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- [00:03]
Tom Holland
This episode is brought to you by TikTok. TikTok gives parents the visibility control they need to help shape an environment that makes sense for their teens.
- [00:13]
Dominic Sandbrook
For starters, teens under 18 have a 60 minute screen time reminder in place and with family pairing, parents can set their own screen time limits, see their teens followers whom they follow and help restrict content that's not right for them
- [00:31]
Tom Holland
because with peace of mind in place, discovery and creativity can follow. Learn more@TikTok.com GuardiansGuide
- [00:46]
Dominic Sandbrook
this is an advertisement by BetterHelp.
- [00:49]
Tom Holland
History preserves the proclamations and the parades. It often emphasises the decisive moment over the sustained effort that made it possible.
- [00:58]
Dominic Sandbrook
And across the centuries, much of that sustained effort has been carried by women, sometimes at the centre of events, often sustaining everything around them.
- [01:09]
Tom Holland
March brings International Women's Day, a celebration certainly, but also a moment to notice how much is carried.
- [01:18]
Dominic Sandbrook
Without commenting, therapy offers a space to step outside the roles you perform for everyone else and ask what you need. Your emotional well being matters. Find support and feel lighter in therapy. Sign up and get 10% off at betterhelp.com restishistory that's better.
- [01:41]
Tom Holland
H E-L-P.com Restishory Foreign this episode is brought to you by Claude by Anthropic
- [01:54]
Dominic Sandbrook
Now Tom, you and I, when we're together, we always argue about one thing, don't we? It's the existence or otherwise of the Loch Ness Monster. But you foolishly are skeptical. And you don't think that there is a monster beneath the freezing waters of that Scottish lock.
- [02:09]
Tom Holland
Because as I know from AI, a plesiosaur would not be able to survive in Scottish waters because they'd just be too cold for it.
- [02:15]
Dominic Sandbrook
Well, Tom, this back and forth is what makes studying history so fun. And actually, Claude was made for this kind of thinking.
- [02:21]
Tom Holland
The deep research feature can pull from dozens of sources at once. It can surface contradictions between them and it can give you a full breakdown with citations so that you can trace the evidence yourself. It's like having a research partner who's read literally everything and wants to chat about what it actually means. So very like Dominic. Actually.
- [02:41]
Dominic Sandbrook
Try Claude for free at Claude. AI/rest is history.
- [02:58]
Tom Holland
Horrible sepulcher. Bloody moon. Cloudy moon. Last hour. Special order number one shrouded Brotherhood of Montgomery division number 71, the Great High Giant commands you. The dark and dismal hour will soon be some. Live today, tomorrow Die be ye ready. The wedded sword, the bullet red and the rights are ours. Dare not wear the holy garb of our mystic brotherhood. Save in quest of blood Mark well our friends Let the guilty beware in the dark caves in the mountain recesses Everywhere our brotherhood appears Traitors beware by order of the Great Grand Cyclops. So that wasn't Jimmy Carter. That was a message that appeared on posters around Montgomery, Alabama, in the spring of 1868. And the florid, the apocalyptic tone, it belongs to a recruiting message by the Ku Klux Klan. And, Dominic, I guess the Ku Klux Klan is one of those aspects of American history that even people who know nothing about American history are familiar with. So it's white robes, isn't it? It's kind of weird. Pointed hoods, burning cross, lynching black people, of course, and I guess two outsiders, the Ku Klux Klan are the embodiment of the dark side of American history. So very violent, but also very lurid. And there's something. I mean, there's almost something comic. And you get it in that kind of announcement, don't you? Because it's. It's such a bad thing to be saying the Great Grand Cyclops. I mean, what's all that about?
- [05:02]
Dominic Sandbrook
He's one of the less extravagantly named officers of the Ku Klux Klan.
- [05:05]
Tom Holland
Yeah, because there are some mad ones to come.
- [05:07]
Dominic Sandbrook
There are. We've got a lot of goblins to come and whatnot. And I completely agree with you. The Klan is well known, even to people who know nothing at all about the context from which it sprung. So, you know, you just have to see a photograph of the Ku Klux Klan. You recognize them immediately. The classic thing, I think, that people on the sort of liberal left in America say is that the Klan is unamerican.
- [05:26]
Tom Holland
This isn't what America is, that kind of thing.
- [05:28]
Dominic Sandbrook
Yeah, this is not America. I mean, actually, there have been three different clans, and I think we can safely say that they are very American. They're deeply rooted in political and social contexts, but in ways that have changed, interestingly over time. So the First Clan, that's what that reading comes from, was founded in 1866 after the American Civil War in the defeated Confederacy. It was a paramilitary group that was committed to overthrowing the process of Reconstruction. That's the process of kind of remodeling the Southern states. And it was dedicated to the principle of restoring white supremacy over the millions of freed slaves. Then there was a second Klan that was founded in 1915, so just before the United States enters the First World War. And that was inspired by a film, the Birth of a Nation, by the great director D.W. griffith. And that clan the second clan, very different in character, much more popular in the industrial north and in the Midwest, in states like Indiana and Illinois, in cities like Detroit and Chicago. It was very nativist, very anti Semitic and above all anti Catholic. White supremacy was always, has always been part of all three clans message. But they've interpreted that white supremacy in different ways. And for the second clan, it was really above a white Protestant supremacy.
- [06:44]
Tom Holland
So it's WASP supremacy.
- [06:46]
Dominic Sandbrook
Exactly. Its chief targets really were Catholics. And that second clan, I mean, this will surprise people who think of the Klan purely as an anti black, you know, American south organization. That second clan was by far the biggest. And at its peak it possibly had as many as 5 million black members. I mean, an extraordinary large and influential organization. And then there's the third clan, which is still kind of staggering on today, which is a far right racist organization formed in the late 40s basically to fight the civil rights movement. And this, I think, the one that we're all familiar with. So this is a clan that does burn crosses. I mean, the first clan doesn't burn crosses at all, by the way. But the third clan, they are easily the least important and interesting of the three incarnations of the clan because they're the smallest, because they're the smallest and they have the least political traction. Whereas the first two clans really matter politically. So let's begin this week. So there is a common lineage between the three groups, but they are different. So let's begin with the first one. That's the one we're talking about this week. And this was founded in a place called Pulaski, Tennessee in the summer of 1866. So to give people a sense of the context, it's just over a year since the end of the American Civil War. And I know this will come as a great shock to our American listeners, but people outside America are not as interested in the American Civil War as they are. So to remind people, the American Civil War saw 11 states in the largely rural south of the United States try to break away from the Union to defend the institution of slavery. And in those 11 states there lived about 9 million people. And just over a third of those people, so about more than 3 million, were black slaves of African descent or African background. And these people were treated as property. At best they were regarded as children. At worst they were regarded as little more than animals, as not fully human. So that's really important to keep that in your minds the whole time. Another thing to remember, the south is not all just one thing. So the terrain of the south, as it were, both physically and economically differs from place to place, depending basically whether or not there were plantations, specifically cotton plantations. So in some states like South Carolina or Mississippi or Louisiana, slaves made up as much as 60% of the population. But in others, let's say Tennessee or Arkansas, there are fewer plantations, so they make up about a quarter. But no matter where you're talking about, racial supremacy was absolutely central to white people's identity and to the political mission of the Confederacy. That is what this is all about. It's what everybody carries in their heads the whole time, the massive separation between black and white. And it's sometimes said, oh, the Civil War wasn't just about slavery, blah, blah, blah, blah. I mean, it might not just have been about slavery, but slavery was always at the heart of it. So the Vice President of the Confederacy, Alexander Stevens, who came from Georgia, was completely explicit on this point. So just before the war broke out, he gave a very famous speech called the Cornerstone Speech. And he said, the cornerstone of the Confederacy is the great truth that the Negro is not equal to the white man, that slavery, subordination to the superior race is his natural and normal condition. And this, our new government, is the first in the history of the world based on this great physical, philosophical, and moral truth. Now, lots of people listening to this will find that absolutely abhorrent. Not just the language, but also the sentiment. But I think it's really important to remember that for most people in the Confederacy, most white people, that's just a plain scientific and moral fact. They see that as absolutely inarguable and
- [10:28]
Tom Holland
the scientific dimension of it. Darwin's Origin of Species had come out a decade before. Before that, you have notions bred of the Enlightenment that there are different races that are at different stages of development. And the moral truth that one race is inferior to the other is contingent on what the white supremacists in the south see as an objective scientific fact.
