New Releases by Ross Allan

Although Kentucky was not subject to reconstruction as such, the period of readjustment after the Civil War was a troubled one for the commonwealth. Ross A. Webb gives us here a refreshingly balanced account of a time filled with bitterness left over from the war. Violence begun by guerrillas continued for years in addition, white "Regulators" tried to cow the new freedmen and keep them in a state of fearful submission that would assure the agricultural labor supply. Their attacks produced exactly the effects whites least desired: the blacks became all the more determined to leave the countryside, and the federal government imposed the Freedmen's Bureau to protect the former slaves.

Benjamin Helm Bristow was the 30th U.S. Treasury Secretary, the first Solicitor General, an American lawyer, a Union military officer, Republican Party politician, reformer, and civil rights advocate. Bristow, during his tenure as Secretary of Treasury, is primarily known for breaking up and prosecuting the Whiskey Ring, a corrupt tax evasion profiteering ring that depleted the national treasury, having President Ulysses S. Grant's permission. As the United States' first solicitor general, Bristow aided President Ulysses S. Grant and Attorney General Amos T. Akerman's vigorous and thorough prosecution and destruction of the Ku Klux Klan in the Reconstructed South.[1] Sol. Gen. Bristow advocated African American citizens in Kentucky be allowed to testify in a white man's court case and that education was for all races to be paid for by public funding.