After the Reconstruction Acts were passed and put into operation, and especially after the Southern communities were reorganized as "States" under them, and the military governments gave way to the "State" governments, this organization spread all over the South, and contributed much by its violent and unlawful methods toward wringing finally the new "State" governments of the South from the hands of the negroes and the "carpet-baggers." As it extended, its methods became more lawless and violent. Its members whipped, plundered, burned, abducted, imprisoned, tortured and murdered, for the prime purpose of keeping the negroes from exercising suffrage and holding office. They were protected by many respectable people who would not have participated personally in their nefarious work. And they had confederates everywhere, who, upon the witness stand and in the jury box, would perjure themselves to prevent their conviction and punishment. It was even said that there were many cases where members of these Klans were able to have themselves subpoenaed as witnesses, or summoned as jurors, in the trials of their comrades, and that they were sworn to perjure themselves, if necessary, to clear each other. The respectable people of the South tried to make it appear that these lawless bands were simply freebooters, such as generally infest a country for a time after a period of war, and had no political meaning or purpose whatsoever; and it is probably true that the Klans never went beyond county organization, any wider bond than the county organization, or Klan, being rather the moral bond of a common purpose; but it cannot be well questioned now that they had one purpose at least in common, and that that was a chief purpose with them all, viz., to terrorize the negro out of the exercise of his {252} newly-granted privileges of suffrage and office-holding, and keep him in his place as a menial. [Sidenote: The naturalness of these organizations.] The appearance of both the Loyal Leagues and the Ku-Klux Klans in the manner in which they appeared, and at the time when they appeared, ought not to cause any surprise to the student of history. Under the reconstruction of the Southern communities as pursued before March of 1867 it seemed as if the freedmen were to be left to the tender mercies of their former masters, irritated against them by the act of the North in emancipating them, and by failure in war to prevent it. It was entirely natural, not to say praiseworthy, for them to combine for the defence of their newly found rights, and for mutual assistance in the hard battle against want which they were now obliged to wage. And it was no less natural that they should look for the intellectual power necessary for forming such combinations to the white men from the North who had helped them out of their bondage, and had given them food and clothes in their hunger and nakedness.