The Chris Voss Show - The Chris Voss Show – Freedom on Trial: The First Post-Civil War Battle Over Civil Rights and Voter Suppression by Scott Farris

Episode Date: May 27, 2021

Freedom on Trial: The First Post-Civil War Battle Over Civil Rights and Voter Suppression by Scott Farris The Confederacy lost the Civil War but quickly began to win the peace when a mysterious organization arose called the Ku Klux Klan. The Ku Klux, as it was then called, sought to restore white supremacy by terrorizing the formerly enslaved to prevent them from voting or owning firearms. To support Black resistance to the KKK’s campaign of murder and mayhem, President Ulysses S. Grant suspended the writ of habeas corpus in large portions of South Carolina and sent the famed 7th Cavalry to make mass arrests. Grant’s new attorney general, the first former Confederate to serve in a presidential Cabinet and an ardent advocate for Black equality, Amos T. Akerman, aggressively prosecuted the Ku Klux in a series of sensational trials that shocked the nation and forced a reckoning regarding just how much the Civil War and the recently enacted Fourteenth and Fifteenth amendments to the Constitution had changed America and its notions of citizenship. Highlighting forgotten Black and white civil rights pioneers and weaving in the story of the author’s own great-grandfather’s crimes as a member of the Ku Klux Klan, Freedom on Trial tells a gripping story of a moment pregnant with promise when race relations in the United States might have taken a dramatically different turn. It is a story that also offers a sober lesson for those engaged in the ongoing work of fulfilling the American promise of equality for all.

You wanted the best. You've got the best podcast, the hottest podcast in the world. The Chris Voss Show, the preeminent podcast with guests so smart you may experience serious brain bleed. Get ready, get ready, strap yourself in. Keep your hands, arms and legs inside the vehicle at all times. Because you're about to go on a monster education roller coaster with your brain now here's your host chris voss hi folks it's voss here from the chris voss show.com the chris voss show.com hey we're coming to another great podcast we certainly appreciate you guys tuning in be sure to refer the show to your friends neighbors relatives get them subscribed over there on the itunes or any other place that you pick up you pick up podcasts you can even get us on amazon

or audible we're even on there as well and which is pretty cool because we're talking to a lot of great brilliant book authors today we have the most amazing author we're going to be talking to him about his book freedom on trial the first post-civil war battle over civil rights and voter suppression his name is scott ferris and this episode is brought to you by our sponsor ifi-audio.com and their micro idst signature it's a top of the range desktop transportable dac and headphone app that will supercharge your headphones. It has two Brown-Burr DAC chips in it and will decode high-res audio and MQA files. We're using it in the studio right now.

I've loved my experience with it so far. It just makes everything sound so much more richer and better and takes things to the next level. IFI Audio is an award-winning audio tech company with one aim in mind, to improve your music enjoyment of quality sound, eradicate noise, distortion, and hiss from your listening experience. Check out their new incredible lineup of DACs and American political history, including the one we just mentioned. And previous works also published by Lions Press include Almost President, The Men Who Lost the Race But Changed the Nation, Kennedy and Reagan, Why Their Legacies Endure, and Inga, Kennedy's Great Love, Hitler's Perfect Beauty, and J. Edgar's Prime Suspect. He's a former journalist and bureau chief for United Press International, who also taught journalism at the University of Wyoming. Ferris has worked as a senior policy and communications advisor to a former U.S. senator from Wyoming, former governors of Wyoming and California,

and the mayor of Portland, Oregon. Ferris also is the Democratic nominee for Congress in Wyoming in 1998 and currently works as government affairs specialist for one of the world's leading renewable power developers. His opinion pieces have been published in the New York Times, Washington Post, and the Wall Street Journal, among others. And he has been a regular guest in the show for the BBC, C-SPAN, CNN, MSNBC, and now he's here with us today. Welcome to the show, Scott. How are you? I'm great, Chris. Thank you so much for having me on the Chris Voss Show.

