Title: Ku Klux Klan Secrets Exposed
Author: Ezra A. Cook
Release date: April 27, 2011 [eBook #35976]
Most recently updated: January 7, 2021
Language: English
Credits: Produced by Bryan Ness and the Online Distributed
Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net (This file was
produced from images generously made available by The
Internet Archive/American Libraries.)
Transcriber's Note:
Inconsistent hyphenation in the original document has been preserved.
Obvious typographical errors have been corrected. For a complete list, please see the end of this document.
To the old Ku-Klux Klan which rode through the south in the days following the civil war the new Ku-Klux Klan is a relative only in name.
It is not tied by blood. It holds the same position to its southern aristocratic forbear as an imposter in social life does to some illustrious gentleman of the same name of whom he claims to be a descendant.
The old Ku-Klux Klan was a historical development. The new is a man's contrivance. The old Ku-Klux Klan movement was an outcome of conditions that prevailed in the southern states after the war. The present Klan, apparently, is an outcome of a group of men's desire to make money.
Widespread, spontaneous, popular, the movement of 1866 grew out of a disordered society, not as a "movement" at all at first, but as a scheme for having fun, a source of amusement among a group of young, full-blooded southern men to puzzle outsiders. Its use as a weapon against the stranger in the old south came later.
The "stranger" was the northern carpetbagger. To the south he was the pestilence that follows war. He was the blunderer who entered the land whose social customs were unknown to him, in a year when the fabric by those social customs was in need of mending.
When southern society seized the Ku-Klux Klan as an instrument with which to resist there were only two classes, carpet-bagger and unruly negro, against which it operated. To join the ranks of the white-robed horsemen, there were no qualifications of religion. The Klan made no mention of Jew or Catholic. Its purpose was to restore order, not to fan prejudice, and therein lies the difference between the old Klan and the present Klan which makes the latter a maverick.
The first unit of the horseback riding knights was founded in the village of Pulaski, Tenn., with the same motive for its organization as the old-time college hazing society. Its members were young men who had come back from the war, poor, exhausted, discouraged, and bored with the tameness of a country town.
According to the story which has lived south of the Mason and Dixon line since those post-bellum days, a group of youths cooling their heels in a law office one May evening in 1866 organized a society for a good time. If anyone had suggested to them at that time that five years later a committee of congress would devote thirteen volumes to a history of their "movement" and pass a law to suppress it, or that before the child of their wits was fully grown it would have developed into a terrorizing "hobgoblin" sheeted for lawlessness, they would have thought it a jest.
When their mere joke had become a grim joke, neighbors who feared it found in its name "Ku-Klux" the suggestion of a clicking rifle. But the name itself was proposed by its charter members in Tennessee as a derivative of the Greek word "Kuklos," meaning a circle. From "Kuklos" to "Ku-Klux" was an easy transition. The "Klan" followed because these youthful students of Greek had an ear for the alliterative.
From the Pulaski law office the society migrated to a haunted house on the outskirts of the village. Its members found their first source of amusement in initiation rites. They named their chief officer a Grand Cyclops and their vice president a Grand Magi. Other officers were the Grand Turk, or marshal; a Grand Exchequer or treasurer, and two Lictors.
The only germ in their constitution from which the "Imperial Wizard" Simmons of the twentieth century Klan could breed his present organization was the promise of absolute secrecy. For his copying years later, the first Klan also contrived a disguise. It consisted of a white mask, a tall cardboard hat, a gown or robe, and for the night riding excursions, a cover for the horses' bodies and mufflers for their feet.
Only after the Pulaski organization had entertained itself for many nights did the phenomenon present itself which was to make the Klan a weapon in the progress of post-war reconstruction. It was the discovery that the African negro was twice as fearful of mysticism and mystery as the white man. It taught the white men of Tennessee and neighboring states that they had a means of their own of preventing what they considered political mismanagement and social insolence in the control by northerners and freedmen of the state government.
