Union League Terrorism

  Union League meetings were conducted as a mystical secret
society with secret rituals. Meetings were especially devoted
to stirring up enmity between blacks and whites.
A catechism written by Radical Republicans in Congress was
used in Union League meetings to create an unreasonable sense
of entitlement, grievance, and resentment. They were taught
that Northern Republican whites were their friends northern
Republican Whites  were their friends and allies and that White
Southerners and Democrats were enemies to be hated and despised.
They were frequently promised that they would receive land and
livestock confiscated from the Whites. In some cases they were
even promised racial dominance that would entitle them to the wives
and daughters of their White enemies. This led to a number of
violent racial incidents. Such racial incidents were frequently
used by carpetbagger governments to demonstrate to Washington and
the Northern press and public the continued need for Southern
reconstruction. Other promises were in the form of threats of a
death penalty by hanging to any Black who betrayed the League by
voting Democrat.
With the coming of Radical Reconstruction and martial law, the role
of the Union League became more aggressive. Union League militias
were formed and were an enforcement arm of the carpetbagger
governments. The militia was composed of former slaves and black
troops stationed in each state. The Union League had 250,000 men in
ten Southern states. North Carolina's Scalawag Governor William W.
Holden had a Union League militia of 80 thousand at his bidding.
The primary role of the Union League was now to keep the corrupt
carpetbagger governments in power. This included suppression of
competing carpetbagger factions.
In order to insure that all blacks voted Republican, the Union
League bullied and beat other Blacks into submission. Even flogging
with the lash was used. If that did not work, they exacted the death
penalty, frequently by lynching. In order to intimidate Whites from
seeking power or influencing black voting, they conducted terror
campaigns. Barns and sometimes houses of Whites were burned. In some
cases small towns were burned as in Warren and Hamburg, Arkansas.
Men, women, and children were killed in raids on "insurrectionary"
communities and counties. Their deaths were reported as "killed
trying to escape." There were Union League barn burnings and other
destruction in every North Carolina County. During a single week of
1869 in Gaston County, North Carolina, nine barns were burned. In
two months of the same year in Edgecombe County, two churches, several
cotton gins, a cotton factory, and many barns and homes were burned.
The Raleigh Sentinel reported on August 29th of the same year that ten
Federal Army companies associated with the Union League had terrorized
the Goldsboro area and committed violent depredations of all sorts. It
reported the actions of the troops "so violent that it was unsafe for
women to leave their homes." This was all part of the Reconstruction
mandate to remake the South.
In Myrta Lockett Avary's 1906 book, Dixie After the War, she relates a
tragic, but not untypical atrocity. In Upstate South Carolina a group
of Union League federal soldiers marching and singing halted to
discharge a volley of bullets into a country church during services,
instantly killing a fourteen year-old girl. At a nearby residence a
squad of the same troops entered a home and bound the elderly owner
as they ransacked his house and argued over who would first ravage
his daughter. The girl when approached drove a concealed knife through
the heart her assailant. She was then beaten to death by the rest. But
under corrupt military and carpetbagger rule, Southern whites had
little recourse to justice. No federal justice occurred.
By 1870 the corruption of the carpetbagger governments and the violence
of the Union League was becoming a concern to a significant minority in
the U.S. Congress. As Klan activity increased in response to Union
League and other Reconstruction misdeeds, the Radical Republicans formed
a committee to investigate the Klan. A minority report by Northern
Democrats and Conservative Republicans representing more than a third
of the committee, however, noted that the Union League had "instilled
hatred of the White race" and had "made arson, rape, robbery, and murder
a daily occurrence." They also noted the role of corrupt government and
Union League violence in driving whites to take law into their own hands.
A very stringent anti-Klan law was passed by the North Carolina
legislature under the direction of Governor William W. Holden in January
of 1870. True to past Radical Republican despotism, it gave the Governor
power to declare counties in a state of insurrection and supersede
practically all laws and Constitutional rights in its prosecution.
Despite a vigorous attempt to enforce the law, Klan-like activity
increased and a top Black activist and leader of the League in Alamance
County was found hanging in a tree. Shortly thereafter, Senator John
Stephens, a ranking White operative for Governor Holden, seeking evidence
for Klan prosecutions, visited a Caswell County Union League meeting.
There he handed to each of about twenty members a box of matches with
the suggestion that they should be put to good use burning barns.
The next night seven barns, a row of houses, and the tobacco crops of
several prominent citizens were burned.
A few days later Senator Stephens attended a rally at the Yanceyville
Courthouse for the purpose of making notes on the speeches. He was
quietly abducted, gagged, and brutally murdered in one of the Courthouse
rooms with an open window to the crowd outside. His body was not
discovered until two days later. It was not proven until 1936 that it
was a well organized assassination by the KKK. The gruesome mystery and
death of Stephens prompted Governor Holden and his advisors to launch a
military campaign against the KKK in June. They hoped this would also
be a political positive in the coming August elections.
Holden called upon Black Union League militia regiments in eastern North
Carolina and the White veterans of Union Colonel George W. Kirk's notorious
bushwhackers from the mountains to score a decisive victory. Kirk was to
be in charge. Kirk was a Confederate deserter that had been made a
colonel in the Union Army during the War. During the war Kirk had
commanded a combined force of Union Army regulars, Confederate deserters,
and opportunistic criminals. A good size book could be written on the
depredations and atrocities Kirk and his men inflicted on civilians in
western North Carolina during the war. According to a report by a Union
officer stationed in Yanceyville, Kirk lived up to his evil reputation
in the service of Governor Holden. Kirk's troops were "an armed mob
roaming the country, pillaging at will, insulting citizens with impunity,
and even threatening to attack the United States troops." Many KKK
suspects were arrested and imprisoned.
But on August 4 of 1870 the elections in North Carolina took place.
Despite their despotic tactics, the Republicans were very nearly routed.
More than two-thirds of the legislative seats went to the Democrats.
A growing number of Whites had been able to register, and many Blacks
and even Union Army men had found the carpetbag corruption and tyranny
so despicable that they voted for the Democrats. On August 6, U. S.
District Court Judge George Brooks found that Kirk had no evidence
against any of his prisoners and ordered their release. Thus ended
the "Kirk-Holden" War. Kirk fled north, and within a few months Governor
Holden was impeached by the North Carolina House for abuse of power,
tried by the Senate and removed from office. Within a year the Union
League in North Carolina was disbanded and disappeared.
Former Confederate General John B. Gordon testified in 1871 to the Joint
Congressional Committee on Affairs in the Insurrectionary States that:
"The first and main reason (for the Klan) was the organization of the
Union League."
Gordon, who later became Governor of Georgia and then a U. S. Senator,
also stated that even the burning of Atlanta and the devastation of
Georgia during the war did not create a tenth of the animosity created
by the Union League's treatment of the Southern people. Former
Confederate General Nathan B. Forrest, a reputed founder of the Klan,
testified before the same committee that:
"The Klan was intended entirely as a protection to the (Southern)
people, to enforce the laws and protect the people from outrages."
Both men realized, however, that after a few years, the Klan, formed
in a people's desperate cry for survival and justice, had itself
become a lawless outrage. But it was the federally sponsored Union
League that ranked first in time and violence. It should not be
forgotten. The evils it inflicted on both Black and White still lives.

Source: The Uncivil War  by Mike Scruggs
Copyright 2007 by Universal Media, Inc.