I'm so glad to have you as well. Give us your plugs so people can find out more about you on the interwebs and order up this wonderful book. They can get it at any fine bookstore. I obviously have an Amazon page, but you can also get it at Barnes and Noble or your local bookstore. And I'm not heavily into social media. It's one of my great faults, but it's anyway, it's an easy book to find. Just Google Scott Ferris. The beautiful thing is when you're published on CNN, MSNBC, and all those different great journalistic enterprises you you don't have to be on social media so much it's all takes care of itself you know it's a full-time job as you as you i do well now to do it we have to do it and like i said i have another

full-time job in addition to writing books so my twitter followers number about eight or nine i can't remember exactly go to his twitter account guys give him some help out there so uh this is your fourth book do i understand that correctly that's correct and tell us what motivated you want to write this book on this subject. This is an unusual book for me in the sense that it began as a personal family histories study. I had always been curious about the truth about my great, excuse me, just my one great grandfather and the family legend that he had fled South Carolina because he had been charged with murder back way in the 19th century. Murder, you say? Murder? That was the family legend.

And so I was curious about what the real story was. And it was when I was reading Eric Foner's book on Reconstruction, he mentioned that a lot of people fled this particular part of South Carolina, a place called York County, because they had been indicted during the Grand Administration's crackdown on the Ku Klux Klan. And about 2,000 members of the Klan had fled the state. And my grandfather, great-grandfather, had fled at that time to Arkansas. And so I began doing more research. And as I researched why this

crackdown on the Ku Klux Klan that the Grand Administration began in 1871, I was able to finally find a copy of a federal indictment at the National Archives, in which my great-grandfather was charged not with murder, but with a pretty heinous crime of participating in the brutal beatings of two black men for the purpose of preventing them from voting. And so this opened up an episode in American history I certainly didn't know much about, figured most other people hadn't, and realized it was actually a pretty consequential event that could have really changed American history had it gone a slightly different way.

And so I decided to write the book to tell the broader story. That's amazing. Please give us an overview of the book, and then we'll get into some of the details. Absolutely. As I mentioned, after the Civil War, a lot of people, of course, know the Ku Klux Klan arose after the Civil War. It began as a social club by a bunch of bored Confederates veterans, but by 1868, it had become a political and quasi paramilitary organization that was designed to prevent african-americans and white republican allies from voting in order to keep the democratic party in power in the south and the outrages accumulated and it became pretty clear that the south was actually in almost a state of anarchy certainly by the 1870 election and which caught the attention of president grant and members of Congress, who following the passage of the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments

decided to crack down on this insurrection in the South and authorized the president to use the military to go out and arrest suspected Ku Klux members and to have them tried in federal court. Now, one of the interesting things about all this is the federal government until then really didn't have much to do in criminal court. There were only a handful of federal crimes like treason and piracy. Everything else was handled by the states. Anything like rape, murder, assault, that would have been a state crime. And the Congress passed some enforcement acts that made violating someone's civil rights a federal crime. That's a fairly common thing today, but was a completely novel idea in 1871.

And so President Grant did dispatch a large number, a fairly large number of federal troops to the South to engage in these arrests. And there were some trials, and there weren't a lot of trials. Given the scope, the Klan at one point probably had 200,000 members, mostly Confederate veterans. The trials only brought a few dozen to justice, and only a few dozen ended up in prison. And yet it was sufficient that the Ku Klux Klan disappeared from American life and didn't resurrect itself until The Birth of a Nation, the silent film that came out, D.W. Griffith's movie in 1915. And that's when the Ku Klux Klan was reborn. That's the Klan we remember from the 20s. It also has lingered to the 60s and even today. But for a while, the Ku Klux Klan was eliminated from the national scene.

That's amazing. I didn't even know about this history. I thought they'd started after the film in the 1900s. But this is pretty amazing. So basically, all the Confederates basically started the Ku Klux Klan back in the 1800s. They did. And obviously, it started in Tennessee. And they had some success.

And so it was heavily publicized by Southern newspapers. And obviously, it started in Tennessee, and they had some success. And so it was heavily publicized by Southern newspapers. And so it's still a debate among historians how centralized the Ku Klux Klan was. There was a notion that General Nathan Bedford Forrest, who had been a Confederate cavalryman, was the grand wizard. And Forrest was coy about that. He would say he was, but it was mostly honorary. So it wasn't very clear what was happening. But it did expand rapidly and engaged in massive crimes. Reconstruction is probably the least studied era of American history, in my view, at least that's my impression. And we don't realize that more than 55,000 African Americans were murdered between the end of the Civil War and roughly 1890. And this was

all during Reconstruction. It was part of a campaign of terror, again, to prevent them from voting and to be able to maintain white supremacy in the South. But yes, it's a story I hadn't heard about, and it's not told much. I even went to the National Museum of African American History. There was a display on Reconstruction about the size of my living room. So it's not a lot. And so it's a very misunderstood period in history and not very well appreciated or studied. Why do you think that is?

