The Planters’ Labor Problems
For decades, historians have debated how best to characterize the KKK, a white supremacist terrorist organization launched by Confederate veterans that first emerged in Pulaski, Tennessee in 1866 before spreading across the South. Hundreds of thousands joined, though obtaining a detailed count of actual members is practically impossible because of the organization’s hyper-secrecy.
Yet much is not in dispute: Klansmen were closely tied to the Democratic Party and used violence — whippings, hangings, drownings, sexual violence, drive-out campaigns — against “insubordinate” African Americans and Republicans of all races. Klansmen also used “softer” forms of repression, including school and book burnings and blacklisting of northern teachers. Sometimes they mobilized to prevent African Americans from becoming educated. According to Z. B. Hargrove of Georgia, Klansmen occasionally whipped freed people “for being almost too smart.”
Racism united white members of the Klan regardless of class differences, but not all played an equal role in the organization. The Klan leadership consisted mostly of downwardly mobile plantation owners, lawyers, newspaper editors, and storeowners — those most harmed by the radical transformation of the South’s economy and labor relations.
These men were infuriated at their declining economic position and the ascension of black men to positions of political power. Newly empowered black men, North Carolina–based Klan leader Randolph Abbott Shotwell complained, had helped the federal government strike down “the rights of the master” and disfranchise “a large proportion of the ablest and best men in the naturally dominated race.”
Resentful elites like Shotwell and Forrest were determined to reestablish their power. Abundant evidence suggests that the Reconstruction-era Klan functioned like an employers’ association with goals that, in some ways, resembled the aims of other anti-labor business organizations.
Klan leaders demanded that the black masses perform one function: engage in tiring, brutally intense forms of labor that resembled pre–Civil War plantation life. Klansmen sought to prevent African American from departing worksites, taking part in political meetings, pursuing education, accessing firearms, or joining organizations meant to challenge their exploiters. As one observer from Georgia told a congressional investigation committee in 1871, “I think their purpose is to control the State government and control the negro labor, the same as they did under slavery.”
While Klansmen insisted that the black masses spend their waking hours planting and picking crops, many refused to believe these same laborers deserved the financial benefits of their efforts. According to a 1871 report from Tennessee, frequently “the employer frames some excuse and falls out with the laborer, and he is forced to leave his crop and abandon his wages by the terror of the Ku Klux, who, in all cases, sympathize with the white employers.” Such cases resembled slavery more than the free labor system promised by emancipation.