They Called Themselves the K.K.K. Read online

  Contents

  * * *

  Title Page

  Contents

  Copyright

  About the Cover

  Epigraph

  Frontispiece

  A Note to the Reader

  “Bottom Rail Top”

  “Boys, Let Us Get Up a Club”

  “I Was Killed at Chickamauga”

  “Worms Would Have Been Eating Me Now”

  “They Say a Man Ought Not to Vote”

  “I Am Going to Die on This Land”

  “A Whole Race Trying to Go to School”

  “They Must Have Somebody to Guide Them”

  “Forced by Force, to Use Force”

  “The Sacredness of the Human Person”

  “It Tuck a Long Time”

  Civil Rights Time Line

  Quote Attributions

  Bibliography and Source Notes

  Acknowledgments

  Index

  About the Author

  Copyright © 2010 by Susan Campbell Bartoletti

  All rights reserved. Originally published in hardcover by Houghton Mifflin, an imprint of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company.

  For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, write to [email protected] or to Permissions, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company, 3 Park Avenue, 19th Floor, New York, New York 10016.

  www.hmhco.com

  The Library of Congress has cataloged the print edition as follows:

  Bartoletti, Susan Campbell.

  They called themselves the K.K.K. : the birth of an American terrorist group / by Susan Campbell Bartoletti.

  p. cm.

  1. Ku Klux Klan (19th cent.)—Juvenile literature. 2. Ku Klux Klan (1915–)—Juvenile literature. 3. Racism—United States—History—Juvenile literature. 4. Hate groups—United States—History—Juvenile literature. 5. United States—Race relations.

  I. Title.

  HS2330.K63B37 2010

  322.4’20973—dc22

  2009045247

  ISBN: 978-0-618-44033-7 hardcover

  ISBN: 978-0-544-22582-4 paperback

  eISBN 978-0-547-48803-5

  v1.1115

  Title page photo credit: Harper’s Weekly, October 24, 1874; Library of Congress

  ABOUT THE COVER: Until its mysterious disappearance, the Klan hood pictured on the cover was housed in the Old Courthouse Museum in Vicksburg, Mississippi. Although it closely resembles costumes worn during the Reconstruction period, it’s more likely that the hood dates from the 1920s, judging by its small red tassel.

  “The method of force which hides itself in secrecy is a method as old as humanity. The kind of thing that men are afraid or ashamed to do openly, and by day, they accomplish secretly, masked, and at night. The method has certain advantages. It uses Fear to cast out Fear; it dares things at which open method hesitates; it may with a certain impunity attack the high and the low; it need hesitate at no outrage of maiming or murder; it shields itself in the mob mind and then throws over all a veil of darkness which becomes glamor. It attracts people who otherwise could not be reached. It harnesses the mob.”

  —W. E. B. Du Bois, 1935

  Albion Tourgée, A Fool’s Errand, by One of the Fools: The Famous Romance of American History (New York: Fords, Howard, & Hulbert, 1879)

  A Note to the Reader

  In the pages of this book, you will meet people who lived during the years that followed the Civil War, a time known as Reconstruction. These people come from a variety of backgrounds. You will read the stories of the Ku Klux Klansmen and their victims from a variety of sources, including congressional testimony, interviews, and historical journals, diaries, and newspapers.

  Wherever possible, I have let the people of the past speak in their own voices. Some of these people use crude language. No matter how difficult it is to see the offensive words in print, I have made no attempt to censor these historical statements.

  You will see images from pictorial newspapers such as Harper’s Weekly and Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper and other sources. These images depict people, events, and viewpoints of the time. Some of the depictions are caricatured and are racially offensive. I deeply regret any offense or hurt caused by the images, but again I have chosen not to censor.

  You will also meet former slaves who were interviewed more than seventy years after the end of the Civil War. These interviews are commonly referred to as the Slave Narratives. Most of these men and women were children or young adults in their teens and early twenties when the Civil War ended, and were in their eighties and nineties when interviewed by government reporters in the late 1930s.

  The government reporters—mostly white men and women—were instructed to transcribe or write the words in a way that reflected the inteviewee’s speech patterns. As a result, some of the dialect may be dificult to read. Even so, I have chosen not to alter the interviews or transpose the dialect into standardized English.

  CHAPTER 1

  “Bottom Rail Top”

  In the spring of 1865, as rain softened the hard ground, plenty of work was found for every pair of hands on the Williams plantation in Camden, Arkansas, despite the Civil War, which was still raging at the end of its fourth year.

  Field hands chopped away old withered cotton stalks to make room for this year’s seeds. Plow hands hitched mules to plows and furrowed the fields, turning over mile after mile of rich black dirt. Other slaves followed the plow, sowing the seeds and working manure into the furrows and building up the cotton beds.

  Near the Big House, slave children worked in groups, too, stooping over vegetable garden rows, pulling weeds, plucking insects from the green shoots, harvesting the early vegetables, and readying the damp earth for the warm-season seeds.

