CAUSES OF THE K. K. K. MOVEMENT.
Situation Produced by the War--Discontented Partisans--The War
District in the South--Words of a Northern Tourist--Widespread
Destitution--The Curse of Slavery--How its sudden Abolition affected
Community Wealth in the Southern States--The Political Situation even
more Distressing--President Johnson--How the Work of Reconstruction
was Inaugurated--The Law-making Power vested in Dummy
Legislatures--Disfranchisement--Enfranchisement--The Color Issue
which these Measures brought--A Singular Peace Policy--The War of the
Conservatives in the South against Radicalism did not Revive Issues
concluded by the late Civil Struggle, as the latter Boasted--Loyal
Epithets--"Traitor," "Guerilla," "Southern Bandit," etc.--Radical
Rule in the South--The Shamelessness of the State Officials--The
Uneducated Negro a Law-giver--Organization of the Loyal
League--Carpet-Bag Administration thereof--Negro Draft--Some of its
Peculiarities--The K. K. K. Movement as an Offset to the League.
When the clouds of passion and prejudice that brooded over the American
States in the beginning of the latter half of the present century had
dropped into the ocean of carnage, which during four years of severe
revolutionary penance deluged all their borders, the return to those
opposite tempers that beget in men a desire to renew the pledges of
ancient covenants, and practise the _ultima thule_ of the Messianic idea,
as delivered to us by the teachers of the Cross (forgiveness), was
pronounced in degree; but while it exceeded the bare tendency looked for
by men, as an outgrowth of the changed order of things, this moral
rehabilitation of the body politic was effected by slow and painful
stages.
Legions of men might have been found on either side of the sectional
dead-line who cherished animosities which no philosophy born of the
emotions could preach down, and before which even those ministers of red
havoc that had invaded their homes were content to lower their weapons and
view in forbearance a virtue.
It cannot be denied that while the widespread diffusion of the war burden
and general travail had a tendency to equalize the feeling of the masses,
and awaken a desire to return to the arts of peace, that in not uncommon
instances inhumanities had been practised, and bloody reprisals sought,
whose issues were wounds, for which the angel of peace brought no healing
on his wings. Those more dignified passions which, in the outset of
hostilities, had swayed the common breast in the rush to arms, where they
had not become wholly extinct in a desire for reunion and renewed
fraternity, as we have shown, had thus degenerated into the more human
instincts of individual hate and revenge which, if sometimes less
blameworthy, are far more implacable. Those who cherished the latter,
however, were discounted in all their efforts to discourage peace
proposals by the feeling of distrust which their former actions had
inspired, and, very soon after the Grant and Sherman dictation of peace
terms, were left to those weaker subterfuges that might not hope for
organized support. Many of this discontented class were domiciled on
Southern soil, and it may be surmised that the genius of desolation that
walked forth to meet them on their homeward passage from Appomattox and
Gainesville inspired them with yet warmer resentments against the authors
of the ignominious defeat under which they suffered.
The war district of the South, in the year of grace which brought about
military amnesty, furnished one of those pictures of "crownless
desolation" in the history of the world's wars for which the art that
decorated St. Peter's with the images of purgatorial griefs could have
possessed no adequate coloring, and in the attempt to portray which
talents and scholarship less consummate than those of the divine Angelo
must have issued in utter failure.
Cities destroyed; towns and villages laid waste; churches, schools, and
public buildings rotting under the hospital plague, or, more fortunate,
sleeping in the ashes of licensed incendiarism; wealthy plantations
stripped of their agricultural paraphernalia, and relegated to the domain
whence they had been lately redeemed by the good offices of the pioneer;
and in room of these--landscape horrors; vast cemeteries, whose enforced
tribute reached unto all kindreds; flame-scarred wastes memorializing a
past civilization, and extending from the Alleghany hills to the Georgian
forests, and from the rivers to the sea; and brooding over all, sole relic
of the conqueror's power, that grim sentinelcy that looked down from
dismantled ruins, and bleak, wind-shaken towers, upon the burial-place of
the domestic arts.
