K.
animal, and that all its movements thereafter indicated not only a badly
disordered stomach, but moral functions so much impaired that it was
constantly ruled by a tendency to ask everybody pardon for sustaining this
relation to society, and to accuse itself of crimes for which it could
only assign somnambulistic causes. Indeed, about the year 1871, it was
completely parodied out of the field, and if Ku-Klux horrors were far more
frequent in this State after that period than previously, the reader, with
the lights before him, is asked to assume the responsibility of the
seeming paradox. It not only had no government patronage at its back, but,
on the other hand, viewed a brilliant perspective of government halters,
and seeing how unequal the rivalry must prove in more respects than one,
wisely concluded to retire from business. A resolution of _sine die_
adjournment was actually passed, and the members having exchanged sad
farewells and wept on each other's necks in view of the gloomy prospect
before them, the "Shams," as they were derisively called, became masters
of the situation. (If we except the Hamburg affair in the summer of 1876,
and one other occurrence of merely local import, the white element of
South Carolina has been guilty of no overt act since the period named
implying contumacy towards the State government or the constitutional
rights of the citizen.)

The "Shams" were opposed in their movements not only by the party who had
formerly upheld the K. K. K. idea as an alleged necessity of the times,
but by that more conservative influence which, though maintaining the same
political views as the latter, contemned the use of all secret agencies in
politics. When it was possible to anticipate their raids, rotten-egg
battalions were formed, which, in their efforts to deter them from their
purpose, employed every character of violence that did not involve the
commission of crime. Not unfrequently their places of meeting were
discovered, and when this was the case, a descent was planned, and the
subject of "unfinished business" rendered one of lively interest to its
membership. But, frequently, organized resistance, from the very nature
of the case, was out of the question, and where citizens were placed at
the mercy of their raids, they sometimes took the execution of the law
into their own hands. An instance in point, which has been given to the
public in different forms, but never correctly, has been relate