every right
and privilege dear to freemen--would have prevailed with this people to
embrace those extreme measures which, soon after this event, they were
driven to adopt with such unanimity. Loyal League supremacy, and the
elevation of the black man to those political rights from which the
Southern white citizen had been so recently thrust down, were far more
conclusive factors of this result; and as such, in all narratives
pretending to authenticity in delivering the political events of this
period, will be more closely blended with the historical fact.

CHAPTER II.

CAUSES OF THE K. K. K. MOVEMENT.

Situation Produced by the War--Discontented Partisans--The War
District in the South--Words of a Northern Tourist--Widespread
Destitution--The Curse of Slavery--How its sudden Abolition affected
Community Wealth in the Southern States--The Political Situation even
more Distressing--President Johnson--How the Work of Reconstruction
was Inaugurated--The Law-making Power vested in Dummy
Legislatures--Disfranchisement--Enfranchisement--The Color Issue
which these Measures brought--A Singular Peace Policy--The War of the
Conservatives in the South against Radicalism did not Revive Issues
concluded by the late Civil Struggle, as the latter Boasted--Loyal
Epithets--"Traitor," "Guerilla," "Southern Bandit," etc.--Radical
Rule in the South--The Shamelessness of the State Officials--The
Uneducated Negro a Law-giver--Organization of the Loyal
League--Carpet-Bag Administration thereof--Negro Draft--Some of its
Peculiarities--The K. K. K. Movement as an Offset to the League.

When the clouds of passion and prejudice that brooded over the American
States in the beginning of the latter half of the present century had
dropped into the ocean of carnage, which during four years of severe
revolutionary penance deluged all their borders, the return to those
opposite tempers that beget in men a desire to renew the pledges of
ancient covenants, and practise the _ultima thule_ of the Messianic idea,
as delivered to us by the teachers of the Cross (forgiveness), was
pronounced in degree; but while it exceeded the bare tendency looked for
by men, as an outgrowth of the changed order of things, this moral
rehabilitation of the body politic was effected by slow and painful
stages.

Legions of men might have been found on either side of the sectional
dead-line w