Unlock The Secrets Of Carpetbaggers, Cavalry, And The Ku Klux Klan: Exposing The Invisible Empire During Reconstruction Devised By J. Michael Martinez File Format Publication Copy

was required reading for a class, The book is written by a lawyer with ties to South Carolina, It is a great example of a historical monograph but probably not for an average reader, Theres a lot of information in the book and can set you in many different directions after you get done, I gave it a four because there are times it is difficult to get through, In some places, the Ku Klux Klan KKK was a social fraternity whose members enjoyed sophomoric hijinks and homemade liquor, In other areas, the KKK was a paramilitary group intent on keeping former slaves away from white women and Republicans away from ballot boxes, South Carolina saw the worst Klan violence and, in, President Grant sent federal troops under the command of Major Lewis Merrill to restore law and order, Merrill did not eradicate the Klan, but they arguably did more than any other person or entity to expose the identity of the Invisible Empire as a group of hooded, brutish, homegrown terrorists.
In compiling evidence to prosecute the leading Klansmen and by restoring at least a semblance of order to South Carolina, Merrill and his men demonstrated that the portrayal of the KKK as a chivalric organization was at best a myth, and at worst a lie.
This is the story of the rise and fall of the Reconstructionera Klan, focusing especially on Major Merrill and the Seventh Cavalry's efforts to expose the secrets of the Ku Klux Klan to the light of day.
This is an excellent account of the post Civil War/Reconstruction period in the Piedmont area of South Carolina that saw the rise of the KKK, and how a determined team of military lawyers attempted to break the terror organization, arresting hundreds of members or sympathizers and attempting to get convictions, and jail time for the worst offenders, so as to crush the organization and send a message to the Whites that violence against Black freedmen, carpetbaggers, scalawags Southern sympathizers of the Union/abolition cause would not be tolerated.
They succeeded to some extent but unfortunately, as the years of Federal military occupation dragged on, Northern interest in Reconstruction waned, and priority was given to unifying the country, even at the expense of upholding Black rights, as set forth in Constitutional amendments.
By approximately ten years after the end of the Civil War, the last of the Federal troops were withdrawn from the final Southern states that still had troops stationed at state houses, and then the Whites were able to regain control of the political life of each of the former Confederate states, set up a system that was similar to what had existed before the war, except with no slavery but debt peonage under sharecropping instead, and no need to enforce White domination of the political sphere the goal of the KKK in the immediate postwar period because of their capture of the statehouses through legislation which blocked voting rights for Blacks, and also implemented segregation a system of apartheid that was upheld by the Supreme Court in a number of infamous decisions despite the Civil War and the Civil War amendments to the contrary.
And so the KKK died out once the Whites regained power in the South, since there was no need for it anymore however, a new version appeared in the earlyth Century in response to the hundreds of thousands of newlyarrived European immigrants, many of them Catholic or Jewish.
A new antiimmigrant and specifically antiSemitic KKK was revived throughout the USA in response to the perceived threat of the new immigrants to the traditions of the nativeborn often Protestant White Americans.
This iteration of the terror group also died out, and since then there has thank God not been a major outbreak of the Klan although there are still Klan organizations around, but tiny compared to the past, and under surveillance etc.


This is a wellwritten book which traces the reason why the Klan was organized in the post Civil War era strangely enough, the original Klan group which consisted of halfdozen men, wasnt organized to terrorize Blacks.
That group was organized by a group of aimless and foppish White youths who thought to play pranks on others, They happened to hit upon preying on Blacks, and it was a later group that actually turned the original gentlemans club into a secret terror group, There were many parallel similar groups throughout the former Confederacy, and the author states that these represented the response of disaffected Whites who were effectively shut out of political power in the postwar period by the Federal occupation troops, carpetbaggers, freedmen, and scalawags.
The only social effective space they could claim was that of lawlessness and terror and perhaps in this way they could feel they were protecting their way of life and especially feminine honor from the mythologized depredations of the newly powerful groups, especially Blacks.
This was of course a complete myth perpetrated to justify or explain deliberate attacks on politically active Blacks, any socially active Blacks, Black leaders, with the idea that terrorizing a highprofile Black individual would send a message to all the Blacks in the area to stay away from politics, social leadership, and the polls.
The ultimately depressing thing is that these Whites who did not want to share power at all, succeeded in virtually reconquering the South for themselves for almost another hundred years of injustice, until the new Civil Rights movement began again in thes which finally resulted in another iteration of the same Civil Rights Acts/legislation/amendments that had already been passed in the Civil war era, again being signed into law, and once again the cycle began of enforcing the antidiscrimination laws and so forth.
The process reached a peak in the middle portion of the last century but this raciallybased struggle never completely ended, although there has been an enormous amount of progress since thes, with numerous Black mayors, and other elected officials, Black policemen, and so forth.
However, the tendency is still to find ways to suppress the Black vote using, as before, legislation in an attempt to keep politics under White control in mostly Southern states although even in those states there have been some Black governors elected, although not that many.
