When white southerners rejected the Fourteenth Amendment and Congress passed the Military Reconstruction Act to put biracial conventions in charge of rebuilding the South, the Ku Klux Klan organized to prevent southern Republicans—black and white both—from voting in favor of the new state constitutions. The Ku Klux Klan murdered nearly a thousand Unionists before the 1868 elections, terrorized their neighbors, and undercut democracy in the South. Even more effective than Ku Klux Klan ropes, clubs and bullets, though, were the new tactics to which white Democrats turned when they realized that
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