Is it because of records or is it because of what's sometimes called whitewashing because we don't want to revisit that history and it's hidden? Why do you think that is? I think it's a bit of that. I think part of it is it's viewed as a failure. There was an opportunity there after the Civil War to try to really establish racial justice and we let it slip through our fingers. And I think also there was a strong interest in not overplaying that. We wanted national reconciliation. We didn't want the South and the North constantly estranged. And so I think a lot of people were very anxious to move past it as quickly as possible. And that's one reason, for example, why the Grant administration, after this initial success, stopped enforcing what were called the Ku Klux Klan Enforcement Acts and lost control of the situation again in the South. And then over the course of about a dozen, 15 years between the Southern states reimposing white supremacy and the U.S. Supreme Court refusing to intervene, in fact, issuing a lot of opinions that were pretty nefarious and very contrary to the civil rights of African Americans and all of us for that matter.

And so I think people just don't like to talk about it because it's an embarrassing part of American history. So we sort of go from the Civil War and everybody wants to study the settlement of the West. And then we pretty soon get to Teddy Roosevelt and we move on. So it is an area, I think, that just is painful for African-Americans. It's embarrassing for white Americans. And so we just don't like to dwell on it. Yeah, that's pretty extraordinary. I know there's the lynching museum that tried to go back and track a lot of lynchings and killings and stuff. Were they able to, I haven't been there yet, but I'm planning on touring it when I get there.

I don't know if they were able to cover a lot of deaths that happened in that era or cover a lot of what went on. You know, they don't. This is one of the interesting things. So the lynchings that occurred during Jim Crow really started around late 1880s, 1890s. So the period we're talking about is about 10, 15 years before that. And so lynchings were horrific, and they were a tremendous shame on the United States. But, and again, I'm using this in relative terms, so nobody take offense, but from 1900 to 1965, roughly, there were roughly 3,000 lynchings of African Americans in the South and sometimes in

the Midwest and other places. Horrific number, appalling. But as I just mentioned, in the era of Reconstruction, there were over 50,000 murders of African Americans. And so the violence was on a tremendously much larger scale and involved a lot more people. Again, I wouldn't say every respectable, but it was extraordinary how many, quote, respectable people were happy to join the Ku Klux Klan. In York County, South Carolina, where my great-grandfather lived and grew up, it was estimated that 89% of adult males were members of the Ku Klux Klan. So it was just something that almost all adult white males in the South at the time joined because it was the struggle to retain control, to put African Americans back in their place,

make sure they weren't enslaved anymore, but they were pretty close to it with basically indentured servitude. They were allowed to leave the plantations. They had worked. They signed contracts that they never could get out of. So the lynching really is much more of a feature of 20th century America. When the Ku Klux Klan killed, there were a few that were lynched, but they were mostly guns with guns and knives and things like that because it was a pitched battle for a while. Wow. Wow. This is extraordinary. Now, you talk about Ulysses S. Grant as president. He takes and does some different things.

Do you want to give us some insight into that? I will. Grant, of course, was one of the things he's most remarkable for was the very magnanimous terms he gave the Confederate Army under Robert E. Lee at Appomattox. Because he was married to, his wife was from a Southern family, or Kentucky family anyway, from a slave-holding state in Missouri. And he very much hoped that the North and the South could reconcile quickly and move on. And so he had great hopes that the South, he had demonstrated this magnanimity. Lee had responded and eventually the North and South would unite. The South would accept the fact that African Americans were no longer slaves and were now citizens of the United States. But then he, of course, was remained commander of the army for several years after the war and realized that, in fact, things weren't

quite as settled as he might have hoped. And then once he became president, he became even more aware of just how much there was still residual hard feelings, obviously, and how reluctant many people in the South were to confer even civil equality on African Americans, let alone social equality. And that was demonstrated, for example, in some elections in 1870, where he realized that Republicans took a shellacking in the South because the Klan was very successful in suppressing the vote of free men and women. Well, women didn't get it, but free men and, again, their Republican allies. And so that's when he became a convert. But as I mentioned, while he was committed for a couple of years to cracking down on the Klan, he again, so desperately wanted the country to reconcile and move on, that at the very moment

