K. K. K. Sketches, Humorous and Didactic. James Melville Beard
which, soon after this event, they were driven to adopt with such unanimity. Loyal League supremacy, and the elevation of the black man to those political rights from which the Southern white citizen had been so recently thrust down, were far more conclusive factors of this result; and as such, in all narratives pretending to authenticity in delivering the political events of this period, will be more closely blended with the historical fact.
CHAPTER II.
CAUSES OF THE K. K. K. MOVEMENT.
Situation Produced by the War—Discontented Partisans—The War District in the South—Words of a Northern Tourist—Widespread Destitution—The Curse of Slavery—How its sudden Abolition affected Community Wealth in the Southern States—The Political Situation even more Distressing—President Johnson—How the Work of Reconstruction was Inaugurated—The Law-making Power vested in Dummy Legislatures—Disfranchisement—Enfranchisement—The Color Issue which these Measures brought—A Singular Peace Policy—The War of the Conservatives in the South against Radicalism did not Revive Issues concluded by the late Civil Struggle, as the latter Boasted—Loyal Epithets—“Traitor,” “Guerilla,” “Southern Bandit,” etc.—Radical Rule in the South—The Shamelessness of the State Officials—The Uneducated Negro a Law-giver—Organization of the Loyal League—Carpet-Bag Administration thereof—Negro Draft—Some of its Peculiarities—The K. K. K. Movement as an Offset to the League.
When the clouds of passion and prejudice that brooded over the American States in the beginning of the latter half of the present century had dropped into the ocean of carnage, which during four years of severe revolutionary penance deluged all their borders, the return to those opposite tempers that beget in men a desire to renew the pledges of ancient covenants, and practise the ultima thule of the Messianic idea, as delivered to us by the teachers of the Cross (forgiveness), was pronounced in degree; but while it exceeded the bare tendency looked for by men, as an outgrowth of the changed order of things, this moral rehabilitation of the body politic was effected by slow and painful stages.
Legions of men might have been found on either side of the sectional dead-line who cherished animosities which no philosophy born of the emotions could preach down, and before which even those ministers of red havoc that had invaded their homes were content to lower their weapons and view in forbearance a virtue.
It cannot be denied that while the widespread diffusion of the war burden and general travail had a tendency to equalize the feeling of the masses, and awaken a desire to return to the arts of peace, that in not uncommon instances inhumanities had been practised, and bloody reprisals sought, whose issues were wounds, for which the angel of peace brought no healing on his wings. Those more dignified passions which, in the outset of hostilities, had swayed the common breast in the rush to arms, where they had not become wholly extinct in a desire for reunion and renewed fraternity, as we have shown, had thus degenerated into the more human instincts of individual hate and revenge which, if sometimes less blameworthy, are far more implacable. Those who cherished the latter, however, were discounted in all their efforts to discourage peace proposals by the feeling of distrust which their former actions had inspired, and, very soon after the Grant and Sherman dictation of peace terms, were left to those weaker subterfuges that might not hope for organized support. Many of this discontented class were domiciled on Southern soil, and it may be surmised that the genius of desolation that walked forth to meet them on their homeward passage from Appomattox and Gainesville inspired them with yet warmer resentments against the authors of the ignominious defeat under which they suffered.
The war district of the South, in the year of grace which brought about military amnesty, furnished one of those pictures of “crownless desolation” in the history of the world’s wars for which the art that decorated St. Peter’s with the images of purgatorial griefs could have possessed no adequate coloring, and in the attempt to portray which talents and scholarship less consummate than those of the divine Angelo must have issued in utter failure.
Cities destroyed; towns and villages laid waste; churches, schools, and public buildings rotting under the hospital plague, or, more fortunate, sleeping in the ashes of licensed incendiarism; wealthy plantations stripped of their agricultural paraphernalia, and relegated to the domain whence they had been lately redeemed by the good offices of the pioneer; and in room of these—landscape horrors; vast cemeteries, whose enforced tribute reached unto all kindreds; flame-scarred wastes memorializing a past civilization, and extending from the Alleghany hills to the Georgian forests, and from the rivers to the sea; and brooding over all, sole relic of the conqueror’s power, that grim sentinelcy that looked down from dismantled ruins, and bleak, wind-shaken towers, upon the burial-place of the domestic arts.
A Northern tourist, who, soon after the close of hostilities, followed the trail of Sherman’s army half across the State of Georgia, and explored the Shenandoah Valley from the mountains at its source to the mountains at its foot, thus comments upon the scenes which beguiled the earlier and later moments of his journey: “And this lovely heritage, interspersed by hills and valleys, lakes and rivers, which but as yesterday, under the transforming hand of wealth and art combined, blossomed as the rose, and was lighted by the torch of America’s best civilization, now, and under these severe conditions—alas! that we should be driven to concede it—has sunk back into aboriginal unsightliness, and many portions thereof become the fitting abode of those monsters who, warned by an instinct of their nature, shun the haunts of human progress.”
But not only did this ghost of desolation hold its solemn rounds where wealth and its monumental insignia had erst been set up—more practical subjects were included in the fearful summing up of Federal conquest. The grain crop of four years had been consumed by the requirements of both armies, or ruthlessly committed to the flames through the weak policy of military commanders; export products were sacrificed to confiscation needs; the agricultural districts were bereft of all labor aids, and stood tenantless and barren; nothing of practical value—not even the currency of the country, which had been demonetized months before the events of which we particularly write—greeted the impoverished inhabitant, who, standing in this presence, could scarce look back upon four years of bootless strife with regret unmingled with repining.
Slavery, which was undoubtedly a great evil, and is at this period conceded to have been such by its most clamorous apologists of ante bellum times, was nevertheless the great prop of community wealth in those States where it had been recognized by the government; and when (keeping in view the wide-spread destitution to which we have called attention) this pet institution was wrecked on the breakers of war, property affairs in all their borders reached an ebb beyond which, it would have seemed, they could not have been impelled by even a retribution born of that highest example of social evil—State treason. The male inhabitants of the South thus found themselves, at the close of the war, not only stripped of fortune, and all that pertained to a farmer’s inheritance, in the strictly agricultural communities to which they belonged, but without business capacity or business employ, had the former been supplied, and under the explicit disfavor of the government administration, in all its branches, with all that that implied.
But while the physical straits to which the inhabitants of these States were driven almost exceeded belief, and challenged the sympathies of Christendom, they were met at this time with a yet more incorrigible evil, as we have already prevised, and one from which all attempts at escape seemed likely to plunge them into deeper miseries. Despite the generous policy inaugurated by the commanders of the Federal forces at the close of the civil conflict, and the good intentions of President Johnson, who had lately succeeded to the chief magistracy, the Congress of the United States at this time resolved upon a system of oppressions towards this people whose parallel is not to be found in modern history. This work was inaugurated by the passage of laws whose effect was a virtual dismemberment of the Union; all the efforts of these States to participate