White Terror
The Ku Klux Klan Conspiracy and Southern Reconstruction
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This day-by-day, county-by-county chronicle of the activities of the hooded night riders traces the development of the Klan from its founding in Pulaski, Tennessee as a social fraternity devoted to playing pranks, to 1870-71 when Congress and the federal judiciary launched a major crackdown. Trelease sees the Klan as the South's grassroot response to radical Reconstruction ("The Klan became in effect a terrorist arm of the Democratic Party") though its decentralized structure precluded the "conspiracy" from assuming more than local power. Trelease offers no evaluation of its social base or fin...
This day-by-day, county-by-county chronicle of the activities of the hooded night riders traces the development of the Klan from its founding in Pulaski, Tennessee as a social fraternity devoted to playing pranks, to 1870-71 when Congress and the federal judiciary launched a major crackdown. Trelease sees the Klan as the South's grassroot response to radical Reconstruction ("The Klan became in effect a terrorist arm of the Democratic Party") though its decentralized structure precluded the "conspiracy" from assuming more than local power. Trelease offers no evaluation of its social base or financial backing apart from the unsatisfactory generalization that "members of every class were implicated" nor do we learn what this unique organization dedicated to "Chivalry, Humanity, Mercy and Patriotism" meant to the self-image of the humiliated Confederacy. The weird rituals, oaths, and iconography are treated as so much mumbo-jumbo apparently unworthy of historical appraisal. Trelease short-circuits his history of the Klan in 1871 without making it clear whether the eclipse was caused by the not-too-vigorous attack of the Federal judiciary or whether it was simply an optical illusion produced by the general post-Reconstruction consensus to "leave the South alone." This massive, highly detailed study will be of interest to specialists, particularly regional historians, but the layman is better off with David Chalmers' Hooded Americanism (1965), lest he miss the forest for the trees. (Kirkus Reviews)
