of 1868, only the councils
in the towns remained active, many of them transformed into political
clubs, loosely organized under local political leaders. The plantation
Negro needed less looking after, and except in the largest towns he
became a kind of visiting member of the council in the town. The League
as a political organization gradually died out by 1870.*

* The Ku Klux Klan had much to do with the decline of the
organization. The League as the ally and successor of the
Freedmen's Bureau was one of the causes of the Ku Klux
movement, because it helped to create the conditions which
made such a movement inevitable. As early as 1870 the
radical leaders missed the support formerly given by the
League, and an urgent appeal was sent out all over the South
from headquarters in New York advocating its reestablishment
to assist in carrying the elections of 1870.

The League had served its purpose. It had enabled a few outsiders
to control the Negro by separating the races politically and it had
compelled the Negroes to vote as radicals for several years, when
without its influence they would either not have voted at all or would
have voted as Democrats along with their former masters. The order was
necessary to the existence of the radical party in the Black Belt. No
ordinary political organization could have welded the blacks into a
solid party. The Freedmen's Bureau, which had much influence over the
Negroes, was too weak in numbers to control the Negroes in politics.
The League finally absorbed the personnel of the Bureau and turned its
prestige and its organization to political advantage.

CHAPTER IX. CHURCH AND SCHOOL

Reconstruction in the state was closely related to reconstruction in the
churches and the schools. Here also were to be found the same hostile
elements: Negro and white, Unionist and Confederate, victor and
vanquished. The church was at that time an important institution in the
South, more so than in the North, and in both sections more important
than it is today. It was inevitable, therefore, that ecclesiastical
reconstruction should give rise to bitter feelings.

Something should be said of conditions in the churches when the Federal
armies occupied the land. The Southern organizations had lost many
ministers and many of their members, and frequently their buildings
were used as hospitals or had been destroyed. Their administration was
disorg