by Charles Lane
Rumors spread that spirits of Confederate soldiers killed in the recently concluded Civil War were swarming through the late-evening atmosphere, crying for blood and revenge.
The local newspaper, the Daily Sun, published lurid editorials heralding a new organization. “The Ku Klux Klan has arrived,” the Daily Sun announced. “And woe to the degenerate.”1
“Something terrible floats on the breeze,” the editorial went on, “and in the dim silences are heard solemn whispers, dire imprecations against the false ones who have proved recreant to their faith and country. Strange mocking anomalies fill the air. Look out!”
The paper did not identify the “false ones” or “the degenerate.” It was hardly necessary: only Republicans, members of the party that had stood for the Union, and against slavery, during the Civil War, received the threats. Their hero, the assassinated President Abraham Lincoln, had defeated the Confederacy, and helped emancipate millions of African Americans. Now, three years after Lincoln’s death and the South’s surrender at Appomattox, his political heirs—white and black—advocated greater equality between the races, the cause for which so many Union soldiers had fought and died.
Columbus’s leading Republican was George W. Ashburn, a tall, gray-haired fifty-three-year-old—one of the minority of white Southerners who opposed secession before the war. Even more unusually, Ashburn had avowed that slavery was evil and that “Africans were human beings,” as a friend would later recall.2 Ashburn’s beliefs prompted him to quit his job as a plantation overseer. Thereafter he sought work as a schoolteacher but no whites would hire him.
During the war, Ashburn left Columbus and joined Union General William Rosecrans’s Army of the Cumberland in Tennessee, as an intelligence officer. After the Union triumph, Ashburn returned to his hometown and became an outspoken Republican. “I only hope to live to see Georgia reconstructed and to lay my bones in soil consecrated to liberty, within her borders,” he wrote a fellow veteran of General Rosecrans’s force.3
In late 1867 and early 1868, Ashburn served as an elected member of a state convention charged with drafting a new Georgia constitution. The proposed document guaranteed black men the vote, among other reforms. Many thought the state legislature to be chosen under the new constitution would select Ashburn to represent Georgia in the United States Senate, given his large following among newly freed and enfranchised African Americans.
All but a few whites in Columbus considered Ashburn a traitor to his region and his race, and the new constitution an evil blueprint for “Negro rule.” When Ashburn returned to town after the convention ended on March 17, 1868, his enemies threatened to kill any white person who offered him housing. The prestigious Perry House hotel lodged Ashburn for a night, but asked him to leave the next day, citing other guests’ objections to his presence. Brushing off a friend’s recommendation that he leave Columbus to save his life, Ashburn boarded with Hannah Flournoy, a formerly enslaved black woman who rented a three-bedroom shotgun-style home two hundred yards from the Perry House.
There, Ashburn received an anonymous death threat, in a letter illustrated with a drawing of his body lying in a coffin marked “K.K.K.”
Ashburn summoned fellow Republicans to his room and displayed the ghoulish message, along with similar missives other Columbus Republicans had received. He passed them around, joking, “Boys, here’s your death warrants.” The group “had quite a laugh, merely thinking them some rebel bombast,” a participant later recalled.4 They dismissed the Ku Klux Klan as a mythical conspiracy, a scare tactic by their political foes, the local white supremacist Democratic Party, whose leaders included Confederate veterans, cotton planters, merchants, and the editors of the Daily Sun. There was a company of Army troops stationed in town; Republicans confidently believed it would deter their antagonists.
* * *
It was indeed rational, in early 1868, for George W. Ashburn and other Republicans in the South to feel optimistic about Reconstruction.
