On October 30, 1868, C. C. Sheets, a Grant candidate for elector, made a speech in Florence. About ten o'clock that night a band of disguised men visited his sleeping apartment. He attempted to escape by way of a gallery, but was caught and taken back to his room. After a short stay the band retired without having in any way harmed him. Sheets said that they exacted from him a promise that he would desist from making inflammatory speeches. Later in the same month Sheets delivered a speech in Huntsville. It was reported that in the course of that speech he told his colored audience that he had been interfered with a few nights before in Florence by Ku Klux, and that he had promised them then that he would not make the abusive and inflammatory speeches that he had been making; but up there, where there were so many colored people, he wasn't afraid to say what he pleased, and that if the colored people would do what was becoming in them, they would carry with them weapons and shoot down those disguised men wherever they found them; that the reason the Ku Klux paraded the country was because the negroes were weak-kneed. The speech excited the negroes. They remained in town all day, and at night a meeting was held in the court-house and many negroes, with guns, attended. During the day leading negroes loudly proclaimed that Ku Klux would never again be permitted to enter the town; that if they attempted to do so, they would be shot on sight. A federal military officer had said it would be lawful to do this. A rumor circulated that Ku Klux were assembling at a point some miles distant, and about dark two large posses of negroes, under command of deputy sheriffs, repaired to points along principal roads to intercept them. While the speaking at the court-house was in progress, fugitive negroes from the posses, which had suddenly dissolved at the approach of danger, rushed to the court-house and announced that Ku Klux were marching on the town. The meeting broke up in confusion and the people hurried into the yard. All the near-by streets and the sidewalks surrounding the square were thronged with people, white and black. Suddenly the cavalcade, numbering about two hundred, fully uniformed in tall conical hats, long gowns, and hoods with eyeholes, some armed with guns and sabres, wheeled into the square, and without sound save the whistle signals--then almost as awe-inspiring as had been the "rebel yell"--rode in military order completely around the court-house, and then turned into one of the streets. Proceeding along this some distance, the column halted and formed into battle line. After maintaining this formation for a few minutes, the march was resumed and the band disappeared. There was stationed in Hunstville at that time a regiment of regular troops, and their commander, General Cruger, with some of his staff officers, from a hotel veranda viewed the spectacle of the Ku Klux parade. His comment was that "it was fine but absurd."