655. The Ku Klux Klan: Terror in the South (Part 2)

17:15Dominic Sandbrook:And they're very excited at the thought of this, making money from railroads and stuff. And they're bored. They're really bored of the arguments about the South, which have been going on for so long. But also they think they really believe in their federal system. You and I might not believe in it, Tom, because we're not Americans, but they do believe in it and they think ultimately the state should decide even if 200 innocent people are being killed well they're shocked by this which is why they end up passing legislation um but ultimately there is not that much there's not that much support for federal intervention lots of people are really unhappy about it including here's the thing that will amaze some people including some people who have been really fervent abolitionists and allies of abraham lincoln they basically end up saying look we've done our best for the freed men of the south we've given them emancipation we've ended slavery and now they just have to make the best of things right and you know it is tough for them but they just have to make the best of it because it's more important to preserve our political system than it is basically to to maintain their rights i mean there are lots of people who think that and there'll be some listeners who are who are really ahead of me i guess what lies partly behind this is the fact that a lot of people in the north even if they were anti-slavery are still quite racist that deep down they'd actually don't want to wreck their system they would say wreck their system or change their system for the benefit of millions of black people in the south i think that's part of this as well okay yeah understood it's a hugely complicated story i mean i remember i did this at university and i can remember uh in our tutorial saying to our tutor why don't they just send in the army you know that's what a normal country does and you know him saying well you have to take seriously the constitution the principle of states of the rights of the states you know the principle of limited government all of those kinds of things if you don't take those things seriously then you don't understand why americans behaved as they did in the 1860s and 1870s so anyway to get back to this the uh the results grant won the election he won 26 states to Seymour's eight, and he took the Electoral College easily and he became the next president.

19:27Dominic Sandbrook:However, there are three important takeaways from all this. Number one, everybody was shocked how close the popular vote was. So Grant won 3 million votes, but Seymour won 2.7 million. And so it wouldn't take that much for the Democrats to win in future, that much of a change. Secondly, historians think that Seymour probably won a majority of white votes among those white people who voted. In other words, if the Democrats can stop black people voting or drive down the black vote, they will probably win. And thirdly, what this proves, some of these figures. So in Louisiana, I mentioned, in six parishes in Louisiana, Ulysses S.

20:11Dominic Sandbrook:Grant got one vote. and in seven parishes he got zero votes and he ended up losing Louisiana. What that proves is that paramilitary violence works. There are not enough federal troops in the south to stop it and the number of federal troops is bound to shrink as northerners get bored and want to withdraw the troops and bring them home. So what happens after the election? Grant was inaugurated on the 4th of March, 1869. And he gives his inaugural address and there's lots of black supporters there actually in Washington to hear it. And Grant, you know, it's quite a, I mean, we said he's not corrupt and boring.

20:51Dominic Sandbrook:It is actually quite a boring speech. He says he rejects prejudice and hate. He wants to see the 15th Amendment ratified. So the 15th Amendment would forbid any state denying you the right to vote based on your color or your race or previous condition of servitude. In other words, basically give ex-male slaves the right to vote. But since the election, the Klan's violence has not died down. In many ways, it's actually got worse. So in Tennessee, for example, the night raids have got worse since the election. Here's one example. Parson Brownlow, the governor, had hired a detective to infiltrate the Klan in Kupulaski.

21:32Dominic Sandbrook:This detective called Mr. Barmore. And he'd actually done a very good job, very successfully. and he was heading home to Nashville. Clearly, he'd been rumbled when a gang of masked men dragged him off and they took him into the woods and shot him. This was a big story at the time. And some white business leaders started to get anxious about this and say things getting out of hand. And what was particularly worrying them was that the Republicans in Nashville were now saying to Brownlow, are you finally going to send in this armed state militia or not, which he's been talking about for months? And on the 20th of January, Brownlow finally agreed to do it.

22:06Dominic Sandbrook:So this is nine days after his detective has been killed. He says, he announces publicly, he says, there's a reign of terror in Middle and West Tennessee. I want to call up recruits to the militia. I will declare martial law. Let's occupy their towns, all of this kind of thing. And at this point, the Tennessee clan clearly panics. So the imperial wizard, Nathan Bedford Forrest, issued an order. He said, I want everyone to go in and basically decommission their masks and disguises. So go to see your grand cyclops with your mask and disguise. You must destroy them in front of him. He says, no more whippings, no more lynchings, no more beatings, none of this, no provocations.

22:47Dominic Sandbrook:And incredibly, in the next few weeks, the Tennessee clan, the original one, actually disbands. So we don't know exactly when, but sometime in late spring or summer of 1869, the white Tennessee clan leadership basically renounces the clan. And that's the end of it. So it's a massive result for Parson Brownlow. Well, it looks like it, but actually there's a twist. Oh, no. The reason they've done it is partly because they don't actually need it anymore. Because Parson Brownlow has just gone off to Washington to become a United States senator from Tennessee. And his replacement is a man inevitably called DeWitt Clinton Center.

23:28Dominic Sandbrook:A Clinton. And DeWitt Clinton Center is much less radical than Parson Brownlow. He says, I'll give Confederates the vote again. I'll disband the militia. And DeWitt, Clinton-centered, does something that is very ominous. He says, obviously, I respect the right to vote for everybody, including African-Americans, as long as you can afford to pay a poll tax.

