Defrocking the Klan
TREFOUSSE, HANS L.
Defrocking the Klan White Terror: The KuKlux Klan Conspiracy and Southern Reconstruction By Allen W. Trelease Harper & Row. 557 pp. $15.00. Reviewed by Hans L. Trefousse Professor of History,...
...The importance of this book lies in his meticulous recording of every sickening incident, his thorough coverage of every state, and his industrious mining of the available sources...
...Yet until the publication of Allen W. Trelease's White Terror, no new full-scale work on the first Ku Klux Klan had made its appearance...
...The radical malefactors of yesterday have become the heroes of today, while their conservative antagonists have suffered a corresponding decline in historical esteem...
...To specialists in the field of Reconstruction, the author's findings will come as no surprise...
...Thomas Dixon's novel, The Clansman, an apotheosis of an allegedly chivalric nightrider, had a lot to do with the growth and persistence of this image...
...If at times Professor Trelease is a bit too painstaking, and if his recurrent descriptions of individual horrors in county after county become trying, he has still given us a lucid, well-written picture of the first Klan...
...But the most cogent reason for the long-standing distortion of facts was the dominance of the Dunning school of Reconstruction history, and the concomitant sweep of racism at the turn of the century...
...Professor Trelease is to be commended for having done his share toward that end...
...As long as the Negro "knew his place" he enjoyed a modicum of safety...
...Its activity was pronounced whenever there were elections?especially where a combined Negro and Unionist vote might carry the district for the Republicans...
...Only when racism is finally recognized for the destructive force it is, of course, will the legacy of the Klan be completely overcome...
...even those who condemned its 20th-century successor maintained that the original organization was different...
...That this claim was palpably false Tre-lease richly documents...
...His Columbia graduate students and his fellow historians accorded him almost universal recognition, writing volume after volume embellishing his findings...
...It is perhaps to be regretted that he did not include the successful use of terror in 1875 to overthrow Republican rule in Mississippi, and the resort to violence in 1876 that produced disputed election results in three other states...
...The last part of the book is devoted to Federal efforts to suppress the Klan...
...The leading men of the South generally played important roles in the organization, and while it is difficult to keep apart the Klan and similar bands in those counties where the dens were most numerous, it is impossible for the gentry to escape its share of guilt for having initiated the indefensible practices of the Klan...
...Andrew Johnson's fame has been seriously diminished...
...While he attempts to find some patterns for Klan activities, Trelease concedes that any generalizations would be difficult...
...Asserting that the organization tended to play a greater role in racially and politically mixed counties than in predominandy white, black, or one-party ones, he nevertheless recognizes exceptions to the rule...
...Trelease is too careful a historian to ascribe conservative victories to the Klan, but he correctly implies that terror was a most important ingredient of the strategy to recapture the Southern states for the old order...
...Three force acts were passed in 1870-71...
...This was especially true in Georgia, where in 1870 the Klan apparently played a vital role in the successful white supremacy campaign that led to the return of conservative rule...
...Thaddeus Stevens, Charles Sumner, Benjamin F. Butler, and Edwin M. Stanton have all found sympathetic biographers...
...Although the flood of books and articles about other facets of Reconstruction had given us a less biased perspective, the story of the terror organization remained encumbered with the prejudices of several generations—prejudices the last specialized treatment, Stanley Horn's The Invisible Empire (1939), did little to dispel...
...These measures led to the Klan's eventual disappearance...
...And the release of D. W. Griffith's vicious cinematic masterpiece, The Birth of a Nation, which was based on it, furthered the legend...
...Perhaps Trelease's most original contribution is his demonstration of the extent of the Klan's political motivation...
...If he aspired to a position of equality with his former masters, if he showed signs of economic independence or even a thirst for learning, he became a target for the hooded terrorists' revenge...
...The blacks' white allies —Northern carpetbaggers as well as Southern scalawags—were also subjected to abuse and physical violence, but it was basically the all-pervasive racism of the South that made the Klan what it was: a criminal conspiracy to keep the section a white man's country...
...In a careful state-by-state and county-by-county chronicle of its activities, he shows it to have been nothing but a terroristic arm of the Democratic-Conservative party, a weapon used to subdue Republicans by any means, fair or foul...
...William Archibald Dunning saw Reconstruction as a period of agony for a South determined to maintain its white character, and the notion of a "noble" Klan was a complement to his view...
...But as Trelease correctly points out, its tradition of lawlessness continued...
...The sheer mass of evidence he has assembled fully backs up his description of the Klan as "a reactionary and racist crusade against equal rights which sought to overthrow the most democratic society or government the South had yet known...
...Marked by an unfavorable treatment of radical efforts to bring about racial justice, these books aimed to enlighten Americans about the process of Reconstruction...
...Southern apologists tended to assert that "the better elements" either had nothing to do with the Klan or left it after it got out of hand...
...Reviewed by Hans L. Trefousse Professor of History, Brooklyn College IN NO FIELD of American historiography has a greater revolution taken place than in the study of Reconstruction...
...after the third, President Grant suspended habeas corpus in some of South Carolina's worst counties, and a few nightriders were convicted in Federal court...
...Thus the Klan was considered essentially respectable, seeking merely to prevent the excesses of radical rule in the South...
...Murder, rape, mutilation, and whipping were among the methods the loosely confederated organization employed...
...Professor Trelease has now thoroughly discredited the myths of the first Klan...
...The thorough background he has provided us, however, suffices to place those events into proper focus...
...Its most frequent victims were Negroes, freedmen who had incurred the wrath of Southerners determined to uphold as much of the old order as possible...
Vol. 54 • July 1971 • No. 14
