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DRAKE referred to the darkest hour of the late war, when postage-stamps were current, and when, if the proposed changes were effected, they could have made the Post-Office department pay for their drinks. But in the present state of the South, when the Ku-Klux Klan, in spite of his most earnest endeavors, refused to kill anybody, he saw no hope that those golden hours would return.
The more serious outrages, exclusive of murders and whippings, noted hereafter, have been the following: " He then proceeds with the details of sixty-eight cases, giving the names of the parties injured, white and black, and including the tearing up of the railway, on the night before a raid was made by the Ku-Klux on the county treasury building.
If, in New England, the very men who thrust Frederick Douglass from car and stage-coach, and mobbed and hunted him like a wild beast, now crowd to shake his hand and cheer him, let us not despair of seeing even the Ku-Klux tarried into decency, and sitting "clothed in their right minds" as listeners to their former victims. The colored man is to-day the master of his own destiny.
The management of the South was the most serious problem before the new administration. The whites were striving by fair means and foul to get political power back into their own hands. The reconstructed state governments, dependent upon black majorities, were too weak for successful resistance. The Ku-Klux and similar organizations were practically a masked army.
Individual effort could not suffice the rage for slaughter, and the ancient order of "assassins" was revived, with an "Old Man" of the swamps at its head. Thus "Ku-Klux" originated, and covered the land with a network of crime. Earnest, credulous women in New England had their feelings lacerated by these stories, in which they as fondly believed as their foremothers in Salem witches.
It was not denied that since the close of the war a considerable number of white men had joined the Republican party; white it was not even claimed that a single negro voted the Democratic ticket in 1868, except as he was led to the polls under the cover of Ku-Klux weapons, terrorized by the violence of that association of lawless men.
The stringent and persistent prosecution in the United States courts of members of the organized bands of Ku-Klux had tended to dissolve that organization and to restrain its members from the commission of such outrages as had distinguished the earlier period of their existence.
He was in a place like the Exposition ground, full of old men and women in peasant costume, like in the song, "When It's Apple Blossom Time in Normandy." Men in spiked helmets who looked like firemen kept charging through, like the Ku-Klux Klan in the movies, jumping from their horses and setting fire to buildings with strange outlandish gestures, spitting babies on their long swords.
There had been gentlemen-regulators a plenty, vigilance committees of gentlemen, and the Ku-Klux clan had been originally composed of gentlemen, as they all knew, but they meant to hew to the strict line of town-ordinance and common law and do the rough everyday work of the common policeman.
Murders have been and are frequent; the abuse, in various ways, of the blacks is too common to excite notice. There can be no doubt of the existence of numerous insurrectionary organizations known as 'Ku-Klux Klans, who, shielded by their disguise, by the secrecy of their movements, and by the terror which they inspire, perpetrate crime with impunity.
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