23:51Tom Holland:So essentially, in best Clinton manner, he's triangulating.

23:54Dominic Sandbrook:He is triangulating, but he's triangulating in a way that is very disadvantageous to black voting. And basically, this is the story of the South in the next few years. this is what they're going to do. This is how the South is going to be, in inverted commas, redeemed for the Democratic Party and the cause of white supremacy. They will bring in all kinds of wheezes to stop black people voting, like poll taxes or literacy tests and so on. And so that September, a local newspaper in Tennessee prints what it claims is a last message from the Klan, which is attributed to the grand tycoon. I don't think we had a grand tycoon in the previous episode.

24:27Dominic Sandbrook:No, I don't think we did.

24:28Tom Holland:This is Gilded Age development, is it?

24:30Dominic Sandbrook:Yeah, exactly. Exactly. Robert Barron, A man in a massive top hat. And the grand tycoon says, our mission on Earth to some extent is ended. For the present, and we hope forever, we are done. So that's them done in Tennessee. But outside Tennessee, the clan rides on. Because outside Tennessee, nobody cares what the Imperial Wizard General Forrest wants. They're fighting their own battles. And the reason they're doing that and why these battles are more vicious than ever is that in some southern states, it's really only in 1869 or 1870 that the occupying US army hands over power to elected radical Republican legislatures.

25:11Dominic Sandbrook:So it's actually only at this point that in some of these states like South Carolina or Louisiana or Mississippi, you see what enfranchising the former slaves really means. So if you take the example of those three states, South Carolina, Louisiana, Mississippi, they had had very large slave populations before the war. And that means that basically when black people are given the vote, you are going to get hundreds of elected black officials, many of whom had been slaves right up to 1863, the Emancipation Proclamation. They had lived in plantation counties. They had literally belonged to the richest, most powerful, foremost conservative white men in the land and now they're making the laws so south carolina sends eight black men to congress its state legislature in south carolina had a black majority louisiana has a black governor the first in american history a man with the excellent name of pbs pinchback and mississippi has the first black united states senator a man called hiram Rhodes Revels.

26:18Dominic Sandbrook:And these people, if you've ever, well, we'll be talking about the film, The Birth of a Nation next week. If you watch that film, or if you read a book of about American history published up to about 1940, these people are portrayed as incompetent, stupid, corrupt, childish, totally ill-suited for political life. And actually, historians now would say these descriptions are unbelievably racist and actually these guys were doing the best possible job they could in horrific circumstances and were completely introduced by generations of historians and what those historians were reflecting is the fact that for white southerners to have pbs pinchback governing your state or hiram roads revels representing your state in the u.s senate it's an unbelievable affront if you've been raised before the war in the world view of white supremacy and you don't even think that a black man is a human being and you basically i mean to give you an example this jumped out at me this detail from one of the books i think it was alan's release the white southerners have been raised in a world where if you walk down the street and a black man bowed to you and said good morning to you you would whip him Even though he'd shown you this courtesy, you would whip him because he had dared to speak to you before you spoke to him.

27:46Dominic Sandbrook:I mean, unbelievable. And now they've got a black governor. And now they've got a black governor. This is why. I mean, that worldview was so entrenched. I mean, that is the thing that is perhaps hardest for people in the 21st century, you know, outside that part of the world, to get their heads around. just how deeply entrenched and how deeply embedded that worldview is. And that's what lies behind this surge of violence across places like Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia, the Carolinas in the next couple of years. And when we're talking about a death toll, definitely in the hundreds, maybe 500, 600, 700 people are possible to say.

28:30Dominic Sandbrook:The sort of death toll that might be comparable to the troubles in Northern Ireland in the first part of the 1970s. That's a reference for our British listeners. And in the troubles in Northern Ireland, people would often say of this violence, well, it's just mindless thuggery, which, you know, it's easy to say about the Ku Klux Klan, but it's absolutely not mindless thuggery at all. It's very, very calculated. The brilliant historian of Reconstruction, one of the greatest American historians, Eric Foner, writes about this in his big book on Reconstruction. He says, quote,

29:22Tom Holland:So Dominic, to pursue the Northern Ireland comparison, the Ku Klux Klan are to the Democrats what the IRA are to Sinn Féin.

29:31Dominic Sandbrook:Yeah, I think that's not an unreasonable comparison. I think you could say they are the kind of armed wing of a political movement. Yeah. Because they've been supported by Democratic newspapers. They are very closely linked to Democratic politicians. You know, their aim is to destroy the Republican Party. So, yeah, absolutely. I mean, it's quite one Florida politician. um the guy called emmanuel fortune who was driven out of jackson county florida by the clan he said the object of it is to kill the leading men of the republican party men who've taken a prominent stand so there are many terrible stories kind of torture murder and whatnot here's just one example and obviously it is a pretty grim story so prepare yourselves there's a guy called abram Colby and he was the son of an Irish plantation owner and his slave so he was born into slavery the son of the owner and then his father later freed him he became a church minister he was a brilliant speaker in 1866 in the aftermath of the war he organized a branch of the Equal Rights Association.

