"When laws become lawless contrivances to defeat the ends of justice, it is not surprising that the people resort to lawless expedients for securing their rights.” -S. S. Cox, in "Three Decades," p. 558. INTRODUCTION. By WALTER L. FLEMING, Ph. D., Professor of History in West Virginia University. Twenty-one years ago there was privately printed in Nashville, Tennessee, a little book by J. C. Lester and D. L. Wilson, that purported to be an account, from inside information, of the great secret order of Reconstruction days, known to the public as Ku Klux Klan. It attracted little notice then; and since that time it has not been given the attention it deserved as a historical document.1 At the time of writing, sectional feeling was still inflamed; the Northern people were not ready to hear anything favorable about the Ku Klux Klan, which they considered a band of outlaws and murderers; and the Southern people were not desirous of being reminded of the dreadful Reconstruction period. Many of the members of the Klan who had been hunted for their 1 Cutler, in his "Lynch Law," p. 139, is the first writer outside of the South who has paid serious attention to this history of Ku Klux Klan. |