ng government for his late master.

Favored by this condition of public affairs, that remarkable secret
order--the Loyal League--found its way into the Southern country, and was
recommended to the negro by its politics, its dark lantern, its
facilities for the transaction of evil deeds, its avenues of escape
afforded to the criminal, and, finally, its picturesque ceremonial, in
which latter we can see no cause to dispute his taste or judgment. Some
description of this singular body, which was, we believe, in a measure
unknown to the great mass of the people of the Northern States, will not
be deemed digressive at this point.

The order was subdivided into neighborhood organizations, and the heads of
these were white men, while their vertebral force was recruited from the
voting population above described; the _chef_ being as completely _en
rapport_ with his African brother as if he had been in truth his congener,
and not simply dependent on him for patronage. Their _locus in quo_ was
nowhere and everywhere,--each city and town numbering its lodges and
sub-lodges, and the diffusion thereof, throughout the agricultural
districts, being in the somewhat extravagant ratio of one to the square
mile. Their object was plunder. Their raids, directed against the white
trash, contemplated everything that might be classed under the term
_commissaries_, and ranged from the pig-pen to the poultry-yard, and from
an ear of corn to a well-grown tuber. The "wee sma' hours ayont the twal"
was the festive time of night selected by the "loil" Moses and his dusky
Israel for their exodus from forest or cavern, and, as they marched, the
flesh-pots of the enemy disgorged their treasure, and animated nature held
its breath. The goods and chattels of the unreconstructed were, by act of
Congress, their lawful prey, and if their foraging expeditions were
conducted by moonlight, it was from constitutional considerations, and not
through any well-grounded fear of resistance on the part of the
intimidated whites.

The conclaves of the society were held nightly, and during the election
campaigns, which progressed with tolerable regularity during eight months
of the year, their _en masse_ assemblages, or political rallies, occupied
each alternate day of the week (the off day being devoted to itinerant
duty among neighboring lodges). A weak solution of the Christian religion
involved in the superstitions which they everywhere practised, aided them
in t