Reconstruction’s Reckoning: Grant vs. the Klan in the Fight for Equal Rights | The American Story | Ep 19

The Glenn Beck Program · Aug 22, 2026 · 50m

Reconstruction promised freedom but delivered a brutal fight over who would truly count as an American. This episode begins with the 1866 New Orleans Massacre, then plunges into President Andrew Johnson’s war with Radical Republicans, the rise of the Ku Klux Klan, and the first presidential impeachment. Along the way, William H. Seward gambles on Alaska, Theodore Judah’s impossible railroad dream binds the continent, and Ulysses S. Grant takes on racial terror from the White House. It’s a story of violence, vision, corruption, courage, and the unfinished struggle to turn emancipation into…