The Klan’s All Here

Despite the myth, the Klan was never centralized, and soon after its initial founding became less serviceable to the South’s counterrevolutionaries as Northern fatigue with federal military enforcement of law and order set in. It is conventional history that a struggle between Abraham Lincoln and Congress for the privilege of directing the Civil War began early and persisted after Lincoln’s death. Ultimately, congressional authority prevailed with the “Radical” Reconstruction, commencing in 1867-68—as in many political labels, the adjective began as an epithet.

The urge to punish the South for the sins of secession and war was powerful, and Andrew Johnson’s inept attempt to implement Lincoln’s lenient intentions—”Let ’em up easy,” he had said—quickly faltered. Johnson’s reconstruction plan brought familiar Confederate figures back to office around the South and unwelcome secessionists back to Washington. For dismayed Unionists, notably the “Radicals” who had warred with Lincoln to impose their own will and policy, it raised the question of who had actually won the war. Lincolnesque generosity did not thrive amid the “waving of the bloody shirt” intended to remind voters that the Democrats were (allegedly) the party of secession and war.

This is not merely orthodox history; it vividly evokes the turbulent setting in which the original Klan flourished, well into 1872, notwithstanding the imperial wizard’s disbandment command. The original Kuklux—as it was named for the Greek word for “circle,” kuklos—began with six former rebel officers in Pulaski, Tennessee, in 1865, though several years passed before the idea caught fire, and in many places (especially in the upcountry South), took on a violent tinge.

The advent of a punitive militarily administered federal reconstruction policy generated its own reaction. Indeed, few occupied societies, from Poland under the Russo-Prussian partition to France under German rule after 1940, have submitted quietly and without violence. The former Confederacy was no exception. Federal military control from Washington was not foreign, unlike Nazi rule in Paris or 19th-century Russian tyranny in Warsaw. But thousands of young white Southern men, having fought a grinding war, possessed the training, bravado, and gall to make nuisances of themselves. Their turbulence tended to thwart the feeble stabs at political equality for the freed slaves embraced in the 13th and 14th Amendments. It was downhill from there until the stirrings of the “second reconstruction” of the 1950s and ’60s, and after: the classic period of white supremacy in America.

If Radical Reconstruction and its disorders became the alpha of the post-Civil War counterrevolution, its omega arrived with the disputed presidential election of 1876, when intersectional and bipartisan wheeling and dealing handed the presidency to a former Union officer, Rutherford B. Hayes, in exchange for concessions to the South. Those concessions included the shutdown of military supervision of reconstruction throughout the former Confederacy—obviously one of the pivotal events of American history, although strangely understudied, even by well-versed students of our past.

Lacking visible reference to the 1877 settlement, Ku-Klux is without an essential part of the larger story. In the presidential election of 1876—which the Democratic candidate Samuel J. Tilden may have won—the disputed electoral count went to the House of Representatives. Feverish efforts by both parties to control the electoral votes of three unreconstructed states (Florida, South Carolina, and Louisiana) stretched to the eve of the March inauguration day. The disputed electors were finally awarded to Hayes on the casting vote of a Supreme Court justice of GOP antecedents.

The promised concessions to the South were implicit but substantial. The 13th and 14th Amendments and their attendant “enforcement” acts, already enfeebled by Northern impatience with racial turbulence, became essentially dead letters, while Southern interests in transcontinental railroad routes and subsidies would be viewed with favor. The eminent rebels whose early reappearance had queered Johnson’s reconstruction design could now raise their heads again.

A notable example was the appointment to the Supreme Court of Mississippian L. Q. C. Lamar, sometime Confederate emissary to St. Petersburg. Within two decades, that tribunal (though without Lamar) would ratify white supremacy in Plessy v. Ferguson, a precedent that stood all but unchallenged until 1954. The late C. Vann Woodward told the 1877 story in a masterwork of historical detection, Reunion and Reaction, essential reading (with other Woodward works, notably The Strange Career of Jim Crow) for those who would understand the ultimate yield of the terror and turbulence of Parsons’s period.

Parsons gets good marks for diligent research; but Ku-Klux shows how easily the forest can be obscured by too much focus on the trees. Her book comes dressed as “cultural history,” and it is certainly that—not least in its fashionable oddities, both of diction (e.g., “freedpeople” for “freedmen” and its omnipresent iteration of the words “discourse” and “narrative”) and novelty of conception (a third of the text is devoted to two chapters on Klan activity in a single South Carolina county).

Another oddity is the author’s use of an algorithm designed to show who may have “co-occurred” in Klan mischief in Union County, South Carolina. For want of identifiable connections, prominent people are connected by crisscrossed lines in a graphic visualization that resembles a ball of yarn. The aim is to detect who might have been associated with night-riding and its enablers. Since these are random connections that may be either innocent or nefarious, this would seem to be guilt by association in its literal form. One is reminded of the exotic “cliometrics” technique that briefly flourished in some history studies of the 1970s. An equally brief life can be predicted for this algorithm.

But however blemished by current fashion, a study of the Klan is useful these days, since echoes of the Invisible Empire continue to figure in the zeal to blot persons now disfavored from history. And the more we know about the original Klan, the better. Recently, in Chapel Hill, an agitation by a small but noisy student-faculty group led the University of North Carolina trustees to expunge the name of a distinguished 19th-century alumnus from the building that once housed the university’s well-regarded history department. William Saunders allegedly had an unspecified connection with the original Klan, as did many thousands of others who in that troubled era never lifted a violent hand against their neighbors, black or white.

He is now banished into Orwell’s memory hole, and pending a return of historical sanity, others are likely to follow.

Edwin M. Yoder Jr. is the author, most recently, of Vacancy: A Judicial Misadventure.