KKK: The Story of the Klu Klux Klan

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KKK

The Story of the Ku Klux Klan

Ben Haas

KKK was originally published in 1963 by Greenleaf Classics, Inc., San Diego.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Contents

TABLE OF CONTENTS 3

CHAPTER I 4

CHAPTER II 5

CHAPTER III 14

CHAPTER IV 27

CHAPTER V 36

CHAPTER VI 42

CHAPTER VII 51

CHAPTER VIII 57

CHAPTER IX 67

CHAPTER X 74

CHAPTER XI 77

CHAPTER XII 83

CHAPTER XIII 96

AUTHOR’S NOTE 99

REQUEST FROM THE PUBLISHER 100

CHAPTER I

LESS THAN two years after Appomattox and the end of the Civil War, a new and strange expression had made its way into the language of Southerners. S. A. Agnew, a Presbyterian minister of Lee County, Mississippi, confided to his meticulously-kept diary on January 30, 1867, the incident of a local family whose son Jack "stole $450 from his father and then dropped it where a Negro woman frequently was and charged her with the theft. They trussed this old Negro up and hung her and treated her most barbarously to extort a confession, but failed. This they called Ku Kluxed."

The truth will out, and the real story of Jack’s theft came to light and his family suddenly found it necessary to emigrate to Texas. But the words they left behind have continued in current usage for nearly a hundred years, and they still have exactly the same meaning: to be Ku Kluxed still means to be treated most barbarously by night riders.

This is because, even in 1963, robed and hooded night riders armed with guns, dynamite, and lash still travel by Southern moonlight. Ninety-seven years after its birth, having endured the determined opposition of both federal and state governments, long periods of dormancy, scandal, and disrepute, the Ku Klux Klan still exists. And not only exists, but is now fattening on the hatreds generated by the current battle for integration, growing and strengthening itself and becoming a formidable force-in-being once more. Like the glass snake of Southern legend, which can shatter into dozens of pieces and then reassemble itself, the Ku Klux Klan seems to have a limitless number of lives. Unlike the glass snake, it is dangerous. Twice in its history it has had power enough to shake administrations and alter the course of the country’s affairs. Whether it will do so again is problematical, but this is what its present-day leaders are working for. In the meantime, it seems important to seek the answers to three questions.

What is the Ku Klux Klan?

Why does it seem ineradicable from American society in general and Southern society in particular?

And finally, and most important, how powerful is the Ku Klux Klan today?

The purpose of this book is to answer these three questions as accurately as possible. And because the Ku Klux Klan—even though now national in its extent— was bred and born in the South and continues to be nourished there, it is necessary to begin looking for the answer to the first question in Southern history in the most turbulent times—the days after the Civil War called Reconstruction.

CHAPTER II

IN A SPEECH delivered in 1867 to veterans of his famous—and infamous—March to the Sea, General William Tecumseh Sherman, merciless in war, forgiving in peace, summed up poignantly the condition of the defeated Confederacy.

Mourning, he said, in every household, desolation written in broad characters across the whole face of the country, cities in ashes and fields laid waste, their commerce gone, their system of labor annihilated and destroyed. Ruin, poverty, and distress everywhere, and now pestilence adding the very cap sheaf to their stack of miseries; her proud men begging for pardon and appealing for permission to raise food for their children; her five millions of slaves free and their value lost to their former masters forever.

It was an accurate description of the situation in which Southern white men found themselves. Nevertheless, in the days immediately following the end of hostilities, they looked hopefully to Washington. If there were to be any salvation for them, it lay with President Andrew Johnson, successor to the murdered Lincoln. Johnson was a Southerner and a Democrat who had been chosen as the Republican Lincoln’s vice president in a general convention of Unionists. The South knew that Johnson planned to follow the course set by his dead chief.

That course was based on the premise that since the war had been fought to prove that states could not secede from the Union, the defeated Confederacy remained in fact part of the United States. Both Lincoln and Johnson planned to ease the Southern states back into full statehood as quickly and with as little disruption of their already blasted economies as possible. To that end, a sweeping amnesty had been declared, excluding only military officers of higher rank, officeholders in the Confederate government, and a few other categories whose cases required special examination. Even these excluded ones could obtain pardon by special application, and the most famous Confederate of all, General Robert E. Lee, applied, though unsuccessfully, setting an example of reconciliation for others.

As part of the Lincoln-Johnson plan, provisional governors had been installed in each Southern state and conventions to write new constitutions had been held. The amnesty had, for the most part, put political power back where it had been before the war, and the new constitutions were framed to keep it there. Most of the Northern states excluded Negroes from voting; so, also, did the new constitutions of the Southern ones.

Thus, Johnson strove for an easy peace, in keeping with surrender terms laid down by Union commanders; and though the South was bankrupt, stricken, and blighted, it looked forward to rejoining the Union with the best grace it could muster, accepting defeat with the least resentment possible, and going about the business of being part of an expanding nation.

That however, was not to be.

Republicans, under the leadership of Representative Thaddeus Stevens of Pennsylvania and Senator Charles Sumner of Massachusetts, held the Congress. They foresaw a threat to their entrenchment in the return of the Confederacy to the Union under Johnsons terms. Full statehood under the new constitutions would mean the return to Congress of Southern Democrats and a strong Democratic tide in Presidential elections. It was vital to the Republican party to keep the South separated from the rest of the country until those eleven states could be somehow made safe for Republicans and be made to return a consistent Republican majority in elections. There was a way to do this and Stevens, Sumner, and their group, known as the Radicals, saw it clearly. Disfranchise the Democratic whites, enfranchise the newly freed slaves, and teach the freedmen to vote Republican.