The Pulaski riders made themselves popular. Young men of neighboring towns organized brother Klans. When southern society found itself a Humpty Dumpty fallen from the wall, it grasped the Pulaski idea as the means for pulling itself up again. The Klan became a military organization, with the purpose of keeping order among the negroes by intimidating them. Mysticism in the order grew. Humor grew with it, and by the time the states of the north discovered that the south had an organization which was in purpose a society of regulators, the young southern war veterans were donning their white robes and cardboard hats with a human skull and two thigh bones as the symbols of allegiance.
The oath which the grand cyclops administered has been preserved in southern diaries and documents. It was taken in a solemn manner as the knights were grouped amid the bones. The oath follows.
"We (or I, as the case might be) do solemnly swear before Almighty God and these witnesses, and looking upon these human bones, that I will obey and carry into effect every order made by any cyclops or assistant cyclops, and if I fail strictly to conform and execute every order made, as above required of me, unless I am prevented from some cause which shall be no fault of mine, or if I shall give any information to any person or persons except members of this order, that the doom of all traitors shall be meted out to me, and that my bones may become as naked and dry as the bones I am looking upon. And I take this oath voluntarily, without any mental reservation or evasion whatever, for the causes set out in said order, so help me God."
Ku-Klux horsemen who rode white-sheeted through the south in the nights of 1866 regarded themselves as upholders of sectional patriotism.
They considered themselves the spiritual descendants of the New Englanders who threw the English tea overboard into Boston harbor nearly 100 years before. Their protests, and the acts of intimidation by which they enforced their protests were against the white "carpetbagger" from the north, the negro freedman to whom liberty meant arrogant office-holding, and the "scalawag," by which terms they designated those deserters from the southern aristocracy who had joined the ranks of the northern stranger.
The second stage came within a year after the secret body had its birth, when the band of burlesquers became a band of regulators.
To the south, the reconstruction acts which congress passed in 1867 were pernicious. The one-time white confederate soldier believed that the congressional legislation made official mismanagement permanent. He saw negroes organized into the militia. He saw his former slaves voting twice and thrice at elections where he himself had to pass, literally, under bayonets to reach the polls. He disliked the freedman's bureau, which substituted northern alien machinery for the old patriarchal relation between white employer and black employe. He heard drunken negroes at his gates in the night. He saw the "carpetbagger" urging upon the freedman civic rights which he knew the latter was not educated enough to perform.
These were the prejudices against which the original Ku-Klux Klan threw itself. They were surface indications of an historical development. They had nothing to do with the racial and religious biases which the present Klan attempted to propagate. To the present Klan, the old Klan, in its first stage, was unrelated. In its second stage it was related only in its methods of terrorism and its removal of justice from the courts to the masques until its own leaders were powerless to check it.
The Klan early fell a victim to the abuses inseparable from secrecy. It happened that Tennessee, the birthplace of the hooded institution, was also the first southern state to find itself turned upside down in reconstruction. "Dem Ku-Kluxes," as the negro called the mysterious union, became a band of regulators. Their first official convention was held in Nashville early in 1867.
The Klan, which, until then, had been bound together only by the deference which priority rights gave to the grand cyclops of the parental Pulaski "den," was organized into the "Invisible Empire of the South." It was ruled by a grand wizard of the whole empire, a grand dragon of each realm, or state, a grand titan of each dominion, or county, a grand cyclops of each den, and staff officers with names as equally suggestive of Arabian Nights.
For the first time its laws defined serious objects. First was the duty of protecting people, presumably white southerners, from indignities and wrongs; second was the duty of succoring the suffering, particularly among the families of dead confederate soldiers; finally was the oath to defend "the constitution of the United States and all laws passed in conformity thereto," and of the states also, to aid in executing all constitutional laws, and to protect the people from unlawful seizures and from trial otherwise than by jury.
It is these purposes which Imperial Wizard Simmons of the modern clan pretends to perpetuate, plus persecutions of Jews, Catholics and negroes, while denying charges of terrorizing outbreaks.
The Nashville convention chose Gen. Nathan B. Forrest, the confederate cavalry leader, as its supreme ruler. He is known to have increased the membership of the hooded horsemen in the old south to 550,000. Among his aides were Generals John B. Gordon, A.H. Colquitt, G.T. Anderson, A.B. Lawton, W.J. Hardee, John C. Brown, George W. Gordon and Albert Pike. The latter became one of the foremost authorities of Masonry.
