by H. W. Brands
Even some Republicans wondered what Grant was getting them into. “Public affairs are growing about as bad as the devil could wish if he were arranging them in his own way,” Representative James Garfield of Ohio grumbled. Garfield didn’t deny that the Southern violence was a problem, but the administration’s solution could prove even worse. “This will virtually empower the President to abolish the state governments,” he said. Garfield was no alarmist, but he feared that Grant was destroying the Republican party. “The impression is gaining ground that the election of Grant is impossible, but it is feared that his nomination is inevitable.”
William Sherman didn’t know where it all would lead. Sherman blamed politics for nearly everything that ailed the country, and he saw his old friend becoming ever more tainted. “Politics have again gradually but surely drawn the whole country into a situation of as much danger as before the Civil War,” he wrote Edward Ord. “The Army left the South subdued, broken, and humbled. The party then in power”—the Republicans—“forgetful of the fact that sooner or later the people of the South must vote, labored hard to create voters out of Negroes and indifferent material.” The results were predictable. “The Negro governments, aided by a weak force of Republican whites, have been swept aside and the Union people there are hustled, branded, and even killed.” But little could be done about it, absent a thorough suspension of local rule. “Any Southern citizen may kill or abuse a Negro or Union man with as much safety as one of our frontiersmen may kill an Indian.… All crimes must be tried by juries on the spot, who of course protect their comrades.” Sherman was more discouraged than ever about democracy. The Republicans, the party of the Union, were in disarray, and his and Ord’s wartime commander faced a bleak future. “General Grant’s personal popularity seems to be waning, and the opposition to his administration is such that if they can unite they will surely prevail.”
But Grant persevered. He marshaled his allies in Congress and held their ranks firm when some started wavering. The result was a measure formally styled “An Act to Enforce the Provisions of the Fourteenth Amendment” but commonly called the Ku Klux Klan Act. It expanded the definition of criminal wrongdoing to include conspiracies to deprive citizens of their rights, and, most significantly, it remobilized the engines of the Civil War to deal with the Klan and the violence it practiced. Whenever “powerful and armed combinations” threatened the integrity of a state government or the enforcement of federal laws within a state, or when a state government connived at the “unlawful purposes of such powerful and armed combinations,” these groups would be deemed to be in “rebellion against the government of the United States.” The president was authorized to employ military force against said combinations and to suspend the writ of habeas corpus.
Grant signed the Ku Klux Klan Act in April 1871. Describing it as a measure of “extraordinary public importance,” he suggested how he might put it to use. He wouldn’t act precipitately. “It is my earnest wish that peace and cheerful obedience to law may prevail throughout the land and that all traces of our late unhappy civil strife may be speedily removed,” he said. “These ends can be easily reached by acquiescence in the results of the conflict, now written in our Constitution, and by the due and proper enforcement of equal, just, and impartial laws in every part of our country.” But the new law had not been written without cause. “The failure of local communities to furnish such means for the attainment of results so earnestly desired imposes upon the national government the duty of putting forth all its energies for the protection of its citizens of every race and color and for the restoration of peace and order throughout the entire country.” He would do his part of the government’s duty. “I will not hesitate to exhaust the powers thus vested in the executive.”
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THE SWEEPING NEW LAW GAVE HEART TO VICTIMS OF THE SOUTHERN violence; once again they appealed to Grant for help. “There is a Ku Klux organization in this county,” Robert Flournoy, the editor of a paper called Equal Rights, wrote from Pontotoc, Mississippi. The Klansmen had closed a school for freedmen and were working to close others. “I am threatened with personal violence,” Flournoy said. He appreciated the new law but said it had made matters worse in the short term, in that the Klansmen and Democrats didn’t believe Grant would follow through and were trying to demonstrate as much to the locals. The president needed to act at once. “Nothing but the strong arm of the government firmly administered can prevent very serious consequences to the integrity of the Union. All the hopes of the loyal people are fixed on you; every day loyal men come to me and enquire will anything be done for them.” Two weeks later Flournoy sent an update: “The Ku Klux attacked us on Friday night. We drove them off, killing one and wounding others. They threaten to return and burn the town. Can we have troops immediately to protect us?”
Allen Huggins, another Mississippi Republican, wrote Grant from the safety of Washington, having been driven from Monroe County in his home state. “The first appearance of Ku Klux in Monroe County was in the month of August 1870,” Huggins informed the president. “About fifty in number at that time visited the jail at Athens seven miles from Aberdeen and forcibly took from there a colored man by the name of Saunders Flint and his two grown sons—Joseph and Moses, I think were their names—who were in jail for defending themselves against an assault made upon them by three white men. The father, Saunders Flint, escaped. The two sons were found about a week after, in the woods torn in pieces by shot.” On Flint’s testimony and additional evidence several of the perpetrators were arrested, but a white jury acquitted them. “From that time to this the county has been one continued scene of persecution and horror to Union men white and black,” Huggins told Grant. The violence was escalating. Huggins described a gruesome series of hangings and shootings. The lucky among the victims of the terror were merely whipped and beaten. Even a white woman had been beaten simply for knowing the identity of some of the murderers.
