The Rest Is History - 655. The Ku Klux Klan: Terror in the South (Part 2)

Episode Date: March 26, 2026

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: [e-mail] _______ 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

When West Jet first took flight in 1996, the vibes were a bit different. People thought denim on denim was peak fashion, inline skates were everywhere, and two out of three women rocked, the Rachel. While those things stayed in the 90s, one thing that hasn't is that fuzzy feeling you get when WestJet welcomes you on board. Here's to Westjetting since 96. Travel back in time with us and actually travel with us at westjet.com slash 30 years. 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. 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, be able to be executed. by a white death and rattling skeleton. At 10 tonight. K, K, K, K. 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, K, K, K, K, stand of course for the Ku Klux Klan.

And I think it is worth pointing out that not only are the Ku Klux Klan, a very violent, murderous and racist, but also they can't spell. What have they misspelled? Klan. Oh, yes, with the K, the K. Yeah, it's with a C. Yes, you're not wrong, Tom. I'm not wrong. Last episode, you did that whole reading where all the Cs were turned into K's.

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 U.S. Congress.

So last time we decided how the clan was founded in Pulaski, Tennessee, in the summer of 1866, 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 kind of farmers and laborers. As 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 salesman. You know, we all need

insurance, Tom. Anyway, at its peak, the clan has a dends in a quarter of southern counties, has got about 150,000 members, and their targets are the three to four million newly liberated freed men and freed women of the South. And they're about a third of the population, and the other two thirds are white. So these people are the clan'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 S. Grant. 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. Because what he had done in his sort of dogged and quiet and sort of small sea 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. And in 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. Corrupt and boring, I think, is what he called it. So he is boring, but he's not particularly corrupt, is he actually? So we should draw back on that. The trend now among historians is just 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 indeed, a lot of Americans would say he wasn't actually even that boring. He was just quiet. Okay, so that's the scholarly consensus. He wasn't boring either. Shocking. We fully take that back then. This is the way history works.

Wild swings of scholarly opinion. Okay, so he wasn't boring either. 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... But since then. Yeah.

And I just want to make it clear to people on the Reddit. We're not responding to you. No, we're not. We're responding to trends in scholarship. That's what we always do. Yeah. Ten years of historical scholarship equals one year of the rest is history. So 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. He's 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, that 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 side, they nominate the former governor of New York, Horatio Seymour. And Horatio Seymour is standing on an uncompromising platform of white supremacy. So Horatio Seymour and the Democrats say we will give amnesty to the Confederate, 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. Sure, they've been in rebellion. Let's get them back into Congress. Again, let's all be friends. And let's stop intervening in the South 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. But Dominic, this Frank Blair, he is the worst, as people will see, when you read out what he actually said. Yeah, very shocking. He said, the radicals want to hand power to a semi-baric race of blacks who are, he said, going to subject white women to their unbridled lust. And that is such a common theme, isn't it? I mean, they're obsessed by that idea of... Completely. The fear of miscegenation, yes. Black men, deflowering white women and all of that.

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. You know, there isn't a headquarters from which orders go out. This is basically an alliance of loosely linked vigilante groups in the small towns and villages of the rural south. And they are united by their opposition to the Republican Party into 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 clan was founded. So in Tennessee, that election, there is extensive violence. violence in Pulaski and the surrounding countryside. Black men were threatened with death if they voted

Republican. They were offered protection papers. They're offered sort of indemnities if they voted Democrats. So there's not a secret ballot. People can see how you're voting. 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. They'll be clustering around you. They can watch you as you do it. Exactly. People will be watching. There'll be huge mob of people around you. Rather like, 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 shoulders

as you vote. So of the 2000 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.

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, Parsons 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.

