, its anti-Black atrocities and crimes against humanity, the evolution of a General and President, and the possibilities and limits of political power all come roaring to life. As searing as it is suspenseful, Klan War delivers an incisive angle into a horrific chapter in American history, one that requires knowing today." —Ilyon Woo, author of Master Slave Husband Wife
"Fergus Bordewich is an expert at turning momentous questions in American history into absorbing narratives. With insight and telling details, he reveals how Grant—by nature no crusader—directed federal resources against Klan attacks on African Americans, only to be undercut by political attempts to appease the hostile Liberal Republicans. A fascinating and foreboding book." —T.J. Stiles, author of Custer's Trials (winner of the Pulitzer Prize)
This information about Klan War was first featured
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Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Fergus M. Bordewich is the author of eight previous nonfiction books, including Congress at War: How Republican Reformers Fought the Civil War, Defied Lincoln, Ended Slavery, and Remade America; The First Congress: How James Madison, George Washington, and a Group of Extraordinary Men Invented the Government (winner of the 2016 D.B. Hardeman Prize in American History); and America's Great Debate: Henry Clay, Stephen A. Douglas, and the Compromise that Preserved the Union (named best history book of 2012 by the Los Angeles Times). He lives in Washington, DC with his wife.
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