(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.
Forrest ping
when he discovered that it was NOT to be a "guerrilla army, whose SOLE mission was to continue the war against the union", he LEFT.
free dixie,sw