655. The Ku Klux Klan: Terror in the South (Part 2)

How and why did the terrible violence of the Ku Klux Klan escalate? What was the political context in America for their rising popularity? And, how was this first iteration of the Klan finally brought down? Join Dominic and Tom as they discuss American politics after the Civil War, the growing popularity of the Ku Klux Klan in the American south and their increasingly barbaric treatment of freedmen, as well as their final destruction… _______ Advertise with us: [email protected] _______ To read our new newsletter, sign up at: therestishistory.com/newsletters _______ Twitter: @TheRestHistory @holland_tom @dcsandbrook Video Editors: Jack Meek, Harry Swan + Adam Thornton Social Producer: Harry Balden Producers: Tabby Syrett & Aaliyah Akude Senior Producer: Callum Hill Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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• 0:03Tom Holland?

  This episode is brought to you by Mint Mobile. Right now, all of Mint's plans are $15 per month, even unlimited. So go to mintmobile.com/history.

• 0:16Dominic Sandbrook?

  Upfront payment of $45 for three months, $90 for six months, or $180 for 12 months, plan required. $15 per month equivalent. Taxes and fees extra. Initial plan term only. Greater than 50GB may slow when network is busy. Includes up to 20GB of hotspot. Capable device required. Availability, speed and coverage varies. See mintmobile.com.

• 0:42Tom Holland?

  This episode is brought to you by the Gates Foundation. We have touched on the fall of the Roman Empire a few times on this show, haven't we? But what our listeners may not know is that among the causes that historians talk about, it's not just barbarian invasions. There's also talk of a disease which people call Roman fever, which I believe we know now as malaria. For thousands of years, humanity was defenseless against it. But thankfully, we live in a time of incredible ingenuity and American scientists and partners around the world are fighting back with support from the Gates Foundation.

• 1:19Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yes, so they're creating a new generation of bed nets that kill up to 90% of mosquitoes. That leads to a 50% drop in malaria, saving lives and protecting vulnerable communities. The Gates Foundation, partners of human potential. Search gatesfoundation.org/mosquito to learn more.

• 1:43Tom Holland?

  This episode is supported by Anthropic, the team behind Claude. Now, history's biggest leaps started as hard questions that people didn't want asked.

• 1:55Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah, there's a classic example of that at the end of the 15th century. And the hard question in particular was, what is out there beyond the Atlantic Ocean to the west? And as you will know, the man who found the answer to that question was the explorer Christopher Columbus. And he realises, or rather, everybody else. Realises that there is a vast continent out there, and it is of course the Americas. So you know, Anthropic knows the importance of questions and it's why Anthropic is founded on one hard question above all. How can we ensure that the AI revolution really goes well for ordinary people?

• 2:26Tom Holland?

  So they asked over a hundred thousand people and what came back wasn't just fear, there was hope as well. People wanted to know, will cancer ever be cured? Can kids have a better future? It turns out that there is hope in hard questions. Ask yours at claude.ai slash rest is history and keep thinking.

• 2:58Tom Holland?

  We have come, we are here, beware, take heed. When the black cat is gliding under the shadows of darkness and the death watch ticks at the lone hour of night, then we, the pale riders, are abroad. Speak in whispers and we hear you. Dream as you sleep in the inmost recesses of your house. And hovering over your beds, we gather your sleeping thoughts while our daggers are at your throat. Ravisher of liberties of the people for whom we died and yet live, begone, ere it is too late.

• 3:42Tom Holland?

  Unholy blacks, cursed of God, take warning and fly. Twice has the sacred serpent hissed. When again his voice is heard, your doom is sealed. Beware, take heed. To be executed by a wad death and rattling skeleton at ten tonight. K, K, K.

• 4:13Tom Holland?

  So that was a chilling warning sent to the sheriff of Jackson County, Arkansas, as reported in the Little Rock Morning Republican on the 13th of May, 1868. And those three letters, KKK, stand, of course, for the Ku Klux Klan. And I think it is worth pointing out that not only are the Ku Klux Klan very violent, murderous and racist, but also they can't spell.

• 4:41Dominic Sandbrook?

  What if they misspelled?

• 4:44Tom Holland?

  Klan.

• 4:45Dominic Sandbrook?

  Oh, yes, with a K.

• 4:46Tom Holland?

  Yeah. It's with a C.

• 4:48Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yes, you're not wrong, Tom.

• 4:49Tom Holland?

  I'm not wrong.

• 4:50Dominic Sandbrook?

  Last episode, you did that whole reading where all the Cs were turned into Ks. You're right to bring it up. So the lurid, sort of slightly bonkers tone of that message plunges us right into the sweltering and very polarised atmosphere of the American South in the late 1860s, in the aftermath of the American Civil War. So to remind people, this is episode two of this series. We're in the era of Reconstruction. Much of the South is under military administration by the United States Army, or it's been run by administrations that are allied to the radical Republican-dominated US Congress. So last time, we decided how the Klan was founded in Pulaski, Tennessee, in the summer of 1866.

• 5:32Dominic Sandbrook?

  Initially a kind of social club for Confederate veterans, but it quickly evolved into something much more sinister. It spreads across the South in the next two years, heavily promoted by Democratic newspapers, and becomes a vigilante group, attracting white men of all classes, from lawyers and doctors to farmers and labourers. Its figurehead is the former Confederate general Nathan Bedford Forrest, who's now an insurance salesman, among other things. And at its peak, it has dens in a quarter. I mean, we may have insurance salesmen who listen to this podcast. I don't want to be rude about insurance salesmen. You know, we all need insurance, Tom. Anyway, at its peak, the Klan has a dens in a quarter of southern counties, has got about

• 6:11Dominic Sandbrook?

  150,000 members, and their targets are the three to four million newly liberated freed men and freed women of the South.

• 6:21Tom Holland?

  And they're about a third of the population. And the other two thirds are white.

• 6:25Dominic Sandbrook?

  So these people are the Klan's targets as well as their allies in the Republican Party. Now, we ended last time at the late summer, early autumn of 1868. So we are just weeks really from the first presidential election since the Civil War. And this is an election which the stakes are really, really high. This is not an ordinary political contest. This is one with existential implications, particularly if you're in the South. So on the Republican side, you have General Ulysses Eschard. So he's from Ohio. He is a career military officer. He was seen in the North as the predominant hero, the preeminent hero of the Northern War effort.

• 7:09Dominic Sandbrook?

  Because what he had done in his sort of dogged and quiet and sort of small C conservative way. He had harnessed the power of industry and a modern army and modern communications and all those kinds of things to wage a campaign that looked, you know, like the campaign, military campaigns of the future rather than the past. He's not about swashbuckling cavalry charges. He is about grinding relentlessly forward. And of course, that's what wins the war.

• 7:37Tom Holland?

  And in our, the series that we did on the assassination of Lincoln, we were inadvertently rude about him, weren't we? And implied that he may have been very corrupt.

• 7:45Dominic Sandbrook?

  Corrupt and boring, I think is what you called him.

• 7:47Tom Holland?

  Corrupt and boring. So he is boring, but he's not particularly corrupt, is he actually? So we should draw back on that.

• 7:53Dominic Sandbrook?

  The trend now among historians is to say that Grant wasn't actually that corrupt. He was a bit corrupt, but not as corrupt as some people. And that the corruption was actually systemic rather than individual. And, and indeed, a lot of Americans would say he wasn't actually even that boring. He was just quiet.

• 8:08Tom Holland?

  Okay, so that's the scholars, he wasn't, he wasn't boring either.

• 8:11Dominic Sandbrook?

  Shocking.

• 8:12Tom Holland?

  We fully take that back then.

• 8:14Dominic Sandbrook?

  This is the way history works. Wild swings of scholarly opinion.

• 8:18Tom Holland?

  Okay, so he wasn't boring either.

• 8:19Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah, and in our own way, we've reflected the pendulum there. Because a year ago, we said he was corrupt and boring. And now.

• 8:27Tom Holland?

  But since then.

