No less a legal light than the Hon. Reverdy Johnson, of counsel, who appeared, to defend persons charged with the commission of crimes similar to those narrated in the foregoing pages, has admitted it. The trials in which Mr. Johnson appeared as such counsel were had before the November (1871) term of the United States Circuit Court, at Columbia, S. C.
On the sixteenth day of the proceedings, the evidence for the Government having closed, Mr. Johnson made his opening for the defense; and although standing before the court as the legal defender of the members of one of the most terrible organizations known to modern times, he was compelled, in justice to human decency, and in acknowledgment of the truth of the statements presented to the court by the United States Attorney, to use the following language in his address to the jury:
“I have listened with unmixed horror to some of the testimony which has been brought before you. The outrages proved are shocking to humanity; they admit of neither excuse or justification; they violate every obligation which law and nature impose upon them; they show that the parties engaged were brutes, insensible to the obligations of humanity and religion. The day will come, however, if it has not already arrived, when they will deeply lament it. Even if justice shall not overtake them, there is one tribunal from which there is no escape. It is their own judgment—that tribunal which sits in the breast of every living man—that small, still voice that thrills through the heart, the soul of the mind, and as it speaks gives happiness or torture—the voice of conscience—the voice of God.
“If it has not already spoken to them in tones which have startled them to the enormity of their conduct, I trust, in the mercy of heaven, that that voice will so speak as to make them penitent, and that, trusting in the dispensations of heaven—whose justice is dispensed with mercy—when they shall be brought before the bar of their great Tribunal, so to speak, that incomprehensible Tribunal, there will be found in the fact of their penitence, or in their previous lives, some grounds upon which God may say: Pardon.”
THE STATISTICS,
as to the number of those who have been the victims of outrages perpetrated by the Ku Klux Klans, are necessarily meagre.
Many of them are recorded alone in the blood of the unoffending victims; thousands of mouths that could speak the unwelcome truth, have been sealed, and are sealed to-day, through fear, and dare not make the terrible revelations; but sufficient have come to light to afford an approximate idea of the extent to which the pernicious designs of the Order have been carried.
With all the figures before us, and with a desire to keep within, rather than exceed the bounds, the awful truth must be confessed, that not less than twenty-three thousand persons, black and white, have been scourged, banished, or murdered by the Ku Klux Klans, since the close of the Rebellion: an average of more than two thousand in each of the States lately in insurrection.
Great care has been had in arriving at these figures. All the available sources of information have been exhausted by research, and the facts obtained have been in a manner borne out by collateral evidence, tending to confirm the accuracy of the statement.
The committee appointed by the Legislature of Tennessee (special session of 1868), to investigate the subject, reported to that body, that: