"The evidences in support of my estimate are daily accumulating, and convincing the most incredulous that it is even below the horrible truth. And yet you wish to know if I re-affirm that estimate! I am uncertain how to regard this demand. It seems too absurd to be serious, and too polite for a threat. If it was supposed that recent events, or the meeting of last night, had so intimidated or alarmed me as to lead me to retract such statement as the price of immunity, it was a mistake. I stated in the letter to which you have directed attention, my apprehension that I might at any moment meet the fate of John Walters. With that apprehension strengthened by your demand, I still reiterate my belief, and hope I would have fortitude to do so if it were to be my dying declaration, as indeed it may well be, since no man can be considered safe from assassination who has rendered himself obnoxious to this band of Christian Thugs.
"With these views, I have done, and shall continue to do, all in my power to direct the attention and influence of the government to this monster evil.
"And now, gentlemen, as I have answered your questions thus fully, will you permit me to ask one or two for my own enlightenment? If the 'good citizens of this county' are so anxious to play the censor, why have they not found breath to utter, in their collective capacity, a protest against the outrages which bands of disguised villains have perpetrated in this county? For more than a year, at brief intervals, under the very noses of the 'people of Verdenton and vicinity,' every right of the citizen has been violated by gangs of masked villains; and yet they have let them pass without 'notice' or 'condemnation.' Some of the most atrocious outrages which even the annals of this modern barbarity can furnish were perpetrated in this very county; and yet no word of censure has ever come from the 'people of Verdenton and vicinity.' No meeting of sympathy, no expression or indignation, no utterance of horror, is heard from the 'people of Verdenton and vicinity.' They have no 'duty to the country' to perform when men are whipped, women beaten almost to a jelly (white women too), children made imbecile by fright, and other outrages perpetrated upon the persons of citizens dwelling 'in the peace of God and the State,' within the limits of this very county. But no sooner does one utter a cry of warning, a call for help, a protest against these fearful enormities, wrung from his very soul by their frequency and horror, than 'the people of Verdenton and vicinity' have a duty to the country, and must not let this cry escape their 'notice' and 'condemnation.' The scourged and mangled victims had no claim upon your sympathy; but the masked and uniformed desperadoes and assassins who perpetrated these fearful, bloody deeds — ah! —
'Take them up tenderly,
Touch them with care.'
Whoever speaks of their crimes above a whisper must be 'noticed and condemned.' Ah, 'people of Verdenton and vicinity,' with the highest personal regard for many of your number, I must say, with 'surprise and regret,' that the conduct of many in this matter bears a flavor which I hesitate to name!
"Duty is a good thing, gentlemen. The notice and condemnation of evil, the reprehension of vice, is so noble a virtue that even an excess of zeal in its exercise may be pardoned or admired. Amor patriæ is a thing so glorious that poets will hymn its praises for all time. But I have understood, gentlemen, that respected brands are sometimes placed upon spurious articles. Duty is sometimes but the livery of an unworthy purpose; reprehension of evil, only the flurry which wrong stirs up to cover its retreat; and amor patriæ — well, it has different faces, 'sometimes the image of good Queen Bess, and anon of a Bloody Mary.' There are near at hand some very ugly facts which it would be well for you to consider at this time.
"Let it not be understood, that, by these remarks, I would reflect upon all the 'people of Verdenton and vicinity.' Some of them have stood forth and denounced these acts from the first; but these, however, are rare.
"Regretting both the events which originally called forth my letter, and have made our State a hot-bed of horrors, and the course which the 'people of Verdenton and vicinity' have seen fit to adopt in relation to the same,
"I remain, gentlemen, your obedient servant,
"COMFORT SERVOSSE."
CHAPTER XXXIV
THE HARVEST OF WISDOM
Table of Contents
THE cry which the Fool had uttered, however, was but the echo of that which had already come up to the ears of an astonished nation from the mouths of thousands upon thousands of those who had seen and suffered the evils which he portrayed, and of other thousands of dumb mouths which spoke of the voiceless agony of death.
This new Reign of Terror had come so stilly and quietly upon the world, that none realized its fearfulness and extent. At first it had been a thing of careless laughter to the great, free, unsuspecting North, then a matter of contemptuous ridicule, and finally a question of incredulous horror. Two things had contributed to this feeling. Those who had suffered had, in the main, been humble people. The public press did not teem with their wrongs, because there were none to tell them. They were people, too, whose story of wrong had been so long in the ear of the public, that it was tired of the refrain. It had yielded, very slowly and unwillingly, to the conviction that slavery was an evil, and the colored man too near akin to white humanity to be rightfully held in bondage, and subjected to another's will. It had slowly and doubtfully been brought to the point of interference therewith on the ground of military necessity in the suppression of rebellion, and, after a grand struggle of conflicting ideas, had finally settled down to the belief that enfranchisement was all that was required to cure all the ills which hitherto had afflicted, or in the future might assail, the troublesome and pestiferous African. This had been granted. The conscience of the nation was satisfied, and it highly resolved that thereafter it would have peace; that the negro could have no further ground of complaint, and it would hear no further murmurs. So it stopped its ears, and, when the south wind brought the burden of woe, it shook its head blankly, and said, "I hear nothing, nothing! All is peace."
