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  Ku-Klux

  Ku-Klux

  The Birth of the Klan during Reconstruction

  Elaine Frantz Parsons

  The University of North Carolina Press

  Chapel Hill

  This book was published with the assistance of the Anniversary Endowment Fund of the University of North Carolina Press.

  © 2015 The University of North Carolina Press

  All rights reserved

  Manufactured in the United States of America

  Designed by Alyssa D’Avanzo

  Set in Quadraat by codeMantra, Inc.

  The paper in this book meets the guidelines for permanence and durability of the Committee on Production Guidelines for Book Longevity of the Council on Library Resources.

  The University of North Carolina Press has been a member of the Green Press Initiative since 2003.

  Jacket illustration: Courtesy of the North Carolina Museum of History

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Parsons, Elaine Frantz, 1970– author.

  Ku-Klux: the birth of the Klan during Reconstruction / Elaine Frantz Parsons.

  pages cm

  “This book was published with the assistance of the Anniversary Endowment Fund of the University of North Carolina Press.”

  Includes bibliographical references and index.

  ISBN 978-1-4696-2542-3 (cloth : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-1-4696-2543-0 (ebook)

  1. Ku Klux Klan (19th century) 2. Domestic terrorism—United States—History—19th century. 3. Racism—United States—History—19th century. 4. United States—Race relations. I. Title.

  HS2330.K63P37 2015

  322.4′20973—dc23

  2015026763

  Portions of this work appeared earlier in somewhat different form in Elaine Frantz Parsons, “Klan Skepticism and Denial in Reconstruction-Era Public Discourse,” Journal of Southern History 77 (February 2011): 53–90, and is reprinted here by the permission of the publisher.

  To my parents,

  Janet Elizabeth Frantz and Carl Daniel Frantz,

  who taught me what I need to know

  Contents

  Introduction

  ONE

  The Roots of the Ku-Klux Klan in Pulaski, Tennessee

  TWO

  Ku-Klux Attacks Define a New Black and White Manhood

  THREE

  Ku-Klux Attacks Define Southern Public Life

  FOUR

  The Ku-Klux in the National Press

  FIVE

  Ku-Klux Skepticism and Denial in Reconstruction-Era Public Discourse

  SIX

  Race and Violence in Union County, South Carolina

  SEVEN

  The Union County Ku-Klux in National Discourse

  Conclusion

  Acknowledgments

  Notes

  Bibliography

  Index

  Illustrations and Figures

  “Midnight Rangers” carte de visite 33

  Replicas of Robert J. Brunson’s Ku-Klux Klan robe and hood, 1866 42

  Hood/mask associated with John Campbell Van Hook Jr., of Roxboro, North Carolina 80

  Bonnet/mask that may have been a Klan costume piece 82

  Robe and hood said to have belonged to Joseph Boyce Steward of Lincoln County, Tennessee 83

  Playbill for a production of Dupres and Green’s Original New Orleans and Metropolitan Minstrels, 1864 89

  Tennessee Ku-Klux Klan rider on horseback and in full regalia, c. 1868 113

  Image purportedly representing a Yale College initiation ceremony 126

  Members of Watertown (N.Y.) Division 289 of the Ku-Klux Klan, c. 1870 200

  Frontispiece of the Klan-themed sensationalist novel The Masked Lady of the White House, 1868 204

  FIGURE 1 The number of articles in which “ku-klux,” “kuklux,” or “klan” appeared per month in four major newspapers, 1868–1872 150

  FIGURE 2 A visualization of the connections between William Faucett and his closest associates in Union, S.C. 225

  FIGURE 3 A visualization of the connections between William Faucett and identifiable Union County residents claiming at least $5,000 total property on the 1870 census 229

  FIGURE 4 A visualization of the connections between William Faucett and identifiable Union County residents arrested under the Enforcement Acts 300

