Hail, Columbia

In 1869, four years after the Civil War has ended, Southerners bristle under the authority of a military government. Embittered Confederate veterans secretly form the Ku Klux Klan to fight what they perceive as their unjust oppression by the North. However, President Ulysses S. Grant views the Klan as a dangerous organization, using arson and murder to destroy the newly won rights of former slaves and sabotage Washington’s authority in the South. Seeking to break the back of the Klan without returning the country to the destruction of the Civil War, Grant turns to his most trusted agent, Major Alphonso Brutus Clay, to find a solution to end the clan’s violent activities in the South.
Aided by his friend the writer Ambrose Bierce and by his lovely, terrifying mistress Teresa Duval, Clay embarks on his greatest challenge yet. Not just to prevent a second presidential assassination, not just to preserve the unity of the country, but to prevent a secret cabal of corrupt financiers from gaining control of the United States, and to save the world from the designs of an organization far older than the United States itself.