The founding of America’s oldest terrorist group, the Ku Klux Klan, is shrouded in myth and legend. While Klan lore places its first meeting on Christmas, 1865, it was probably founded six months later. We do know when the groups first large convention was. According to Dunning School historian Walter Fleming:
After the Klan had changed character and become a body of regulators, and it was decided that the administration should be centralized, a convention of delegates from the Dens met in Nashville, in April, 1867, and adopted the original Prescript…
[From: Introduction to Wilson, D. L. (Daniel Love); Lester, J. C.. Ku Klux Klan Its Origin, Growth and Disbandment (Kindle Locations 235-238). . Kindle Edition.]
The Prescript was the constitution for the Ku Klux. It is available here.
Klansman James Crowe claimed long after the Nashville convention that former-Confederate general Nathan Bedford Forrest and John W. Morton were present at the Nashville meeting, but some of his other claims have proved to be untrue. [Source: Parsons, Elaine Frantz. Ku-Klux: The Birth of the Klan during Reconstruction (p. 50). The University of North Carolina Press. Kindle Edition.]
Historian Elaine Parsons says that while Forrest is sometimes depicted as having called the Nashville convention: I have found no evidence that Forrest associated himself with the Klan before 1868, after it had spread throughout the South. [From: Parsons, Elaine Frantz. Ku-Klux: The Birth of the Klan during Reconstruction (p. 50). The University of North Carolina Press. Kindle Edition.]
While the Ku Klux Klan was first organized in June 1866 (or Dec. 24 1865) it apparently received little notice before March 1867. At that time The Citizen newspaper began publishing articles on calls for Ku Klux to assemble. Parsons believes that the newspaper played a role in supporting the early Klan in part because its sensational nature sold newspapers.
The poorly documented Nashville convention appears to have consisted primarily of Ku Klux from Tennessee and Alabama although sources also described delegates from elsewhere in the South.
S.E.F. Rose, who became the historian of the United Daughters of the Confederacy (UDC), described the Klan as under the leadership of Forrest before the Nashville meeting, but Parsons says that there is little evidence of this. Here is what Rose says in the UDC-endorsed history of the Klan, in which she claims that the convention was in 1866:
The Maxwell House convention was well-enough known that when the Federal Writers Project put together its Depression Era WPA tourism guide to Tennessee it included the convention as part of its coverage of Nashville:
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Morton included an epilogue in his autobiography, written by Thomas Dixon, Jr. (later of “The Clansman” infamy), that provided details of Forrest being sworn into the Klan at the Maxwell House in the fall of 1866:
Thanks Andy. I was surprised by Parsons’s statement of the lack of contemporary evidence of Forrest’s involvement in leadership of the Klan before 1868.