As Attorney General Jeffrey Sessions redeploys the resources of the United States Department of Justice against African Americans, immigrants and Northern cities, and away from cyberthreats, terrorism and voting rights, he does so against the founding principles of his office. These core principles, the protection of the civil and voting rights of minorities against terrorism, originated with a New Hampshire-born Northerner-turned-Confederate who became the only rebel to hold a Cabinet position under the Grant administration and was perhaps the greatest civil rights prosecutor in the history of the country.
Attorney General Amos T. Akerman, born and raised in Portsmouth but removed to the penumbra of Athens, Ga., as an adult, was the first attorney general to preside over the newly established Department of Justice in 1871.
Historian Malcolm McFeely, Pulitzer Prize-winning biographer of President Ulysses S. Grant wrote of Akerman that “perhaps no attorney general since his tenure … has been more vigorous in the prosecution of cases designed to protect the lives and rights of black Americans.”
In the aftermath of Gen. Robert E. Lee’s surrender at Appomattox, Akerman was a poor but honorable lawyer-farmer in the lawless world of the South during the presidency of Andrew Johnson. As northern military forces stood down, the Ku Klux Klan spread like a disease and ran roughshod over an already war-battered Georgia. Akerman, a Southerner by choice, expressed the sentiment that “a surrender in good faith really signifies a surrender of the substance as well as of the forms of the Confederate cause.”
Akerman abhorred the Klan and saw at an early stage of Reconstruction that the path to justice lay through reconciliation, not further warfare and terrorism. In so doing, he drew the attention of President Grant. Grant, an obscure man himself until fortune cast him in the role of the nation’s military savior, plucked Akerman from obscurity to lead a second offensive against Southern terrorism, this time through the application of new federal laws designed to combat terroristic efforts to reverse Lee’s pledge of peace at Appomattox.
In efforts that presaged the investigation and prosecution of Nazis during the Nuremberg Trials, Grant deployed legal and military resources through Akerman and Maj. Lewis Merrill to investigate and prosecute the atrocities of the Ku Klux Klan in South Carolina, where Klan violence was at a peak. Some of these efforts will become the subject of a major motion picture titled “K Troop” and starring Joseph Gordon-Levitt as Merrill.
According to historian Lou Falkner Williams, “Akerman left South Carolina convinced that ‘from the beginning of the world until now,’ no community ‘nominally civilized, has been so fully under the domination of systemic and organized depravity.’ The Ku Klux ‘combinations amount to war … and cannot be effectively crushed on any other theory.’”
Akerman found that Klan violence, which included the rape, murder and torture of citizens attempting to organize to vote, targeted newly freed African Americans and Republicans through acts of violence. As a result of fear or complicity, state law enforcement, state courts and state juries refused to punish these terrorists through the application of state law.
An earlier recognition of these facts led Congress to pass laws to empower the federal authorities to respond and establishing a United States Department of Justice to enforce the new laws of the post-war nation. Akerman used these new federal powers to prosecute thousands of Klan offenders in the course of a single year in an unprecedented marshalling of government power to secure the civil rights of minorities.
The result yielded the last fair and representative election in the south in 1872 until after the passage of the Civil Rights Acts of 1964. It also produced a backlash. Historians such as McFeely believe Akerman’s aggressive pursuit of justice resulted in the end of Akerman’s tenure after a year of service. Robust civil rights prosecutions nevertheless continued along some variant of Akerman’s model for decades and the Civil Rights division of the United States Department of Justice became the crown jewel of the agency.
Sessions is betraying this great heritage by federalizing his extreme values and weaponizing them against citizens through law enforcement efforts in the areas of federal drug offenses and immigration. Lest you object to the point about immigration, consider that so many of the children whose parents are here illegally are citizens, and they comprise the future of our country.
At the same time, Sessions is effectuating this retrenchment of values. He has withdrawn support from aggressive voter protection litigation in Texas, undermining the protection of voting rights that has been a centerpiece of his agencies agenda for decades.
Sessions’s values find their heritage in the forces Akerman sought to upend, a point Corretta Scott King made about him when the United States Senate blocked his nomination to be a federal trial judge.
As citizens, we should consider how to judge his allocation of resources as we move toward the next election and whether the arc of justice favors Sessions’s approach, or whether Akerman’s example more truly reflects the “better angels of our nature.”
(Michael S. Lewis is a Concord attorney.)