by Philip Dray
While Klan attacks were often related to politics, they could also be prompted by other perceived transgressions, even incidental ones—buying land where poor whites resided; leaving a job or refusing to work; not giving way in a carriage; disrespecting a white woman; operating a moonshine business that competed with whites; or, as one Klansman complained of his victim, for "acting the Big Man and fool generally." Turning to white authorities or courts for help was hardly an option in areas where Klan membership was widespread enough to include almost every white man. Police, retired military men of rank, businessmen, physicians, and even ministers held places in the group's leadership. A teacher at a college in Limestone Springs, unable to obtain a Klan disguise in time for one midnight rendezvous, showed up in his professorial gown. The lower levels of the organization were often filled with teenage boys, most too young to have worn the gray but who identified with the Lost Cause.
Blacks had to be especially careful not to appear to succeed at the expense of individual whites. In 1871 a coachman named Samuel Simmons, representing his widowed employer in a horse trade, apparently got the better of a white neighbor named Beloue. When Simmons and the woman next rode out in their carriage, Beloue intercepted the pair, telling the widow he would "put six balls through your boy" and assuring Simmons he would "bring the Ku Klux on you, and swing you to a limb until you are dead, by God." Beloue was as good as his word: Klansmen with horns on their heads came to Simmons's house in the middle of the night and whipped him, explaining that they were the ghosts of Confederate soldiers slain at Gettysburg. They instructed their terrified victim to observe that one of the Klansman's horns had been bent as he crawled from the grave.
Klan assaults on lonely black settlements, though chiefly meant to intimidate residents and prevent voting and other political activity, often included acts of sexual humiliation and molestation of black women; night riders forced women to lower their dresses, or strip completely, to receive a lashing across the back. Rape was not uncommon. Such acts dehumanized black women, humiliated their male kinfolk, and reinforced the idea that white men controlled the region's sexual dynamics.
The Klan's wrath at times did not even spare ex-Confederates. George W. Garner of Union County, who had fought at Antietam and Fredericksburg, angered local Klansmen by serving as a deputy sheriff for the local Republican government. Irritated by his "damned Radical way of doing," they took Garner from his house one night and administered a painful flogging. "They cut my back all to pieces, and told me if I did not announce myself as a true Democrat, and promise it faithfully, that they would come back and kill me." What the Klan was after—in Garner's case and in many others—were public statements or acts of contrition, meant to shame anyone, white or black, who had been led into wayward alliance with the Republicans. Isaiah Brown of Spartanburg, when threatened, dutifully placed a notice in his local paper, stating, "I did honestly believe that it was in my interest to vote with the Radical party, and that that party was the colored man's friend, but I am now most thoroughly convinced of my error." The black residents of one village became so anxious that they issued a preemptive public proclamation: "We will no longer be used as tools or instruments in placing [Radical] men into office, but will hereafter identify ourselves with the interests of the good people among whom we have been brought up." E. Henry Bates, like Garner a Confederate veteran, was forced to deny publicly any sympathy for the Radicals, stating, "I have an utter abhorrence for their principles and constitutions."
An example of the economic coercion that often accompanied Klan intimidation across the South was Edgefield County's Agricultural and Police Club, founded in 1870. To protect local landholding interests, its members were forced to swear an oath not to sell land to blacks. The club also worked to isolate uncooperative white men, for local backsliding was worrisome: in 1872 a coalition of moderate Democrats and Republicans claimed several municipal positions in an election, and, in an even more glaring affront, a white Republican staged his marriage to a local freedwoman on the steps of the county courthouse. Any man who failed to join, according to George Tillman, a group founder, was to be treated "as a whole nigger should be treated ... pass him and his whole family with silent contempt ... let him or any of his household get sick, or even die with none to cheer the lonely hours, or to bury the tainted remains, but his nigger associates." Such ostracism in an insular rural area could be psychologically unbearable: an Edgefield County land-owner named Joshua McKie made the mistake of renting property to a black; finding himself shunned by friends, tradesmen, and even his own relatives, he committed suicide. Trapped between their belief in Reconstruction and the mounting hostility of their neighbors, while residing in remote hamlets with little hope of federal protection or even contact with political allies, whites with Republican sympathies increasingly felt endangered. One North Carolina carpetbagger described them as "the worst frightened men you ever saw."
