sidence or other accident,
were made conversant with such scenes almost every week in the year, and
who were not unfrequently drawn away from the contemplation of social
misdemeanors or crimes of the most serious import to split their sides
over some ludicrous _faux pas_, or intended farce, of the perpetrators,
will not be slow to discover their basis of fact, nor accord to the author
that honesty of purpose to which he lays claim in the conduct of these
pages. It was stated in a previous chapter that the secret organization
known as the Ku Klux Klan was a political movement intended to offset what
was known as the Loyal League, an order whose draft was taken from the
negro population, but which was controlled by, and in the interest of, a
class of political harpies known as carpet-baggers. The latter element, by
means of this political engine, dominated the politics of the South for a
period of more than five years, and while its power may not have been
broken by the influences set in motion by the counter movement, and though
the latter must be condemned on general principles, yet among the people
where it had its origin, and stripped of the analogies which the
imaginations of fault-finders would be apt to supply, its objects were not
deemed harmful to society. As to its wisdom, there can be no doubt that it
was aimed at the most salient of the enemy's weak points.

In treating this proposition, we shall seek to avoid that ponderous
science which that branch of transcendentalists who acknowledge Mr.
Wendell Phillips as their leader put before the world under the title of
Negropholism, and deal with the article as we find it--so much on the
greasy surface of the native that the temptation of the carpet-bagger to
use it for base ends must be regarded an uncommon one.

[The people of the South, young and old, who were brought up under that
social regimen which embodied the negro as a prominent and necessary
feature, will appreciate the feelings of the writer when he states that he
has not, and never can have, any feeling of enmity towards this race. Some
of the tenderest passages in his heart history he is glad to refer to that
period when negroes were not only admitted _en famille_ among the whites,
but in innumerable instances given absolute control over the household
affairs of their masters. He numbers among his cultured acquaintance
scores of young men and maidens who never knew any other parentage, and
who can neve