Riots--Their Effect on
the Returning Boards--Coushatta--K. K. K. in Texas--Border History
Uneventful--Texas Legislature Interferes.

In the States of Louisiana and South Carolina the war between the K.'s and
Loyal League waged fiercest, and was longest protracted, for here the
fires of political proscription were earliest lighted, and the boundaries
of party maintained with the greatest fortitude. In the former State, a
party of men, who were known in certain quarters by the derisive title of
"Adventists," had assumed to control its affairs, not so much in the
interest of, as by the use of, as a means, the negro element of its
population. Practising upon the credulity of this unenlightened class, it
is not too much to say that they effected their object; and for a period
of more than seven years around these central suns of the political
firmament the parasitical blacks fluttered. Governors, congressmen, and
legislators were created from this material without any reference whatever
to the legal attainments or other qualifications of the aspirants, and
with a view only to such class legislation as could be made available to
the negro rings, and destructive to the people's interests in that
quarter.

Placed in control of affairs, these men, having suffered under the
dispensation which the poet sought to describe in the words, "A little
learning is a dangerous thing, etc.," and suspecting, moreover, that his
meaning had not been fully brought out in that expressive stanza,
astonished even their followers with an example which said "a little power
is a dangerous thing." Legislating, mainly, with a view to continuance in
authority, and arbitrarily seizing the elective machinery of the State,
they had, independently of the League, under the existing conditions, an
unlimited lease of the State administration. Nor did they fail to realize
the advantages that came to them under the system of government which they
had adopted. Having found a precedent for the most pronounced
transgressions of a written law in the acts of their co-conspirators in
other States, and an excuse in the resistance which they inspired, they
proceeded to lengths of usurpation which those interested for the cause of
liberty on those shores viewed with surprise and dismay. The fullest use
was made of every prerogative, and in innumerable instances they were
subjected to that stretching process which has been commonly found so
destructive to the