The History of the Original Ku Klux Klan

Authors Avatar
The Ku Klux Klan came into existence at the end of the War Between the States in a period called "Black Reconstruction." During that period, most White people had lost the right to vote. Illiterate Blacks, with no history of civilized government, became the bulk of the voting population, resulting in tremendous crime, violence, and corruption against White Southerners. At the darkest hour, the Klan arose and restored the government of the South back to the Southern people, and as Woodrow Wilson said, it saved civilization on this continent.

Since that time, the KKK has been the target of incessant hatred from anti-White, pro-minority forces in the mass media, who, because they oppose the Klan's ideals and recognize it's powerful appeal, have endeavored to defame it's leadership , its followers, it's history, and its ideals. Hundreds of books, movies, and television programs are produced each year attacking the Klan, but no arguments sympathetic to the Klan are permitted in the mass media. The only examples given are morons who are paraded around TV shows such as Jerry Springer in their multi-colored Klan robes. They certainly don't represent the type of spokesmen our people need; committed, intelligent, and articulate spokesmen for the movement they certainly are not. The Knights is proud to have such a tremendous speaker and leader as National Director Thomas Robb who doesn't embarrass the organization as these so-called leaders embarrass theirs. Unfortunately the talk shows pass up the real deal like Pastor Robb in favor of a freak show of illiterate "Klansmen" and higher ratings.

The History of the Original

Ku Klux Klan

When an American has been born who can write an impartial history of the ten years of our country immediately succeeding Appomattox, and deal fairly with the opposing factions in the bitter and frequently bloody after-struggle, he will find nothing so remarkable and mysterious as the purposes and history of "The Invisible Empire," more commonly known as the "Ku Klux Klan." It sprang into being almost in a night; it spread with inconceivable rapidity, until its "dens" largely dominated the States of Mississippi, Alabama, Tennessee, Georgia, North Carolina, South Carolina, Florida, and parts of Arkansas and Louisiana. It defied State and national authority (as they then existed), and under the very nose of the army of the United States it sent forth 100,000 armed men to do its bidding, passed laws without Legislatures, tried men without courts, and inflicted penalties, sometimes capital ones, without benefit of clergy; it was the most thoroughly organized, extensive, and effective vigilance committee the world has ever seen; or is likely to see; its every act was in defiance of the established order and the spirit and letter of our institutions, and yet I am thoroughly convinced that, among conditions as they existed in the States referred to between 1866 and 1872, scarcely a man in this assembly would have been other than a Ku Klux or a Ku Klux sympathizer. I do not mean that anyone present could for an instant tolerate or excuse many acts of cruelty and oppression committed by "The Invisible Empire," or the still larger number committed in its name by its enemies and reckless and malicious individuals, who had no real connection with the movement; I do not mean that the original design of the organization, treated as an academic question, could meet with the approval of right-minded men; but an individual can be properly judged only in the light of surroundings and the conditions under which he acts; applying this standard, the Ku Klux movement assumes the dignity of a revolution, the protest of a proud and despairing race against conditions not to be endured; not a movement of weaklings or theorists, but of desperate men, challenging fate, and swearing that life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness should be theirs and their children's at any cost.

All authorities have not agreed on what constitutes the right of revolution; it is stated by one that "The right of revolution is the inherent right of a people to cast out their rulers, change their polity, or effect radical reforms in their system of government or institutions, by force or a general uprising, when the legal and constitutional methods of making such changes have proved inadequate, or are so obstructed as to be unavailable." (Black's Constitutional Law, 2nd Ed., p.11.)

Another says - "The general duty of obedience to the laws results from the protection they afford to the lives and property of the citizens and subjects; but when a civil government fails to afford that protection, and obstinately persists in a course injurious to the people, and when the probable evils accompanying the change are not greater than the blessings to be obtained by it, revolution becomes a duty as well as a right." (Sir Sherston Baker,)

Still a third says - "When a long train of abuses and usurpation's, pursuing invariably the same object, evinces a design to reduce them under an absolute despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such government, and to provide new guards for their security."(Halleck on International Law.)