- [10:52]
Dominic Sandbrook
Yeah, exactly. Right, exactly. Which is why they don't abandon their principles once the war is over. So important to remember, they never think for a moment that they are the villains in this story.
- [11:03]
Tom Holland
They're the victims.
- [11:04]
Dominic Sandbrook
Yeah. They're defending a scientific and moral truth, as you say, but they are overwhelmed in the American Civil War by the industrial, urban modernity of the North. So by the end of the war, a quarter of a million white Southerners have been killed. So that is almost a fifth of the entire adult white population. The economy of the south has been completely destroyed. Most people have lost a huge chunk of their livelihoods. Or their savings, their infrastructure has been smashed. Their houses and their farms have been burned to the ground by the Union armies. And of course, they have lost the bit of their property that meant most of them, either economically or kind of psychologically, because all of the slaves had been freedom under Abraham Lincoln's emancipation proclamation of January 1863. Now, for people who owned slaves, for the white people of the south, this was a gigantic shock. Economic shock, political, but also psychological. Right. That the. I mean, their whole worldview had been based on owning slaves. But if you're a former slave, this is a moment of tremendous liberation. So the freedmen, as they're called, 3 million of them, they are. I mean, this is a moment of great excitement. They can taste their freedom for the first time. They can set up their own schools, their own churches, they can set up institutions. They set up these political education societies called the Union Leagues, in which people will, you know, basically, the one or two people who can read will read newspapers to all the rest, and they'll discuss political ideas and they'll look forward to voting and to exercising their rights as citizens.
- [12:36]
Tom Holland
And the voting is the key issue, isn't it? Because if they vote, then they can get people who will not be in favor of white supremacy, and so then their defeat in the Civil War will be entrenched politically.
- [12:50]
Dominic Sandbrook
Yeah. Well, if you're a Black Freedman in 1866, you're probably going to vote Republican. I mean, you're almost certainly going to vote Republican because the Republican party is the party that's freedom. And so the white Southerners are now looking forward to an age in which. I already mentioned, in South Carolina or Mississippi, what, the white population is only 40% of the state. So they will be permanently outnumbered by people who, as they see it, will always vote for their enemies. Anyway, let's get on to the politics of this. So last year we did a series about the assassination of Abraham Lincoln, and we talked about how when Lincoln died, he died without any very clear plan about what he was going to do with the South. Now, his successor was a guy called Andrew Johnson, who was a Unionist from Tennessee. So he's a Southerner, but unusually, he'd backed the Union. And Andrew Johnson has this horrendous inheritance because, first of all, he has to integrate the Confederacy back into the Union. How are you going to do that? But he also has to work out what he's going to do with the three and a half million former slaves, because, of course, they've been freed. But what are they going to do what jobs are they going to do? Where are they going to live? And there's a government organization called the Freedmen's Bureau, which has been set up to deal with them. But what that means nobody knows. Now, to the horror of many of Lincoln's old allies, some listeners may remember that when we did the assassination series last year, we quoted a lot of sort of radical Republicans, as they were called, saying, oh, I think Johnson's going to be better than Lincoln. You know, maybe some of them were actually saying, thank God Lincoln's gone, because we think Johnson will be tougher on the south, and that's what we want. Well, they were quite wrong about that. He's very keen to integrate the Southern states as quickly as possible. And at one point, he's offering thousands of pardons every day to former Southerners to bring them back in. But by 1866, so that's a year after the end of the war, the Confederate south is still a very chaotic and violent place. So the former owners are trying to regain control over what they see as their lost property. So they are whipping and beating and shooting and hanging African Americans in large numbers.
- [14:54]
Tom Holland
Donnie, I'm just wondering, you say it's chaotic. This is in the wake of a war. There must be enormous amounts of weaponry around. Why are the freed slaves not tooling up and particularly where they're the majority kind of, you know, fighting back?
- [15:09]
Dominic Sandbrook
That's a good question. Actually, in some places they do so, and there are stories about black people arming themselves, forming militias and so on. There is a great anxiety on the part of white Southerners that these Union leagues are actually a kind of front for a race war that their former slaves will wage against them and so on. So I think to some degree, the answer is some of them are tooling up, at least. But by and large, most of them don't want to have a war. You know, they've got what they wanted, right? They want to just be able to enjoy their freedom. They've been absolutely brutalized by this appalling system in which they've been treated as chattels. Now they've been freed. I mean, there are, of course, cases of people exacting revenge, and there are lots of, you know, accounts of violence on both sides, of course. But by and large, most of the freed people, as it were, just want to get on. You know, they want to get on with their lives. You know, that's what you would want to do, right? If you've been freed, when you get out of prison, your first instinct is not usually I want to go and kill the jailer. It's I want to taste the fruits of freedom. Anyway, just last word on the political context. So by 1866 or so, the south very chaotic. Also Washington politics, very chaotic. Many of Lincoln's old allies, the so called radical Republicans, have lost faith in President Johnson. They think, not unreasonably, that he's going to undo their victory in the Civil War, that he's going to scrap the process of Reconstruction or accelerate it so quickly that it'd be meaningless. So they are determined to take control of Reconstruction away from him. And we'll see how that plays out in the second half. So all this is the background for what happens in Pulaski, Tennessee in the summer of 1866. Now, Tennessee is an unusual state by Confederate standards. It had fewer slaves than most other Confederate states. It only had about. Only about 1 in 4 of its population was black. In East Tennessee, which is Appalachian Mountains, there were very few slaves at all because the terrain was no good for cotton plantations. As a result, there are kind of lots of small farms owned by white people who tend to be Unionists. So to support the United States. So Tennessee had a bigger loyalist population. It was the first Confederate state to come under Union military rule. And at the end of the Civil War, the governor of Tennessee is a bloke called Parson Brownlow. And he was called Parson because he'd been a Methodist horse preacher, which meant that he basically just sort of trudged around on a horse.
- [17:33]
Tom Holland
He wasn't preaching to horses.
- [17:34]
Dominic Sandbrook
No, preaching to revivalist meetings.
- [17:36]
Tom Holland
Francis Fasisi.
- [17:38]
Dominic Sandbrook
Exactly. Parson Brownlow is a very abrasive, stubborn, vituperative man. Everybody agrees he is a difficult customer, but he is allied to the radical Republicans in Congress and he has taken quite a hard line on the former Confederates. So he has stripped all former Confederates of the vote.
- [17:56]
Tom Holland
So the former slaves now have the vote and the slave owners don't.
- [17:59]
Dominic Sandbrook
Right. Well, this is exactly as we shall see. This is a key part of the context for the emergence of the Klan. So the end of 1866, Tennessee was the first form rebel state that was allowed back into the Union, allowed to rejoin the Union, send people to Congress
- [18:14]
Tom Holland
and so they all get their votes back.
