18701776 Club
Grant signs a real law department into being; the Attorney General can no longer moonlight to make ends meet
For 80 years the government's chief law officer ran a six-person office. The new Department of Justice centralizes all federal legal authority under one full-time hand.
For eighty years, the federal government's chief law officer ran a six-person office and moonlighted in private practice to pay the bills. That changed on June 22, 1870, when President Ulysses S. Grant signed the bill creating the Department of Justice — centralizing federal legal authority under a full-time Attorney General for the first time. Congressman William Lawrence had introduced the measure in 1868 after the House Judiciary Committee concluded the government simply needed a real law department. Within a year, the new agency had issued 3,000 indictments against Ku Klux Klan members across the South…