At 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 Aberville County, two Republicans. 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 B.F. Randolph, who had been a chaplain to a U.S. Army regiment, a black regiment, in the Civil War. And B.F. Randolph was shot in broad daylight on a railway platform with loads of people standing around by three men who

then rode off unchallenged and were never caught and never convicted. 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. 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 clansmen 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 a lot 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 1 vote. And unbelievably, in 11 Georgia counties, with black majorities. So this is where the Republican vote would be really strong. Ulysses S. Grant, got no votes at all. 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. And there is no attempt to kind of legislate against these results and to say, well, they're obviously corrupt or a result of intimidation. 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. They're in the Enforcement's Act and the Kukkos 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, you 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 Kukukok's clan. And I mentioned in the last time, the Knights of of the white camellia. I can't take them seriously with that. In the, well, I mean, you definitely take them seriously if you leave 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 chamele killed at least 200 black people. people in the weeks and days before the election. And there is no legal government response to this at all? Here is the issue with this whole story.

I mean, the United States is a federal system, separation of powers, but also the sort of division of responsibility between the federal government and the states. Yeah, so states' rights, but states don't have the right to go around killing people. So in somewhere like Louisiana, if the state authorities are in the hands, you know, of people 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 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 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 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. Even if 200 innocent people are being killed. Well, they're shocked by this, which is why they're. 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 had 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.

Right. 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 maintain their rights. I mean, there are lots of people who think that, and there'll be some listeners who are really ahead of me, I guess, what lies partly behind this is the fact that a lot of people in the North, even if they're anti-slavery, are still quite racist. They're 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. Okay. Yeah, understood. It's a hugely complicated story. I mean, I remember, I did this at university, and I can remember in our tutorial 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

behave as they did in the 1860s and 1870s. So anyway, to get back to the results, Grant won the election. He won 26 states to Seymour's 8, and he took the electoral college easily and he became the next president. However, there are three important takeaways from all this. Number one, everybody was shocked how close the popular vote was. So Grant won three 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. In Louisiana, I mentioned, in six parishes in Louisiana, Ulysses S. Grant got one vote, 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 he rejects prejudice and hate. He wants to see the 15th Amendment ratified

so the 15th Amendment would forbid any state denying you the right to vote based on your colour or your race or previous condition of servitude. In other words, basically gives ex-male slaves the right to vote. But since the election, the clan'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. Parsons Brownlow, the governor, had hired a detective to infiltrate the clan in Pulaski.

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, 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, Brownow finally agreed to do it. So this is nine days after his detective has been killed.

He says, he announces publicly, he says there's a reign of terror in Middle 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 clan clearly panics. 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 clan, the original one, actually disbands. So we don't know exactly when, but sometime in late spring or summer of 1869, the white Tennessee the clan leadership basically renounces the clan, and that's the end of it. So it's a massive result for Parsons Brownlow. Well, it looks like it, but actually there's a twist. Oh, no.

The reason they've done it is partly because they don't actually need it anymore. Because Parsons 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 Pastor 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 manner, he's triangulating. He is triangulated, 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 clan, which is attributed to the grand tycoon. I don't think we had a grand tycoon in the previous episode. I don't think we did. This is a Guilted 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, we are done. So that's them done in Tennessee. But outside Tennessee, the clan rides on. Because outside Tennessee, nobody cares what, you know, the Imperial Wizard General Forest 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 U.S. 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. So if you take the example of 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 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. 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 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 introduced by generations of historians. And what 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, it's 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 of me, this detail from one of the books, I think it was Alan's release. The white southerners have 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 you before you spoke to him. I mean, unbelievable. And now they've got a black governor. And now they've got a black governor. This is why. I mean, this, that world for you. That world for you. were so entrenched. I mean, that is the thing that is perhaps hardest

for people in the 21st century outside that part of the world to get their heads around. Just how deeply entrenched and how deeply embedded that worldview is. 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, 600, 700 people are possible to say.

The sort of death toll that might be comparable to the troubles in Northern Ireland 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 clan 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, reestablish control of the black labor force, and restore racial subordination in every aspect of southern life. So, Dominic, to pursue the the Northern Ireland comparison, the Ku Klux Klan are to the Democrats, what the IRA are to Sinn Féin? 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. Yeah. Because they've been supported by Democratic newspapers. They're very closely linked to Democratic politicians. You know, their aim is to destroy the Republican Party. So yeah, absolutely. I mean, it's quite one Florida politician. The guy could Emmanuel Fortune, who was driven out of Jackson County, Florida by the clan. 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. 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 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 clansmen, 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. 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 nightclothes 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. 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 Utah, Alabama, in 1874 people were killed. In the same month, in Lawrence County, South Carolina, the clan 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, Mississippi.