- [18:15]
Dominic Sandbrook
Not initially, they do later on. It's not a very happy place, Tennessee. There's this great sense of victimhood in the middle and west of the state where people have lost their slaves and they've lost their social status, they've lost a lot of money. And there are parts of the state where law and order is fragile at best. So there are bands of kind of vigilantes who are known as regulators, who are roaming around attacking Republicans and attacking the freedmen. And you get that in in almost every Southern state. And one of these places where law and order has broken down is Giles County. So this is on the border with Alabama, the south of the state. About 30,000 people live in Giles County. Just under half of them were slaves. The only vaguely sizable town is this place, Pulaski, which is a kind of sort of quite rough and ready kind of place. About 2000 people. The authorities in Pulaski are very, very racist. The sheriff still goes around boasting that he's whipping. He will whip his former slaves if he sees them. And the local agent of the Freedmen's Bureau, so that's the agency set up to look after the African Americans, he reported back to headquarters. The white people do all they can to degrade the freedmen and to keep them down to what they see fit to call their proper place. And it's in this place in Pulaski in Giles county that the Ku Klux Klan is born. And it happened in the law office of Judge Thomas M. Jones, probably in late May 1866. And there were six people involved that very first meeting. They were the judge's son, Calvin, a man called Captain John C. Lester, Major James R. Crow, John B. Kennedy, Richard R. Reid, and Frank O. McCord. It's a brilliant book on the First Clan by Alan Trellise, which is kind of the definitive book. But it's been supplemented, but very recently, by a historian called Elaine France Parsons, who's looked into the backgrounds of these guys. They were from what was seen as good families in the locality. They were well educated. They were all quite young. So they're in their mid-20s or early 30s. They'd all fought for the Confederacy. But although they're army veterans, I don't think they see this as a paramilitary organization. This is not the Fry Corps. They don't see it as a veterans organization or anything like that. It's basically a local social club.
- [20:30]
Tom Holland
Well, I was looking at the other names that they were planning on coming up with, and there was the Secret Circle, the Pulaski Social Club and the Thespians. I think the Ku Klux Klan would be a lot less menacing if they'd been called the Thespians.
- [20:44]
Dominic Sandbrook
The Thespians, yeah. You're not wrong. So it's a social club. And the reason they've chosen that name, obviously a really important part of it is it's exotic, but it's also very much of the time. So for almost a century, American university fraternities had adopted Greek names. So the most famous, Phi Beta Kappa, you know, it's still going, I think. And one of those fraternities, one of the best known actually in the south in the early 19th century, was a fraternity called the Ku Klos Adelphon, which was originally at the University of North Carolina. And it spread through the south, but then kind of fell away in the 1850s and 1860s. Now, Ku Klos comes from the Greek kind of ring or circle, I think it means. And that's where you get Ku Klux. And then they just chose clan with a capital K, you know, because the alliteration, nothing. It's as simple as that. There's an element of a college fraternity. From the beginning, their meeting place is this kind of derelict house, this grove, rather next to a derelict house, and they call it the Den. They all give themselves titles. So that's where you get the Grand Cyclops, the Grand Magi, the Grand Turk, the Grand Exchequer, and two Lictors. And they dress up. And they dress up not just in the canonical outfit. So they do wear the white mask with the holes, that sort of the pointed kind of hat and the long robe. But we know that they wore other things too. So there's an early quote, they wore Spanish jackets and wide trousers with a cap and feathers.
- [22:13]
Tom Holland
That's interesting, isn't it, the Spanish jacket? Because that. That pointed, conical white thing. I mean, it comes from Spanish Catholic practice. You wear. You wear it in Holy Week and process through the streets. Am I overthinking it? This is a big Spanish thing.
- [22:25]
Dominic Sandbrook
I think it's just a fun, exotic costume.
- [22:27]
Tom Holland
It's japery.
- [22:29]
Dominic Sandbrook
It is slightly public school japery. You know, they're the. They're the young bloods of the town. They've come back from the war. They've got nothing to do. They're dressing up and they are making up silly rituals themselves. And this is what a lot of people do in 19th century America.
- [22:43]
Tom Holland
So just to emphasize it is not at this point a racist organization. It's just for fun. It's a social organization.
- [22:50]
Dominic Sandbrook
Well, this is a complicated question. It's a racist organization insofar as all the people who are in it are racists. They are white supremacists who believe that white supremacy is the cornerstone of their society. However, that's not why they've set this up. There's no doubt they would have said racist things when they're hanging around, you know, having their japes. But that's not why they've done this.
- [23:13]
Tom Holland
The equivalent of a kind of a Tory club or a Whig club in London, that kind of thing.
- [23:19]
Dominic Sandbrook
A little bit, yeah.
- [23:20]
Tom Holland
Your political affiliations are why you meet up, but you're not sitting there discussing politics all the time.
- [23:25]
Dominic Sandbrook
Yes, I think that's probably right now how it spread. The first organisers were very vague about this. I think possibly because they were a little bit embarrassed by its later associations with violence, even though they shared the political aims of the people who practiced that violence. But what seemed to happen is other people in neighboring counties heard about this den of these guys to dress up and they said, oh, we'd like to do that too. And they sort of got permission, or they got probably just verbal permission from the Grand Cyclops for the Grand Cyclops to set up their own dens. And so by the late summer of 1866, there are other KKK Dems. There are very, very few contemporary accounts of them, but Alan Trellise quotes a man from Alabama who says he saw them at a midnight picnic that autumn. He remembered them wearing pretty and showy costumes, hats decorated with stars and spangles. So they're basically dressed as conjurers or something. And I quote, it seemed to be a thing of amusement. I never heard anything in connection with it as a political organization. But of course it's going to be very difficult to stay as a non political organization in a. In a world in which, you know, politics is so charged with menace.
- [24:35]
Tom Holland
But as you say, it's not the Frikorps. It's not a kind of overtly paramilitary organization.
- [24:40]
Dominic Sandbrook
Well, not yet. Not yet. I think that's the point. So across Tennessee and much of the south, political temperature is rising. So that winter at the end of 1866, there are a lot of violent attacks on black freedmen and on white unionists, that's to say white Republicans. And by early 1867, Governor Brownlow, Parson Brownlow, who's this very stubborn man, as I already described, he issued a proclamation. I have no concessions to make to traitors, no compromises to offer to assassins and robbers. The outrages enumerated must and shall cease shall in capital letters. And he said, I'm going to call for federal troops. I'm going to organize a state militia. This is always terrifying for former Confederates to talk of a state militia because they know that by definition it would consist of armed black men. And that is the one thing that terrifies them more than anything else. Going back to your point, Tom, about the fears of black people getting weapons, this is the single biggest nightmare for a white Southerner. And Brownlow says, I'm going to make sure that all black men have the vote before the next election. Now, instead of calming things, this absolutely inflames them because the ex Confederates at this point double down. As they see it. Brownlow has basically said to them, I'm going to rule by military despotism. I'm going to bring in more troops, and I'm going to give black people the vote so, you know, you'll never win an election again. And so at this point, they say, well, in that case, we're entitled to raise our own paramilitary opposition to you. And this is the point in the spring of 1867, when the clan really evolves into an explicitly political organization. And the key moment, this is an incredible fact, it took place at the hotel after which Maxwell House Coffee is named. So we don't know that much about this meeting because they didn't keep records. Basically, the Grand Cyclops of the Pulaski den summoned some of the other clan dens. Now, at the same time or just afterwards, there was a sort of basically a Democratic state convention in Nashville. The Democrats at this point were calling themselves the Conservatives.
- [26:47]
Tom Holland
So confusing.
- [26:48]
Dominic Sandbrook
So there's probably an overlap between some of these sort of mainstream political people. The Democratic Party arriving in Nashville and the KKK delegates arriving a few days before. Because there's a huge amount of overlap actually, between this First Clan and the Democratic Party in the South. And the key figure seems to have been former brigadier general in the Confederate army called George W. Gordon. General Gordon. Dump.