That had not always been the case, to be sure. Lincoln’s expressions on how to deal with the postwar South suggested that he supported voting rights for at least some African Americans, but his plans never had a chance to ripen. His murder on the night of April 14, 1865, left Reconstruction up to his vice president and successor, Andrew Johnson, a Tennessean and a prewar Democrat. He had been made Lincoln’s running mate as a gesture of bipartisanship, and because he was a rare pro-Union, antislavery Southerner. Those opinions reflected his class resentment toward the planter elite, not sympathy for people of color, however. In the early months of his accidental presidency, Johnson offered Southern states renewed membership in the Union, without substantial reform to their prewar system of racial hierarchy beyond nominal abolition of slavery. Their legislatures, dominated by former secessionists and former Confederate Army officers, enacted “black codes” limiting the rights of newly freed African Americans so rigidly as to restore slavery in everything but name.
Northern Republicans rejected President Johnson’s policy, because it cheated African Americans of true freedom, and left Southern Democrats, most of them former rebels, in control of the former Confederate states—with a chance eventually to leverage that power into control over the federal government, too. When the Republican-dominated Congress returned in December 1865, after a nine-month recess, it immediately set about overturning Johnson’s plan. The lawmakers refused to seat the Southern states’ newly elected representatives or senators, who included no fewer than six former members of the Confederate cabinet, four former Confederate generals, fifty-eight former members of the Confederate Congress, and former Confederate Vice President Alexander H. Stephens, who came to Washington as a would-be senator from Georgia.5
Congress enacted major laws over Johnson’s veto, one extending the power of the new Freedmen’s Bureau to aid newly emancipated people, the other a Civil Rights Act, which made all African Americans United States citizens and prohibited states from denying them equal rights. To entrench the Civil Rights Act’s statutory equalization of citizenship in the nation’s basic law, Congress passed the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution in 1866, then submitted it to the states for ratification.
Republicans campaigned on this program in the 1866 midterm elections. Voters rewarded them with veto-proof majorities in both houses of Congress. In 1867, Congress passed three Reconstruction Acts, over Johnson’s veto. The laws grouped ten of the eleven formerly seceded Southern states into five military districts, with each district governed by an Army general and patrolled by several thousand troops. (Tennessee had already returned to the Union through a separate process.) The ten states would be excluded from congressional representation pending the rewriting of their constitutions by state conventions.
The conventions, in turn, would be elected by black and white male voters, except for former Confederate leaders, who would be ineligible based on their past role in the rebellion. Then voters would go to the polls again in April 1868, to ratify the constitutions in statewide elections. Only after its voters ratified a new constitution, and its legislature ratified the Fourteenth Amendment, could any of these ten former Confederate states be restored to the Union and send representatives to Congress.
By early 1868, it seemed Congress might indeed accomplish what had come to be called “radical” Reconstruction. Originally an exclusively Northern antislavery movement, the Republican Party would achieve national viability, based on black votes in the Southern states. That, in turn, would help sustain the great legislative achievements of the postwar Republican Congresses—equal rights, regardless of race or caste, for every man in every state. What had been an agglomeration of fractious states would at last be a true nation-state, steered by a federal government responsible for security and the economy, and, above all, rededicated to the Declaration of Independence’s self-evident truth, “that all men are created equal.”
The vast majority of Southern whites rea
cted with fury and horror. The war had destroyed their plantations and towns; now radical Reconstruction threatened the basic principle of their society, white supremacy. How to resist, though, was less clear. Another attempt at secession and armed revolt was unthinkable. The sporadic, uncontrolled violence across the South in recent months had proven counterproductive: in mid-1866, for example, whites attacked and murdered African Americans and white Republicans in Memphis, Tennessee, and New Orleans, Louisiana, achieving nothing except a Northern backlash and a landslide in favor of the Republicans in November. As for trying to compete with the Republicans for African American votes, that would have required the Democrats to concede that their presumed racial inferiors had a right to participate in the first place.
There was another alternative: subversion.
* * *
The Ku Klux Klan began as a club for a half dozen bored Confederate Army veterans in tiny Pulaski, Tennessee.6 It formed during the Christmas season of 1865, when it still seemed Johnson’s view of Reconstruction could prevail. American men had a penchant for freemasonry, fraternities, and secret societies, and at first the Klan—whose strange name derived from the ancient Greek kyklos (“circle”), and whose costumes and rituals seemed contrived mostly for amusement—typified that tendency.