Terrorism spread, until during the political campaign which preceded the 1868 presidential election, 2,000 persons were killed and injured in Louisiana by Ku-Klux Klansmen, who rode at night, disguised as freebooters, and according to James G. Blaine, defeated candidate for the presidency at a later date, hesitated at no cruelty.
In the north, in the years immediately after the civil war, the original Ku-Klux Klan was called a conspiracy.
In the south, where society was being ground in the mills of reconstruction, the Klan started its midnight rovings as an instrument of moral force. But within three years its period of usefulness, as the white southerner saw it useful, was over.
Its founders had played with it as with an exciting bonfire. During the months, however, when former confederate soldiers used it to frighten away northern officeholders with oppressive tactics, it had leaped in size until when the moment came for smothering it out its leaders discovered it beyond control.
Not until the full fire department of federal and state law had been called out did the Invisible Empire cease to operate.
By 1872 the white-robed knights of midnight, whose purpose to enforce law had in itself yielded to lawlessness, were for the most part disappeared. But so, in one state after another, had the northern carpetbagger and the southern scalawag.
Tennessee, where the Klan was founded, was the first to take legislative action against it. In September, 1868, its legislature passed a statute making membership in the Klan punishable by a fine of $500 and imprisonment for not less than five years.
As a result, in February, 1869, Gen. Nathan B. Forrest, former cavalry officer of the confederate army, who was grand wizard of the order, officially proclaimed the Ku-Klux Klan and Invisible Empire dissolved and disbanded forever.
But members of the adventurous law-assuming organization were reluctant to yield their mysterious power.
The wizard's order went into effect. Klan property was burned.
But immediately in southern states, as far west as Arkansas, there sprang up disguised bands, some of them neighborhood groups only, some of them bands of ruffians who traveled in the night to win personal ends, still others new orders founded in imitation of the Ku-Klux and using similar methods.
Of the last, the Knights of the White Camellia was the largest. In some private notebooks of the south its membership was said to be even larger than the parent Klan.
From New Orleans early in 1868, it spread across to Texas and back to the Carolinas. Racial supremacy was its purpose.
Only white men 18 years or older were invited to the secrets of its initiation, and in their oath they promised not only to be obedient and secret, but to "maintain and defend the social and political superiority of the white race on this continent."
Initiates were enjoined, notwithstanding, to show fairness to the negroes and to concede to them in the fullest measure "those rights which we recognize as theirs."
Other bands of nightriders responded to the names of "Pale Faces," "White Leaguers," the "White Brotherhood" and the "Constitutional Union Guards."
Surviving members are hazy as to their aims and methods, the character of their membership, their members, and the connection between them.
Federal recognition that the Invisible Empire, whether it was the original Klan or not, was everywhere a real empire came in the spring of 1871, when a senate committee presented majority and minority reports on the result of its investigations of the white man's will to rule against the freedmen's militia in the south.
The majority report found that the Ku-Klux Klan was a criminal conspiracy of a distinctly political nature against the laws and against the colored citizens.
The minority found that Ku-Klux disorder and violence was due to misgovernment and an exploitation of the states below the Mason and Dixon line by radicals.
The first Ku-Klux bill was passed in April, 1871, "to enforce the fourteenth amendment." Power of the president to use troops to put down the white-hooded riders was hinted at.
In the next month the second Ku-Klux bill was passed to enforce "the right of citizens in the United States to vote."
In 1872 federal troops were sent into the south to back up his anti-Ku-Klux proclamation. By the end of 1872 the "conspiracy" was thought to be overthrown.
At various times individuals in the south and elsewhere have tried to put breath into the Klan's dead body.
It was left for "Grand Wizard" Simmons of Atlanta to accomplish it. His new organization, he explains, is imbued with the Ku-Klux "spirit."
"That this spirit may live always to warm the hearts of many men," he says, "is the paramount ideal of the Knights of the Ku-Klux Klan."
President Grant answered: "Thou shalt not" to the Ku-Klux Klan in 1871. He backed up his word with armed troops.
During the whole of one session of congress senators and representatives serving in Washington in the years just after the civil war occupied themselves in stripping the masques off the southern night-riders.
