1
Why was Klan violence effective as a means of conservative opposition to
Reconstruction?
Abstract
The ending of the Civil War was intended to mark a return to peace and
democratic principles. To Republicans and freedpeople, Reconstruction afforded
an opportunity to establish a greater degree of economic, political, and social
equality. W. E. B. Du Bois, however, considered the Reconstruction era as a story
of ‘how civil war in the South began again – indeed had never ceased.’1 Initially,
such a view may appear pessimistic and certainly contrasts with the commendable
advancements made in equality legislation. In reality, racial and social violence
against freedpeople was widespread. It soon developed an organised nature in the
form of White supremacist paramilitary groups, particularly the Ku Klux Klan,
which successfully undermined Reconstruction efforts and played an integral role
in the conservative redemption of Southern state legislatures. The object of this
discussion is to investigate why such violence was effective as a conservative tool
in achieving these ends. Evidence is primarily drawn from contemporary
newspaper reports and personal accounts of Klan activities to understand the
effect of violence on freedpeople. Klan strength was built on its widespread
appeal among diverse White communities with differing aims, its localised nature
but national outlook, Democratic support, and the systematic targeting of
Republican voters. Federal failure to provide an adequate military response left
Klan violence unchecked and afforded no protection to freedpeople who wished to
exercise their political rights. The extent of military and political organisation
displayed by Klan activities is a subject of historical debate, but it was
fundamental to conservative success. Indeed, it was the political direction and
active involvement of the Democratic Party in the Klan which enabled
paramilitary violence to be one of the primary reasons for the failure of
Reconstruction.
Keywords
Reconstruction; violence; Klan; freedpeople; conservatives
The Reconstruction of the former Confederate states was an era of radical aspirations,
unprecedented legal and constitutional change, all overshadowed by extreme social and
political violence. Union victory in the Civil War left the South demoralised, destitute, and in
1
W. E. B. Du Bois, Black Reconstruction in America 1860-1880 (New York, 1935), p. 670.
2
a state of flux. Many White families had lost male family members; land had been ruined or
confiscated; and substantial property and labour had been lost due to the Emancipation
Proclamation bestowing freedom on approximately four million African-American slaves.
The challenge facing the Republican Congress in the immediate aftermath of the war was
how to balance the need for national healing and the required dispensation of justice to
former Confederates; two necessities which were not easily compatible, especially within a
setting of poverty, destruction, and intense bitterness.2 The Redemption of the South by
conservatives marked the end of federal attempts to shape Southern society through
Reconstruction policies. Conservatives used many methods to prevent Blacks voting and
destroy Radical Reconstruction; their most successful tactic was the use of intimidation,
murder, and often military operations through organized White supremacist paramilitary
groups such as the Knights of the White Camelia, the White Brotherhood, and most
infamously, the Ku Klux Klan. This discussion will argue that such Klan violence was
effective due to its appeal to all sections of the White conservative community, its organized
nature, the targeting of Black voters and the lack of a concerted military response by the
federal government. Klan violence was one of the primary reasons for the failure of
Reconstruction throughout the South. Indeed, Foner contends that the scope of terrorist
activity directed against Blacks and other Republican supporters, especially between 1868
and 1871, ‘lacks a counterpart either in the American experience or in that of the other
Western Hemisphere societies that abolished slavery.’3
Violence against Blacks, both slave and free, had existed across the South, and indeed
in the North during the antebellum period, throughout the Civil War, and in its immediate
aftermath. Bitterness among returning soldiers and their families generated by Confederate
defeat in the Civil War and an already developing ‘lost cause’ sentiment deepened resentment
directed at the North, Blacks, and Republicans; such sentiment was coupled with a mixture of
White supremacist ideology and a fear of retribution against them by newly emancipated
Blacks. Initial terrorist violence was committed by demobilized Confederate soldiers who
harassed freedpeople and Union supporters on their return home. Although of a haphazard
nature, the often sadistic types of violence used highlights the links between antebellum and
later paramilitary violence; in February 1866 outrages were reported to the Freedmen’s
Bureau consisting of assaults on Union men in which ‘one Union man was publicly whipped
in the streets’ and an attack on a freedman in which they ‘first castrated him and afterwards
murdered him in cold blood.’ This group proceeded to kill and assault further freedpeople
but the testimony of a Freedmen’s Bureau agent reveals that there was not ‘a single case in
which the local authorities or police or citizens made any attempt or exhibited any inclination
to redress any of these wrongs or to protect such persons.’4 Two themes from these early
outbreaks of violence hint at why paramilitary action later became so prevalent. ExConfederate soldiers played a prominent role in violence and were ready recruits for the
