The Thief, the Senator, and the Knight of the Bleeding Heart: John Stephens and the Ku Klux Klan in Reconstruction North Carolina - Paperback

The murder of John Walter Stephens by the Ku Klux Klan in 1870 was a turning point in the fight for equal voting rights in North Carolina. The Thief, the Senator, and the Knight of the Bleeding Heart is an intriguing and original work that is part biography (of both Stephens and his electoral opponent, former U.S. Senator Bedford Brown), part period history, part legal analysis, and part true crime thriller. The author is a retired appellate criminal defense attorney who brings the events to life as never before by treating the subject as a cold case to be investigated from the ground up through exhaustive archival research and close analysis of the evidence. Along the way, he exposes a nineteenth century campaign of propaganda, voter intimidation and electoral fraud that serves as a reminder to this modern age that there is nothing new under the sun.

"This is an important book." -- Fergus M. Bordewich, author of Klan War: Ulysses S. Grant and the Battle to Save Reconstruction (available on Amazon).

The author "deftly dissects" the smear on Stephens' name, "digs deeply into the backgrounds of Stephens, his rivals, his enemies and his supporters," and "makes use of court records, congressional testimony and personal correspondence to draw a more finely textured account of the political trench warfare." -- The Wall Street Journal, January 6, 2024.