The

The In 1869, Ulyssiness Grant took office as the 18th president of the United States,

and he rose to that office after leading the union to victory in the civil war.

But as president, he had a new war to fight. And in some ways, it was a war just as complex and difficult as the war he had just won.

It was the war against the Ku Klux Klan, the infamous clan, one of the most rightfully vilified groups in American history.

And historians often call the Korean War America's forgotten war. And in some ways,

the war on the clan has also been a forgotten war. And this era, the war against the clan,

has often been described as America's second civil war.

And it was one that featured a shocking level of violence and atrocity as bad as has ever been seen in American history.

Our guest today, Fergus Bordowick, has written a new book about this war.

It's titled Clan War, Ulysses S. Grant, and the Battle to Save

Reconstruction. So make sure you check it out in the bookstores. So thanks for being on our show.

It's a pleasure, Richard. Good morning. Good morning, yes. So just to give a little bit of a

context of where the country was at this time, Grant enters office 1869.

So we're talking about the post-Civil War era. So our history buffs know the civil war happened from 1861 to 1865.

The union, of course, had defeated the Confederacy just a few years earlier. And that was the deadliest war in American history.

So the nation is still reeling from that moment.

The 13th Amendment had just been ratified, as important as almost any amendment in American

history, it banned slavery, which means that millions of black Americans are now free.

And so we're at a point where the nation faces the

challenge of reunifying, healing, and it has to face the question of how do you ensure the

welfare and the rights of millions of black Americans. And unfortunately, that wasn't the goal for

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