- [27:11]
Tom Holland
Surely a General Gordon can't be a bad man. Dominic, tell me it ain't so.
- [27:14]
Dominic Sandbrook
I know it's sad to have a General Gordon on the show who's letting the General Gordon's of history down. So this General Gordon, George W. Gordon, he was the youngest Confederate general at the war's end. He was 31 years old. And he came back to Pulaski to become a lawyer, and he wrote a new blueprint for the Klan. It was called its Prescript. And basically, I know you're a big fan of the Marvel superhero films, and this is like a massive administrative chart for the Avengers or something or some team of superheroes. So this is how it works. If you're an ordinary member of the Ku Klux Klan, you are a ghoul, and you belong to a den and each den is headed by a Grand Cyclops and two Nighthawks.
- [27:54]
Tom Holland
God, not two Nighthawks.
- [27:56]
Dominic Sandbrook
Yeah, two Nighthawks, not just one. There is the Grand Giant of the Province and four goblins. Then above them there's a Grand Titan of the Dominion and four Furies. Then there's the Grand Dragon of the Realm. The Realm is the State, and there's eight Hydras. And then above them there is the grand wizard of the empire and his 10 genii. And the Empire is the American South.
- [28:22]
Tom Holland
You know what it is? It's people who hate Tolkien and have never read him. It's what they think Lord of the Rings is like.
- [28:28]
Dominic Sandbrook
It's more sort of CS Lewis, isn't it? Because CS Lewis throws everything at it. He's got Father Christmas in there. He's got satires, he's got whatever. That's what this is. Because there's also. There's a whole load of other officers that I don't really know where they fit in. There's Grand Turks, the Grand Magi, there are Grand Sentinels. And then what I love as well, they've set up two internal tribunals which surprise you if you're an. If you're an officer and you've done something wrong, and if you're just an ordinary ghoul, then you're tried by the Council of Centaurs. So they also issue a formal statement of the clan's purpose. Now, you mentioned Walter Scott. This is classic Walter Scott. This is an institution of chivalry, humanity, mercy and patriotism, embodying its genius in its principles, all that is chivalric in conduct, noble in sentiment, generous in manhood, and patriotic in purpose. Its goals are to protect the weak, the innocent and the defenseless from the indignities of and wrongs and outrages, the lawless, the violent and the brutal.
- [29:23]
Tom Holland
But presumably, when it says the weak, the innocent and the defenseless, it's not referring to former slaves.
- [29:28]
Dominic Sandbrook
No, no. This is defending white people from what it sees as the tyranny of the former slaves and their allies in the Republican Party and the Union Army. And it's this all textbook Southern stuff. This is what the Southerners were saying before and during the Civil War. We are the forces of nostalgia, of chivalry, the values of old England and the old country against the soulless machine of Northern capitalism.
- [29:55]
Tom Holland
And also, we are the victims here.
- [29:58]
Dominic Sandbrook
Oh, yeah, we are the victims is so central to. Well, to all three clans, actually. And actually, some people listening to this will say, you know, they're over egging this. There's nothing very racist about this, but the 10 questions that you have to answer to become a ghoul, rather, give the game away. Have you ever belonged to the Republican Party? Did you serve in the Union army in the war? Do you oppose black equality? Do you support the constitutional rights of the South? And what that basically means is, are, you know, are you on board to reverse the result of the war, to reverse the process of reconstruction, and to reimpose white supremacy and the subordination of African Americans? Then, a few weeks after this Maxwell House meeting, this group gets its figurehead. And the figurehead is the first and only grand wizard of the first clan. And this is another former Confederate general called Nathan Bedford Forest.
- [30:55]
Tom Holland
So he's top clansman.
- [30:56]
Dominic Sandbrook
It's the Grand Wizard. You can't get bigger than the grand wizard. Were you following that administrative chart, Tom?
- [31:01]
Tom Holland
So there isn't a kind of Sauron equivalent?
- [31:03]
Dominic Sandbrook
No, he is Sauron.
- [31:04]
Tom Holland
He is Sauron.
- [31:04]
Dominic Sandbrook
He completely is. So Nathan Bedford Forrest was from Tennessee. He's a former plantation owner. He's a former slave trader. He had really, you know, rocketed up in the Confederate Army. He'd enlisted as a private and rose to become a cavalry general. And he was nicknamed the wizard of the Saddle for his swashbuckling style.
- [31:23]
Tom Holland
So wizardry is very much his thing, then.
- [31:25]
Dominic Sandbrook
Very much his thing. Although there is a dark side to this guy. So Northerners saw him as a war criminal because there was one particular incident, place called fort Pillow in 1864, where the Union sort of garrison or whatever had surrendered. Many of its troops were black, and Nathan Bedford Forrest's men had allegedly tortured and then hacked them to death, hundreds of them, after they had surrendered. Historians still argue about this, but my personal view is he definitely did it. Nathan Bedford Forrest had ended the war fighting down in the deep South. He disbanded his troops when he heard about Robert E. Lee's surrender. So actually, the fact that he gave up so late adds to his lustre for the Southern public. Like a lot of former Confederate officers, he then put his money into railroads. Everybody does this in this period. So he's sort of become a sort of railroad speculator. It's not clear whether he volunteered to join the clan or he was invited, but either way, he became the perfect public face for it. Because to the white Southern public, Nathan Bedford Forrest is the incarnation of the swashbuckling Confederate officer who fights to the very end, but he's really just a figurehead. You know, that's the point with all the clans, actually. Is their local groups make all the running. There's never really any very strong coherent central organization.
- [32:42]
Tom Holland
So it's very decentralized, which in turn must make it hard to kind of stamp out.
- [32:46]
Dominic Sandbrook
Yeah, how do you stamp it out when there's. When there's no one to, you know, there's no single person to talk to. So now we've got to the summer of 1867, just as we approach the break. And the clan is still very localized, but it has definitely now become much more public and much more political. So the Pulaski Citizen newspaper, for example, is running regular reports on clan meetings. On the 5th of June, 1867, there is the first Klan public parade. About 75 Klansmen marching through the town in costume. The report in the local paper, as so many of these things sounds absolutely demented. Tom, do you want to read it in your splendid southern accent?
- [33:20]
Tom Holland
The column was led by the grand Cyclops who had on a flowing white robe, a white hat about 18 inches high. He had a very venerable and benevolent looking face and long silvery locks. Next there followed two of the tallest men out of jail. One of them had on a robe of many colors with a hideous mask and a transparent hat. They conversed in Dutch, Hebrew or some other language. No two of them were dressed alike, all having on masks and some sort of fanciful costume.
- [34:03]
Dominic Sandbrook
Yeah, interesting there that they're not. No two are dressed alike. So there's no uniform. They're not all wearing white robes. They are wearing. They're just basically wearing fancy dress.
- [34:12]
Tom Holland
And that is so sinister, isn't it? I mean, it's so sinister. It's kind of like they're dressing up as clowns or something, which they will be doing in due course. But I mean, it's much more frightening to be attacked, I think, by, you know, a bunch of people dressed up as clowns, say, than just by your everyday thug.
