There are very few first hand accounts of the Ku Klux Klan during the Reconstruction Era. Documents from the Klan at the national and state level have been recovered, but most Klan members did not record what they did for the terrorist organization. In January of 1908, the new magazine Uncle Remus published an account by a leader of the Klan in Georgia. The magazine was published by Joel Chandler Harris, the author of the Uncle Remus and Brer Rabbit stories that were so popular among white children in the first half of the 20th Century. In 1946, Disney made a movie out of these stories called Song of the South, which is no longer distributed because of its racist content.
The author of the article was John C, Reed, a lawyer who served in the Confederate Army. He was discharged after the surrender at Appomattox. He returned to Lexington, the county seat of Oglethorpe County, after the war. Reed writes of what he found at Lexington:
The blacks, largely outnumbering the whites, were rioting in the leisure of sudden and unexpected emancipation, making gods of the Federal soldiers garrisoning the towns, and hanging around the Freedman’s Bureau to be fed and to have cases which they brought incessantly against their old masters heard and determined. Officials of the Bureau were soon lining their pockets by embezzling the supplies intended for the negroes, and by levying secret contributions upon each employer who was sued by his hands or who wished them forced back where they had left him in crop time.
Adventurers connected with the Bureau, or pretending to be connected with it, were soon selling striped or painted sticks, with instructions how the fortyacre parcel expected by negro dupes under a provision in the Bureau act of March, 1865, was to be marked therewith. I knew of one of these officials who made much money by remarrying black couples, and charging five dollars for each ceremony. These incipient Scalawags prospered while the rest of the whites steadily went from bad to worse; and they naturally encouraged the negroes to prey more and more greedily upon their former owners.
Reed goes on to talk about the class consciousness of Blacks after the War:
The newly-aroused class consciousness of the blacks caused them, immediately upon the collapse of the Confederate States, to set up their own churches. What a joy it was to them to meet therein, frequently at night, and sing, shout and sleep until the short hours! Usually their Sunday meetings were not so eagerly attended. The Republican agitator—some native negro instructed by Carpetbaggers in garrisoned places—soon began to harangue in these churches, and there the Loyal League often had meetings.
The Negroes in Control
Now came congressional reconstruction. I did not go to the election of delegates to the State convention ordered by General Pope. The negroes had the polls to themselves for five days, ending November 2, 1867, and it was a stupefying horror to all of us. We could not fully take in the fact that Congress had resolved that our late slaves—ignorant, semi-barbarian—were to remake our constitution, and rebuild according to their wishes the entire structure of the State government.
John Reed said that he and other whites refused to go to the polls to discredit the elections. In spite of the absence of whites, the election and convention to write a new constitution took place. Reed saw a provision at the convention that could make white voters support the new biracial constitution. Many of the former Confederates had run up debts during the war to keep their plantations and farms operating. The constitution would forgive a part of those debts. Reed saw that to obtain debt relief, whites would vote for the constitution even though it made Blacks into voters. He wrote:
Other measures of relief to debtors were undertaken by the convention. Probably ninety per cent of the whites were debtors. I began to see that many of these could not keep themselves from considering these relief proposals, although they abhorred the offer of them by the piebald convention—to use their language—as the great disgrace of the State. To prevent this menaced defection of the whites who were tempted to get relief by yielding suffrage to the negro was the hardest of all the tasks of the Ku Klux. I make this emphatic declaration here because the important fact has up to this time been overlooked even by native historians.
…While the convention was in session I wrote for the Augusta Chronicle and Sentinel a series of articles signed “Albus,” which means “White Man.” The purpose of the articles was to keep our people from being won for negro suffrage by the bribe of illusory relief; to show that as the relief provisions impaired the obligation of contracts they would fall as soon as the creditors took them to the United States Supreme Court—a thing which did happen. These articles were generally read in the county and I was known to be the writer. Besides my career as County Solicitor and the authorship of the Albus articles, I was rising fast as a lawyer. So when the election of April, 1868, came in sight (at which the State constitution was to be ratified or rejected, and officers of the new State government, as well as members of the Legislature, were to be chosen), I was nominated by the Democrats as one of their two candidates for the House of Representatives. I did not believe for one moment that I could be elected, yet I canvassed with diligence every part of the county.
I was beaten by a huge majority. But I have never felt that I was beaten. That canvass gave me the minute knowledge of men and places needed when I soon afterwards organized the Klan.
