Guno צְבִי
We fight, We win, Am Yisrael Chai
Amidst the white terror campaigns, Grant and his legislative allies spied a solution. That year, Congress passed the first of what eventually would become three Enforcement Acts. In effect, the statutes made it a federal offense to deprive individuals of civil or political rights, and provided greater federal oversight of elections and voter registration. That wasn’t all. A few weeks later Congress voted to create the Department of Justice, staffing up lawyers under the attorney general and giving the attorney general oversight of all U.S. attorneys and federal marshals. Grant took full advantage of the new tools, putting a “powerful team” together to head the Justice Department, wrote Smith. New Attorney General Amos Akerman understood the stakes, saying that the Klan was in effect leading a “war, and cannot be effectively crushed on any other theory.”
With white supremacist terror continuing to race across the region, led primarily by the Klan, Grant decided to make countering the terrorists his sole focus. In March 1871, he requested a special legislative session for the express purpose of suppressing the group, whose thousands of members across the South formed a so-called “Invisible Empire.” The president placed counter-insurgent efforts front and center of his administration, calling on legislators to make it a federal crime to conspire to “overthrow or destroy by force the government of the United States.” The resultant Ku Klux Klan Act provided Grant authority to use the army to crush further white terror, even allowing him the right to suspend the writ of habeas corpus in areas deemed insurrectionist. The bill’s passage was hardly assured—the opposition, as Smith wrote, encompassed everyone from “unabashed white supremacists, to civil libertarians, to Grant-haters of every variety”—but a visit from Grant to Capitol Hill rallied legislators to the cause. That April, nearly five years to the day after the Civil War officially ended at Appomattox, the anti-KKK bill passed.
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/poli...utting-down-violent-insurrections/ar-BB1deGWw
With white supremacist terror continuing to race across the region, led primarily by the Klan, Grant decided to make countering the terrorists his sole focus. In March 1871, he requested a special legislative session for the express purpose of suppressing the group, whose thousands of members across the South formed a so-called “Invisible Empire.” The president placed counter-insurgent efforts front and center of his administration, calling on legislators to make it a federal crime to conspire to “overthrow or destroy by force the government of the United States.” The resultant Ku Klux Klan Act provided Grant authority to use the army to crush further white terror, even allowing him the right to suspend the writ of habeas corpus in areas deemed insurrectionist. The bill’s passage was hardly assured—the opposition, as Smith wrote, encompassed everyone from “unabashed white supremacists, to civil libertarians, to Grant-haters of every variety”—but a visit from Grant to Capitol Hill rallied legislators to the cause. That April, nearly five years to the day after the Civil War officially ended at Appomattox, the anti-KKK bill passed.
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/poli...utting-down-violent-insurrections/ar-BB1deGWw