Scott here with another episode of the History on Plug Podcast.

The Ku Klux Klan rose from the ashes of the Civil War in the American South,

and at its peak in the early

70s had tens of thousands of members. This included former

Confederate soldiers and unemployed manual laborers who couldn't find any work

because the war destroyed the Southern economy, but it also included landowners,

lawmen, doctors, journalists, churchmen, as well as future governors and congressmen.

Their mission was to obliterate the small but growing political and economic power of newly emancipated black Americans and their white allies.

The clans spread across the South as the de facto military wing of the Democratic Party's most reactionary elements.

It started with flogings and beatingsings and then lynchings and shootings,

accompanied by systematic torture, burnings, castration and sexual humiliation.

One white Republican wrote that, where the Clan Road, one would wake in the morning to see 10 feet of new

Manila rope dangling from a limb in your front yard with a pine coffin box at the

root of the tree inscribed, get out. Every time one's dog barked you listen for a

battery ram at your front door. Our houses were veritable arsenals and every time we

answer the doorbell at night we carried with us a cock revolver. Many people know about the

clan but they don't know why it formed. After all, emancipation was occurring across the world in the 19th century, but nations like

Brazil in the New World didn't see the sort of insurgent activity that happened with the

Clan in the reconstruction of South.

To talk about this period as today's guest,

Virgus Boardwick, author of Clan War, Ulysses S Grant,

and the Battle to Save Reconstruction.

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