CA 207Fact card produced in 1993 by Atlas Editions about the birth of the KKK. The war brought economic ruin and a complete change to the social structure in the south. The Radical Republican Congress had placed the South under military rule and carpetbaggers and scalawags sat in the State houses, raising taxes and looting state treasuries. White Southerners had lost all control over their own affairs and as ex-Confederate General Nathan Bedford Forrest put it, in losing the war they had “lost all but (their) honor”, and now they felt even that was being stripped from them. To regain some measure of control, secret societies were formed and in 1866 a group of six ex-Confederate veterans formed the Ku Klux Klan. Thus began the “invisible empire of the South” that would grow to be the largest and best known of the groups that opposed the Reconstruction government and attempts by freed blacks to receive their rights. Klansmen wore white hoods as “ghosts of dead Rebel soldiers” and paid midnight visits to frightened blacks and carpetbaggers. Disgusted at how the KKK had become so violent, General Forrest resigned as the first Grand Wizard. Text on reverse. B
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