K Troop: the eradication of the original Ku Klux Klan
By Matthew Pearl
... Klan operatives carefully monitored incoming intelligence on the efforts against them. In fact, before K Troop made the long trip from Kansas, a different squadron of U. S. Army soldiers headed for York County to prevent a Klan scheme to attack the county treasurer’s office. The Klan tore up the railroad tracks in advance to stop the infantry’s arrival. While the soldiers labored to repair the tracks, the Klan carried out its raid on the treasury—which targeted the white treasurer whom the Klan believed supported the black militia. The treasurer, knowing the Klan wanted him dead, fled not just the county, but the country, ending up in Canada ...
It was now six years since Appomattox, but evidence of the war’s aftermath was everywhere. Sgt. Winfield Scott Harvey, the blacksmith of K Troop, kept track of the battlefields they passed on their trip by boat and train from Kansas to York. Burned mansions still dotted the landscape. Many Southern whites stewed with anger at their defeat and humiliation at the hands of the Union Army and the continued degradation through Reconstruction efforts of their perceived birthrights of racial and economic superiority. Their black neighbors were daily reminders of all they had lost beyond battles. If a ghost war was to be carried out, blacks were the proxies for the North and the Klan were the ghost soldiers, right down to their flowing robes and masks ...
Merrill realized, more and more, just how surrounded he was. When he telegraphed information back to Washington, Klan members instantly came into possession of the whole exchange—the telegraph operator was part of the Klan. The conductor of the railroad was Klan, too, and spied on the movements of bluecoats delivering messages for Merrill. Along with the already exposed sheriff were judges, lawyers, municipal officials—all loyal members. As one of Merrill’s soldiers commented in a morbid mood, “Go out and shoot every white man you meet, and you will hit a Ku-Klux every time.” Merrill’s knowledge of the Klan’s assortment of signals could make a simple walk down Congress Street a surreal experience—if two men shaking hands interlaced their little fingers and touched the palm with the point of the forefinger, they were Klan; if one man tapped his left ear with his left hand three times, and another walking by then put his right hand in his right pocket, thumb on the outside and fingers on the inside, Klansmen were hailing each other. It was as though the major entered some Poe-inspired gothic tale about a search for a town’s hidden monsters that ended with half the townspeople the monsters ...
Merrill’s telegraphic communications with Washington were now transmitted in cipher, with his Washington go-betweens urging Merrill to keep the key to the cipher “in your own custody as its loss, or betrayal would involve the change of the entire system.” They had learned that, in addition to having spies in the telegraph office, the Klan had a machine that could tap the wires to intercept the content of telegraphs. The Shakespeare-quoting Merrill probably never knew, but might have appreciated the fact, that one of the government clerks copying the outgoing confidential letters from the attorney general’s office to K Troop headquarters was 52-year-old poet Walt Whitman ...
http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/history/2016/03/how_a_detachment_of_u_s_army_soldiers_smoked_out_the_original_ku_klux_klan.single.html
= new reply since forum marked as read