Into the country south of the Mason and Dixon line they dispatched congressional investigators, whose duty it was to enter the "portals of the invisible empire" and discover what was hiding behind them. When they reported that the Ku-Klux Klan, decked out in the uniform of ghosts, was waging midnight warfare on the negro and carpet-bagger congress passed legislation which suppressed the order.
Action was quick. Almost before the government printing presses had finished turning out ten volumes in which the committee recorded the results of their investigation the white robes and hoods of the Ku-Kluxes had gone out of fashion in the old south.
President Grant in 1871 was without precedent. His law enforcers, just getting acquainted with the amendment which freed the slaves, were without a statute to deal with the armed clique which proposed to keep the negro down in the day by frightening him in the night. The emergency bill which congress passed at that period empowers the regular army or the navy to put down any unlawful combination which is doing domestic violence.
When congress met for its forty-second session in 1871, the cross bones and skull and coffin with which the Ku-Klux were marking their threats had become the symbols of terrorism in the south. So grave was the situation that speakers on the floor of the house, when the session opened, classed the conspiracy of the Klan "less formidable, but not less dangerous to American liberty" than the just-ended war of the rebellion. They charged that as well as binding its members to execute crimes against its opponents in the social-political life of the south, it protected them against conviction and punishment by perjury on the witness stand and in the jury box. Representatives asked why, of all offenders, not one had been convicted.
On March 23, 1871, President Grant sent a message to both houses in which he recommended that all other business be postponed until the Klan was made subservient to the flag.
"A condition of affairs now exists in some of the states of the Union rendering life and property insecure and the carrying of the mails and the collection of revenue dangerous," his message said. "The proof that such a condition of affairs exists in some localities is now before the senate. That the power to correct these evils is beyond the control of the senate authorities I do not doubt; that the power of the executive of the United States, acting within the limits of existing laws is sufficient for present emergencies, is not clear. Therefore, I urgently recommend such legislation as in the judgment of congress shall effectually secure, life, liberty and property and the enforcement of law in all parts of the United States. It may be expedient to provide that such law as shall be passed in pursuance of this recommendation shall expire at the end of the next session of congress. There is no other subject on which I would recommend legislation during the present session."
The law which was at the disposal of President Harding was popularly known as "the Force bill." Under congressional passage it was entitled "An act to enforce the Fourteenth amendment of the constitution of the United States and for other purposes." President Grant approved it April 20, 1871.
It is aimed at two or more persons who conspire to use force and intimidation "outside the law." It forbids them to go in disguise along a public highway or upon the premises of another person for the purpose, either directly or indirectly, of depriving that person of equal privileges under the law. Punishment for the offense may be imprisonment from six months to six years, a fine not less than $500, nor more than $5,000, or both.
The act took particular action against the practice of the Klanists of protecting each other in court. It provides that every man called for service on a jury in a Klan case shall take oath in open court that he is not a member of nor has ever aided or advised any such "unlawful, combination or conspiracy."
That individual was declared a violator of the law who shall "go in disguise upon the public highway or upon the premises of another for the purpose, either directly or indirectly, of depriving any person or class of persons of the equal protection of the laws, or of equal privileges or immunities under the laws, or by force, intimidation or threat to prevent any citizen lawfully entitled to vote from giving his support or advocacy in a lawful manner toward the election of any lawfully qualified person for office."
The act states further: "That in all cases where insurrection, domestic violence, unlawful combinations or conspiracies in any state shall so obstruct or hinder the execution of the laws thereof, and of the United States, as to deprive any portion or class of the people of any rights, privileges or immunities or protection, and the constituted authorities of such state shall either be unable to protect, or shall fail in or refuse protection, it shall be unlawful for the president, and it shall be his duty, to take such measures by the employment of the militia or the land and naval forces of the United States for the suppression of such insurrection."
Pages of the Congressional Globe, as the present Congressional Record was then called, were filled during the months before the passage of this act with the word "Ku-Klux."
The verb "Kukluxed" became in the mouths of senators and representatives arguing over the bill a synonym for "intimidated." Friends of the nightriders termed them "modern knights of the Round Table," and "conservators of law and order." Opponents on the floor of the house advocated a policy of "amnesty for every rebel, hanging for every Ku-Klux."
