| The Attack On Fort Stedman, And (My Great Grandfather) |
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THREE MONTHS AFTER LEE SURRENDERED at Appomattox President Andrew Johnson appointed James Johnson, a highly respected Columbus lawyer, as governor of Georgia; and, assisted by the state's wartime chief executive, Joseph E. Brown, now turned Republican, the new appointee conscientiously took up the task of restoring Georgia to the Union. He promptly issued a call for a state convention, which met in October and repealed the ordinance of secession, abolished slavery and took other steps looking to the readmission of the state. Governor Johnson, however, served for only a few months, and at the regular election held in November, 1865, he was succeeded by Charles J. Jenkins, an old-line Whig.
Jenkins, although a staunch Union man, had equally firm convictions about the rights of the states; and in March, 1867, when Congress passed the Reconstruction Act over the President's veto, Governor Jenkins applied to the Supreme Court of the United States for an injunction to prevent Secretary Stanton and Generals Grant and Pope from putting the act into effect in Georgia. This heroic gesture was fruitless, as the Court denied its jurisdiction; but Jenkins seemed sincerely determined to give the state an honest administration. In December, 1867, he refused to payout forty thousand dollars of the state's money to cover the expenses of the rump constitutional convention being held in Atlanta; and for this flagrant act of defiant honesty he was removed from office in January by General Meade, who had succeeded Pope as commander of the Third Military District. The Secretary of State and the Comptroller were removed at the same time, Meade appointing army officers to their places; and thus, by a stroke of the pen, Georgia was reduced to a military government.
There ensued the usual train of troubles and disorder common to the Southern States at that time. The carpetbaggers were swarming in and, together with the scalawags, soon were in control of the state government, including the judiciary. The Loyal Leagues began to blossom in all their menacing, militant mystery; and unrest among the negroes rapidly increased. Mrs. Frances Butler Leigh in her Ten Years on a Georgia Plantation tells of the ominous change in the demeanor of the negro servants after they began to fall under the influence of the League's teachings. They assumed, she said, an obnoxiously familiar air with their employers, treated the women with disrespect, worked only when they felt so inclined and threw fear into the white people's hearts by their marching about with guns on their shoulders. Mrs. Leigh wrote that in those times she never slept without a pistol under her pillow, as did women on isolated plantations throughout the South.
As a natural corollary of the growing terror, the Ku Klux Klan soon appeared in Georgia, as it had in other states. The native white citizens saw these menacing organizations led by, unscrupulous white agitators, and in their helpless political condition they felt the futility of ordinary, lawful defensive measures. John B. Gordon, late general in the Confederate army, reflected the prevailing sentiment of the native population of his state - and of the South - when he told the Congressional Committee:
“We, in Georgia, do not believe that we have been given proper credit for our honesty of purpose. We believe that if our people had been trusted, as we thought they ought to have been trusted - if we had been treated in the same spirit which, as we thought, was manifested on the Federal side at Appomattox Court House - a spirit which implied that there had been a conflict of theories, an honest difference of opinion as to our rights under the general government - a difference upon which the South had adopted one construction and the North another, both parties having vindicated their sincerity upon the field in a contest which, now that it had been fought out, was to be forgotten - if this had been the spirit in which we had been treated, the alienation would have been cured. But to say to our people: "You are unworthy to vote; you can not hold office; we are unwilling to trust you; you are not honest men; your former slaves are better fitted to administer the laws than you are" - this sort of dealing with us has definitely alienated our people. The burning of Atlanta and all the devastation through Georgia never created a tithe of the animosity that has been created by this sort of treatment of our people.”
Excerpted from INVISIBLE EMPIRE
The Story of the Ku Klux Klan 1866-1871
Published 1939
Stanley F. Horn, Author
Pages 168-170
Reprint Edition
Crown Rights Book Company
Reprinted 2001
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