  In this illustration, called The Rising Generation, children climb fence rails that represent the upper, middle, and bottom economic classes of Southern society.

  Albion Winegar Tourgée, The Invisible Empire

  Inside the Big House, there was plenty of work, too. For fourteen-year-old Mittie Williams, who worked as a house slave, there was Miss Eliza to tend to. Ever since Old Master died—in the South, use of the word old indicated respect for the person’s years—Mittie had become the elderly woman’s constant companion. “She skeered to stay by herself,” Mittie recalled seventy-two years later.

  A war artist for Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper depicts invading Yankee soldiers plundering a Southern farm as they forage for food.

  Library of Congress

  Miss Eliza had reason to be afraid. Like most white Southerners, she would have known that the Confederacy was disintegrating and that Yankees were sweeping over the South. Frightening tales traveled from plantation to plantation, telling how Yankee soldiers were ransacking houses, turning the air thick with feathers as they ripped open mattresses and beds, searching for guns and silver and other valuables. How the Yankees swarmed over fields, stealing horses and hogs and chickens and molasses and flour, leaving little to eat. How the roads were littered with wasted carcasses of hogs and cattle. To Miss Eliza and other white Southerners, the Yankees were blue devils, determined to destroy the South, to starve out the Rebels and ruin their property, leaving them broken and destitute.

  House slaves such as Mittie often overheard their masters and other white people holding political conversations and discussing the progress of the Civil War. Whatever news the slaves picked up about the “Freedom War,” as they called it, they were quick to pass on to others along the “grapevine telegraph.” The grapevine telegraph carried news, gossip, and rumors as it wound its way informally from person to person,
plantation to plantation.

  Some rumors were true. It was through the grapevine telegraph that many slaves had learned about the Emancipation Proclamation, which President Abraham Lincoln had signed two years earlier, on January 1, 1863. The Emancipation Proclamation decreed that all slaves in the eleven Rebel states and their territories were free. Two years later, in January 1865, as Northern victory became inevitable, Congress passed the Thirteenth Amendment, a law that abolished slavery everywhere in the United States and granted Congress the power to enforce the amendment. (It would take nearly a year for Congress to ratify, or formally adopt the Thirteenth Amendment.)

  And enforce the amendment the Union army did. Mittie might have heard how the Yankees marched throughout the South, acting as an army of liberation, telling the slaves they were free—as free as any white person. Although many white Northerners did not favor racial equality, most supported emancipation, because as one Union soldier from Illinois wrote his parents, “Slavery stands in the way of putting down the rebellion.” By freeing the slaves and ruining plantations, the Yankees were waging total war, destroying the South’s agricultural economy and bringing the Rebels to their knees on the home front.

  “I never, in my life, felt more certain that I was doing right, than I do in signing this paper,” said Lincoln about the Emancipation Proclamation. “If my name ever goes into history it will be for this act, and my whole soul is in it.” The Proclamation did not free the slaves in the border states that sided with the Union.

  Library of Congress

  In the last days of fighting, Confederate leaders warned white Southerners that if the South lost the war, the slaves would rule over their former masters and other whites. This false rumor was scare talk, intended to whip white Southerners into a state of great fear and make them hate the Yankees even more, but many white Southerners believed it could happen.

  With great emotion, black Union soldiers liberate slaves on a North Carolina plantation.

  Harper’s Weekly, January 23, 1864; Library of Congress

  Some rumors were half-truths, as when the slaves heard that the federal government intended to give black families forty acres carved out of their former master’s land, as well as a mule, just as soon as the North won the war. “We heard that lots of slaves was getting land and some mules to set up for theirselves,” recalled Mittie.

  In reality, the government had passed a special order that would have permitted some slave families to rent confiscated land, parcels up to forty acres in size for three years, with the possibility to buy. As the news traveled, slave men and women grew excited about the crops they’d raise to eat and to sell and the homes they’d build once they had their land. But the allocation of land had hardly begun before the federal government revoked the special order.

  Despite her fear of the Yankees, Miss Eliza granted Mittie and her father permission to go fishing one Sunday in April. No sooner had Mittie cast her line into the river than cannons began to boom in the distance.

  Right away, Mittie’s father knew what the thundering cannons meant. “Pappy jumps up, throws down his pole and everything, and grabs my hand and starts flying towards the house,” recalled Mittie. “‘It’s victory,’ he keep on saying. ‘It’s freedom. Now we’se gwine be free.’”

  Victory came on April 9, 1865, the day that the Confederate general Robert E. Lee surrendered his army to Ulysses S. Grant, commander of the Union army, at Appomattox Court House, a village in Virginia. As news of Lee’s surrender spread through the Union army camps, wild jubilation broke out among Yankee soldiers.

  Cannons all over boomed, signaling the fall of the Confederacy. Within a few weeks, the remaining Confederate generals all surrendered.

  On April 9, 1865, the Confederate general Robert E. Lee (right) surrenders to the Union general Ulysses S. Grant (left).