A Northern tourist, who, soon after the close of hostilities, followed the
trail of Sherman's army half across the State of Georgia, and explored the
Shenandoah Valley from the mountains at its source to the mountains at its
foot, thus comments upon the scenes which beguiled the earlier and later
moments of his journey: "And this lovely heritage, interspersed by hills
and valleys, lakes and rivers, which but as yesterday, under the
transforming hand of wealth and art combined, blossomed as the rose, and
was lighted by the torch of America's best civilization, now, and under
these severe conditions--alas! that we should be driven to concede it--has
sunk back into aboriginal unsightliness, and many portions thereof become
the fitting abode of those monsters who, warned by an instinct of their
nature, shun the haunts of human progress."
But not only did this ghost of desolation hold its solemn rounds where
wealth and its monumental insignia had erst been set up--more practical
subjects were included in the fearful summing up of Federal conquest. The
grain crop of four years had been consumed by the requirements of both
armies, or ruthlessly committed to the flames through the weak policy of
military commanders; export products were sacrificed to confiscation
needs; the agricultural districts were bereft of all labor aids, and stood
tenantless and barren; nothing of practical value--not even the currency
of the country, which had been demonetized months before the events of
which we particularly write--greeted the impoverished inhabitant, who,
standing in this presence, could scarce look back upon four years of
bootless strife with regret unmingled with repining.
Slavery, which was undoubtedly a great evil, and is at this period
conceded to have been such by its most clamorous apologists of _ante
bellum_ times, was nevertheless the great prop of community wealth in
those States where it had been recognized by the government; and when
(keeping in view the wide-spread destitution to which we have called
attention) this pet institution was wrecked on the breakers of war,
property affairs in all their borders reached an ebb beyond which, it
would have seemed, they could not have been impelled by even a retribution
born of that highest example of social evil--State treason. The male
inhabitants of the South thus found themselves, at the close of the war,
not only stripped of fortune, and all that pertained to a farmer's
inheritance, in the strictly agricultural communities to which they
belonged, but without business capacity or business employ, had the former
been supplied, and under the explicit disfavor of the government
administration, in all its branches, with all that that implied.
But while the physical straits to which the inhabitants of these States
were driven almost exceeded belief, and challenged the sympathies of
Christendom, they were met at this time with a yet more incorrigible evil,
as we have already prevised, and one from which all attempts at escape
seemed likely to plunge them into deeper miseries. Despite the generous
policy inaugurated by the commanders of the Federal forces at the close of
the civil conflict, and the good intentions of President Johnson, who had
lately succeeded to the chief magistracy, the Congress of the United
States at this time resolved upon a system of oppressions towards this
people whose parallel is not to be found in modern history. This work was
inaugurated by the passage of laws whose effect was a virtual
dismemberment of the Union; all the efforts of these States to participate
in the administration of the affairs of the general government being in
pursuance thereof promptly discountenanced.
The movement which followed was in keeping therewith, and involved the
withdrawal from the State governments of all their prerogatives as such.
The civil power was vested in military satraps, who were commissioned to
govern these provinces (for such they had become); or where the work of
reconstructing or radicalizing the populace was more advanced, and it was
necessary to preserve the form of the civil machine, State elections were
improvised and conducted under the shadow of overawing bayonets. The
administration of justice was as summarily withdrawn from the legal
functionaries, and given over to the Federal judicatories; or, what was
far worse, placed in the hands of that most ignorant and despotic of all
judiciary systems--military courts-martial. The law-making power, in its
turn, was farmed out to dummy legislatures, which in their constitution,
if not in the modus of their creation, were _fac-similes_ of the great
"rump" model which had made laws before them, and which, with its
two-thirds majority and grand faculty for caucusing, was quite equal to
all the devices of vetoing chief magistrates. The provision disfranchising
the white men of the South had been contemporaneously declared, and was a
part of that remarkable series which had empanoplied the negro race with
all the political belongings of freedom.
The policy adopted by the Southern people in concerting resistance to the
attacks of these modern Sejanus was the only one which could have
succeeded, and, whatever else may be said regarding its morality, was just
to themselves and disinterested mankind. They did not as a class, nor as
individuals, conceive for a moment that their allegiance to the
constitution and laws of their country was involved in the issues of the
political war which they waged against Radicalism, though constantly
reminded to that intent by their enemies, whose vocabulary of loyal
epithets included such choice terms as "rebel," "traitor," "guerilla,"
"Southern bandit," etc., and their integrity as citizens of the United
States government they never ceased to insist upon, though their leaders
foretold (and it has since been verified) that they would never succeed in
_establishing_ it until the movement, which they had inaugurated under so
many difficulties, had accomplished the _disestablishment_ of Radicalism
at the national capitol.
