They Called Themselves the K.K.K.

by Susan Campbell Bartoletti

  Over the next year, the rallies, parades, and favorable newspaper publicity increased the visibility of the “Invisible Empire,” and in turn attracted more members.

  Grand Wizard Nathan Bedford Forrest’s work as a life insurance representative and railroad investor required extensive travel throughout the South. This gave him ample opportunity to promote the Klan. It was probably no coincidence that Klan notices—and new dens—followed his visits to each Southern state.

  Although the Ku Klux Klan admitted white men only, eighteen years and older, women were instrumental in their support, often carrying messages from one den to another, hiding Klansmen from the law and concocting alibis, and preparing meals for the nightriders. Women also sewed the costumes, which ranged from lavish gowns, usually white, red, or black, to cheap facemasks. Some headpieces were elaborately decorated with moons, stars, or horns.

  Here artist Thomas Nast depicts the threat that Nathan Bedford Forrest and other white supremacist leaders pose to the lives and rights of black Americans.

  Harper’s Weekly, September 5, 1868; Library of Congress

  In Tipton County, Tennessee, when a white customer happened upon the wives of several known Kukluxers sewing the costumes in the back room of a store, he found himself in trouble with the Klan. “[They] told me that they were watching me, and that they would kill me if they heard of me talking or telling anything,” said Jacob Davis.

  Klansmen recruited new members, supposedly after a thorough background check. Once approved, the initiates were led, blindfolded, to the meeting place, often in a secluded wooded area or on an abandoned piece of farmland. Some dens met in town in the back rooms of stores; one Florida den met above a drugstore. Amid the costumed men, the initiate knelt and recited the Klan oath.

  Klansmen developed a system of passwords to identify members from other dens. For instance, on meeting a stranger, a Klansman might touch his head above his right ear; if the stranger belonged, he returned the signal by touching his head above his left ear. Or a Klansman might touch his right lapel on his coat and say, “Have you a pin?” A fellow Klansmen knew to return the secret gesture by touching his left hand to his left lapel. Upon meeting at night, a Klansman spelled out, “I S-A-Y,” to which the other spelled, “N-O-T-H-I-N-G.”

  Messengers called Night Hawks gathered information about black people who registered to vote, who taught school, who served as pastors, or whom the Klan considered impudent or uppity, as well as white people who voted Republican or broke the laws of racial etiquette by associating with black people and sympathizing with their plight. They also reported white men who abused their wives, who sold liquor on Sundays, and who visited bawdy houses, and, on occasion, boys who didn’t mind their mothers.

  “The Ku Klux did not consider themselves law-breakers but as law enforcers,” said Ryland Randolph, Grand Cyclops of an Alabama den.

  At their weekly meetings, Klan members listened to each case and then voted. If the majority voted to punish, a group was chosen to carry out the orders—to either warn, whip, or kill. Generally, a den first warned the victim; a second visit meant a whipping; and a third visit meant death. But these practices varied from den to den, and often by the victim’s race. Whites were usually warned first, whereas blacks were whipped or outright murdered without warning.

  The costumes shown here were captured during a raid on a North Carolina den.

  From Green Raum’s The Existing Conflict Between Republican Government and Southern Oligarchy, p. 157

  Traveling by horseback, a Klan den might cover twenty-five to thirty miles in one night. “What is called a raid is a night’s trip,” explained James Justice, a state legislator from North Carolina who was pistol-whipped by several Klansmen. “They may commit twenty violations of law in one night.” Justice estimated several hundred acts of Klan violence, or outrages, in his county alone over a twelve-month period, and even greater numbers in the neighboring counties.

  On a raid, the Klansmen always outnumbered their victims, sometimes forty or more to one. During the attacks, some Klansmen acted theatrically. Speaking in fake foreign accents or gibberish, they claimed to have come from the moon, risen from a Confederate grave, or traveled from the depths of hell to seek revenge.

  Two Alabama Klansmen who threatened a sixty-six-year-old white man wore striped black and white aprons and fake beards and fake mustaches, which they twisted dramatically as they sauntered about the bedroom, sniffing all around the man’s bed, as if there were a great odor. The “stink” was Samuel Horton, a Republican who intended to testify against a Democrat. Horton was spending the night before the trial at the judge’s house, perhaps for protection.

  In a high voice, the first Klansman said, “Is he fat?” to which the second responded in a low voice, “Yes.”

  “Well, we’ll eat him then,” said the first.

  Although frightened, Horton responded with humor, saying, “Look here, gentlemen, I am getting tolerably old now, and it looks to me like I would be tolerable tough eating.”

  Fortunately for Horton, the judge intervened and ordered the Klansmen to leave. They did, but later they found Horton again and threatened to whip him if he didn’t leave the county.

  On a raid, no names were used; each raiding Klansman was assigned a number. They signaled one another with whistles. Three blasts shrilled a warning; four called for help.

  In times of need, Klansmen were obligated to help one another. “We were to swear for them, to help them in distress, and everything that way,” said John Harrill, twenty-two, from North Carolina. “Even if it meant to swear falsely in court for them.”

