US. Representative Philadelph Van Trump, conservative Democrat of OH, circa. 1867-1873
On December 5, 1870, President Grant declared that black voters were being denied the exercise of their voting rights by intimidation and violence in several states “lately in rebellion.” He was principally influenced by North Carolina Governor William Holden’s clamoring for Federal Government assistance, alleging that the Ku Klux Klan was holding North Carolina in a state of terror. Actually, since Confederate veterans had been disenfranchised by the February 1867 Reconstruction Act, as much as 85 percent of the native white Southern vote was still substantially suppressed, and voting was under the control of carpet-bagger governments and Federal Army troops
Governor Holden also had an armed and constantly drilled Union League force of 80,000 predominantly black militia spread across most of the state burning barns and threatening and terrorizing both white and black. The Union League and the KKK.
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My impression of the Klan is that it was made to protect Southern people from abuses.
ReplyDeleteThe original klan, for sure.
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