Born in the wake of the Civil War, the Ku Klux Klan remains a significant, though lesser, force in American politics today. It constitutes one of the world's earliest terrorist organizations. The organization's specific intent is the advancement of white supremacy. Originally this goal had been sought for the entire United States, but contemporary Klansmen have revised this objective by calling for a separate all-white region in the nation, preferably located in the west. The purpose of this research is to document the history and evolution of the Ku Klux Klan from its origins in the 1860s to its current status in the 1980s.
Slavery had long been institutionalized into the Southern economy and culture by 1860. Slavery had become so engrafted on the South that its abolition was considered tantamount to the utter destruction of the region's way of life. In 1861, the South had gone to war largely over these beliefs about slavery. Four years later, the region had been defeated by the North. By 1865 the Confederacy lay in ruins.
Although President Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation had abolished slavery primarily as a means to disrupt the Southern economy during the war, the abolition of slavery was eventually codified by the Thirteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. President Lincoln and the Republican Congress established as part of the Reconstruction program the Bureau of Freedmen, Refugees and Abandoned Lands - better known as the Freedmen's Bureau - in order to facilitate the adjustment of blacks to their new status. The Freedmen's Bureau provided education, health care and other social services with an emphasis on the integration of blacks into positions of political authority.
Efforts to integrate blacks into the South's power structure were met with fierce resistance. Blacks who had left plantations were being murdered by "bushwackers" and other wandering gangs that were remnants of defunct slave patrols...