They Called Themselves the K.K.K.

by Susan Campbell Bartoletti

  In his long reports to the adjutant general, Merrill cited outrage after outrage and vented his frustration. “It requires great patience and self-control to keep ones [sic] hands off these infamous cowards,” he wrote, “when absolute knowledge exists of who they are, and what they do, and what they propose to do.”

  At last, President Grant realized something that thousands of Klan victims had long known: that life and property were in peril and that justice was impossible in Southern local and state courts. The Klan’s influence and corruption were too widespread. “That the power to correct these evils is beyond the control of the State authorities, I do not doubt,” wrote President Grant in a message to Congress.

  But as Major Merrill had lamented, the United States Constitution limited the federal government’s power to use federal soldiers against any state. In order to deploy federal troops to a state such as South Carolina, the federal government had to give itself the right to intervene.

  That’s just what President Grant intended to do.

  In April, President Grant signed the Civil Rights Act of 1871, better known as the Ku Klux Klan Act. This new law enforced the Fourteenth Amendment, which had been ratified nearly three years earlier in 1868. The Ku Klux Klan Act made it a federal offense to interfere with an individual’s right to vote, hold office, serve on a jury, or enjoy equal protection of the law.

  The act also made it illegal for groups to conspire together or wear disguises to intimidate or harm individuals or to hinder state authorities from protecting citizens. Those groups or individuals accused of doing these things would be tried in a federal court, not in local or state courts.

  In cases of extreme violence, the act authorized the president to send in federal troops and to suspend the writ of habeas corpus—or the right to be brought before a judge and not be arrested and jailed and held for trial without evidence. This would allow the federal government to move quickly, making mass arrests. Otherwise, each arrest would have to be backed with formal charges.

  On April 20, 1871, President Ulysses S. Grant signed the Civil Rights Act of 1871, better known as the Ku Klux Klan Act.

  Frank Leslies Illustrated Newspaper, May 13, 1871; Library of Congress

  This last piece of legislation incensed Democrats, who argued that the new law was “unlawful seizure” and was a direct violation of the United States Constitution, which said that “the privilege of the writ of habeas corpus shall not be suspended.” But the Constitution also stated: “unless when in cases of rebellion or invasion or the public safety may require it.”

  Democrats insisted the Klan reports were exaggerated and there was no need to legislate against a “myth.” They called the new laws dire threats to individual freedom. A Southern woman complained bitterly about such “unlawful seizure.” “White men would be arrested on blank warrants or no warrant at all,” wrote Myrta Lockett Avary, “carried long distances from home, held for weeks or months, and then be released without ever being brought to trial.”

  But leading Republicans defended the legislation. “If the Federal Government cannot pass laws to protect the rights, liberty, and lives of citizens of the United States in the States,” asked Benjamin Butler, a member of the House of Representatives who had authored the legislation, “why were guarantees of those fundamental rights put in the Constitution at all?”

  At last, with the Ku Klux Klan acts in place, President Grant and the federal government had the power and authority to move against the Klan.

  “And I want to say further that the K.K.K. saved our State from ruin and that it has had a wholesome influence over the lawless element up to the present time.”

  —Milius S. Carroll, in 1924. As a South Carolina Klansman, Carroll participated in the murderous raid on Jim Williams in 1871.

  CHAPTER 10

  “The Sacredness of the Human Person”

  President Grant sent undercover detectives to the Klan-infested states. Pretending to be businessmen or men looking for work, the detectives infiltrated the order. They uncovered names and other secret information about the Klan, from signs to passwords to codes to even their secret cry for help: “Avalanche.” They dashed their reports across telegraph wires to the president.

  Although the federal government now had the power to use force, the Justice Department hoped to use legal means to break up the Klan. They wanted to prove that the United States was a nation of laws, and that its laws would work to arrest, hold trials, and punish the guilty—if enforced. The Justice Department intended to use federal soldiers only as a last resort to help local authorities make arrests.

