Southern Reconstruction: Part 6: How Federal Reconstruction tyranny led to the Klan

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By Mike Scruggs – In an address to the Bar Associations of Texas and Arkansas at Texarkana on July 10, 1906, Thomas W. Gregory of Austin, one of the most respected attorneys in the U.S. and later Attorney General of the United States (1914-1919) under President Woodrow Wilson, gave a history of the Ku Klux Klan and the conditions which fostered its growth.

Gregory began by detailing the nature and consequences of a “Civil Rights” bill in 1866 and three Reconstruction bills in 1867, all passed over the veto of President Andrew Johnson. The “Freedman’s Bureau Bill,” first introduced in February 1866 and finally passed in July 1866, created the Freedman’s Bureau and made it an arm of the War Department. Under this bill, every county in the South was placed under the rule of Army officers and appointed Freedman’s Bureau agents exercising the authority of military judges. This was done to assure the rights of former slaves, especially their registration as voters, but in so doing, it abolished the ordinary rules of procedure by law and denied the right of trial by jury and appeal to the vast majority of white Southerners. Thus Federal agents ruled the South with tyrannical and unconstitutional powers.

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