But, when the cries became so clamorous that they could not longer be ignored, the Wise Men appointed a committee who should investigate the matter, and hear all that could be said both pro and con.
Oh! a strange, sad story is that which fills the thirteen volumes of testimony, documents, and conclusions, reported by that committee; a strange commentary upon Christian civilization; a strange history of peaceful years; — bloody as the reign of Mary, barbarous as the chronicles of the Comanche!
Of the slain there were enough to furnish forth a battlefield, and all from those three classes, the negro, the scalawag, and the carpet-bagger, — all killed with deliberation, overwhelmed by numbers, roused from slumber at the murk midnight, in the hall of public assembly, upon the river-brink, on the lonely woods-road, in simulation of the public execution, — shot, stabbed, hanged, drowned, mutilated beyond description, tortured beyond conception.
And almost always by an unknown hand! Only the terrible, mysterious fact of death was certain. Accusation by secret denunciation; sentence without hearing; execution without warning, mercy, or appeal. In the deaths alone, terrible beyond utterance; but in the manner of death — the secret, intangible doom from which fate springs — more terrible still: in the treachery which made the neighbor a disguised assassin, most horrible of all the feuds and hates which history portrays.
And then the wounded, — those who escaped the harder fate, — the whipped, the mangled, the bleeding, the torn! men despoiled of manhood! women gravid with dead children! bleeding backs! broken limbs! Ah! the wounded in this silent warfare were more thousands than those who groaned upon the slopes of Gettysburg! Dwellings and schools and churches burned! People driven from their homes, and dwelling in the woods and fields! The poor, the weak, the despised, maltreated and persecuted — by whom? Always the same intangible presence, the same invisible power. Well did it name itself "The Invisible Empire." Unseen and unknown! In one State ten thousand, in another twenty thousand, in another forty thousand; in all an army greater than the Rebellion
, from the moldering remains of which it sprung, could ever put into the field! An Invisible Empire, with a trained and disciplined army of masked midnight marauders, making war upon the weakling "powers" which the Wise Men had set up in the lately rebellious territory!
And then the defense! — no, not the defense — , the excuse, the avoidance set up to rebut the charge, to mitigate the guilt! Ah, me! it is sad, sadder almost than the bloody facts themselves. What is it?
"We were rebels in arms: we surrendered, and by the terms of surrender were promised immunity so long as we obeyed the laws. This meant that we should govern ourselves as of old. Instead of this, they put military officers over us; they imposed disabilities on our best and bravest; they liberated our slaves, and gave them power over us. Men born at the North came among us, and were given place and power by the votes of slaves and renegades. There were incompetent officers. The revenues of the State were squandered. We were taxed to educate the blacks. Enormous debts were contracted. We did not do these acts of violence from political motives, but only because the parties had made themselves obnoxious."
Alas, alas that a people who had inaugurated and carried through a great war should come to regard any thing as an excuse for organized Thuggism!
Yet it was a magnificent sentiment that underlay it all, — an unfaltering determination, an invincible defiance to all that had the seeming of compulsion or tyranny. One can not but regard with pride and sympathy the indomitable men, who, being conquered in war, yet resisted every effort of the conqueror to change their laws, their customs, or even the personnel of their ruling class; and this, too, not only with unyielding stubbornness, but with success. One can not but admire the arrogant boldness with which they charged the nation which had overpowered them — even in the teeth of her legislators — with perfidy, malice, and a spirit of unworthy and contemptible revenge. How they laughed to scorn the Reconstruction Acts of which the Wise Men boasted! How boldly they declared the conflict to be irrepressible, and that white and black could not and should not live together as co-ordinate ruling elements! How lightly they told the tales of blood, — of the Masked Night-Riders, of the Invisible Empire of Rifle Clubs and Saber Clubs (all organized for peaceful purposes), of warnings and whippings and slaughters! Ah, it is wonderful!
And then the organization itself, so complete, and yet so portable and elastic! So perfect in disguise, that, of the thousands of victims, scarce a score could identify one of their persecutors! And among the hundreds of thousands of its members, of the few who confessed and revealed its character, hardly one knew any thing more than had already been discovered; or, if he knew it, did not disclose it! It is all amazing, but sad and terrible. Would that it might be blotted out, or disappear as a fevered dream before the brightness of a new day!
Yet in it we may recognize the elements which should go to make up a grand and kingly people. They felt themselves insulted and oppressed. No matter whether they were or not, be the fact one way or another, it does not affect their conduct. If the Reconstruction which the Wise Men ordained was unjust; if the North was the aggressor and wrongful assailant of the South in war; if, to humiliate and degrade her enemy, the terms of surrender were falsified, and new and irritating conditions imposed; if the outcasts of Northern life were sent or went thither to encourage and induce the former slave to act against his former master, — if all this were true, it would be no more an excuse or justification for the course pursued than would the fact that these things were honestly believed to be true by the masses who formed the rank and file of this grotesquely uniformed body of partisan cavalry. In any case, it must be counted but as the desperate effort of a proud, brave, and determined people to secure and hold what they deemed to be their rights.
