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By Root 1831 0

to do their work. The Klan stopped at nothing; they whipped, burned and raped; they were willing, even eager, to kill. Black victims were usually innocent of any crime except upward mobility. The Klan murdered a black legislator in Sumter County, Alabama, in 1870 simply because he had become successful and was influential with “people of his color.”52 In Mississippi, Klansmen whipped a black man who dared to sue a white who owed him money; this was far too uppity.53 A black who was making money and achieving some success was a natural target for Klan terror. Black people, in Klan ideology, belonged on white farms and plantations, as docile workers. The Klan was willing to beat or murder whites, too, if they sided with blacks or opposed the Klan.

Resistance was almost useless; local government was either supine, or helpless, or allied with the Klan. The local courts were little better. The stench from the Klan was too much for many northern Republicans; perhaps some of them wondered who, after all, had won the Civil War. In 1870 and 1871, Congress adopted a series of laws designed to curb the Klan. These acts, among other things, made it a felony for men “to band or conspire together, or go in disguise upon the public highway ... with intent to ... injure, oppress, threaten, or intimidate” citizens, and to prevent them from enjoying their constitutional rights.54 This legislation moved the federal courts massively into law enforcement—a new and unaccustomed role. Enforcement was not an easy matter. The victims of the Klan were poor, frightened, and mostly black; and most of the white community was ranged on the side of the Klan.55 In 1871 in Monroe County, Mississippi, twenty-eight whites went to the home of a black named Aleck Page, in disguise; they tied him, dragged him from his home, hanged him, and buried his body. An unusually zealous U.S. attorney indicted the Klansmen, for violating the federal Enforcement Act. The locals, however, treated the defendants like heroes, and the U.S. attorney, who saw the handwriting on the wall, agreed to drop most of the charges. The defendants entered pleas of guilty, and the judge fined them twenty-five dollars each and made them post a peace bond.56 This, then, was the price for cold-blooded murder. In many districts of the South, it was impossible even to get this kind of pitiful result, or any conviction at all. There were thousands of indictments, but relatively few convictions; and hardly anything in the way of punishment. The federal effort perhaps succeeded in discouraging some of the worst excesses of the Klan, but it is hard to be sure.

After the 1870s, the Klan’s reign of terror in the South petered out, but probably only because it was no longer needed. The Klan had gotten what it wanted. The South was white man’s country. Segregation by law superseded the lawlessness of the Klan. But southern violence against blacks was by no means over. The horrors of lynch law, as we shall see, emerged from the swamp of southern racism toward the end of the century.

In the mountains of the South and the border states, another long struggle took place between the locals and the federal government in the last half of the century. It had quite a different character. This was the struggle between “revenuers” and “moonshiners.”57 The Civil War was fearfully expensive; it soaked up revenues like a sponge. Taxes increased enormously. Most of the tax laws expired after the war, but the federal government maintained its liquor tax, which it had come to depend on. In the almost inaccessible creeks and hollows of the Appalachian Mountains, “blockaders” made liquor in illegal, untaxed, unlicensed stills. The federal government meant to collect its tax and close down the moonshine operations. It sent agents to do the job, but they met bitter, often bloody resistance. Men died on both sides, and neither side could ever claim victory. Here, again, local authorities were indifferent or hostile to the general law of the land. Some local authorities even dared to arrest and try federal agents who had