For the first time its laws defined serious objects. First was the duty of protecting people, presumably white southerners, from indignities and wrongs; second was the duty of succoring the suffering, particularly among the families of dead confederate soldiers; finally was the oath to defend "the constitution of the United States and all laws passed in conformity thereto," and of the states also, to aid in executing all constitutional laws, and to protect the people from unlawful seizures and from trial otherwise than by jury.
It is these purposes which Imperial Wizard Simmons of the modern clan pretends to perpetuate, plus persecutions of Jews, Catholics and negroes, while denying charges of terrorizing outbreaks.
The Nashville convention chose Gen. Nathan B. Forrest, the confederate cavalry leader, as its supreme ruler. He is known to have increased the membership of the hooded horsemen in the old south to 550,000. Among his aides were Generals John B. Gordon, A.H. Colquitt, G.T. Anderson, A.B. Lawton, W.J. Hardee, John C. Brown, George W. Gordon and Albert Pike. The latter became one of the foremost authorities of Masonry.
Terrorism spread, until during the political campaign which preceded the 1868 presidential election, 2,000 persons were killed and injured in Louisiana by Ku-Klux Klansmen, who rode at night, disguised as freebooters, and according to James G. Blaine, defeated candidate for the presidency at a later date, hesitated at no cruelty.
In the north, in the years immediately after the civil war, the original Ku-Klux Klan was called a conspiracy.
In the south, where society was being ground in the mills of reconstruction, the Klan started its midnight rovings as an instrument of moral force. But within three years its period of usefulness, as the white southerner saw it useful, was over.
Its founders had played with it as with an exciting bonfire. During the months, however, when former confederate soldiers used it to frighten away northern officeholders with oppressive tactics, it had leaped in size until when the moment came for smothering it out its leaders discovered it beyond control.
Not until the full fire department of federal and state law had been called out did the Invisible Empire cease to operate.
TENNESSEE ACTS AGAINST IT
By 1872 the white-robed knights of midnight, whose purpose to enforce law had in itself yielded to lawlessness, were for the most part disappeared. But so, in one state after another, had the northern carpetbagger and the southern scalawag.