• 8:28Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah. And I just want to make it clear to people on the Reddit, we're not responding to you.

• 8:32Tom Holland?

  No, we're not. We're responding, we're responding to trends in scholarship. That's what we always do.

• 8:38Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah. 10 years of historical scholarship equals one year of the rest is history. So that's how, that's how it works. So Grant is very popular with business elites in New York City. Who want to get on with making money is very close to them. Hence, some of the corruption allegations later on. But Grant also supports Congressional Reconstruction, as it is called. So this is the approach that says, let's bring law and order to the South. Let us guarantee equal rights for African Americans. Come on, we didn't fight this war for nothing. We want to see proper results. On the Democrat's side, they nominate the former governor of New York, Horatio Seymour. And Horatio Seymour is standing on an uncompromising platform of white supremacy.

• 9:22Dominic Sandbrook?

  So Horatio Seymour and the Democrats say, we will give amnesty to the Confederates. Come on, the war's over now. Let's all be friends. Let's restore the Southern states to the Union as quickly as possible. They sure they've been in rebellion, but let's get them back into Congress. Again, let's all be friends and let's stop intervening in the South with the with the Union Army. The federal government has no business interfering in the South. That's not why we fought the war. So the tone of Seymour's campaign was set by his vice president, who was a man called Frank Blair from Missouri. I know you generally love a Blair.

• 9:54Tom Holland?

  But Dominic, this Frank Blair, he is the worst, as people will see when you read out what he actually said.

• 9:59Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah, very shocking. He said, the radicals want to hand power to a semi barbaric race of blacks, who are, he said, going to subject white women to their unbridled lust.

• 10:09Tom Holland?

  And that is such a common theme, isn't it? I mean, they're obsessed by that idea of.

• 10:13Dominic Sandbrook?

  Completely, the fear of miscegenation, yes.

• 10:15Tom Holland?

  Black men, deflowering, white women and all of that.

• 10:19Dominic Sandbrook?

  Totally. And this is the last time, really, in a US presidential election that white supremacy is so overtly explicitly the issue. One Democratic tactician said explicitly, our strategy is to exploit the aversion with which the masses contemplate the equality of the Negro. So this is clearly a very highly charged campaign. And especially in the South, and this is where the Klan comes in. Now, as we said last time, the Klan is not a top down cohesive organisation. Yeah, there isn't a headquarters from which orders go out. This is basically an alliance of loosely linked vigilante groups in the small towns

• 11:02Dominic Sandbrook?

  and villages of the rural south, and they are united by their opposition to the Republican Party and to black voting rights and by their commitment to use violence to get their way. So if we look at a couple of examples and we start with Tennessee, where the Klan was founded. So in Tennessee, that election, there is extensive violence in Pulaski and the surrounding countryside. Black men were threatened with death if they voted Republican. They were offered protection papers. They were offered sort of indemnities if they voted Democrats.

• 11:33Tom Holland?

  So there's not a secret ballot? People can see how you're voting?

• 11:37Dominic Sandbrook?

  No, there's no uniform arrangements. So different states can make their own different provisions. And of course, if you're voting in a small town, everybody will basically know the way you vote. There'll be clustering around you.

• 11:48Tom Holland?

  They can watch you as you do it?

• 11:50Dominic Sandbrook?

  Exactly. People will be watching. There'll be a huge mob of people around you. Rather like in, you know, we did a series about elections in 18th and 19th century Britain. This is not dissimilar. There'll be huge crowds at the polls and there'll be people basically peering over your shoulder as you vote. So of the 2,000 African Americans who have registered to vote in Pulaski, only about 600 to 700 of them turned up. Some of them actually voted Democratic because they wanted these protection papers. They're intimidated to vote in Democratic. And as a result, the Democrats took that county by 50 votes. And it was a similar story in a lot of the other counties of middle Tennessee.

• 12:32Dominic Sandbrook?

  So the Republican vote, historians reckon the Republican vote in this area was 10,000 votes down on what it should have been. Now, this wasn't enough to win the state for the Democrats, because the Confederates, as we said last time, had been disenfranchised by the governor, Parson Brownlow. So ex-Confederates couldn't vote. But it is a sign of how effective violence can be in elections. Take another example, neighboring state of South Carolina.

• 12:59Dominic Sandbrook?

  South Carolina, democratic clubs handed out guns to their supporters and they would go out riding at night firing randomly at black people's cabins. Prominent republican activists would find coffins marked with the three letters KKK on their doorsteps. In the worst-hit county, which was Abbeville County, two republican legislators were murdered in the days before the election. So, one of them was a white man called James Martin, the other was a state senator of mixed race called BF Randolph, who had been a chaplain to a US Army regiment, a black regiment, in the Civil War. And BF Randolph was shot in broad daylight on a railway platform with loads of people

• 13:42Dominic Sandbrook?

  standing around by three men who then rode off unchallenged and were never caught and never convicted. In Georgia, the Freedmen's Bureau reported 142 incidents between August and late October, 31 killings, 43 shootings, five stabbings, 55 beatings and eight whippings of 300 to 500 lashes apiece. The worst of these attacks was an attack on, again, open air, public, everybody can see. It's on a black republican rally in the town of Camilla in South Georgia on the 19th of September. The local sheriff led the attack. 400 Klansmen, they opened fire on this parade of republican supporters and then chased them across the countryside.

• 14:27Dominic Sandbrook?

  They killed surprisingly few of them actually. I mean, in some ways, they killed seven people, they injured about 40 more. Then on election day, you're asking, Tom, you know, can you cast a secret ballot? The answer here is no. Basically, armed white Klansmen are at the polls, they confiscate the republican papers, the republican ballots, from people who are trying to cast them. And as a result, to give you as an example of two counties, in Warren County, the republican vote fell from more than 1,000 to 188. In Columbia County, it fell from 1,222 to one vote. And unbelievably, in 11 Georgia counties with black majorities. So this is where the republican vote would be really strong.

• 15:12Dominic Sandbrook?

  Ulysses S. Grant got no votes at all.

• 15:17Dominic Sandbrook?

  In other words, either nobody voted for him because they were so intimidated, or basically the people who were counting the votes just said, he got zero. And none of those votes counted at all. And as a result, Georgia went democratic in the presidential election.

• 15:34Tom Holland?

  And there is no, no attempt to kind of legislate against these results and to say, well, they're obviously corrupt or a result of intimidation.

• 15:44Dominic Sandbrook?

  No, no, to cut a long story short, we'll get on to the legislation. So later on, there is legislation to try to deal with the Klan. There are an enforcement's act and the Ku Klux Klan Act, but they come a little bit later. So at the time, Grant wins the election. So because he's won the election, there's no need. And just the worst violence, actually, we haven't even got to the worst violence. The worst violence was in Louisiana. So in Louisiana, there are two different paramilitary groups doing the Democratic Party's work. There's the Ku Klux Klan, and I mentioned in the last time, the Knights of the White Camellia.

• 16:15Tom Holland?

  I can't take them seriously with that name.

• 16:17Dominic Sandbrook?

  In the, well, I mean, you definitely take them seriously if you live in Louisiana. So they're very strong in the southern parishes of Louisiana. Louisiana has parishes rather than counties, of course, it's got its French heritage. And in the southern parishes, more than half of the white male population belongs to the Knights. And they are absolutely ruthless. So in St. Landry Parish, just one parish, the Knights of the White Camellia killed at least 200 black people in the weeks and days before the election.

• 16:48Tom Holland?

  And there is no legal government response to this at all?

• 16:53Dominic Sandbrook?

  Here is the issue with this whole story. I mean, the United States is a, is a federal system. Separation of powers, but also the sort of division of responsibility between the federal government and the state.

• 17:04Tom Holland?

  Yeah, so states' rights, but, but states don't have the right to go around killing people.

• 17:09Dominic Sandbrook?