30:39Dominic Sandbrook:He lived in Greene County, Georgia, and in 1868 he was elected to the Georgia House of Representatives from Greene County. A year later in 1869, in October, he was dragged from his bed by a mob of 60 Klansmen, and they took him out into the woods along with his mother, his wife, and his daughter who were in the cabin with him, and they stripped him naked in front of his family, and then they whipped him for three hours. And we know this because he testified to a congressional committee about it three years later. And he said of the men who had attacked him, they weren't disguised. They didn't need to disguise themselves because they knew they could do this with impunity.

31:21Dominic Sandbrook:He said of them, some of them are first class men in our town. One is a lawyer, one a doctor, and some are farmers. they had their pistols they took me in my night clothes and carried me from home they hit me 5 000 blows they said i had voted for grant and had carried the negroes against them and while they're doing this they're holding a gun to his little daughter's head and i quote they actually frightened her to death she never got over it until she died i.e she died of shock that was the part that grieves me the most then the committee said to him how long before you recovered from the effects of this treatment answer i have never got over it yet they broke something inside of me i cannot do any work now although i always made my living before you know a really sad story there's no happy ending to this there are larger scale attacks so there are attacks on republican rallies for example a place called utah alabama in 1874 people were killed in um same month in lawrence County, South Carolina.

32:22Dominic Sandbrook:The Klan drove 150 people out of their homes. They murdered 13 people, including a white judge and a black legislator. And then an incredible story, six months later, Meridian, Mississippi. Three black leaders were arrested by the white authorities who were based in league with the Klan for making what they said were incendiary speeches. And at their court hearing the court hearing was invaded by clansmen the clansman killed the judge at the court hearing a republican and two of the defendants and then ran amok in the town and killed about 30 people including and i quote all of the leading colored men of the town so you know you were asking before how is it they're able to do this and get away with it i mean basically because if they stand against them they will kill you and there are not enough federal troops to make a difference and there's not enough will in washington or in the north to intervene on such a scale you would have to be a massive scale right you'd have to flood every southern county with troops in order to

33:25Tom Holland:stop this and i suppose that every every act of violence is a testing of the boundaries um a kind of stress testing of how able the federal government is to respond to outrages like this Yeah. And so presumably, the more they realize they can get away with, the more the violence escalates.

33:43Dominic Sandbrook:Right. Well, you just keep doing it because it works. I mean, it works. So here's the other thing that you were asking about before. So Eric Foner used the phrase, and that bit I quoted from Eric Foner, he said it was political in the broadest sense. And you asked about people who can read and write and so on. the clan is determined to crush churches and schools they kill white teachers black teachers they will beat people who rent rooms to teachers there's an example of an irish teacher called william lynch he was working in a black school in cross plains alabama he was dragged from his house and lynched they will target people who can as i said who can read and write who have their own land, who have their own livestock, people who don't doff their hats to white passers-by, people who don't give up the sidewalk, the pavement, people who speak disrespectfully.

34:37Dominic Sandbrook:They will even attack, quote, women who dress up and fix up like they thought anything of themselves. So in other words, black women who have a little bit about them. So basically, it's about keeping them in heritage. Yes, completely it is. So it's an awful picture, terrible picture. and yet we haven't actually got to the worst of it because there is one county where the clan wields unparalleled power where its word is law and you cannot challenge it quote alan trelease the brilliant historian of the first clan in this county in every subject the clan was supreme a juggernaut propelled forward by the size and character of its membership and the terror it inspired in every person in the county including its own members and this place was york county South Carolina.

35:20Dominic Sandbrook:And we will find out what happened there and how the Grant administration was finally roused to fight back against and destroy the Klan after the break.

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37:54Tom Holland:Hello everyone and welcome back to The Rest is History. We are now in the state of South Carolina and South Carolina of course had played a key role in the Civil War. It had been the first southern state to secede from the union back in december 1860 and it had been the state where the first shots of the civil war had been fired in april 1861 so dominic what is the context in south carolina what is the kind of the racial balance all of that kind of thing its population

38:28Dominic Sandbrook:is about 60 black and 40 white now given those racial demographics it will not surprise people to know that in 1868 it had voted Republican. It had voted for Ulysses S. Grant. And in 1870, it elected as governor a former United States, i.e. Northern Army officer called Robert Kingston Scott, and it voted him in by a margin of 60 to 40. So basically the voting completely follows the racial demographics. Now, the state legislature I mentioned in the first half has a black majority, again, reflecting the demographic makeup of the state. So in any fair election, it is pretty obvious that South Carolina will always go with the Republicans, unless they've been incredibly corrupt or something.

39:16The white Southerners in South Carolina are never going to get their way.

39:22Dominic Sandbrook:And they were furious and horrified at the result of the 1870 gubernatorial election. So Alan Trelis in his History of the Klan quotes the Charleston Daily News. Now, unbelievably, this was a moderate democratic newspaper. So this is what a moderate democratic newspaper sounds like. We regard the solid black vote cast against the nominees of our party as a declaration of war by the Negro race against the white race, by ignorance against intelligence, by poverty against wealth. and the Charleston Daily News went on to say, it is now the duty of white men to organise an arm in the name of decency, purity and political freedom.