Black and white victims of the gun-toting ghosts were brought from Tennessee, Georgia, Louisiana, Texas and other states where the Klan rode to recount before the congressional committee the details of their persecutions. Their accounts as the government documents preserve them might well have been a primer, it has been said, for the acts of later Lenines and Trotzkys.
The report of the congressional committee is a recital varying from mirth to murder. In one county the victim of the hooded Klan might be an itinerant minister who had offended by teaching a negro mammy to pray. Next door a Ku-Klux sign, with a coffin painted in blood, might be hung over the dead body of a "bad" negro whose freedom had made him officious.
One negro was whipped for stealing a beef. Another was tarred and feathered because his daughter ran away from the white man who had employed her.
Colored cooks were beaten for talking saucily to their southern mistresses. Northern white women were threatened for hiring colored cooks.
When a negro ignored a note carrying the Ku-Klux skull and cross bones and voted "republican" instead of "conservative," his body, ornamented with skull and bones in blood, might be found the next morning in the middle of the road—lifeless.
The congressional minutes report a bold, public display of the Klan's official orders. They might appear in a whisk of the wind on the post office window. They might be pinned on a tree or pole or building. On one occasion, when a member of the Klan was on trial in a county court, a band of white masquers, riding through the courtyard on horse, dropped a note addressed to the court, grand jury and sheriff.
"Go slow," it commanded. At the bottom was a drawing of a coffin and on each side a rope. The signature was "K.K.K."
Ku-Klux rule in the south half a century ago was an attempt to govern by masque.
Secret covenants arrived at by a sheeted brotherhood, veiled signs, orders written in blood and posted at midnight on the victim's door—by such means did the Klan substitute the masque for the ballot.
Congressional investigating committees who stripped the night-riding organization of secrecy during the administration of President Grant, were entertained during a session of congress by tales of lares and lemures howling at night in fields or on crossroads, bad luck omens for the negroes.
In organization the Klan was military, and its town, county and state rule, as recorded in the Congressional Globe, operated as under martial law.
As the revolt of the white southerner to colored and northern domination reared itself into giant-size, towns under Klan domination came to take their rule and law from the K.K.K. note, flapping in the wind on a tree or fencepost, with the coffin on its signature, urging that it be obeyed.
In South Carolina, according to the report of the federal committee, townsfolk journeyed to the postoffice, not to get their mail, but to read the daily Ku-Klux bulletin. One such, reprinted in the ten-volume report of the committee which examined southern outrages, was a warning against further "carpet bagger" administration. It is as follows:
Headquarters, Ninth Division, S.C.
Special Orders, No. 3, K.K.K.
Ignorance is the curse of God.
For that reason we are determined that members of the legislature, the school committee and the county commissioners of Union county shall no longer officiate.
Fifteen days' notice from this date is given, and if they, and all, do not at once and forever resign their present inhuman, disgraceful and outrageous rule, then retributive justice will as surely be used as night follows day.
By order of the Grand Chief,
A.O., Grand Secretary.
Another "special order," this one warning that the colored race in general would be punished for all malicious fires in particular, was made public in the Charleston News, Jan. 31, 1871.
Headquarters, K.K.K.
January 22, 1871.
Resolved: That in all cases of incendiarism, ten of the leading colored people and two white sympathizers shall be executed.
That if any armed bands of colored people are found hereafter picketing the roads, the officers of the company to which the pickets belong shall be executed.
Southern speakers on the floor of the house in the debates which preceded the passage of the "act to enforce the fourteenth amendment," traced the origin of the Ku-Klux to the Union league, an association in the south composed chiefly of northerners. Charges were also made by statesmen once in the confederate army that "Tammany Hall" in New York furnished arms to the Klanists, in order that they might murder southern republicans.
When the act suppressing the Klan was approved by President Grant on April 20, 1871, it was estimated that the night riders were operating in eleven states of the south. Six months later, in October, President Grant issued a proclamation calling on members of illegal associations in nine counties in South Carolina to disperse and surrender their arms and disguises in five days.
