Carpetbaggers, Cavalry, and the Ku Klux Klan: Exposing the Invisible Empire During Reconstruction (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Carpetbaggers, Cavalry, and the Ku Klux Klan: Exposing the Invisible Empire During Reconstruction LeeAnna Keith Carpetbaggers, Cavalry, and the Ku Klux Klan: Exposing the Invisible Empire During Reconstruction. By J. Michael Martinez. (Lanham, Md.: Rowman & Littlefield, 2007. Pp. xiv. Cloth, $65.00; paper, $24.95.) Carpetbaggers, Cavalry, and the Ku Klux Klan recreates the history of one of Reconstruction’s most gripping and important confrontations, the federal government’s effort to contain the power and violence of the Ku Klux Klan in the Piedmont region of South Carolina. Centered on events of 1871 and 1872, Martinez’s account covers the major test of the federal Ku Klux Klan Enforcement Acts, criminal codes enacted by the Republican-controlled Congress to address the burgeoning threat of conservative conspiracy and violence in the former Confederacy. The failure of the most prominent South Carolina cases prosecuted under the Enforcement Acts anticipated the sweeping defeat of the government’s new powers in the federal judiciary and by the determined network of southern whites committed to shielding KKK perpetrators from Enforcement Act justice. The South Carolina Klan cases—including hundreds of indictments and more than five hundred arrests in 1871 and 1872—have been well developed in [End Page 394] the literature on Reconstruction. Martinez’s version is more comprehensive than previous published accounts, and it wrestles successfully with the outstanding ambiguities of the story, including its complicated standing before the Supreme Court of the United States. The author substantiates his claim for the historic significance of the South Carolina trials: while they could not prevent the intimidation and murder of southern blacks, the cases revealed the true character of the Ku Klux Klan as a ruthless terrorist organization committed to subverting law and order in the South. Wearing the white hat in Martinez’s KKK drama is an unacknowledged American hero, Maj. Lewis Merrill of the Seventh U.S. Cavalry division. Despite his middling rank (and his uncomfortable subordination to the command of Gen. George Armstrong Custer), Merrill acted with considerable autonomy to investigate Klan violence in York County and other upcountry provinces of South Carolina. When President Ulysses Grant designated nine counties as being in a state of rebellion in 1871, he activated Enforcement Act provisions that suspended the writ of habeas corpus and allowed Merrill and the Seventh Cavalry to hold more than five hundred suspected Klansmen without charge. Merrill’s inquiry uncovered the organizational dynamics and political purposes of the Ku Klux Klan as well as the identity of key participants. His dossier would serve as the foundation for one of the largest federal prosecutions in American history. Carpetbaggers, Cavalry, and the Ku Klux Klan also recognizes the three attorneys who made the government’s case. Amos T. Akerman was Grant’s attorney general, the first to preside over the newly organized Justice Department and a fervent advocate of justice for Republicans and freedmen in the southern states. Serving as prosecutors were U.S. attorneys Daniel H. Chamberlain and David T. Corbin. Both men were carpetbaggers, and Corbin had previously served as an agent of the Freedmen’s Bureau in South Carolina. Martinez echoes Akerman’s judgment that the two prosecutors “managed the business ably” and that together they had played a historic role in “the exposure and destruction of a terrible conspiracy.” Colorful sketches develop the biographies of a number of KKK defendants. The most notorious, perhaps, was Dr. J. Rufus Bratton, who fled York County for Canada and managed to evade incarceration after his conviction under the Enforcement Acts. Like others caught up in the government dragnet, Bratton succeeded in outlasting the federal commitment to bringing Klansmen to justice, living out his days as a free man held in high esteem among like-minded South Carolina whites. [End Page 395] The case of Dr. Bratton illustrates what Eric Foner has called the “unfinished revolution” of the Reconstruction era, which failed to deliver its promise of equality for southern blacks. Martinez’s book is a welcome addition to the growing body of scholarship that presents the human face of this gallant and arduous era of experimentation and progress. LeeAnna Keith The Collegiate School, New York City Copyright © 2009 The...