Join us on Thursday, November 16, as we discuss author Fergus M. Bordewich’s new book KLAN WAR: Ulysses S. Grant and the Battle to Save Reconstruction.
This stunning story details when Ulysses S. Grant wielded the power of the federal government to dismantle the KKK. The Ku Klux Klan, defined 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 tens of thousands of members, no small number of them landowners, law enforcement officers, doctors, journalists, and churchmen, as well as future governors and congressmen. 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 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.
Like all USCHS programs, this webinar is free and open to the public; registration is required.
Fergus M. Bordewich has been an independent writer, historian, and journalist since the early 1970s. In 2015, he served as chairman of the awards committee for the Frederick Douglass Book Prize given by the Gilder-Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition, at Yale University. He is a frequent public speaker at universities and other forums, as well as on radio and television. His articles have appeared in many national magazines and newspapers. His book reviews appear regularly in the Wall Street Journal. As a journalist, he traveled extensively in Asia, the Middle East, Europe, and Africa, writing on politics, economic issues, culture, and history. He also wrote the script for a PBS documentary about Thomas Jefferson and the founding of the University of Virginia: Mr. Jefferson’s University. Mr. Bordewich’s latest book is about the federal government’s struggle to defeat the Ku Klux Klan in the early 1870s. It will be published by Alfred A. Knopf in October 2023.
Fergus M. Bordewich is the author of eight non-fiction books: Congress at War: How Republican Reformers Fought the Civil War, Defied Lincoln, Ended Slavery, and Remade America (Alfred A. Knopf, 2020); The First Congress: How James Madison, George Washington, and a Group of Extraordinary Men Invented the Government (Simon & Schuster, 2016. Winner of the D.B. Hardeman Prize); America’s Great Debate: Henry Clay, Stephen A. Douglas, and the Compromise that Preserved the Union (Simon&Schuster, 2012. Winner of the 2012 Los Angeles Times History Prize); Washington: The Making of the American Capital (Amistad/HarperCollins, 2008); Bound for Canaan: The Underground Railroad and the War for the Soul of America (Amistad/HarperCollins, 2005. Named one of the New York Public Library’s ten best books of 2005); My Mother’s Ghost: A Memoir (Doubleday, 2001); Killing the White Man’s Indian: Reinventing Native Americans at the End of the Twentieth Century (Doubleday, 1996); and Cathay: A Journey in Search of Old China (Prentice Hall Press, 1991).
Release Date:
October 10, 2023
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 tens of thousands of members, no small number of them landowners, lawmen, doctors, journalists, and churchmen, as well as future governors and congressmen. 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 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.
