IT IS, AFTER ALL, THE SAME INSURRECTION:

[T]he echoes of that Reconstruction-era violence -- led by both white marauders (cloaked as the Ku Klux Klan and other terrorist groups) and white supremacist Democratic officials bent on reclaiming power from Republicans -- were impossible to escape in Washington in early January when the rioters paraded Confederate flags through the halls of the Capitol and chanted threats to hang the vice president. Though largely overlooked in mainstream American history, these insurrections -- in Louisiana, in South Carolina, in Mississippi, in North Carolina -- attempted to install terrorist-backed regimes in multiple post-Confederacy states. Their longevity was echoed as well in the warning last week from the Department of Homeland Security, which said for the first time publicly that the country faced a rising threat from "violent domestic extremists" who sympathized with the Capitol attack and the false narrative, stoked by former President Donald Trump, that the election was rigged.

"We have to realize that this is a powerful strand in the American experience. It's always been here, the resistance to actual democracy," Eric Foner, a historian at Columbia University who specializes on Reconstruction, told me. "We pride ourselves on being a democracy, but there's actually a long tradition of people who don't think that, who are unwilling to accept the rights of African-Americans to be citizens, the right of elections to overturn governments in power. In other words, we should realize the fragility of democratic culture."

While that fragility was on full display in the aftermath of the Civil War (as well as during the siege on the Capitol), those Reconstruction-era insurrectionists contended with a force they consistently underestimated: Ulysses S. Grant, who served as president from 1868-76. Rising to the presidency as the heroic general of the Civil War, Grant entered the White House amidst violent white extremists continuing to roil American politics -- and following the failed presidency of a one-term impeached president, who had only added fuel to the post-war inferno.

Time and again, Grant battled back, sometimes almost single-handedly, against rising insurrections bursting across the South. Time and again, he appeared to succeed -- only to eventually watch the entire edifice of Reconstruction crumble under Supreme Court decisions, wilting willingness among Northern whites to win the peace, and, most especially, a Compromise of 1877 that cemented the beginnings of the Jim Crow era to come.

Grant's approach relied on a combination of brute military force and a drastic curtailment of civil liberties, yet it nevertheless has relevance for the current moment and contains lessons for lawmakers who fear that January 6 might have been only the first of widespread attacks on the government and elected officials at all levels, across large swaths of the nation. Officials in our current era have many more legal tools at their disposal to combat such terrorism. But as Grant's experience shows, it's not just the tools that count; rather, it's the willingness to persist in the fight that will likely decide whether these counter-terrorism efforts actually succeed.

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