This work is undertaken with the wish to gratify a popular desire for addition to the scant literature relating to the Reconstruction Era and that most remarkable organization of modern times--begotten of conditions unparalleled in history, conditions which can never recur, and vanishing with the emergency which created it--the militant Ku Klux Klan. Only one writer has ventured far into this field of research, which until then seemed forbidden, and in his contribution to history, fact and fiction are so interwoven as to be almost indistinguishable.