Page:Confederate Military History - 1899 - Volume 12.djvu/327

Rh in its legislative work. It combined the best men of the State, old, virtuous, settled, cautious citizens. Its object was the preservation of order and the protection of society. It used mystery as its weapon. It was intended to aid the law, and prevent crime. In the license of the era, it was a matter of self-defense against plunder, assassination, and rape. Both the league and the Ku Klux Klan were excrescences of reconstruction, and the natural outcome of abnormal politics and abortive government." (A very's History of Georgia.) The writer of this chapter never knew personally of this Klan. He saw the effect of it in a negro county of Mississippi (Noxubee), where there were ten negroes to one white person. The lawlessness and tendency to riot and override the laws of social life, became so great that a crisis appeared to be near, as shown by abusive language, disorderly meetings, and incendiary proceedings. This existed for months. One night about two hundred white men clothed in white sheets, in single file on horseback, without uttering a word, rode through the thickly-settled negro portions of the county. They appeared without warning at dark. They disappeared just before dawn. The effect was electrical. The negroes gave little more trouble in that county, notwithstanding the league and their secret organization.

"His like the world has never seen from the days of Cain or of the forty thieves in the fabled time of Ali Baba. Like the wind, he blows and we hear the sound thereof, but no man knoweth whence it cometh or whither it goeth. National historians will be in doubt how to class him. Ornithologists will claim him, because in many respects he is a bird of prey. He lives only on corruption, and takes his flight as soon as the carcass is picked. He is no product of the war. He is a 'canker of a calm world' and of peace, which is des-