The Atlantic Magazine has an article on the Reconstruction Era Ku Klux Klan in California. Historian Kevin Waite has identified a dozen attacks by the Klan on Chinese immigrants from 1868 to 1870. According to the article:
Sometimes the mere threat of violence sufficed. Like southern Klansmen, western vigilantes operated in a cryptic and clandestine fashion. In April 1869, “another open Ku Klux proclamation, without address or envelop[e] … was thrown into the Post Office receiving box last night,” reported the Patriot of San Jose. “It threatens a destruction of all the crops of persons employing even a single Chinaman.” Another message, signed “Ku Klux Klan,” threatened to disembowel a citizen near Marysville, California, for his comparatively progressive views on race.
California Klansmen played the victim and reveled in theatricality. “Action! Action! Action!” demanded a manifesto addressed to “fellow members of the KKK” that was distributed near San Francisco in 1868. The letter vowed “retribution and vengeance” and promised to “sheath daggers” in the breasts of those who sought the “enslavement of a free people”—that is, white workers. The irony of white supremacists complaining about slavery was apparently lost on certain Klansmen.
The fact that California had never left the Union meant that after the Civil War the state was not occupied by the army. According to the article:
Western vigilantes in the Reconstruction era could claim an advantage that some southern Klansmen lacked: the support of their local government. Klan activity peaked in the late 1860s, when most former Confederate states were under military occupation and governed by Republican politicians. California, however, had remained loyal to the United States in the Civil War and thus avoided federal oversight during Reconstruction. That left Democrats free to participate in politics. They carried the state election of 1867 in a landslide, catapulting unabashed white supremacists into California’s highest offices. In his inaugural address, Governor Henry Haight told his white audience precisely what they wanted to hear: Chinese immigration must cease. The “influx” of Chinese workers would, he warned, “inflict a curse upon posterity for all time.” A Klansman couldn’t have put it more pointedly.
Follow Reconstruction Blog on Social Media:
