Customer Reviews

The Great South Carolina Ku Klux Klan Trials, 1871-1872 (Studies in the Legal History of the South)

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I was troubled to discover the negative review above, because I regard this as a truly outstanding book. Indeed, I have decided to recommend it to incoming law students at the University of Texas Law School as one of the best ways to understand the limits of law and legal institutions. This book, although ostensibly about a very narrow subject, helps us to understand why what has come to be called "regime change"--or "reconstruction"--is so very difficult, if not impossible, unless one is willing to put almost limitless resources into the project.

South Carolina, the home of the most hotheaded secessionists, might have lost the battle, but most of the white population had scarcely changed its mind about proper political relations between whites and blacks (who might well have been a majority of the population). It was no surprise, then, that the Ku Klux Klan proved to be a popular organization among South Carolina whites, who believed that terrorism might succeed in restoring white domination and black subordination.

An heroic US attorney made valiant efforts to prosecute the Klan, but a major point of the book is that there were simply too many defendants and too few resources. The Grant Administration ultimately proved unwilling to pay the price required truly to change the vicious regime of racial oppression.

I will leave it up to readers to make analogies to contemporary events. But I cannot recommend this book high enough, both for its historical analysis and its (unintended) resonance with regard to current events.

Sanford Levinson
University of Texas Law School

Mr. Williams attacks southern whites from the very first chapter. While I totally agree that the acts perpetrated by the Ku Klux Klan were vicious and animal-like, the view they held was NOT held by all southern white people. Although many of these men were sentenced to jail and had to pay fines, the author leaves you with the impression that the trials were a joke and the U.S. government was as racist as the klansmen that commited the crimes. The whipping and beating of innocent people is always an outrage, but I have yet to associate these acts as being indicative of the "Southern-style" way of getting even (as the Mr. Williams states several times). Although this book is one in a series which purports to explore "the ways in which law has affected the development of the United States and in turn the ways the history of the South has affected the development of American law", it is seems to be nothing more than an attack upon southern white people (white males in particular) and the southern way of life. It would appear that he would like to have seen all white people in South Carolina in 1871 lined up and shot, whether they were a member of the klan or not. I hate to rate a book this low, but in this case it is warranted.