passed into
history, and it is with them that we are concerned.

CHAPTER VII.

DETAILS OF ORGANIZATION.

A Band of Regulators whose Force at this time numbered a Half Million
well-organized and perfectly Drilled Men--Who composed its
Draft--Considerations which recommended it to the Better Classes of
Society--Its Haunts--Oath-bound Covenant, and Penalties
attached--Panoply of Lower Regions--Its Raiding Rendezvous--Galloping
forth to Predestined Conquest--It proceeded under a rigid
Constitutional System--Territorial
Subdivisions--Empire--Realm--Province--Den--Grand Wizard and his
Cabinet--Grand Giant--The Commander of a Den--Grand
Cyclops--Night-Hawks, etc.--Recruiting Agents--How Members were
Initiated--Proposed Initiates might Retire if Displeased with the
Conditions of Membership--How far the Klan was "Rebel" in its
Draft--Members of State Legislatures, Congressmen, and Governors of
States, took its Vows upon them--Its Political Suffrages--Compelling
Ignorant Colored Men to relinquish the Franchise--K. K. K.
Placards--Empty Coffins containing Ukase of Banishment Carted to the
Doors of Obnoxious White Citizens--Its Ideas of Social Decorum.

The mystic order of K. K. K. had scarcely emerged from its
swaddling-clothes, as things go in the material universe, ere it had
developed into a giant that filled the Southern zodiac, as effectually as
the almanac dummy comprehends in his physical outlines the cardinal points
of the seasons. Moving from county to county, and from one State to
another, it invaded the most remote communities--until within three months
from the time that the slogan call had been sounded on the eastern shore
of the Mississippi, its bannerets formed a cordon around the Gulf and
Atlantic coasts, and its dominion over the Trans-Mississippi country was
undisputed. A band of regulators, whose force at this time numbered a half
million well-organized and perfectly drilled men, it aimed at nothing less
than the subjection of the pending elements in the Southern State
governments, and as a means thereto, the total overthrow and dispersion of
all secret subsidiary agencies. In its ranks all conditions of white
society in the South were represented--attracted partly by the weighty
political considerations upon which the movement rested, and in not a few
instances by its outside of novelty and vague promise of sensati