[sporkgoddess]

Interesting... I knew about the 20th century revival (hurray for obscure Frank vs. Magnum knowledge finally paying off) but I didn't know that the original KKK wasn't really for racist purposes.

[vetvetdoug]

Most historians are unaware of what transpired in West Tennessee toward the end of the Civil War and through reconstruction. During the war Confederate soldiers were tortured and murdered by local Union Cavalry. One could read references to these atrocities in the OR. At Pocahontas, Tn, a captured Confederate soldier was skinned alive and one gutshot at every mile marker from there to Purdy, Tn. After the war's end, Confederate sympathizers and former Confederate soldiers were not protected from Carpetbaggers, scalawags, and criminals by the appointed law enforcement (read Union sympathizers. The Klan was formed to protect the former Confederates against this lawlessness. The first Klan was ordered disbanded when the former Confederates were allowed to vote and hold office, such as sheriff and LE positions.

[wardaddy]

(original Klan)It was in response to Union occupation, white disenfranchisement and what both those meant to whites. Not to say they were darlings....they were not.

Blacks were esentially freed, exploited momentarily to usher in shoddy Radical Republican administrations in the Deep South and then rejected and abandoned by those who "freed" them and who really understood them less and were even more bigoted than us. Sorta like I think you ought be free but now since you are would you mind staying down South away from us and maybe if you're good we'll give you some little postage stamp of land we appropriated from the ruins of plantocracy. Sorta like how the Dems treat any minority today.

That is the north's legacy they'd prefer you forget.

Not to say they're weren't some decent folk here and there who meant well.

Forrest quit the Klan after a few years when the Yankees left ...as did Wheeler I believe.

[Colt .45]

Not to mention the fact that the US Army wanted Nathan Bedford Forrest to command troops during the Spanish American War, owing to the fact that he (Forrest) was a excellent tactical leader. He declined the offer.

So you see the South wasn't fighting to be racist, there was far more at stake there.

"Get there first with the most!" - General Nathan Bedford Forrest, CSA.