demand from such missionaries of the party as labored with Mr. White.

This was one of the mild cases, but it shows a mode of manufacturing public opinion, and making converts to the Democratic faith so effective that the later victories of that party in regions where the negro race is largely predominant is not to be wondered at, and whose simplicity challenges attention, as it dispenses with education, moral sentiment, free will, and the troubles of thought, discussion, and all the responsibilities and perils of individual judgment and the preferences and prejudices of individual desire or will.

On the same night that Mr. White was converted to Democ racy by this simple method, Dr. John Winsmith, a native of the State, an old man sixty-eight years of age, who had been a member of the South Carolina legislature fifteen years, was visited, and on making resistance was fired at, and received seven musket-ball wounds from the disguised propagandists.

John Genobles, sixty-nine years of age, was also visited, stripped, flogged, and required to make public announcement of his conversion, which he did on the day of the sheriff's sales at the county court. He testified as follows: "I got up,-the sheriff was then done selling my property, -I got up on the steps, and said I was no longer a partisan man, and was not in favor of a Black Republican government; that I thought a white man was somewhat superior to a black man. That is pretty much all I said; also that I was a member of the church for forty-three years." The question was asked him why he did this, and his answer was, "To save my life."

Rev. A. W. Cummings, D. D., and P. Q. Camp, Esq., made up a list of two hundred and twenty-three cases of whipping and maiming in Spartanburg County which they had knowl edge of, and the United States Deputy Marshal, C. L. Casey, testified that the number reached nearly to five hundred, and there were four murders. The alarm was so great that hundreds of people left their houses and slept in the woods, from October to March, to avoid the interviewers of the Conservative party. Mr. Shand, a lawyer of Unionville, testified that in his judgment every respectable married white man in that

town was a member of the order.

Major Lewis Merrill of the United States army, whose evidence in some of the more recent transactions in Louisiana has been accepted with alacrity by the conservatives, took especial pains to investigate affairs in the county of York, and reported thus: "From the best information I can get, I estimate the number of cases of whipping, beating, and personal violence of various grades in this county, from November 1 to March 26, at between three and four hundred, excluding numerous minor cases of threats, intimidation, abuse, and small personal violence." The testimony of Major Merrill is important, because he is from the school of West Point, not an active politician, never identified with either political party, though tending to Republican ideas, and because, prior to his being stationed in South Carolina, he regarded the stories of outrages as largely exaggerated. In reply to a question from Mr. Stevenson, of the committee, he said: "I came here from Kansas, where I had no knowledge at all of anything connected with these matters, except such as one gets in an ordinary reading of the newspapers. I fully believed that the stories in circulation were enormous exaggerations, and that the newspaper stories were incredible." But General Terry, who commanded the department, informed him that "the half had not been told him." Still he was not convinced, and thought the cases were of the sporadic order and did not come from any organized violence. When he had been on the spot, however, and come to a personal knowledge of facts, he says that he had never imagined such a state of social disorganization being possible in any civilized community. Yet he did not despair. He thought there must be some latent virtue in the community, and with a faith in human nature highly creditable to his heart, he called a conference of the leading citizens to devise measures for suppressing the outrages. They met and talked, and Major Merrill informed them that he knew the names of the villains, laughed at their simplicity in not being posted when it was so easy; all of which was, in a way, melancholy, yet amusing, since it subsequently transpired that several of the leading members of the order were present at the conference, and took part in the

proceedings, as lovers of law and order. That they should dare to come into the presence of a United States officer whose special duty was the suppression of their clan shows how securely they had fortified themselves, and how amply they were protected by the influential classes of society,- indeed, they were the influential classes and nothing less.

This statement is made in face of the denials of such men as Wade Hampton and Senator Gordon, because it is impossible to account for the boldness of the conspirators and their success in evading punishment on the opposite theory.

The story of Elias Hill, as given by himself under oath, throws light upon the purposes of the order. Mr. Hill was a poor slave, crippled in both legs and arms with rheumatism when he was seven years of age, so that for physical labor he was worthless, and law and custom rendered his education for anything else out of the question; hence he was left to vegetate as he might. He had a powerful intellect, however, and during the long, tedious days of childhood and youth, when he was unable to move hands or feet, and must sit in a place till some one moved him to another, helpless, listless, worthless, he managed to call the passing school-children into his cabin, and from them, little by little, learned his letters and the art of reading and writing. Unsuspected by the grand upper classes of society, he tapped the little, scanty rivulets of knowledge that were running past his door, and from this chance tuition and through these youthful teachers he learned lessons in literature, science, and theology which enabled him at early manhood to become a Baptist preacher, and, when his people were emancipated, a school-teacher and corresponding agent for his uneducated neighbors and friends.