2
D. W. Blight, Race and reunion: the Civil War in American memory (Cambridge, 2002), p. 57.
E. Foner, Reconstruction: America’s unfinished revolution 1863 – 1877 (New York, 1988), p. 425.
4
Testimony of Lt. Col. Dexter H. Clapp, 38th USCT [Freedmen’s Bureau Agent, Pitt County, N. C.]; in 39th U. S.
Congress, Joint Select Committee Report on Reconstruction, June 1866; After Slavery Project, Unit 9, Document
1 (http://afterslavery.com/chapter9.html).
3
3
Klan. Coupled with their military experience and retention of weapons, many were mentally
brutalised by war and returned ‘as defenders of a defeated cause, with the emotional weight
of having lost.’5 The concept of the Republican enemy may never have subsided, especially
when Union Leagues were organised and Blacks were politically mobilized. Additionally,
although initially paralyzed by the complicity of the conservative ‘Johnson’ governments,
lack of action by state and federal authorities to counteract violence served to embolden such
violence.
The Klan, by 1868, existed throughout the South as a paramilitary organization which
crucially worked at the local level. The military operations which it conducted highlight the
skill and collaboration which Klansmen used but Parsons has argued that its weakness was
that it was localized and its reliance on handwritten notices, whistles, and horseback
messengers symbolize its inability to use sophisticated organisational techniques.6 Yet such
techniques were not unusual for a 19th century secret society. It could be argued that the
effectiveness of the Klan was drawn from its localized organization but national outlook; it
may not have been conducting coordinated operations across the South but a common name
may have given it a common identity. In effect, a sense of purpose of national significance
which in itself made it more effective in appeal and intimidation than a small, locally minded
group could have been. Whether the Klan was an organization with a clearly organized
structure and leadership is a highly contested historical debate but the common purpose and
similar tactics which local Klan groups exhibited, allows a generalization of why it attracted
members, its goals, and its impact on the South’s experience of Reconstruction.7 The
Cincinnati Daily Gazette reported the breakup of a Klan den in Memphis which resulted in a
seizure of its objective and member requirements stated as ‘The object of this organization is
for the purpose of protecting the people of the South from the band of murderers and robbers
now preying upon them.’8 For both contemporaries and historians, such open ended and
vague descriptions are indicative of the difficulties encountered when attempting to
understand the overall aim and effectiveness of the Klan. Indeed, Harper’s Weekly expressed
the view that ‘the darkness and the mystery with which the Ku-Klux is enveloped serve both
to exaggerate and to conceal the truth’ while Fitzgerald states its ‘nature defies easy
explanation.’9 It suggests that the Klan was an umbrella group which could thus attract
members from all classes of the White community.
One of the aims of violence was the social control of freedpeople in rural areas,
especially where there existed extensive White owned farms and plantations. The end of
slavery removed traditional means of plantation social discipline as freedpeople no longer
wished to live in designated slave quarters and often refused to work unless they received
5
J. W. McClurken, Take care of the living: reconstructing Confederate veteran families in Virginia
(Charlottesville, 2009), p. 51.
6
E. F. Parsons, ‘Midnight rangers: costume and performance in the Reconstruction-era Ku Klux Klan’ in The
Journal of American History, 92 (2005), p. 815.
7
Foner, Reconstruction, p. 425.
8
Cincinnati Daily Gazette, 11 April 1868.
9
Harper’s Weekly, 4 November 1871; M. W. Fitzgerald, ‘The Ku Klux Klan: property crime and the plantation
system in Reconstruction Alabama’ in Agricultural History, 7 (1997), p. 186.
