The widow of a Ku Klux captain tells me that one night, when her husband was absent on duty in a town where whites were in terror because the negroes were threatening to burn it, her own house was fired. She was in bed, her new-born baby at her side; stealthy steps were heard under her window. Her old black mauma was afraid to go to the window and look out. There was a smell of fire; the mauma ran to the door and shrieked alarm. A shout answered from the cellar, where a faithful negro man-servant was putting out flames. He had let the incendiaries go away thinking their purpose fulfilled. The returning husband, sorely perplexed, said: “I do not see how I can do my duty by my family and the public. I must give up my Klan.” “No,” she answered. “All have to take turns in leaving their own unprotected. I let you go into the army. Some one must lead, and your men will not follow and obey any one else as they will you.” He had been their captain in the Confederate Army.
To a Loyal League jury or magistrate a prisoner on trial had but to give the League signal to secure acquittal. A convicted and sentenced criminal would be pardoned by a Loyal League Governor. Klans took administration of justice into their own hands because courts were ineffective. In a den, regularly established and conducted, a man would be tried by due process before judge and jury, with counsel appointed for defense; evidence would be taken, the case would be argued; the jury would render verdict; the judge would dismiss the case or pronounce sentence. The man on trial might or might not be present. A Ku Klux captain tells me that great effort was made to give fair trials; acquittals were more frequent than convictions. But when the court imposed sentence, sentence was carried out.
In the hill country of South Carolina, a one-armed ex-Confederate, a “poor white,” made a scanty living for his large family by hauling. Once, on a lonely road when his load was whiskey, he was surrounded by negro soldiers, who killed him, took possession of the whiskey and drank it. Ring-leaders were arrested and lodged in jail; some were spirited away to Columbia and released; a plan was afoot to free the rest, among them the negro captain who had boasted of his crime, and flouted the whites with their powerlessness to punish him. The prison was surrounded one night by silent, black-robed horsemen on black-draped horses moving without sound; jailer and guards were overpowered; cells entered; prisoners tried—if proceedings interrupted by confessions and cries for mercy can be called trial. Sentences were pronounced. The black-robed, black-masked circle chanted “Dies Iræ, Dies Illa.” The town awoke from a night of seeming peace and silence to behold dead bodies swinging from the trees.[20]
The Stevens Mystery, of Yanceyville, N. C., has never been unravelled; the $5,000 reward which President Grant offered for answer to the question, “Who killed Stevens?” was never won, though skilled detectives tried for it. Stevens was a scalawag. He achieved his sobriquet, “Chicken Stevens,” through being chased out of his native county for stealing chickens. One of his adherents, when quite drunk, said before an audience of two thousand negroes: “Stevens stole chickens; that elected him to the Legislature; if he steals turkeys, it will elect him to Congress.” The pleasantry was cheered to the echo. Stevens was charged with instigating riots and barn-burnings. He received a mystic warning to leave the country. He did not go.
One day, while court was in full session, he was seen in the Court Room, in conversation with several people; was seen to leave in amicable company with a citizen who parted with him and went out by the street door, while Stevens entered a county office where clerks were busy; several persons recalled seeing and speaking to him here, but nobody could remember seeing him alive afterwards. Yet hall and offices were thronged with his adherents. He was soon missed by the negroes who set a guard around the building. Next day he was found in the Grand Jury Room, sitting bolt upright, dead, strangled or with his throat cut, I forget which. This room opened on the hall through which a stream of people, white and black, had been passing all day; a negro cabin commanded a view of the window; a negro janitor held the key.
Kirke’s cut-throats, sent down by Governor Holden, arrested prominent citizens and carried them to Raleigh. No evidence for conviction could ever be found, and they were liberated. Stevens’ death has been charged to Ku Klux; also, to his confederates, who, it is said, received instructions from headquarters to “kill off Stevens,” meaning politically, which they construed literally. I have been told that one of the slayers is living and that at his death, a true statement will be published showing who killed Stevens and how.
These stories are sufficient to show the good and the evil of Ku Klux; there is public peril in any secret order which attempts to administer justice. Uniform and methods employed to justifiable or excusable ends by one set of people were employed to ends utterly indefensible by another. The Radicals were quick to profit by Ku Klux methods; and much was done under the name and guise that the Klan did not do. Yet, in its own ranks were men reckless, heedless, and wicked, avengers of personal grudges.
The Invisible Empire, as the Klan was called in its organisation in 1867 under the leadership of Grand Wizard, General Nathan Bedford Forrest, and with men like General Dudley Du Bose, of Georgia, for division commanders, had a code that might have served for Arthur’s Round Table. Its first object was “To protect the weak, innocent and defenseless from the indignities, wrongs and outrages of the lawless, the violent and the brutal; to relieve the injured and oppressed, to succour the suffering and unfortunate, especially the widows and orphans of Confederate soldiers.” Its second: “To protect and defend the Constitution of the United States and all laws passed in conformity thereto.” Its third: “To aid and assist in the execution of all constitutional laws, and to protect the people from unlawful seizure and from trial except by their peers in conformity to the laws of the land.”
“Unlawful seizure” was practiced in South Carolina, Arkansas, Louisiana, Mississippi and other States, where white men would be arrested on blank warrants or no warrant at all; carried long distances from home, held for weeks or months; and then, as happened in some famous cases, be released without ever having been brought to trial; in other instances, they were beaten; in others, committed to penitentiaries; in others, it was as if the earth had swallowed them up—they have never been heard from. Some agency was surely needed to effect ends which the Klan named as object of its existence; that the Klan was effective of these ends in great degree no one conversant with facts will deny, nor will they deny that “Tom-foolery” and not violence was its most frequent weapon.
Where Ku Klux rode around, negroes ceased to venture out after dark. Some told tales of ghastly nocturnal visitors who plead for a drink of water, saying, “Dee ain’ had nay drap sence de Yankees killed ’em at Gettysburg. An’ den, suh, when you han’ ’em er gode-full, dee say: ‘Kin you let me have de bucket? I’se jes come f’om hell an’ I’se scotchin’ in my insides.’ An’ den, mun, dat ar hant des drink down dat whole bucket at a gulp, an’ I hyern it sizzlin’ down his gullet des same ez you done flung it on de coals! I ain’ gwi fool longer nothin’ lak dat! Some folks say it’s white folks tryin’ tuh skeer we-all, but, suh, I b’lieve it’s hants-er Ole Satan one!” Terrible experience it was when “A hant—or suppin nur—wid er hade mighty nigh high ez er chimley ud meet a nigger in de road an’ say: ‘I come f’om torment (hell) tuh shake han’s wid you!’ An’ de nigger—he didn’ wanter do it, but he feared tuh ’fuse—he tooken shuck han’s wid dat ar hant, an’ dat ar han’ what he shuck was a skelumton’s—de bones fa’r rattle!”