As is explored in this chapter, resistance in the South to the post-Civil War Reconstruction Amendments to the U.S. Constitution led the victorious Union general-turned-president Ulysses S. Grant to request a suspension from his Congress in order to infiltrate the Ku Klux Klan and combat Klan violence. Studying the Reconstruction period reveals that the understanding of the constitutional privilege and suspension remained consistent with Anglo-American legal tradition. In carrying out the suspension on the ground, military officers employed their expanded powers to engage in preventive detention of Klan members and to advance the new civil rights constitutionalized in the Reconstruction Amendments, while recognizing that with the lapsing of suspension, further detention could only be justified through the criminal process. Throughout, the Reconstruction period underscores the continuing influence of the English Habeas Corpus Act on American constitutional habeas jurisprudence. Notably, however, the Reconstruction period tells a very different narrative about the ends to which the suspension power may be wielded—namely, the advancement of civil rights.
Habeas Corpus, Civil Rights, and the Federal System