4
land and wages. Foner argues that this was a labour issue faced by every plantation society
which underwent emancipation. Each society experienced conflict over labour control or
class formation with the outcome based on the external relationship of the society with the
national or international economy, and on internal problems such as scarcity of land and the
retention of political power within the planter class;10 but the use of systematic paramilitary
violence by planters and poor Whites in the former Confederacy is exceptional. Violence and
intimidation against freedpeople, who attempted to test the bounds of their freedom, forced
them back on the plantation and reassured the southern planter class that emancipation would
not affect the supply of a dependent, stationary, cheap, practically enslaved labour force. A
judge reported that planters formed and used the Klan as although they could no longer
‘control the labour... through the courts’ they endeavoured to ‘compel them [freedpeople] to
do by fear what they were unable to do by law.’11 Thus, the Klan continued the practices of
night patrols, whippings, and house visits which had characterised slave plantation discipline.
Such violence was very effective due to the nature of sharecropping in which Blacks isolated
themselves by living in independent homesteads rather than communal buildings; greater
independence thus meant greater intimidation. Under this system, tenants paid crop halves or
thirds in place of rent and acquired commodities, tools and seed on credit, all of which
required commercial awareness, and thereby placed the tenant at the risk of fraud from the
landowner. Blacks who disagreed about the portion of crop to be paid were whipped. 12 Cane
Cook, a tenant from Georgia in 1869, described a situation when he was heavily beaten for
questioning his level of debt falsely calculated by the landowner;13 a frequent occurrence for
many tenants throughout the South.
Planters alone, however, could not have sustained the levels of violence and
intimidation required for rural social control. Indeed, the involvement of poor Whites, who
were themselves the economic victims of sharecropping and the dominance of large scale
planters, shows that it is misleading to argue that the Klan was simply an instrument which
‘worked in pursuit of the goals of the planters.’14 Instead, poor White farmers ‘possessed
goals and agency of their own.’15 Poor Whites were motivated to join the Klan out of racial
fear of uncontrolled Blacks, a perception of Blacks as robbers and vagrants, and as
competitors against freedpeople for wages. It was reported that ‘The lower class of White
people...have a great prejudice against the negro, because he is a competitor for common
labour, and wherever they come into collision, those fellows form themselves into a Klan,
and take up the negroes that come in their way, and punish them.’16 Thus, Klan violence did
not arise as a method of planter labour control; it was generated by White supremacist
10
E. Foner, Nothing but freedom: emancipation and its legacy (Baton Rouge, 1983), p. 10.
42nd Congress, 2nd Session, House Report 22: Testimony taken by the Joint Committee to enquire into the
condition of affairs in the late insurrectionary states, p. 1758. (Ku Klux Klan Hearings)
12
Foner, Reconstruction, p.429.
13
‘Statement of Cane Cook’ in H. W. Pierson (ed.), A letter to Hon. Charles Sumner with “statements” of
outrages upon freedmen in Georgia, and an account of my expulsion from Andersonville GA., by the Ku-Klux
Klan (Washington, 1870), p. 5. (African American pamphlet collection – Library of Congress)
14
M. J. Wiener, Social origins of the New South: Alabama 1860 – 1885 (Baton Rouge, 1978), p. 61.
15
Fitzgerald, ‘The Ku Klux Klan’, p. 187.
16
Ku Klux Klan Hearings, p. 797.
11
5
attitudes and the impoverished state of poor Whites. Indeed, the Klan disregarded some
pressing planter concerns by taking no action to reverse land tenure changes, nor did they
force freedwomen into field work;17 an action which would only have further lowered wages.
Additionally, violence could cause labour shortages by causing Blacks to flee, forcing
planters to seek an end to Klan violence, at least for a time.18 Richardson stresses the
importance of poverty. Public works commissioning and an influx of capital from the federal
government would have ‘prevented the South from spiralling into the impoverished and
racially torn backwater.’ This argument asserts that economic depression, wartime
destruction, and lack of capital ‘informed the way Whites perceived labour disputes, land
ownership and escalating taxes’ causing ‘issues of race and labour to be exacerbated by
problems of poverty...Relieving the economic pressure of insufficient capital would have
removed the keystone from the arguments of White supremacists.’19 Thus, to aristocratic and
poor Whites who still feared the antebellum threat of racial uprisings, the freedpeople who
refused to work for low wages, moved to towns for work, or struck and squatted on land
represented challenges to authority, class warfare, and only reinforced their presumption that
Blacks were only suited to slavery; hence, they believed Blacks had to be controlled through
intimidation and violence.
