Historian Fergus Bordewich about his new book, ‘Klan War’
Join Michael in his conversation with Fergus Bordewich about his new book, Klan War: Ulysses S. Grant and the Battle to Save Reconstruction which tells the story how President Grant, his attorney general, Amos Akerman, and Major Lewis Merrill led the successful, multi-year assault on the Ku Klux Klan.
Fergus is one of the leading independent historians writing on 18th and 19th America. He is the author of eight previous award-winning non-fiction books including The First Congress: How James Madison, George Washington, and a Group of Extraordinary Men Invented the Government which won the D.B. Hardeman Prize in American History.
About Klan War
Klan War is a 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. Bordewich describes the Ku Klux Klan as "the first organized terrorist movement in American history." At its peak in the early 1870s, the Klan boasted tens of thousands of members, many of them privileged landowners, doctors, lawyers, journalists, even lawmen and churchmen. 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 battle against both armed southern enemies of Reconstruction and northern politicians seduced by by visions of peaceful postwar conciliation, testing the limits of the federal government in determining the power of states rights. Bordewich transports readers to the front lines, in the hamlets of the former Confederacy and the marble corridors of Congress, highlighting an unsung generation of grassroots Black leaders and key political figures such as Missouri senator Carl Schurz, who sacrificed the rights of Black Americans in the name of political "reform," and the ruthless Klan leader and former slave trader and Confederate general Nathan Bedford Forrest.
