The Right to Vote

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One of the critical developments in the South during Reconstruction came with the effort to retain social and political control over the former slaves, not freed men and women. The Ku Klux Klan is perhaps the best-known means southerners employed to assert themselves, but opponents of Reconstruction found other ways to intimidate African Americans as well.

Following the Civil War, many southerners took drastic steps in an effort to intimidate and control the former slaves. The most notorious of these efforts took the form of the night riders of the Ku Klux Klan. The Klan began in Middle Tennessee in 1866, primarily as a fraternal society. In�uential southerners, such as former general Nathan Bedford Forrest, who served as Imperial Grand Wizard, turned the organization into a means of asserting power in the Reconstruction South. Dressed in white hoods and robes in an effort to make blacks believe that Klan members were the ghosts of Confederate soldiers, the Klansmen used fear and violence to frighten their victims into subservience. In particular, they strove to keep the freedmen politically impotent and thereby destroy the Republican Party in the South.

The Klan met with mixed results. They may have made African Americans afraid of being killed, whipped, or burned out, but they did not panic them into running from the spirits of the dead. Blacks knew the Klansmen were their neighbors, not ghosts, and they could often identify individuals by their voices, their horses, and even their shoes. The Klan made a viable Republican Party almost impossible in the South, but the violence also led to national anti-Klan laws that gave the federal government the power to declare martial law and to prosecute the vigilantes. Many states in turn responded by passing mask laws that prohibited the wearing of disguises. In light of this reaction, and with Forrest ordering an end to the violence, the Klan faded away early in the 1870s and later resurfaced in the early twentieth century.

Southern nationalists had another reason for giving up their robes. They found that they represented a broad constituency and that they could achieve their purposes in a slightly less dramatic fashion. This realization led to the emergence of Democratic Military Clubs, or Ri�e Clubs, that became known as Red Shirts. Heavily armed, and wearing the bright badge of their of�ce, they took it upon themselves to control the votes of the freedmen. If violence proved necessary, Ri�e Clubs chose to take the steps in strictest secrecy, thereby avoiding legal problems. In their highly visible shirts, however, and unmasked, they monitored elections. Since each party printed its own tickets, the defenders of white supremacy had no dif�culty telling how people voted. Blacks knew they were being watched, and they knew that a miscast ballot meant danger. Eventually the southern states instituted political racism with grandfather and understanding clauses, literacy tests, and poll taxes. In the meantime, like the Confederate Army and the Klan before them, Red Shirts stood ready to defend the South.