They Called Themselves the K.K.K.
Page 6
William Ludwell Sheppard, Harper’s Weekly, July 25, 1868; Library of Congress
The freed people were willing to take extreme risks to exercise their right to vote. They understood that voting meant the power to change things. At the league meetings, they learned how to register to vote and how to use the ballot box. At the time, no secret ballot existed; usually multiple paper ballots, also known as party tickets, were printed on large sheets of paper to be cut up later for voters. In some places, different-colored tickets were used for the different parties, thus making it easy for Klansmen to tell for whom a black voter cast his vote. In truth, both Republicans and Democrats tried to keep the other from voting and both practiced voter fraud. But Republicans were not known to resort to violence.
Illiteracy also posed a problem for some voters. In Russell County, Alabama, for instance, a literate freedman campaigning for local office spotted his opponent, a white Democrat, handing out fraudulent tickets to unsuspecting black voters who couldn’t read. “He handed one to me and it was headed, ‘Republican,’ and in the body of it was Democratic nominees,” said Burton Long.
Long called the white man on the deception, saying, “Mister, you can’t call this a Republican ticket with Democratic nominees.” But when he reported the ruse, Long found himself arrested and jailed for perjury. “Everything I possess is now taken from me because of that election.”
In 1868, the Democratic Party ran on a platform of white supremacy, arguing that white men had to lead the country. They insisted that the former slaves were unprepared for the responsibilities of citizenship and voting. “I do not think he should be permitted to vote,” said a former slave owner from Georgia. “Not because I have any prejudice against him, but because I do not believe he is capable of self-government.”
As black suffrage became a reality in the Reconstructed Southern states, many Democratic candidates for local office realized they needed the vote of their former slaves in order to win. Many believed their former slaves would vote for them, the men who had clothed them and fed them and cared for them as slaves.
But they were wrong, as one candidate discovered when he campaigned for the office of state legislator in Georgia. “Realizing that the vote of the ex-slaves would probably mean election for him,” said Isaiah Green, “he rode through his plantation trying to get them to vote for him. He was not successful, however, and some families were asked to move off.”
Some white landowners encouraged their black workers to attend Democratic rallies. During the rallies, they introduced black Democrats, calling them role models for the freedmen. But this strategy didn’t work, for most freedmen viewed these black Democrats as traitors. “We call them enemies to our people,” said Robert Gleed, a black state senator from Mississippi. “We ostracize them; we won’t associate with them.”
As the former slaveholders watched the freedman think for themselves, they grew to resent them and their Union Leagues.
Tension mounted as the 1868 presidential election neared. The Ku Klux Klan launched a reign of terror against Republicans, whom they blamed for ruining the country. They especially detested Unionists, or Southern-born white men who had opposed secession and who now supported voting rights for black men and other Republican policies. They called such men scalawags, meaning “scamp” or “scoundrel.”
In the eyes of most white Southerners, scalawags were traitors to their country and to their race. “[They] have dishonored the dignity of the white blood,” said one Southern Democrat. A Klansman from South Carolina called them “the meanest, most detestable creatures that ever wore the skin of a white man.”
In Lincoln County, Tennessee, after the Klan pistol-whipped a white Republican in his midsixties, the victim stood up to his attackers. “My political crime is, I have wronged no man,” said William Wyatt. “I have corrupted no man; I have defrauded no man. If God give a man a black skin, I was taught from the cradle not to abuse him, nor tramp on him for what God gave him.”
This 1868 Democratic Campaign badge announces the party’s motto and its two candidates: presidential hopeful Horatio Seymour, and vice presidential hopeful Francis P. Blair.
Photographs and Prints Division, Schomberg Center for Research in Black Culture, New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox, and Tilden Foundation
Black men took their lives into their hands when they attended Loyal League meetings or discussed politics. In Maury County, Tennessee, nine Klansmen attacked an eighteen-year-old freedman who had escaped slavery and fought with the Union army. “They whipped me very hard,” said Charles Belefont, who was too young to vote. “They said I was a damned nigger and had been a Yankee soldier, and they were going to kill all that had been in the Yankee Army, or that belonged to the Union League.” Among the attackers, Charles recognized his former master, who had served in the Confederate army.
As the attacks continued in Tennessee, the Republican legislature passed a law that, among other things, granted the governor the power to send the state militia into any county to protect citizens and enforce the law.
In response, Nathan Bedford Forrest publicly said he didn’t want a war, but he warned that he could raise 40,000 men if Republicans dared to use the militia against the Klan in Tennessee. “I have no powder to burn killing negroes. I intend to kill radicals,” said Forrest in an interview to a reporter for the Cincinnati Commercial. “There is not a radical leader in this town [Memphis] but is a marked man, and if trouble should break out, none of them would be left alive.”
Some employers and landowners fired and evicted workers who voted Republican. Here, a white employer watches as a black man casts his vote.
