The Quarterly of the Texas State Historical Association, Volume 9, July 1905 - April, 1906 Page: 263
ix, 294 p. : ill. ; 23 cm.View a full description of this periodical.
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The Ku Klux Klan.
263
domination of the Negro over the Southern white man; while the
camp-follower and the active carpetbagger organized the Negroes
into camps of the Loyal League, firing their zeal by the promise
of forty acres of land and a mule, and by inflammatory appeals
to their ignorance and cupidity, instilling into their minds a hatred
of the Confederate white man and a desire for revenge against
him.
The great wrong done the people of the South by the reconstruc-
tion legislation was the result of passion aroused by the inflam-
matory appeals of Northern fanatics, predicated, to a great extent,
on the assassination of Lincoln. It was not the result of calm
and deliberate purpose, nor of a wicked and cruel heart. It had
been loudly proclaimed in the North, and the people generally be-
lieved, that the Confederate high officials instigated Lincoln's mur-
der, and that the Confederate people approved it. This stirred the
minds of the Northern people into such a frenzy of passion that
they did not hesitate, at the time, to indorse the most drastic and
unjust legislation for the humiliation and punishment of the Con-
federate people. In the murder of Lincoln the Confederate people
lost their best and most powerful Northern friend; and no one
now pretends to believe that the Confederate officials instigated
his murder, or that the people of the South approved it.
Such were the conditions that surrounded the people of the Con-
federate States, and seemed to afford them no loophole of escape.
They were beaten, broken, and depressed, with no hope of relief.
They had no cloud by day, nor pillar of fire by night, to show them
the way; but, dark as the prospect was, deliverance came in an un-
expected manner, and this deliverance emphasizes and illustrates
the fact that Divine Providence interferes in the affairs of men
and nations, and that "He moves in a mysterious way His wonders
to perform."
The Ku Klux Klan, or the Invisible Empire, was the madcap
fancy of schoolboys in Pulaski, Tennessee. Gotten up in boyish
sport, in older hands it proved to be the fulcrum on which the lever
worked that freed the Confederate people, and tore from the hands
of the fanatics the fruit they expected to gather from the recon-
struction legislation, towit: the domination of the Confederate
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Texas State Historical Association. The Quarterly of the Texas State Historical Association, Volume 9, July 1905 - April, 1906, periodical, 1906; Austin, Texas. (https://texashistory.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metapth101036/m1/267/: accessed April 27, 2024), University of North Texas Libraries, The Portal to Texas History, https://texashistory.unt.edu; crediting Texas State Historical Association.