  In addition to secrecy, the order’s strength also came from absolute obedience. “We were to obey all the orders,” said James Grant, nineteen when he joined a North Carolina den. “When the chief or anybody else wanted anybody whipped or killed, the council was to sit on it and decide what to do with him—whether to whip him, or kill him, or hang him, or gut him, or cut his throat, or drown him, or anything.”

  Klansmen were sworn to kill informers, even fellow members, who divulged information about the order, its rituals, or its members. Reluctant Klansmen who refused to follow orders or who tried to quit were threatened with a whipping or even death. Once James Grant discovered the Klan’s true purpose, he changed his mind about belonging. “I did not believe in whipping a man I had nothing against, and persons with no arms of any description,” said Grant, “and I told them I was going to quit them. . . . I had to leave home for fear they would kill me.”

  Some South Carolina Klansmen would later claim that they were forced to join or joined out of fear. “My neighbors told me I had to go in it, or be whipped in it,” said William Jolly, who was seventeen when he joined.

  “They told me I had better join for fear of being killed,” said Christenberry Tait, a seventeen-year-old Klansman who participated in four raids.

  “I was pressed into the order,” said Junius Tyndall, nineteen, “for they said we had to keep the negroes down; they said they had to keep them from overrunning the white people.” Tyndall went on three raids, attacking black people who planned to hold a dance.

  Few photographs exist of the Reconstruction-era Klansmen, but here a South Carolina man models the costume he once wore as a nightrider, fifty years earlier.

  James Welch Patton, Unionism and Reconstruction in Tennessee 1860–1869 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1934), 175.

  “There was no way to get out of it,” said William Owens, a twenty-five-year-old carriage maker who rode on three raids. “Worms would have been eating me now, I suppose, if I hadn’t gone to the meeting.”

  By 1868 the Ku Klux Klan had spread into every former Confederate state and even Kentucky, a state that had sided with the Union during the war. The greatest number of dens formed in South Carolina, notably the first state to secede from the Union and where the first shot of the Civil War was fired.

  In September that year Grand Wizard Nathan
Bedford Forrest would boast to a Cincinnati Commercial newspaper reporter that membership had topped 550,000 men, with 40,000 in Tennessee alone. If this number is believed, this means that roughly one out of two white Southern men called themselves the Ku Klux Klan.

  The civil rights leader and historian William Edward Burghardt Du Bois (pronounced doo-BOYSS) summed up Reconstruction and the ensuing years in these words: “The slave went free; stood a brief moment in the sun; then moved back again toward slavery.”

  Schomberg Center for Research in Black Culture, New York Public Library

  Five days later, Forrest would recant his estimate, calling it misrepresented. (Other Klansmen would also call it exaggerated.) Although the actual number for the secret organization will never be clear, this much is known: large numbers of white Southerners willingly joined the Ku Klux Klan not because the Klan frightened or intimidated them but because another kind of fear drove them to join.

  Today, psychologists explain that people who join groups such as the Ku Klux Klan are insecure and feel a need to belong to something that makes them feel powerful or superior. Perhaps W. E. B. Du Bois, historian and civil rights leader, understood Klansmen best: “These human beings at heart are desperately afraid of something,” explained Du Bois. “Of what? Of many things, but usually of losing their jobs, being declassed, degraded, or actually disgraced; of losing their hopes, their savings, their plans for their children; of the actual pangs of hunger, of dirt, of crime.”

  “I loved the old government in 1861; I love the old Constitution yet. I think it is the best government in the world if administered as it was before the war. I do not hate it; I am opposing now only the radical revolutionaries who are trying to destroy it. I believe that party to be composed, as I know it is in Tennessee, of the worst men on God’s earth men who would hesitate at no crime, and who have only one object in view, to enrich themselves.”

  —Nathan Bedford Forrest, as interviewed in the Cincinnati Commercial, August 28, 1868, condemning Republicans and their efforts to transform the South and ensure the rights of black Americans

  CHAPTER 5

  “They Say a Man Ought Not to Vote”

  As new Ku Klux Klan dens spread like wildfire throughout the South, President Andrew Johnson and the Republican-controlled Congress were battling each other over Reconstruction. Unwilling to compromise, the president and Congress fought each other at every turn.

  Uncle Sam, shown here as a pharmacist, urges President Johnson to swallow his medicine, the Fourteenth Amendment. Johnson and many other Democrats believed that the Republicans’ “cures” were ruining the country.

  Harper’s Weekly, October 27, 1866; American Social History Project

  Two years earlier, in 1866, the president had vetoed the Civil Rights Act, a law that declared that all persons born in the United States were citizens. A year later, he vetoed the Reconstruction Acts, laws that allowed freedmen to vote in Southern elections and forced the former Confederate states to ratify the Fourteenth Amendment, which granted citizenship and equal protection of the law to the freed people. Both times, Congress overruled the president’s vetoes and passed the legislation.

  But Johnson wouldn’t back down. Determined to fight Congress, Johnson sought other ways to undermine the Republicans’ plans to reconstruct the South. He ignored the Reconstruction Acts.