Many Americans, including members of Congress, were reluctant at first to contemplate the scope of the Klan's activities, almost as if the nation, utterly weary of civil war, could not bring itself to acknowledge the evidence of renewed Southern agitation. "The Northern mind, being full of what is called progress, runs away from the past," Attorney General Amos Akerman would observe. Indeed, the ratification of the postwar amendments had created much false hope in the North—the faith that once given the vote, America's newest citizens would soon learn to stand on their own, using their new political power to secure their own safety and confront all manner of social, economic, and educational challenges. This was exasperating to men like Akerman, Frederick Douglass, and Charles Sumner, who were convinced that the willful spirit of secessionist defiance, which had surprised the North in 1861 and had taken four bloody years and all the North's resources to put down, was far from suppressed. "The principle for which we contended," Jefferson Davis had vowed at war's end, "is bound to reassert itself, at another time, and in another form," words that by the early 1870s appeared darkly prescient.
One potential tool to combat the Klan in the South was the militias, which state governments were authorized to use against insurrection or lawlessness; in Tennessee, North Carolina, and Texas, militia units did act to quash Klan activity. But this approach was problematic: militias were expensive to maintain at a time when funds were desperately needed for myriad projects related to Reconstruction; citizens resented having to support a standing military force; and many whites refused to serve as peers of freedmen or subordinates of black officers. Also, because in many places militias were largely made up of blacks, authorities feared that using them against Klan vigilantes would alarm the white populace and possibly excite more general racial violence. In 1871, Governor William Holden of North Carolina paid the ultimate political price for dispatching his state's militia against the Klan; he became the first governor in American history to be impeached and removed from office.
The white public's deep-rooted hostility to black armed men in uniform was occasionally expressed in attempts to banish the playing of drums—the militias' usual means of rousing their members. Also offensive were the militiamen's love of brightly colored outfits, sashes, and hats and the tendency of black men, women, and children to turn out in large numbers to cheer units of black militiamen and military bands, evidently as thrilled with the novel spectacle of armed black pageantry as whites were bothered by it. Reconstruction South Carolina saw several violent incidents related to black militias parading in public. In one example, a streetcar moving along Charleston's King Street on March 27, 1871, came up behind two black militia companies. After the car lurched close to the militia's ranks, the blacks accused the driver of disrespect and began using their bayonets and gunstocks to smash the car's windows. Terrified passengers fled. The next day's Daily News blamed "the atrocious policy of allowing excited and vindictive negroes to parade the public streets with arms in their hands. These negroes are not to be trusted with deadly weapons." Disarming militiamen, and blacks in g
eneral, thus became a fixation of the Klan, and raids on black households often included an effort to locate and confiscate guns.
In South Carolina the state militia had about twenty thousand members in 1870, but only half were armed; and though they had shown themselves capable of guarding polling places, many militiamen lacked training and were said to suffer an innate reluctance to fight. As the carpetbagger Daniel Chamberlain would inform President Grant,
The long habit of command and assertion on the part of the whites...[and] the fact that at least four fifths of the property of these [Southern] states are in their hands ... give them an easy physical superiority ... over the recently emancipated race, who still exhibit the effects of their long slavery in their habit of yielding to the more imperious and resolute will ... and material resources of the white men.
The Klansmen, many of whom were Confederate veterans, also had the overwhelming advantage of combat experience in battle and a sense of military tactics. As The Nation observed: "The fighting men of the South are all on the Ku-Klux side."