when this could have been something that sort of was solidified and stayed with us, and was a concrete measure of progress, it did slid back because he thought, well, the Ku Klux is gone, everybody's learned their lesson, everyone will behave now. And of course, that wasn't exactly how it happened, even though the Ku Klux Klan did disappear. Yeah, I think he pardoned or he basically didn't prosecute Robert E. Lee. Is that correct? And some of the leaders of the thing? I think the only Confederate leader that was even a significant attempt to prosecute was Jefferson Davis. And eventually that was foregone as well. But no, he had no desire to prosecute and do that. And he was very reluctant to send the army. And he was also very embarrassed. He didn't like being called a military despot. He didn't like using the army for domestic policing. And so he really wanted to get out of that as quickly as he could. But he just couldn't look past the atrocities. Again, they were just absolutely horrific. And he felt an obligation to act. And with Congress, he did. And again, I think it was the high point of Reconstruction. And in a recent biography of Grant, it was called kind of the high

point of his presidency. I think that's true. Wow. Now, in the bio here, or in the book notes, it says, the book tells a gripping story of a moment pregnant with promise when racial relations in the United States might have taken a dramatically different turn. What turn do you think could have happened if things had gone differently in the story that you tell in your book? I think the biggest problem was the Supreme Court, which was odd because of the all nine members of the Supreme Court were from the North. Eight of them were Republican appointees and appointed by either Lincoln or Grant. And so you would think they would be pretty sympathetic to the idea of rights, civil rights for African Americans. And I want to emphasize again, when the attorneys were arguing the case for civil

rights of African Americans, they were also arguing for the case of civil rights for white Americans. And we can get into that in a minute, because that's another fascinating story. But the Supreme Court, after they finally got some cases, the very first case the Supreme Court ruled on the 14th Amendment didn't even involve civil rights for African Americans. It involved a bunch of white butchers from New Orleans suing to prevent a state-owned monopoly of a slaughterhouse in New Orleans. And yet the Supreme Court then ruled this very narrow definition of what they thought this 14th Amendment meant, and so that it dramatically reduced the scope of federal action on civil rights. And then they had a bunch of succeeding decisions that basically gutted what the sponsors of the 14th Amendment believed it was going to do. And that paved the way again for a separate but equal doctrine of Plessy versus Ferguson and Jim

Crow and legal segregation that stayed with the country until Brown versus Board of Education. While the Grant administration deserves some approbation for pulling back too soon from imposing this insistence on law and order in the South. The Supreme Court is the one who pulled the legal underpinnings out from under the African Americans and all of us by saying the 14th Amendment had nothing to do with protecting our rights as citizens. And that affected white people too with that ruling that you were mentioning? So this was something I did not know, and I don't think most people do. But before the Civil War, the Bill of Rights did not apply to individuals.

The Supreme Court had ruled under John – I know, shocking, isn't it? John Marshall wrote an opinion in a case called Barron v. Baltimore and said that the Bill of Rights are there not to protect your individual rights, they're simply to restrict the power of the federal government. Oh, wow. government. And if the founding fathers had meant that the Bill of Rights applied so the states couldn't infringe on our rights of free speech and religion and all that, they would have said. And so for the first hundred years we were a country, the Bill of Rights did not guarantee individual rights. And in fact, in the South, they allowed all sorts of free speech. You couldn't own abolitionist magazines. You couldn't even speak against slavery in private conversation.

It was a crime. So what the 14th Amendment tried to do after the Civil War was they said, look, America as was founded by the founding fathers is no more. We're not 13. In those days, 13 independent states with this sort of loose linkage under the Constitution were one nation. The national government is now preeminent. Federalism has been changed. And the Bill of Rights should now guarantee every individual these rights, no matter who they are, no matter where they live. This is what it means to be a citizen of the United States. As I said, the Supreme Court said, no, that's not what it meant. That's too radical. They couldn't possibly have meant that. Though, interestingly, they said it didn't mean that for the corporations. The decisions that came out of the Supreme Court said, we believe in a strong national government, provided it's regulating the state so they don't