  Ku-Klux

  Introduction

  The Ku-Klux Klan remains a ghostly presence in U.S. history. Like a ghost, it commands attention: 150 years after the Klan’s beginning, the Klansman still evokes a powerful response when he appears and reappears in popular films and writings. And no U.S. history textbook is complete without discussions of the Klan in the Reconstruction era, around World War I, and in response to the civil rights movement. The Klan is solidly entrenched as part of our national narrative, where it has come to represent the most violent aspect of white racial oppression. And yet few are confident that they know what they have seen. Discussions of the Klan tend to resolve into discussions of its covert nature: we spend as much time contemplating what we imagine is hidden from us as we do describing the Klan based on the ample information we have. The Klan’s secrecy is as large a part of what makes it interesting to many as is its violence.

  The Klan emerged after the Civil War as a solution to the problem of southern white defeat. We know now that white political, economic, and social dominance of black southerners would long outlast slavery, but white southerners, lacking the benefit of hindsight, were not at all certain that they could maintain their grip on resources and power in the South after losing the war. They had reason to fear; black southerners had reason to hope, and northerners looked on with mixed feelings. White southerners still had immense advantages over their black neighbors: they owned the vast majority of land and other capital; as a group, they were considerably more literate and numerate; they had experience controlling and working within institutional structures such as local governments, the military, and other voluntary organizations; and they had important allies—many had active networks of personal and business ties to influential people beyond their local area, in neighboring counties and even distant states. Together, these white advantages in property, education, organization, and connections would seem insurance enough against black competition even without the formal system of slavery.

  Yet white southerners shared a widespread fear that their former slaves would rapidly overtake them. They worried that all of the remaining pillars of their power could be chipped away if freedpeople took full advantage of their new freedoms and the federal government and other sympathetic northerners supported them. The federal government engaged in widespread talk, and much more limited action, around land redistribution in 1865. Some exceptional black families who had been free before the war, and even some slave families, had accumulated enough capital before or during the war to rise to the top half of their community in property holdings in the 1870 census: as few as their numbers were, these relatively prosperous postwar black southerners loomed as large in the white as they did in the black imaginary. Meanwhile, what felt like a second army of schoolteachers flooded into the South, where they passionately set about educating freedpeople in hopes of narrowing the yawning gap between black and white education.

  And many freedpeople approached their new freedom with tremendous boldness and energy, determined that they would have all of its fruits. Freedpeople eagerly attended classes and amassed their limited resources to board teachers and to build them schoolhouses. While black southerners had little experience running formal institutions, the experiences many had gained in collective life during slavery equipped them well to organize and participate in formal groups, most notably Union Leagues but also militias, religious associations, and self-improvement societies. White northerners again provided assistance in getting many of these groups started, but southern black communities needed little encouragement. The sight of organized black groups of any sort in the early Reconstruction years made many Democratic whites sweat. Freedpeople traveled in order to rebuild their family structure; those black southerners who were literate quickly began to form ties with one another and with sympathetic white leaders, corresponding with new allies in nearby counties, state capitals, and even Washington, D.C.

  As the props of their power began to feel less secure, white southerners became preoccupied by the new threat posed by freedpeople’s strength. During slavery, whites could count on their control of slaves’ mobility, associational life, and access to weapons, paired with their largely unquestioned right to punish or control slaves or free people of color based on the slightest suspicion, to ensure that black southerners could not use physical force to claim rights or property. Before the war, they also had recourse to local and state governments organized largely around maintaining the slave system. After the war, with these traditional forms of control gone, whites feared that black southerners, in small ways or large, would overpower them and demand resources and rights.