- [34:28]
Dominic Sandbrook
Yeah, I guess that is true, actually. If a clown beat you up, that'd be really terrifying. That'd be absolutely frightening. Now at this point, they haven't yet really started beating people up. Tennessee has elections that August, but they're quite quiet now. Why is that? It's actually because the local sort of ex confederates are hoping madly. It's a sign how much they've internalized their own rhetoric. They are hoping that their former slaves will vote with their masters. They sort of saying to themselves, well, they know what's best for them. They'll sign. They never really dislike slavery that much. They'll probably vote for us Anyway, as the Republicans win a clean sweep among the white Southerners, there is this sense of terrible shock. They can't believe that their African American neighbors have voted against them. And late that summer, Captain Judd of the Freedmen's Bureau reports on the Klan for the first time. And he writes, this society is very numerous and it seems to extend all over the country, meaning the county. They march about the streets thoroughly disguised in a uniform. I'm credibly informed they are heavily armed. I am sure they're capable of great mischief if they are to take it. The best citizens here say this Ku Klux Klan is got up by the young men merely for fun and they never intend to interfere with anyone. This may well be true, but I doubt it mightily. The clan is poised to expand now from a few counties in central Tennessee. It is now. It is then going to burst out of Tennessee to every state in the former Confederacy. And for all its talk of honor and chivalry, the Ku Klux Klan is about to unleash a reign of terror.
- [36:02]
Tom Holland
Well, on that chilling note, let's take a break.
- [36:06]
William from Empire
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- [37:22]
Tabby
this episode is brought to you by the Folio Society. And it's Tabby and Dominic here from the book club Goal Hangers latest show.
- [37:30]
Dominic Sandbrook
Now, Tabby. As you know, there are some books that you read once, but there are others you especially return to again and again. And those second kind of books, they really deserve to last.
- [37:40]
Tabby
Don't they that's what the Folio Society does. They are an independent employee owned publisher based in London.
- [37:47]
Dominic Sandbrook
Every book is produced with specially commissioned beautiful artwork and a specially commissioned introduction that puts the story in its context.
- [37:57]
Tabby
Folio Society publishes the books we love. From Bronte to Dickens, from Margaret Atwood to Tom Holland. The books can feel like works of art in their own right. They're built around the text, the stories that last in books that are made to last. If a story matters, keep it properly. Find it at foliosociety.com thebookclub that's foliosociety.com theBookClub.
- [38:30]
Tom Holland
This episode is brought to you by
- [38:32]
Dominic Sandbrook
Claude by Anthropic Now, Tom, you and I, when we're together, we always argue about one thing, don't we? It's the existence or otherwise of the Loch Ness Monster. But you, you foolishly are skeptical and you don't think that there is a monster underneath the freezing waters of that Scottish loch.
- [38:49]
Tom Holland
Because as I know from AI, a plesiosaur would not be able to survive in Scottish waters because they'd just be too cold for it.
- [38:56]
Dominic Sandbrook
Well, Tom, this back and forth is what makes studying history so fun. And actually, Claude was made for this kind of thinking.
- [39:01]
Tom Holland
The deep research feature can pull from dozens of sources at once. It can surface contradictions between them, and it can give you a full, full breakdown with citations so that you can trace the evidence yourself. It's like having a research partner who's read literally everything and wants to chat about what it actually means. So very like Dominic.
- [39:21]
Dominic Sandbrook
Actually, try Claude for free at Claude AI slash Restishory.
- [39:32]
Tom Holland
The Ku Klux Klan are called upon to castigate or kill any colored cusses who may approve the Constitution being concocted by the contemptible carpetbaggers at the Kabadal. Each clan is commanded by a carnivorous kern who collects his comrades with care and caution commensurate with the magnitude of the cause. Whenever convened, they must correctly give four countersigns. These are Kill the colored cuss. Clean out the carpet baggers. Crush the Convention. Carry conservatism confusion to Congress. Confederates will conquer. So that is an insane article in a Virginia newspaper, the Richmond Dispatch, in the spring of 1868. And what I could not adequately convey was that the degree to which all the words which begin with C in conventional spelling, they are given K's in the printout of that section from the newspaper.
- [40:21]
Dominic Sandbrook
Yeah. So we've moved on a few months now, sort of. We were in 1866, moving towards 1868. And that is from. You said it was from Virginia, Tom. So moved outside Tennessee. The Ku Klux Virus, as some papers called it, has spread beyond the borders of its original state. And as that article shows, actually it is much more overtly racist and violent even now than it was 18 months or so ago. Now, a lot of this is down to the fact the context is changing all the time. So I mentioned in the first episode, in 1866 and 1867, there was a power struggle in Washington between President Andrew Johnson, Lincoln's successor from Tennessee, and the so called Radical Republicans in Congress. And Congress won it. So first of all, Congress secured the passage of the 14th Amendment. So the 14th Amendment extends American citizenship to anybody born in the United States, including former slaves. They are now American citizens. The 14th Amendment mandates that no state can deprive any person of life, liberty or property without due process of law. That due process of law, I mean, so much constitutional argument in the last kind of century and a half has, has come down to those words and what you can and cannot do to somebody.
- [41:40]
Tom Holland
That's the problem with the written Constitution, isn't it?
- [41:42]
Dominic Sandbrook
Bonkers. I don't agree with it any more than you do. And the 14th Amendment also guarantees all citizens equal protection under the law. Again, what that means will be hotly contested in the years to come. The Radical Republicans tried to get rid of President Johnson. They impeached him and he survived by just one vote in the Senate. So he's kind of clinging on. But they have all the momentum now and all the power. Between spring 1867 and early 1868, they went further and they passed four reconstruction acts that went way beyond not just Johnson's plans for the south, but almost certainly what Abraham Lincoln was planning for the south when he died in 1860. So now 1867-68, the entire former Confederacy, except for Tennessee, which has been readmitted to the Union, the entire former Confederacy is put under martial law and governed by the United States army. And elections will be held under military supervision so that black men can vote in them. So in other words, they're basically saying it's two and a half years since the end of the war. The south has proved incapable of behaving itself. We are reimposing martial law. Now this is very exciting if you're a former slave, because now you have what looks like a guarantee that you will be able to exercise your right as an American citizen if you're a man and cast your vote. And so there's a Great rush to enroll in things like these union leagues and local Republican organizations on the part of the freedmen, because they're, like, brilliant.
- [43:17]
William from Empire
We can.
- [43:17]
Dominic Sandbrook
We can vote and nobody will stop us. So when the Southern states hold elections in the first half of 1868, the results very heavily favor the Republican party, right? Abraham Lincoln's old party, the party of emancipation.
- [43:31]
Tom Holland
Yeah, of course.
- [43:32]
Dominic Sandbrook
And so that means that for the next two years, much of the south will be under Republican rule. And if you're a white Southerner who supported the Confederacy, this is an absolute nightmare for you. And they made no secret of their desire that they would roll this back and destroy it. As one Democrat newspaper put it, these constitutions and governments will last just as long as the bayonets which ushered them into being shall keep them in existence, and not one day longer. In other words, the white Southerners say, sure, you've won this. You know, you won the battle, but we will defeat you. We will roll this back and undo all this and regain our former supremacy
- [44:17]
Tom Holland
by extra constitutional means, if necessary.
- [44:20]
Dominic Sandbrook
Right. And they think they are. I mean, they think, don't forget that they are fighting in defense of their constitutional liberties and their constitutional privileges and whatnot. And they would say, well, you know, if we have to sometimes use extra constitutional means to defend the Constitution, then so be it. That's what they would say. And they have two weapons above all, right? The first weapon is very simply time. So if you're a white Democrat, a white ex Confederate, you say to yourself, I will never give up. This is absolutely existential for me. This is central to my way of life and my sense of myself and the reason I'm on earth.
- [44:56]
Tom Holland
So it matters more to them than it does to the Unionists.
- [45:00]
Dominic Sandbrook
Of course, if you live in Connecticut or Ohio or whatever, ultimately you don't really care what's going on in Georgia or in Mississippi. So over time, you will lose interest. You'll be thinking about your railroad investments and other such Gilded age things. But if you're a Southerner, you will never stop thinking about this. And the second weapon they have is violence. And that will work on three levels. First of all, violence to intimidate African Americans away from the polls. Secondly, violence to disrupt and destroy local Republican organizations. And finally, and I think in many ways, the key thing, the more violent you are, the more it will persuade people in the north to give up. Because people in the north will just say, ah, come on, we're never going to change the South.
