Guy Gugliotta, Grant’s Enforcer: Taking Down the Klan. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2025. 296 pp.

In October 1871, President Ulysses S. Grant invoked the Third Anti-KKK Enforcement Act, declared martial law in nine counties in the South Carolina piedmont, and ordered soldiers to suppress what Grant called a “conspiracy” against the Constitution, which had recently, through ratification of the Fourteenth Amendment, been altered to enforce the revolutionary results of the Civil War by guaranteeing equal protection and the right to vote.

In a proclamation issued in May, shortly after signing the Enforcement Act into law, Grant had declared:

I will not hesitate to exhaust the powers thus vested in the Executive, whenever and wherever it shall become necessary to do so for the purpose of securing to all citizens of the United States the peaceful enjoyment of the rights guaranteed to them by the Constitution and laws.

In October, Grant followed through on his promise.

Guy Gugliotta, historian and former Washington Post reporter, describes the crackdown in South Carolina in his recent book, Grant’s Enforcer: Taking Down the Klan. The federal government had spent months developing a network of informants, using the threat of federal prosecution under the Enforcement Act to thoroughly infiltrate the Klan. The Third Enforcement Act—so called because it “enforced” the Reconstruction Amendments—authorized the suspension of habeas corpus, giving federal authorities the power to arrest and detain suspected Klan members without charge. It also made it unlawful for two or more people to conspire against the civil rights of others, an underutilized provision that remains on the statute books.

When the battle-worn Troop K of the 7th Cavalry fixed bayonets and fanned out across the nine South Carolina counties on October 19, 1871, the impact was immediate and overwhelming. “There were no pitched battles, burning of houses, beatings, or torture,” Gugliotta writes. “Troopers without incident arrested Klan chieftains” and “swept up a bunch of the raiders” responsible for horrific killings of freedmen and Republicans.

Gugliotta quotes an 1872 report by Lewis Merrill, the Army officer who helped lead the military crackdown, who describes the devastating impact of the Grant administration’s operation against the Klan in South Carolina. “Many of the Ku Klux leaders, suspecting that measures were being devised to bring them to justice, and with the cowardice that defined all of their infamous crimes, fled,” leaving behind “their poorer followers and ignorant dupes.” The Klan was “bewildered and demoralized” such that “day after day for weeks, men came in in such numbers” to turn themselves in.

The rank-and-file turned on the leadership. As Gugliotta notes, “the Klan’s ‘secrecy or death’ vow didn’t hold under pressure.” He quotes future journalist and Labor Secretary Lewis F. Post, then a young attorney assigned to transcribe prisoners’ testimony, as saying that “as hope of release died out and fears of hanging grew stronger,” Klansman after Klansman reported on one another. The organization would never recover (at least not until the 1910s and 20s, when the Klan re-emerged in its second, anti-communist and anti-immigrant, iteration).

Grant’s Enforcer is written with a biographical framing, telling the story of the Grant administration’s crackdown on the Klan through the life and work of his Attorney General, Amos T. Ackerman. This is appropriate given the critical constitutional questions that arise from the prosecution and crackdown.

Ackerman, originally from New Hampshire, moved to the antebellum South as a young man to pay off student debt. An anti-secessionist, he nevertheless became a Confederate quartermaster during the war. Becoming a zealous proponent of Reconstruction after the war, Ackerman’s legal theories began attracting the attention of leading Radicals in Washington. As Gugliotta describes so well, Ackerman understood that the Civil War marked a second American revolution, a radical transformation enshrined in law through the Thirteenth, Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments.

Grant saw something in the young prosecutor, elevating him out of obscurity to become the federal government’s top lawyer just five months after the founding of the Justice Department in 1870, passing over far more powerful and established figures clamoring for the position.