Republicans, however, were convinced that planters were involved and threatened
retaliation on them if the Klan violence continued. Such threats, however, only served to
galvanize elite support for the Klan as it was considered self defence. The effectiveness of
Klan violence caused planters to tolerate it.20 Thus, few elites criticised Klan violence.
Democrat leaders encouraged the Klan by increasing their involvement, and directed it into a
paramilitary wing with the purpose of undermining Radical Republican activism and
governments; planter and Democratic influence encouraged greater membership of the Klan
beyond the poor White constituency. Democratic newspapers exploited freedom of the press
to encouraged prejudice and played on the racial fears of much of the White community.21
They rarely made explicit support for violence as they risked being investigated by federal
officials; however, they encouraged civil disobedience and frequently insinuated that Blacks
and Republicans got what they deserved. Newspapers frequently ran Klan propaganda
campaigns through cartoons, editorialized against Black politicians and Republican policies,
and promoted the Klan.22 The Louisiana Planters’ Banner provides an example of the
mystical nature of the Klan which aimed to make it appealing, likely to young aristocratic
men, by romanticising it and labelling the ‘strange, ghostly appearances’ as ‘confederate
ghosts’ such as one who scared a freedman by claiming ‘he was killed at the battle of Shiloh.’
The article makes no overt description of Klan violence but leaves the statement ‘If negroes
attempt to run away from the K. K. K.’s, these spirits always follow them, and catch them,
17
Fitzgerald, ‘The Ku Klux Klan’, p. 189.
Foner, Reconstruction, p. 432.
19
H. C. Richardson, ‘A Marshall Plan for the South? The failure of Republican and Democratic ideology during
Reconstruction’ in Civil War History, 51 (2005), pp 378-380.
20
Fitzgerald, ‘The Ku Klux Klan’, pp 189, 205-206.
21
C. M. Logue, ‘Racist reporting during Reconstruction’ in Journal of Black Studies, 9 (1979), pp 339-347.
22
Ibid, p. 336.
18
6
and no living man hears from them again,’ open to interpretation.23 Such sentiments
endeared the Klan to the ‘lost cause’ mentality, but not all sections of the White community
were swayed to join the Klan; a minority of conservatives, although opposed to
Reconstruction, could not condone violence. Any public criticism, however, risked an
accusation as a scalawag and violent retaliation; leading to a silence described by one Klan
investigator as ‘the demoralization of public opinion.’24 Membership of the Klan was
extensive and crossed class boundaries. Most members were ex-Confederate soldiers and
poor White farmers with their leaders comprised from planters, merchants, lawyers, and
ministers; thereby leading a Freedmen’s Bureau agent to report ‘The most respectable
citizens are engaged in it, if there can be any respectability of such people.’25 Violence was
hence extensive as it utilised the vast majority of the White conservative community.
The use of violence as a social and political tool became well established in the South
due to the near impunity afforded White supremacists by Presidential Reconstruction.
Pitched street battles between Blacks in Union Leagues and Whites in the Klan were
common; in Rable’s view, the first such street battle in New Orleans in July 1866 was a sign
of ‘the emergence of political violence...marking a shift from social and economic
disturbances’ such as the Memphis race riot in May 1866 ‘to those based on politics.’26
Effective in maintaining conservative ascendancy during the early years of Reconstruction,
such riots and violence, however, provoked a backlash.
Northern public opinion was
incensed that, so soon after the Civil War, ‘Already men are shot by stealth in the late slave
States because they declare justice to be the best policy’ while ‘hatred of the principle of
equal rights before the law massacres the most friendless and unfortunate part of the
population.’27 Such sentiments, fostered by Southern violence, encouraged the Radical
Republican dominated Congress to overrule Johnson.
Radical Republicans were successful in overturning conservative governments and
the Black Codes. They passed legislation with the 14th Amendment, which gave Blacks
many of the rights of citizenship including the right to vote and hold political office and
thereby prohibiting any state from depriving ‘any person of life, liberty or property, without
due process of law.’ It also disqualified ex-Confederates who had not sworn an oath of
loyalty, thus removing potential opposition.28 In protest to the subsequent implementation of
Military Reconstruction created by the Reconstruction Acts of 1867, many White
conservatives boycotted elections in 1868. The electoral register for the South Carolina
constitutional convention had 40,736 and 65,390 White and Black voters respectively.