- [45:46]
Tom Holland
It's a morass.
- [45:47]
Dominic Sandbrook
But, you know, how people think like that. People always think like that. They often don't double down and say, well, we'll send more troops. They actually say, God, what a mess and a nightmare. Let's just call it a day.
- [45:58]
Tom Holland
Take our hand out of the Magimix.
- [45:59]
Dominic Sandbrook
So this is the background for the expansion of the clan. Yes, it started as possibly as dressing up, as having fun, as a social club, serenading girls, whatever. But by this point, it has become much more a sort of association of paramilitary groups that are dedicated to overthrowing Republican rule in the name of white supremacy. It's not the only one, actually. So there are others. There's a group called the White Brotherhood. There's a group called the Invisible Empire in North Carolina, the most famous one. I mean, you were saying about Walter Scott in the first half and the sort of stuff about chivalry that's so common in Southern kind of culture, because the most famous rival is called the Knights of the White Camellias, and that was set up in Louisiana.
- [46:42]
Tom Holland
They don't sound very frightening.
- [46:44]
Dominic Sandbrook
They're very frightening. No, they're terribly violent. I mean, you don't want to be on the wrong side of the Knights of the White Camellias, I can tell you. They were founded in New Orleans, an extremely violent city in this period in May 1867. They had similar rituals and handshakes and passwords, and they were explicitly devoted in their Constitution, too. And I quote, the supremacy of the white race.
- [47:06]
Tom Holland
Yeah, okay, they are frightening.
- [47:07]
Dominic Sandbrook
But of all of them, it's the Klan that expands. The furthest part of this, I think, is because of Nathan Bedford Forrest. He's a really good front man for it, not least because he's the president of the Selma, Marion and Memphis Railroad. So he's traveling a lot across the south in his railroad duties, especially Mississippi and Alabama. He's also going. He's also a life insurance salesman. So he's kind of traveling life insurance to widows or whatever. And whenever he's there, he will meet local bigwigs and he'll meet other Confederate veterans, other officers like him who don't like what's happened to the South. And they will set up after he's left other paramilitary groups like the clan, to defend the south against the horrors of radical reconstruction. And these. I think I get the impression that a lot of the people who end up becoming grand dragons and grand titans of the Southern clan are ex kind of drinking buddies, war comrades and whatnot of Nathan Bedford Forest, who he's visited in his life insurance duties and Then inspired them to set up their own clans.
- [48:16]
Tom Holland
Do you think he bundles in a title with the, with the life insurance? Take it out and you can be a grand gnome.
- [48:22]
Dominic Sandbrook
Right? Exactly. But actually I think the biggest influence in spreading the clan is actually just the newspapers, Southern Democratic newspapers. So they are regularly reporting by 1868 the Klan's activities in Tennessee. And they're basically saying, you know, in Tennessee there's this group called the Klan and hurrah for them. They are fighting back against the tyrannical imposition of black rule by the Republican party. So this is the Richmond, Virginia Inquirer and examiner. In March 1868 it said that the Klan was behind its mask was a purpose as resolute, noble and heroic as that which Brutus concealed beneath his mask of well dissembled idiocy. Is that fair to Brutus?
- [49:03]
Tom Holland
It's great to have Brutus back on the show, isn't it? Because he was much admired by Booth and he is the, the leader of the Roman Republicans who threw out the monarchy. This is the, the first Brutus. The Brutus who leads the rebellion against the. The monarchy.
- [49:17]
Dominic Sandbrook
Oh, against talking the proud because he
- [49:19]
Tom Holland
disguised himself as an idiot. So I think that's what's going on there. So the, the idea that they're dressing up in kind of ludicrous costumes, they're disguising the fact that secretly they're ruthless killers.
- [49:29]
Dominic Sandbrook
Yes. And the funny thing is that they don't think they're the conspirators. They think the conspiracy is somebody else. Because as this Richmond newspaper says, the conspiracy is a secret Negro conspiracy which has face objects the establishment of Negro domination. This is the kind of language they use all the time, by the way. So two obvious questions. What kind of people join it and where? So first of all, the Klan does not thrive in places where there are lots and lots of Republicans for obvious reasons. If it's a place that back to the Union in the Civil War, for example, in the Appalachians, in the mountains where there are no plantations, there are never going to be many people to join the clan. There just aren't enough Confederates. Also, people aren't going to set up a Klan somewhere where they are massively outnumbered by African Americans, by freedmen. So in the Mississippi Delta, in the Mississippi Delta, black people outnumber white by three to one. You'd be mad to set up the clan there because really, you know, you'd get beaten up, you'd be on the wrong side of that fight. Basically, the Klan ends up being set up where black and white populations are roughly equal or where whites are slightly outnumbered.
- [50:37]
Tom Holland
And they can do that because the whites have ready access to weapons and the blacks don't.
- [50:43]
Dominic Sandbrook
The whites, by and large, they have access to weapons and better weapons. They are richer, they are more powerful, they are better connected, they have more resources, you know, all of those kinds of things.
- [50:53]
Tom Holland
And I suppose also they have control of the legal system.
- [50:56]
Dominic Sandbrook
Yes, of course. Sheriffs, judges. Yeah, all of those kinds of things. They have all the leaves of power. Because all that has changed to some degree. I mean, it's a massive change, is that people who were once slaves are no longer slaves. They're still living on the land. They're still living in kind of, you know, wooden cabins, shacks and things. Land has not been redistributed, they have not been given. What were they? The. The initial promise was something like three acres and a mule or something that they would be given. They never were given them. You know, they are still very powerless. So, of course, if there's a conflict, they will always be at a massive disadvantage.
- [51:32]
Tom Holland
And the legal system, as well as weaponry can be used to terrorize them.
- [51:36]
Dominic Sandbrook
Yes, which it will be. Exactly. Now, as for the kind of people who join the clan, probably the majority are very ordinary kind of farmers and labourers, but there are lots of accounts of lawyers and doctors and whatnot, professional people joining. As Alan Trellise says in his brilliant book on the clan, the thing is, all classes of the white south had been complicit in slavery and they had always. All classes had worked together to defend it and all classes had served in the Confederate army during the Civil War. That. I think your point about fun, though, is an important one. So there's a Republican plantation owner called Charles Stearns who lived in Georgia. He's an anomalous figure. I said he was a plantation owner, but he's a Republican and he hated the Klan. And he said of the clan later on, he said it was men who are neither better nor worse than the average of the population, but simply young men with plenty of leisure on their hands, with a great love of adventure in their souls and intensely rebel in their proclivities. To repeat, he didn't like them, but he said they're kind of. They're young men who like fighting, who like adventure, who like dressing up, who like, you know, beating people up. I think that's definitely part of it. I mean, that element of it being exciting in a world that has been ripped apart by war and which is nothing really much else to do. I mean that makes complete sense to me. And what drives them is the nightmare that's the back of every white Southerners mind, which is the fact that they will be ruled by people they'd once regarded as their property. So what's it like to be in the clan? Obviously there's the excitement of dressing up. Often they don't need to wear the disguises because as you say, they control the legal system. That part of it. I think they're often. They really are doing it for fun. They don't just wear white, they wear black at night, they wear red. Some clans wear yellow. But I mean they must look very weird riding around in their kind of yellow robes or whatever.
- [53:33]
Tom Holland
Oh right. Like they don't look weird if those robes are white.