  So in somewhere like Louisiana, if the state authorities are in the hands, you know, of people who, who want to behave in this way, right? What does the federal government do? The only thing it can do is to send in troops, right? Because it's got to enforce its will somehow. And the the problem that runs through this whole story of reconstruction is that in the North, people think we've won the war. Can we just go home now, please, and crack on with making loads of money? Because actually, the United States is poised to go this tremendous, go through this tremendous transformation, you know, into this sort of industrial capitalist colossus. And they're very excited at the thought of this, making money from railroads and stuff. And they're bored, they're

• 17:52Dominic Sandbrook?

  really bored of the arguments about the South, which have been going on for so long. But also, they think, they really believe in their federal system. You and I might not believe in it, Tom, because we're not Americans. But they do believe in it. And they think ultimately, the state should decide.

• 18:08Tom Holland?

  Even if 200 innocent people are being killed?

• 18:10Dominic Sandbrook?

  Well, they're shocked by this, which is why they end up passing legislation. But ultimately, there is not that much, there's not that much support for federal intervention. Lots of people are really unhappy about it, including, here's the thing that will amaze some people, including some people who have been really fervent abolitionists and allies of Abraham Lincoln. They basically end up saying, look, we've done our best for the freedmen of the South. We've given them emancipation. We've ended slavery. And now they just have to make the best of things.

• 18:42Tom Holland?

  Right.

• 18:43Dominic Sandbrook?

  And, you know, it is tough for them. But they just have to make the best of it, because it's more important to preserve our political system than it is basically to to maintain their rights. I mean, there are lots of people who think that. And there'll be some listeners who are who are already ahead of me, I guess. What lies partly behind this is the fact that a lot of people in the North, even if they are anti slavery, are still quite racist. That deep down, they'd actually don't want to wreck their system, they would say wreck their system or change their system for the benefit of millions of black people in the South. I think that's part of this as well.

• 19:19Tom Holland?

  Okay, yeah, understood.

• 19:20Dominic Sandbrook?

  It's a hugely complicated story. I mean, I remember, I did this at university, and I can remember. In our tutorials, saying to our tutor, why don't they just send in the army? You know, that's what a normal country does. And, you know, him saying, well, you have to take seriously the constitution, the principle of states, of the rights of the states, you know, the principle of limited government, all of those kinds of things. If you don't take those things seriously, then you don't understand why Americans behaved as they did in the 1860s and 1870s. So, anyway, to get back to the, the, the results. Grant won the election. He won 26 states to Seymour's eight, and he took the Electoral College easily and he became the next president. However, there are three important takeaways from all this.

• 20:02Dominic Sandbrook?

  Number one, everybody was shocked how close the popular vote was. So Grant won 3 million votes, but Seymour won 2.7 million. And so it wouldn't take that much for the Democrats to win in future, that much of a change. Secondly, historians think that Seymour probably won a majority of white votes among those white people who voted. In other words, if the Democrats can stop black people voting or drive down the black vote, they will probably win. And thirdly, what this proves, some of these figures. So in Louisiana, I mentioned, in six parishes in Louisiana, Ulysses S. Grant got one vote.

• 20:45Dominic Sandbrook?

  And in seven parishes, he got zero votes and he ended up losing Louisiana. What that proves is that paramilitary violence works. There are not enough federal troops in the South to stop it. And the number of federal troops is bound to shrink as northerners get bored and want to withdraw the troops and bring them home. So what happens after the election? Grant was inaugurated on the 4th of March, 1869. And he gives his inaugural address and there's lots of black supporters there actually in Washington to hear it. And Grant, you know, it's quite a, I mean, we said he's not corrupt and boring. It is actually quite a boring speech. He says, um, he rejects prejudice and hate. He wants to see the 15th Amendment ratified.

• 21:30Dominic Sandbrook?

  So the 15th Amendment would forbid any state denying you the right to vote based on your color or your race or previous condition of servitude. In other words, basically give ex-male slaves the right to vote. But since the election, the Klan's violence has not died down. In many ways, it's actually got worse. So in Tennessee, for example. The night raids have got worse since the election. Here's one example. Parson Brownlow, the governor, had hired a detective to infiltrate the Klan in Kupolaski. This detective called Mr. Barmore, and he'd actually done a very good job, very successfully. And he was heading home to Nashville. Clearly, he'd been rumbled.

• 22:12Dominic Sandbrook?

  When a gang of masked men dragged him off and they took him into the woods and shot him. This was a big story at the time. And some white business leaders started to get anxious about this and say things getting out of hand. And what was particularly worrying them was that the Republicans in Nashville were now saying to Brownlow, are you finally going to send in this armed state militia or not, which he's been talking about for months? And on the 20th of January, Brownlow finally agreed to do it. This is nine days after his detective has been killed. He says, he announces publicly, he says, there's a reign of terror in mid and west Tennessee. I want to call up recruits to the militia. I will declare martial law. Let's occupy their towns, all of this kinds of thing. And at this point, the Tennessee Klan clearly panics.

• 22:58Dominic Sandbrook?

  So the Imperial Wizard, Nathan Bedford Forrest, issued an order. He said, I want everyone to go in and basically decommission their masks and disguises. So go to see your grand cyclops with your mask and disguise. You must destroy them in front of him. He says, no more whippings, no more lynchings, no more beatings, none of this, no provocations. And incredibly, in the next few weeks, the Tennessee Klan, the original one, actually disbands. So we don't know exactly when, but sometime in late spring or summer of 1869, the white Tennessee Klan leadership basically renounces the Klan. And that's the end of it. So it's a massive result for Parson Brownlow. Well, it looks like it, but actually there's a twist. Oh, no.

• 23:43Dominic Sandbrook?

  The reason they've done it is partly because they don't actually need it anymore. Because Parson Brownlow has just gone off to Washington to become a United States Senator from Tennessee. And his replacement is a man inevitably called DeWitt Clinton Center. A Clinton. And DeWitt Clinton Center is much less radical than Parson Brownlow. He says, I'll give Confederates the vote again. I'll disband the militia. And DeWitt Clinton Center does something that is very ominous. He says, obviously, I respect the right to vote for everybody, including African Americans, as long as you can afford to pay a poll tax. So essentially, in best Clinton. And manner, he's triangulating.

• 24:26Dominic Sandbrook?

  He is triangulating, but he's triangulating in a way that is very disadvantageous to black voting. And basically, this is the story of the South. In the next few years, this is what they're going to do. This is how the South is going to be in inverted commas redeemed for the Democratic Party and the cause of white supremacy. They will bring in all kinds of wheezes to stop black people voting, like poll taxes or literacy tests and so on. And so that September, a local newspaper in Tennessee prints what it claims is a last message from the Klan, which is attributed to the Grand Tycoon. I don't think we had a Grand Tycoon in the previous. No, I don't think we did. This is Gilded Age development, is it? Yeah, exactly, exactly. Robert Barron, man in a massive top hat. And the Grand Tycoon says, our mission on earth, to some extent, is ended. For the present and we hope forever,

• 25:11Dominic Sandbrook?

  we are done. So that's them done in Tennessee. But outside Tennessee, the Klan rides on. Because outside Tennessee, nobody cares what the Imperial Wizard, General Forrest, wants. They're fighting their own battles. And the reason they're doing that, and why these battles are more vicious than ever, is that in some southern states, it's really only in 1869 or 1870, that the occupying US Army hands over power to elected radical Republican legislators. So it's actually only at this point, that in some of these states, like South Carolina, or Louisiana, or Mississippi, you see what enfranchising the former slaves really means.

• 25:54Dominic Sandbrook?

  So if you take the example of these, those three states, South Carolina, Louisiana, Mississippi, they had had very large slave populations before the war. And that means that basically, when black people are given the vote, you are going to get hundreds of elected black officials, many of whom had been slaves right up to 1863, the Emancipation Proclamation. They had lived in plantation counties. They had literally belonged to the richest, most powerful, most conservative white men in the land, and now they're making the laws. So South Carolina sends eight black men to Congress. Its state legislature in South Carolina had a black majority. Louisiana has a black governor, the first in American

• 26:38Dominic Sandbrook?

  history, a man with the excellent name of PBS Pinchback. And Mississippi has the first black United States Senator, a man called Hiram Rhodes Revels.

