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Despite the great variety in Klan membership, on the whole, the group tended to direct its attention toward persecuting freed people and people they considered carpetbaggers , a term of abuse applied to northerners accused of having come to the South to acquire wealth through political power at the expense of southerners. The colorful term captured the disdain of southerners for these people, reflecting the common assumption that these men, sensing great opportunity, packed up all their worldly possessions in carpetbags, a then-popular type of luggage, and made their way to the South. Implied in this definition is the notion that these men came from little and were thus shiftless wanderers motivated only by the desire for quick money. In reality, these northerners tended to be young, idealistic, often well-educated men who responded to northern campaigns urging them to lead the modernization of the South. But the image of them as swindlers taking advantage of the South at its time of need resonated with a white southern population aggrieved by loss and economic decline. Southern whites who supported Reconstruction, known as scalawags    , also generated great hostility as traitors to the South. They, too, became targets of the Klan and similar groups.

The Klan seized on the pervasive but largely fictional narrative of the northern carpetbagger as a powerful tool for restoring white supremacy and overturning Republican state governments in the South ( [link] ). To preserve a white-dominated society, Klan members punished blacks for attempting to improve their station in life or acting “uppity.” To prevent freed people from attaining an education, the Klan burned public schools. In an effort to stop blacks from voting, the Klan murdered, whipped, and otherwise intimidated freed people and their white supporters. It wasn’t uncommon for Klan members to intimidate Union League members and Freedmen’s Bureau workers. The Klan even perpetrated acts of political assassination, killing a sitting U.S. congressman from Arkansas and three state congressmen from South Carolina.

A broadside reads “I AM COMMITTEE. 1st. No man shall squat negroes on his place unless they are all under his employ male and female. 2d. Negro women shall be employed by white persons. 3d. All children shall be hired out for something. 4th. Negroes found in cabins to themselves shall suffer the penalty. 5th. Negroes shall not be allowed to hire negroes. 6th. Idle men, women, or children shall suffer the penalty. 7th. All white men found with negroes in secret places shall be dealt with, and those that hire negroes must pay promptly and act with good faith to the negro; I will make the negro do his part, and the white must too. 8th. For the first offence is one hundred lashes; the second is looking up a sapling. 9th. This I do for the benefit of all, young or old, high and tall, black and white. Any one that may not like these rules can try their luck, and see whether or not I will be found doing my duty. 10th. Negroes found stealing from any one, or taking from their employers to other negroes, death is the first penalty. 11th. Running about late of nights shall be strictly dealt with. 12th. White man and negro, I am everywhere; I have friends in every place; do your duty and I will have but little to do.”
The Ku Klux Klan posted circulars such as this 1867 West Virginia broadside to warn blacks and white sympathizers of the power and ubiquity of the Klan.

Klan tactics included riding out to victims’ houses, masked and armed, and firing into the homes or burning them down ( [link] ). Other tactics relied more on the threat of violence, such as happened in Mississippi when fifty masked Klansmen rode out to a local schoolteacher’s house to express their displeasure with the school tax and to suggest that she consider leaving. Still other tactics intimidated through imaginative trickery. One such method was to dress up as ghosts of slain Confederate soldiers and stage stunts designed to convince their victims of their supernatural abilities.

An illustration shows a black family, with three small children, tending to their hearth as a hooded Klansman, undetected, points a rifle at them through the open doorway.
This illustration by Frank Bellew, captioned “Visit of the Ku-Klux,” appeared in Harper’s Weekly in 1872. A hooded Klansman surreptitiously points a rifle at an unaware black family in their home.

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Source:  OpenStax, U.s. history. OpenStax CNX. Jan 12, 2015 Download for free at http://legacy.cnx.org/content/col11740/1.3
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