interfere with interstate commerce. So all sorts of rights for corporations, but no individual rights for individual Americans. And so it's taken a long time for the court to reverse those decisions and say, the First Amendment, the Second Amendment, Third Amendment apply to you and me no matter where we live. And so that was a really fascinating thing that I did not know about. But that was a big revolution after the Civil War was, okay, the Civil War must have changed something. 750,000 people died. Yes, we freed the slaves. That's one thing. But it certainly must have changed how America views itself, as Lincoln talked about in the Gettysburg Address. But that was the big legal question involved in these Ku Klux Klan trials was what did the 14th Amendment mean? And that was a huge thing. And so the trials focused, the Ku Klux Klan

was represented by two former U.S. attorneys general who felt very strongly about this. And they argued in the Ku Klux case. And of course, the sitting U.S. attorney general, who had been a former Confederate and slave owner, by the way, I want to talk about in a minute, was directing the prosecution. So you had all these U.S. attorneys general in this little courthouse in Columbia, South Carolina, arguing these big constitutional questions that they hoped would define the meaning of the 14th and 15th Amendments. Wow, that's extraordinary. Mitt Romney, of course, would appreciate the Bill of Rights for corporations. You know, corporations are people too. Yeah, it was interesting. We had Tom Hartman in the show, and he talked about how basically there was an oligarchy in the south

of the rich slave owners and plantation owners, and they're really the ones who started the war because they saw their oligarchy and their money being infringed upon. So it's interesting to merge some of the different thoughts and things that were going around and how that all plays out. How did it play out in the end and get us to where we are here that you cover in your book? Like I said, the Supreme Court, a whole bunch of things happen. So you have this extraordinary set of trials that gets all this national attention. In fact, they go to this New York County, this tiny little county in what's called upcountry South Carolina,

the Piedmont, and it gets all front pages of the New York and Chicago papers. And people are quite sure this is going to be a major turning point in American history. Oddly enough, we haven't changed a lot, Chris. Our attention span as a nation is pretty short. And so it wasn't long before the North got pretty bored with the rights of African Americans in the South. And again, like I said before, they wanted to move on. There were other things. There was the Credit Moliere scandal and the Tammany Hall scandal. And then there was all the Grant Administration scandals and, of course, the Battle of Little Bighorn, and pretty soon people forgot about the South and moved on. And as I said, what could have been codified by the Supreme

Court and made permanent dissipated pretty quickly, evaporated. And an example of how quickly that happened, so in 1896, in Louisiana, for example, 130,000 or so African-American men cast ballots in that election. Four years later, 5,000 did, and four years after that, 1,000 or so African-American men cast ballots in that election. Four years later, 5,000 did.

And four years after that, 1,000 did. So within a space of eight years, basically more than 90% of all African-Americans were disenfranchised because the Supreme Court said, you know, you guys need to pay attention to what these constitutional amendments say. They say that you can regulate your elections and limit the franchise, but you just can't do it on the basis of race. Wink, wink. And so that's when we started getting things like poll taxes, literacy tests, good character tests, things that were designed to prevent whoever they wanted to prevent from voting. Like the MMS in the jar test.

Exactly. How many beans are in this jar? I'm sorry, son, you're not going to get to vote today. And, of course, now we're seeing a slight replay of that. Again, I'm not accusing modern politicians of either party of doing this. But the same thing is, I don't want certain people to vote because they're not going to vote for me. How do I do that constitutionally? And so that's the interesting thing, I think, about the book that people might find particularly interesting as they read about what's happening in state legislatures all across the country is how this

kind of idea of voter suppression got started. Because really, the story of the Ku Klux Klan, yes, it's hard about racism and all that, but it's also mostly a story of political power. How do you get it? How do you keep it? How do you maintain it? And that's the story, of course, as old as America. Just insane how long we've had this problem

that we just never fix with racism. And because of it, we're just always still so broken. 200 years later or something. And that's one of the reasons I did want to write the book. Everybody can find their own path. I thought it was illuminating for me personally. And I have to admit, I'm not a big fan of the books like White Fragility and How to Be an Anti-Racist.

They're fine. I applaud the authors who've done it. But I felt it was important to me to just understand my own family history, how it relates to this. Because then you realize that anybody could do it. I don't know how, I didn't know my great-grandfather. He died decades before I was born. But I have the same, some of his DNA at least.

