IN DECEMBER 1865, AT ALMOST THE VERY MOMENT THAT the Radical Republicans were refusing to seat congressmen from the defeated Confederate states, a group of six young Confederate war veterans, most college educated, met in Pulaski, Tennessee, a few miles north of the Alabama border. The town had been named after Kazimierz Pułaski, the Polish nobleman who had died heroically fighting for the Americans in the Revolutionary War. These six men would spark a revolution of a far different sort.
They had not met with that goal in mind, however. They were simply interested in having some fun by dressing up in elaborate disguises, inventing a series of secret passwords and oaths of allegiance, calling each other by a series of odd names, and then galloping around town after dark engaging in pranks. They named the group Kuklux, evidently from the Greek word “kuklos,” which means “ring” or “circle,” although there had been a group in ancient Greece with a similar name that called itself “Circle of the Moon.” “Klan” seemed to have been added simply because they liked the sound.
From the first, the targets of their “jokes” were local black residents. One of their early efforts involved a member of the group dressing in a white sheet and a frightening mask and then riding up to the home of a black family after midnight and demanding water. He would then seem to drink from the well bucket, but would actually be pouring the water into a rubber tube hidden beneath his robe. He would demand more and more water until the black man watching him could not believe anyone could drink that much. The white man would thank the black man, say that he had not had a drink since he died on the battlefield at Shiloh, and gallop off into the darkness.
This all seemed great fun until the white men realized that the freedmen genuinely believed that the ghosts of dead Confederate soldiers were galloping through the countryside. They also found out that they reminded the freedmen of slave patrols that rode at night before the Civil War, looking for runaways or any slaves that strayed out of their tumbledown cabins without permission. Beatings and whippings would follow.
Word spread quickly that freedmen were terrified of these strange “night riders,” and new “Klan” groups popped up throughout the South. The outings soon turned more sinister. It was not long before the “Kuklux” began to use the terror that their rides provoked to “keep the freed slaves in line.” The whippings and beatings of the slave patrols became common.
In April 1867, just after Congress passed the Reconstruction Acts and the United States Army was sent as an occupying force into the South, a call went out to all the Klan chapters—there were now dozens—to send representatives to Nashville, Tennessee. At this meeting, what had been a loose-knit group of individual chapters became a disciplined organization, with rules, leaders, and a military-like chain of command. At the top of that chain would be the Grand Wizard. Chosen for the job was one of the most feared and respected of all the Confederate soldiers, a legend, the “Wizard of the Saddle,” General Nathan Bedford Forrest. The title “Grand Wizard” was chosen because of Forrest’s nickname.
Forrest had enlisted in the Confederate army as a private and risen to general in less than two years. He was a brilliant horseman, a fearless fighter, ruthless with a saber or pistol, but most of all, he possessed perhaps the most brilliant military mind in the nation. Union General William Tecumseh Sherman described him as “the most remarkable man our civil war produced on either side,” whose men “could travel one hundred miles in less time than ours can travel ten.” Ulysses Grant called him “that devil Forrest.”
There were times when Forrest’s cavalry seemed to be attacking in two or three places at once. He would strike at an opponent’s weakness, then move to a different weak spot when the first was reinforced.
Forrest was preternaturally tough. At the Battle of Shiloh, where he was the last man wounded, he led a charge toward Union troops and found himself alone and surrounded in their midst. He fired his revolvers until they were empty and then slashed with his saber at the troops trying to pull him off his horse. Soon he was hit with a musket ball that lodged in his spine, an incredibly painful injury. Using his free hand, he grabbed a Union soldier by the shirt collar and pulled him off the ground, using the man as a shield as he rode through the enemy troops to safety. One week later, with no anesthesia to be had, an army surgeon removed the musket ball from Forrest’s spine.
But Forrest was also a participant in one of the war’s greatest atrocities. In April 1864, Forrest attacked Fort Pillow in Henning, Tennessee, where a large part of the defending Union force were African American soldiers. Although Forrest later denied it, eyewitnesses, including those in Forrest’s own command, insisted that after the Union garrison surrendered, he ordered all the black soldiers massacred. A Confederate soldier wrote to his sister,
The slaughter was awful. Words cannot describe the scene. The poor, deluded negroes would run up to our men, fall upon their knees, and with uplifted hands scream for mercy, but they were ordered to their feet and then shot down. I, with several others, tried to stop the butchery, and at one time had partially succeeded, but General Forrest ordered them shot down like dogs and the carnage continued. Finally our men became sick of blood and the firing ceased.1
No criminal charges were ever filed against Forrest or any of his men.
