The Ku Klux Klan

By
Annie Cooper Burton

President, Wade Hampton Chapter, No. 763,
United Daughters of the Confederacy,
Los Angeles, California

Cover Design by Howard Willard
Typography by Taylor's Printery

WARREN T. POTTER
PUBLISHER AND BOOKMAKER
511-12 Baker-Detwiler Building
LOS ANGELES, CAL.

Copyright, 1916, by
WARREN T. POTTER
All Rights Reserved

To Father

The Ku Klux Klan

The great Ku Klux Klan sprang up like a mushroom, a Southern organization formed in a time when no other power in the world could have saved the suffering South from the utter disorder which prevailed during the awful period following the War between the States.

The stigma attached to the name Ku Klux Klan by the uninformed masses has, at this late day, been practically removed, thanks to that Southern author, Thomas J. Dixon, who through "The Clansman" swayed public opinion the right way; and thanks again to that master director, David W. Griffith, another Southerner, who filmed this wonderful story and set the people to exclaiming, "Why, the Ku Klux Klan was a grand and noble order! It ranks with the best."

Every clubhouse of the United Daughters of the Confederacy should have a memorial tablet dedicated to the Ku Klux Klan; that would be a monument not to one man, but to five hundred and fifty thousand men, to whom all Southerners owe a debt of gratitude; for how our beloved Southland could have survived that reign of terror is a big question.

The very name Ku Klux shows that the order was formed among men of letters. It is a Greek word meaning circle. Klan suggested itself; the name complete in turn suggested mystery. Originally the order was purely a social organization, formed in Pulaski, Tennessee, May, 1866, and gave diversion to the restless young men after the reaction of war. They found vast amusement in belonging to a club which excited and baffled curiosity; great sport, too, was found in initiating new members. But it was when the Klan realized that it had a great, vital work to perform that it rose majestically to the gigantic task.

When the order at the end of a year had grown throughout the South to such a size that a master hand was needed to guide it, Nathan Bedford Forrest, famous cavalry general of the Southern Army, he of the charmed life, a man who was in "more than one hundred battles and had twenty-seven horses shot under him," a leader famous for his military strategy, was elected Grand Wizard of the Invisible Empire. Forrest always stressed the order that no fighting would be allowed. If they needed to fight they would throw off their disguise and fight like soldiers. Their purpose was to scare into submission the unruly free negroes and the trouble-making carpetbaggers; and this purpose they accomplished, without one drop of blood being shed, except in the most extreme cases. Whenever an undesirable citizen was not wanted, he generally found a note tacked to his door saying that if he did not move on within twenty-four hours he would be visited by the Ku Klux Klan. Signed "K. K. K." The man generally "moved on" long before the stipulated time.

The negroes, being naturally superstitious and imaginative, helped the order to gain power. In Nashville, Tennessee, among the five dens, there was one formed of medical students from the University. One of the favorite pranks of these young doctors was to ask a negro to hold their horse, and then place in his hand as he reached out to take the lines a finger or a hand taken from a corpse. The negro generally went a mile before he stopped running. Another effective trick practiced by the Klan was, when they had a negro on trial, to sprinkle beforehand a little powder on the floor—"hell fire," they called it—and when the negro would be looking down at the floor one of the Klansmen would surreptitiously run his foot over the powder line, and a fiery-looking trail would show. The negro would be paralyzed with fright, and was always careful in the future never to have cause to be brought before the Order again.

The Klan practiced numerous clever devices. Fancy the impression made on a negro when a robed Klansman asked him for a drink of water, to see a whole pail go down without any effort (a rubber bag concealed in the uniform aided in this deception), and then to hear a sepulchral voice say, "This is the first drink I have had since I was killed at Chickamauga!"

One never knew when nor where to expect a body of Ku Klux; they would spring up out of the ground, to all appearances; their ghostly figures multiplying like magic; they had a manner of forming their companies which made a band of one hundred men appear like a thousand. Their horses' feet were always muffled, making their approach completely noiseless. But it was only the guilty who feared them; and fear was what the Klan worked to effect. To kill was not their aim, and only where absolutely necessary was it ever resorted to. A rare instance was that of the hanging of a Northern spy by the Pulaski Klan. This man came to Pulaski and took up carpentry; he made the people like him, and worked himself into the Klan; got their pass-words, everything in fact that they knew; then made ready to get away to the North and expose the secrets of the Order. They found it out before he got away, and when he boarded the train in Pulaski, a number of the Klan boarded the car as it turned out of the city, took the man off the train and hung him at the bridge, thus saving their Order a gigantic tragedy. It was never known who did it, the government could find out nothing. The matter was never discussed by any of the Klan, even long years afterward.

In preparing this sketch of the Ku Klux Klan, I have been most fortunate in having Capt. H. W. Head, 9th Tennessee Regiment, now a popular physician of Santa Ana, California, a former Grand Cyclops of one of the Nashville dens, to draw upon for material, and through his generosity in lending me his treasured Prescript, which has never been out of his possession since 1867, I am enabled to give a verbatim copy of their secret oath and ritual. When Mrs. S. E. F. Rose, Historian of the Mississippi Division, wrote her interesting booklet on the Ku Klux Klan, she was anxious to secure a copy of this oath. She wrote to a lady in Tennessee who had one in her possession and asked if she would, for the sake of history, give her a copy. The lady replied that she regretted not being able to comply with her request, as she was not able to write it herself, and prized it too highly to allow it out of her possession for even an hour to have a typewritten copy made. She said that her Ku Klux papers, together with her husband's parole of honor obtained at Appomatox, Virginia, were to her treasures whose price was far above rubies. So you see what a treasure we have secured through Capt. Head's gallantry and generosity. I am sure the Daughters appreciate the interest he has taken in helping compile this data. It was my aim to get information first-hand.

My father, Capt. James C. Cooper, was Grand Cyclops of a den in Mt. Pleasant, Tennessee, but I never saw his uniform, as it was burned when the Klan disbanded. Capt. Head buried his uniform, and thus saved it. He obliged me by posing for a photograph in this interesting outfit. It was strange how the old feeling came back to him. He felt, he said, as if he were breaking his secret oath in thus displaying his uniform. Certainly he did look guilty and a