And so I looked at him, this is my relative, and his brother was in the Ku Klux Klan, etc. He had a cousin who wasn't, by the way. Odd thing. He actually was a captain of a black militia. You do look at it, you say, how would I behave in a certain situation? Would I address people on the basis of race or their political beliefs or whatever? And it's something I think everybody in a democracy needs to constantly question. Am I really promoting the values of democracy or am I just part of a power grab? And I thought it was important for me to look at that in my own family's history, to be humbled by it,

and then just use it as a marker for me to constantly reassess my own behavior and beliefs in whoever I interact with, whether they're right or left. Did you get any blowback from your family? Hey, why are you digging around in the... A little bit. My siblings, particularly, were like, why are you writing this again? Why aren't we learning our language? Why can't you write it without bringing in great-grandfathers? But they read it.

They liked it. And again, I, you mentioned a minute ago, something about, Tom Hartman said about the oligarchy in the South, and this was, they were the ones that was the rich slave owners who started the war. And that's certainly true, though I think most Southerners had bought into the notion that the slave society was better than the North had society. They weren't ashamed of it at all. They thought they had a better society and a more just society than the North did. But obviously most of the people who were fought in the war, most people belonged to the Ku Klux Klan, didn't own slaves. In fact, my great-grandfather didn't own any property at all. That was one of the struggles through his whole life, is he wanted a little patch of land and never got it.

But they followed along. In fact, when the Ku Klux Klan, my great-grandfather never stood in the dock, but those like him who did said, I sure wish my betters had told me this was a bad idea. I wouldn't have done it. The guys in my community who we look up to and the leaders of the Klan were lawyers and doctors and judges and state legislators. And so they were the leaders in the Ku Klux Klan, just as they were in the war. But certainly they had a lot of willing followers who then went, they're the ones who bore the brunt of it. And they're the ones who suffer. The most extraordinary moment for me was the January 6th moment of seeing the Confederate flag inside the legislative body. That just still wrecks me

to this day to think about that we have still not reconciled this crap. And there's a lot of discussions, a lot of authors we had like yourself on this show that have talked about how this keeps being a thing because we never put this to bed. We never close the casket. We never seal it up. We keep going through this, what President Obama called the zigging and the zagging of America. But it's just extraordinary to me because last year we had a lot of people on the show. We talked all the way back to the original lie that sets up the city on the shining hill thing with the puritans and how this whole thing just turns into 450 years of just racism and slavery and just the mess that that's america and you just look at it all and you're just like when do we get this fixed when do we reconcile this

yeah yeah my great-grandfather was wounded uh three times actually in war and spent you know time in a hospital nearly died of dysentery for one thing but he also he was wounded three times, actually, in war, and spent time in a hospital, nearly died of dysentery, for one thing. But he also was wounded to battle the wilderness and a couple other minor skirmishes. I'm sure he fought valiantly. I'm sure he was courageous. I'm sure most of his peers were. And I think those of us can say we, our ancestors, were brave men. But that doesn't mean we have to also celebrate the Confederacy. I think we can say, if it was even Grant or somebody, no men fought better for a less noble cause than those who fought for the Confederacy. And so I think one of the things I want to do first in my book is that, look, I can honor my great, I don't feel I'm dishonoring my great grandfather. I'm explaining why he did what he did so that we can all understand why a lot of people did what they did.

So I'm not ashamed of him, but I would say, I think if he came back today and saw the world today, he'd say, yeah, that's probably not the smartest thing I ever did fighting for the Confederacy. The other thing about the book though, and I mentioned Amos T. Ackerman, I want to get back to him really quickly. I hope the book also notes that there are other people the South could honor with statues and monuments who got the message. Amos T. Ackerman, he was actually born in New Hampshire, but he moved to the South at a very young age. He became a lawyer, a very successful lawyer in Georgia, was a slave owner, was a Confederate officer during the war. But after the war, he said he just came to the conclusion that not only had the Confederacy been defeated in the battles and on the battlefield, it had been defeated in the battle of ideas, and that he was willing to accept this notion now that African

Americans were citizens. And so he became a Republican. And it's pretty obscure, but Grant tapped him to lead this crusade against the Ku Klux Klan. And he did a tremendous job. He was absolutely committed to African-American equality. And now there's a Southerner. Most people never heard of him. They finally, the Georgia Historical Society in 2019 finally erected a plaque outside his house in Cartersville, Georgia. And the current attorney general of Georgia had to admit when he came to the unveiling, he said, I've never heard of this guy.

