The secret orders, regardless of their original purposes, were all finally to be found opposing radical reconstruction. Everywhere their objects were the same: to recover for the white race their former control of society and government, and to destroy the baneful influence of the alien among the blacks. The people of the South were by law helpless to take steps towards setting up any kind of government in a land infested by a vicious element--Federal and Confederate deserters, bushwhackers, outlaws of every description, and negroes, some of whom proved insolent and violent in their newly found freedom. Nowhere was property or person safe, and for a time many feared a negro insurrection. General Hardee said to his neighbors, "I advise you to get ready for what may come. We are standing over a sleeping volcano." To cope with this situation ante-bellum patrols--the "patter-rollers" as the negroes called them--were often secretly reorganized. In each community for several months after the Civil War, and in many of them for months before the end of the war, there were informal vigilance committees. Some of these had such names as the Black Cavalry and Men of Justice in Alabama, the Home Guards in many other places, while the anti-Confederate societies of the war, the Heroes of America, the Red Strings, and the Peace Societies, transformed themselves in certain localities into regulatory bodies. Later these secret societies numbered scores, perhaps hundreds, varying from small bodies of local police to great federated bodies which covered almost the entire South and even had membership in the North and West. Other important organizations were the Constitutional Union Guards, the Pale Faces, the White Brotherhood, the Council of Safety, the '76 Association, the Sons of '76, the Order of the White Rose, and the White Boys. As the fight against reconstruction became bolder, the orders threw off their disguises and appeared openly as armed whites fighting for the control of society. The White League of Louisiana, the White Line of Mississippi, the White Man's party of Alabama, and the Rifle Clubs of South Carolina, were later manifestations of the general Ku Klux movement.