Book Review: Grant’s Enforcer: Taking Down the Klan by Guy Gugliotta

Grant’s Enforcer: Taking Down the Klan. By Guy Gugliotta. Athens, Georgia: University of Georgia Press, 2025. Hardcover, 271 pp. $32.05.

Reviewed by Kevin C. Donovan

On October 17, 1871, President Ulysses S. Grant went to war against the Ku Klux Klan. Grant declared nine South Carolina counties “to be in rebellion against the Government.” (187) Grant suspended the writ of habeas corpus and unleashed the Army on the inhabitants of the targeted area. Troopers of the U.S. 7th Cavalry promptly seized scores of citizens. Hundreds of others turned themselves in while “perhaps 2,000 Klansmen fled the state,” some going as far as Canada.[1] Newspapers howled that Grant had unleashed a “reign of terror” using “arbitrary power” for purely political reasons. (190)

Leading citizens of South Carolina fought back. Former Confederate Lt. Gen. Wade Hampton chaired a legal defense committee. Legal heavyweights and former U.S. Attorneys General Reverdy Johnson and Henry Stanbery—the latter fresh off his impeachment defense of Andrew Johnson—were retained as defense counsel. It was to no avail. Government attorneys employing new civil rights enforcement statutes as well as novel constitutional legal theories secured convictions and plea deals. The prosecutions spread throughout the former Confederacy until the KKK was destroyed.

The legal strategist and driving force behind the Klan’s defeat was an unlikely figure. Amos T. Akerman, a former slaveholder and Confederate army officer from Georgia, was the first attorney general to lead the newly created Department of Justice. Akerman also was the only Southerner in any Reconstruction-era Cabinet.

In Grant’s Enforcer: Taking Down the Klan, Guy Gugliotta spotlights this obscure, yet key figure in the post-Civil War fight for civil rights. Akerman’s tenure in office was brief (June 1870 – January 1872). Yet Gugliotta reveals the impact had by a crusader who combined a zeal for justice with revolutionary legal theories on how the newly enacted 14th Amendment could be used to dramatically enhance federal jurisdiction over what had been considered strictly state-level crimes.

Gugliotta, a journalist by trade, starts by telling stories of Klan terror inflicted upon African Americans, using detailed first-person accounts drawn from court transcripts and testimony before Congressional committees. The author shows the immunity from state prosecution enjoyed by the perpetrators of violence, as well as the smug assurances of contemporary newspapers and community leaders that no such thing as the Klan really existed.

Proving both that the Klan existed and represented an unlawful conspiracy under new federal law was Akerman’s mission. Gugliotta introduces the reader to key Akerman allies in meeting the challenge, including brave African Americans, supportive army officers, and key informants. Also addressed is how Grant was convinced that those nine specific counties so epitomized Klan violence that it justified the drastic remedy of suspending habeas corpus.

While celebrating his successes, Gugliotta also explores how Ackerman’s career came to an untimely end. A man of unquestioned integrity, Akerman made powerful enemies among railroad interests by refusing to tailor legal opinions in their favor. He had a back-stabbing solicitor general. A lack of funding hampered his efforts to deal with an enormous caseload while constructing a new department. Finally, the country was weary of constant crises arising in the South.

Throughout his book, Gugliotta effectively uses primary sources, including testimony before the joint congressional committee investigating the Klan in 1870-72, which produced “thirteen immense volumes of raw and courageous first-person accounts.” (229) He adds extensive newspaper research to craft accounts that are both compelling and disturbing. Gugliotta also provides valuable insight into the then radical legal theories Akerman was urging as part of his anti-Klan campaign, theories that if adopted by the courts could have tremendously expanded the federal government’s civil rights arsenal.

Gugliotta admits that for some of his topics definitive historical evidence is lacking. For example, it is unclear both why Grant selected Akerman—a political nobody with no power base—for attorney general, and exactly why he fired him. In these instances, Gugliotta admits the lack of clarity, but offers reasonable theories.

Even with respect to Akerman himself, Gugliotta concedes that “outside of Washington, his paper trail is remarkably skimpy.” (230) Yet Gugliotta has done yeoman’s work in uncovering information on Akerman, from locating a 1939 interview of Akerman’s then-living sons for a graduate student master’s thesis, to identifying and interviewing his descendants, one of whom possessed family records.

Other books on Reconstruction have references to Akerman. But nothing known to this reviewer offers such a comprehensive portrait of the role that this man played in destroying the Klan. One can only wonder what path Reconstruction and the early struggle for civil rights might have taken had Akerman been permitted to remain in his role and press forward his legal theories. Gugliotta’s work gives a glimpse not only at what was achieved, but at what might have been.

[1] The 2,000 number comes from Eric Foner, Reconstruction: America’s Unfinished Revolution, 1863-1877, p. 458 (Harper & Row, New York, NY 1989).