• 26:49Dominic Sandbrook?

  And these people, if you've ever, well, we'll be talking about the film The Birth of a Nation next week. If you watch that film, or if you read a book of about American history published up to about 1940, these people are portrayed as incompetent, stupid, corrupt, childish, totally ill-suited for political life. And actually, historians now would say these descriptions are unbelievably racist. And actually, these guys were doing the best possible job they could in horrific circumstances and were completely reduced by generations of historians. And what

• 27:30Dominic Sandbrook?

  those historians were reflecting is the fact that for white southerners to have PBS pinchback governing your state, or Hiram Rhodes Revels representing your state in the US Senate, is an unbelievable affront. If you've been raised before the war in the worldview of white supremacy, and you don't even think that a black man is a human being, and you basically, I mean, to give you an example, this jumped out at me, this detail from one of the books, I think it was Alan Trelace. The white southerners had been raised in a world where if you walked down the street and a black man bowed to you and said good morning to you, you would whip him. Even though he'd shown you this courtesy, you would whip him because he had dared to speak to

• 28:15Dominic Sandbrook?

  you before you spoke to him. I mean, unbelievable.

• 28:19Tom Holland?

  And now they've got a black governor.

• 28:21Dominic Sandbrook?

  And now they've got a black governor. This is why, I mean, this, that worldview was so entrenched. I mean, that is the thing that is perhaps hardest for people in the 21st century, you know, outside that, that part of the world, to get their heads around just how deeply entrenched and how deeply embedded that worldview is. And, and that's what lies behind this surge of violence across places like Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia, the Carolinas in the next couple of years. And when we're talking about a death toll indefinitely in the hundreds, maybe 500, 600, 700 people are possible to say, the sort of death toll that might be comparable to the troubles in Northern Ireland

• 29:05Dominic Sandbrook?

  in the first part of the 1970s, that's a reference for our British listeners. And in the troubles in Northern Ireland, people would often say of this violence, well, it's just mindless thuggery, which, you know, it's easy to say about the Ku Klux Klan. But it's absolutely not mindless thuggery at all. It's very, very calculated. The brilliant historian of Reconstruction, one of the greatest American historians, Eric Foner, writes about this in his big book on Reconstruction. He says, quote, "In effect, the Klan was a military force serving the interests of the Democratic Party, the planter class, and all those who desired the restoration of white supremacy. Its purposes were political in the broadest sense: to destroy the Republican Party's infrastructure, undermine the Reconstruction state, re-establish control of the black

• 29:49Dominic Sandbrook?

  labour force, and restore racial subordination in every aspect of southern life."

• 29:54Tom Holland?

  So Dominic, to pursue the Northern Ireland comparison, the Ku Klux Klan are to the Democrats what the IRA are to Sinn Fein?

• 30:03Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah, I think that's not an unreasonable comparison. I think you could say they are the kind of armed wing of a political movement.

• 30:11Tom Holland?

  Yeah.

• 30:12Dominic Sandbrook?

  Because they've been supported by democratic newspapers, they are very closely linked to democratic politicians, you know, their aim is to destroy the Republican Party. So yeah, absolutely. I mean, to quote one Florida politician, a guy called Emmanuel Fortune, who was driven out of Jackson County, Florida by the Klan, he said, "The object of it is to kill the leading men of the Republican Party, men who've taken a prominent stand." So there are many terrible stories, kind of torture, murder and whatnot. Here's just one example, and obviously it is a pretty grim story, so prepare yourselves. There's a guy called Abram Colby, and he was the son of an Irish plantation owner and his slave.

• 30:53Dominic Sandbrook?

  So he was born into slavery, the son of the owner, and then his father later freed him. He became a church minister. He was a brilliant speaker. In 1866, in the aftermath of the war, he organised a branch of the Equal Rights Association. He lived in Green County, Georgia, and in 1868, he was elected to the Georgia House of Representatives from Green County. A year later, in 1869, in October, he was dragged from his bed by a mob of 60 Klansmen, and they took him out into the woods, along with his mother, his wife and his daughter, who were in the cabin with him. And they stripped him naked in front of his family, and then they whipped him for three hours.

• 31:39Dominic Sandbrook?

  And we know this because he testified to a congressional committee about it three years later. And he said of the men who had attacked him, they weren't disguised, they didn't need to disguise themselves because they knew they could do this with impunity. He said of them, "Some of them are first-class men in our town. One is a lawyer, one a doctor, and some are farmers. They had their pistols. They took me in my night clothes and carried me from home. They hit me 5,000 blows. They said I had voted for Grant and had carried the Negroes against them." And while they're doing this, they're holding a gun to his little daughter's head. And I quote, "They actually frightened her to death. She never got over it until she died, i.e. she died of shock. That was the part that grieves me the most."

• 32:23Dominic Sandbrook?

  Then the committee said to him, "How long before you recovered from the effects of this treatment? Answer." "I have never got over it yet. They broke something inside of me. I cannot do any work now, although I always made my living before." You know, a really sad story. There's no happy ending to this. There are larger-scale attacks. So there were attacks on Republican rallies, for example, a place called Utopia, Alabama, in 1874, people were killed. In the same month, in Lawrence County, South Carolina, the Klan drove 150 people out of their homes. They murdered 13 people, including a white judge and a black legislator. And then an incredible story, six months later, Meridian,

• 33:04Dominic Sandbrook?

  Mississippi. Three black leaders were arrested by the white authorities, who were based in league with the Klan, for making what they said were incendiary speeches. And at their court hearing, the court hearing was invaded by Klansmen, the Klansmen killed the judge at the court hearing, a Republican, and two of the defendants, and then ran amok in the town and killed about 30 people, including, and I quote, "all of the leading colored men of the town." So You know, you were asking before, how is it they're able to do this and get away with it? I mean, basically, because if you stand against them, they will kill you. And there are not enough federal troops to make a difference. And there's not enough will in

• 33:47Dominic Sandbrook?

  Washington or in the North to intervene on such a scale. It would have to be a massive scale, right? You'd have to flood every southern county with troops in order to stop this.

• 33:57Tom Holland?

  And I suppose that every, every act of violence is a testing of the boundaries, a kind of stress testing of how able the federal government is to respond to outrages like this.

• 34:09Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah.

• 34:09Tom Holland?

  And so presumably, the more they realise they can get away with, the more the violence escalates.

• 34:14Dominic Sandbrook?

  Right. Well, you just, you just keep doing it because it works. I mean, it works. So here's the other thing that you were asking about before. So Eric Foner used the phrase, in that bit I quoted from Eric Foner, he said it was political in the broadest sense. And you asked about people who can read and write and so on.

• 34:32Tom Holland?

  Hmm.

• 34:33Dominic Sandbrook?

  The Klan is determined to crush churches and schools. They kill white teachers, black teachers. They will beat people who rent rooms to teachers. There's an example of an Irish teacher called William Lynch. He was working in a black school in Cross Plains, Alabama. He was dragged from his house and lynched. They will target people who can, as I said, who can read and write, who have their own land, who have their own livestock, people who don't doff their hats to white passersby, people who don't give up the sidewalk, the pavement, people who speak disrespectfully. They will even attack, quote, "women who dress up and fix up like they thought anything of themselves." So in other words, black women who have a little bit about them.

• 35:16Tom Holland?

  So basically, it's about keeping them in hellage.

• 35:19Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yes, completely, it is. So it's an awful picture, terrible picture. And yet, we haven't actually got to the worst of it. Because there is one county where the Klan wields unparalleled power, where its word is law and you cannot challenge it. To quote Alan Trelle, the brilliant historian of the First Klan. In this county, in every subject, the Klan was supreme, a juggernaut propelled forward by the size and character of its membership and the terror it inspired in every person in the county, including its own members. And this place was York County, South Carolina. And we will find out what happened there and how the Grant administration was finally roused to fight back against and destroy the Klan after the break.