Under Forrest’s leadership, the Kuklux, as it was still known, quickly began to function as a guerrilla army, patrolling those areas of the South where either United States troops could not easily reach or there weren’t enough people to justify stationing a unit there. Whipping and beating soon gave way to killing and the burning of homes. But to many white residents, the Klan became the force of law where the detested Yankees could not function. And that meant controlling the black population.
Mary Polk Branch was the widow of a Confederate general, a plantation owner, a member of the best Southern gentry, and a first cousin to James L. Polk, the eleventh president of the United States. In 1912, she wrote the story of her life, Memoirs of a Southern Woman, in which she recounted stories of the Klan.
Then came Reconstruction days. It would have been very different if the negroes had been left to themselves, and not listened to the “carpetbaggers” who swarmed over the South, but by them they were incited to lawlessness and insult.
What could be done? There was no law! The Kuklux filled the needed want, and by thorough superstition awed the negroes into better behavior.
I have looked out in the moonlight, and seen a long procession wending their way slowly on the turnpike, in front of my house. Not a sound could be heard from the muffled feet of their horses, as in single file they moved in speechless silence—a spectral array clothed in white. No one knew who they were, whence they came, and what their object, but the negroes soon knew; and if there were excesses in their new-found liberty, crimes committed by them, they knew there would be a speedy retribution by these spectral visitants.
They effected a great good, but as good is often attended with evil, lawless men, who did not belong to the regular organization, disguised themselves as Kuklux.
For instance, on my brother Lucius’s plantation, one night he was aroused by negroes from the quarter, calling at his window, begging him to get up; that there was, “A company of Kuklux at the quarter.” He went at once, and demanded what they wanted. They said: “One of the negroes on the place has done a great deal of mischief, and we have come to whip him.” My brother said: “I know him to be a good negro, and you cannot whip him.” “But we must!” “You cannot,” said my brother. “If you do it will be over my dead body, for I am his natural protector.” “Well, General, your life is too valuable to be given for this negro’s, so, as we do not wish to kill you, we will go.”2
But sometimes the Klansmen did not go, as in an eyewitness account by Thomas Burton. Burton, born a slave in Kentucky in 1860, was sent to school with the help of John Fee, a white minister and founder of Berea College, and eventually became a doctor practicing in Indiana. Berea College accepted students of all races, as did Reverend Fee’s congregation. In 1872, while a young Thomas Burton sat in church, he watched as Reverend Fee paid the price for his decency.
The sermon had commenced when a mob of sixty men with pistols and guns surrounded the house. One came in and said to Mr. Fee, “There are men here who wish you to stop and come out.” He replied, “I am engaged in the exercise of a Constitutional right and a religious duty; please do not interrupt me,” and preached on. The man went out, and soon two others returned and demanded that he come out. He preached on. They seized him and dragged him out, no resistance being made. Men with a rope swore they would hang him to the first tree unless he would promise to leave the county and never return. He replied, “I am in your hands; I would not harm you if you harm me; the responsibility is with you; I can make no pledge; duty to God and my country forbid.” They swore they would duck him in the Kentucky River as long as life was in him unless he would promise to leave the county. He said: “I am a native of the State. I believe slavery is wrong. I am acting for the good of my country and all her people. You will know my motives at the judgment.” He had proceeded but a few moments when one exclaimed, “We didn’t come here to hear a sermon; let us do our work.” They stripped Robert Jones naked, bent him down, and gave him thirty-three lashes with three sycamore rods. He was so injured that he could not walk the next day; but he made no pledges and did not leave. They said to Mr. Fee, “We will give you five hundred lashes if you do not leave the county and promise never to return.” He knelt down and said, “I will take my suffering; I can make no pledge.” Later two lawyers were engaged to prosecute in behalf of him and Jones. The mob swore they would give five hundred lashes to any lawyer who would prosecute the cases. The grand jury never inquired into it. This is one of many such mobs through which Rev. John G. Fee went in those days.3
Through terror and intimidation, the Klan in some areas operated as a shadow government, or as some called it, “the Invisible Empire.” They could not have much effect in the cities or in other areas where the army was a constant presence, but in the countryside, they could prevent newly freed black citizens from exercising the civil rights that the Radical Republicans in Congress had fought so hard to gain for them, the most important of which was the right to vote.