However, despite urgings by Democratic newspapers to make every White vote count, the
23
Planters’ Banner, 23 May 1868 as quoted in W. L. Fleming (ed.), Documentary history of Reconstruction
(Cleveland, 1966), ii, p. 365.
24
Ku Klux Klan Hearings, p. 1482.
25
Foner, Reconstruction, p. 432; Ku Klux Klan Hearings, p. 151.
26
G. C. Rable, But there was no peace: the role of violence in the politics of Reconstruction (Athens, 1984), p.
43.
27
Harper’s Weekly, 18 August 1866.
28
M. L. Benedict, The fruits of victory: alternatives in restoring the Union: 1865 – 1877 (New York, 1986), p.
118.
7
result was 56,791 for and 2,239 against.29 The result across the South, especially in states
which had a large unionist or Black population such as South Carolina, was Radical
Republican dominated state governments which conservatives labelled ‘Negro and Carpetbag
Rule.’ Such boycotts and governments served to create an atmosphere of alienation and a
belief that the governments were not legitimate. Thus, although it was violence which had
contributed to a federal crackdown, the loss of political voice among Whites increased that
same paramilitary insurgency violence against the new Republican regimes.
Political violence was particularly targeted against Black voters who, through
politicization in the Union League, were highly motivated to exert their democratic right and
support Radical Republican candidates. Klan violence peaked during the 1868 Presidential
election between Grant and Seymour. George Smith, a Georgian freedman, recalled that
before the election ‘large bodies of men were riding about the country in the night for more
than a month. They and their horses were covered with large White sheets, so that you could
not tell them or their horses... I saw them pass my house one night, and I should think there
were thirty or forty of them.’ The Klan made house visits in which they whipped Republican
supporters into promising to vote Democrat; and murdering those who refused. In rural
communities, such intimidation was highly effective as little protection existed for such
Republican supporters. Smith resorted to take his blanket and gun ‘and ran to the woods and
lay out all night, and a good many other nights. Nearly all the Radicals in the neighborhood
lay in the woods every night for two weeks before election.’ That ‘None of the Radicals that
had been Ku-Kluxed tried to vote,’ shows that paramilitary violence was a successful means
by which to undermine Republican activism; despite a strong desire to exercise their right to
vote in a Presidential election for the first time, many Republican supporters understandably
placed survival over politics.30
The Klan’s reach spread into towns, provided only a small federal garrison was
present, where they paraded during the day and read out declarations which had a strong
performance element which were as intimidating as violence; at a parade in Kentucky, Klan
members dragged a ‘stuffed figure representing a dead negro, with a rope about his neck.’31
Despite the extensive presence of the Klan, it could not intimidate every Republican voter. In
such cases, conservatives could use other methods which ranged from simply barring voters
through corrupt or Democrat leaning officials in which ‘judges made them all show their
tickets, and if they were for Grant they would not let them vote,’32 to a mixture of threat and
bribe where Blacks such as Richard Reese were promised ‘that if they vote the Democratic
ticket their tax was paid,’ otherwise ‘if I put my ticket in they would put me in jail.’33
Conservative Whites therefore had a variety of means available to undermine the new
Republican governments. Klan violence effectively intimidated those who would otherwise
have voted, while those who persevered were turned away by threats or hostile officials.
Democrats recognized the importance of all these methods in redeeming Alabama and other
29
Logue, ‘Racist reporting’, p. 336.
‘Statement of George Smith’ in Pierson (ed.), A letter to Hon. Charles Sumner, pp 8-9.
31
Parsons, ‘Midnight rangers’, pp 811-814; Cincinnati Daily Gazette, 11 April 1868.
32
‘Statement of George Smith’ in Pierson (ed.), A letter to Hon. Charles Sumner, p. 9.
33
‘Statement of Richard Reese’ in Pierson (ed.), A letter to Hon. Charles Sumner, p. 9.