In an effort to comprehend the magnitude of the threat the Klan posed, Congress in December 1870 created the Joint Committee to Inquire into the Condition of Affairs in the Late Insurrectionary States, one of the first large-scale congressional investigations in the country's history. Committee members fanned out across the South to hear evidence of Klan outrages. The result was a massive thirteen-volume document—a kind of black book of Southern disturbances, listing abuses ranging from voter intimidation to whippings and murder. The report revealed a clear pattern of white brutality and made novel use of the raw, unfiltered voices of Southern freedmen taken in recorded testimony. Released in February 1872, eight months before the presidential election, its executive summary reminded the country of the need to maintain Reconstruction's authority over the unstable former Confederacy and, as some Southern critics charged, the importance of reelecting President Grant.
Grant took action even before the report was concluded. In May 1870, he encouraged Congress to pass the first of several major Enforcement Acts prohibiting the use of intimidation, bribery, or force to violate voting rights and making it an offense to wear a disguise on public highways or on private property in order to harm or intimidate voters. Another, passed in February 1871, established the means for federal officials to monitor and supervise congressional elections. Despite their name, though, the laws were somewhat vague as to the precise means of safeguarding voters' rights on a reliable basis and punishing abuses. As one congressman lamented, "It is not law that is wanted in the South; it is the execution of the laws."
There was, however, already talk of another major enforcement act that would deal directly with the Klan. It involved extending the judicial reach of the federal government to address criminal acts that had always been a matter for local and state courts. This was extremely controversial, for Southerners already decried the voting-related Enforcement Acts as federal bullying. But was there any alternative? To many Northerners it seemed that the sacrifice of the Civil War would be meaningless unless Ku Kluxism could be stopped. "If the federal government cannot pass laws to protect the rights, liberty, and lives of citizens of the United States in the states, why were guarantees of those fundamental rights put in the Constitution at all, and especially by acts of amendment?" asked Congressman Benjamin Butler, who helped draft the new legislation. If an American citizen was waylaid or assaulted abroad, in a foreign nation, he asserted, it would be expected that "the whole power of the Republic" would be available to "protect him and redress his wrongs." It only made sense that a citizen terrorized as he slept peacefully in his bed, "on our own soil, under his own roof-tree, and covered by our own flag," should enjoy the same security. During the House discussion of the issue, it was said that Butler displayed a bloodied nightshirt worn by a county school superintendent in Mississippi who had been flogged by the Klan—the origin of the expression "waving the bloody shirt," that is, eliciting Northern sympathy for the victims of Southern vigilantism. There is some question as to whether Butler actually did this, and evidence suggests that the expression was in use earlier, its exact genesis unknown; but whatever its origin, the term, and the concept to which it referred, would recur frequently in debates over Reconstruction.
The South Carolina representative Joseph Rainey reported to his white congressional peers that the Klan situation at home had become so severe not even state authorities were safe and that he himself had been threatened. Rainey had received a message from the Klan, scrawled in red ink, with crude drawings of a skull and crossbones:
K.K.K.
Beware! Beware! Beware!
Your doom is sealed in blood
Special Order: Headquarters 17th Division, Cyclopian Cyclop Commandery
At a regular meeting of this post on Saturday it was unanimously resolved that notice be given to J. H. Rainey and H. F. Heriot to prepare to meet their God.
Take heed, stay not. Here the climate is too hot for you. We warn you to flee. You are watched each hour. We warn you to go.
"When myself and colleagues shall leave these halls and turn our footsteps toward our Southern home," Rainey explained, "we know not but that the assassin may await our coming."
However, many in Congress shunned the idea that the federal government might appropriate local authority to address crimes of murder, assault, and trespass. Indeed, many in Congress, including the Ohio Republican congressman James A. Garfield, worried about the constitutionality of such a step as well as the apparent rush to usurp state authority and thus hand Southern Democrats more cause for protest. Others felt that although bold federal laws had been, of necessity, passed in the war's immediate aftermath, now was the time to rein in such impulses. "We have reconstructed, and reconstructed, and we are asked to reconstruct again," declared Representative John F. Farnsworth of Illinois. "We are governing the South too much."
