That period of the night equally removed from the departed and the coming day, had accomplished its fiftieth revolution, and now hung fire over the eighteenthly of the most eloquent discourse that was ever flattened out over the crowns of an equal proportion of unsuspecting listeners for the same number of times. The cries of the stricken arose from every quarter of the vast audience, and hundreds of the slain had submitted to that elongating process by which their contorted frames were made to do duty for the greatest number of “squatter sovereigns.” One brother arose to testify, in a series of whoops, to the pungency of “de brudder’s doctorin’,” and immediately went to bed to a mass of excruciating hurts on the outskirts of the assembly. A sister, racked by the “alloverishes,” and knowing the penalty for interrupting the services at this interesting stage, screamed out in affright, and reaching that point over a causeway of the best Boston built brogans, was content to embrace her toes around a neighboring sycamore. Nineteenthly stood up for duty,—arranged its cravat,—tip-toed,—and lo! instead of a chorus of grunts, a chorus of gasps, full-chested, deep drawn, and suffocating. There he stood, or rather towered, just where the rays of light fell strongest, garbed in funereal black, and full twelve feet from crown to sole.[B] Steadying himself after an awkward, but ghostlily impressive bow, there issued from that portion of his corporeal frame which might be supposed to represent the mean in a mathematical estimate of his inches, the following announcement: “I am a Ku-Klux!” and then from the upper extreme the following confirmation of this report: “I have just forded the Tallahatchie River, and am the advance guard of the old original whoopers, surnamed K. K. K.;” and then from mean and extreme, in dismal chorus, “Tramp, tramp, tramp, the boys are marching, etc.”
Nothing could be further from our purpose than to injure that excellent person, either in the eyes of his contemporaries or of that posterity which he was wont to invoke so confidently from the more thrilling promontories of his discourse; but a decent regard for the “proprieties” of this narrative compels us to state that the reverend orator observing, or fancying that he observed, something mandatory, and withal personal in the terms of this refrain, at once inaugurated the “tramp” exercise over the heads of the assembly, and reaching terra firma, one mile from the point of embarkation, and seeing nothing in the homogeneity of a mob particularly attractive to a man of genius, proceeded to divest himself of his surroundings in the best executed “lonesome” since the days of Ahimaaz, the son of Zadok. This movement, moreover, possessed a striking appropriateness, inasmuch as it rendered him practically the leader of his flock, and perhaps on no former occasion of his extended ministry did he ever discharge the duties of the “relation” with the same yearning solicitude for the success of the issue, even admitting, in extenuation of the past, that the most lukewarm of his constituency did their whole duty on this memorable occasion. As the writer has never been successful at equating distances since he was gobbled by the greyhound in connection with his more legitimate prey in the good old days of “academicia,” he declines to state just how many furlongs the panic-stricken multitude had traversed, when a gloaming of red in the east warned them that they had nothing further to fear from the “nocturnal beasts,” who had obtruded their heathenish “doxullumgy” on the late exercises, and will not commit himself as to the sequel, further than to say that the results of the “great awakening” were soon after visible in a certain rejoicing tendency of the cotton plant and pumpkin vine of that fertile region.
CHAPTER XVIII.
K. K. K. AS A FACTOR IN POLITICS.
Late Announcement of the Earl of Beaconsfield before an Assembly of Englishmen—The Secret Societies of Europe—Men of Influence in the Southern States Disclaim the alleged Good Offices of the Klan in the Work of Southern Redemption—Its True Status with Regard to Current Politics—Combining the Offices of Regulator and Vigilante with that of Politician—An Absolutist in all Society Matters—Many who advance the Idea that that Complete Renovation of the Social System Effected through its Means could not have been Accomplished in the Use of less Radical Measures—Inhuman Butcheries, etc., Figments of the Scalawag Imagination—Many of its Acts were Lawless, etc.—A Logical Presentation of the True Theory—How it Injured the Common Cause—Its Generical Belongings—Few Friends Unconnected with its Patronage—Negative Issue which it Introduced into the Great Campaign—Occupying a Voice in Southern Counsels—Unprincipled Plagiaries—Dangerous Sentimentalism Awakened at the North—What the Imaginative Prose of the News-Reporter was Calculated to Do—How it (K. K. K.) Prolonged the “Carpet-Bag” Reign of Terror.
The late announcement of the Earl of Beaconsfield (Mr. D’Israeli), before an assembly of Englishmen, that the pending war against Turkey was the war of the secret societies of Europe, conducted through Prince Milan, as their agent, may induce incredulous persons to give greater heed to the statement which we here make that the movement inaugurated by the secret order known as the Ku-Klux-Klan was a war against radicalism as it formerly existed in the Southern States, waged through its ... allies. If the English premier speaks truth, there is a strong probability that the secret purveyors to whom he refers will achieve their aim, and be crowned with the same reflected glory that has availed to cover a multitude of sins in the instance of the American order, though reflecting people, who take into account the incentives to such measures, can but regard them as intermeddlers of a very base stamp. The cause of religious liberty on the Turkish frontier will not be benefited by this revelation; and, continuing the analogy, there are few men of influence in the Southern States who do not make it a point, whenever occasion offers, to disclaim the alleged good offices of the Klan in the work of Southern redemption.
We have before intimated that, in one of these States, the cause of the allied Democrats and Republicans did receive essential aid from this source, and while we shall not enter into any such exegesis of the question as would show just how far the common cause was aided or retarded by the secret measure, we must be permitted to record a belief that its influence was commonly hurtful.
Every secret society, enterprised with a political end in view, must, in the nature of the case, prove unpopular with the masses of those who wield the franchise, and in not unfrequent instances, as we have anticipated, be deprehended by the very individuals, or parties of individuals, whom they seek to succor. In the instance of the Klan, these conditions were felt with peculiar weight; inasmuch as the people among whom it was domiciled cherished, beside this common feeling, a natural aversion to such influences in politics, derived from their ante bellum experience; and the people of the North, unacquainted with its aims, and grossly unenlightened as to its materiel and claims to social rank, wrote it down a very monster of sedition. It was denounced in public, scoffed at in private, declared to be an outlaw by the legislatures, interpreted as the very essence of crookedness in morals by the courts, fulminated against by the national and State executives, and how, under these severe conditions, it contrived to even exist, is, and must remain, one of the unsolved problems of the “gilded age.”