Here's a Georgian who served as U.S. attorney general, the first head of the Justice Department, by the way. And yet nobody in Georgia had ever heard of him. And why is that? Because he was erased, because he was an integrationist, not a segregationist. I hope the book also, and there are other men in this story as well,

but I hope it also shows that there are other people the South can be proud of who did the right thing. It doesn't mean we have to dismiss the people who fought under misconceptions or who are misguided, but let's move on. Let's move past this. We can all agree the Confederacy was a terrible mistake. It definitely was. So you highlight a lot of forgotten black and white civil rights pioneers that are in there. I have a saying that I like to always say,

the one thing man can learn from his history is that man never learns from his history. Thereby, we just keep going around and around. and so hopefully reading books like yours that expose the put a light on this period because i went through this i in school i was taught that lincoln freed the slaves and it was just dreamy ever since then and there were some problems in like the 60s and then that all got fixed and then yeah things got better there's a hole there and i just always assume that i don't, I guess everyone got along for a while. Reading books like yours and cast and other different things that document these sort of histories, you go, wow, there's some real problems there. And then of course, I've learned a lot

about the Jim Coyier. I don't even remember being taught much about the Jim Coyier in high school. So this is extraordinary. Any other takeaways that you hope people come away from your book or things that we want to touch on? A couple of the points I'd like to raise with the book, as you mentioned, the Black civil rights pioneers, is I think, again, we give short shrift to African-Americans about, first of all, what they did in their own emancipation. Yes, Lincoln was the great emancipator. He signed the Emancipation Proclamation.

But I think most Civil War historians now would tend to agree that one of the reasons the North won was because of the surge of African-American enlistees, especially in the last two years of the war. 180,000 African-Americans fought on the Union Army, and they were a decisive factor in victory. I think Grant certainly acknowledged that. And I don't think we credit them with enough agency in their own emancipation.

Similarly, in Reconstruction, they were very aggressive in trying to assert their rights. Again, we have this image gone with the wind of everything, of black people holding their hat in hand, begging white people to come to their aid. And that's not the way it was at all. One of the most interesting things that liberals may find gives them pause on the Second Amendment is that one of the most important rights that African-Americans wanted was the right to keep and bear arms. They needed guns to protect themselves from the predations of the Ku Klux Klan. The Ku Klux Klan, in addition to going out and whipping and beating and raping and murdering African Americans to grant them from voting, also always seized their guns, wanted to disarm them and make them helpless.

And African Americans were very aggressive, trying to organize. They organized militias under the state auspices. They trained. They tried to protect their communities as best they could, again, until the rug got pulled out from under them. So I do have a lot of examples of African Americans who really wanted to assert their rights and who weren't asking white people to fight their battles, who were willing to assert themselves. I will give you one story, though, that's interesting to show you that human nature

is biracial or multiracial, we should say. There's a character in the book called Elias Hill. Elias Hill must have been one of the most fascinating people in American history. He apparently had either polio or muscular dystrophy. He was horribly disfigured. He had been, because he was a dwarf, basically, but he was apparently a powerful speaker, even though he couldn't walk or even crawl. He was a powerful speaker and a great intellect. He taught himself to read, taught himself to read. He became a very strong political leader in his part of South Carolina. He was beaten by the Ku Klux Klan in a raid. Here's this guy who can't even move his arms and they're on the ground and they're kicking him with sticks. He eventually decided, because he'd

heard that his neighbors, who he thought he had a good relationship with, his white neighbors, didn't warn him, he concluded that he couldn't live among the whites, that blacks and whites would never get along in America. So he took a big group to Liberia. There was still an exodus of African Americans to Liberia. A lot of Confederates moved to Mexico and Brazil. A lot of African Americans went back to Africa. He went to Liberia, and he was appalled to find that a lot of African Americans who had emigrated to Liberia had money. They had more status. They were now treating the native Liberians very similarly to the way that white

people were treating African Americans in the South. He was very appalled, and he was starting to talk about reforms and trying to shame the African American population in Liberia, and then he caught malaria and died. His nephews stayed there and became some of the wealthiest men in Liberia, big coffee planters and other things. But it goes to show you that even people who had been enslaved went to another country and said it's an opportunity to to dominate others so it's more white supremacy is the great sin in america but human nature you just said is pretty much universal and it's another sort of sobering theme of the book yeah quite so it's thank god we've we've gotten above slavery and other things although we have we have all sorts of different things on with, I forget what it's, human trafficking and stuff like that. So one of these days we'll evolve as a species, hopefully, and get beyond that. Any day now is good with me. Any time the stories that it tells, the things that it teaches. And of course, if we can learn from our history, we can hopefully change it and do stuff if