Three black leaders were arrested by the white authorities who were based in league with the clan for making what they said were incendiary speeches. And at their court hearing, the court hearing was invaded by Klansman. The Klansman killed the judge at the court hearing, a Republican, and two of the defendants, and then ran a mock 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 Washington or in the north to intervene on such a scale. You would have to be a massive scale, right? You'd have to flood every southern county with troops in order to stop this. And I suppose that 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. And so presumably the more they realize you can get away with, the more the violence escalates. Right. Well, 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 and the broadest sense. And you asked about people who can read and write and so on. The clan 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 passes by, 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. So basically it's about keeping them in helitage. 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 clan wields unparalleled power, where its word is law and you cannot challenge it. To quote Alan Trillis, the brilliant historian of the first clan,

In this county, in every subject, the clan 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 clan after the break. This episode is brought to you by the Folio Society. And it's Tabby and Dominic here from the book club, Gollhanger's latest show. Now Tabby, as you know, there are some books that you read once, but there are others you especially return to again and again. And those second kind of books, they really deserve to last, don't they?

That's what the Folio Society does. They are an independent, employee-owned publisher based in London. Every book is produced with specially commissioned beautiful artwork and a specially commissioned introduction that puts the story in its context. Folio Society publishes the books we love, from Bronte to Dickens, from Margaret Atwood to Tom Holland. The books can feel like works of art in their own right. They're built around the text, the stories that last in books that are made to last.

If a story matters, keep it properly. Find it at foliosociety.com slash the book club. That's foliosociety.com slash the book club. 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 sudden 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? 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, a 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 will always go with the Republicans, you know, unless there's some, you know, they've been incredibly corrupt or something. Yeah, 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 Trellise in his history of the clan 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 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 organise an 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. 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, serials, that kind of thing. The clan 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, and the clan spread exponentially. The local leader was the sheriff, Major James W. Avery. He was a Confederate war veteran. He was actually wounded at Appomattox on the last day of the one, 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 clan. 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 Klansman came to his house, they dragged him out, they shot him, and they cut his throat. His widow was able to identify some of the killers. But this landowner, William C. Black, paid. for the defence of the killers. He organised 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. 11 people murdered. Hundreds of people beaten and whipped, including women and children. Five black schools were burned down. One of them was burned down four times. They kept rebuilding it and they just burned it down again. And to give, again, to give people a bit of context. 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 furority, right, if so many people were to be killed in Stratford-upon-Avon, but obviously this is in the context of the 1870s when violence is much more common. Well, we talked about stress testing how far you can go, kind of testing the boundaries of

permissible behavior. And this must surely be pushing at those boundaries to the extreme. I mean, can the federal government ignore violence on this scale? Well, what they do is 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. So they're like UN peacekeepers? They're totally like UN peacekeepers. 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, they're actually the people

who are carrying out the crimes. So the Klansmen actually, after the federal troops came in, they carried on killing people. And then on the 6th of March, they carried out one of the most notorious of all Klan murders. This was the murderer of man called Jim Williams. Jim Williams was about 40 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 old county after the war. He spoke out against the clan and he organized 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 organization for the freedmen, to arm themselves, you know, let's protect ourselves, all of this kind of thing. We're not going to take us lying down. And the clan invited him to a kind of parley at a crossroads on the 11th of February.

