Echoes of Reconstruction: How a Law Professor Described the Klan to His Students

Emerging Civil War is pleased to welcome back Patrick Young, author of The Reconstruction Era blog.

This year I have offered a look at the Ku Klux Klan during Reconstruction. I wrote about the Klan’s Constitution, the commercialization of the Klan, and the efforts of Union officers to use the mass media to control the growth of the Klan. Now I want to look at how the Klan was remembered in the South. One example comes from a professor who helped found the Florida Klan.

William Simkins was a professor of law at the University of Texas in Austin on Thanksgiving in 1914 when he decided to use his speech to his students that day to recall his role in the Ku Klux Klan in Florida nearly half a century earlier. In 1861 he was a student at The Citadel in Charleston, South Carolina. He recalled his Confederate service in his speech, saying “I stood by the first gun fired in Charleston Harbor, South Carolina, and I heard the last at Bentonville, North Carolina…”  He rose to the rank of Confederate colonel. After surrender, Simkins had no hope of returning to his home on his family’s plantation in South Carolina because General Sherman had turned the property over to former slaves to cultivate.

Simkins left his plantation home in South Carolina when he found that Blacks there were asserting full citizenship rights. He moved to family property in Florida. According to Simkins, he decided to head to a family property in Florida where white supremacy had not yet been challenged by Blacks who, while legally free, were held in ignorance of their new status by their former “masters.” Simpkins told his student audience in 1914:

“Upon reaching Florida I found the negroes on the plantations, and while there was some suppressed excitement, there was no indication that they were going to assert their freedom by abandoning the plantations; there was no particular evidence of unrest. They had not grasped their situation as freemen and the influence of the former owners had not been shaken, as the carpetbagger had not made his appearance, or the scallawag risen to the surface.”

However, the Freedmen’s Bureau soon set up an office near his new home. One reason the planters hated the agents of the Freedmen’s Bureau so much was that one of the first things they did when arriving in a district was read the Emancipation Proclamation to those held as slaves. Simkins said that; “The Freedman’s Bureau..,was also armed with powers that were intended to humiliate the South, and enforce[d] the anticipated Civil Rights laws, the germ of which was social equality.” The prospect of the social equality of Blacks and whites excited the fears of white landowners like Simkins. Even worse, the Reconstruction forces were serious about enforcing the new civil rights laws on behalf of African Americans, whom Simkins calls the “ignorant masses.” Simkins complained to his students that “The severest penal laws were enacted against those who interfered in any way with the free exercise of any whim of these ignorant masses.”

Simkins told his student listeners that he decried the fact that upon the “oath of an ignorant negro; and to enforce the orders of this irresponsible Bureau the army was at its back to arrest white men and women” for violating the rights of former slaves.

By 1868, Blacks in Florida followed the lead of their brothers and sisters in South Carolina. Simkins told his students:

“the negroes became bolder, incendiary harangues were heard everywhere, white women could not appear on the streets without escort, and domestic duties were performed with a ready pistol at hand. The Freedman’s Bureau aggravated the conditions by pandering into the rising prejudice of the negro, arresting white men and women on trivial complaints by servants in the household, or negroes from the plantations. Equal rights began to assume the form of insistence on social equality and we find the Legislature of Florida passing a force bill to accomplish it by law.”

In the next section of his speech, Simkins was remarkably frank in discussing his leadership of the Ku Klux Klan for a man occupying a professor’s chair at a law school. While he put the most romantic spin on his actions, and while he denied involvement in murder, he clearly knew that his students would approve his armed resistance to Black equality. Simkins called the Klan “The Invisible Empire” and says that it was founded in self-defense by former Confederates:

“So…to suppress this volcano on which our women and children were nightly sleeping…arose the “Invisible Empire.” It was demanded for our safety and essential to our peace. In its organization and operation each state acted independently, and I can only speak of its organization and operation in Florida with which I was connected. Florida was more fortunately situated than other states to facilitate the operation of the Klan. The railroad from Tallahassee to Gainesville passed through the center of the black belt where we were most needed, and the conductors, engineers, and telegraph operators, being mostly Southern young men in hearty sympathy with us, never hesitated to carry out our orders when such services were needed, either for the dispatch of orders or the transportation of men. Our particular organization policed the counties of Jefferson, Madison, Taylor, and as far east as Columbia county, which comprise the heart of the black belt in Florida. Most of our service was performed at night and on horseback and not by rail. Our plan was never to work men in the county of their residence; the masked flitters of the night were always brought from other counties that the ready alibi might always be in evidence. The dawn of day was the hour to disperse and no two must be seen together after daylight. We worked, of course, upon the fears and superstitions of the negroes, performing before their cabins at night apparently supernatural stunts. The immediate effect upon the negro was wonderful, the flitting to and fro of masked horses and faces struck terror to the race, and any belated negro on the road at night who saw us coming never stood on the order of his going. The spirit of “dem Ku Kluxers,” as they called us, guarded the roads at night; in a word, the night prowlers now were satisfied to remain at home.”

Simkins leaves no doubt that the Klan was a Confederate veterans’ organization with widespread appeal:

“The Klan was composed of the best young men of the land, soldiers of the Southern army, many of them heroes in battle, and now as fearless in their duty as they had been in war. Our organization was compact, and we could assemble several hundred men at almost any point of the black belt on short notice…”

Simkins depicted himself as someone fighting against the rampant sexuality of Black men. He recalled that once “I was staying at the hotel in my town when one morning a lady came in apparently quite frightened and in tears. I asked her what troubled her. She said she had been insulted by a negro. Ascertaining the name of the negro I seized a barrel stave lying near the hotel door and whipped that darkey down the street and into the Freedman’s Bureau.” Simkins was not charged with a crime, he said, because everyone knew he was with the Ku Klux Klan.

In another incident he chased a Black elected representative through the streets with a stick after the man gave a “radical” speech. Simkins said that he was not prosecuted for the attack on the Black office holder because “the unseen power was behind me.”

In the clection of 1870, Simkins used the Klan to control the vote. Six out of seven eligible voters in the county were Black and Simkins called in two hundred men from Georgia to intimidate Blacks into staying away from the polls. Later, Simkins organized a train robbery to prevent the embattled Black community from receiving weapons to defend itself.

Simkins was an honored leader at the law school. In subsequent years he would deliver his 1914 speech each year on Thanksgiving Day. It became a comforting tradition in a world that was changing. A whites-only dorm was named after the professor. A decade ago his name was removed from the dorm.