  To set their plan in motion, the Justice Department authorized a joint committee of seven senators and fourteen representatives, both Republicans and Democrats, to investigate conditions in the Southern states. This joint committee sent subcommittees to South Carolina, North Carolina, Georgia, Florida, Tennessee, Alabama, and Mississippi, where the Klan was considered most virulent. Only minimal effort was made to gather evidence from Louisiana, Arkansas, Texas, Virginia, and Tennessee. No effort was made in Kentucky.

  The Ku Klux Klan Act empowered federal authorities to intervene in local and state affairs. In August 1871, a North Carolina den sentenced the Republican John Campbell (pictured here) to death. Fortunately, a U.S. marshal and federal soldiers arrived in time to save the condemned man and arrest the Klansmen.

  Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper, October 7, 1871; Library of Congress

  For the next eight months, from May through December 1871, the subcommittees gathered testimony from witnesses from all walks of life: Klansmen and victims; Republicans and Democrats; planters, farmers, and poor whites; the educated and the uneducated; preachers and teachers; blacks and whites, male and female; adults, teenagers, and children. The youngest Klansman, the son of a South Carolina Klan leader who inducted him before taking him on a raid, was thirteen.

  Each witness was examined and cross-examined during public hearings. Newspaper reporters quoted the witnesses and summarized their testimony. For weeks, Northern readers followed the trials closely, shocked at the extent and horror of the violence.

  In Clay County, Florida, when the freedman Samuel Tutson and his wife, Hannah, learned about the investigation, they took their land title and headed to the county seat, Green Cove Springs, where they had heard they could find a United States lawyer.

  There, someone pointed the Tutsons to a public bathhouse. They stood outside until several important-looking white men emerged. “Isn’t one of you gentlemen a United States lawyer?” asked Samuel Tutson. When one of the men responded yes, Samuel showed him the land title and told him how Kukluxers had beat him and his wife, trying to force them from the land they had owned and worked for three years.

  Three weeks later, Samuel and Hannah sat in a Jacksonville, Florida, courthouse, testifying before the congressional subcommittee. They recounted the brutal attack and told how no arrests had been made.

  In state after state throughout the South, hundreds of freed people like the Tutsons stepped forward to tell their stories. It took great courage, for no witnesses knew what awaited them after testifying, whether they would be evicted or fired, or beaten or killed.

  Still they came forward. Some, such as Henry Lipscomb from South Carolina, told how men whom they had known their entire lives attacked them. Henry’s seventy-five-year-old brother described the crippling beating he suffered and how he had lost the greatest part of his crop. He told of his own fear and the terror that permeated the black communities. “They are afraid to stay in their houses of a night,” said Daniel Lipscomb. “If I hear a stick crack, I am watching to see them come and take me. . . . I have been stung once, and a burnt child fears the fire.”

  In Alabama, George Taylor told the court how he and his wife lost all that they had owned after the Klan forced them out of their home and off their land, leaving a substantial crop in the ground, provisions enough to last the year, two mules, and a horse that George had bargained
for.

  In Yorkville, South Carolina, the crippled preacher Elias Hill whispered the names of his attackers out of fear they might hear. He described the devastating effect the Klan’s raids had on him and the black community. “We do not believe it possible, from the past history and present aspect of affairs, for our people to live in this country peaceably, and educate and elevate their children to that degree which they desire,” said Elias. “They do not believe it possible—neither do I.”

  Later that fall, Elias Hill and 167 other former slaves would board a ship and sail for Liberia, a free republic founded in 1847 on the western coast of Africa. Its founders, the American Colonization Society, believed that white prejudice would never allow black people to enjoy full citizenship in the United States.