40:05Dominic Sandbrook:To repeat, this is a moderate newspaper, not an extreme one. And so this sets the tone for two years of horrendous violence in upstate South Carolina in what's called the Piedmont region. This is a region where black and white are pretty evenly divided. So that's kind of all to play for. and the very worst county is york county and in york county almost every single white man joined the ku klux klan so this is right at the top of if you look at a map it's at the top of south carolina it's just south of the city of charlotte in north carolina today it was a rural county about 25 000 people um cotton cereals that kind of thing the clan had been founded there in 1868.

40:50Dominic Sandbrook:It had been actually reasonably quiet until the 1870 election for governor, which the Republicans had narrowly won in the county by about 500 votes. And that was the spark that basically set off, you know, this kind of racist bonfire. I'm not sure where this metaphor is going. But anyway, in the next few weeks after that election, the Klan spread exponentially. The local leader was the sheriff, Major James W. Avery. He was a Confederate war veteran. He was actually wounded at Appomattox on the last day of the war, the last morning of the war. And he was a planter, a bigwig in the local area. He owned the big store in Yorkville, which was the kind of county seat.

41:32Dominic Sandbrook:And he's one of many bigwigs involved with the clan. So another one is one of the county's richest landowners, a man called William C. Black. And it was William C. Black who ordered the first notable murder, and this was the murder of a man called Tom Roundtree. Tom Roundtree was a spokesman for the African-American, the freedmen of the county, and he was a married man with children. And in December 1870, a mob of Klansmen came to his house. They dragged him out. They shot him and they cut his throat. His widow was able to identify some of the killers. But this landowner, William C. Black, paid for the defense of the killers.

42:13Dominic Sandbrook:He organized it. He sorted out alibis for them. And in the end, Mrs. Roundtree and her children were driven from their home and had to flee the county. And that set the tone for weeks of violence. 11 people murdered, hundreds of people beaten and whipped, including women and children. Five black schools were burned down. One of them was burned down four times. yeah people they kept rebuilding it and they just burn it down again and to give again to give people a bit of context this is in a county all of these killings and burnings and whatnot is in a county with a population roughly the size of the town of stratford-upon-avon today so imagine you know the furore right if that this was if so many people were to be killed in stratford-upon-avon but obviously this is in the context of the 1870s when violence is much more common well

43:04Tom Holland:Well, we talked about stress testing how far you can go, kind of testing the boundaries of permissible behaviour. And this must surely be pushing at those boundaries to the extreme. I mean, can the federal government ignore violence on this scale?

43:19Dominic Sandbrook:Well, what they do is the federal government did send in some troops. They sent in a detachment of troops in late February. But the federal troops generally, when they're sent in, they don't do anything. They don't really have orders what to do. Who are they going to fight? They're always told, cooperate, please, with the local authorities. So they're like UN peacekeepers. They're totally like UN peacekeepers. They're like UN peacekeepers at Srebrenica or something, standing idly by, looking a little bit bewildered, because the people they're meant to be working with are actually the people who are carrying out the crimes.

43:47Dominic Sandbrook:Yeah. So the Klansmen, actually, after the federal troops came in, they carried on killing people. And then on the 6th of March, they carried out one of the most notorious of all Klan murders. This was the murder of a man called Jim Williams. Jim Williams was about 40 years old. he'd been a slave in york county before the war but he'd escaped he'd run away he'd joined the northern army and then he came back to his you know old county after the war he spoke out against the clan and he organized a militia this goes back to your point about why don't black people arm themselves well he did and this is what happened he used the local union league the sort of political organization for the freedmen um to arm themselves you know let's protect ourselves all of this kind of thing we're not going to take this lying down and the clan invited him to a kind of parley at a crossroads on the 11th of february and they met on the 11th of february and he said look we will stand down and we'll actually give up our weapons if you promise to stop raiding and the clan said sure we'll stop raiding the next day the truce broke down when the clan killed another eight people and williams said well there's no way we're going to give up our weapons now.

44:57Dominic Sandbrook:The Klan spread rumours around the county. They said Williams is keeping his weapons because he's planning to lead an uprising of black people to murder and rape, you know, all the white people in the county. And on the night of the 6th of March, a local doctor called J. Rufus Bratton, who was the nephew, I think not coincidentally, of the man who had once owned Williams, the slave owner who'd once treated him as property. This doctor, Dr. Bratton, assembled a gang of 60 men wearing masks. They broke into Williams' cabin and they found him hiding under the floorboards. They dragged him out and they hanged him from a tree.

45:34Dominic Sandbrook:Terrible story, this. And they left him hanging there for days with a placard that read, Captain Jim Williams on his big muster. Doctors are not coming well out of this story. No, doctors, lawyers, they're terrible people. They come out really badly from this story. Now, actually, at this point, some respectable white citizens in York County started to worry they'd gone too far. and actually the only newspaper which was the Yorkville Enquirer condemned violence on both

46:00Tom Holland:sides that's always the way isn't it right good people on both sides yeah correct and said maybe

46:06Dominic Sandbrook:it would be good for the older men to quote advise the young men not to engage in whipping and murdering the colored people but the clan leadership was total uncompromising they issued a statement in response the intelligent honest white people of this county shall rule it we can no longer put up with negro rule black bayonets and a miserably degraded and thievish set of lawmakers the scum of the earth the scrapings of creation we are pledged to stop it we're determined to end it even if we are forced by force to use force now i mentioned the state governor robert kingston scott as was quite common he was a former u.s army officer he came not from south carolina but from Ohio.