- [53:36]
Dominic Sandbrook
Well, I guess we're used to the idea of them being white robes. Right? I mean if somebody makes a film in which the Klu Klaus Klan are riding around in red and yellow robes, you'd find that very. Would you not find that a bit. A bit odd?
- [53:46]
Tom Holland
The Grand Banana.
- [53:48]
Dominic Sandbrook
Exactly. Well, they don't always wear those hats, so sometimes they will wear horns or beards or they have giant tongues. Masks with massive tongues. An important point, actually. Their robes were generally made by their wives or their sisters or their mothers or whatever. So women are involved in the clan
- [54:03]
Tom Holland
as well, but they don't have official roles within it. No, there isn't a kind of the
- [54:07]
Dominic Sandbrook
grand Goblin es or anything in the second clan. Next week we'll be talking about a lot of clans, women, but not in this clan. And they recruit members through these mad notices. You read one right at the beginning. Lots of stuff about ghosts and graveyards and kind of the hour of the sepulcher has come or whatever, all of that kind of thing. Again, I mean there's a good example here actually. This, this is made for you. All your life you've been building towards the moment when you could do a reading from the Tuscaloosa Alabama Independent Monitor.
- [54:35]
Tom Holland
Make ready. Make ready. Make ready. The mighty hobgoblins of the Confederate dead in hell. A blue assembled Revenge. Revenge. Be secret, be cautious, be terrible. By special grant, hell freezes over for your passage Offended ghosts, put on your skates and cross over to mother Earth. And so it just goes on and on like that.
- [54:57]
Dominic Sandbrook
That's like about a tenth of the. Of the entire.
- [55:00]
Tom Holland
Just goes on.
- [55:01]
Dominic Sandbrook
And it's Babel. I mean, what does it even mean?
- [55:03]
Tom Holland
It's a word salad.
- [55:04]
Dominic Sandbrook
Put on your skates and cross over to mother Earth.
- [55:06]
Tom Holland
Well, I suppose it said that hell has just freezed over.
- [55:08]
Dominic Sandbrook
Oh, hell is that.
- [55:09]
Tom Holland
Maybe it's that.
- [55:10]
Dominic Sandbrook
Okay, I'm just too stupid to understand. Understand Ku Klux Klan recruiting message and actually the clan becomes this kind of mad popular craze, as weird as that sounds. So people set up Ku Klux junior baseball teams. There is a song called the Ku Klux Midnight Roll Call. And there is Ku Klux Merch. So you can buy knives, you can buy paint, you can buy. This is the maddest one, a Ku Klux smoking tobacco pack that contains the spirits of a hundred faithful KKK's with an accurate and attractive full length portrait of the great Grand Cyclops. So this makes the whole thing sound like a joke and there is still an element that you describe it as japery. So they never burn crosses, the clan, the First Clan. But they do play weird practical jokes on their black neighbors. So they will dress up in these weird. In these sort of frames that make them look like 12 foot tall ghostly figures. And they'll intimidate the freedmen. They will do stuff like. I mean, this sounds so deranged. They will put on detachable hands and force black people to shake their hand in the street. And then the hand will come off or they, their favorite trick just sounds so weird. They will strap a sort of bottle to their chest underneath their hood and their robes, and they will pretend to drink gigantic quantities of water.
- [56:38]
Tom Holland
How does that work?
- [56:39]
Dominic Sandbrook
Because basically you're pouring it into your. If you're watching on video, you can see me, I'm miming it. Yeah, you're pouring this water into your hood and then you've got a kind of concealed. Oh, I see, you've got a concealed bottle. So it looks like you're drinking an unearthly quantity of water.
- [56:54]
Tom Holland
And if you forget to do it, then no wonder your robes are yellow.
- [56:58]
Dominic Sandbrook
Right? Very good. Now, in the early 20th century, historians who were sympathetic to the lost cause of the Confederacy claimed that these tricks were brilliant and that they terrified African Americans and they stopped them voting and they helped redeem the south from the horrors of Reconstruction. But historians now generally say the idea that the freedmen were taken in by these sort of tricks is a. Is itself a racist myth. As Alan Trellise says, this is actually a story not about black superstition, about ghosts, it's a story about white superstitions, about black people. Because it basically, the white, the Klansmen are playing these tricks and laughing and saying to them, each other, gosh, the African Americans are so gullible. They're taken in by my detachable hand. In reality, of course, the African Americans aren't taken in by it at all, but they're just terrified that if they don't play, play up the game and if they don't pretend to be frightened, they'll be lynched. Yeah. Then they'll be, they'll be beaten up or killed or whatever.
- [57:56]
Tom Holland
I mean, it's bad enough meeting a practical joker, but meeting a practical joker will kill you if you don't laugh at his joke. That's the worst.
- [58:04]
Dominic Sandbrook
Exactly right. And actually the emphasis on these cruel jokes is a bit misleading because by the summer of 1868, what the Klan is really about is violence. So this is why the Klan matters. Not the dressing up, not the jokes, but because of the beating and shooting and ha and rape and murder of thousands of people, the vast majority of them black. Like the Klan itself, the violence really begins in earnest in Tennessee in 1868 in the build up to the county elections. And one of the best documented examples is a place called Maury county, which was south of Nashville. And the Klan had several hundred members there. And they would carry out these attacks at night there'd be about a dozen hooded men and they would target isolated rural homes with black residents. They would target them. Sometimes they'd been accused of crimes, often because they were regarded as outspoken or insolent in the kind of language of the white south, because they were politically active, because they were planning to vote Republican, or sometimes there was no reason at all. The Klansmen just wanted to attack a black family. They'd arrive outside your house, they would either call you out or they would drag you outside. The victims are usually men or older boys, but not always. So there are attacks on children or on pregnant women. Often you'll be beaten with sticks hundreds of times on your bare back. But sometimes the attacks would go much further. So there's a story about one 20 year old black man who was dragged from his home in Columbia, Tennessee by a Klansman who garrotted him and then they tied a stone around his neck and they threw him into the river. There was another man called Henry Fitzpatrick. He'd been accused on the basis of no evidence of setting fire to some barns. He was lashed 200 times one night and then the next night the Klansmen came back and they hanged him. Then a third example, black veteran of the Union army. So I mean, he ticks every clan target box, he's black and he'd fought for the north in the Civil War. He's Clinton Drake, and he is dragged from his house and hanged. And the Klansmen then proclaimed a warning. They said, all Union veterans, you know, heed his example or you will face the same fate. And as time goes on, the Klan becomes more and more public about all this. So in July 1868, there's a parade on the 4th of July, actually, in the town of Columbia. And Klansmen ended up fighting a pitched battle, about 150 clansmen with 30 armed freedmen who had hidden their guns from the clan's regular sweeps. So that goes back to your question, Tom, about are the freedmen arming themselves? Yes, some of the freedmen do have guns. The clan will search for them. These freedmen have hidden them, and they end up having basically a pitched battle. And the result of this is that it radicalizes the white population of the county. They all basically pile in on behalf of the Klan. And the black men flee. They flee into the countryside. And for the next few weeks, the Klan are basically scouring the countryside for these guys. When they find them, they lynch them. Some of them managed to escape to Nashville, but most of them didn't.
- [61:12]
Tom Holland
And Dominic, are the other Klan targeting black people who are literate?
- [61:17]
Dominic Sandbrook
Yes, absolutely, they are. We'll talk about this in the next episode. Actually, about how the Klan target black people who can read and write, black people who want to be teachers, people who are ministers, people are active in the community. Basically, anybody who challenges the idea that black people are inherently subordinate and inferior, basically, even if you do too well, if you're too good at farming, if you own your own livestock, they will come after you because you are challenging the principles on which they're kind of their sense of the world, I guess, is based.
