Complete horseshit. No wonder you had to have a Googly image make your point so that you could run away.
Number one, Fallacy of Composition assumes that some sample group, e.g. Southerners, are predominantly Democrats, ergo every action they take is driven by their, of all things, political philosophy. Which was conservative anyway.
Number two, fundamental ignorance of what political parties are and how they work. A political party is a device to acquire and consolidate power. That's it, end of definition. To imagine a political party is some sort of fixed point in space that never ever shifts with the political winds is to be at best a blind partisan hack and at worse a moron.
Moreover by the beginning of the Civil War for practical purposes only the Democratic Party even
existed; the RP was six years old and just getting started. Whigs were dead. Know-Nothings, Anti-Masons, Free Soilers and several others had sparked, fizzled and died off. The election of as recently as 1824 didn't even
have parties involved. To apply the circumstances we have today where a single party (cleverly disguised as two) completely and totally dominate everything to an era when we the people changed political parties like shirts is profound ignorance. Go look up the "First Party System" and "Second Party System" in a history book. Git chew a edumacation. This application of contemporary dichotomy to the past is Blatantly Beyond Bullshit.
All of this time the issue of slavery was building, hotly debated, even causing some of those myriad parties to rise an fall. James Buchanan is widely held to be the worst or second-worst POTUS ever for his failure to address it. But to suggest the Civil War was somehow caused by "Democrats" in the South one day up and seceding out of nothing is to not only display the same abject ignorance of American history but to rudely insult the reader's intelligence.
More moreover on this point -- in the election of 1860 the Republican candidate obviously was Lincoln, being the second candidate that party ever ran. Who was the Democratic nominee? Steven Douglas.
How may states did Lincoln win in the South? Zero.
How many states did Douglas win in the South? Zero.
The South wasn't having the DP, disrupted the convention which had to be suspended, walked out and formed their own parties and candidates (two of them) -- a pattern that would re-enact itself several times in the future (1924, 1948, 1964) so to identify the South with a political party
philosophically is outright disingenuousness ---- and articulates that same American history ignorance again. Because as just stated above, the purpose of a political party is to acquire power -- not to represent an ideology. The latter changes with the wind; the former
never does.
More to follow on this complete crock of anti-American revisionist claptrap. Got things to do. I shall return.
Number three, neither "Democrats" nor Nathan Bedford Forrest founded any incarnation of the KKK. That was done (the first time) by some young Confederate veteran soldiers -- as a social club, in 1865 (Christmas Day), out of small-town boredom. A lark. All the Greek terms and alliteration of "kleagles" and "klaverns" exemplifies that. When they dressed up in sheets and rode through town, at that time not as any kind of terrorist act but a simple college-kid prank, they were surprised to find strong visible reaction and took on the sheets as a kind of uniform.
Context: What was happening at the same time however is where the plot sickens -- having just been vanquished and humiliated in a war they expected to win, factions in the South rose up in resistance and guerilla warfare, targeting what they saw as occupying forces from the North as well as the newly-freed slaves whenever they did outrageously unacceptable things like request a fair wage, dare to walk into town, or try to vote. These targets were at the least intimidated and at worst, publicly hanged, burned alive, even skinned. In effect the War was not over. Sometimes these incidents were flash mobs, but several paramilitary groups formed, usually by Confederate soldier veterans, to organize the resistance. The Knights of the White Camellia is probably the second-best known. The White League -- and several others. Into the originally-innocuous Ku Klux Klan came
this dynamic, and it became a vehicle for the same violence all the insurgents were doing.
By the way, these six young veterans who started the Klan? No known political affiliation. Just college-age veteran soldiers. In 1865 there wasn't much in the South in the way of politics-as-usual anyway-- the entire focus, for what had been as long as anyone could remember the ruling class (i.e. whites), was either picking up one's shattered life, rising up in armed resistance, or both. So the idea of
normal political debate in that time and place as in two or more alternative political philosophies-- didn't even exist. And I specify whites because no one else had power.
Here lie the seeds of the Democratic 99-year (white) dominance of the South; it's just been vanquished and humiliated by the first President of the newfangled "Republican Party"; associating with that party is going to be literally unthinkable for generations. Lincoln's party represents the "aggressor". In a kind of supreme irony the South saw itself as
enslaved by the North. But we digress with background here -- the point is the Klan was neither founded by a political party; it wasn't even founded as a terrorist group. Revisionism's a *****.