G. T. F. Boulding of Tuscaloosa, Alabama, pleaded with Grant to act quickly against the Klansmen. “Give us poor people some guarantee of our lives,” Boulding wrote. “We are hunted and shot down as if we were wild beasts. On last Saturday night, April 30, the clique known as the K. K.’s visited the house of one of our most guileless colored citizens and shot him dead, after which they robbed his house of about $200 in money and carried off his gun and pistol. This is not the only case of the kind in the last ten days but the third or fourth case. We hope as our lives, liberty, and property are in imminent peril that you will do something for us as soon as possible. We have imperiled our lives to support you, and we look to you to help us when in distress.” Boulding invited Grant to publish his letter but requested that his name be omitted. “If the name was known I would not live for twenty-four hours.”
From Fayette County, Alabama, arrived a petition with a similar message and a similar request for anonymity. “Armed bands styling themselves Ku Klux are committing crimes and outrages upon peaceable and law-abiding persons,” the petition read. “Murders by these ruffians who have long disgraced this county are of common occurrence. The civil authorities have been overawed and are utterly powerless to execute the laws.… We do most humbly and imploringly appeal for that protection which the Constitution and laws guarantee to every citizen of the United States.… Please do not give publicity to our names as we are in constant danger of assassination.”
Grant shared the grim news with Congress, which created a special investigative committee. Members visited several Southern states and heard testimony from hundreds of victims and witnesses. Alfred Richardson was a carpenter in Watkinsville, Georgia, who had entered politics and been elected to the state legislature. One night a band of armed white men rode to his house. “There were about twenty or twenty-five of them, I reckon,” he told the committee. The whites battered down his door and chased him upstairs, where they shot him once in the arm and twice in his side. He nonetheless reached a cache of weapons he kept in his garret. “They came up
stairs with their pistols in their hands, and a man behind with a light. I shot one of them as he got on the top step. They gathered him up by the legs, and then they all ran and left me.” He hadn’t seen them since but knew he was a marked man. In Jackson County, Florida, Emanuel Fortune had been compelled to flee Klan violence, and to the committee he described the apparent intentions of the organization. “The object of it is to kill out the leading men of the Republican party,” he said. Alabamian George Moore and a neighbor were beaten in his home by Klansmen, who also raped a young girl. “The cause of this treatment, they said, was that we voted the Radical ticket,” Moore related. In Chattanooga a black man named Andrew Flowers had defeated a white opponent in an election for justice of the peace. Shortly thereafter the Klan inflicted its own form of justice, whipping Flowers savagely. “When they were taking me out of the door, they said they had nothing particular against me,” Flowers told the committee. “They didn’t dispute I was a very good fellow, and they never heard anything wrong of me. But they did not intend any nigger to hold office in the United States.”
The reports from South Carolina were the most alarming of all. “We are fast drifting into anarchy,” Warren Driver wrote from Barnwell County. “I am told plainly to leave here or change my politics or they will kill me as no damned Radical will be tolerated—told so by the leading man of this section.… There are armed bands of ruffians roaming through the country murdering inoffensive people. There has been five murders committed in as many weeks in my vicinity.… No one arrested for it.… Mr. President, is it not time that these butcheries ceased? Is it not time that a heavy hand was laid on these demons?” Javan Bryant pleaded in like vein from Spartanburg County. “All eyes are turned to the executive of the nation,” Bryant wrote Grant. “In him alone are concentrated all our hopes. We look upon the Ku Klux Klan as rebellion in its worst form.” The Civil War was being waged again, and it needed to be won again. “At Appomattox Court House the great rebellion was cut off at the ground,” Bryant said. “In Spartanburg County it has sprouted out from the stump, and the scions are more poisonous than the parent tree. We humbly pray, Almighty God, that he who cut it off at Appomattox Court House may declare martial law in Spartanburg County, and never stack arms until the last root has been extirpated.”
The congressional investigators largely agreed with Grant’s petitioners. Senator John Scott of Pennsylvania visited South Carolina and wrote Grant that in parts of the state the situation was entirely out of control. “The cruelties that have been inflicted in Spartanburg and York counties are shocking to humanity, crimes that ought not to go unpunished in any civilized country,” Scott said. “The perpetrators are at large and unwhipped of justice.… All warnings have been disregarded and the efforts of the well-disposed citizens have proved unavailing.”