- [61:53]
Tom Holland
So it's like the Spartans and the Messenians or the Nazis with the Poles. If you're literate or if you are high ranking, you're toast.
- [61:59]
Dominic Sandbrook
So the million dollar question is why the authorities don't stop it. And the obvious answer is that it's just very, very difficult. You can't rely on local law enforcement because so many sheriffs and whatnot are sympathetic to the Klan. And we know that basically in every case where black people try to go to the courts to get justice, they cannot get a sheriff to arrest, they can't get a grand jury to indict, they can't get attorneys to prosecute, and they can't get juries to convict. So all of this puts a lot of pressure on the governor. Of Tennessee, Parson Brownlow. He's in a real bind because his Republican legislature in Nashville is very anxious about alienating white opinion by sending in the state militia. Because if they send in the state militia, that means basically arming a lot of African American volunteers, which is the one thing that is guaranteed.
- [62:50]
Tom Holland
Well, I mean, but you might say, so what?
- [62:52]
Dominic Sandbrook
I mean, I think you could reasonably say, so what? I mean, I think a lot of radical Republicans would say, come on, what are you going to lose? The Klan and the white. And the white supremacists are in arms already.
- [63:02]
Tom Holland
I mean, they're not going to vote Republican, so it doesn't really matter, right?
- [63:05]
Dominic Sandbrook
Exactly. At first, his instinct is to send for federal troops, so he sends her federal troops. There's an infantry company of the U.S. army sent to Columbia, Tennessee. But they are totally useless because Washington is telling them, work with the local authorities. And the local authorities are, of course, on the side of the Klan. So by the summer of 1868, law and order in middle Tennessee is very close to breaking down. And the Free Men's Bureau reports to Washington, and I quote, the colored people are leaving their homes and are fleeing to the towns and large cities for protection. Unless something is done immediately, the cities will be flooded by poor, helpless creatures. The Ku Klux organization is so extensive and so well organized and arms that it's beyond the power of anyone to exert any moral influence over them. Powder and ball is the only thing that will put them down. And Brownow himself has finally run out of patience. He calls for a special session of the state legislature. And he says, look, you know, we've given them every chance, and they have not. Not one of them has been punished. They've carried out thousands of crimes with. With impunity. So they pass a bill that makes it illegal to join a secret organization for the purpose of disturbing the peace. And they authorize Brownlow to send in the state militia to any county where 10 people you need. You need 10 people to say the law is not being enforced. And then you can send in the state militia.
- [64:30]
Tom Holland
And those people can be black.
- [64:32]
Dominic Sandbrook
Yes, exactly. So this is now the great nightmare for the white people of middle Tennessee, the what Alan Trellise calls the ultimate horror, that their towns are going to be patrolled by black men with guns who are going to get revenge for all the years of slavery. And actually, the funny thing is, they blink. It's. It's the white supremacist ex confederates who crack because Nathan Bedford Forrest and George Gordon lead all their Mates to go to Technical, went to Nashville and to see the governor, and they say, fine, we'll call off the dogs, as it were. There'll be no more violence. And they make a public promise that they will help the authorities maintain the peace and order of the state. And actually, Gordon, General Gordon gives a rally in Pulaski, the homeland of the clan, and he says, in future, we should obey the laws and uphold a spirit of peace and harmony. And actually, at first it seems to work. So it seems that the tension dissipates and actually Brownlow's hard line has paid off. However, in the other states of the Confederacy, all this time, clan support has been building. So the Klan is now heading towards having dens in perhaps a quarter of all counties in the former Confederate south and probably about 100, 150,000 members. And don't forget, we're in the summer of 1868 at this point. And now the stakes are becoming very high. A reminder the future of the Republic for the last year or so has been in the hands of the Radical Republicans in Congress. And the whole Confederacy, with the exception of Tennessee, has been under military occupation. But on the 3rd of November, 1868, the American people will have a chance to turn back the clock because this will be the first presidential election since the Civil War. So the Republicans as their candidate have chosen General Ulysses S. Grant. So he is the ultimate Northern war hero, and he is going to stand on an explicit platform of equal and civil political rights for all. But the Democrats have chosen as their candidate Governor Horatio Seymour of New York. And he is an outspoken critic of radical Reconstruction. And his campaign slogan is, and I quote, this is a white man's country. Let white men rule.
- [67:04]
Tom Holland
Chilling stuff, Dominic. And what is to come is going to be even more chilling. Members of the Rest Is History Club can hear that right away, of course, the battle for the future of the south and the fate of the first incarnation of the Ku Klux Klan. And what you can also hear if you are a member of the rest of History Club, are the next two episodes after those two, so episodes three and four, which take the story into the 20th century. So to join them, if you're not a member, you know what you've got to do. Restishory.com and sign up there. Thank you, Dominic. Thank you everyone, for listening. Bye bye.
- [67:40]
Dominic Sandbrook
Bye bye, Tom. I have to say, when I look at the stream, sheer sweep and scope of everything we've done on the Rest is History, it starts to look a little bit like the library of Alexandria, doesn't it?
- [67:52]
Tom Holland
Yeah. And of course the problem with the library of Alexandria was that it's gone. So whether it was destroyed by the Romans or the Christians or the Muslims or by entropy, who can say? But that is a fate that we do not want to see visited on the Rest Is History Library. And so we have built an enormous and exceedingly impressive digital monument to house all our episodes in.
- [68:16]
Dominic Sandbrook
We have. And it is of course the official the Rest Is History website. And I don't know about you Tom, but when I look at that website, I don't think anything in my life has ever given me greater pleasure.
- [68:28]
Tom Holland
Well, you'll know, Dominic, I have been so excited about this and particularly about the curated collections. So this features series and episodes organized by theme. So there's ancient history or conquistadors and explorers and so on. And my favorite one is the history of Britain, which goes all the way from Stonehenge up to the fall of Liz Truss in chronological order.
- [68:53]
Dominic Sandbrook
But Tom, I know you love the curated collections, but for me, the real highlight, the jewel in the crown no less, is the Rest Is History Archive. So it is the complete official catalog of every single episode that we have ever done.
- [69:07]
Tom Holland
And it is so unbelievably high tech. It's been built by one of our beloved Athelstan's, Matt Povey, with the help of a SO AI not just since Sinister. It's. It does good as well. And this high tech allows you to search by era, or by person, or by event, or by guest. So if you wanted to find out, for instance, every time that we've mentioned, I don't know, Henry VIII or Cromwell or whatever, then the search function will take you straight there.
- [69:38]
Dominic Sandbrook
Yeah, it's a brilliant thing, but it's not the only thing that we have on the website. There is a special book section if you're a book lover. There's all the details about our live events, including the very exciting Rest Is History festival at Hampton Court. And of course there is a place where you can buy yourself our exclusive Rest Is History merch.
- [69:59]
Tom Holland
And if you are a member of the Rest Is History Club, then you can log into our exclusive members area where you can find all of your account details, your members exclusive merch and and most excitingly, the videos of our members only miniseries.
- [70:16]
Dominic Sandbrook
Now I guess there are people here who are watching this who are not yet members.
- [70:21]
Tom Holland
Madness.
- [70:21]
Dominic Sandbrook
It is madness. So the good news for you is the website also has its very own membership sign up page, so you can go to the website you can explore all the tremendous highlights and then you can go to the sign up page and sign up, become a member and then go to the members exclusive area and then buy yourself some merch to celebrate. Brilliant.
- [70:41]
Tom Holland
The whole way through our career as advertisers on this podcast, we have been saying there's never been a better time to sign up. But on this occasion it is literally true. There never has been a better time. So head to thereestishistory.com check out our new website and then do what you've got to do. Sign up. It's great. And I genuinely, truly, authentically mean that.