Meanwhile, in the century and a half since the Civil War, waves of Blacks migrated North to find better paying industrial jobs, although as those jobs in turn migrated to Asia, many Blacks have actually migrated back to the South, where their renewed presence has added life to many cities, such as Atlanta.
The tendency of various groups to blame other groups for their problems continues however, with Latino immigrants currently being the latest object of fear, especially by workers displaced by industrial jobs having migrated to China and what jobs remain being taken by Latino immigrants who may take jobs at subpar wages, no benefits, and willing to work in dangerous jobs without recourse to OSHA because of their illegal immigration status.
The struggle is always over resources that is jobs, and power that is, political power and unfortunately, despite the US being a meltingpot, the divisions seem to recur and tear apart the fabric of society with a vengeance again and again, exacerbated by such spectacles of cruelty and horror as the George Floyd or Eric Garner killings.
The book under discussion is an account of one of the original attempts to set things right with respect to equal access to political power in the immediate post Civil War era it shows the obstacles in getting convictions since the judges in South Carolina were often sympathetic to the Klan if not secret Klansmen themselves, likewise juries.
But these Federal military lawyers and the Attorney General of the US persisted and did make some progress, What progress they made, unfortunately, however, was relatively ephemeral as noted above, since once the Federal troops left, the system of Jim Crow resubjugation of Blacks through legislation arrived at the same result as the previous reign of Klan terror: Suppression of freedmen, their exclusion from opportunities, and the eventual migration of thousands of them North.
This unfortunately is the truth about the outcome of the Civil War although it did of course outlaw slavery, the dominion, that is sociopolitical domination, of Whites over Blacks and later freedmen, did not end and so the Whites, who wanted it all money and power could then feel they had somehow succeeded in reinstating their former unjust system.
Sadly, this in effect was true as discrimination and segregation was upheld in a number of unjust decisions by the Supreme Court, The only thing society can do even today is ensure that all groups of citizens enjoy equal voting rights, and do not suffer discrimination in employment, housing, education, on account of their race, ethnic origin, or religion.
Sadly, despite thes legislation, there is still de facto segregation in education as many White families put their children into private schools, so that public school systems become filled with mostly minoritymember students.
In housing, the process is similar: The sorting takes place according to income level, so that expensive suburbs may have only a few welloff Blacks, while rundown innercity areas are mostly inhabited by minority group members.
The cycle is perpetrated seemingly indefinitely by urban educational system that cannot match those of the wealthier suburbs, If a student is illprepared educationally, they will not be employed at the higherpaying positions, which will inevitably then go to the candidates from the wealthier, whiter, suburbs, And so generation after generation, despite Civil Rights legislation, wealth is inevitably built up by Whites in general, while staying depressed within the minority groups, This is a pattern that can only be broken by pouring money into the inner city school system so that their educational preparation can somehow match that of the students from the wealthier suburbs.
Unfortunately, the tax base of some of the rundown post industrial cities does not allow for that to happen, especially if money has to be spent on social services in general.
And so from year to year, the same social trap is sprung on the next generation of unfortunate minority group members, unable to break out of the cycle of powerlessness because they are unable to secure highpaying jobs, economic power, etc.
And when that happens, they often perhaps logically give up on political participation, which explains why they often do not go to the polls, even without suppressive legislation in place.
And how can anyone blame them,

Here are the quotes from the book: Klan, . . targets included blacks, especially freedmen, emancipated from slavery, Northern carpetbaggers" who came to the South to interfere in Southern affairs, and Southern Unionists derisively labeled scalawags, The original Klan died . before Reconstruction ended in thes, Rather than improving their condition as individuals, Klansmen look to the past and think of themselves collectively, . yearn for halcyon days when white men were masters of their domain and no one, . . questioned their unbridled authority . Major Lewis Merrill, the solider who led the federal governments Reconstructionera investigation into the South Carolina Ku Klux Klan, Once Grants attorney general, Amos T, Akerman, left he administration at the end ofand Grant, . . was reelected the following year, the federal government retreated from its commitment to protecting the freedmen, By, after Rutherford B. Hayes was elected president in the contestedelection and ordered federal troops to stop guarding the Louisiana and South Carolina statehouses, Reconstruction ended, President Andrew Johnson issued a proclamation of amnesty on May,, Except for the Confederate leadership, the president, . . pardoned all Southerners for their roles in the rebellion, . . the Radical Republicans were astonished when Johnson vetoed both the bill extending the Freedmens Bureau and the Civil Rights Bill of, Benjamin F. Wade, a . Radical Republican from Ohio, was elected, . . to the U. S. Senate in, and emerged as a fierce critic of slavery, Many of his statements criticizing American capitalism were so, . . radical they echoed the arguments of European Socialists, In his view, an economic system which degrades the poor man and elevates the rich, which makes the rich richer ad the poor poorer, which drags the very soul out of a poor man for a pitiful existence is wrong.
