Ku Klux Klan: Its Origin, Growth and Disbandment

by John C. Lester; D. L. Wilson

Circumstances made it evident that the measures and methods employed for sport might be effectually used to subserve the public welfare—to suppress lawlessness and protect property. When propositions to this effect began to be urged, there were many who hesitated, fearing danger. The majority regarded such fears as groundless. They pointed to the good results which had already been produced. The argument was forcible—almost unanswerable. And the question was decided without formal action. The very force of circumstances had carried the Klan away from its original purpose. So that in the beginning of the summer of 1867 it was virtually, though not yet professedly, a band of regulators, honestly, but in an injudicious and dangerous way, trying to protect property and preserve peace and order.[32]

After all, the most powerful agency in effecting this transformation, the agency which supplied the conditions under which the two causes just mentioned became operative, was the peculiar state of affairs existing at the South at that time.

As every one knows, the condition of things was wholly anomalous, but no one can fully appreciate the circumstances by which the people of the South were surrounded except by personal observation and experience; and no one who is not fully acquainted with all the facts in the case is competent to pronounce a just judgment on their behavior. On this account, not only the Ku Klux, but the mass of the Southern people, have been tried, convicted and condemned at the bar of public opinion, and have been denied the equity of having the sentence modified by mitigating circumstances, which in justice, they have a right to plead.

At that time the throes of the great revolution were settling down to quiet. The almost universal disposition of the better class of the people was to accept the arbitrament which the sword had accorded them. On this point there was practical unanimity. Those who had opportunity and facilities to do so, engaged at once in agricultural, professional or business pursuits. There was but little disposition to take part in politics.

But there were two causes of vexation and exasperation which the people were in no good mood to bear. One of these causes related to that class of men who, like scum, had been thrown to the surface in the great upheaval.[33]

It was not simply that they were Union men from conviction. That would have been readily forgiven then, as can be shown by pointing to hundreds of cases. But the majority of the class referred to had played traitor to both sides, and were Union men now only because that was the successful side. And worse than all, they were now engaged in keeping alive discord and strife between the sections, as the only means of preventing themselves from sinking back into the obscurity from which they had been upheaved. Their conduct was malicious in the extreme and exceedingly exasperating. These men were a "thorn in the flesh" of the body, politic and social; and the effort to expel it set up an inflammation which for a time awakened the gravest apprehensions as to the result.

The second disturbing element was the negroes. Their transition from slavery to citizenship was sudden. They were not only not fitted for the cares of self-control, and maintenance so suddenly thrust upon them, but many of them entered their new role in life under the delusion that freedom meant license. They regarded themselves as freedmen, not only from bondage to former masters, but from the common and ordinary obligations of citizenship. Many of them looked upon obedience to the laws of the state—which had been framed by their former owners—as in some measure a compromise of the rights with which they had been invested. The administration of civil law was only partially re-established. On that account, and for other reasons, there was an amount of disorder and violence prevailing over the country which has never been equaled at any period of its history. If the officers of the law had had the disposition and ability to arrest all law-breakers, a jail and court-house in every civil district would have been required.

The depredations on property by theft and by wanton destruction for the gratification of petty revenge, were to the last degree annoying. A large part of these depredations was the work of bad white men, who expected that their lawless deeds would be credited to the negroes. But perhaps the most potent of all causes which brought about this transformation was the existence in the South of a spurious and perverted form of the "Union League."[34]

It would be as unfair to this organization as it existed at the North, to charge it with the outrages committed under cover of its name, as it is to hold the Ku Klux Klan responsible for all the lawlessness and violence with which it is credited.

But it is a part of the history of those times that there was a widespread and desperately active organization called the "Union League." It was composed of the disorderly element of the negro population and was led and controlled by white men of the basest and meanest type just now referred to. They met frequently, went armed to the teeth, and literally "breathed out threatening and slaughter." They not only uttered, but in many instances executed the most violent threats against the persons, families and property of men, whose sole crime was that they had been in the Confederate army. It cannot be truthfully denied that the Ku Klux committed excesses and were charged with wrongdoing. But they were never guilty of the disorderly and unprovoked deeds of deviltry which mark the history of the Southern "Union League." It was partly, I may say chiefly, to resist this aggressive and belligerent organization that the Ku Klux transformed themselves into a protective organization.[35]