Testimony Taken by the Joint Select Committee to Inquire by U.S. SENATE - 1872

1872. (KU KLUX KLAN). U.S. SENATE. Testimony Taken by the Joint Select Committee to Inquire into the Condition of Affairs in the Late Insurrectionary States. Florida. Washington: Government Printing Office, 1872. 1st ed. xviii,xxii,399pp. Contemporary sheep, black and red morocco spine bands. Very old waterstain to upper free corner of final rear leaves, not affecting text, else very good. Senate report on Ku Klux Klan behavior. The Klan was decentralized and local; each state and community had its own violent story. By 1869, the Klan had helped terrorize black voters and overturn elected Republican governments in the Deep South. In 1870 and 1871, the Radical Republicans struck back in Congress, passing the Enforcement and Ku Klux Klan Acts aimed at protecting the rights of blacks, and a Joint Select Committee issued a 12-volume report on its hearings on Klan violence. President Ulysses S. Grant suspended habeas corpus in nine South Carolina counties, and convictions in South Carolina and Mississippi helped bring a decline in violence. Pages 2-41 includes the testimony of Nathan Bedford Forrest in June 1871. Forrest, though the First Grand Wizard, claims to have had the group disbanded. The report notes: "The natural tendency of all such organizations is to violence and crime; hence it was that General Forrest and other men of influence in the state, by the exercise of their moral power, induced them to disband." One of the other testimonies claims that the Klan was responsible for having murdered over 200 blacks in Florida. This Florida report is the rarest volume of the series of reports on the Klan.