o straighten and a
large portion of them requiring renewal."

=Capital and Credit Destroyed.=--The fluid capital of the South, money
and credit, was in the same prostrate condition as the material capital.
The Confederate currency, inflated to the bursting point, had utterly
collapsed and was as worthless as waste paper. The bonds of the
Confederate government were equally valueless. Specie had nearly
disappeared from circulation. The fourteenth amendment to the federal
Constitution had made all "debts, obligations, and claims" incurred in
aid of the Confederate cause "illegal and void." Millions of dollars
owed to Northern creditors before the war were overdue and payment was
pressed upon the debtors. Where such debts were secured by mortgages on
land, executions against the property could be obtained in federal
courts.

THE RESTORATION OF WHITE SUPREMACY

=Intimidation.=--In both politics and economics, the process of
reconstruction in the South was slow and arduous. The first battle in
the political contest for white supremacy was won outside the halls of
legislatures and the courts of law. It was waged, in the main, by secret
organizations, among which the Ku Klux Klan and the White Camelia were
the most prominent. The first of these societies appeared in Tennessee
in 1866 and held its first national convention the following year. It
was in origin a social club. According to its announcement, its objects
were "to protect the weak, the innocent, and the defenceless from the
indignities, wrongs, and outrages of the lawless, the violent, and the
brutal; and to succor the suffering, especially the widows and orphans
of the Confederate soldiers." The whole South was called "the Empire"
and was ruled by a "Grand Wizard." Each state was a realm and each
county a province. In the secret orders there were enrolled over half a
million men.

The methods of the Ku Klux and the White Camelia were similar. Solemn
parades of masked men on horses decked in long robes were held,
sometimes in the daytime and sometimes at the dead of night. Notices
were sent to obnoxious persons warning them to stop certain practices.
If warning failed, something more convincing was tried. Fright was the
emotion most commonly stirred. A horseman, at the witching hour of
midnight, would ride up to the house of some offender, lift his head
gear, take off a skull, and hand it to the trembling victim with the
request that he hold it for a few minut