The details of the political strife of those years are unimportant to our
narrative; but the intelligent reader will perceive nothing occult in our
purpose if we call attention to the long imprisonments to which many of
the leaders of the Southern movement were subjected, the causeless
sequestration of public and private properties, the numberless criminal
prosecutions inaugurated in obedience to the whims of the "trooly loil,"
the immense peculations chargeable to the State governments under Radical
rule, and, lastly, the open robberies perpetrated under the name and with
the sanction of the national legislature.
The governments in the South--State, district, and municipal--were negro
governments, and if, in a few exceptions, this characterization was but
partial, it was where the negro alternated with that pestiferous
nomad--the carpet-bagger--in administering government for his late master.
Favored by this condition of public affairs, that remarkable secret
order--the Loyal League--found its way into the Southern country, and was
recommended to the negro by its politics, its dark lantern, its
facilities for the transaction of evil deeds, its avenues of escape
afforded to the criminal, and, finally, its picturesque ceremonial, in
which latter we can see no cause to dispute his taste or judgment. Some
description of this singular body, which was, we believe, in a measure
unknown to the great mass of the people of the Northern States, will not
be deemed digressive at this point.
The order was subdivided into neighborhood organizations, and the heads of
these were white men, while their vertebral force was recruited from the
voting population above described; the _chef_ being as completely _en
rapport_ with his African brother as if he had been in truth his congener,
and not simply dependent on him for patronage. Their _locus in quo_ was
nowhere and everywhere,--each city and town numbering its lodges and
sub-lodges, and the diffusion thereof, throughout the agricultural
districts, being in the somewhat extravagant ratio of one to the square
mile. Their object was plunder. Their raids, directed against the white
trash, contemplated everything that might be classed under the term
_commissaries_, and ranged from the pig-pen to the poultry-yard, and from
an ear of corn to a well-grown tuber. The "wee sma' hours ayont the twal"
was the festive time of night selected by the "loil" Moses and his dusky
Israel for their exodus from forest or cavern, and, as they marched, the
flesh-pots of the enemy disgorged their treasure, and animated nature held
its breath. The goods and chattels of the unreconstructed were, by act of
Congress, their lawful prey, and if their foraging expeditions were
conducted by moonlight, it was from constitutional considerations, and not
through any well-grounded fear of resistance on the part of the
intimidated whites.
The conclaves of the society were held nightly, and during the election
campaigns, which progressed with tolerable regularity during eight months
of the year, their _en masse_ assemblages, or political rallies, occupied
each alternate day of the week (the off day being devoted to itinerant
duty among neighboring lodges). A weak solution of the Christian religion
involved in the superstitions which they everywhere practised, aided them
in their delusions concerning politics; and it is not exaggeration to
state that the remaining four months of the year, under the above
estimate, were devoted to their so-called revival meetings, which never
failed to prove an insufferable burden to the pork- and vegetable-raising
communities on which they were billeted. Their religion was, in truth, a
part of their politics, and, on occasion, their ministry their most
serviceable performers on the hustings.
These twin ideas of religion and politics having been introduced into the
League, dominated the order so completely that its secular business was
often arrested by a call to prayers, and more frequently than otherwise
its order of business terminated by a twilight homily on the total
cussedness and final unreliability of all who anchored their faith to the
Conservative idea in politics.
This new element, however, was far from benefiting the League; its morals
grew infinitely worse; its larcenies became more frequent, and were
prosecuted on a larger scale; it became more arrogant in its assumption of
exclusive political right on unreconstructed territory; and, finally,
assayed, through the medium of politics, to accomplish a social reform
that would elevate the ignorant and semi-savage race which it represented
to family equality with a class of beings who recognized no title to such
a claim, but that of honorable ancestry and a spotless name. Beyond the
attempt, however, which was warmly seconded by the national Congress, it
is needless to say that nothing was ever done; and this extreme of rash
legislation, undertaken, it would seem at this date, with no other object
in view than the humiliation of a proud and constitutionally sensitive
enemy, proved in the end the downfall of the League. From this moment, it
was met by a counter movement, which, while possessing an organization in
many respects superior to its own, covered its movements with the same
veil of secrecy; caucused with the same regularity; foraged on its enemies
with equal pertinacity and greed; and, finally, proceeded on its mission
with the same fell purpose of triumphing by fair means or foul.