Five days afterwards, another proclamation was issued suspending the privileges of the writ of habeas corpus in the counties named. More than 200 persons were arrested within a few days. It is believed that the Ku-Klux Klan was practically overthrown by the middle of the following January.
Must Every Citizen be a Slave of Fear Spread by Masked Night-Riders, or Will He Live under the Protection of the Constitution of the United States?
Are you a citizen of the United States? If you are it is to your interest to inform yourself about the Ku-Klux Klan. As a citizen you are under the protection of the constitution of the United States. The Ku Klux Klan has set itself above the constitution. It has made laws of its own. Its members have inaugurated a reign of lawlessness that may drag you out of your bed at midnight and submit you to a coat of tar and feathers through the whims of some neighbor who does not like the country in which you were born, or who objects to your religion, your color, your opinions, your personal habits or anything else about you that does not suit his fancy.
The constitution guarantees that your house, your person and your papers and effects are free from unlawful search and seizure; that you cannot be deprived of life, liberty or property without due process of law, which law must be publicly enforced in God's sunshine by persons legally chosen; that when you are accused of any delinquency or crime you shall have a speedy, public trial before a judge and an impartial jury; that you may be a member of any religious denomination or sect with whom you may worship as you please; that you have the right of free speech; that you cannot be held in involuntary servitude except as a punishment for crime, for which you have been found guilty in a legal way; that you cannot be denied the right to vote on account of your color.
Masked riders of the night disagree with these guarantees of freedom. They break into your house under cover of darkness unlawfully seize your person and ride away with you, depriving you of liberty without due process of law. They accuse you of charges that may or may not be true, without giving you the opportunity of knowing the identity of your accusers, because they are masked. They try you without giving you a chance to defend yourself. They make themselves accuser, judge, jury and executioner. They deny that you have the right to worship God as you please. They deny your right to free speech, because they forbid you to criticise what they do.
The Ku Klux Klan clamps involuntary servitude on its own members by making them take oaths to uphold their leaders, even when they violate the constitution. It aims to place those whom it opposes under its heel. It openly defies the article of the constitution that guarantees race equality, by binding its members to put the black race under the supremacy of the white.
The American constitution says that if you were born abroad, but have become a naturalized citizen of the United States, you have as many rights here as though you were actually born here. The Ku Klux Klan is against the constitution on that point. The Ku Klux Klan wants to make the foreigner a serf.
The Ku Klux Klan has set itself up as a regulator of morals. Persons against whom there has been neighborhood gossip have been tarred and feathered. Thanks to the New York World, court records have been published showing that some of the highest persons in the Ku Klux have been involved in proceedings as disgraceful as those for which tar and feather parties have been organized by the Klan or persons masquerading as Ku Klux.
Men and women, white and black—have been mistreated by masked men. The number of these attacks grows as the Klan increases in size. At present the Klan has branches in all states of the union except three—New Hampshire, Montana and Utah. In each state the law would be enforced by legal officials against any persons guilty of crime if public spirited citizens would make it their business to assist public officials to round up law breakers. The Klan, however, believes in its own method of punishment against those whom it opposes. It protects its own members and there is no case on record where a Klansman has been outraged. The Klan has one law for itself and another for its victims. The revelations of scandal among its leaders have not resulted in any movement on the part of its members to "clean house." Its motto seems to be "A Klansman can do no wrong." The lesson to be drawn from the revelations is that those in high places in the Klan have played on the gullibility of tens of thousands of otherwise sensible Americans. These leaders have become rich by dealing in the hocuspocus of mysticism, secret rites and high sounding phrases and by inflaming the passions of dupes by false stories involving religions and races.
In the south they have preached and conspired against the negroes. This hatred also has been carried into certain sections of large cities of the north where there are large negro populations. In some states they have played upon the feelings of those who might be drawn into the Klan by a crusade against Catholics. They have made use of counterfeit documents in secret bids for membership on this score. In cities like New York and Chicago, where the populations are largely Jewish, they have fanned the flames of religious hatred by propaganda against the Jews. Where foreign-born residents are living in large numbers the Klan has secretly intrigued against them. On the Pacific coast this propaganda is made against the Japanese; on the eastern seaboard it has been against persons born in European and Asiatic countries.