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Chapter 8: The Democratic Party, the Ku Klux Klan, and the Politics of Fear
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243 CHAPTER 8 The Democratic Party, the Ku Klux Klan, and the Politics of Fear by Carl H. Moneyhon T he era of Reconstruction in Texas, as elsewhere in the South, was marked by a wave of violence that revisionist historian Eric Foner has described as lacking a “counterpart in the American experience or in that of the other Western Hemisphere societies that abolished slavery in the nineteenth century.” Historians have long recognized that central to the story of this upheaval was the secret organization known as the Ku Klux Klan. Foner, synthesizing Reconstruction scholarship, concluded that while racial, social, and political conflict had been widespread in the South from the end of the Civil War, that strife increased and intensified with the appearance of the Klan. Foner identified the Klan as the embodiment of what he called the “counterrevolutionary terror ” that swept over the former Confederate States after 1867. What was this powerful organization? Foner summed up the work of others when he described the Klan movement as a popular uprising by dissatisfied whites who opposed the course of Reconstruction. It served as a “military force” protecting the interests of the planter class, the Democratic party, and all whites who wished to restore as much as possible the white supremacist order of the antebellum South, and ultimately helped undo Reconstruction. Nonetheless, it lacked any real organization and had no clear leadership. Klan violence usually was committed by “local groups on their own initiative.”1 Historians have long recognized the presence of the Klan in Reconstruction Texas and provided broad generalizations about its purpose and organization, even though little attention has been paid to its actual history. The earliest scholar to comment on the Klan was Charles W. Ramsdell, whose 1910 study of Reconstruction in Texas portrayed it as a unplanned insurgency with no real structure, a conclusion not unlike 244 Carl H. Moneyhon that of Foner. He differed as to its purpose, however, characterizing it as a response to a legitimate threat to society posed by the actions of freedmen . Klan activity, he believed, focused especially on areas where the “Loyal Union League had produced restlessness among blacks.” Ramsdell provided little evidence as a basis for his conclusions, relying on the generalizations provided by contemporary Democratic newspapers and one of the state’s only admitted Klansmen, W. D. Wood. In an article published in 1906, Wood had justified the Klan as a reaction to blacks who had become impudent and were prowling on the property of their neighbors. Whites had determined “for the safety of their families” to do something to “regulate the Negroes and curb their insolence.”2 Revisionist historians have disagreed with Ramsdell on certain points concerning the Texas Klan, although, like his, most of their works have never focused particularly on the movement’s history. Alan Trelease’s 1971 study of the movement across the South offers a chapter on Texas that is the only scholarly effort aimed specifically at telling the story of the state Klan, but it is based primarily on a detailed look at its activity in Jefferson, Texas, that assumes the story of that group was representative of Klan activity elsewhere. Others have touched on the Klan only tangentially in broader studies of postwar violence that have tried to explain the general upheaval without exploring the story of the Klan itself. In these works, Ramsdell’s explanation for the purpose of the Klan has been the principal issue of dispute, with Revisionists attributing it, as does Foner, to a reactionary fury aimed at reversing the revolutionary changes produced by the war and emancipation. On the other hand, they have found themselves in agreement with Ramsdell that the Texas Klan was local in character and lacked central direction. Trelease’s explanation is representative of the literature when he described the Jefferson Klan as “a local one, with no apparent relationship outside the area,” and generalized that it probably was “typical” of others in the state. “Later mythmakers,” he observed, “ascribed a greater organization to the Klan than it ever possessed.”3 The following essay explores the validity of our views concerning the Ku Klux Klan in Texas by taking a direct look at its post-Civil War history, examining its sources and character. Any understanding of the Klan necessarily begins with uncovering the basic chronology of its story and also recognition that violence against freedmen and the advocates of Reconstruction significantly pre-dated its appearance in Texas. As an organization, the Ku Klux...