uses which produced
and fed the excitement. It illustrates the weird and irresistible
power of the unknown and mysterious over the minds of men of all
classes and conditions in life. And it illustrates how men, by
circumstances and conditions, in part of their own creation, may be
carried away from their moorings and drifted along in a course against
which reason and judgment protest.

The popular idea supposes the Ku Klux movement to have been conceived
in malice, and nursed by prejudice and hate, for lawlessness, rapine
and murder. The circumstances which brought the Klan into notice and
notoriety were of a character to favor such conclusions. No other
seemed possible. The report of the Congressional Investigating
Committee confirmed it.[15] Even if that report be true, like
everything else which is known of the Ku Klux, it is fragmentary
truth. The whole story has never been told. And the impression
prevails that the Ku Klux Klan was conceived and carried out in pure
and unmixed deviltry. The reader who follows this narrative to its end
will decide, with the facts before him, whether this impression is
just and true.

The Ku Klux Klan was the outgrowth of peculiar conditions, social,
civil and political, which prevailed at the South from 1865 to 1869.
It was as much a product of those conditions as malaria is of a swamp
and sun heat.

Its birthplace was Pulaski, the capital of Giles, one of the southern
tier of counties in Middle Tennessee. Pulaski is a town of about three
thousand inhabitants. Previous to the war its citizens possessed
wealth and culture--they retain the second--the first was lost in the
general wreck. The most intimate association with them fails to
disclose a trace of the diabolism which, according to the popular
idea, one would expect to find characterizing the people among whom
the Ku Klux Klan originated. A male college and a female seminary are
located at Pulaski, and receive liberal patronage. It is a town of
churches.

There, in 1866, the name Ku Klux first fell from human lips. There
began a movement which in a short time spread as far north as
Virginia[16] and as far south as Texas, and which for a period
convulsed the country and attracted the attention of the civilized
world. Proclamations were fulminated against the Klan by the President
and by the Governors of States; and hostile statutes were enacted both
by State and National Legislatures.

It was finally quieted, but not unt