met on the 11th of February and he said, look, we will stand down and we'll actually give up our weapons if you promised 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 rumors around the couch. They said, Williams is keeping his weapons because he's planning to lead an uprising of black people to murder and rape, you know, all the white people in the county. And on the night of the 6th of March, a local doctor called J. 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 60 men wearing masks. They broke into Williams' cabin and they found him hiding under the floorboards. They dragged him out and they hanged him. from a tree. Terrible story of this, and they left him hanging there for days with the 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. 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 Yorkville Inquirer, condemned violence on both sides. That's always the way, isn't it? Right. Good people on both sides. Yeah, correct. And said, 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 and compromising. They issued a statement in response, the intelligent, honest white people at 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. 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 here's your classic example of what the Southerners later called carpetbaggers. You know, they had this idea that loads of unscrupulous northerners were coming down to the south with their possessions in a carpet bag 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 your county. And his argument was, well, if I do that, that will basically mean, 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 if there are fewer of them, you know, experience shows that they will always go further, behave more badly. You know, 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 am delighted to report that they are companies of our old friends

in the Seventh 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 2? Yeah. This is it. It's the prequel.

It's the prequel to... The Phantom Menace of the Custer series. So, actually, the 7th 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. So I looked him up. Yeah. His beard, it has to be said, is not impressive. No. Custer has stronger hair action. I'm going to make a comparison in a moment that will please you. Major Meryl 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. Why? Well, maybe he was too good as well to discover. Yeah, fair enough. A couple of other 7th Cavalry characters. So one of them was Major Reno.

Remember Major Reno? Yeah, the one who squeals like a hog. Yeah, but he of all people said of Major Merrill, the Major Merrill was a notorious coward and a shirk. God, that's a bit rich. Right. And you'll remember, of course, Captain Benton. Of course.

Who could forget Captain Benton? The one who was very like you. Behind his chubby, cheap, cordiality was a dark and sinister intelligence. Yes, that one. Captain Benton said of, of Reno and Merrill. As poor a soldier as Reno was, he was a long way ahead of Merrill. Benton also said of Merrill that Merrill was a chump.

Wow. So anyway, he comes to poor reviews from three ludicrous men. So actually, that should alert people that actually he's probably a good guy. 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? Well, modesty prevents me from saying he sounds exactly like me. Major Lewis Merrill is literally the Tom Holland of Pennsylvania. And he's the hero of this story. He is the hero of this story. He is the hero of this story. So Major Lewis Merrill arrives in York County. He is skeptical about all this stuff about the clan.

He just doesn't. He thinks the stories are exaggerated. You know, he's had no experience of it and he thinks, this is probably a lot 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 realizes every local official in the county is a Klansman. there is a grand jury, but the judge is a Klansman, most of the jurors themselves are Klansmen, and two of them have actually been involved in Klan murders. So Merylis 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 learned to read and write. He'd been taught by local white children that he kind of played with. 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 clan. And the fact that he was so severely disabled did not protect him. Because at midnight on the 5th of May, a group of clansmen 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 disabled

and that he couldn't escape, fight back or anything like that, and that he was such an impressive guy. And he's a man of the cloth. And a man of the cloth and all of this kind of thing. It explains why he becomes such a big scandal. And a few months later, actually, Hill left for Liberia. And he went with about 100 other African Americans, many of them from York County. So that's in Africa.

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 sort of bigwigs of U.S. York County, and he said, I know some of you are Klansman. If you do not stop this now, Washington will take really drastic measures. 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 and so on.

And there are actually a lot of people in his party, allies of his, who are saying, okay 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. So if they're being lynched, it's their own fault. basically. I guess the thing is these people are raised in the 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 lay-s and your freedom of expression and 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.

But essentially what they're saying is 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 clansmen. I mean, effectively that is a recipe for this race war that they keep talking about. 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 we enjoy. There are 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 Coo Clucks Can Act. And this made it a federal offence, not a state offence, to conspire, to deny other people's political rights. And it gave the president power to send in troops against the clan, 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. Yeah. But even many Republicans, including people who've been really close to Abraham Lincoln and who have 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... His Attorney General, interestingly, was a lawyer called Amos T. Aikerman,

who had seen the clan at first hand because he'd organized the Republican Party in Georgia. in the late 1860s. And Aikerman went to York County and he met Merrill and he came back to Washington and 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 clan 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 them more keenly is what he said of Merrill.