John T. Trowbridge’s A Picture of the Desolated States, 1865–1866. Library of Congress
Freedmen vote for the first time in 1867 local and state elections. In an accompanying article, the artist Alfred Waud wrote, “The freedmen are represented marching to the ballot-box to deposit their first vote, not with expressions of exultation or of defiance of their old masters and present opponents depicted on their countenances, but looking serious and solemn and determined.”
Harper’s Weekly, November 16, 1867; Library of Congress
Outspoken black men found themselves in trouble with the Klan. “My daddy charge with bein’ a leader ’mongst de niggers,” recalled Lorenza Ezell, a former South Carolina slave. “He make speech and ’struct de niggers how to vote for Grant’s first ’lection. De Klu Klux want to whip him and he have to sleep in a holler log every night.”
But a black editorial writer from Charleston, South Carolina, proclaimed the length to which black voters were willing to go: “If we are to be massacred because we refuse to vote the Democratic ticket; if we are to be murdered in cold blood . . . then let it come—we can die but once.”
Such steadfastness alarmed Southern Democrats, who had believed they would be able to control and manipulate black voters just as they had controlled black people during slavery.
Despite the Klan’s terror tactics, freedmen turned out to vote in extraordinary numbers. In Spartanburgh County, South Carolina, for instance, freedmen swam rivers, waded streams, and walked miles to reach the polls. “A man can kill me,” explained Henry Lipscomb, “but he can’t scare me.”
It was the same throughout the South. In Apling County, Georgia, one hundred black men armed with rifles, pistols, and clubs walked twelve miles to the county seat to vote. In Yazoo, Mississippi, white men beat black men and women who sported Ulysses S. Grant campaign buttons, but many supporters wore the buttons anyway. Some black women walked twenty miles or more to get a Grant button to wear, defying their worried husbands who knew the danger their wives faced.
In November 1868, Republican Ulysses S. Grant won the presidency, garnering 214 electoral votes to his opponent’s 80. A former Union general, Grant symbolized a double Northern victory over the South. His supporters counted on him to end the turmoil and violence in the South.
A victorious Ulysses S. Grant knocks his opponent, Horatio
Seymour, off a horse labeled K.K.K.
Harper’s Weekly, November 14, 1868; Library of Congress
Black voters also helped to elect hundreds of black and white leaders to local- and state-level offices across the South. This feat alarmed many white Southerners, who protested angrily, “The white people of our state will never quietly submit to negro rule.”
Like most fear-based rumors, the claim of “Negro rule,” or being governed by a black majority, wasn’t grounded in fact. In general, the number of elected black officials in a state reflected that state’s black population. Over the next decade, 1,465 black men would hold public office, but white men would continue to dominate Southern politics, holding 60 to 85 percent of all offices.
After the 1868 election, the Democrats’ disappointment turned to fury as they realized the impact black voters had in the election. It was clear that black political power could pose a threat to white supremacy in the future.
A freedman elected to the South Carolina state legislature explained the reaction of Southern whites. “As soon as they found out they were beaten, they began to get mad,” said Henry Johnson. “They have been whipping and thrashing ever since.”
To control future elections, one Southern state after another would pass laws to restrict black men and other “undesirables” from voting. One law required that a voter pay a poll tax, or fee, in order to vote. Other laws required that a voter must own a certain amount of taxable property and be able to read and write. In some black precincts, fewer polling places were made available, requiring black voters to travel far distances.
Many of these laws already existed in the North, but a black Southern senator noted the impact that literacy and property qualifications would have in his state. “They say a man ought not to vote, except he can read and write nicely, and owns $250 or $500 worth of real estate,” said Robert Meacham from Monticello, Florida. “It would exclude two thirds of the colored people.”
But violence remained the method of choice for many white Southerners. Southern Democratic newspapers soon urged readers to organize Ku Klux Klan dens whenever and wherever a Union League formed.
A murdered black voter lies in the street. Harper’s Weekly published this cartoon, captioned “One Vote Less,” by Thomas Nast in two presidential election years, 1868 and 1872, when Grant ran for reelection.
Harper’s Weekly, August 8, 1868; Library of Congress
Sometime after Grant’s election, Klan leaders again met secretly to revise and amend the order’s Prescript, and to formally designate the order as “an institution of Chivalry, Humanity, Mercy, and Patriotism.” Among others, Klansmen made these promises:
to protect the weak, the innocent, and the defenseless from the indignities, wrongs, and outrages of the lawless, the violent, and the brutal; to relieve the injured and the oppressed; to succor the suffering and the unfortunate, and especially the widows and orphans of Confederate soldiers.
to protect and defend the Constitution of the United States, and all laws passed in conformity thereto, and to protect the States and people thereof from all invasion from any source whatever.
to aid and assist in the execution of all constitutional laws, and to protect the people from unlawful seizure, and from trial except by their peers in conformity to the laws of the land.
Klan leaders also devised a series of ten questions for each new member to answer orally. The questions made it clear that the order expected each new member to dedicate himself to white supremacy:
1st. Have you ever been rejected, upon application for membership in the *** [Ku Klux Klan], or have you ever been expelled from the same?