• 36:05Dominic Sandbrook?

  This episode is brought to you by Mint Mobile. Right now, all of Mint's plans are $15 per month, even unlimited. So go to mintmobile.com/history. Upfront payment of $45 for three months, $90 for six months, or $180 for 12 months. Plan required. $15 per month equivalent. Taxes and fees extra. Initial plan term only. Greater than 50GB may slow when network is busy. Includes up to 20GB of hotspot. Capable device required. Availability, speed and coverage varies. See mintmobile.com.

• 36:44Dominic Sandbrook?

  This episode is brought to you by ZipRecruiter. Tom, as you know, I spend all my time working. And in a dream world, I would clone a sort of Tom Holland who would do all the work for me. But sadly, technology has not advanced to that point. If it did, I wish there was a recruiting company that I could use to hire that clone for me. Well, Dominic, you are in luck, because if you are hiring, then ZipRecruiter is the great time saver. You can try it free at ziprecruiter.com/history. It shows you qualified candidates almost instantly. So save time with ZipRecruiter. Four out of five employers who post on ZipRecruiter

• 37:29Dominic Sandbrook?

  get a quality candidate within the first day. Try it for free at ziprecruiter.com/history. That's ziprecruiter.com/history. Meet your match on ZipRecruiter.

• 37:51Tom Holland?

  Hello everyone and welcome back to The Rest Is History. We are now in the state of South Carolina and South Carolina, of course, had played a key role in the Civil War. It had been the first southern state to secede from the Union back in December 1860 and it had been the state where the first shots of the Civil War had been fired in April 1861. So Dominic, what is the context in South Carolina? What is the kind of the racial balance, all of that kind of thing?

• 38:24Dominic Sandbrook?

  Its population is about 60% black and 40% white. Now, given those racial demographics, it will not surprise people to know that in 1868 it had voted Republican, it had voted for Ulysses S. Grant, and in 1870 it elected as governor a former United States, i.e. Northern Army, officer called Robert Kingston Scott, and it voted him in by a margin of 60 to 40. So basically, the voting completely follows the racial demographics. Now, the state legislature I mentioned in the first half has a black majority, again reflecting the demographic makeup of the state. So in any fair election, it is pretty obvious that South Carolina

• 39:08Dominic Sandbrook?

  will always go with the Republicans, you know, unless there's some, you know, they've been incredibly corrupt or something. You know, the white Southerners in South Carolina are never going to get their way. And they were furious and horrified at the result of the 1870 gubernatorial election. So Alan Trellese in his History of the Klan quotes the Charleston Daily News, "Now, unbelievably, this was a moderate democratic newspaper." So this is what a moderate democratic newspaper sounds like. "We regard the solid black vote cast against the nominees of our party as a declaration of war by the Negro race against

• 39:48Dominic Sandbrook?

  the white race, by ignorance against intelligence, by poverty against wealth." And the Charleston Daily News went on to say, "It is now the duty of white men to organize and arm in the name of decency, purity, and political freedom." To repeat, this is a moderate newspaper, not an extreme one. And so this sets the tone for two years of horrendous violence in upstate South Carolina and what's called the Piedmont region. This is a region where black and white are pretty evenly divided. So it's kind of all to play for. And the very worst county is York County. And in York County, almost every single white man joined the Ku Klux Klan.

• 40:30Dominic Sandbrook?

  So this is right at the top of, if you look at a map, it's at the top of South Carolina. It's just south of the city of Charlotte in North Carolina today. It was a rural county, about 25,000 people, cotton, cereals, that kind of thing. The Klan had been founded there in 1868. It had been actually reasonably quiet until the 1870 election for governor, which the Republicans had narrowly won in the county by about 500 votes. And that was the spark that basically set off, you know, this kind of racist bonfire. I'm not sure where this metaphor is going. But anyway, in the next few weeks after that election, the Klan spread exponentially. The local leader was the sheriff, Major James W. Avery.

• 41:15Dominic Sandbrook?

  He was a Confederate war veteran. He was actually wounded at Appomattox on the last day of the war, the last morning of the war. And he was a planter, a bigwig in the local area. He owned the big store in Yorkville, which was the kind of county seat. And he's one of many bigwigs involved with the Klan. So another one is one of the county's richest landowners, a man called William C. Black. And it was William C. Black who ordered the first notable murder. And this was the murder of a man called Tom Roundtree. Tom Roundtree was a spokesman for the African American, the freedmen of the county. And he was a married man with children. And in December 1870, a mob of Klansmen came to his house. They dragged him out, they shot him and they cut his throat.

• 42:00Dominic Sandbrook?

  His widow was able to identify some of the killers. But this landowner, William C. Black, paid for the defense of the killers. He organized it, he sorted out alibis for them. And in the end, Mrs. Roundtree and her children were driven from their home and had to flee the county. And that set the tone for weeks of violence. Eleven people murdered, hundreds of people beaten and whipped, including women and children. Um. Five black schools were burned down. One of them was burned down four times. Yeah, people, they kept rebuilding it and they just burned it down again. And to give, again, to give people a bit of context.

• 42:37Dominic Sandbrook?

  This is in a county, all of these killings and burnings and whatnot, is in a county with a population roughly the size of the town of Stratford-upon-Avon today. So imagine, you know, the furore, right? If this was, if so many people were to be killed in Stratford-upon-Avon. But obviously, this is in the context of the eighteen seventies when violence is much more common.

• 43:00Tom Holland?

  Well, we talked about stress testing, how far you can go, kind of testing the boundaries of permissible behaviour. And this must surely be pushing at those boundaries to the extreme. I mean, can the the federal government ignore violence on this scale?

• 43:16Dominic Sandbrook?

  Well, what they do is they, the federal government did send in some troops. They sent in a detachment of troops in late February. But that only, the federal troops generally, when they're sent in, they don't do anything. They don't really have orders what to do. Who are they going to fight? They're always told cooperate, please, with the local authorities.

• 43:31Tom Holland?

  So they're like UN peacekeepers.

• 43:33Dominic Sandbrook?

  They're like, totally like UN peace, they're like UN peacekeepers at Srebrenica or something, standing idly by, looking a little bit bewildered. Because the people they're meant to be working with are actually the people who are carrying out the crimes.

• 43:44Tom Holland?

  Yeah.

• 43:45Dominic Sandbrook?

  So the clansmen, actually, after the federal troops came in, they carried on killing people. And then on the sixth of March, they carried out one of the most notorious of all clan murders. This was the murder of a man called Jim Williams. Jim Williams was about forty years old. He'd been a slave in York County before the war, but he'd escaped. He'd run away, he'd joined the Northern Army, and then he came back to his, you know, old county after the war. He spoke out against the Klan and he organised a militia. This goes back to your point about why don't black people arm themselves? Well, he did, and this is what happened. He used the local union league, the sort of political organisation for the freedmen.

• 44:22Dominic Sandbrook?

  Um. To arm themselves, you know, let's protect ourselves, all of this kind of thing. We're not going to take this lying down. And the clan invited him to a kind of parley at a crossroads on the 11th of February, and they met on the 11th of February. And um, he said, look, we will stand down. And we'll actually give up our weapons if you promise to stop raiding. And the clan said, sure, we'll stop raiding. The next day, the truce broke down when the clan killed another eight people. And Williams said, well, there's no way we're going to give up our weapons now. The clan spread rumours around the county. They said, Williams is keeping his weapons because he's planning to lead a um, an uprising of black people to murder and rape, you know, all the white people in the county.

• 45:04Dominic Sandbrook?

  And on the night of the 6th of March, a local doctor called Jay Rufus Bratton, who was the nephew, I think not coincidentally, of the man who had once owned Williams, the slave owner who'd once treated him as property. This doctor, Dr Bratton, assembled a gang of sixty men wearing masks. They broke into Williams's cabin and they found him hiding under the floorboards. They dragged him out and they hanged him from a tree. Terrible story this. And they left him hanging there for days with a placard that read Captain Jim Williams on his big muster. Doctors are not coming well out of this story. No, doctors, lawyers, they're terrible people. They come out really badly from this story.