It is difficult to appreciate the degree to which white Southerners loathed the sight of African Americans casting ballots in free elections. Frank Alexander Montgomery, who had been a lieutenant colonel in the First Mississippi Cavalry, wrote that the Reconstruction Acts, by allowing freed slaves to vote, “filled to overflowing the cup of bitterness the south was called upon to drink.” Montgomery, who would later serve both as a member of the Mississippi legislature and a federal circuit court judge, thought it
impossible to conceive that the ingenuity of hate could have devised anything which would have so humiliated the white people of the state as this cruel and unnecessary act, by which the former slave was placed upon a political equality with his master, in many cases superior to his master, for often the slave could vote while the master could not . . . The negroes stood in a long line, patiently waiting each till his turn should come, and had no more idea what he was doing or who he was voting for than ‘the man in the moon’ had.4
As always, Southerners thought themselves reasonable rather than bigoted.
The people of the north did not understand the character [of] the negro; to them, or the vast majority, he was a white man with a black skin, while we of the south knew him to be not only an alien race, but so vastly inferior that no fit comparison now occurs to me. Whatever traits of character he had which raised him from a condition of barbarism he owed to his association with the white man, and to-day it is well known that if he were even now removed from this association he would relapse into the lowest grade of humanity.
The Klan took specific aim at the Loyal Leagues. To white Southerners, these were “secret political organizations among the colored people, and were generally organized and presided over by their white allies. Meetings were usually held at night in some out-of-the-way place, and were harangued by white Republican speakers. These organizations solidified the black vote, for there was a league in every community, and every colored man was a member.”5
The Klan’s reputation in the countryside as a terrorist organization out of the reach of law spread dread among black residents. Often, Klan members needed simply to show up to keep black men from the voting booth. In many cases, they did not specifically have to break any laws.
If a party of white men, with ropes conspicuous on their saddlebows, rode up to a polling place and announced that hanging would begin in fifteen minutes, though without any more definite reference to anybody, and a group of blacks who had assembled to vote heard the remark and promptly disappeared, votes were lost, but a conviction on a charge of intimidation was difficult. Or if an untraceable rumor that trouble was impending over the blacks was followed by the mysterious appearance of bodies of horsemen on the roads at midnight, firing guns and yelling at nobody in particular, votes again were lost, but no crime or misdemeanor could be brought home to any one.6
Klan terror achieved some notable success. In the presidential election of 1868, in eleven counties in Georgia, each with a majority of black voters, not a single vote was reported for Grant and the Republicans.7 That same year, when the Reconstruction state constitution was up for a vote in Mississippi, “It was charged by the Republicans . . . that whites terrorized the negroes by the Kuklux method, and either kept them away from the polls or intimidated them into voting against the Constitution.”8
Although there could be no specific measurement of the degree to which the Klan and similar white supremacist groups that it spawned suppressed black voting, that it was cutting into Republican majorities was obvious. Although Republicans took back the White House, Ulysses Grant besting New York’s Horatio Seymour, the results in the Southern states could not help but be worrisome for Republicans. Democrats closed the gap in South Carolina, North Carolina, and Alabama, and won in Georgia, Louisiana, Kentucky, and Maryland. Virginia, Mississippi, and Texas had not yet returned to the Union, and Florida’s three electoral votes were awarded to Grant, although no election had been held. Without African American votes, and if the former Confederates whose voting rights had been taken away had been allowed to cast ballots, Grant would likely have lost the popular vote. Democrats also gained twenty seats in the House of Representatives, although Republicans retained a clear majority, added seats in the Senate, and made big advances in state legislatures.
That white Republicans needed both the black vote and to maintain control in the South was apparent. Without either, their power in government and in many cases their jobs would disappear. By 1868, however, much of white America was losing its taste for the money and effort required to support Reconstruction.
With Democrats on the rise and Reconstruction on the wane in the old Confederacy, the Fourteenth Amendment was not going to be enough. There needed to be another, one that would place black Americans’ right to vote beyond the ability of Southern state governments, even under Democratic control, to eliminate or restrict it.