Freedom on Trial

For President Ulysses S. Grant and blacks in the South following the Civil War, the conflict did not end with the surrender of the Army of Northern Virginia at Appomattox in April 1865, but continued with the Ku Klux Klan's terror campaign against blacks during Reconstruction. Grant not only authorized the U.S. Army to put down these insurrections through the use of force, but also to have the perpetrators of Klan violence vigorously prosecuted. In what would be a test of the boundaries of the recently enacted fourteenth and fifteenth amendments to the Constitution, the prosecution, led by Amos T. Ackerman, specifically sought to accurately catalogue the atrocities committed by this Army in disguise.