• 45:45Dominic Sandbrook?

  Now, actually, at this point, some respectable white citizens in York County started to worry they'd gone too far. And actually, the only newspaper, which was the Orkville Inquirer, condemned violence on both sides. That's always the way, isn't it? Right, good people on both sides. Yeah, correct. And said, um, maybe it would be good for the older men to, quote, advise the young men not to engage in whipping and murdering the coloured people. But the clan leadership was total uncompromising. They issued a statement. In response, the intelligent, honest white people of this county shall rule it. We can no longer put up with negro rule, black bayonets and a miserably degraded and thievish set of lawmakers, the scum of the earth, the scrapings of creation.

• 46:28Dominic Sandbrook?

  We are pledged to stop it, we're determined to end it, even if we are forced by force to use force. Now, I mentioned the state governor, Robert Kingston Scott. As was quite common, he was a former US Army officer. He came not from South Carolina but from Ohio. So he is your classic example of what the Southerners later called carpetbaggers. You know, they had these, this idea that loads of unscrupulous northerners were coming down to the South with their possessions in a carpetbag to rule despotically over the ordinary people of the South. Robert Kingston Scott doesn't really know what to do. Some of his Republican allies say to him, well, why don't you arm a black militia? Send them into York County.

• 47:12Dominic Sandbrook?

  And he, his argument was, well, if I do that, that will basically mean what, you know, to use the terminology of the time, a race war. And in a race war, the white people are better armed, they're richer, they're more powerful, they will always win, even though there are fewer of them, they, you know, experience shows that they will always go further, behave more badly. You know, they, this, this will invite disaster for the black people of York County. So what Scott does is he writes to Washington, begs them for more troops and that does the trick. And in March 1871, Ulysses S. Grant decides to send three more federal companies. And Tom, I'm delighted to report that they are companies of our old friends in the Seventh

• 47:57Dominic Sandbrook?

  Cavalry. The Seventh Cavalry. Great to have them back on the show. Well, finally, people have been saying, when are you going to do Custer Season Two? Yeah. This is it. It's the prequel. It's the prequel to. The Phantom Menace.

• 48:09Tom Holland?

  Of the Custer series.

• 48:11Dominic Sandbrook?

  So actually, the Seventh Cavalry who were sent to York County are commanded by a much less famous person, but a more impressive person. Can you get more impressive than George Armstrong Custer? You can. He's called Major Lewis Merrill.

• 48:26Tom Holland?

  So I looked him up. I mean, his beard, it has to be said, is not impressive.

• 48:32Dominic Sandbrook?

  No.

• 48:32Tom Holland?

  Custer has stronger hair action.

• 48:36Dominic Sandbrook?

  I'm going to make a comparison in a moment that will please you. Major Merrill came from Pennsylvania. He was a Dragoons officer. He had served under Custer on the frontier before being sent to York County. Custer absolutely hated him.

• 48:50Tom Holland?

  Why?

• 48:50Dominic Sandbrook?

  Well, maybe he was too good, as we'll discuss.

• 48:53Tom Holland?

  Yeah, fair enough.

• 48:55Dominic Sandbrook?

  Couple of other Seventh Cavalry characters. So one of them is Major Reno. Remember Major Reno?

• 48:59Tom Holland?

  Yeah, the one who squeals like a hog.

• 49:03Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah, but he of all people said of Major Merrill, that Major Merrill was a notorious coward and a jerk.

• 49:10Tom Holland?

  God, that's a bit rich.

• 49:11Dominic Sandbrook?

  Right. And you'll remember, of course, Captain Benteen.

• 49:14Tom Holland?

  Of course. Who could forget Captain Benteen? The one who was very like you.

• 49:18Dominic Sandbrook?

  Behind his chubby-cheeked cordiality was a dark and sinister intelligence or whatever. Captain Benteen said of Reno and Merrill, as poor a soldier as Reno was, he was a long way ahead of Merrill. Benteen also said of Merrill that Merrill was a chump.

• 49:34Tom Holland?

  Wow.

• 49:35Dominic Sandbrook?

  So anyway, he comes with poor reviews from three ludicrous men. So actually, that should, that should.

• 49:42Tom Holland?

  Alert people that actually he's probably a good guy.

• 49:44Dominic Sandbrook?

  He is. He's the hero of this story. So the New York Tribune said of him, he has the head, face and spectacles of a German professor and the frame of an athlete. Does that remind you of anybody, Tom?

• 49:56Tom Holland?

  Well, modesty, modesty prevents me.

• 50:01Tom Holland?

  From, from, from, from, from saying he sounds exactly like me.

• 50:06Dominic Sandbrook?

  He, Major Lewis Merrill is literally the Tom Holland of Pennsylvania.

• 50:09Tom Holland?

  Ah, and he's the hero of this story.

• 50:11Dominic Sandbrook?

  He is the hero of this story. He genuinely is the hero of this story. So Major Lewis Merrill arrives in York County. He is skeptical about all this stuff about the Klan. He just doesn't, he thinks the stories are exaggerated. You know, he's had no experience of it and he thinks that's probably all a load of rubbish. And he arrives and he starts talking to the victims and he is horrified by what he finds. He says, I never conceived of such a state of social disorganization being possible in any civilized community as exists in this county now. And he starts to gather evidence and then he realizes what he's up against. I mean, it is like the plot of a film or something. He, he realizes every local official in the county is a Klansman. There is a grand jury, but the judge is a Klansman.

• 50:56Dominic Sandbrook?

  Most of the jurors themselves are Klansmen and two of them have actually been involved in Klan murders. So Merrill has arrived, he's been there a few weeks. And then on the night of the 5th of May, there was the most shocking, I think in many ways, the most shocking of all Klan attacks. And the victim of this attack was a Baptist preacher, a black man called Elias Hill. And Elias Hill was about 50. He had been born into slavery in York County, but from the age of seven, he had been severely disabled. It's not clear whether it was polio or muscular dystrophy or something along those lines. So he can't walk, he can't crawl, he needs help to clothe and to feed himself. He is a very impressive person. He had learnt to read and write, he'd been taught by local white children that he kind of played with.

• 51:42Dominic Sandbrook?

  After the Civil War, he became an ordained preacher. He was the president of the local union league and he opened a school for black children. And all of this, of course, brought him to the attention of the Klan. And the fact that he was so severely disabled did not protect him. Cause at midnight on the 5th of May, a group of Klansmen burst into his cabin. They dragged him out into the yard, they beat him, they lashed him with a horse whip. They said that he was stirring up a race war. They accused him absurdly of plotting a campaign of rape against white women. And they beat him all night, they didn't kill him. But the story became a gigantic scandal because of course, the fact that he was so badly

• 52:26Dominic Sandbrook?

  disabled and that he couldn't escape, fight back or anything like that, and that he was such an impressive guy.

• 52:31Tom Holland?

  And he's a man of the cloth.

• 52:33Dominic Sandbrook?

  And a man of the cloth and all of this kind of thing explains why it becomes such a big scandal. And a few months later, actually, Hill left for Liberia and he went with about a hundred other African Americans, many of them from York County.

• 52:46Tom Holland?

  So that's in Africa.

• 52:47Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah, so Liberia and West Africa. And he told a congressional committee before he went, he said, we're going because, quote, "We do not believe it is possible for our people to live in this country peaceably." And his story ended very sadly because, like a lot of people who emigrated to Liberia at the time, he got malaria pretty much straight away and he died after six months. And that was the end of him. And for Major Merrill, the Tom Holland of this story, the attack on Hill is pretty much the last straw. He summoned a group of the bigwigs of York County and he said, "If I know some of you are Klansmen, if you do not stop this now, Washington will take really drastic measures."

• 53:29Dominic Sandbrook?

