Grand Cyclops and the Ghouls Essay

The Ku Klux Klan was organized in Pulaski, Tennessee in 1866 after the Civil War. This organization was very violent. This event occurred with a group of Southerners who was angry when the Civil War ended. Blacks were this group’s primary target. Jews, Catholics, liberals, etc. was also hated by the KKK but hatred was more directed to the blacks. The leader of the group was called the Grand Cyclops and everyone in the group was called Ghouls. This group wanted to torture slaves because they were so upset that blacks had won their freedom of slavery and they would no longer have any slaves. They felt as if blacks would have more power. Without slaves they felt as if their lives were threatened.
Blacks were treated very poorly and it really saddens me. Churches of black populations was burnt the KKK gave the blacks no respect at all. Teachers and educated blacks was also lynched. They were raped murdered etc. because the color of their skin. Black people were murdered for almost any reason. Men, women, children rather they were cripple or not the suffered the same consequences as everyone else. They would even whip elderly people a 103 year old was whipped without any hesitation and a man was whipped so bad that he was paralyzed. Something that really stood out to me during this time was that and man by the name of Abraham Colby was whipped in front of his wife and children for hours. His daughter begged them to stop and not take her father away from her. She never recovered after seeing what was done to her father and died not to long after her father was whipped in front of her. A man by the name of Jack Dupree throat was cut in front of his wife who had just not long given birth to twins. He was also disemboweled in front of his wife, The KKK had no sympathy they were very heartless. White people that had any contact with black people feared their lives also. Senior law officers high ranked the KKK men this was a white protestant in the south. There was a point and time when blacks were starting to get fed up with the KKK. They tried fighting back the best way possible no violently. The NAACP also known as the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People asked Washington to help stop the KKK violence toward blacks but no help was received. The blacks then decided to turn to “Black to Africa” but they told them to go back to their native America. During this time period the blacks really didn’t have any control over anything and they had hope.
At the end of the American Civil War, the devastation and disruption in the state of Georgia were dramatic. Wartime damage, the inability to maintain a labor force without slavery, and miserable weather had a disastrous effect on agricultural production. The state's chief cash crop, cotton, fell from a high of more than 700,000 bales in 1860 to less than 50,000 in 1865, while harvests of corn and wheat were also meager. The state government subsidized construction of numerous new railroad lines. White farmers turned to cotton as a cash crop, often using commercial fertilizers to make up for the poor soils they owned. The coastal rice plantations never recovered from the war.
Bartow County was representative of the postwar difficulties. Property destruction and the deaths of a third of the soldiers caused financial and social crises; recovery was delayed by repeated crop failures. The Freedmen's Bureau agents were unable to give blacks the help they needed.
At the beginning of Reconstruction, Georgia had over 460,000 Freedmen.[3] In January 1865, in Savannah, William T. Sherman issued Special Field Orders, No. 15 authorizing federal authorities to confiscate 'abandoned' plantation lands in the Sea Islands, whose owners had fled with the advance of his army, and redistribute them to former slaves. Redistributing 400,000 acres (1,600 km²) in coastal Georgia and South Carolina to 40,000 freed slaves in forty-acre plots, this order was intended to provide for the thousands

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