And this, they decided, was something that must be done even if it destroyed a President of the United States and an entire region of the country.

But by Christmas Eve, 1865, the Radical Republicans still had to make their move; and the six threadbare young men who met in a little law office in Pulaski, Tennessee, that night were concerned with things other than politics. Confederate veterans all, they were bored and restless in the letdown that comes after battle. What they wanted was amusement, something to take their minds off the bleak prospects of the year ahead.

Their names were John C. Lester, John B. Kennedy, James R. Crowe, Frank O. McCord, Richard R. Reed, and Calvin E. Jones. Lester, Kennedy, and Crowe had served as captains, the others in the ranks. They huddled glumly about the stove in the office belonging to Jones’s father and sought for something to think about besides their troubles.

It was Lester who came up with the idea. Boys, he said, ‘let’s start something to break the monotony and cheer up our mothers and girls. Let’s start a club of some kind."

His suggestion struck a responsive chord in the others, and they discussed the idea. It should, somebody suggested, be a secret society. There was nothing unusual about that idea; such societies, very much like college fraternities in concept and conduct, had been frequently organized among the young bloods of the South in pre-war days. A lot of fancy passwords and regalia, a little bit of pranking and hell-raising, and some serenading of the fair sex were the usual objectives; there is no reason to believe that the six around the stove had anything more serious in mind.

Before they left for their homes and a cheerless Christmas, they had informally approved the idea and had agreed to meet again to discuss further details.

At the second meeting, the first matter under consideration was a name for the proposed club. Either Captain Kennedy or Richard Reed came up with the proposal that it include the word Kukloi, derived from the Greek Kuklos, the root of the English word circle. It met with approval, and since they could all point to Scotch-Irish ancestry, so did Lester’s proposal that they add the word Klan. After more discussion, they decided that to add mystery and baffle the uninitiated, the two suggested words should be garbled into the name Ku Klux Klan. It was secret-sounding, they agreed, and nonsensically inscrutable. Approval having been given to that, they elected a chairman and a secretary and set up committees to write bylaws.

Meanwhile, they had moved their meeting place from the law office of Judge Jones to the home of one Colonel Thomas Martin, who had gone to Mississippi on an extended trip. These were bad times in which to leave a house untenanted, and Captain Kennedy had been asked to stay there while Martin was away.

At subsequent meetings, the rules were approved and new members were recruited—the Ku Klux Klan had been born.

Initiations took place in Martin’s home, and they were good-humored, riotous affairs, even though the organization tended a little toward the macabre. Their terminology was deliberately weird: Frank McCord, their leader, was designated Grand Cyclops; Kennedy, his assistant, was Grand Magi; there was also a Grand Scribe; a recruiter called the Grand Turk; two guards known as Lictors; and two messengers called Night Hawks. The rank and file of the club were termed Ghouls. Disguises and regalia were an integral part of every secret society, and the young men solved the problem of their limited resources by raiding family linen closets. Pillow slips became hoods, sheets became robes, and tall, conical hats of paper added the final touch.

Pleased with themselves and their outré appearance, they rode abroad at night to play practical jokes and serenade the ladies. With their horses also swathed in white, they congratulated themselves on the striking eeriness of the picture they made as they galloped along the county’s roads at black-dark. And they were vastly tickled to see what surprise and terror their weird gear inspired in the Negroes they encountered in their nightly journeys.

Of all the post-war problems, none was more vexing to the defeated Confederates than the swarms of newly-freed slaves drifting about the countryside. There were mobs of them, with no place to go and nothing to do but wait for the fulfillment of a rumored promise. Thaddeus Stevens had made a speech in which he proposed confiscating the property of all Southerners who owned more than 200 acres, dividing it, and giving every Negro forty acres and a mule. The scheme was fantastic and could never have been implemented, but there were those stupid or unscrupulous enough to represent it to the Negroes as something concrete in the near offing. These were the Northern administrators of the Freedmen’s Bureau and the Loyal Leagues. Here we must pause to consider these two organizations in detail.

Before the war, iron discipline had been enforced among the slaves by what were called patrols, a system of informal, local constabulary policing each area to make sure that no slave was abroad without a pass and that no secret, unauthorized meetings took place. Always lurking in the minds of the planters was the fear of a slave rebellion, like the bloody, abortive one led by Nat Turner in Virginia earlier in the century, or like the revolution in Haiti.

For the most part, their fears were groundless. The slaves remained almost uniformly loyal to their masters during the war, even on plantations where there were no longer any white men to enforce discipline. Those that did not, instead of seeking vengeance, simply took off in search of freedom. After the war, despite their altered status, many slaves insisted on remaining with their former owners; but others—the majority—went abroad to seek their freedom and their fortunes.

Though there were a number of men of stature among them, most of the freedmen were victims of the planters’ deliberate policy of keeping slaves illiterate and in ignorance of the most basic fundamentals of how to manage their own affairs. Thus the roads of the South became choked with mobs of Negroes wandering aimlessly, with no clear-cut idea of where they were going, what they should do, or even how to go about gaining food and clothing. The whites looked upon them as a horde of locusts and tried to combat the problem by including in the new state constitutions what came to be known as Black Codes. These were laws which, in the view of Southerners, were necessary to maintain order; from the standpoint of Northerners the laws were simply an insidious way of reinstituting slavery. In some states, a Negro was required to contract his employment a year in advance, and his employer had virtually the same power over him that de massa would have exercised in slavery days. Negro artisans were required to buy expensive licenses to do business, not required of whites;