It is sometimes said, by those who do not comprehend its purpose, to have been a base, cowardly, and cruel barbarism. "What!" says the Northern man, — who has stood aloof from it all, and with Pharisaic assumption, or comfortable ignorance of facts, denounced "Ku-Klux," "carpet-baggers," "scalawags," and "niggers" alike, — "was it a brave thing, worthy of a brave and chivalric people, to assail poor, weak, defenseless men and women with overwhelming forces, to terrify, maltreat, and murder? Is this brave and commendable?"
Ah, my friend! you quite mistake. If that were all that was intended and done, no, it was not brave and commendable. But it was not alone the poor colored man whom this daring band of night-riders struck, as the falcon strikes the sparrow; that indeed would have been cowardly: but it was the Nation which had given the victim citizenship and power, on whom their blow fell. It was no brave thing in itself for old John Brown to seize the arsenal at Harper's Ferry; considered as an assault on the almost solitary watchman, it was cowardly in the extreme: but, when we consider what power stood behind that powerless squad, we are amazed at the daring of the Hero of Ossawattomie. So it was with this magnificent organization.
It was not the individual negro, scalawag, or carpet-bagger, against whom the blow was directed, but the power — the Government — the idea which they represented. Not unfrequently, the individual victim was one toward whom the individual members of the Klan who executed its decree upon him had no little of kindly feeling and respect, but whose influence, energy, boldness, or official position, was such as to demand that he should be "visited." In most of its assaults, the Klan was not instigated by cruelty, nor a desire for revenge; but these were simply the most direct, perhaps the only, means to secure the end it had in view. The brain, the wealth, the chivalric spirit of the South, was restive under what it deemed degradation and oppression. This association offered a ready and effective method of overturning the hated organization, and throwing off the rule which had been imposed upon them. From the first, therefore, it spread like wildfire. It is said that the first organization was instituted in May, or perhaps as late as the 1st of June, 1868; yet by August of that year it was firmly established in every State of the South. It was builded upon an ineradicable sentiment of hostility to the negro as a political integer, and a fierce determination that the white people of the South, or a majority of that race, should rule, — if not by the power of the ballot, then by force of skill, brain, and the habit of domination. The bravest and strongest and best of the South gave it their recognition and support, — in most cases actively, in some passively. Thousands believed it a necessity to prevent anarchy and the destruction of all valuable civilization; others regarded it as a means of retaliating upon the government, which they conceived to have oppressed them; while still others looked to it as a means of acquiring place and power.
That it outgrew the designs of its originators is more than probable; but the development was a natural and unavoidable one. It is probable that it was intended, at first, to act solely upon the superstitious fears of the ignorant and timid colored race. The transition from moral to physical compulsion was easy and natural, especially to a people who did not regard the colored man as having any inherent right to liberty and self-government, or the personal privileges attendant thereon, but only such right as was conferred by a legislation which was deemed at least questionable. The native whites who had identified themselves with that movement which gave political power to the blacks were regarded not only as mercenaries and renegades who had deserted their section, but also as traitors to their race. The Northern men who did likewise were regarded as intruders and invaders, and believed to be instigated, not only by the basest personal motives, but also by that concentrated hate which the Southern man always attributed to the Northern opponent of slavery. Unaccustomed to immigration as the South was, accustomed, indeed, to regard all strangers with suspicion, until assured of their harmlessness as regarded the main institution of their land, it needed but the conviction of oppression, and the chagrin of defeat, to make them look upon every individual from the hostile section as an active and virulent enemy, whose claim of citizenship there was a false pretense, constituting the owner, in effect, an emissary of the enemy, entitled only to the considera
tion and treatment of the spy.
All this was natural, and should have been foreseen and acted upon by the Wise Men whose task it was to reform the shattered nation. As it was not done, however, and the cry for relief came up from so many thousands, the Congress appointed this committee, and enacted certain laws in regard to the matter for the protection of its citizens. At the same time, the various State governments in the South (which, it will be remembered, had been placed in power by the new political elements) began to move in the same direction. In some, the Executive levied troops, and suspended the writ of Habeas Corpus, on the ground that the power of the State was threatened and subverted by this organization. But meantime, and before either power had carried their designs into practical execution, the Klan organization had accomplished its primary object, the majority which had pronounced in favor of the Reconstruction measures had been suppressed in quite a number of the States, and the minority found themselves in legislative control. Instantly, upon this being ascertained, the power of such States was turned upon those who had exerted extraordinary powers to protect their people from the raids and violence of the Klan. The governors of some were impeached and deposed for this cause. Others were threatened with the same fate, and resigned to avoid it.
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