SLCL Presents Ulysses Grant Biographer Fergus Bordewich

St. Louis County Library Foundation’s Westfall Politics & History Series presents historian Fergus Bordewich for a discussion and signing of “Klan War: Ulysses S. Grant and the Battle to Save Reconstruction.”

The event will take place on Wednesday, October 16, at 7:00 p.m. at the Daniel Boone Branch of the St. Louis County Library, 300 Clarkson Road, Ellisville, MO 63011.

The event is presented in partnership with the Ulysses S. Grant National Historic Site.

The program is free and open to the public. Books will be available for purchase at the event from The Novel Neighbor.

The Ku Klux Klan, which celebrated historian Fergus Bordewich defines as “the first organized terrorist movement in American history,” rose from the ashes of the Civil War. At its peak in the early 1870s, the Klan boasted many tens of thousands of members, no small number of them landowners, lawmen, doctors, journalists, and churchmen, as well as future governors and congressmen. And their mission was to obliterate the muscular democratic power of newly emancipated Black Americans and their white allies, often by the most horrifying means imaginable.

To repel the virulent tidal wave of violence, President Ulysses S. Grant waged a two-term battle against both armed Southern enemies of Reconstruction and Northern politicians seduced by visions of postwar conciliation, testing the limits of the federal government in determining the extent of states’ rights. t.

“Klan War” is a bold and bracing record of America’s past that reveals the bloody, Reconstruction-era roots of present-day battles to protect the ballot box and stamp out resurgent white supremacist ideologies.

Fergus Bordewich is the author of eight previous nonfiction books, including “Congress at War: How Republican Reformers Fought the Civil War, Defied Lincoln, Ended Slavery,” and “Remade America; The First Congress: How James Madison, George Washington, and a Group of Extraordinary Men Invented the Government,” winner of the 2016 D.B. Hardeman Prize in American History.

Program sites are accessible. With at least two weeks' notice, accommodations will be made for persons with disabilities. Call 314-994-3300 or contact us.