K. K. K. Sketches, Humorous and Didactic. James Melville Beard
all their prerogatives as such. The civil power was vested in military satraps, who were commissioned to govern these provinces (for such they had become); or where the work of reconstructing or radicalizing the populace was more advanced, and it was necessary to preserve the form of the civil machine, State elections were improvised and conducted under the shadow of overawing bayonets. The administration of justice was as summarily withdrawn from the legal functionaries, and given over to the Federal judicatories; or, what was far worse, placed in the hands of that most ignorant and despotic of all judiciary systems—military courts-martial. The law-making power, in its turn, was farmed out to dummy legislatures, which in their constitution, if not in the modus of their creation, were fac-similes of the great “rump” model which had made laws before them, and which, with its two-thirds majority and grand faculty for caucusing, was quite equal to all the devices of vetoing chief magistrates. The provision disfranchising the white men of the South had been contemporaneously declared, and was a part of that remarkable series which had empanoplied the negro race with all the political belongings of freedom.
The policy adopted by the Southern people in concerting resistance to the attacks of these modern Sejanus was the only one which could have succeeded, and, whatever else may be said regarding its morality, was just to themselves and disinterested mankind. They did not as a class, nor as individuals, conceive for a moment that their allegiance to the constitution and laws of their country was involved in the issues of the political war which they waged against Radicalism, though constantly reminded to that intent by their enemies, whose vocabulary of loyal epithets included such choice terms as “rebel,” “traitor,” “guerilla,” “Southern bandit,” etc., and their integrity as citizens of the United States government they never ceased to insist upon, though their leaders foretold (and it has since been verified) that they would never succeed in establishing it until the movement, which they had inaugurated under so many difficulties, had accomplished the disestablishment of Radicalism at the national capitol.
The details of the political strife of those years are unimportant to our narrative; but the intelligent reader will perceive nothing occult in our purpose if we call attention to the long imprisonments to which many of the leaders of the Southern movement were subjected, the causeless sequestration of public and private properties, the numberless criminal prosecutions inaugurated in obedience to the whims of the “trooly loil,” the immense peculations chargeable to the State governments under Radical rule, and, lastly, the open robberies perpetrated under the name and with the sanction of the national legislature.
The governments in the South—State, district, and municipal—were negro governments, and if, in a few exceptions, this characterization was but partial, it was where the negro alternated with that pestiferous nomad—the carpet-bagger—in administering government for his late master.
Favored by this condition of public affairs, that remarkable secret order—the Loyal League—found its way into the Southern country, and was recommended to the negro by its politics, its dark lantern, its facilities for the transaction of evil deeds, its avenues of escape afforded to the criminal, and, finally, its picturesque ceremonial, in which latter we can see no cause to dispute his taste or judgment. Some description of this singular body, which was, we believe, in a measure unknown to the great mass of the people of the Northern States, will not be deemed digressive at this point.
The order was subdivided into neighborhood organizations, and the heads of these were white men, while their vertebral force was recruited from the voting population above described; the chéf being as completely en rapport with his African brother as if he had been in truth his congener, and not simply dependent on him for patronage. Their locus in quo was nowhere and everywhere—each city and town numbering its lodges and sub-lodges, and the diffusion thereof, throughout the agricultural districts, being in the somewhat extravagant ratio of one to the square mile. Their object was plunder. Their raids, directed against the white trash, contemplated everything that might be classed under the term commissaries, and ranged from the pig-pen to the poultry-yard, and from an ear of corn to a well-grown tuber. The “wee sma’ hours ayont the twal” was the festive time of night selected by the “loil” Moses and his dusky Israel for their exodus from forest or cavern, and, as they marched, the flesh-pots of the enemy disgorged their treasure, and animated nature held its breath. The goods and chattels of the unreconstructed were, by act of Congress, their lawful prey, and if their foraging expeditions were conducted by moonlight, it was from constitutional considerations, and not through any well-grounded fear of resistance on the part of the intimidated whites.
The conclaves of the society were held nightly, and during the election campaigns, which progressed with tolerable regularity during eight months of the year, their en masse assemblages, or political rallies, occupied each alternate day of the week (the off day being devoted to itinerant duty among neighboring lodges). A weak solution of the Christian religion involved in the superstitions which they everywhere practised, aided them in their delusions concerning politics; and it is not exaggeration to state that the remaining four months of the year, under the above estimate, were devoted to their so-called revival meetings, which never failed to prove an insufferable burden to the pork- and vegetable-raising communities on which they were billeted. Their religion was, in truth, a part of their politics, and, on occasion, their ministry their most serviceable performers on the hustings.
These twin ideas of religion and politics having been introduced into the League, dominated the order so completely that its secular business was often arrested by a call to prayers, and more frequently than otherwise its order of business terminated by a twilight homily on the total cussedness and final unreliability of all who anchored their faith to the Conservative idea in politics.
This new element, however, was far from benefiting the League; its morals grew infinitely worse; its larcenies became more frequent, and were prosecuted on a larger scale; it became more arrogant in its assumption of exclusive political right on unreconstructed territory; and, finally, assayed, through the medium of politics, to accomplish a social reform that would elevate the ignorant and semi-savage race which it represented to family equality with a class of beings who recognized no title to such a claim, but that of honorable ancestry and a spotless name. Beyond the attempt, however, which was warmly seconded by the national Congress, it is needless to say that nothing was ever done; and this extreme of rash legislation, undertaken, it would seem at this date, with no other object in view than the humiliation of a proud and constitutionally sensitive enemy, proved in the end the downfall of the League. From this moment, it was met by a counter movement, which, while possessing an organization in many respects superior to its own, covered its movements with the same veil of secrecy; caucused with the same regularity; foraged on its enemies with equal pertinacity and greed; and, finally, proceeded on its mission with the same fell purpose of triumphing by fair means or foul.
CHAPTER III.
THE KLAN.
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