  In Columbia, South Carolina, Rosy Williams described how Jim hadn’t wanted to relinquish his guns, how the Klan had raided their cabin, and how they had tied a rope around her husband’s neck. She told how the Klan dragged Jim into the woods, and how the next day, she found his body hanging from a pine tree. But the widow was discharged as a witness after the defense counsel objected to her testimony about the guns as “hearsay.”

  Cornelius McBride, the white schoolteacher from Mississippi, carried his notebooks to Washington. Relying on his notes, McBride provided eighteen pages of testimony about the Klan’s raids against teachers and freed people in Sparta, Mississippi, and nearby counties, recounting each violent episode in detail.

  These freed people from Arkansas await transportation to Liberia, Africa, where they hope to own land and lead independent lives, a dream they no longer considered possible in the United States. Most black Americans, however, refused to surrender their claim to United States citizenship and equal rights. “We are not Africans now, but colored Americans, and are entitled to American citizenship,” wrote one man in 1877.

  Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper, April 24, 1880; Library of Congress

  He explained how fear kept victims from pressing charges. “I was the only one that attempted it,” said McBride, “and I risked my life in doing it. I knew that I was playing a game of life and death in doing it; that those men would kill me if they could.”

  To the committee, McBride summarized the sort of men who joined the Ku Klux Klan. “As a general thing, they are an ignorant, illiterate set of men, and they seem determined to keep everybody else the same.”

  To the most violent regions, President Grant dispatched U.S. marshals and federal soldiers to deal with the nightriders. Using his new authority, Grant suspended the writ of habeas corpus in nine South Carolina counties so that suspected Klansmen could be arrested and jailed in mass numbers without a wait for evidence.

  A Yankee schoolteacher from New York testifies before a Senate committee, describing how the Klan brutally attacked him, forcing him to flee the Southern school where he taught.

  Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper, April 8, 1871. Special Collections, Binghamton University

  The South Carolina Klansmen were ordered to surrender their arms and disguises. As federal marshals and their troops closed in, hundreds of the South Carolina Klansmen surrendered. In some cases, entire dens surrendered together. Many pleaded guilty and agreed to testify in return for immunity or light sentences. The Klan called these men “pukers.” Some dens swore revenge on pukers and others who testified against the Klan.

  Throughout the South, thousands of Klansmen fled. In South Carolina alone, an estimated two thousand Klansmen escaped to Canada. Among these fugitives were two prominent York County physicians: James Rufus Bratton, who had organized the murderous raid on Jim Williams, and Edward Avery, who had led another brutal attack on a black preacher. Their friends claimed that it was impossible that good citizens such as the two doctors could have committed such crimes and that the two doctors were only fleeing from despotism.

  Democrats reacted with great indignation and hostility toward the mass arrests and prosecutions. They condemned the victims’ stories as lies or distortions of the truth. Some accused the victims of provoking the attacks. In Alabama, a U.S. congressman told how the Patona residents blamed William Luke for the hostility he had aroused, especially among the leaders of the local Klan dens. “Luke had made himself particularly obnoxious,” said Peter Dox, a Democrat. “He was a miscegenationist [sic]. . . . That doctrine is very offensive among those mountaineers.”

  Other witnesses argued that the Klansmen were reluctant regulators who had taken the law into their own hands in order to prevent or punish political corruption. Unfortunately, the charges of corruption were often true. Throughout the Reconstruction years, many Republican officials, black and white, had engaged in fraudulent activities, from voter fraud to moneymaking schemes. So had Democrats.

  Without the funds or the staff to prosecute the thousands of Klansmen, the prosecutors concentrated on Klan leaders. Some Klan leaders, such as Nathan Bedford Forrest, were granted immunity in exchange for their testimony.

  Despite the immunity, Forrest evaded the questions, often claiming he didn’t know. Although men who knew Forrest well credited him with a quick mind and a good memory, Forrest repeatedly told the prosecutor, “I do not remember” and “I do not recall.”