With Reed’s defeat came another piece of bad news. The constitution was approved by the voters extending the vote to African Americans. Reed writes:
The constitution was ratified, Republican officers and representatives elected, and the negroes felt— to use the expression which they brought into vogue when they began to have the Bureau make “ole master” do what they wanted—that the bottom rail was really on top, and there for good. Flushed with the great victory they became more insolent and disposed to violence. And many weak-kneed whites were secretly beginning to curry favor with the Scalawags. I became sick at heart and longed for an efficient organization to protect our homes and families. I could not satisfy myself what it should be. I had read something in the papers of the Ku Klux Klan. But I thought it only a young man’s farce.
In the early summer of this year, 1868, while I was expressing my wishes to General Dudley M. DuBose, he told me that he had just been made the head of the Klan in our Congressional district, and he wanted me to take command of Oglethorpe, one of the counties in that district. He urged that I accept his offer, begging me to co-operate with him heart and soul in saving the South from Africanization.
This nadir of white control led Reed to the Ku Klux Klan:
In the early summer of this year, 1868, while I was expressing my wishes to General Dudley M. DuBose, he told me that he had just been made the head of the Klan in our Congressional district, and he wanted me to take command of Oglethorpe, one of the counties in that district. He urged that I accept his offer, begging me to co-operate with him heart and soul in saving the South from Africanization.
I had learned to know DuBose in the army. At Fussell’s Mill, August 16, 1864, the Eighth Georgia had been in all the bloody fighting which drove the enemy within our lines back to our works. He was now on the other side of these works, using them as a defence. The Confederates persistently attempted the final rush. After a while a few crept up a ravine to a point whence they could enfilade a part of the hostile line. It was strange to hear them cheer while they were lying on their stomachs. Their cheers and fusillade brought many helpers. Just at this time DuBose, then Colonel of the Fifteenth Georgia, and in command of Benning’s brigade, came up, and falling in with me, asked my advice. I showed him the part of the works from which the men in the ravine had drawn the defenders, advising that he assault it at once. He took it all in instantly, and promptly made proper dispositions. No men ever got ready for battle quicker than Benning’s. Forward they went upon the untenable part of the works. The whole line on each side of DuBose, understanding our advantage, moved forward with the true Confederate pace and yell, and the day was ours. I looked with unstinted admiration upon DuBose’s soldierly bearing as he led that charge. From that time on we were intimate friends.
Our Dominion Organized
He was a son-in-law of General Toombs. This fact gave him further qualification for a Ku Klux commandership.
At this meeting with DuBose in 1868 I became a member of the Klan, and immediately went to work with a will to establish its rule in my county.
The component territories, divisions and subdivisions of the Klan were suggested by and corresponded with the leading territorial divisions and subdivisons of the South. The Southern States were regarded as a single body—as an Empire—to use the language of the Prescript of the Ku Klux Klan.* The Grand Wizard was the supreme officer of the Empire. A State was a Realm. Its supreme officer was a Grand Dragon. In the State were different aggregations of counties, each aggregation called a Dominion. The supreme officer of the Dominion was the Grand Titan. So far as I observed, the congressional districts made the several Dominions. DuBose’s Dominion, which he commanded as Grand Titan, was the congressional district in which he and I lived. .
The next subdivision was a Province. That was a county. Its chief officer was a Grand Giant. I was Grand Giant of the Province which Oglethorpe county constituted, during all my career as a Ku Klux. The foregoing describes what we may call the general officers. The Grand Wizard was the commander-inchief, the Grand Dragon was a corps commander, the Grand Titan, a division-commander, the Grand Giant a brigade commander. This last was more like a commander of a department, in which garrisons or posts are stationed in different places of strategic or tactical importance.
The military student will note that the organization just described was mostly fashioned upon that of the Confederate army.
Now, for the line. vision was the Den. militia district. Oglethorpe had twelve militia districts. Now and then, however, a district would be so large that it had to be divided into two, and sometimes into three dens. A den commander was called the Grand Cyclops. As we have mentioned, the Grand Giant on one side was like a brigadier, and on another side like a department commander, but the Grand Cyclops was decidedly like a captain, and his two Night Hawks were really first and second lieutenants. A man in the ranks of the order was called a ghoul. He always belonged to a particular den.
The number of mounted men in a body is usually greatly magnified by observers even in the daytime. At night the negroes who peeped through the cracks of their hidings, and the women and girls whom a hint from someone had induced to wait for hours upon the verandah—all these made us out, as we passed, to be from ten to even fifty times as many as we really were. It was our policy to appear very strong to both white and black. The scheme of our organization assumed these exaggerated numbers. A den was generally spoken of as if it had from seventy-five to one hundred ghouls, when, in fact, it rarely had more than fifteen or twenty, and often not more than ten. It was hardly ever possible to find in any one place many horses fit for service. Mules were far more numerous than horses. In organizing I had to take only such men as could furnish themselves with good horses.
This article will be a multi-part series.
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