  In the five Southern military districts, he limited the power of military commanders, stripping away their ability to protect the lives and property of voters as local and state elections took place. He removed military officers who enforced the laws, and in their place he appointed commanders who allowed disqualified Confederates to vote.

  Twice in 1867, Republicans had attempted to bring charges against, or impeach, the president; both times they failed to reach the necessary vote to begin the formal proceedings. In early 1868, Republicans got another chance when Johnson fired a cabinet member whom he considered disloyal. It was no secret that the man, Edwin Stanton, sided with Republicans and opposed the president’s lenient policies toward the South.

  President Johnson is served with a summons to appear for an impeachment hearing before the Senate.

  Harper’s Weekly, March 28, 1868; Library of Congress

  With this firing, Johnson overstepped, violating the Tenure of Office Act of 1867. This act made it illegal for the president to dismiss members of his Cabinet without the consent of Congress. A gleeful Congress accused Johnson of “high crimes and misdemeanors.” This time, the charge stuck and impeachment proceedings began in February 1868.

  The impeachment proceedings angered the Ku Klux Klan. A Virginia den fired off an assassination threat to Thaddeus Stevens, a leading Republican Congressman from Pennsylvania who spearheaded the charges against Johnson and served as one of the prosecutors in the Senate trials. “Your days are numbered, for before the President of the United States is disposed of you will be in hell, where you should have been long ago,” the Klan warning read. “This is a free country, and by Heaven! We will not submit to your damnable laws any longer. If we have not the power to remove the laws, we will remove those who make them.”

  The impeachment proceedings lasted more than three months, but the Senate ultimately acquitted the president by one vote. Although Johnson remained in office, he was a lame duck, politically weakened, with nearly eleven months left in his term.

  Republicans now had the power to take over Reconstruction. They pushed forward on their plan to improve the South with factories, railroads, and public schools, and to further transform the lives of the freed people. By the summer of 1868, seven Southern states—Tennessee, Arkansas, Florida, North Carolina, South Carolina, Louisiana, and Alabama—had been readmitted to the Union. (It would take two more years for Virginia, Mississippi, Texas, and Georgia to meet the Reconstruction requirements.)

  The impeachment of Andrew Johnson was a popular event for spectators. Here is a copy of a ticket to watch the proceedings.

  Harper’s Weekly, April 4, 1868; Special Collections, Binghamton University

  With the readmission of these seven states, Congress had the requisite number—twenty-eight out of thirty-seven, or three-quarters—needed to ratify the Fourteenth Amendment. In addition to guarantees of citizenship to every person born or naturalized in the United States and equal protection under the law, the amendment also barred any state from taking a person’s life, liberty, or property “without due process of the law.” And, for the first time, the amendment specified that voters were male. This ratification by Congress was an important protection, for the Supreme Court must honor all amendments. Laws, however, can be overturned more easily.

  The country now turned its attention to the fall presidential election between the Republican and former Union general Ulysses S. Grant and the Democrat Horatio Seymour.

  Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper typically did not support the Republican Party, but in these two illustrations artist James E. Taylor shows a black American listening to a white candidate lobbying for his vote (top) and registering to vote (bottom).

  Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper, November 30, 1867; Library of Congress

  The fall 1868 election would be the first national election since the war’s end, and for Southern voters, the first since secession in 1861. It would also mark the first opportunity for freedmen to vote for a president.

  Both Republicans and Democrats vied for the freedman’s vote. But most black Americans flocked to the Republican Party, the party of Abraham Lincoln that had freed them and secured them the right to vote. “I do believe it [the Republican Party] comes nearer to God’s will and universal love and friendship in this world that any other,” explained Elias Hill, a black preacher from South Carolina. “I believe the Republican Party advocates what is nearer the laws of God than any other party.”

  By 1868, nearly every black voter belonged to a Republican political organization such as the Union League, or the Loyal League. These leagues had begun in the North as
Republican patriotic clubs during the war and then spread throughout the South after the war. It would be another fifty-two years before women won the right to vote, but women and children attended the meetings and rallies and picnics.

  The leagues met in schools and in churches. The meetings provided an opportunity for the freed people to learn about political issues such as taxes, public education, labor, and equal rights. Determined to work within the law, black leaders developed legal strategies to protect themselves and their rights as well as to combat Klan terrorism. They wanted local authorities—sheriffs, police, and elected officials—to enforce the laws equally, regardless of race. “The laws of this State are as good as any man can ask,” said the Reverend Charles H. Pearce, a black minister and Republican leader, about Florida. “But I am sorry to say they have not been carried out in many instances.”

  Republicans nominated Ulysses S. Grant for president, hoping the general would end turmoil in the South. In accepting the nomination, Grant promised to “endeavor to administer all the laws in good faith, with economy, and the view of giving peace, quiet, and protection everywhere.” He closed his letter with the words “Let us have peace.”

  Library of Congress

  This 1868 illustration shows newly enfranchised freedmen engaged in a lively political discussion.