IN the present number of THE CENTURY may be
found a chapter of the inside history of the Ku Klux
Klan, which is, in many respects, remarkable. It
describes the somewhat trivial origin of the Klan out of
circumstances which account for the mystery attending
its rise and growth; it traces the causes which changed
the Klan into a powerful organization called “the
Invisible Empire”; and it leaves the history at the
point where, in 1869, the “Grand Wizard” disbanded
the Empire, though, for a long time after, bands of
men calling themselves Ku Klux continued to “regulate”
affairs in the South, on secret mob
principles.
†
In its specific statements of fact, the narrative, we
think, bears inherent marks of authenticity. It is
proper to say that the writer of the paper is an active
minister in the Southern Presbyterian Church. We
may state also that he has no personal knowledge
of the Ku Klux, although he has had abundant opportunity
to know as much of the inside history of the
Klan as if he had been a leading member; he has
had access, besides, to authentic private documents.
†
Many of the facts related by him will be as new,
probably, to most readers at the South, who were
personally acquainted with the “mission” and deeds of
the “Invisible Empire,” but not with its origin, as to
those readers at the North who remember the name
Ku Klux only as the synonym for midnight murder
and political infamy. These are harsh terms, but they
are none too harsh if one is to characterize frankly
that unfortunate period in our history, which has come
to be regarded at the South with solid, though softening,
satisfaction, and at the North with lessening disapproval
of the results, though with lasting abhorrence of the methods.
In its drift, the paper may be regarded as a moderate
apology for the Ku Klux, on the score of unpremeditated
mission and extenuating provocation. Its conclusions in this
regard are partly unsound, because the
writer does not properly bring into the premises the
real impelling idea of the Invisible Empire. Its
members were a people who had sought by revolution
to insure the perpetuity of a slave system, which was
the corner-stone of their social and industrial life.
The penalty of defeat required that they should be
governed in large part by the politically unskilled and
mentally ignorant race which had been in servitude to
them, and which was being organized and led by a
few whites, who were even more odious to
them.
†
Here was a state of affairs, it is now plain to see, as
perfectly arranged to breed trouble as the juxtaposition
of fire and powder. No race on the face of the earth
would have accepted such moral and political subjugation
to another race regarded as of a lower type, and
which had just been transported from barbarism,
or recently reared out of it. Probably the nearest
approach to such moral and political servitude observable
to-day, is the ease with which the native intelligence
of some of our Northern cities is ruled by a
horde of ignorant foreign-born liquor-dealers, and
their more ignorant foreign-born clients. We certainly
favor a reform of this anomaly, but not by bloodshed.
There are stronger agencies for social and political
regeneration than mob violence; and a mob of the
higher elements of society is worse than a mob of the
ignorant and of the dregs, because its example is more
pernicious and lasting.
So, when we are told that many members of the Ku
Klux were originally in search of amusement, and did
not premeditate outrage, terrorism, and murder in giving
wide-spread organization to the Klan, we cannot
help thinking that they might have stilled the evil
power they had raised if their hearts had not been
fired by a general purpose to subjugate the blacks,
who, by the operation of the law of the land, had become
their political masters.
†
What was an overmastering wish with
some was a lawless determination with others, and with all it
meant revolution at any
cost. The ordinarily peaceable men in the Klan had
helped to fashion it into an effective instrument, and
the rebellious spirits of that unsettled time seized the
weapon, some to wage private warfare, and all to vent
their hatred of the political situation. It was the worst
kind of mob violence; and, as in every deviation from
legal methods, the worst elements came to the top.
In estimating the minor provocations which, it is
claimed, led the Ku Klux into the role of regulators,
and in weighing the tone of injury and innocence
which pervades the manifestoes of the Klan, we must
not forget who, in the eyes of the law, were the aggressors.
It is not uncommon for an aggressor, of
whatever kind, to view with alarm and abhorrence a
natural act of self-defense or retaliation. The Government,
which placed the blacks in their strange position,
in the end left them to defend themselves. Naturally,
they were made to yield to the whites the power they
had not the physical courage and the mental ability to
hold.
†
They are entitled to the fullest sympathy, for
they were politically without blame and were grievously
sinned against. And perhaps we should also regard their
trials and the place they have accepted as necessary features
{Page 462}
of the discipline which is to make intelligent freemen of a
once barbarous and ignorant race of bondmen.
On the other hand, there is a growing sympathy
with the whites of the South, and a willingness to admit
that on the ground of human sentiment—that
great changeable force which now seems to differentiate human
law and the law of heaven, and again seems
to override both—the whites had great provocation.
In the same spirit men are beginning to accept the success of the
Ku Klux revolution as being
in the result
the inevitable solution of an anomalous political situation.
Peace and happiness never could come to the
South so long as the political lines were co-existent
with the color lines, with the blacks in the ascendancy.
Every well-wisher of the blacks will counsel them to
accept the foot of the political ladder, and it is not
without fitness that they should begin at the bottom
rung and work up, because they were the last to be
apprenticed to citizenship. Already the whites, as in
Charleston, are giving them a share of the public
employment, by making them street-cleaners, firemen,
and. policemen. This is not sharing according to
numerical importance, but it is a beginning, and the
education which is being placed within their reach
will fit them for better things to come.
But let us not be misunderstood. If it was a questionable
device to place the power of the ballot, suddenly and
without limitations, in the hands of an
emancipated and uneducated race, none the less immoral,
unjustifiable, and brutalizing were the means
adopted by the whites to rid themselves of an intolerable rule.
And because the blacks are still restrained
from the free exercise of their legal rights, the situation
at the South is to-day morally unsound. For it is for ever
true, as a Southern orator has said, that “the political
devil is no more to be fought with fire, without terrible
consequences to the best interest of the community,
than is the devil of avarice, or of envy, or of ambition, or
any other of the numerous devils which infest society.”
The lessons to be drawn from the Ku Klux period
are mainly for statesmen, but they also teach the
individual citizen, in a new way, that mob force is a
barbarous and dangerous remedy for real or fancied
wrongs. When, in the April CENTURY, we discussed
one phase of the subject under the heading, “Mob or
Magistrate,” we did not know we should be able to
broaden its application by publishing so important a
study of violence as the paper we print in the present
number on the Ku Klux Klan.
Source: New Light on the Ku Klux Klan (editorial),
Topics of the Times, The Century, Volume 28,
Issue 3, July 1884.
