Civil War and Reconstruction in Alabama

by Walter L. Fleming

The most famous parade and riot of the Ku Klux Klan occurred in Huntsville, in 1868, before the presidential election. A band of 1500 Ku Klux[1958] rode into the city and paraded the streets. Both men and horses were covered with sheets and masks. The drill was silent; the evolutions were executed with a skill that called forth praise from some United States army officers who were looking on. The negroes were in a frenzy of fear, and one of them fired a shot. Immediately a riot was on. The negroes fired indiscriminately at themselves and at the undisguised whites who were standing around. The latter returned the fire; the Ku Klux fired no shots, but formed a line and looked on. Several negroes were wounded, and Judge Thurlow, a scalawag, of Limestone County, was accidentally killed by a chance shot from a negro’s gun. The whites who took part received only slight wounds. Some of the Ghouls were arrested by the military authorities, but were released.[1959] This was, in the annals of the Radical party, a great Ku Klux outrage.

Another widely heralded Ku Klux outrage was the Patona or Cross Plains affair, in Calhoun County, in 1870. It seems that at Cross Plains a negro boy was hired to hold a horse for a white man. He turned the horse loose, and was slapped by the white fellow. Then the negro hit the white on the head with a brick. Other whites came up and cuffed the negro, who went to Patona, a negro railway village a mile away, and told his story. William Luke, a white Canadian, who was teaching a negro school at Patona, advised the negroes to arm themselves and go burn Cross Plains in revenge and for protection. Thirty or forty went, under the leadership of Luke, and made night hideous with threats of violence and burning, but finally went away without harming any one. The next night Luke and his negroes returned, and fired into a congregation of whites just dismissed from church. None were injured, but Luke and several negroes were arrested. There were signs of premeditated delay on the part of some of the civil authorities, so the Ku Klux came and took the Canadian and four negroes from the officers, carried them to a lonely spot, and hanged some and shot the rest.[1960]

In Greene County the county solicitor, Alexander Boyd, an ex-convict, claimed to have evidence against members of the Ku Klux organization. He boasted about his plans, and the Ku Klux, hearing of it, went to his hotel in Eutaw and shot him to death.[1961]

Another famous outrage was the Eutaw riot, in 1870. Both Democrats and Radicals had advertised political meetings for the same time and place. The Radicals, who seem to have been the latest comers, asked the Democrats for a division of time. The latter answered that the issues as to men or measures were not debatable. So the Democrats and Radicals held their meetings on opposite sides of the court-house. The Democrats’ meeting ended first, and they stood at the edge of the crowd to hear the Radical speakers. Some of the hot bloods came near the stand and made sarcastic remarks. One man who was to speak, Charles Hays, was so obnoxious to the whites that even the Radicals were unwilling for him to speak. He persisted, and some one, presumably a Conservative, pulled his feet out from under him, and he fell off the table from which he was speaking. The negroes, seeing his fall, rushed forward with knives and pistols to protect him. A shot was fired, which struck Major Pierce, a Democrat, in the pocket. Then the whites began firing, principally into the air. The negroes tore down the fence in their haste to get away. After the whites had chased the negroes out of town the military came leisurely in and quelled the riot.[1962] The campaign report of casualties was five killed and fifty-four wounded. As a matter of fact only one wounded negro was ever found, and no dead ones.[1963]

A common kind of outrage was that on James Alston, the negro representative in the legislature from Macon County in 1870. Alston was shot by negro political rivals just after a League meeting in Tuskegee. They were arrested, and Alston asked the whites to protect him. The Democratic white citizens of Tuskegee guarded him. The carpet-bag postmaster in Tuskegee saw the possibilities of the situation and sent word to the country negroes to come in armed, that Alston had been shot. They swarmed into Tuskegee, and, thinking the whites had shot Alston, were about to burn the town. The white women and children were sent to Montgomery for safety. About the same time the negroes murdered three white men. The excitement reached Montgomery, and a negro militia company was hastily organized to go to the aid of the Tuskegee negroes. General Clanton got hold of the sheriff, and they succeeded in turning back the negro volunteer company. The affair passed off without further bloodshed, and Alston was notified to leave Tuskegee.[1964]

There were no collisions between the United States soldiers and the night riders. At first they were on pretty good terms with one another. The soldiers admired their drills and parades and the way they scared the negroes. One impudent Cyclops rode his band into Athens, and told the commanding officer that they were there to assist in preserving order, and, if he needed them, would come if he scratched on the ground with a stick.[1965]

While there was not much dependence upon central authority,[1966] there was a loose bond of federation between the Dens. They coöperated in their work; a Den from Pickens County would operate in Tuscaloosa or Greene and vice versa. Alabama Ku Kluxes went into Mississippi and Tennessee, and those states returned such favors. When the spurious organizations began to commit outrages, each state claimed that the other one furnished the men.[1967]

The oath taken by the Ku Klux demanded supreme allegiance to the order so far as related to the problems before the South. Members of the order sat on juries and refused to convict; were summoned as witnesses and denied all knowledge of the order; were members of the legislature, lawyers, etc. It is claimed that no genuine members of the order were ever caught and convicted.[1968]

Though the Klan was almost wholly a Democratic organization,[1969] it took little share in the ordinary activities of politics, more perhaps in the northern counties than elsewhere. In Fayette County, in 1870, the Klan went on a raid, and when returning stopped in the court-house, took off disguises, resolved themselves into a convention, and nominated a county ticket.[1970] Nothing of the kind was done in south Alabama; indeed, the constitution of the White Camelias forbade interference in politics.[1971] The Union League meetings were broken up only when they were sources of disorder, thievery, etc. When cases of outrage were investigated, it was almost invariably found that they had no political significance. Governor Lindsay sent an agent into every community where an outrage was reported, and in not a single instance was a case of outrage by Ku Klux discovered.

It is probably true that few, if any, of the leading Democratic politicians were members of the Klan or of any similar organization. Under certain conditions they might be driven by force of circumstances to join in local uprisings against the rule of the Radicals. But as a rule they knew little of the secret orders. There were various reasons for this. The Conservative leaders saw the danger in such an organization, though recognizing the value of its services. It was sure to degenerate. It might become too powerful. It would have a bad influence on politics and would furnish too much campaign literature for the Radicals. It would result in harsh legislation against the South. The testimony of General Clanton[1972] and Governor Lindsay[1973] shows just what the party leaders knew of the order and what they thought of it. The Ku Klux leaders were not the political leaders.[1974] The newspapers of importance opposed the order. The opposition of the political leaders to the Klan in its early stages was not because of any wrong done by it to the Radicals, but because of fear of its acting as a boomerang and injuring the white party. It was the middle classes, so to speak, and later the lower classes, who felt more severely the tyranny of the carpet-bag rule, who formed and led the Klan. The political leaders thought that in a few years political victories would give relief; the people who suffered were unable to wait, and threw off the revolutionary government by revolutionary means.[1975]