46:48Dominic Sandbrook:So here's your classic example of what the Southerners later called carpetbaggers. You know, they had this idea that loads of unscrupulous Northerners were coming down to the South with their possessions in a carpetbag to rule despotically over the ordinary people of the South. Robert Kingston Scott doesn't really know what to do. Some of his Republican allies say to him, well, why don't you arm a black militia, send them into your county? And his argument was well if i do that that will basically mean what you know to use the terminology of the time a race war and in a race war the white people are better armed they're richer they're more powerful they will always win even though there are fewer of them they you know experience shows that they will always go further behave more badly you know they that this this will invite disaster for the black people of your county.

47:43Dominic Sandbrook:So what Scott does is he writes to Washington, begs them for more troops, and that does the trick. And in March 1871, Ulysses S. Grant decides to send three more federal companies. And Tom, I am delighted to report that they are companies of our old friends in the 7th Cavalry. The 7th Cavalry. Great to have them back on the show. Well, finally, people have been saying, when are you going to do Custer Season 2? Yeah.

48:08Tom Holland:This is it. It's the prequel. It's Custer's prequel. to the phantom menace of the custer series so actually the seventh cavalry who were sent to

48:17Dominic Sandbrook:um york county are commanded by a much less famous person but a more impressive person can you get more impressive than george armstrong custer you can he's called major lewis merrill

48:29Tom Holland:so i looked him up i mean his beard it has to be said is not impressive no custer has stronger

48:37Dominic Sandbrook:hair action. I'm going to make a comparison in a moment that will please you. Major Merrill came from Pennsylvania. He was a Dragoons officer. He had served under Custer on the frontier before being sent to York County. Custer absolutely hated him. Why? Well, maybe he was too good as we'll discover. Yeah, fair enough. A couple of other 7th Cavalry characters. So one of them is Major Reno. Remember Major Reno? Yeah, the one who squeals like a hog. He of all people said of Major Merrill that Major Merrill was a notorious coward and a shirk. God, that's a bit rich. Right. And you'll remember, of course, Captain Bentine.

49:18Dominic Sandbrook:Of course. Who could forget Captain Bentine? The one who was very like you. Behind his chubby cheek cordiality was a dark and sinister intelligence or whatever. Captain Benteen said of Reno and Meryl, as poor a soldier as Reno was, he was a long way ahead of Meryl. Benteen also said of Meryl that Meryl was a chump. Wow. So anyway, he comes with poor reviews from three ludicrous men. So actually, that should alert people that actually he's probably a good guy. He is. He's the hero of this story. So the New York Tribune said of him, he has the head, face and spectacles of a German professor and the frame of an athlete.

49:57Tom Holland:Does that remind you of anybody, Tom? Well, modesty prevents me from saying he sounds exactly like me. Major Lewis Merrill is literally the Tom Holland of Pennsylvania.

50:12Dominic Sandbrook:And he's the hero of this story. He is the hero of this story. He genuinely is the hero of this story. So Major Lewis Merrill arrives in York County. He is sceptical about all this stuff about the clan. he just doesn't he thinks the stories are exaggerated you know he's had no experience of it and he thinks that's probably a load of rubbish and he arrives and he starts talking to the victims and he is horrified by what he finds he says i never conceived of such a state of social disorganization being possible in any civilized community as exists in this county now and he starts to gather evidence and then he realizes what he's up against i mean it is like the plot of a film or something he realizes every local official in the county is a clansman there is a grand jury but the judges are clansmen most of the jurors themselves are clansmen and two of them have actually been involved in clan murders so merilus arrived he's been there a few weeks and then on the night of the 5th of may there was the most shocking i think in many ways the most shocking of all clan attacks and the victim of this attack was a baptist preacher a black man called Elias Hill.

51:18Dominic Sandbrook:And Elias Hill was about 50. He had been born into slavery in York County. But from the age of seven, he had been severely disabled. It's not clear whether it's polio or muscular dystrophy or something along those lines. So he can't walk. He can't crawl. He needs help to clothe and to feed himself. He is a very impressive person. He had learned to read and write. He'd been taught by local white children that he kind of played with. After the Civil War, he became an ordained preacher. He was the president of the local Union League, and he opened a school for black children. And all of this, of course, brought him to the attention of the Klan.

51:56Dominic Sandbrook:And the fact that he was so severely disabled did not protect him. Because at midnight on the 5th of May, a group of Klansmen burst into his cabin. They dragged him out into the yard. They beat him. They lashed him with a horse whip. They said that he was stirring up a race war. They accused him absurdly of plotting a campaign of rape against white women. And they beat him all night. They didn't kill him. But the story became a gigantic scandal. Because, of course, the fact that he was so badly disabled and that he couldn't escape, fight back or anything like that, and that he was such an impressive guy.