  Southern whites developed many strategies to prevent this. Making the most of the economic power inherent in their continued possession of the land was crucial: at a time when many freedpeople were dying from the effects of malnutrition and exposure, whites who held the key to food and housing could make broad demands of those they hired; freedpeople were hardly in a position to walk away even from a cruel employer.1 Economic control often included physical violence; if employer violence was not always as dramatic as collective violence, it could rival its devastation and horror. Alabama freedman
John Childers testified on the death of his nine-year-old daughter eight days after her employer beat her severely for losing the hat of the white baby she was watching. “I saw the rest of the children playing in the yard, and she was in the door sitting there and I thought that was strange, because she was a mighty playful chap, and I asked ‘what are you sitting here for’ and she says, ‘Pap, Mr. Jones has beat me near to death.’ [The witness weeping].”2

  Most white-on-black violence took such humble forms: individual white men (and women and children) attacking black men (and women and children) to assert their private interest, confident that they would not be punished. Kidada Williams has called this private racial violence “the ordinary violence of emancipation.”3 This individual white-on-black violence was largely a continuation of violence that was common during slavery. In addition to continuing to use violence on the bodies of those working for them, many postwar whites illegally continued their traditional role as judges and enforcers of black public behavior, challenging and assaulting black people who did not adhere to white standards of propriety or violently breaking up public meetings of black people as they would have done under slavery.

  Whites did continue to have substantial, though less predictable, access to the state’s capacity for violence to assist them in dominating their black neighbors. While most state and local governments came under the temporary control of Republicans during the early Reconstruction era, both state and local governments continued to be important perpetrators of white-on-black violence. Juries after the war were mixed-race, and some show of due process was required, but justice was hardly color-blind in the postwar period. By necessity, convictions relied on local reputations and rumors. Whites often blamed their black neighbors for thefts or fires and arrested them on thin or no evidence. Black jury members might hold the line against conviction, but the pressure on them to convict could be tremendous. Jails and prisons began to fill up with black southerners. As Michael Trotti notes, “In the half-century after the Civil War, three-quarters of [the 2,768 people] executed in the South were African Americans.”4

  But while many patterns of white-on-black violence persisted, racial violence in the South did transform dramatically with the end of slavery. Everyone came out of the Civil War terribly more familiar with deadly violence than they had been. Black men’s participation in combat had given them skills, confidence, and plausibility as effective users of violence. But, in the South, the number of black men who had taken up arms was dwarfed by the number of whites who had done so, and whites were also much more likely to have participated in informal collective wartime violence like guerrilla warfare; despite white anxieties, combat experience enhanced rather than detracted from the white monopoly on violence. Through these experiences, white southerners in particular had learned to ambush, to stalk, to mobilize and move efficiently, and to fire a building. They had also developed skill with weapons, both on battlefields and to intimidate or control civilians. At the same time, it became more common during and after the Civil War to own guns and to carry them on the street. Before the war, whites in plantation counties of South Carolina and Georgia had used guns in 37 percent of the homicides they were convicted of. After the war, they used guns in 80 percent.5

  Perhaps informed by the lessons learned in war, white southerners increasingly turned to collective violence. Race riots surged in the early Reconstruction years. The massive and deadly 1866 riots in New Orleans and Memphis received the most press, but other such riots occurred throughout the early Reconstruction South. In Camilla, Georgia, between eight and twelve black people were killed, and over thirty wounded, when whites assaulted a Republican political rally in September 1868. That same month, white rioting left many black men dead in Opelousas, Louisiana; so chaotic was the situation there that estimates of the dead ranged from 52 to 227. In March 1871, rioting whites in Meridian, Mississippi, killed thirty black people. In April 1873, in a dispute over the validity of an election, a large group of white men in Colfax, Louisiana, attacked a large group of black citizens, killing at least 70, and perhaps more than 165. At least 48 of the men killed had surrendered and been disarmed before being shot. In all of these riots, whites suffered negligible bloodshed, since they were substantially better organized and armed.6

