They considered themselves the spiritual descendants of the New Englanders who threw the English tea overboard into Boston harbor nearly 100 years before. Their protests, and the acts of intimidation by which they enforced their protests were against the white "carpetbagger" from the north, the negro freedman to whom liberty meant arrogant office-holding, and the "scalawag," by which terms they designated those deserters from the southern aristocracy who had joined the ranks of the northern stranger. The second stage came within a year after the secret body had its birth, when the band of burlesquers became a band of regulators. To the south, the reconstruction acts which congress passed in 1867 were pernicious. The one-time white confederate soldier believed that the congressional legislation made official mismanagement permanent. He saw negroes organized into the militia. He saw his former slaves voting twice and thrice at elections where he himself had to pass, literally, under bayonets to reach the polls. He disliked the freedman's bureau, which substituted northern alien machinery for the old patriarchal relation between white employer and black employe. He heard drunken negroes at his gates in the night. He saw the "carpetbagger" urging upon the freedman civic rights which he knew the latter was not educated enough to perform. FIRST OBJECTS POLITICAL These were the prejudices against which the original Ku-Klux Klan threw itself. They were surface indications of an historical development. They had nothing to do with the racial and religious biases which the present Klan attempted to propagate. To the present Klan, the old Klan, in its first stage, was unrelated. In its second stage it was related only in its methods of terrorism and its removal of justice from the courts to the masques until its own leaders were powerless to check it. The Klan early fell a victim to the abuses inseparable from secrecy. It happened that Tennessee, the birthplace of the hooded institution, was also the first southern state to find itself turned upside down in reconstruction. "Dem Ku-Kluxes," as the negro called the mysterious union, became a band of regulators. Their first official convention was held in Nashville early in 1867. The Klan, which, until then, had been bound together only by the deference which priority rights gave to the grand cyclops of the parental Pulaski "den," was organized into the "Invisible Empire of the South." It was ruled by a grand wizard of the whole empire, a grand dragon of each realm, or state, a grand titan of each dominion, or county, a grand cyclops of each den, and staff officers with names as equally suggestive of Arabian Nights. LAWS DEFINE OBJECTS