  But of course, the question is, will Washington ever take the measures that are necessary? So Ulysses S. Grant has been president since March 1869. He's been walking this very fine line because on the one hand, he's the hero of the North, he's the champion of radical reconstruction, he has delivered the 15th Amendment, which supposedly gives black men the right to vote. On the other hand, Grant's campaign slogan was, "Let us have peace." And that implies that this whole business is going to go away. His cabinet is full of relative moderates. Personally, he's pragmatic and he's quite cautious and conservative

• 54:11Dominic Sandbrook?

  and so on. And there are actually a lot of people in his party, allies of his, who are saying, "Okay, we've had, we really have had enough now. The 15th Amendment gives African Americans the right to vote and that should be it." So a good example is a guy who was another Civil War hero called James Garfield, goes on to become president, who's a moderate Republican congressman. Garfield said, and I quote, "The 15th Amendment confers upon the African race the care of its own destiny. It places their fortunes in their own hands."

• 54:45Tom Holland?

  So if they're being lynched, it's their own fault? Basically.

• 54:49Dominic Sandbrook?

  I guess the thing is, these people are raised in a world of laissez faire. You know, laissez faire, small l liberalism is an enormous element of Republican Party ideology. And actually, one reason they didn't like slavery, a lot of these people, is they thought it offended laissez faire. It didn't, you know, slavery was paternalistic and feudal. And it denied you your free labor and your freedom of expression and your your ability to make something of yourself, to stand on your own two feet. But they really do believe that excessive government intervention would be as bad.

• 55:30Tom Holland?

  But essentially, what they're saying is that that black people in these counties, where there is this great explosion of violence. What they should be doing is arming themselves and taking the fight to the Klansmen. I mean, effectively, that is a recipe for this race war that they keep talking about.

• 55:48Dominic Sandbrook?

  I don't disagree with you, by the way. To be fair to Washington, there is still just enough, to use an expression that our American listeners will enjoy. There is still enough gasoline left in the tank for them to do something about this. So in May 1870, February 1871, Congress passed two enforcement acts to prevent terror and intimidation in elections. And they took the jurisdiction away from the state courts to the federal courts to try to basically exercise some kind of supervision. And then April 1871, they passed the Ku Klux Klan Act. And this made it a federal offense, not a state offense, to conspire to deny other people's political rights.

• 56:29Dominic Sandbrook?

  And it gave the president power to send in troops against the Klan, crucially, to suspend habeas corpus and to make arrests without charge. In other words, they give the president that power. Now, the thing is, this goes back to the exchange we were just having. This was so massively controversial at the time. First of all, the Democrats hated it. The Democrats said, this is destroying civil liberty, it's destroying self-government. This is Ulysses S. Grant arresting people without charge, sending in troops, he is making himself a dictator.

• 57:05Tom Holland?

  Yeah.

• 57:05Dominic Sandbrook?

  But even many Republicans, including people who've been really close to Abraham Lincoln and who've been passionate abolitionists, said, this is going much too far. This is undermining our system. This is undermining civil liberties. You know, this far and absolutely no further. However, for Major Merrill, this is the weapon he needs. So he reported to a congressional committee. Grant sent his attorney general to South Carolina, who was a, he was a, his attorney general, interestingly, was a lawyer called Amos T. Aikerman, who had seen the Klan at firsthand because he'd organized the Republican Party in Georgia in the late 1860s.

• 57:46Dominic Sandbrook?

  And Aikerman went to York County and he met Merrill and he came back to Washington. He said, this guy Merrill is absolutely brilliant. He loved Merrill. And what he said was, he said, the thing that impresses me about Merrill is that Merrill went to York County and he didn't believe in the Klan. And he thought it was exaggerated. And precisely because of that, we should take him more seriously. The safer because incredulous at the outset and therefore disposed to scrutinize reports, the more keenly is what he said of Merrill.

• 58:16Tom Holland?

  Yeah. And resolute, collected, bold and prudent, very discriminating between truth and falsehood. So just like me.

• 58:21Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah, I knew you were going to quote that. You saw an opportunity to quote that and talk to basically make it about yourself and you, you took it and I, I respect it.

• 58:28Tom Holland?

  I, I was waiting for you to, to read that out and you didn't. So I was making up for it.

• 58:32Dominic Sandbrook?

  I mean, I would have done the same. So October, October 1871, Grant proclaimed a state of lawlessness in nine South Carolinian counties and he flooded them with troops and he suspended habeas corpus. So this is the thing that would have worked, right? But to get him to do it in just nine counties of South Carolina, so not even the whole state, is a huge undertaking. So the idea of him doing it across the whole of the South is just, I think utterly implausible. Anyway, he did it. The troops started making mass arrests. In York County alone, they locked up 200 people. By the end of the year, about 500 more people had voluntarily surrendered and given evidence. And the Klan leaders all fled. They all, a lot of them fled to Canada.

• 59:18Dominic Sandbrook?

  And it worked. By the end of 1871, the Klan in York County had basically ceased to exist and violence fell and the elections of 1872 were much more peaceful than previous years. In other words, finally, Grant basically grasped the nettle. He sent in the troops, he made all these mass arrests without charge, and it ended up working. And what happens to the Klan leaders once they've been locked up? Are they kept in prison for a long time or are they let out or what happens? It's not really a happy ending because the answer is nothing. Most people who are arrested are never prosecuted and even those prosecutions that happen don't really go anywhere. Most of the charges ended up being dropped or a lot of the defendants are actually

• 1:00:01Dominic Sandbrook?

  pardoned. And actually, northerners who went to report on this were often really shocked and sort of depressed by what they found. The New York Tribune sent a reporter and he said, when he talked to white people in York County, and I quote, "There seemed to be almost no public sense of right and wrong, no appreciation of the heinousness of crimes committed upon helpless and unoffending people." And the Attorney General, so this guy, Amos T. Aikman, you know, who had pulled this off, basically he had got his way, he said afterwards, "I feel greatly saddened by this business. It has revealed a perversion of moral sentiment among the southern whites which bodes ill for that part of the country

• 1:00:44Dominic Sandbrook?

  for this generation." And I think he was right, and I think this is the big, sort of, as it were, the takeaway from all this. Because the Klan was beaten, the Klan basically by this point, late 1871, 1872, has completely ceased to exist. But it has already achieved most of what it wanted to do. So in some states, the Klan made a massive difference. It made an electoral difference. So the Democrats were ready to regain control, for example, of Georgia and Alabama in 1870. The Klan smashed the Republican Party in the South. It destroyed local organisations. It made it impossible to basically be an open Republican. One Mississippi Republican said, "You can't basically have your best and most reliable

• 1:01:28Dominic Sandbrook?

  workers murdered with impunity and hope to function as a democratic organisation." And so the South will remain Democrat. For decades and decades to come. Exactly. It destroys the institutions of the black freedmen and freedwomen. So their churches, their schools and so on. Don't forget, these institutions are so precious because they're so new and because, you know, their independence is so fragile. And of course, the other big thing, it does what the Southerners had always planned to do. It destroys the patience and the political will of people in the North. So if you get to like, I don't know, 1872, you are 12 years on from the election of Abraham Lincoln and the outbreak of the war, pretty much. And

• 1:02:11Dominic Sandbrook?

  if you're in the North, you're sitting there in, you know, Illinois or Maine or wherever it might be. You've got a fat cigar, you've got a top hat, you're making loads of money in railroads. Yeah, right. And you're thinking to yourself, 12 years now, I've been listening to all this stuff and I'm app's, it's the most boring subjects in the world. It's a little bit when people used to say, we used the Northern Ireland parallel earlier. People in Britain never had strong views about Northern Ireland. They actually, as you will remember, Tom, to the disbelief of people in Northern Ireland, people in Britain would often say they found it really boring and they wished it would go away. And I think that's exactly how most people in the North think about the South. They just find the subject, they're sick of it. They don't understand it, they're bored

• 1:02:54Dominic Sandbrook?

  of it. They want everyone to stop talking about it. And they actually think at this point, if the Southern Republicans and the black people in the South can't defend themselves, sodden, you know, just fine. The South is the South, it's never going to change. I'm not going to spend loads of tax dollars on federal troops. You know, you can't have half of your country under military occupation the whole time. Just let them get on with it. And so because of all this, I don't think there is an alternative reality in which these, this could have worked out differently. First of all, I think there was never the will in the North to sustain a massive long-term military occupation. They were never going to pay for it. They're never going to rip up the federal system. That's one thing. But then the other thing, two thirds of the people

• 1:03:39Dominic Sandbrook?

  in the Confederacy are white. And they were just not prepared to accept the equality of their former slaves. They would never have accepted it. You know, these include the richest, most powerful, most influential people in that part of the world. And white supremacy was of such existential importance to them that they would do anything to preserve it. I mean, they fought a civil war to preserve it. The fact that they lost, they haven't changed their minds. They still think there is an, you know, an indissoluble wall between the races and they will do anything to restore it. And, and they do.