52:34Dominic Sandbrook:And he's a man of the cloth. And a man of the cloth and all of this kind of thing explains why it becomes such a big scandal. And a few months later, actually, Hill left for Liberia. And he went with about 100 other African-Americans, many of them from York County.

52:49Tom Holland:So that's in Africa.

52:50Dominic Sandbrook:Yeah, so Liberia and West Africa. And he told a congressional committee before he went, he said, we're going because, quote, we do not believe it is possible for our people to live in this country peaceably. And his story ended very sadly, because like a lot of people who emigrated to Liberia at the time, He got malaria pretty much straight away, and he died after six months. And that was the end of him. And for Major Merrill, the Tom Holland of this story, the attack on Hill is pretty much the last straw. He summoned a group of the bigwigs of York County, and he said, I know some of you are Klansmen.

53:26Dominic Sandbrook:If you do not stop this now, Washington will take really drastic measures. But of course, the question is, will Washington ever take the measures that are necessary? So Ulysses S. Grant has been president since March 1869. He's been walking this very fine line because on the one hand, he's the hero of the north. He's the champion of radical reconstruction. He has delivered the 15th Amendment, which supposedly gives black men the right to vote. On the other hand, Grant's campaign slogan was, let us have peace. And that implies that this whole business is going to go away. His cabinet is full of relative moderates.

54:10Dominic Sandbrook:Personally, he's pragmatic and he's quite cautious and conservative and so on. And there are actually a lot of people in his party, allies of his, who are saying, OK, we really have had enough now. The 15th Amendment gives African-Americans the right to vote. And that should be it. So a good example is a guy who was another Civil War hero called James Garfield, goes on to become president, who's a moderate Republican congressman. Garfield said, and I quote, the 15th Amendment confers upon the African race the care of its own destiny. It places their fortunes in their own hands. So if they're being lynched, it's their own fault, basically.

54:52Dominic Sandbrook:I guess the thing is, these people are raised in a world of laissez-faire. You know, laissez-faire, small l liberalism is an enormous element of republican party ideology and actually one reason they didn't like slavery a lot of these people is they thought it offended laissez-faire it didn't you know slavery was paternalistic and feudal and it denied you your free labor and your um freedom of expression and your your ability to make something of yourself to stand on your own two feet but they really do believe that excessive government intervention would be as bad

55:33Tom Holland:but essentially what they're saying is that um that that black people in these counties where there is this great explosion of violence yeah what they should be doing is arming themselves and taking the fight to the the kransmen i mean effectively that is a recipe for this race war

55:49Dominic Sandbrook:that they keep talking about i don't disagree with you by the way to be fair to washington there is still just enough to use an expression that our American listeners enjoy there is still enough gasoline left in the tank for them to do something about this so in May 1870 February 1871 Congress passed two enforcement acts to prevent terror and intimidation in elections and they took the jurisdiction away from the state courts to the federal courts to try to basically exercise some kind of supervision. And then April 1871, they passed the Ku Klux Klan Act. And this made it a federal offence, not a state offence, to conspire to deny other people's political rights.

56:32Dominic Sandbrook:And it gave the president power to send in troops against the Klan, crucially to suspend habeas corpus and to make arrests without charge. In other words, they give the president that power. Now, the thing is, this goes back to the exchange we were just having. This was so massively controversial at the time. First of all, the Democrats hated it. The Democrats said this is destroying civil liberty. It's destroying self-government. This is Ulysses S. Grant arresting people without charge, sending in troops. He is making himself a dictator. But even many Republicans, including people who've been really close to Abraham Lincoln and who'd been passionate abolitionists said, this is going much too far.

57:19Dominic Sandbrook:This is undermining our system. This is undermining civil liberties. You know, this far and absolutely no further. However, for Major Merrill, this is the weapon he needs. So he reported to a congressional committee. Grant sent his attorney general to South Carolina. His attorney general, interestingly, was a lawyer called Amos T. Ackerman, who had seen the Klan at first hand because he'd organized the Republican Party in Georgia in the late 1860s. And Aikerman went to York County and he met Meryl and he came back to Washington. He said, this guy Meryl is absolutely brilliant. He loved Meryl. And what he said was, he said, the thing that impresses me about Meryl is that Meryl went to York County and he didn't believe in the Klan and he thought it was exaggerated.

58:07Dominic Sandbrook:And precisely because of that, we should take him more seriously. the safer because incredulous at the outset and therefore disposed to scrutinize reports the more

58:17Tom Holland:keenly is what he said of Meryl yeah and resolute collected bold and prudent very discriminating between truth and falsehood so just like me yeah I knew you were going to quote that you saw an

58:26Dominic Sandbrook:opportunity to quote that and talk to basically make it about yourself and you you took it and I

58:30Tom Holland:I respect it I was waiting for you to uh to read that out and you didn't so I was making up for it

58:35Dominic Sandbrook:I mean, I would have done the same. So October 1871, Grant proclaimed a state of lawlessness in nine South Carolina counties, and he flooded them with troops, and he suspended habeas corpus. So this is the thing that would have worked, right? But to get him to do it in just nine counties of South Carolina, so not even the whole state, is a huge undertaking. So the idea of him doing it across the whole of the South is just, I think, utterly implausible. Anyway, he did it. The troops started making mass arrests. In York County alone, they locked up 200 people. By the end of the year, about 500 more people had voluntarily surrendered and given evidence.

