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These resources address issues of race, culture, and politics in the U.S., especially the South, after the Civil War and Reconstruction periods.
Updated on 2008-05-15
Created on 2008-01-27
Category: Schools & Education
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Ku Klux Klan in the Reconstruction Era
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From 1868 through the early 1870s the Ku Klux Klan functioned as a loosely organized group of political and social terrorists.
The Klan's goals included political defeat of the Republican Party and the maintenance of absolute white supremacy in response
to newly gained civil and political rights by southern blacks after the Civil War. They were more successful in achieving
their political goals than they were with their social goals during the Reconstruction era. -
Add Sticky NoteThe political terrorism was effective. While Republican gubernatorial candidate Rufus B. Bullock carried the state in April
1868 elections, by November Democratic presidential candidate Horatio Seymour was in the lead. In some counties the contrast
was incredible. In John Reed's Oglethorpe County, 1,144 people had voted Republican in April, while only 116 dared to vote
Republican in November when Reed's armed Klansmen surrounded the polls. In Columbia County armed Klansmen not only intimidated voters but even cowed federal soldiers sent to guard the polling place. Not surprisingly,
while 1,222 votes had been cast in Columbia County for Republican governor Rufus Bullock in April, only one vote was cast for Republican presidential candidate Ulysses Grant in November 1868. Similar political
terrorism and control of the polling places help account for Georgia's quick "redemption" and return to conservative white
Democratic control by late 1871. - 1 more annotations...
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Lost Cause Religion
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The argument of the Lost Cause insists that the South fought nobly and against all odds not to preserve slavery but entirely
for other reasons, such as the rights of states to govern themselves, and that southerners were forced to defend themselves
against Northern aggression. When the idea of a Southern nation was defeated on the battlefield, the vision of a separate
Southern people, with a distinct and noble cultural character, remained. -
Add Sticky NoteThe main components of the Lost Cause myth, repeated in writings, sermons, lectures,
and speeches by scores of postwar southern figures, are easily identified. First, the prewar South—the Old South—was a place
of nobility and chivalry. (There is no better capsule description of the Old South of the Lost Cause myth than the opening
words of the movie version of Gone With the Wind, with its elegiac reference to the now-vanished pretty world "of Cavaliers and Cotton Fields," where gallantry "took its
last bow.")
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Ku Klux Klan in the Twentieth Century
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The original Klan of Reconstruction was suppressed by the federal government in the early 1870s, but in following decades its violent activities were increasingly
rationalized and even romanticized, most notably in Thomas Dixon's popular novels, The Leopard's Spots (1902) and The Clansman (1905). -
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popularity of The Birth of a Nation, and specifically its appearance in Atlanta in December 1915, proved the major impetus for the reemergence of the Klan.
William J. Simmons
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The Birth of a Nation (From The Rise and Fall of Jim Crow--PBS)
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Add Sticky NoteThomas Dixon reveled in its triumph.
"The real purpose of my film," he confessed
gleefully, "was to revolutionize Northern audiences
that would transform every man into a Southern partisan
for life." -
Griffith later regretted the racial prejudice that his film promoted. He tried to make amends by making INTOLERANCE, a film attacking race prejudice. But INTOLERANCE never approached the success of THE BIRTH OF A NATION.
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