• 1:04:21Tom Holland?

  Because I suppose essentially what it would require would be an equivalent of denazification in Germany after the Second World War.

• 1:04:27Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah.

• 1:04:27Tom Holland?

  And I suppose the federal government just lacks the resources and perhaps even the will to force that through.

• 1:04:34Dominic Sandbrook?

  Completely. So just to finish off this part of the story, by the 1870s, most people in the North have lost interest, including many Republicans. There was then a massive financial crash in 1873, which triggered a depression that lasted for most of the rest of the decade. That was terrible news to the Republicans, of course, because they had a party in power. So the Democrats then made huge gains. They regained control of the House of Representatives. At the same time, as a general retreat from federal intervention, the Supreme Court starts to gut a lot of the Reconstruction legislation. It reinterprets the 14th Amendment. It makes it much harder for the federal government to enforce the, the laws that had been passed in the 1860s.

• 1:05:16Dominic Sandbrook?

  And so what you have in the 1870s is one state after another falling back to the Democrats, often in very violent circumstances. So the end of the Klan does not mean the end of the terrorist violence. There are successor groups, which nobody talks about now, a group in Louisiana called the White League, or a group in Mississippi and the Carolinas called the Red Shirts, that there's loads of violence at election times. And then once the Democrats have got control back, they don't need the violence anymore because they can pass laws to stop black people voting, like literacy tests or poll taxes. And so they win.

• 1:05:49Tom Holland?

  Are these groups not remembered because they lack the, the?

• 1:05:53Dominic Sandbrook?

  Branding of the Klan. They lack the pointy hats and all that. They don't have the same branding and they don't have successors. The Klan would probably be forgotten were it not for the Second Klan. Okay. Which we'll come to next time. The Klan would be like the Knights of the White Camellia. They'd be a sort of slightly lurid, exotic, paramilitary group of the eighteen sixties and seventies. But yeah, when people ever talked about the red shirts, you know, they're not forgotten, but they're very effective. Actually, here's the thing that really surprised me. The worst violence of all actually happens after the Klan has disappeared. So the single worst incident was in Colfax, Louisiana, in April eighteen seventy-three. There'd been a contested election for the state governor.

• 1:06:33Dominic Sandbrook?

  So there are sort of rival governors. There's a group of black Republicans are cornered in the Colfax courthouse by white paramilitaries. And the white paramilitaries killed about a hundred and fifty people. God, yeah, that's a lot of people. I mean, it's a lot of people. When you think how much something like the so-called Peterloo massacre, right, is is commemorated in Britain. It's a, it's a really good reminder of how much more violent American democracy has always been than, you know, British democracy, for example. I mean, there is a sort of culture of armed violence that is just unthinkable. In our, in our own dear country, Tom.

• 1:07:17Dominic Sandbrook?

  Good. Well, I'm, I'm glad that we emerged from this story well. So, um, the last nail in the coffin, so-called compromise of eighteen seventy-seven. Presidential election of eighteen seventy-six ends in deadlock between Republican Rutherford B. Hayes and the Democrat Samuel J. Tilden. Basically, they do a deal. The Republicans can keep the presidency. And in return, Rutherford B. Hayes will withdraw the last federal troops from South Carolina, Louisiana and Florida. And now the Democrats have kind of carte branche to regain control. Reconstruction is over. The laws are rolled back. Racial segregation ends up being enshrined in law a generation later. The Jim Crow system, Tom, that you were talking about.

• 1:07:56Dominic Sandbrook?

  And actually, well, an element of this is lynching becomes almost institutionalized. So by the eighteen nineties, you have hundreds of black men being lynched every year. And the Ku Klux Klan itself is now no more than a memory. So a generation after the this has all happened. So you get to the 1890s and the 1900s. It's sort of bundled in to this new cult of the lost cause of the Confederacy. So these are people who are, yeah, there are still Confederate heroes who are alive. You know, they're white bearded now. But their their successors, the generation below them, uh, who have, you know, reintegrated into the unions, the United States.

• 1:08:39Dominic Sandbrook?

  But they share this idea that although the South lost, it stood for something noble and precious. A kind of hierarchical feudal way of life. You know, this is the ideal that is celebrated in Gone with the Wind.

• 1:08:55Tom Holland?

  Yeah, that famous kind of opening, the the introduction.

• 1:08:58Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah, that the sort of noble gentleman.

• 1:09:02Tom Holland?

  Men were knights and ladies were princesses and all of that.

• 1:09:05Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah, and the black people, you know, they had their place.

• 1:09:09Tom Holland?

  They were happy. They knew their place. Yes.

• 1:09:11Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah, I mean, this is the the lost cause idea. And in this version of history, the Klan are not racist vigilantes, but they are the intrepid, swashbuckling defenders of white civilization. So the first historical account of the Klan, published in 1905 by a professor of history at Vanderbilt, quite a distinguished historian by the standards of the time, called Walter Linwood Fleming. Walter Linwood Fleming's father had been a planter and a slave owner and a Confederate cavalryman. And Walter Linwood Fleming said of the Klan, "The Ku Klux movement was the effort of by the southern white people to restore order and maintain control of their civilization, caused by the disorder in the South,

• 1:09:55Dominic Sandbrook?

  the inefficiency and corruption of the governments, and the alarm of the whites and negro domination." He says, "It wasn't a criminal group. It was composed of men of standing in their communities, and its declared object was to protect society from lawlessness." And he goes on to say, "There were excesses, but the organization as a whole aimed at restraint and control rather than destruction." And this, as shocking as it might now seem, becomes the standard view, both in academia and in popular culture. And in popular culture, the key figure who enshrines this is a writer and failed politician and failed Baptist minister from North Carolina called Thomas Dixon.

• 1:10:40Dominic Sandbrook?

  And Thomas Dixon's father had been a member of the Klan, his uncle had been in the Klan, one of its leaders in fact. And Dixon, in 1915, turned their lives into the inspiration for a novel called The Klansman, which then became a very popular play. And then in 1915, the most innovative film director of the age, one of the most innovative directors who's ever lived, D W Griffith, turns it into the first great narrative feature film, The Birth of a Nation. And this is a film that does two things. It revolutionises cinema, but it also resurrects the Ku Klux Klan, because just months after the release of Birth of a Nation, a second Klan is born. And by the mid 1920s, that second Klan

• 1:11:23Dominic Sandbrook?

  has literally millions of members.

• 1:11:27Tom Holland?

  And so Dominic, that is the story, The Birth of a Nation, the rebirth of the Klan that we will be telling next time. And it has, I think, all kinds of unexpected nuances and dimensions that was kind of news to me. And club members, of course, can hear that episode and the final episode in this series right away. If you are not a club member and you would like to hear those two, then you can go to the rest is history dot com. If you don't want to do any of that, then both episodes will be out next week. Thank you, Dominic. Thank you, everyone, for listening. Bye bye.

• 1:12:00Dominic Sandbrook?

  Bye bye.

• 1:12:11Speaker 02

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