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Carpetbaggers, Cavalry, and the Ku Klux Klan: Exposing the Invisible Empire During Reconstruction. By J. Michael Martinez. (Lanham, Md.: Rowman & Littlefield, 2007. Pp. xiv. Cloth, $65.00; paper, $24.95.)
Carpetbaggers, Cavalry, and the Ku Klux Klan recreates the history of one of Reconstruction's most gripping and important confrontations, the federal government's effort to contain the power and violence of the Ku Klux Klan in the Piedmont region of South Carolina. Centered on events of 1871 and 1872, Martinez's account covers the major test of the federal Ku Klux Klan Enforcement Acts, criminal codes enacted by the Republican-controlled Congress to address the burgeoning threat of conservative conspiracy and violence in the former Confederacy. The failure of the most prominent South Carolina cases prosecuted under the Enforcement Acts anticipated the sweeping defeat of the government's new powers in the federal judiciary and by the determined network of southern whites committed to shielding KKK perpetrators from Enforcement Act justice.
The South Carolina Klan cases - including hundreds...