Disfranchisement After Reconstruction Era - Reconstruction, KKK, and Redemption

Reconstruction, KKK, and Redemption

Between 1864 and 1866, ten of the eleven Confederate states inaugurated governments that did not provide suffrage and equal civil rights to freedmen. Because of this, Congress refused to readmit these states to the Union and established military districts to oversee affairs until the state governments could be reconstructed.

The Ku Klux Klan (KKK) formed in 1865 and quickly became a powerful secret vigilante group, with chapters across the South, during early Reconstruction. It was one form of insurgency after the Civil War, as armed veterans in the South began varied forms of resistance. Starting in 1866, the KKK tried to prevent black Americans from voting and from participating in government affairs. The Klan initiated a campaign of intimidation marked by lynchings and other acts of violence directed against blacks and allied whites, including vandalization and destruction of their property.

The Klan's murders moved the Congress to pass laws to end it. In 1870, the strongly Republican Congress passed an act imposing fines and damages for conspiracy to deny black suffrage.

The Force Act of 1870 was used to reduce the power of the KKK. The Federal government banned acts of terror, force, or bribery to prevent someone from voting because of his race. It empowered the President to deploy the armed forces to suppress organizations that deprived people of rights guaranteed by the Fourteenth Amendment. Any such organizations that appeared in arms was considered in rebellion against the United States. The President could suspend habeas corpus under those circumstances.

President Ulysses S. Grant used these provisions in parts of the Carolinas in the fall of 1871. United States marshals supervised state voter registrations and elections and could summon the help of military or naval forces if needed.

More significant in terms of their effects were paramilitary organizations that arose in the 1870s as part of continuing insurgent resistance in the South. Groups included the White League, formed in Louisiana in 1874 out of white militias, with chapters forming in other Deep South states; the Red Shirts, formed in 1875 in Mississippi but also active in North Carolina and South Carolina; and other "White Liners" such as rifle clubs. Compared to the Klan, they were open societies, better organized, and often solicited newspaper coverage for publicity. Made up of well-armed Confederate veterans, a class that covered most adult men who could have fought in the war, they worked for political aims: to turn Republicans out of office, disrupt their organizing, and use force to intimidate and terrorize freedmen to keep them from the polls. They have been described as "the military arm of the Democratic Party." These groups were instrumental in many southern states in driving blacks away from the polls and ensuring a white Democratic takeover of legislatures and governorships in most states of during the elections of 1876.