With assistance from carpetbaggersan allusion to their supposed propensity to call all they owned in cheap carpetbagsfreedmen struggled to find a place in their new world, Southern Unionists who dared lend a hand were deemed scalawags, an epithet referencing, . . the town of Scalloway in the Shetland Islands, infamous for its poor quality, . . cattle. In Attorney General Akermans view, admonitions to obey the law and threats of legal prosecution absent a credible show of armed force were useless, . . Lincolns promise of malice toward none, charity for

all was also, . . ineffective. Klansmen viewed kindness as timidity As the cradle of the, . . Confederacy a state filled with unreconstructed Rebels, South Carolina, . . became a crucial battleground in the fight to reconstruct the Union, President Johnson allowed Southern states to undermine federal requirements and adopt black codes that would end slavery in name only, Although The South was required to obey edicts, . . from Northern leaders that did not stop the white ruling class from imposing harsh conditions on freedmen, . . such that conditions of near servitude existed, poor crops inand forced planters to seek creative means of compensating former slaves for their work, sharecropping was born of necessity, but . persisted because it was an effective means of keeping blacks, . . mired in debt and tied to the land, Planters borrowed money from a bank using, land and crops as collateral, Blacks owend no land. . had no collateral all they owned was their labor, So the planter would furnish a small shack, food and clothing, farm animals, and feed and seed to blacks in exchange for heir tlabor, Some . even established a company store where, . . blacks could buy on credit until the crop was harvested, credit acted as a lien on a tenant farmers meager physical possessions, ensuring that he and his family would remain, . . until harvesting time. When the crop came in and the money was repaid to remove the lien, the tenant had no money, . . left. He asked for more credit ensuring that he would remain on the land, . . To maximize return on investment in order to, . . pay the bank note, purchase supplies for the, . . laborers, realize a profit, a planter had to, . . grow highyield crops, mostly cotton, But over time cotton overproduction forced the price of cotton lower and, . . the soil was not replenished of, . . nutrients . the planter grew more cotton to compensate in volume for what he lost in revenue, the destructive cycle lead to a depression of the Southern economy, . . well into the twentieth century, It linked white planters to black laborers in a mutually enervating, embittering relationship of nearpoverty and, desperation . white South Carolinians resisted Reconstruction throughout thes ands so as to preserve the traditional social hierarchy, Most whites who joined the Klan had never owned slaves, . . but Without assurances that whites would, . . again control the mechanisms of government and enjoy a superior social status, . . freed blacks represented a threat to the Southern way of life, As the elections approached, conservative whites were determined to, . . wrest control from carpetbaggers, scalawags, and freedmen, all, seen as sources of widespread corruption, the York district suffered the highest Civil War casualty rate in, . . South Carolina Even if a farmer could retain his land, he knew little of farming techniques or strategies for replenishing nutrients in the soil, the average farmer therefore worked fewer acres compared with, . . the antebellum years, and each acre produced smaller and smaller yields as the years passed, Grant was reluctant to antagonize Southerners any more than was necessary, Although Grant knew Democrats and proSouthern whites would regard his action sending the Army to South Carolina to prevent KKK outrages as a first step toward a military dictatorship, . . he thought he had little choice if he hoped to stop the Klan, Acknowledging that a state of rebellion existed in South Carolina, . . the president, acting as commanderinchief of the armed forces pursuant to Article II of the Constitution, suspended habeas corpus in the nine Upstate counties during the continuance of the, . . rebellion, the first time in American history a president took, . . such drastic measures in peacetime. President Andrew Johnson believed that the U. S. Constitution was a document limiting federal authority in favor of the states, . . Attorney General Akerman warned Justice Department officials and prosecutors that, as long as, . . bad men believe you are unable to protect yourselves, they will cherish the purpose of injuring you as soon as the hand of the Government shall be withdrawn, on both sides of the MasonDixon Line citizens yearned to look ahead, not behind, president Grant offered amnesty to former Klansmen in, Thomas Dixon Jr. snovel, The Clansman, glorified the KKK and became, . . a model for the resurrection of he group in, D. W. Griffiths film The Birth of a Nation, was loosely based on The Clansman, In December Akerman resigned. It was unclear whether he quit to protest the Grant administrations refusal to pursue future Klan prosecutions with vigor or was forced out for political considerations apart from the Ku Klux Klan, it soon became clear that, . . his successor would no longer actively prosecute the KKK, Northern whites had grown weary of the NorthSouth schism, Apathy set in . commerce and industry beckoned. Most political leaders were uninterested in, . . policing the South. After the Radical Republicans passed on in thes ands, . . new congressional leaders had no interest in stirring up the divisive, intractable issues of race and social relations raised by the Civil War, the party of Lincoln became, by, . . the party of big business and unfettered free enterprise, The nation had entered a new age. A quarter of a million factories employed,million workers in Steel production increased from,tons into,tons in, an astonishing,percent increase, Per The Constitution electoral votes should be counted in the presence of both houses of Congress, but, . . the parties represented in each chamber could not agree on which electors should be recognized and which votes should be counted, Reconstruction became less a way of reincorporating the former Confederate states into the Union than a way, . . of punishing a way of life and attitudes unpopular north of the MasonDixon Line, .