ition to its nativism, the Klan lashed out against wife beaters, drunkards, bootleggers, and gamblers - in short, anyone who violated time-honored standards of morality. Groups like the Klan and the Knights of the White Camelia were positioned ideologically as alternatives to submission to the demands of Reconstruction.
After the defeat of the Confederacy, the African slaves were practically s well as officially free - a condition they had legally held since Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation. Martin and Roberts (1989) state that fairly early in Reconstruction, most former slaves realized that little had really changed;
most continued to work in agriculture, owning small farms or working as tenant farmers for their former masters. The system of sharecropping emerged when white planters, who were cash poor and land rich, sought Black tenants for their lands; Martin and Roberts (1989) have suggested that sharecropping was disastrous for most Blacks and many poor whites. Economically, the white landowners still held enormous power, particularly after the first and worst years of Reconstruction ended. Blacks acquired political autonomy along with the right to vote, but as Reconstruction became a memory laws and practices were enacted that prevented many from exercising this right.
It was, however, the formal resistance to the policies of Reconstruction in the form of the Klan that most troubled race relations in the South during an long after Reconstruction. Martin and Roberts (1989, pp. 501 -502) quote a historian of the Klan who asserted that it "whipped, shot, hanged, robbed, rape
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