ut, 'fo de
Lord, it's de fust I eber got de money!" Under administrations conducted
in this spirit the whole South was given up to plunder. The looting went
on persistently and on a scale almost unthinkable. The public debts
reached amazing figures, while Negro legislators voted each other wads
of public money as a kind of parlour game, amid peals of hearty African
laughter.

Meanwhile the Governments presided over by Negroes, or white courtiers
of the Negro and defended by the bayonets of an armed black militia,
gave no protection to the persons or property of the whites.

Daily insults were offered to what was now the subject race. The streets
of the proud city of Charleston, where ten years before on that fatal
November morning the Palmetto flag had been raised as the signal of
Secession, were paraded by mobs of dusky freedmen singing: "De bottom
rail's on top now, and we's g'wine to keep it dar!" It says much for the
essential kindliness of the African race that in the lawless condition
of affairs there were no massacres and deliberate cruelties were rare.
On the other hand, the animal nature of the Negro was strong, and
outrages on white women became appallingly frequent and were perpetrated
with complete impunity. Every white family had to live in something like
a constant state of siege.

It was not to be expected that ordinary men of European origin would
long bear such government. And those on whom it was imposed were no
ordinary men. They were men whose manhood had been tried by four awful
years of the supreme test, men such as had charged with Pickett up the
bloody ridge at Gettysburg, and disputed with the soldiers of Grant
every inch of tangled quagmire in the Wilderness. They found a remedy.

Suddenly, as at a word, there appeared in every part of the downtrodden
country bands of mysterious horsemen. They rode by night, wearing long
white garments with hoods that hid their faces, and to the
terror-stricken Negroes who encountered them they declared
themselves--not without symbolic truth--the ghosts of the great armies
that had died in defence of the Confederacy. But superstitious terrors
were not the only ones that they employed.

The mighty secret society called the Ku-Klux-Klan was justified by the
only thing that can justify secret societies--gross tyranny and the
denial of plain human rights. The method they employed was the method so
often employed by oppressed peoples and rarely without success-