Grant wanted an assessment from his own agent, and so he sent his new attorney general. Amos Akerman was an oddity in Grant’s cabinet, being a Southerner and former Confederate officer. But he wasn’t a full-blooded Southerner, having been born and raised in New Hampshire. Like William Sherman he went south before the war to become a teacher; unlike Sherman he stayed south, in Georgia, upon secession and eventually joined the Confederate army. Yet after Lee’s surrender he abandoned the Lost Cause as utterly lost and beneficially so. “A surrender in good faith really signifies a surrender of the substance as well as of the forms of the Confederate cause,” he explained in jumping ship all the way to the Republican party. He became federal district attorney for Georgia and a zealous enforcer of the civil rights of the freedmen. When Grant decided to remove Ebenezer Hoar from the cabinet, he chose Akerman to replace him. Besides being the first former Confederate to hold a cabinet position, Akerman was the first attorney general to head a federal department. The Justice Department was created in 1870 to facilitate enforcement of the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments and the federal laws passed in pursuance thereof. Akerman denominated the department his civil rights army, and with Grant’s approval he led his troops from the front. He traveled to South Carolina in 1871 to gather information and steel the spines of the federal marshals, attorneys and civil rights commissioners for a major campaign against the Klan.
Grant launched the campaign with troops already on the ground. “Order the troops in South Carolina to aid in making such arrests as the U.S. commissioner for South Carolina may ask, and in all cases to arrest and break up disguised night marauders,” he directed William Belknap, the secretary of war. The move served symbolic notice but accomplished little constructive. The federal troops in South Carolina were few and the people unfriendly. As if to show their derision for federal authority, the Klansmen escalated the violence, and the number of murders actually increased.
Grant answered the challenge with greater sternness. He had Akerman draft language that fit the notification requirements of the Ku Klux Klan Act. “Unlawful combinations and conspiracies have long existed and do still exist in the State of South Carolina for the purpose of depriving certain portions and classes of the people of that State of the rights, privileges, immunities, and protection named in the Constitution of the United States,” Grant declared on October 12, 1871. South Carolina’s authorities had shown themselves unable or unwilling to secure those rights and privileges. “Therefore I, Ulysses S. Grant, President of the United States of America, do hereby command all persons composing the unlawful combinations and conspiracies aforesaid to disperse and to retire peaceably to their homes within five days.”
Grant wasn’t surprised that the proclamation by itself had little effect. The violence continued. Akerman reported that the Klan and its terrorist kin were most powerful in nine counties of the state. “These combinations embrace at least two-thirds of the active white men of those counties and have the sympathy and countenance of a majority of the other third,” Akerman wrote Grant. “They are connected with similar combinations in other counties and states, and no doubt are part of a grand system of criminal associations pervading most of the southern states. The members are bound to obedience and secrecy by oaths which they are taught to regard as of higher obligation than the lawful oaths taken before civil magistrates. They are organized and armed. They effect their objects by personal violence often extending to murder. They terrify witnesses. They control juries in the state courts and sometimes in the courts of the United States.” The president should act swiftly on the warning he had given. “Unless these combinations shall be thoroughly suppressed, no citizen who opposes their political objects will be permitted to live, and no freedman will enjoy essential liberty in the territory now subject to their sway.”
Grant agreed. He augmented the federal force in South Carolina, and the moment the grace period expired he issued a second proclamation, in which he repeated his characterization of the South Carolina rebellion, noted that the perpetrators remained at large, specified the nine most troublesome counties and declared: “The public safety especially requires that the privileges of the writ of habeas corpus be suspended, to the end that such rebellion may be overthrown.”
Grant’s action provoked a new uproar in Congress. The Democrats’ response was predictable. Francis Blair had spent the summer trying to neutralize the testimony given to the congressional investigative committee about the Klan violence. For each witness who graphically described the terror in the South, Blair brought forward another witness who asserted that all was well in Dixie. “What has been, and is now, the relation or state of feeling between the white and colored people?” Blair asked of Francis Lyon, an Alabamian who had held both federal and Confederate office. Lyon responded: “The general disposition of the white people has been, and is now, to do the blacks justice.” Such trouble as occurred in the South was the fault of self-interested agitators. “If the colored people were let alone by political demagogues and unworthy office-seekers, there would be but little trouble between the races,” Lyon said. “When the Loyal Leagues”—Republican organizations in the South—“were in operation,
efforts were made by designing white men to control the votes of the negroes, by representing to them that their old owners would re-enslave them if they had the power, a thing which everybody ought to know is utterly false. There is no power to do any such thing, and no disposition to do it if the power existed.”
Blair continued to insist that the South could handle its own affairs, and he condemned Grant’s suspension of habeas corpus as tyrannically misguided. He sponsored a resolution in the Senate calling on the president to furnish proof of his allegations as to the violence in South Carolina—“giving the names of his informants, their statements when made to him in writing, and the substance of them when made verbally.” Blair accused the president of making selective use of the examination of witnesses before the investigative committee. “As a member of the committee, I can give my opinion that the facts elicited by that examination did not justify the proclamation of martial law, and I suspect that I know more about the facts elicited before the committee than the President does.” Blair lumped the legislature in with his attacks on the executive. “While I am not surprised that the President should have exercised the authority given to him, as his education and his genius are arbitrary and look to arbitrary measures, I am astonished, sir, at the servility of Congress in submitting the rights of all citizens of this country to his discretion, and depriving them of the guarantees of the Constitution.”