59:17Dominic Sandbrook:And the Klan leaders all fled. A lot of them fled to Canada. And it worked. By the end of 1871, the Klan in York County had basically ceased to exist and violence fell. And the elections of in 1872 were much more peaceful than previous years. In other words, finally Grant basically grasped the nettle. He sent in the troops. He made all these mass arrests without charge, and it ended up working.

59:43Tom Holland:And what happens to the Klan leaders once they've been locked up? Are they kept in prison for a long time, or are they let out? What happens?

59:50Dominic Sandbrook:It's not really a happy ending, because the answer is nothing. Most people who are arrested are never prosecuted. And even those prosecutions that happen don't really go anywhere. Most of the charges ended up being dropped, or a lot of the defendants are actually pardoned. And actually, northerners who went to report on this were often really shocked and sort of depressed by what they found. The New York Tribune sent a reporter, and he said, when he talked to white people in York County, and I quote, there seemed to be almost no public sense of right and wrong, no appreciation of the heinousness of crimes committed upon helpless and unoffending people.

1:00:28Dominic Sandbrook:and the attorney general to this guy amos t akerman you know who had pulled this off basically he had got his way he said afterwards i feel greatly saddened by this business it has revealed a perversion of moral sentiment among the southern whites which bodes ill for that part of the country for this generation and i think he was right and i think this is the big sort of as it were the takeaway from all this because the Klan was beaten the Klan basically by this point 18 late 1871 1872 has completely ceased to exist but it has already achieved most of what it wanted to do so in some states the Klan made a massive difference it made an electoral difference so the Democrats have already regained control for example of Georgia and Alabama in 1870 the Klan smashed the Republican Party in the south it destroyed local organizations it made it impossible to basically be an open republican one mississippi republican said you can't basically have your best and most reliable workers murdered with impunity yeah and hope to function as a as a democratic

1:01:36Tom Holland:organization and so the south will remain democrat for decades and decades to come exactly it destroys

1:01:43Dominic Sandbrook:the institutions of the black freedmen and freedwomen so their churches their schools and so on don't forget these institutions are so precious because they're so new and because you know they're independence is so fragile and of course the other big thing it does what the southerners had always planned to do it destroys the patience and the political will of people in the north so if you get to like i don't know 1872 you are 12 years on from the election of abraham lincoln and the outbreak of the war pretty much and if you're in the north you're sitting there in you know illinois or or maine or wherever it might be you've got a fat cigar you've got a top hat you're making loads of money in railroads yeah right and you're thinking to yourself 12 years now i've been listening to all this stuff and i'm apt it's the most boring subject in the world it's a little bit when people used to say we use the northern ireland parallel earlier people in britain never had strong views about northern ireland they actually as you will remember tom to the disbelief of people in Northern Ireland, people in Britain would often say they found it really boring and they wished it would go away.

1:02:50Dominic Sandbrook:And I think that's exactly how most people in the North think about the South. They just find the subject, they're sick of it. They don't understand it. They're bored of it. They want everyone to stop talking about it. And they actually think at this point, if the Southern Republicans and the black people in the South can't defend themselves, Sodom, you know, just fine. The South is the South. It's never going to change. I'm not going to spend loads of tax dollars on federal troops you know you can't have half your country under military occupation the whole time just let them get on with it and so because of all this I don't think there is an alternative reality in which these this could have worked out differently first of all I think there was never the will in the north to sustain a massive long-term military occupation they were never going to pay for it they're never going to rip up the federal system.

1:03:38Dominic Sandbrook:That's one thing. But then the other thing, two-thirds of the people in the Confederacy are white, and they were just not prepared to accept the equality of their former slaves. They would never have accepted it. These include the richest, most powerful, most influential people in that part of the world, and white supremacy was of such existential importance to them that they would do anything to preserve it i mean they fought a civil war to preserve it the fact that they lost they haven't changed their minds they still think there is an you know an indissoluble wall between the races and they will do anything to restore it and and they do because

1:04:25Tom Holland:i suppose essentially what it would require would be an equivalent of uh denazification in germany after the second world war yeah and i suppose the federal government just lacks the resources and perhaps even the will to force that through completely so just to finish off this part of

1:04:40Dominic Sandbrook:the story by the 1870s most people in the north have lost interest including many republicans there was then a massive financial crash in 1873 which triggered a depression that lasted for most of the rest of the decade that was terrible news for the republicans of course because they are the party in power so the democrats then made huge gains they regained control of the house of representatives. At the same time, as a general retreat from federal intervention, the Supreme Court starts to gut a lot of the Reconstruction legislation. It reinterprets the 14th Amendment. It makes it much harder for the federal government to enforce the laws that had been passed in the 1860s.

1:05:19Dominic Sandbrook:And so what you have in the 1870s is one state after another falling back to the Democrats, often in very violent circumstances. So the end of the Klan does not mean the end of the terrorist violence, there are successor groups, which nobody talks about now. A group in Louisiana called the White League, or a group in Mississippi and the Carolinas called the Red Shirts. There's loads of violence at election times. And then once the Democrats have got control back, they don't need the violence anymore because they can pass laws to stop black people voting, like literacy tests or poll taxes.

