Klan War: Ulysses S. Grant and the Battle to Save Reconstruction

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 KKKThe 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.