The two preceding chapters may occur to those who were not informed of the nature and degree of the excitement which waited upon the movements of these secret organizations in obscure and uninformed neighborhoods, and among the negroes in various localities, as partaking of the hypercritical in narrative. But those who, by reason of residence or other accident, were made conversant with such scenes almost every week in the year, and who were not unfrequently drawn away from the contemplation of social misdemeanors or crimes of the most serious import to split their sides over some ludicrous _faux pas_, or intended farce, of the perpetrators, will not be slow to discover their basis of fact, nor accord to the author that honesty of purpose to which he lays claim in the conduct of these pages. It was stated in a previous chapter that the secret organization known as the Ku Klux Klan was a political movement intended to offset what was known as the Loyal League, an order whose draft was taken from the negro population, but which was controlled by, and in the interest of, a class of political harpies known as carpet-baggers. The latter element, by means of this political engine, dominated the politics of the South for a period of more than five years, and while its power may not have been broken by the influences set in motion by the counter movement, and though the latter must be condemned on general principles, yet among the people where it had its origin, and stripped of the analogies which the imaginations of fault-finders would be apt to supply, its objects were not deemed harmful to society. As to its wisdom, there can be no doubt that it was aimed at the most salient of the enemy's weak points. In treating this proposition, we shall seek to avoid that ponderous science which that branch of transcendentalists who acknowledge Mr. Wendell Phillips as their leader put before the world under the title of Negropholism, and deal with the article as we find it--so much on the greasy surface of the native that the temptation of the carpet-bagger to use it for base ends must be regarded an uncommon one.