1:05:52Tom Holland:And so they win. Are these groups not remembered because they lack the branding of the Klan? They lack the pointy hats and all that.

1:06:00Dominic Sandbrook:They don't have the same branding and they don't have successors. The clan would probably be forgotten were it not for the second clan, which we'll come to next time. The clan would be like the Knights of the White Camellia. They'd be a sort of slightly lurid, exotic paramilitary group of the 1860s and 70s. But yeah, when people ever talked about the red shirts, they're not forgotten, but they're very effective. Actually, here's a thing that really surprised me. The worst violence of all, and actually it happens after the Klan has disappeared. So the single worst incident was in Colfax, Louisiana in April 1873.

1:06:33Dominic Sandbrook:There'd been a contested election for the state governor. So there were sort of rival governors. There's a group of black Republicans are cornered in the Colfax courthouse by white paramilitaries. And the white paramilitaries killed about 150 people. God, yeah, that's a lot of people. I mean, it's a lot of people. When you think how much something like the so-called Peterloo Massacre, right, is commemorated in Britain, it's a really good reminder of how much more violent American democracy has always been than British democracy, for example. I mean, there is a sort of culture of armed violence that is just unthinkable in our own dear country, Tom.

1:07:21Dominic Sandbrook:Good. Well, I'm glad that we emerged from this story well. So the last nail in the coffin, so-called Compromise of 1877, presidential election of 1876 ends in deadlock between Republican Rutherford B. Hayes and the Democrat Samuel J. Tilden. Basically, they do a deal. The Republicans can keep the presidency. And in return, Rutherford B. Hayes will withdraw the last federal troops from South Carolina, Louisiana and Florida. And now the Democrats have kind of carte blanche to regain control. Reconstruction is over. The laws are rolled back. Racial segregation ends up being enshrined in law a generation later.

1:07:57Dominic Sandbrook:The Jim Crow system, Tom, that you were talking about. And actually, an element of this is lynching becomes almost institutionalized. So by the 1890s, you have hundreds of black men being lynched every year. And the Ku Klux Klan itself is now no more than a memory. So a generation after this has all happened, so you get to the 1890s and the 1900s, it's sort of bundled in to this new cult of the lost cause of the confederacy so these are people who are you know there are still confederate heroes who are alive you know they're white bearded now um but their their successors the generation below them uh who have you know reintegrated into the union to the united states but they share this idea that although the south lost It stood for something noble and precious, a kind of hierarchical, feudal way of life.

1:08:54Dominic Sandbrook:You know, this is the ideal that is celebrated in Gone with the Wind.

1:08:58Tom Holland:Yeah, that famous kind of opening, the introduction.

1:09:02Dominic Sandbrook:Yeah, that the sort of noble gentlemen.

1:09:05Tom Holland:Men were knights and ladies were princesses and all of that. Yeah.

1:09:09Dominic Sandbrook:And the black people, you know, they had their place. They were happy. They knew their place. Yeah. I mean, this is the Lost Cause idea. And in this version of history, the Klan are not racist vigilantes, but they are the intrepid, swashbuckling defenders of white civilization. So the first historical account of the Klan, published in 1905 by a professor of history at Vanderbilt, quite a distinguished historian by the standards of the time, called Walter Linwood Fleming. Walter Linwood Fleming's father had been a planter and a slave owner and a Confederate cavalryman. and Walter Linwood Fleming said of the Klan the Ku Klux movement was the effort of by the southern white people to restore order and maintain control of their civilization caused by the disorder in the south the inefficiency and corruption of the governments and the alarm of the whites and negro domination he says it wasn't a criminal group it was composed of men of standing in their communities and its declared object was to protect society from lawlessness and he goes on to say there were excesses but the organization as a whole aimed at restraint and control rather than destruction and this as shocking as it might now seem becomes the standard view both in academia and in popular culture and in popular culture the key figure who enshrines this is a a writer and failed politician and failed Baptist minister from North Carolina called Thomas Dixon.

1:10:43Dominic Sandbrook:And Thomas Dixon's father had been a member of the Klan. His uncle had been in the Klan, one of its leaders, in fact. And Dixon, in 1915, turned their lives into the inspiration for a novel called The Klansman, which then became a very popular play. And then in 1915, the most innovative film director of the age, one of the most innovative directors that's ever lived, D.W. Griffith, turns it into the first great narrative feature film, The Birth of a Nation. And this is a film that does two things. It revolutionizes cinema, but it also resurrects the Ku Klux Klan because just months after the release of Birth of a Nation, a second clan is born.

1:11:23Dominic Sandbrook:And by the mid-1920s, that second clan has literally millions of members.

1:11:30Tom Holland:And so, Dominic, that is the story, the birth of a nation, the rebirth of the clan that we will be telling next time. And it has, I think, all kinds of unexpected nuances and dimensions. That was kind of news to me. And club members, of course, can hear that episode and the final episode in the series right away. If you are not a club member and you would like to hear those two, then you can go to the rest is history dot com. If you don't do any of that, then both episodes will be out next week. Thank you, Dominic. Thank you, everyone, for listening. Bye-bye.

1:12:04Dominic Sandbrook:Bye-bye.