A Fever in the Heartland: The Ku Klux Klan's Plot to Take Over America, and the Woman Who Stopped Them

by Timothy Egan

In early 1867, a Tennessee paper reported the rise of “some general and unrefined dread among Negroes of a secret order that has recently made its appearance.” And that secret order had spread beyond Pulaski. At a regional convention in Nashville, a prominent Tennessean, Nathan Bedford Forrest, declared himself the first Grand Wizard. As a Confederate general, Forrest was notorious for the Fort Pillow Massacre, the execution of about 150 Black Union soldiers who had thrown down their arms and surrendered. On his orders, they were bayoneted, clubbed to death, and “shot down like dogs,” one Confederate soldier wrote. Pardoned by Johnson of the war crime, Forrest had trouble making a living in an economy no longer built on human property.