He preached righteousness, and also the gospel of Republicanism in a mild form, -two things so decidedly distasteful to the order of Ku-Klux, that he was made a recipient of one of their visits. They went first to his brother's house, and flogged the brother's wife to compel her to tell where Elias was. He could not crawl away, and they came upon him and charged him with burning some gin-houses in the neighborhood, with secreting a man charged with murder, and with

preaching politics, the latter being the objectionable offence for which their maledictions were chiefly poured out, the others being of course sham charges, made to cover or introduce the real one; and rhetorically to strengthen the indictment they pointed pistols at his head, stripped up his shirt and laid upon his bare back the lash of a horsewhip, cutting to the very bone, pulled his weak rheumatic limbs apart to torture him, and compelled him on pain of death to renounce his Republican principles, to stop the Republican paper which he was a subscriber to, burned his letters and books, and then left him out in the shivering cold to get back to his cabin as he might, or die if help should fail to reach him.

But the whippings, though numerous and barbarous in the extreme, were supplemented by much more aggravated and heinous crimes. On the night of July 11, 1870, at the village of Cross Plains, Calhoun County, William C. Luke, a white schoolmaster, and four colored men, Tony Cliff, Berry Harris, Cæsar Frederick, and William Hall, were seized and put to death by hanging and shooting. These men, at the time, were under arrest and in charge of the officers of the law for complicity in certain acts of an unlawful nature, but the evidence against them was so slight it was probable that they would not be convicted, and to make sure of their punishment, regardless of law or evidence, the Ku-Klux forcibly took them from the custody of the authorities and murdered all of them. To investigate this case the governor of Alabama employed Lewis E. Parsons, a leading lawyer, and Johnson's provisional governor of reconstruction fame, as counsel, and ordered a special term of the court for preliminary investigation, with one of the supreme judges to preside. The judge, the governor, Mr. Parsons, and General Crawford proceeded in August to Calhoun County, where, to their surprise, nearly all the white inhabitants were silent concerning the affair and withheld all information concerning it. After some delay, and the examination of one hundred and thirty witnesses, they found ample evidence in the opinion of the judge to justify the arrest of nine persons, and remanded them to the grand jury with the evidence, and they refused to indict a single one of them, but

did find a bill for assault with intent to kill against a negro, Jacob Moore, who had been shot by the Ku-Klux.

This is from the testimony of Governor Parsons, who also said he had never known of a conviction for the murder of a negro. In March, 1870, in the county of Green, Alabama, Alexander Boyd, the prosecuting attorney, was murdered. Prior to this a negro named Sam Colvin had been murdered, and Boyd, having worked up the testimony, gave out word that he should proceed against the parties who had murdered Colvin; but before he had time to perfect his plans his own taking off had been accomplished by a squad of twenty-five men, who rode into the square fronting the hotel, formed, sent in a detachment who compelled the clerk to show them Boyd's room, to which they went, put two balls through his head and several through his body, and left. This was in the town of Eutaw, of about two thousand inhabitants, where the sheriff was stopping, and the elders and ministers of the Presbytery were holding a reunion. No alarm was given, the sheriff called no posse, the people remained quiet and slept the sleep of the just; nobody got up an excitement, the bar passed no unavailing resolutions of grief or indignation, no member attended his funeral, and he went to his grave with as little ostentation as accompanies the ordinary town pauper to his final abode. All this could not happen in a community unless the leading influences were unmistakably on the side of the deed, and its design and significance fully understood.

Rev. A. S. Larkin, a minister of the Methodist Episcopal Church, sent out under the auspices of the bishop of Ohio, made memorandums of thirty-two murders and three hundred and forty-one whippings and other maltreatments in his district in Northern Alabama from 1868 to 1871. No less than ten clergymen, all but one of whom he personally knew, were whipped, shot, or by violence driven away from their people.

In some localities the schools came in for an undue share of Ku-Klux attention. In 1871, in Pontotoc County, Mississippi, a large number of the teachers of the colored schools received warning to stop their schools. The State superintendent of schools while on a visit to Aberdeen, Monroe County, in the