Many organizations arose to terrorize the South, but the Ku Klux Klan became the most notorious. Founded in Tennessee in 1866, the Klan emerged as the armed wing of the Democratic Party. It struck hard in Alabama and harder still in Mississippi. Klan night riding arose easily out of the antebellum slave patrols. Recruits were easy to find in a countryside full of bitter ex-soldiers inured to violence and unreconciled to defeat, but the Klan seems to have recruited largely from the sons of well-to-do slaveholding families who had lost wealth and standing following the war.