It has been contended by some that the right of revolution exists in instances where there is a reasonable probability of its being successfully asserted, and it may be said that a revolution is a rebellion which succeeds, while a rebellion is a revolution which fails; measured by any of these rules, the Ku Klux movement must be set down as a revolution, in that it accomplished certain results when all other measurers had failed.

The author of this paper was born during the war and raised on a plantation in Monroe County, Mississippi, near the Tombigbee River; it was a section devoted to cotton raising, the Negroes outnumbered the whites about four or five to one, and no portion of the South suffered more from the horrors of reconstruction or responded more militantly to the call of "The Invisible Empire."

As a child the writer has spent many a winter's evening in the Negro quarter listening to the weird stories of phantom horses and gigantic riders who nightly kept the countryside in fear, of ghostly visitors whose grinning skulls were carried under their arms and whose skeleton hands were offered in salutation, and of how each night they came from the graves of Shiloh and Vicksburg to ride again and warn the wandering Negro to stay by his own fireside and not tempt Providence by nocturnal meetings.

As the years rolled by the child gradually learned who the riders were, and why they rode; he came to know that perhaps all the adult male members of his own family had been Ku Klux, and in writing and by word of mouth received from survivors a clearer insight into what has never been half understood at the North and not fully at the South. In his search for the truth the writer has not hesitated in appropriating from several excellent articles on the subject important facts and figures; an article written by D.L. Wilson, which appeared in the July Century for 1884, entitled "The Ku Klux Klan," and one published by William Garrott Brown in The Atlantic Monthly of May, 1901, with the title "The Ku Klux Movement," have been especially helpful, and quotations from both have been freely indulged in in several instances.

In order to understand the remarkable conditions existing when the order sprang into being, it is necessary to glance at national legislation and policy between 1865 and 1872.

Perhaps the greatest misfortune which could have befallen the South was the assassination of Abraham Lincoln; he was not only a great man, but he was a kind and generous man, who, throughout the war, looked upon the South as an erring child to be brought back, forcibly in necessary, into its father's house, and in dealing with the great problems immediately following the war he would have acted with "charity for all, with malice towards none,"

Perhaps the second greatest misfortune which could have befallen the South was the succession of Andrew Johnson to the presidency. With the single exception of Aaron Burr, no public man of our country has suffered so much at the hands of his contemporaries as has Andrew Johnson; despised by the South as a renegade, first distrusted and finally hated by the Republicans with a venom unsurpassed in public life, he was ground between the upper and nether millstones. As a matter of fact, honesty and consistency marked his remarkable political career, but no man was ever more brutal or less diplomatic in dealing with delicate situations or endowed with such a faculty for doing the right thing in the wrong way.

It hardly admits of question but that Johnson adopted, almost in total, the plan Mr. Lincoln had mapped out for dealing with the Southern States, involving the immediate organization of the State governments and their representation in both Houses of Congress.

The details of the plan included the appointment of a provisional governor by the President in each State , and the calling of a Constitutional Convention with delegates selected by those who were qualified voters under the old laws and would take the oath of allegiance prescribed by the Amnesty proclamation; it was also Mr. Lincoln's plan to admit as voters such Negroes as could read and write and had served in the Union army.

When Congress met in December, 1865, the Southern States had carried out the design of the President.

It must be borne in mind that throughout the war and up to this time the North and the Republican party had uniformly contended that the Southern States had never been out of the Union, that the Union and the States were indestructible, and that there was no way by which any of them could get out/ this had been announced in various resolutions of Congress and proclamations of Mr. Lincoln, and was in fact the only theory on which the position of the Union in the war between the States could be sustained.
Join now!


Immediately on the collapse of the Confederacy the views of the leaders of the Republican party underwent a startling change; Thaddeaus Stevens, as leader in the House, and Wade and Sumner in the Senate began to preach the doctrine that the Southern States had become conquered provinces, that all Federal laws and guarantees of the Constitution of the United States were suspended within their limits, and that Congress alone could restore the laws and rights so suspended. It the Southern States were still States of the Union, then their citizens were entitled to all the guarantees of the ...

This is a preview of the whole essay