The Nation expressed an additional fear: that a "Ceasarist" doctrine of federal law enforcement would cause state-level government to atrophy. The magazine called for "restoration of peace and order" in the South "by natural processes" and discouraged the "desperate attempt" to exploit "the humanitarian feelings of the Northern people." Klan outrages, it suggested, were the inevitable result of the ill-conceived disenfranchisement of the South's "natural" leadership and the subjection of Southern whites to "the rule of [the community's] most ignorant members [blacks], aided or managed by knavish adventurers [carpetbaggers]." The Nation concluded that empowering the federal government to repress the Klan would simply compound one bad policy decision with another, delaying the moment when the Southern people ultimately made their own peace with the black population in their midst. "We must," it averred, "hand the Government over to the people."
President Grant wrestled with the problem. Certainly, it would be better if local or state law enforcement would put down vigilantism, but it was obvious that the Klan would never be effectively prosecuted that way, for few residents in their areas of operation were bold enough to testify against them, many jurists dared not convict them, and most sheriffs were too frightened or sympathetic to investigate their crimes or hold them in custody. Some Southern courts seemed to act as agencies of the Klan itself. When William Wright, a black citizen of York County, South Carolina, accused Klansman Abraham Sapoch of leading a Klan posse that whipped Wright and set fire to his house, Sapoch slapped Wright with a lawsuit for perjury and false arrest. After a court deliberated, Sapoch was set free to return to his Klan unit, and Wright, the complainant, was dispatched to the state penitentiary.
"Sir, we are in terror from Ku-Klux threats & outrages," a white woman, Mrs. S. E. Lane, the wife of a Presbyterian minister, informed the president in a letter from Laurens County, South Carolina.
Our nearest neighbor, a prominent Repub'can now lies dead, murdered by a disguised Ruffian Band, which attacked his house at midnight. His wife also was murdered ... she was buried yesterday, and a daughter is lying dangerously
ill from a shot-wound. My husband's life is threatened [and] we are in constant fear and terror. Ought this to be? It seems almost impossible to believe that we are in our own Land.
Another upcountry white, C. F. Jones, confided that
I am a clergyman, superannuated, dwelling on my plantation, having a number of colored tenants and hired laborers. On Thursday night ... my farm was invaded by a gang of disguised ruffians, who went from house to house, dragging the inmates out, beating them, firing pistols at them, etc. A bullet has since been extracted from the head of one. Another aged, upright, Christian man, was slaughtered, in his own yard, while begging them to spare him.
Such cries for help were impossible to ignore but could not completely outweigh Grant's concern that federal anti-Klan policies might appear overbearing. Attorney General Akerman, however, was less hesitant; his unusual dual background as a Unionist with powerful Southern sympathies, and his intimate knowledge of life in the rural South, allowed him to grasp more readily than others both the evil the Klan represented and the imperative that it be stopped.
Shortly after graduating from Dartmouth in 1842, Akerman, who had respiratory problems related to a childhood swimming incident, was advised by doctors to relocate to a southern climate. He found employment in South Carolina, tutoring the children of the elite, and later moved to Savannah to serve as a private instructor to the children of John M. Berrien, a U.S. senator and a former attorney general under Andrew Jackson. In exchange Berrien provided Akerman with an education in the law. In 1850 Akerman became an attorney in Habersham County, Georgia, and purchased a three-hundred-acre farm, which he worked himself, along with a small "force" of slaves.
Faithful to the principle of the rule of law, he sided with his adopted state when war came, worried that Lincoln's policies toward the South lacked consistency and fearful of the turmoil emancipation might bring. He joined a home guard unit that was activated when Union forces entered Georgia in spring 1864. However, he accepted the war's outcome as inevitable and served as a delegate to Georgia's constitutional convention of 1867–68, believing it his duty "to let Confederate ideas rule us no longer [and] to discard the doctrines of states rights and slavery." Black suffrage had at first seemed to him "an alarming imposition on account of [their] supposed ignorance ... But on reflection we considered that if ignorance did not disqualify white men it should not disqualify black men. We considered that colored men were deeply interested in the country and had at least sense enough to know whether government worked well or not in its more palpable operations, and therefore would probably be safe voters."