This account of a Ku Klux Klan occupation of Florence comes from the Democratic newspaper the Daily Phoenix. It was originally published in the Memphis Avalanche, a paper sympathetic to the Ku Klux Klan.
Daily phoenix
Sunday, Dec 06, 1868
Columbia, SC
Vol: 4
Page: 5
After the Ku Klux was established in Tennessee in 1866, Alabama was the first state in which it expanded into. According to the Encyclopedia of Alabama:
The group’s membership included white men of varying social classes as well as many Confederate veterans. For example, James H. Clanton, a lawyer and former Confederate general who lived in Montgomery, was Alabama’s first Grand Dragon. Following Clanton’s murder in 1871, John Tyler Morgan, an ex-Confederate general and a future six-term U.S. senator from Alabama, held the position of Grand Dragon for several years. General Edmund Pettus of Dallas County was the last person to hold that title during Reconstruction. Other prominent Klan leaders in Alabama included Ryland Randolph, editor of the Tuscaloosa newspaper Independent Monitor, public Klan figure, and Confederate veteran, and Episcopal Bishop of Alabama Hooker Wilmer—who served as the state Klan chaplain. Several other white supremacist groups also formed in Alabama that imitated but possessed no true relation to the Ku Klux Klan.
You can read more about the Klan in Alabama here.
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