As the Republican plan for Reconstruction took hold, however, Klan “dens” mutated into white supremacist vigilante groups targeting African Americans, Freedmen’s Bureau officials, and white Republicans. They would don frightening masks and disguises, often hoods crowned with animal horns, to imitate those that supposedly protruded from the devil’s head, and ride through the Southern nights, shooting and whipping their victims, and burning African American schools, churches, and homes.
During Reconstruction, Ku Klux Klan costumes served two purposes: to conceal the wearer’s identity and to terrify victims. (Collection of the Buffalo History Museum)
The Ku Klux Klan remained relatively obscure and mostly limited to Tennessee until early 1868, when it became clear to the South’s white supremacists that the political transition provided for under the 1867 Reconstruction Acts was indeed going forward, and their strongest defender in Washington, Andrew Johnson, was likely to face an impeachment attempt by the Republican Congress.
Former Confederate officers led by cavalry chieftain Nathan Bedford Forrest of Tennessee hatched a plan to take over the Ku Klux Klan and convert its sporadic violence into an organized terror campaign. Their goal would be to disrupt radical Reconstruction through intimidation of Republican voters and politicians, starting with the 1868 elections. The new Klan leaders formalized the hierarchy of the “Invisible Empire,” as it would come to be known, with a “Grand Wizard,” Forrest, at the top, commanding rank-and-file “ghouls” initiated in secret grips, passwords, and rituals.
A slave trader before the Civil War, and a commander of forces notorious for massacring surrendered black Union soldiers during the conflict, Forrest nevertheless remained at liberty to start a railroad and an insurance firm after Appomattox. Business gave him a plausible rationale to travel through the defeated region and to recruit white Democrats, many of them Confederate veterans, to the Klan conspiracy. New Klansmen swore to support “a white man’s government,” and to maintain absolute secrecy about Klan activities, upon pain of death.
In early March, Forrest came to Columbus.7 The town had avoided the worst of the havoc Union General William Tecumseh Sherman’s armies wreaked on Georgia, but a late Union cavalry raid—a week after Appomattox—left its textile and arms factories, powered by the Chattahoochee River, in ruins. By Forrest’s visit the town had rebuilt the old Eagle Mills textile plant and renamed it the Eagle & Phenix Mills, a tribute to its emergence from the ashes of war. Leading white citizens, mostly Confederate veterans in their late twenties and early thirties, nevertheless seethed with resentment over the South’s defeat and horror at living on equal terms with their erstwhile slaves.
They proved receptive to Forrest’s appeal. Unlike more open forms of resistance, the Ku Klux Klan threatened radical Reconstruction at its most vulnerable point: its lack of support among white Southerners. The white population could be the sea, wide and deep, in which the Klan would swim. As in the rest of the South, what little organized police presence there was in Columbus and surrounding Muscogee County would itself be drawn from this pool of sympathetic manpower. Klan terrorists would be invulnerable to detection and punishment by the local Army garrison or any other federal authority as long as their code of silence held.
Within days of Forrest’s sojourn in Columbus, the first threats against Ashburn and other Republicans appeared on their doorposts, and in the pages of the Daily Sun.
* * *
After their meeting in George W. Ashburn’s room, Republicans, white and black, returned to the public spaces of Columbus, rallying in advance of the two-day state constitutional referendum on April 20 and 21, 1868; a new governor, state legislature, and local governments would be chosen then, too. On March 28, 1868—a Saturday—two thousand people, most of them black, filled the town’s main square to nominate candidates, and to hear a campaign speech from Henry McNeal Turner, the famous African Methodist Episcopal bishop.
