. Costumes worn in Tennessee and North Alabama 97

8. Carpetbaggers Listening to a Ku Klux Report, (Cartoon) 113

9. The Fate of the Carpetbagger and the Scalawag, (Cartoon) 192

10. A Specimen Warning sent by the Klan 196

"When laws become lawless contrivances to defeat
the ends of justice, it is not surprising that
the people resort to lawless expedients for
securing their rights."--_S.S. Cox, in "Three
Decades," p. 558._

INTRODUCTION

BY

WALTER L. FLEMING

INTRODUCTION.

By WALTER L. FLEMING, Ph. D.,

Professor of History in West Virginia University.

Twenty-one years ago there was privately printed in Nashville,
Tennessee, a little book by J.C. Lester and D.L. Wilson, that
purported to be an account, from inside information, of the great
secret order of Reconstruction days, known to the public as Ku Klux
Klan. It attracted little notice then; and since that time it has not
been given the attention it deserved as a historical document.[1] At
the time of writing, sectional feeling was still inflamed; the
Northern people were not ready to hear anything favorable about the Ku
Klux Klan, which they considered a band of outlaws and murderers; and
the Southern people were not desirous of being reminded of the
dreadful Reconstruction period. Many of the members of the Klan who
had been hunted for their lives, and who were still technically
outlawed, were unwilling to make known their connection with the order
and some even considered their oaths still binding. But since the book
was printed, the Prescripts or Constitutions of the order have come to
light, and the ex-members are now generally willing to tell all they
know about the organization. As yet, no other member has written an
account of the Klan, though several have been projected, and Lester
and Wilson's History seems likely to remain the only one written
altogether from inside sources.

The authors, Capt. John C. Lester and Rev. D.L. Wilson, were in 1884,
when the booklet was written, residents in Pulaski, Tennessee, where
the first Den of the Klan was founded. Major Lester was one of the six
original members of the Pulaski Den or Circle. He made a fine record
as a soldier in the Civil War in the Third Tennessee (Confederate)
Infantry, and afterwards became a lawyer and an official in the
Methodist Church, and was a member of the Tenne