some young Tennesseans. Horrid tales were told to frighten the negroes from roaming about and pilfering. The testimony before the committee on that subject, of which the writer was a member, showed that they daily visited houses and talked their foolish talk; that they were "mummicking about," whatever that means. They carried a flesh bag in the shape of a heart, and went about "hollering for fried nigger meat." One of the Klan, for instance, represented that he had been killed six years before at Manassas, "and since then some one has built a turnpike over his grave and he has to scratch like h-1 to get up through the gravel." One Ku-Klux carried an India rubber stomach, to startle a negro by swallowing pailfuls of water. There is no doubt that political reasons had their influence after the Ku-Klux were under way. They were a disfranchised body and did not intend to submit to such laws. Is not here the secret of their beginning? They justi fied their orgies, their names, and their conduct on political grounds. The worse the government, the worse the outrages. The South was sparsely populated. Public opinion, consequent on subjugation and the breach of Federal faith, was much inflamed. Their rulers gave them an example in lawlessness, and produced the temptation to do in the dark what could not be found out.

Such, at least, is the account given by the Confederate general, Forrest. In his testimony before the joint select committee of Congress, in 1871-'72, he stated that he had joined one of these secret societies. His purpose was to suppress it, in the interest of peace. This "order" bore the title of "Pale Faces"; but it was only designated in its construction and by-laws by the sign of the three stars. It was organized for self-protection. It was intended as an offset against the "Loyal League," into which colored men were inducted by their white local leaders. General Forrest explained the reasons and objects of these secret organizations among the whites of the South to be the insecurity felt by the Southern people; the fact that Northern men were coming there and forming these Loyal Leagues; and the fact that night meetings were being held by negroes who were becoming very insolent, and by whom many outrages, particularly against virtuous women, were being perpetrated, without legal punishment. There was a great deal of insecurity in the country, he said, and the organization that he spoke of was gotten up to protect the weak. It had no political motive.

This may not have been the original design of these secret, oath-bound organizations. Certain it is, that they soon came to be made use of, in the most arbitrary, cruel, and shocking manner, for the furtherance of political ends, and for the crushing out of Republicanism in the Southern States; to which party the colored people were almost unanimously attached. The crimes and outrages narrated in these pages had their origin, almost exclusively, in political causes, in the effort on the part of the whites to set at naught the rights of suffrage guaranteed to the negroes, and to exclude

from Federal, state, county, and local offices all persons whose reliance for election to such offices was mainly, if not altogether, on negro votes.

General Forrest estimated the strength of the Ku-Klux organization in Tennessee at 40,000. He expressed the belief that it was still stronger in other states. The members were sworn to secrecy, under the penalty of death for breach of fidelity. Their ordinary mode of operation-as gathered from the mass of evidence-was to patrol the country at night. They went well armed and mounted. They wore long white gowns. They masked their faces. Their appearance terrified the timid and superstitious negroes who happened to see them as they rode past, and who then regarded them as ghostly riders. But most frequently they surrounded and broke into the cabins' of the negroes; frightened and maltreated the inmates; warned them of future vengeance; and' probably carried off some obnoxious negro, or "carpet-bagger," whose fate it was to be riddled with murderous bullets, hung to the limb of a tree, or mercilessly whipped and tortured, for some offense, real or imaginary, but generally because he was active in politics or in negro schools or churches.

The Ku-Klux operations in the State of North Carolina were described to a congressional committee by one who had been a member, but who had. shrunk from participation in the crimes to which he had pledged his countenance and support when he joined the order. This was a member of the North Carolina bar. His name is Mr. James Boyd. He was United States District Attorney for the western district of the state- having joined the Republican party and become one of its conspicuous local leaders. Mr. Boyd described the ceremonies of initiation. The oath-bound members were

to obey all lawful orders of the organization,-the qualification "lawful" being applied, not to Federal or state authority, but to the authority of the order. The meetings were held in the woods or other secret places. The manner of making nocturnal raids was prescribed by the regulations. No raid was to be made, no person punished, no execution done, unless it had been first unanimously agreed upon at a regular meeting of "a camp" of the Klan. It must have been duly approved by the officers and chief of the Klan. They had secret signals and watchwords. When punishment was ' to be inflicted on a victim, the raiders came, not from his vicinity, but from a distant locality, so as to avoid recognition. The penalty for disclosing the secrets of the order was death; and the obligations extended to giving false testimony before the courts, if necessary, and if on a jury, to acquitting members on trial.

According to the majority report of the Senate select committee, of March 10, 1871, the Ku-Klux associations, by whatever name known, were instituted in North Carolina in 1867 or 1868. fore, was coeval with the Reconstruction inference is that those acts, by their revolutionary character, formed the

This lawless combination, thereacts and their enforcement. The

chief provocation to Ku-Klux atrocities. The people of North Carolina had submitted, with what degree of resignation they could command, to the abolition of slavery, to the overthrow of their state government, and to the temporary rule of military power; but the grant of universal suffrage to their former slaves, accompanied by the disfranchisement of the most intelligent, wealthy, and influential citizens, was more than they could patiently bear. Nothing could have been more hopeless than the idea of successful resistance; and the resistance offered was at once foolish and criminal. Still it was natural under the circumstances; and should have been anticipated and avoided by the ruling element in Congress. There were indeed circumstances in the condition of the South which pointed strongly to the necessity of giving universal suffrage to the negroes. As a rule, no one class of people can be safely entrusted with the exclusive powers of legislation and government over other classes; and the temper of the Southern white people towards their former slaves, just emancipated by the conquering arms of the Union, was not such as to make that people an exception to that rule. But where is found any reason for the subjugation of the whites to the blacks? Will not its attempt forever remain a stain upon the wisdom and fairness of the then dominant power in Congress? If, while conferring universal suffrage upon the blacks, the leading whites had been left in free and undisturbed possession of political rights, and had been invited and encouraged to take an active part in the reconstruction, without being required to recant former political views and party associations,—the success of reconstruction measures would have been promoted; the rights of the negroes better secured; good feeling substituted for a sense of bitterness and injustice; and an orderly and honest administration of state affairs would have existed instead of the carnival of fraud, robbery, and violence that actually followed the enforcement of the Reconstruction acts.

The report of the Senate committee of the 10th of March, 1871, before referred to, recites a startling number of Ku-Klux outrages. They embrace whipping, mutilation, and murder. These cruelties took place in North Carolina, between December, 1868, and December, 1870. The report gives some of the horrifying details. One case is that of a man named Outlaw. His only crime was that he was the head of a Loyal League in Alamance County. For this offense he was condemned, sentenced, and executed by the Ku-Klux organization, on Feb. 9, 1870. He was taken from his house about midnight by a band of from eighty to a hundred men, and hung upon an elm tree, not far from the court-house door. No active measures were taken to arrest and punish the murderers. In this same county, a simpleton, who was supposed to have seen some of his neighbors who had taken part in the murder of Outlaw, was drowned in the mill-pond. Two other negroes were shot, but not killed, and fifty were whipped. In Craven County, two men were shot, but not killed. In Caswell County, a member of the state