Grant’s Enforcer does justice to Ackerman, a remarkable figure. At a time when Democrats and conservative Republicans denied or downplayed the KKK outrages in Congress and the press, Ackerman appeared at cabinet meetings and read at length from accounts provided by freedmen and white Republicans describing the horrors perpetrated by the Klan. This testimony is buttressed by Gugliotta, who relates some of the more harrowing acts of violence, including the murder of Republicans and black veterans of the Union Army.

More conservative members of Grant’s cabinet grew tired of Ackerman’s focus on the Klan and criticized his efforts to direct all prosecutorial resources to Enforcement. But his political line was clear, and Grant kept him on as the suppression continued. In a speech to Brooklyn Republicans two weeks after the October 19 crackdown in South Carolina, he declared that the Klan members and leaders “are to be convicted. Some would be fined, some would be imprisoned, some sent to the penitentiary and some would be hung.” In an era when masses of people still clamored for hanging the Confederate leaders from sour apple trees, Gugliotta adds that “This last remark was greeted with prolonged applause.”

Ultimately, Ackerman was cachéd when he ran afoul of the railroads, which were at the time engaged in a massive bribery and speculation scheme. This would surface through the Crédit Mobilier scandal that broke months after Ackerman was forced out of office. The Klan prosecutions continued for a time after Ackerman’s dismissal, but the Third Enforcement Act soon became dormant.

The Northern bourgeoisie was exhausting the revolutionary role it had played in the Civil War. Reconstruction would formally end in 1876 as the ruling class turned its attention to the suppression of the class struggle and the development of an imperialist foreign policy. Violence against blacks and their white allies continued throughout the South, black legislators were purged and the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments became essentially unenforceable in the South until the 1950s and 1960s.

Nevertheless, through operations like its 1871 actions in the South Carolina piedmont, the Grant administration all but destroyed the Klan in its first manifestation. Grant’s Enforcer is an important reminder that political reaction is not all-powerful. When challenged, the Klan collapsed.

With this in mind, it is impossible to read Grant’s Enforcer without comparing the Grant administration’s resoluteness with the feckless response of the Democrats to the more recent insurrection that took place in Washington on January 6, 2021.

Five years have passed since Donald Trump led a coup attempt to overturn the Constitution and establish himself as presidential dictator. The putsch failed, though not on account of any serious opposition from the Democratic Party or incoming Biden administration. In the half-hearted impeachment effort that followed, Democrats allowed the 15 Republican Senators who had expressed support for Trump’s coup to cast votes against conviction. They should have been barred by Section 3 of the 14th Amendment, which excludes individuals who “have engaged in insurrection or rebellion” from serving in either house of Congress. Had they been barred, Trump would have been convicted by one vote.

The impact of the Democrats’ failure to prosecute the conspiracy is impossible to overstate. The insurrection has continued, and its leader now occupies the White House. None of the conspiracy’s leaders spent a day behind bars, with the exception of Steve Bannon, who was convicted of contempt of Congress and spent a few months in jail in 2024. All Congress could muster in the years that followed was a law that made it somewhat more difficult for Trump to employ the same “alternative electors” stratagem in subsequent plots. In any case, the Supreme Court subsequently held that the president is constitutionally immune from “official acts” engaged in while president.

During his first year in office, Trump has been using his “official acts” to make good on his 2022 pledge to “terminate the Constitution.” Among his first moves in office was pardoning the lower-level participants in the mob that marched past Grant’s statue and up the Capitol steps on January 6. Many have doubtless joined the ranks of ICE and CBP as they carry out their conspiracy against the population in plain sight and under ostensible color of law.

The present American bourgeoisie can produce no Amos Ackermans. No faction of the ruling class will defend the most basic democratic principles. Fearful that any appeal to the population to defend democratic rights may trigger revolutionary sentiments, the Democrats have normalized Trump and downplayed the threat of dictatorship.

Today, “enforcement” of the democratic gains of the first two American revolutions requires mass action. The impetus for the necessary revolutionary overhaul of society will come from the working class and it will require the abolition of capitalism.