  The private nighttime attack, however, would be the form of collective violence most closely associated with the Reconstruction era. It was not a new form: the rural South had a long-standing tradition of collective nighttime attacks.7 In the charivari tradition stretching back to early modern Europe and imported to both the northern and southern United States at the time of settlement, costumed men would surround the homes of those who had offended the community, clanging pots or playing rude music, and sometimes forcing the inhabitants out to beat or humiliate them. In the years before and during the war, groups of men sometimes arrived at the home of a target, yelling obscenities, throwing rocks, shooting at the house, or assaulting its inhabitants. People who were suspected of sexual immorality, gambling, drinking, or socializing across racial lines; of theft, fraudulent trading, or fencing stolen goods; or of holding unpopular views risked a nighttime visit from outraged community members. For that matter, a nighttime attack hardly needed to represent community consensus: whenever two people were involved in a serious dispute, one party might gather a group of friends to menace or attack the other party’s home during the night. This tradition of nighttime collective attacks continued, particularly in the rural South through the antebellum period.

  During the war, guerrilla violence, which often took this form, plagued many parts of the South, particularly along the borders and in areas near more formal combat. Like most antebellum collective nighttime attackers, these groups were often nameless. Newspapers, letter writers, and government officials referred to them in any number of ways: as “slickers,” “guerrillas,” “regulators,” or “gangs.” These groups raided the homes of political enemies, stealing from, terrorizing, beating, raping, and sometimes killing inhabitants. With governments otherwise occupied, they could grow much larger than vigilante groups before the war or after, and they could attack entire neighborhoods or communities, sometimes even during the day. These groups could be more or less persistent over time, gathering for one raid or many.8

  Sporadic small-group nocturnal violence continued to be practical and effective in the postwar rural South. It required little organization or planning, could respond quickly and easily to specific local conditions, and drew on community networks that the northerners interested in suppressing it found difficult to decipher. Early in the postwar period, particularly in 1866 and 1867, former Confederate soldiers and others took advantage of the weakened state to spawn groups of “vigilantes” or “guerrillas” throughout the South. Most were nameless, but some took names, or had names given to them. The Black Horse Cavalry wore blackface while terrorizing laborers in Franklin Parish, Louisiana. The Pale Faces emerged in 1867 in Middle Tennessee. The Knights of the White Camellia began in Louisiana in the spring of 1867.9 Countless other groups of unnamed “slickers” roamed rural regions throughout the South in the early Reconstruction years.

  All of these forms of violence, however, shared a significant shortcoming as a means of reasserting white racial dominance. Individual white-on-black attacks, riots, or slickers demonstrated and asserted local white control and intimidated and disheartened black southerners, yet the same qualities that made these types of violence attractive in the early Reconstruction era—they skirted potential northern interference by being seemingly unplanned, sporadic, and deniable—also neutered their coordinated political force. The many thousands of individual white-on-black attacks, the several bloody riots, the hundreds of slicker groups failed to add up to a coherent whole. Rather than representing the voice of a defeated-but-not-prostrate white South—an emergent southern white leadership—they conveyed a message of inchoate southern white fury.

  The Ku-Klux Klan would solve this problem. It revalued collective local nighttime attackers, allowing Ku-Klux to effectively remain small, local, and difficult to detect or suppress, and yet to imagine and present themselves as part of a single pan-southern resistance movement. Wedding small-scale organization with an insistent discursive claim to regional coherence, the many small groups that comprised the first Ku-Klux Klan would together become the most widely proliferated and deadly domestic terrorist movement in the history of the United States. From 1866 through 1871, men calling themselves “Ku-Klux” killed hundreds of black southerners and their white supporters, sexually molested hundreds of black women and men, drove thousands of black families from their homes and thousands of black men and women from their employment, and appropriated land, crops, guns, livestock, and food from black southerners on a massive scale. Klan groups aimed many of their attacks at black people who expected and demanded political rights and social dignity. As Ed Ayers has argued, “the Klan was indirect testimony to black assertion and autonomy in the old plantation regions, not to black powerlessness.” Black southerners who mobilized to vote, organized their peers, or ran for office were particular targets of Klan violence, along with those who defended their property and failed to defer to white Democratic southerners in private conflicts and public spaces. As black victim Simon Elder testified, the Klan targeted him because, as a prosperous renter able to hire white labor, “I was getting too much for them.”10