2d. Are you now, or have you ever been a member of the Radical Republican party, or either of the organizations known as the “Loyal League” and the “Grand Army of the Republic [a Union veteran’s organization]?”
3d. Are you opposed to the principles and policy of the Radical party and to the Loyal League, and the Grand Army of the Republic, so far as you are informed of the character and purposes of those organizations?
4th. Did you belong to the Federal army during the late war, and fight against the South during the existence of the same?
5th. Are you opposed to negro equality, both social and political?
6th. Are you in favor of a white man’s government in this country?
7th. Are you in favor of Constitutional liberty, and a Government of equitable laws instead of a Government of violence and suppression?
8th. Are you in favor of maintaining the Constitutional rights of the South?
9th. Are you in favor of the re-enfranchisement and emancipation of the white men of the South, and the restitution of the Southern people to all their rights, alike proprietary, civil, and political?
10th. Do you believe in the inalienable right of self-preservation of the people against the exercise of arbitrary and unlicensed power?
Over the coming year, state after state would ratify the Fifteenth Amendment, granting all male citizens the right to vote, regardless of color or previous condition of servitude. Congress would also pass additional legislation intended to enforce the Fourteenth and Fifteenth amendments. Called the Enforcement Act, the new law would make it a federal offense to bribe or intimidate voters.
But laws are only as good as they are enforced.
Later, Nathan Bedford Forrest would claim that he had urged the Ku Klux Klan to disband after the presidential election. “I was trying to suppress the outrages,” Forrest insisted.
Founding Klansman John Lester would corroborate Forrest’s claim, saying that the Grand Wizard had issued General Order No. 1, instructing all Klansmen to burn all Klan regalia and paraphernalia and to desist from any further outrages.
Historians note that Klan activity in Tennessee and Alabama did subside after the 1868 election. Perhaps this shows that as Grand Wizard, Forrest did try to disband the Klan, and if he did, perhaps he desired to restore peace to the South. Or perhaps he wanted to remove himself from responsibility for Kukluxers who had grown out of control.
This much is known: the order was impossible to enforce, given the proliferation of the dens and the propensity of ignorance, fear, and hate to fester and infect and spread on their own.
And spread they did.
This 1870 print by Thomas Kelly celebrates the passage of the Fifteenth Amendment, which guarantees African Americans the right to vote. Vignettes illustrate the rights guaranteed to black Americans, such as the right to attend school, marry, and worship.
Library of Congress
“We was a-sittin’ dar befo’ de fire, me an’ my ol’ woman, when we heard a stompin’ like a million horses had stopped outside de do’ [door]. We tipped to de do’ an’ peeked out an’ whut we seed was so terrible our eyes jes’ mos’ popped out our haid. Dere was a million hosses all kivered in white, wid dey eyes pokin’ out and a settin’ on de hosses was men kivered in white too, tall as giants, an’ dey eyes was a-pokin’ out too.”
—Gabe Hines, nearly one hundred years old in this 1937 photograph, recalling how frightened he and his wife were when the Klansmen appeared outside their Georgia cabin. The Klansmen kidnapped a “carpetbagger” hiding behind the cabin. The carpetbagger was never seen again.
Library of Congress
CHAPTER 6
“I Am Going to Die on This Land”
For most freed slaves, farming was the work they knew best. As slaves, they had raised most of the cotton, tobacco, rice, sugar, and hemp crops that farmers and planters sold for profit, as well as most of the food grown for the table.
For families such as this Georgia one, freedom meant the right to work for themselves and reap the fruit of their own labor and to live together as a family.
Stereograph by J. N. Wilson, Savannah; PR 065-0081-0009, negative no. 50475; Collection of the New York Historical Society
When the government’s promise of forty acres and a mule wasn’t fulfilled, most freed people had no choice but to continue worki
ng for their former master. With the support of the Freedmen’s Bureau, many freed people bargained for better working conditions. They refused to work in labor gangs under the supervision of an overseer. They bargained for the right to use the landowner’s tools and draft animals. As free workers, they wanted to be treated with dignity and paid for their labor.
Without money to buy land, many freed people sought to rent it, so that they could raise their own food and crops to sell, just as white farmers did. They also wanted to work together as a family, something many hadn’t been allowed to do as slaves. Some freedwomen refused to work in the fields, preferring to care for their children and tend their own gardens.
Like many former slaves, George Taylor didn’t know his exact age, but figured he was twenty-three when the war ended. He didn’t have land, a house, or money, but he burned with desire to improve daily life for himself and his young wife in Colbert County, Alabama.
“I worked night and day,” said George about the first years after freedom. “And had about two or three hundred cords of wood cut, that I got a dollar a cord for; I had men hired to cut the timber laps already down. I was making two or three dollars a day.” This was a remarkable achievement for a former slave.
A freedman plows his leased land in South Carolina. For many freed people, sharecropping was an important first step to land ownership and independence from their former masters.