Civil War and Reconstruction in Alabama

by Walter L. Fleming

CHAPTER XXI

THE KU KLUX REVOLUTION

The Ku Klux movement was an understanding among southern whites, brought about by the chaotic condition of social and political institutions between 1865 and 1876. It resulted in a partial destruction of the Reconstruction and a return, as near as might be, to ante-bellum conditions. This understanding or state of mind took many forms and was called by many names. The purpose was everywhere and always the same: to recover for the white race control of society, and destroy the baleful influence of the alien among the blacks.[1860]

Causes of the Ku Klux Movement

When the surviving soldiers of the Confederate army returned home in the spring and summer of 1865, they found a land in which political institutions had been destroyed and in which a radical social revolution was taking place—an old order, the growth of hundreds of years, seemed to be breaking up, and the new one had not yet taken shape; all was confusion and disorder. At this time began a movement which under different forms has lasted until the present day—an effort on the part of the defeated population to restore affairs to a state which could be endurable, to reconstruct southern society. This movement, a few years later, was in one of its phases known as the Ku Klux movement. For the peculiar aspects of this secret revolutionary movement many causes are suggested.

For several months before the close of the war the state government was powerless except in the vicinity of the larger towns, the country districts being practically without government. After the surrender there was an interval of four months during which there was no pretence of government except in the immediate vicinity of the points garrisoned by the Federal army. The people were forbidden to take steps toward setting up any kind of government.[1861] From one end of the state to the other the land was infested by a vicious element left by the war,—Federal and Confederate deserters, and bushwhackers and outlaws of every description. These were especially troublesome in the counties north of the Black Belt. The old tory class in the mountain counties was troublesome.[1862] Of the little property surviving the wreck of war, none was safe from thievery. The worst class of the negroes—not numerous at this time—were insolent and violent in their new-found freedom. Murders were frequent, and outrages upon women were beginning to be heard of.[1863] The whites, especially the more ignorant ones, were afraid of the effects of preaching of the doctrines of equality, amalgamation, etc., to the blacks. There were soon signs to show that some negroes would endeavor to put the theories they had heard of into practice.[1864]

There was much talk of confiscation of property and division of land among the blacks. The negroes believed that they were going to be rewarded at the expense of the whites, and many of the latter began to fear that such might be the case. The Freedmen’s Bureau early began its most successful career in alienating the races, by teaching the black that the southern white was naturally unfriendly to him. In this work it was ably assisted by the preaching and teaching missionaries sent out from the North, who taught the negro to beware of the southern white in church and in school. The Bureau broke up the labor system that had been patched up in the summer and fall of 1865, and people in the Black Belt felt that labor must be regulated in some way.[1865] In the white counties the poorer whites, who had been the strongest supporters of the secession movement, not because they liked slavery, but because they were afraid of the competition of free negroes, began to show signs of a desire to drive the negro tenants from the rich lands which they wanted for themselves.[1866] For years after the war it was almost impossible for the farmer or planter to raise cows, hogs, poultry, etc., on account of the thieving propensities of the negroes.[1867] Houses, mills, gins, cotton pens, and corn-cribs were frequently burned.[1868] The Union League was believed by many to be an organization for the purpose of plundering the whites and for the division of property when the confiscation should take place.[1869] It was also an active political machine. Nearly all the witnesses before the Ku Klux Committee who stated the causes of the rise of Ku Klux said that the League was the principal one. The whites soon came to believe that they were persecuted by the Washington government. The cotton frauds in 1865; the cotton tax, 1865-1868; the refusal to admit the southern states to representation in Congress, though they were heavily taxed; the passage of the Reconstruction Acts, by which the governments in the South were overturned, the negroes enfranchised, and all the prominent whites disfranchised,—all combined to make the white people believe that the North was seeking to humiliate them, to punish them when they were weak. They did not contemplate such treatment when they laid down their arms. As one soldier expressed it: the treatment received was in violation of the terms of surrender as expressed in their paroles; the southern soldiers could have carried on a guerilla warfare for years; the United States had made terms with men who had arms in their hands; they had laid them down, and the United States had violated these terms and punished individuals for alleged crime without trial; yet their paroles stated that they were not to be disturbed as long as they were law-abiding; the whole Reconstruction was a violation of the terms of surrender as the southern soldiers understood it; it was punishment of a whole people by legislative enactment, and contrary to the spirit of American institutions. It was not a matter of law, but of common honesty.[1870]

General Clanton complained that the southern people passed out of the hands of warriors into the hands of squaws.[1871] The government imposed upon Alabama after the voters had fairly rejected it according to act of Congress was administered by the most worthless and incompetent of whites—alien and native—and negroes. Heavy taxes were laid; the public debt was rapidly increased; the treasury was looted; public office was treated as private property. The government was weak and vicious; it gave no protection to person or property; it was powerless, or perhaps unwilling, to repress disorder; and was held in general contempt. The officials were notoriously corrupt and unjust in administration. There were many disorders which the people believed the state and Federal governments could not or would not regulate.[1872] There was a general feeling of insecurity, in some sections a reign of terror. Innumerable humiliations were inflicted on the former political people of the state by carpet-bagger and scalawag, using the former slave as an instrument. Negro policemen stood on the street corners annoying the whites, making a great parade of all arrests, sometimes even of white women. The elections were corrupt, and the law was deliberately framed to protect ballot-box frauds.[1873] The highest officers of the judiciary, Federal and state, took an active interest in politics, contrary to judicial traditions. Justice, so called, was bought and sold. The most thoroughly political people of the world, the proudest people of the English race, were the political inferiors of their former slaves, and the newcomers from the North never failed to make this fact as irritating as possible, by speech and print and action.[1874]

In short, there was anarchy, social and political and economic. As the negro said, “The bottom rail is on top.” The strenuous editor Randolph said, “The origin of Ku Klux Klan is in the galling despotism that broods like a nightmare over these southern states,—a fungus growth of military tyranny superinduced by the fostering of Loyal Leagues, the abrogation of our civil laws, the habitual violation of our national constitution, and a persistent prostitution of all government, all resources, and all powers, to degrade the white man by the establishment of negro supremacy.”[1875]