Back to the Klan and Nathan Bedford Forrest. Forrest had been a prominent Civil War general, and by accounts from both sides a brilliant strategist, and so had status. The rising KKK asked Forrest to be the figurehead of the organization in the spring of 1867 -- a year and a half
after the KKK was already formed and looking to expand, organize and take on legitimacy. So he wasn't a "founder", which again displays the abject pig-ignorance of making points via Google Images, than which on a message board there's probably no more cowardly act. Matter of fact once the violence got out of control he issued an order
disbanding the Klan in January of 1869 and thereafter denied being a part of it. In spite of this, freelancers -- again, like the war not accepting of an ending -- kept up the action for a few years into the 1870s before Grant and the government suppressed it out of existence. By the end of the 1870s the Klan was dead. As were the other paramilitary groups that had sprung up synonymously with them.
So why do we know of the Klan so prominently today and not the White League? Because in 1915 (a time which had degraded to the absolute nadir of racial strife in this country, a tenor the school history books somehow forget to point out), a preacher-turned-salesman and inveterate club-starter/joiner in Georgia named William Simmons revived it, capitalizing on the impact of the racist film "Birth of a Nation" which glorified the KKK, which was at the time an romanticized artifact of decades past. Simmons, working off the film, introduced the whole burning crosses schtick, in fact using the imagery to (re)start the organization on Stone Mountain. By 1920 he had hired PR agents to proselytize the Klan and grow it -- after all, there was money to be made in memberships.
Oh by the way just to stay on point , William Simmons? Again, no known political affiliation. He insisted the Klan was a "fraternal" organization -- although clearly a polarizing one
Context: What was happening at the time here was not only the blanket of racism across the country with lynchings and race riots going on regularly, but an isolationism derived from a recent influx of immigrants, especially from central and eastern Europe. So Simmons' Klan expanded its hatred to not just blacks but equal-opportunity terrorism against Catholics, Jews, loose women and adulterers, and communists, hailing themselves as champions of "100% Americanism", which might sound eerily familiar. In one instance they took a (white) woman out an whipped her for "failing to go to church" and when her 15-year-old son came out to defend her they whipped him too.
Simmons' PR people used the isolationism angle to build up huge memberships around the country, far outside the South, and this is the point where they get into politics. Not with a particular party -- Democrats in the South, Republicans in the midwest and west. Whatever worked at the time. In Oregon they got a Democrat into the governor's chair and a Republican as mayor of Portland, Republican Senators and Governors in Colorado and Indiana. Republican city council in Anaheim. And obviously, Democrats in the South. Because unlike your façile Google Imagery, the KKK at least understood what a political party is and what it isn't.
Matter of fact when a Governor in Oklahoma (Walton) tried to drive the Klan out after the infamous Tulsa race riots, the KKK got him removed. When a Presidential candidate from Alabama (Underwood) denounced the Klan, they denounced him and muscled him out of contention. Walton and Underwood were both Democrats.
Doesn't fit your Big Ugly Loosey-Loosey Superficial Hotlinked Image Theory does it? The things you find out when you look under the BULLSHIT.
This second Klan, after internal power struggles and infighting and a huge rape scandal, followed by the Depression and World War Two, dwindled in its influence and largely spun down. Then in 1946 a dentist named Samuel Green tried to re-form and reorgaize it again, once again on Stone Mountain. Again playing on nativism, Green targeted the "uppity nigras who got all the good jobs while you were in uniform" as well as the influx of Jewish refugees from the Holocaust. Happily Green was killed by a heart attack in 1949, decentralizing and splintering the group which has been intermittently sputtering ever since.
Oh and this Samuel Green? All together now -- no known political affiliation.
What your dumbdown image is trying to do here is play pollitical football with what is clearly (racism, anti-Semitism, bigotry in general and theocracy) a
cultural issue. Trying to play dress-up with demons not only plays the Eliminationist monolithic-thought game but in fact cheapens the entire question and in effect suppresses examination of it.
And I will not allow this pig-ignorant revisionism.
Your last point about Opelousas -- no idea. There's no link. There's no link to any of this bullshit.
Here's some links. Study them. And quit promulgating Google Image Bullshit. It's counterproductive. This ain't no ******* football game, Jack.
Ku Klux Klan - a History of Racism
Klan in Oregon
Kolorado Klan Kountry
Red Summer
The Irony of the Solid South: Democrats, Republicans and Race, 1865-1944
Git chew a edumacation. Quit trying to dumb us down.
