Grant's Gamble - April 20, 1871

On April 20, 1871, President Ulysses S. Grant signed the Ku Klux Klan Act a law that gave him the power to suspend habeas corpus and deploy the U.S. Army against domestic terrorism. The man he chose to enforce it was a former Confederate officer who had once owned eleven enslaved people. Their story is one of the most complex, forgotten chapters of Reconstruction and the law they created together is still the foundation of civil rights litigation in America today.