  Currier and Ives, Library of Congress

  The war that had seemed endless was over, and with it, two hundred and fifty years of bondage for black Americans were also over.

  Slavery had mocked the ideals of a nation dedicated to freedom and equality. Now as the United States faced Reconstruction, or the work of putting the country back together, it had the chance to live up to its creed.

  It wouldn’t be easy. Racism was deeply embedded in white society in the North as well as the South. It would take many years for white Americans to understand what freedom meant for black Americans. For two hundred and fifty years, white people had occupied the top rails in society, and black people, the bottom rail.

  It would be especially difficult in the South, where most black people lived. There, they were understood only as an inferior race, as property that could be bought and sold and exploited in order to produce wealth for white people.

  Most white Southerners believed that God created black people for the special purpose of working and serving white people. To them, the thought of racial equality was immoral because it violated God’s plan. “Such equality does not in fact exist and never can,” explained a Georgia state supreme court judge in 1869. “The God of nature made it otherwise. . . . From the tallest archangel in heaven to the meanest reptile on earth, moral and social inequities exist, and must continue to exist throughout all eternity.”

  Even after the Confederacy’s surrender, many white Southerners felt certain that black people still had to belong to someone. “If they don’t belong to me, whose are they?” asked one white woman from Virginia about her former slaves.

  “’Course she is our nigger,” said a Missouri woman to her husband about their seventeen-year-old house slave. “She is as much our nigger now as she was the day you bought her two years ago and paid fifteen hundred dollars for her.”

  Most white Southern families did not own slaves. Those who did—about one out of every four families—felt anger at the loss of their valuable human property. Before the war, each slave was worth about one thousand dollars, or thirteen thousand dollars today. The average slaveholder owned between one and nine slaves, and some of the wealthiest planters owned hundreds. Many slaveholders expected the federal government to compensate them for their great monetary loss.

  The wife of an Alabama planter bitterly described her family’s situation. “We had all our earnings swept away,” wrote Victoria Clayton. “The Government of the United States has the credit of giving the black man his freedom, while it was at the expense of the Southern people.”

  This 1865 photograph of ruined houses shows the total destruction that some planters suffered in Savannah, Georgia, possibly as a result of the Union bombardment or General Sherman’s campaign, known as the “march to the sea.”

  Library of Congress

  A Mississippi planter described the devastation that he and other planters suffered in addition to the loss of their slaves. “We came out of the war utterly broken up,” said Samuel Gholson, a former Confederate brigadier general and slaveholder. “We lost all our stock; the slaves were emancipated; on a great many plantations houses and fencing were burned; and we were out of provisions, and at least ninety-nine men out of a hundred in debt; having nothing left but our land.”

  White Southerners such as Victoria Clayton and Samuel Gholson did not consider the financial losses suffered by generations of slave families. All told, some modern historians estimate that slaves lost a total $3.4 billion worth of unpaid labor, or more than $17 billion today. Other scholars estimate the loss as much higher, possibly $1.4 trillion or $4.7 trillion, respectively.

  As Samuel Gholson points out, all many planters and farmers had left was their land, and as they regarded their fields, they worried about their future and getting back on their feet financially. Slave labor had raised more than half of the tobacco crops, three-quarters of the cotton, and nearly all of the rice, sugar, and hemp. Now that the slaves were freed, who would cultivate and harvest the hundreds of thousands of acres, and how much would it cost? Most planters and farmers had no cash or sources of credit to pay wages. The war had made their Confede
rate money worthless. On top of these losses, the Confederate states owed $712 million in war debts.

  During the war the Confederacy printed paper money, as shown here. By the spring of 1864, it took forty-six dollars to buy an item that had cost one dollar at the start of the war in 1861. By the war’s end, Confederate money was nearly worthless.

  Library of Congress

  White Southerners who had not owned slaves also worried about their future. Some of these people lived in towns and ran stores or businesses, but most were yeoman farmers or farmers who owned small plots of land. Before the war, these small farmers had aspired to own larger farms and to acquire slaves in order to produce more crops, which would in turn increase their wealth. Now these men would compete with the freed people over land and cash crops.

  The lowest class of white Southerners consisted of poor, unskilled laborers who owned no land and worked for other white people. These whites feared that black people might take their jobs.

  In this caricatured engraving, Yankee soldiers liberate slaves at a planter’s house. White Southerners feared that liberation would turn the social order upside down.

  Harper’s Weekly, April 4, 1863; Library of Congress

  In the eyes of most white Southerners, emancipation threatened to turn their society upside down, with black people on top and white people on the bottom. They also feared that black people would get grand ideas, thinking that freedom made them as good as—or even better than—white people. Rumors spread about black people who flaunted their freedom and new station. Four months after surrender, Harper’s Weekly reported a gleeful reaction from a black Union soldier who spotted his former master among a group of Confederate prisoners. “Hello, massa,” he shouted. “Bottom rail top dis time.”