Yeah, and Resolute, collected, bold and prudent, very discriminating between truth and falsehood. So just like me. 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 took it and I respect it. I was waiting for you to read that out and you didn't, so I was making out for it. I mean, I would have done the same.

So October 1871, Grant proclaimed a state of lawlessness in nine South Carolina counties and he flooded them with troops and he said. 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 clan leaders all fled. A lot of them fled to Canada. And it worked. By the end of

1871, the clan 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 clan 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 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, to this guy, Amos T. Aikerman, 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 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 clan was beaten. The clan 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 clan made a massive difference. It made an electoral difference. So the Democrats have already regained control, for example, of Georgia and Alabama in 1870. The clan smashed the Republican Party in the South. It destroyed local organizations. It made it impossible to basically be an open Republican.

One Mississippi Republican said, you can't basically have your best and most reliable workers murdered with impunity and hope to function as a democratic organization. And so the South will remain Democrat for decades and decades to come. Exactly. It destroys the institutions of the black freed men and freed women. So their churches, their schools and so on. Don't forget these institutions are so precious because they're so new and because 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 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 apps. 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 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, Sodom. you know, just fine.

The South is the South is 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 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 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. 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

war between the races and they will do anything to restore it. And they do. Because I suppose essentially what it would require would be an equivalent of denazification in Germany after the Second World War. Yeah. And I suppose the federal government just lacks the resources and perhaps even the will to force that through? 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 were the party in power. So the Democrats then made huge gains. They regained control of the House of Representatives. At the same time, there's 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 laws that had been passed in the 1860s. 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 clan 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. Are these groups not remembered because they lack the branding of the clan? They lack the pointy hats and all that. They don't have the same branding and they don't have successes. The clan would probably be forgotten where we're not for the second clan, which will come to you next time. The clan would be like the knights of the white camellia. They'd be a sort of slightly lurid, exotic paramilitary group of the 1860s and 70s.

But yeah, when people ever talked about the red shirts, you know, they're not forgotten, but they're very effective. Actually, here's a thing that really surprised me. The worst violence of war, and actually it happens after the clan has disappeared. So the single worst incident was in Colfax, Louisiana, in April and 1873. there'd been a contested election for the state governor. 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 150 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 commemorated in Britain, it's a really good reminder of how much more violent American democracy has always been than British democracy, for example.

I mean, there is a sort of culture of armed violence that is just unthinkable in our own dear country, Tom. Good. Well, I'm glad that we emerge from this story well. So the last name in the coffin, so-called compromise of 1877, presidential election of 1876 ends in deadlock between Republic. Rutherford B. Hayes and the Democrat Samuel J. Tilden, basically 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 blanche 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. And actually, well, elements of this is lynching becomes almost institutionalized. So by the 1890s, 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, you know, there are still Confederate heroes who are alive, you know, they're white bearded now. But their successors, the generation below them, who have, you know, reintegrated into the Union, to the United States. 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. Yeah, that famous kind of opening, the introduction.

Yeah, that the sort of noble gentleman. Men were knights and ladies were princesses and all of that. Yeah. And the black people knew, you know, they had their place. They were happy. They knew their place, yes. Yeah. I mean, this is the lost cause idea.

And in this version of history, the clan are not racist vigilantes, but they are the intrepid, swashbuckling defenders of white civilisation. So the first historical account of the clan, published in 1905, by a professor of history of 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 cavalry man. And Walter Linwood Fleming said of the clan, the Ku Klux movement was the effort by the southern white people to restore order and maintain control of their civilization, caused by the

disorder in the South, 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 organisation 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. And Thomas Dixon's father had been a member of the clan, his uncle had been in the clan, one of its leaders, in fact. And Dixon in 1915 turned their lives into the inspiration for a novel called The Clansman, 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 has 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 revolutionizes cinema, but it also resurrects the Ku Klux Klan, because just months after the release of birth of a nation, a second clan is born, and by the mid-1920s, that second clan has literally millions of members. And so, Dominic, that is the story, the birth of nation,

the rebirth of the clan 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.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. Bye-bye.