Other reviewers shared Turner’s admiration for Wilson’s history, yet they couldn’t help but notice the author’s fondness for the Ku Klux Klan, an organization whose mission, in Wilson’s words, was “to protect the southern country from some of the ugliest hazards of a time of revolution.” Wilson scolded Klan members for being hotheaded, yet he defended their motives. They were acting, he wrote, out of “the mere instinct of self-preservation.”
