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While at Malden he saw something of the doings of the members of the somewhat mysterious Ku-Klux Klan, which in the Cyclopædia of Names is thus described: "A former secret organisation in the Southern United States, of which the object was to intimidate the negroes, carpet-baggers and 'scalawags, and to prevent them from political action.
A mild effort to arouse a sentiment for county control was made, and this failing, the Kentuckian had straightway gone for firebrand and gun. The dormant spirit of Ku-Klux awakened, the night-rider was born again, and one by one the toll-gates were going up in flame and settling back in ashes to the mother earth.
Twenty years before, indeed, there had been wild doings, during the brief Ku-Klux outbreak, but that was before Ellis's time, or at least when he was but a child. He had come of a Quaker family, the modified Quakers of the South, and while sharing in a general way the Southern prejudice against the negro, his prejudices had been tempered by the peaceful tenets of his father's sect.
It seemed as though the passions of men, aroused by the political troubles and getting no vent in action, welcomed this new outlet, and already the night-riding of ku-klux and toll gate days was having a new and easy birth. And these sinister forces were sweeping slowly toward the Blue-grass. Thus the injection of this new problem brought a swift subsidence of politics in the popular mind.
At a slow walk the stranger drew alongside of Marston and turned his spear point downward. "Gawd!" said an old darky. "Ku-klux done come again." And, indeed, it looked like a Ku-klux mask, white, dropping below the chin, and with eye-holes through which gleamed two bright fires. The eyes of Buck and Mollie were turned from Marston at last, and open-mouthed they stared.
The alleged Ku-Klux clansmen would fight their way out, leaving their prisoner behind and in the confusion but not until then the saddle-bags would disappear. It was all very simple, and prettily adjusted, but the difficulty was that Jase had failed to arrive and the act was lagging without its climax. He failed because of unforeseen events.
"Now, Alexander McGivins," proclaimed a deep and solemnly pitched voice, "ye stands before ther dread an' awful conclave of ther order of ther Ku-Klux; ther regulators of sich as defies proper an' decorous livin'. We charges ye with unwomanly shamelessness an' with ther practicin' of witchcraft."
People who had never been south of the Potomac and Ohio Rivers knew all about this "Ku-Klux"; but I failed, after many inquiries, to find a single man in the South who ever heard of it, saving in newspapers. Doubtless there were many acts of violence. When ignorant negroes, instigated by pestilent emissaries, went beyond endurance, the whites killed them; and this was to be expected.
It soon became evident, too, that the whites were determined, by a well- disciplined legion, known as the Ku-Klux Klan, whose members pretended to be the ghosts of the Confederate dead, to intimidate the colored voters, and intimidation was often supplemented by violence and murder.
All this they answered by pointing to speeches delivered by some fiery adorer of "the lost cause," to the Ku-Klux outrages, to political murders, like that of Chisholm, to the building of monuments to the Confederate dead, or to some newspaper expression of reverence for Confederate nationality.
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