The order was subdivided into neighborhood organizations, and the heads of these were white men, while their vertebral force was recruited from the voting population above described; the _chef_ being as completely _en rapport_ with his African brother as if he had been in truth his congener, and not simply dependent on him for patronage. Their _locus in quo_ was nowhere and everywhere,--each city and town numbering its lodges and sub-lodges, and the diffusion thereof, throughout the agricultural districts, being in the somewhat extravagant ratio of one to the square mile. Their object was plunder. Their raids, directed against the white trash, contemplated everything that might be classed under the term _commissaries_, and ranged from the pig-pen to the poultry-yard, and from an ear of corn to a well-grown tuber. The "wee sma' hours ayont the twal" was the festive time of night selected by the "loil" Moses and his dusky Israel for their exodus from forest or cavern, and, as they marched, the flesh-pots of the enemy disgorged their treasure, and animated nature held its breath. The goods and chattels of the unreconstructed were, by act of Congress, their lawful prey, and if their foraging expeditions were conducted by moonlight, it was from constitutional considerations, and not through any well-grounded fear of resistance on the part of the intimidated whites. The conclaves of the society were held nightly, and during the election campaigns, which progressed with tolerable regularity during eight months of the year, their _en masse_ assemblages, or political rallies, occupied each alternate day of the week (the off day being devoted to itinerant duty among neighboring lodges). A weak solution of the Christian religion involved in the superstitions which they everywhere practised, aided them in their delusions concerning politics; and it is not exaggeration to state that the remaining four months of the year, under the above estimate, were devoted to their so-called revival meetings, which never failed to prove an insufferable burden to the pork- and vegetable-raising communities on which they were billeted. Their religion was, in truth, a part of their politics, and, on occasion, their ministry their most serviceable performers on the hustings. These twin ideas of religion and politics having been introduced into the League, dominated the order so completely that its secular business was often arrested by a call to prayers, and more frequently than otherwise its order of business terminated by a twilight homily on the total cussedness and final unreliability of all who anchored their faith to the Conservative idea in politics.