we don't follow my old rule of man never learns from his history. And so therefore, we're just doomed to keep repeating it. So really awesome that way. Do you have any chances to get turned into a movie maybe or something that might give a higher, get it spread out more on the word of it? I hope so. And two fronts, one fiction, one nonfiction. I have sent it to a couple of movie folks.

My earlier book, Anger, Got Option, is a movie that hasn't been made into one. But I do think because it's a courtroom drama, there's a lot of cinematic potential. And one of the things that was interesting is that Ackerman, particularly because he wanted the truth down, ordered a rare court transcript. That was actually pretty rare in the 19th century to have a court reporter taking it down.

So there's actually a court transcript if anybody wants to track it down. It's fascinating. So you actually have, what I have in the book is a lot of verbatim exchanges between the attorneys for the Ku Klux Klan and those representing the government, plus all the testimony by witnesses. It's absolutely fascinating, some stuff about jury tampering. And there's a sort of a villain of the piece is with the local Ku Klux Klan leader who flees to Canada and creates the, and then the Secret Service, the U.S. Secret Service tries to kidnap him and bring him back from Canada, which creates this international incident. So there's a lot of, and I mentioned Elias Hill. There's another character named Jim Williams, who's the early black militia captain. These are all great cinematic characters. I don't know who, Almodovar Ney or Spike Lee or somebody,

or anybody wants to make a movie of this, I'm more than excited. The other thing the book might get a little attention from is actually something I got in the mail today, oddly enough. You mentioned the January 6th insurrection. Several members of Congress are suing President Trump and Rudy Giuliani and others, accusing them of violating the Ku Klux Klan Enforcement Acts of 1871. And I was asked about some of my research because they're putting together this lawsuit trying to convict or at least sue the president, the former president and others for fomenting that insurrection in the Capitol, which included a lot of people in disguise who had the intent of trying to interfere with the election, which was what the Ku Klux Klan acts of 1871 were about.

Maybe the book will also appear in the nightly news. But again, I think it underscores, again, it's a relevant story. It's a fascinating, completely forgotten, and actually not even forgotten, unknown period of American history that I think people will maybe not enjoy because there's some genuine brutality in the book, obviously, but it's something that's very fascinating. I think they'll learn a lot from it, I hope. We definitely need our history. Thank you very much for coming and spending some time with us today and helping us learn more about the book. We certainly appreciate it. It's been really insightful.

I'm just really amazed. Like I said, this whole era was just a hole for me based on what I was taught in history, and so I'm really excited to learn more about it. Thank you very much, Scott, for coming by and sharing the stories with us. Chris, thank you for your time, and thank you for letting me share that story with your readers, and I do hope that they will be readers too and order the book if

they can. There you go. Where can they find you on the internet and pick up the book? Again, go to Amazon and put in Scott Farris, F-A-R-R-I-S, and all my books will come up. Freedom on Trial, as you already mentioned many times, is the title of the book. But again, you can also get it through Barnes & Noble, Powell's, and your local bookstore. It's published by Lions Press, so it's nationally distributed. Anybody can get a copy. And, of course, it's available both on Kindle and there's an audio book. I didn't read this book.

I did the freebies for you, but the fellow who did this one did a tremendous job. So if you like audio books, it's also available through that format as well. So I just hope people will reach out and learn about a period of history they don't know much about. There you go. Thank you very much for being on the show with us, Scott. Guys, go pick up the book, Freedom on Trial, the First Post-Civil War Battle Over Civil Rights and Voter Suppression by Scott Ferris. You can order it.

Of course, it's all the different places you can find books. Go to youtube.com, 4chesschrisfast, to see the whole interview of this on video. You can also go to goodreads.com for just Chris Foss, see everything we're reading, reviewing over there, go to Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter,

Instagram, Tik TOK, all the places we are, where there's numerous groups and different book things are all over the internet. Check them out on the chrisfossshow.com. We certainly appreciate you guys tuning in, be good to each other and we'll see you guys next time.