30
8
state legislatures; ‘Men in all situations of difficulty are ingenious in their resources, and
must seize upon every weapon of offense and defense (sic) within their reach. It is lawful to
fight the devil with fire.’34
Klan violence was effective in attacking individuals and the property of federal
agencies and programmes including schools and the Freedmen’s Bureau. Associated with
Republican carpetbagger interference and its support of Black education, the Freedmen’s
Bureau was the focus of much conservative hostility and poor White hatred even though
many of its programs had the potential to economically aid poor Whites. Bureau agents
reported feeling unsafe without army support; a Tennessee agent ‘went to bed armed to the
teeth for fear of being attacked in his sleep.’35 In such a situation, in which agents had
inadequate protection, the Bureau could achieve little to aid freedpeople. It had poor access
to policing resources including guns and horses and held little power over authorities who
showed great leniency towards the Klan; of 41 murders in Georgia in 1865-66 only four came
to trial and all were acquitted.36 As symbols of Black freedom, schools were symbolic and
easy targets. In response to a school burning, one freedman, Richard Reese made a plea for
greater government help and to gain sympathy, he emphasised the restraint freedpeople were
showing in not responding: ‘We want some law to protect us. We know that we could burn
their churches and schools, but it is against the law to burn houses, and we don't want to
break the law or harm anybody. We want the law to protect us, and all we want is to live
under the law.’ Federal aid, however, was limited and hence enabled Klan violence to be
extremely effective; a fact recognised by the Klan which they made clear in a death threat
directed at a teacher: ‘Congressional reconstruction, the military, nor anything else under
Heaven, will prevent summary justice being meted out to such an incarnate fiend as
yourself.’37
The failure of the federal government to provide the Republican state governments
with adequate protection, especially army garrisons, enabled the Klan and other paramilitary
groups to commit crimes of school burnings, intimidation, and massacres which may have
been preventable. In Georgia, General Meade issued warnings that anyone involved in
intimidation, inflammatory newspaper articles or violence would ‘be liable to trial and
punishment by military commission.’38 However, this warning was impotent as despite
conservative claims of ‘bayonet rule’, Military Reconstruction did not provide for a military
occupation or operations against violence, merely military administration. In October 1868,
only 17,657 soldiers were stationed in the former Confederacy, 5,685 on the Texan frontier
alone. This force steadily diminished until only 7,700 remained inn 1874, 55% being in
Texas; in stark contrast to the suggested required minimum of 20,000. Additionally, the
majority of this force was infantry; and a lack of cavalry made combat against horseback
34
Mobile Register, 31 July 1868.
P. A. Cimbala, The Freedmen’s Bureau: reconstructing the American South (Malabar, 2005), p.37.
36
Ibid, p. 97.
37
‘Statement of Richard Reese’ and ‘Ku Klux letter ordering author to leave’ in Pierson (ed.), A letter to Hon.
Charles Sumner, pp 9-10.
38
New York Herald Tribune, 6 April 1868.
35
9
insurgents ineffective.39 The passing of the Enforcement and Ku Klux Klan Acts mark the
one serious attempt to combat the Klan but overall they achieved little success. Despite
Grant’s withdrawal of habeas corpus in several regions of South Carolina, troop levels
remained low, Klan leaders were not arrested and therefore it failed to eradicate paramilitary
violence. Ultimately the crackdown arrested several hundred low ranking Klansmen ‘most of
whom the government ended up sending back to their homes anyway.’40 Klan activities did
diminish but this was concurrent with the rise of other White supremacist organizations such
as The White League, Red Shirts, and Rifle Clubs which, as an indication of the lack of
federal threat, significantly did not feel compelled to hide their identity. Thus, although
Meade did ‘not mean to have the shooting done all on one side,’ federal forces were
physically unable to combat paramilitary violence.41 Paramilitary violence was a successful
tool in undermining Reconstruction due in no small part to federal inaction.
