A General State of Terror: A Survey of Klan Violence in the Carolinas during Reconstruction

At the height of Radical Reconstruction, from 1868-1871, members of the Ku Klux Klan attacked thousands of people in the U.S. South. They hanged, shot, whipped, and beat men and women, black and white. This paper surveys that violence to demonstrate that Klansmen had a coherent ideology of racial oppression they attempted to enforce through vigilante violence. The paper focuses upon North and South Carolina to show that though Klan violence had local variation, there were significant similarities to the forms it took and the effects it was intended to have.

Acts of violence do not operate in isolation and they do not simply affect those immediately involved. Not only does violence reflect the context in which it arises, it also changes that context. Klansmen committed violence to do far more than simply reassert the mastery slave owners had had during slavery; Klansmen were responding to the new world that emancipation had created. The perpetrators, the victims, and the methods of Klan violence all differed significantly from the violence used to defend slavery in the antebellum South.  Most notably, white men who could not commit racial violence under the rules of antebellum slave ownership could be deputized by membership in the Klan to police racial behavior. Though the violence Klansmen committed was shaped by the experiences of slaveownership and civil war, that violence also was intended to make racial oppression manifest in a U.S. South newly structured by emancipation and black citizenship.