Who signed the Enforcement Act of 1871 and served as Commaning General of the US Army at the end of the American Civil War?
Second Enforcement Act of 1871 The Enforcement Act of 1871 (17 Stat. 13 ), also known as the Civil Rights Act of 1871, Force Act of 1871, Ku Klux Klan Act, Third Enforcement Act, or Third Ku Klux Klan Act, is an Act of the United States Congress which empowered the President to suspend the writ of habeas corpus to combat the Ku Klux Klan (KKK) and other white supremacy organizations. The act was passed by the 42nd United States Congress and signed into law by President Ulysses S. Grant on April 20, 1871. The act was the last of three Enforcement Acts passed by the United States Congress from 1870 to 1871 during the Reconstruction Era to combat attacks upon the suffrage rights of African Americans. The statute has been subject to only minor changes since then, but has been the subject of voluminous interpretation by courts.
William Louis Marshall William Louis Marshall was born June 11, 1846, in Washington, Kentucky, a scion of the family of Chief Justice John Marshall. At age 16 he enlisted in the 10th Kentucky Cavalry, Union Army. He graduated from the United States Military Academy in 1868 and was commissioned in the Corps of Engineers. Accompanying Lieutenant George Wheeler's Wheeler Survey expedition (1872–76), Marshall covered thousands of miles on foot and horseback and discovered Marshall Pass in central Colorado. He oversaw improvements on the Lower Mississippi River near Vicksburg and on the Fox-Wisconsin Waterway canal system in Wisconsin. As Chicago District Engineer from 1888 to 1899, he planned and began to build the Illinois and Mississippi Canal. Marshall made innovative use of concrete masonry and developed original and cost-saving methods of canal lock construction. Stationed at New York (1900–08), his genius further expressed itself on the Ambrose Channel project and in standardizing fortification construction methods. He retired June 11, 1910—the final Chief of Engineers to have served in the Civil War—but his engineering reputation earned a special appointment from President William Howard Taft as consulting engineer to the Secretary of the Interior on hydroelectric power projects. General Marshall died July 2, 1920, in Washington, D.C.