Randa Abdelfattah

When the war began, Ackerman saw how the federal government responded to the first invasions of the Confederate army.

federal weakness, and also the fact that he himself was a slaveholder who enslaved 11 people.

Just like before the Civil War, Georgia attorney Amos Ackerman saw the federal government failing to respond to challenges to its authority.

He was getting frustrated with their weak stance, and he was not afraid to be open about it.

Ackerman caught President Grant's eye, and he offered him a position as the nation's new attorney general, which took the whole country by surprise.

When Ackerman took office in 1870, he was ready to use the federal power at his disposal to enforce the law.

Coming up, Amos Ackerman sends the Department of Justice into South Carolina.

Jim Williams was an active civil rights leader.

He was also the captain of a state militia company based in York County.

It was clear that the Klan had targeted Williams because he was such a public figure.

South Carolina's attorney general told the press that civil authorities were unable because of the Klan to enforce the laws.

In other words, it was like another mini civil war was unfolding right in South Carolina and the government was losing.

The federal government had a problem.

For the past year, Congress had been passing a series of laws designed to protect the rights of newly emancipated Black people and regain order and control over white supremacist violence in the South.

They were known as the Enforcement Acts.

Congress passed the KKK Act in April 1871, a little over a month after Jim Williams' murder.

And this was the act that would allow Amos Ackerman to prosecute the Klan in South Carolina.

Ackerman needed to discover its leaders, its members, and figure out what kind of planned violence the organization was responsible for.

If Amos Ackerman was going to arrest the Ku Klux Klan in raids, he was going to need men on the ground.

And Lewis Merrill was one of those guys.