Du Bois has claimed that Reconstruction was a story of ‘how civil war in the South
began again – indeed had never ceased.’42 Indeed, organized paramilitary violence became
endemic to the extent that the federal army could not cope and Republican state governments
collapsed. The Klan, and paramilitary violence as a whole, was effective due to its ability to
attract members and support from all sections of the conservative White community. They
did not necessarily have congruent aims. Planters used it as a means of labour control but for
the poor Whites who made up the majority of its membership, it was perceived of as a means
of self defence against an unleashed Black population. During Radical Reconstruction, those
deprived of a political voice found a replacement in paramilitary violence. Democrats
encouraged and utilised the Klan to terrorize Republican voters; a skill which was transferred
easily from rural social control to political intimidation. Due to the political mobilization of
Black and White Republicans, Democrats would have struggled to redeem control of the
southern states without paramilitary violence. The Klan’s effectiveness however, was not
fully of its own making; a failure by the federal government to provide adequate resources to
the army or Freedmen’s Bureau ensured that violence was essentially unchecked. Radical
Republicans have been congratulated for their multiple constitutional amendments and acts
which guaranteed Black political rights on paper, but their inability to provide a strong
federal presence to uphold these rights made many of them meaningless to Blacks terrorized
by violence. The Klan was thus an effective means for conservative and White supremacist
opposition to Reconstruction and set a precedent for how ‘home rule’ was to be maintained.
39
M. Grimsley, ‘Wars for the American South: the first and second Reconstructions considered as insurgencies’
in Civil War History, 58 (2012), pp 10, 397-398.
40
R. Zuczek, ‘The federal government’s attack on the Ku Klux Klan: a reassessment’ in The South Carolina
Historical Magazine, 97 (1996), pp 63-64.
41
New York Herald Tribune, 6 April 1868.
42
Du Bois, Black Reconstruction, p. 670.
10
Bibliography
Primary:
Printed volumes:
Fleming W. L. (ed.), Documentary history of Reconstruction: political, military, social,
religious, educational and industrial 1865to 1906 (2 vols, Cleveland, 1966)
Pierson H. W. (ed.), A letter to Hon. Charles Sumner with “statements” of outrages upon
freedmen in Georgia, and an account of my expulsion from Andersonville GA., by the KuKlux Klan (Washington, 1870). African American pamphlet collection – Library of
Congress.
Newspapers:
Cincinnati Daily Gazette
1868
Harper’s Weekly
1868-1874
Mobile Register
1868
New York Herald Tribune
1868
Official publications:
Testimony of Lt. Col. Dexter H. Clapp, 38th USCT [Freedmen’s Bureau Agent, Pitt County,
N. C.]; in 39th U. S. Congress, Joint Select Committee Report on Reconstruction, June 1866;
After Slavery Project, Unit 9, Document 1 (http://afterslavery.com/chapter9.html)
42nd Congress, 2nd Session, House Report 22: Testimony taken by the Joint Committee to
Enquire into the Condition of Affairs in the Late Insurrectionary States (Ku Klux Klan
Hearings)
Secondary:
Benedict M. L., The fruits of victory: alternatives in restoring the Union, 1865-1877 (New
York, 1986)
Blight D. W., Race and reunion: the Civil War in American memory (Cambridge, 2002)
Cimbala P. A., The Freedmen’s Bureau: reconstructing the American South (Malabar, 2005),
Du Bois W. E. B., Black Reconstruction in America 1860-1880 (New York, 1998)
Fitzgerald M. W., ‘The Ku Klux Klan: property crime and the plantation system in
Reconstruction Alabama’ in Agricultural History, 7 (1997), pp 186-206
Foner E., Nothing but freedom: emancipation and its legacy (Baton Rouge, 1983)
11
Foner E., Reconstruction: America’s unfinished revolution 1863-1877 (New York, 1988)
Grimsley M., ‘Wars for the American South: the first and second Reconstructions considered
as insurgencies’ in Civil War History, 58 (2012), pp 6-36
Logue C. M., ‘Racist reporting during Reconstruction’ in Journal of Black Studies, 9 (1979),
pp 335-349
McClurken J. W., Take care of the living: reconstructing Confederate veteran families in
Virginia (Charlottesville, 2009)
Parsons E. F., ‘Midnight rangers: costume and performance in the Reconstruction-era Ku
Klux Klan’ in The Journal of American History, 92 (2005), pp 811-836
Rable G. C., But there was no peace: the role of violence in the politics of Reconstruction
(Athens, 1984)
Rodgers W. W., ‘The Boyd incident: Black Belt violence during Reconstruction’ in Civil War
History, 21 (1975), pp 309-329
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