  He refused to admit his role in the Klan, but he justified the order’s vigilante violence, arguing that Klansmen defended the South against Northern Republican aggression and from outrages committed by black people. “I think this organization was got up to protect the weak,” said Forrest, “with no political intention at all.”

  When the prosecutor asked about the Cincinnati Commercial newspaper interview in which Forrest revealed that the Klan numbered about 550,000 men, Forrest again blamed the reporter. “The whole statement is wrong, he did not give anything as it took place,” said Forrest under oath. “So far as numbers were concerned I knew nothing about the numbers of the organization. . . . I knew nothing about its operations.”

  Forrest claimed that he learned about the Ku Klux Klan from “information from others.” Yet when pressed for the names of those people, he said that one was dead and that he couldn’t recall the names of the others.

  But Forrest took credit for urging the Ku Klux Klan to disband after the presidential election of 1868. “I talked with different people that I believed were connected with it, and urged its disbandment, that it should be broken up,” said Forrest. “My object was to keep peace.”

  There was little doubt that Forrest knew more than he told and that the famous cavalry general had outmaneuvered the prosecutor. Afterward, in a bar, Forrest allegedly told a friend, “I’ve been lying like a gentleman.” The Congressional investigating committee would ultimately decide in Forrest’s favor, finding no evidence that he had founded or led the Klan.

  Just a few months earlier, black men, women, and children had hidden in the South Carolina woods and swamps, out of fear for the Klan. Now, hundreds of South Carolina Klansmen hid in the woods to avoid arrest. Several hundred others testified or pleaded guilty in return for immunity or light treatment, which was given to men such as Milus Carroll, who admitted to the raid on Jim Williams but denied knowing who had murdered him. Carroll was fined one hundred dollars and sentenced to eighteen months.

  Many Klansmen in their late teens and early twenties blamed their lack of education, which one judge described as “deplorable ignorance.” These men claimed they had been duped into joining, saying it was customary for poor men like themselves to follow orders from the leading men in the communities.

  Some South Carolina Klansmen such as William Self sounded remorseful. “I know I done wrong,” Self told the judge. “I was ordered to do it by the Klan; of course, I didn’t feel like it was right.” The judge called William Self’s conduct “unmanly” and sentenced him to three months, including time already “suffered.”

  Others seemed unrepentant or unable to see what they had done was wrong. After nineteen-year-old Frederick Harris confessed to five raids, naming the black men that he
and his den had pulled from bed and whipped, Judge Hugh Bond asked, “Would you not have thought it wrong if James Gaffney [one of the victims] had dragged you out of bed and whipped you?”

  “Well,” said Harris, “I suppose I would have thought hard of it.”

  “Don’t you suppose he thought the same?”

  “I didn’t know whether it was wrong or not,” answered Harris. “I was ordered to do it by the committee.”

  Judge Hugh Bond was appalled at the lack of empathy and remorse and conscience in the Klansmen who stood before him. “None of you seems to have the slightest idea of, or respect for, the sacredness of the human person,” he told them.

  The judge told the Klansmen that they had to make a choice: either to be ignorant and follow the laws of the Ku Klux Klan or to be men and follow the laws of the United States. “They cannot exist together,” said Judge Bond about the choices. “And it only needs a little manliness and courage on the part of you ignorant dupes of designing men to give supremacy to the law.”

  “Every man has to serve God under his own vine and fig tree.”

  —Martin Jackson, recalling this advice from his father, 1937. In other words, his father is saying that the full promise of freedom is a person’s right to work for himself and to reap the fruits of his own labor without fear. Martin Jackson, born a slave in 1847, is shown here at age ninety.

  Library of Congress

  EPILOGUE

  “It Tuck a Long Time”

  Some modern historians call the Ku Klux Klan trials a great victory. Through the judicial system and the presence of military troops, the federal government succeeded in breaking up the Klan, something that the Southern state governments had been unable or unwilling to do. These historians point to evidence that shows order returned to the chaotic South and that violence declined.