Traces the rise and fall of the Ku Klux Klan during the Reconstruction period, and describes its manifestations in each of the Southern states.

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Excerpt from Invisible Empire: The Story of the Ku Klux Klan, 1866-1871 Shows that bad government will make bad citizens; and when the corruption, extortions and Villainy of the governments which Congress has set up and maintained over the Southern states are thoroughly understood and made known, as we trust. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.

The first comprehensive examination of the nineteenth-century Ku Klux Klan since the 1970s, Ku-Klux pinpoints the group's rise with startling acuity. Historians have traced the origins of the Klan to Pulaski, Tennessee, in 1866, but the details behind the group's emergence have long remained shadowy. By parsing the earliest descriptions of the Klan, Elaine Frantz Parsons reveals that it was only as reports of the Tennessee Klan's mysterious and menacing activities began circulating in northern newspapers that whites enthusiastically formed their own Klan groups throughout the South. The spread of the Klan was thus intimately connected with the politics and mass media of the North. Shedding new light on the ideas that motivated the Klan, Parsons explores Klansmen's appropriation of images and language from northern urban forms such as minstrelsy, burlesque, and business culture. While the Klan sought to retain the prewar racial order, the figure of the Ku-Klux became a joint creation of northern popular cultural entrepreneurs and southern whites seeking, perversely and violently, to modernize the South. Innovative and packed with fresh insight, Parsons' book offers the definitive account of the rise of the Ku Klux Klan during Reconstruction.

The North Carolina carpetbagger Albion Winegar Tourgée came to the South in 1865 after serving as a Union volunteer during the Civil War. His struggles in the cause of civil rights led him to take part in the political reorganization of the region. However, in 1879, Tourgée despaired of his efforts in the South and returned to the North. There he published A Fool’s Errand, a largely autobiographical novel that depicted a southern society dominated by the Ku Klux Klan and riddled with racism, ignorance, and corrupt policies. Within a year of the release of A Fool’s Errand, Tourgée published The Invisible Empire, a nonfiction account of his years in the South intended to buttress the portrait of Reconstruction southern society he had depicted in his novel. The Invisible Empire investigates white supremacy as it emerged from the milieu of slavery, war, politics, and Reconstruction. Tourgée argues that organizations such as the Klan appealed to the mass of white southerners as a means of ameliorating their defeat and ensuring a measure of political control. He describes that Klan as the produce of southern hostility toward “any and all things” associated with the uplifting of the black population. Tourgée’s efforts in his books and in his life, were aimed at undermining racism and promoting egalitarian and democratic ideals. This reprint of The Invisible Empire brings to light a book that will interest scholars and general readers alike. It is a striking, contemporary look into the mind of the carpetbagger and the genesis of both the Ku Klux Klan and the political structure of the postwar South. Otto H. Olsen’s introduction and notes place the work in its proper historical and literary context. His analysis of the documentary evidence supplied by various reliable sources gives Tourgée’s narrative a more solid historical basis than it has heretofore had.