any new ones had yet been laid, and in the dark and
benighted interval the remains of the Confederate armies--swept after
a long and heroic day of fair fight from the field--flitted before the
eyes of the people in this weird and midnight shape of a Ku Klux Klan."
Ryland Randolph, an Alabama editor who was also an official of the Klan,
stated in his paper that "the origin of Ku Klux Klan is in the galling
despotism that broods like a nightmare over these Southern States--a
fungus growth of military tyranny superinduced by the fostering of Loyal
Leagues, the abrogation of our civil laws, the habitual violation of our
national Constitution, and a persistent prostitution of all government,
all resources and all powers, to degrade the white man by the
establishment of Negro supremacy."

The secret orders, regardless of their original purposes, were all
finally to be found opposing radical reconstruction. Everywhere their
objects were the same: to recover for the white race their former
control of society and government, and to destroy the baneful influence
of the alien among the blacks. The people of the South were by law
helpless to take steps towards setting up any kind of government in a
land infested by a vicious element--Federal and Confederate deserters,
bushwhackers, outlaws of every description, and Negroes, some of whom
proved insolent and violent in their newly found freedom. Nowhere
was property or person safe, and for a time many feared a Negro
insurrection. General Hardee said to his neighbors, "I advise you to get
ready for what may come. We are standing over a sleeping volcano."

To cope with this situation ante-bellum patrols--the "patter-rollers"
as the Negroes called them--were often secretly reorganized. In each
community for several months after the Civil War, and in many of them
for months before the end of the war, there were informal vigilance
committees. Some of these had such names as the Black Cavalry and Men of
Justice in Alabama, the Home Guards in many other places, while the
anti Confederate societies of the war, the Heroes of America, the Red
Strings, and the Peace Societies, transformed themselves in certain
localities into regulatory bodies. Later these secret societies numbered
scores, perhaps hundreds, varying from small bodies of local police to
great federated bodies which covered almost the entire South and even
had membership in the North and West. Other important organizations were
t