The KKK was founded in Tennessee immediately after the end of the Civil War as a sort of social club for former Confederate Soldiers whose influence quickly spread through the decimated Southern states. As Columbia professor Eric Foner wrote in his A Short History of Reconstruction, in its early days, the group was loosely bound by one main principle: launching a reign of terror against Republican leaders black and white.
Racism was, of course, a guiding principle, but not quite as guiding as the hatred of the Republicans, the party of Lincoln, the Yankees who early Klansmen believed destroyed their homeland through what they termed a “war of northern aggression.”
The Republican Party had been founded in a schoolhouse in Ripon, Wisconsin just 12 years earlier, and Lincoln was its first president. The Klan saw both as just as big a menace as the newly freed slaves. Less than a year after Lincoln’s assassination, the Klan’s anti-Republican ideology spread rapidly.
Im just bored amd over caffinated i have no opinions on this issue lmao