But in between came the tremendous crisis of the Civil War. Here the opposition was not between native and immigrant, but between north and south, an industrial society of free laborers against an agricultural society of castes,—planters, poor whites, and negro slaves. I shall not go further into this conflict, because it is too familiar and has comparatively little to do with the particular application of my viewpoint. But, from our point of view, it is important to see the place of the first Ku Klux Klan of 1865–71. This was again a secret organization, adding the feature of disguise, for the terrifying effect on the negroes whom it was the object of the Klan to overawe. The Klan was a partisan and sectional organization, of Southern white men of Confederate sympathies, to maintain their group supremacy over the newly freed negroes and the “carpet baggers” from the North. The victors had, as usual, indulged in oppression over the losers, and the grievance was a very real one. The Klan was partially successful in its object, but at once fell into numerous abuses, was used by partisans to vent personal grudges, fell into the hands of a lawless element, and was formally disbanded in 1871 by General Nathan B. Forrest, its national commander or Grand Wizard. Its slogan of “white supremacy” shows its animus against the negroes and the North, not against the alien. Some of its partisans claim that the Klan did not disband when it was formally ordered so to do, but persisted in its underground activity until as late as 1877.[66] However that may be, its character and purpose are very clear; it was sectional, timely, and for the one aim of white supremacy. It appealed to its members and frightened its enemies by its methods of disguise and secrecy, no less than by the beatings, burnings and other outrages which were carried on either under its auspices or by the false use of its insignia and methods. Its defiance of the law imposed by force, and its use of force in reply, are the vestiges of war psychology; It was the legitimate, if unlovely, offspring of the Reconstruction. It had no function left when the white South regained control of the states, but its memory still lingers as part of the idealization of the “lost cause” of the Confederacy.