The Man Who Saved the Union (73 page)

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 upstairs 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.”

T
he 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.”

G
rant’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.”

If the dismay of the Democrats at Grant’s bold stroke was expected,
the revolt of certain Republicans was not. Carl Schurz had been a Lincoln man and a supporter of emancipation, but he thought Grant was on a power-grabbing fool’s errand trying to enforce equality in the South. Southern society was in a process of “
fermentation,” Schurz said; the region’s “inveterate habits, opinions, and ways of thinking” would change only with time. Schurz was currently a senator from Missouri; he professed familiarity with Southern Republicans, whom he considered corrupt, and
African Americans, whom he deemed incapable of independent political judgment. He discounted the horror stories of Klan activity in South Carolina and elsewhere as gross mischaracterizations of actual events, and he took Grant’s suspension of habeas corpus as occasion to declare his break from the president. “
I stand in the
Republican party as an independent man,” he said. Calling himself a “liberal Republican,” he characterized the creed of himself and his ideological allies: “We desire peace and good will to all men. We desire the removal of political restrictions and the maintenance of local self-government to the utmost extent compatible with the constitution as it is. We desire the questions connected with the Civil War to be disposed of forever, to make room as soon as possible for the new problems of the present and the future.”

Even within his own administration Grant got little support.
Amos Akerman was zealous, of course, but other members of the cabinet wished he and the president would find a more popular cause. The politically attuned secretaries feared a voter backlash;
Hamilton Fish feared falling asleep. “
Akerman introduces Ku Klux,” Fish recorded in his diary on November 24. “He has it on the brain. He tells a number of stories, one of a fellow being castrated, with terribly minute and tedious details of each case. It has got to be a bore, to listen twice each week to this same thing.”

O
n the scene in South Carolina federal marshals assisted by army troops rounded up many hundreds of Klansmen and associates. The habeas suspension allowed the arrests to take place far more rapidly than they would have otherwise, because the authorities didn’t have to bring the persons arrested before a judge shortly and charge them with a crime. The effects of the sweep went beyond arrest numbers; many Klansmen fled their home counties ahead of the troops and marshals, some fled the state and a few even fled the country. The detainees overwhelmed the available jails and, after they were eventually indicted, clogged the
dockets of the courts. Amos Akerman conceded he had bitten off more than the courts could chew. “
It seems to me that it is too much for even the United States to undertake to inflict adequate penalties through the courts,” he told an associate. But he defended the president’s action. “Really these combinations amount to war and cannot be effectively crushed on any other theory.”