Born free in South Carolina, Turner had gone on to serve as the first black chaplain of the United States Colored Troops during the Civil War. That Saturday afternoon, he seemed to revel in telling the crowd that the mysterious skeletal remains found dangling from the Republican tax assessor’s office door were not the remains of a Confederate soldier, as the accompanying Ku Klux Klan leaflet claimed, but the skull and neck bones of a harmless turtle. Like the Republicans who had assembled with Ashburn a few days earlier, Turner’s audience roared with laughter.
On Monday evening, March 30, another crowd, numbering eighteen hundred, gathered at Columbus’s Temperance Hall to hear Turner once again. This time, Ashburn stood with him on the speaker’s platform.8
The Temperance Hall meeting had been over for a little more than an hour, the moon had set, and clocks had just struck midnight, when Hannah Flournoy heard a knock at the door of her home.9 She rose from her bed, pulled on a dressing gown, and shouted to the unexpected caller to identify himself. “Mary Tillinghurst” was the reply, audible through the closed front door, but uttered in a weird falsetto, as if the visitor were trying to disguise his voice. Suspicious, Flournoy refused to open up.
In the next instant, five armed men broke down the door and swarmed her parlor. They were draped in dark clothing, their hands gloved and faces partially covered by pasteboard masks, like those worn at genteel antebellum costume balls. The intruders lit a candle and demanded to know where they could find Flournoy’s boarder, George W. Ashburn.
Stunned, Flournoy did not respond. The men pushed past her. Startled out of his bed by the commotion, Ashburn grabbed a pistol and threw a rough cloth coat over his nightshirt. Another houseguest pleaded with Ashburn to give him the gun, and even tried to wrest it from Ashburn’s hand, to use it in self-defense. Ashburn held on to the weapon, insisting no shooting would be necessary. The intruders probably wouldn’t hurt them, he said.
“Who comes there?” Ashburn called, hastily lighting a candle and placing it on a small bedside table. Then, he opened his chamber door.
“There’s the damned shit!” one of the assailants cried, and in that same moment, he and several other masked men opened fire.
Ashburn cried out, “Stop, stop!” and fell under a hail of bullets.
Shots hit the Republican activist on his left leg and in the buttocks, wounding him badly but not mortally. One intruder kneeled next to Ashburn’s bleeding frame, aimed his gun through the legs of the bedside table behind which Ashburn lay—and shot him between the eyes.
“Come on, boys,” the assassin said. As the gang fled, two more masked men came in from outside and peered briefly into Ashburn’s room, confirming the kill. Then they, too, hurried out.
The brazen assassination of a key Republican politician in the South shocked the whole country. Prior to George W. Ashburn’s murder on March 31, 1868, Northern newspapers knew, and reported, little about the Ku Klux Klan. After what appeared to be the Klan’s first major political murder, the victim of which was a white politician, they could not get enough of the story.
Ashburn’s assassination shocked the country. A popular New York–based weekly captioned this artist’s rendition of the crime “The Ku Klux Klan at Work.” (Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper)
The attempted decapitation of Georgia’s Republican Party could only be the work “of a secret conclave who have spread themselves throughout the entire South,” the Cincinnati Daily Gazette warned. It was “a blow at the Government—a blow at every loyal man.”10 A Detroit newspaper called Ashburn’s killers “the most villainous secret political organization which has ever existed in this country, if not any country.”11 The New York Times called for a beefed-up military presence in the South, suspension of habeas corpus, and the trial of Klan offenders by “drumhead court-martial.”12 Suddenly, the success of Congress’s plan for Reconstruction did not seem so assured; it might hinge on the federal government’s ability to dismantle that “secret political organization.”
In Columbus, men of color grabbed their shotguns or hunting rifles and stood watch over the homes of their white Republican allies. Some spoke openly of taking revenge, even of setting the town on fire. “As Mr. Ashburn was the political leader of the colored people here,” the commanding officer of the eighty-man Army company in Columbus telegraphed his superior officers the day after the assassination, “great excitement has prevailed among them, and I had feared a collision with the whites.” He ordered troops to patrol the city around the clock.13 Republicans, led by Henry McNeal Turner, circulated through the black community, advising against retaliatory violence.
