White Faces, White Hoods, White Phantoms
The Supernatural and Existential Claims of Confederate Monuments and the Ku-Klux Klan
Last month, I picked up a book from my local book store: Colin Dickey’s Ghostland: An American History in Haunted Places. About two chapters in I realized that I had yet another source to depend on for this work. In fact, Chaper 12, “Our Illustrious Dead” inspired the research that has gone into this piece. Written about the era of Reconstruction and the scramble to organize formal burials for soldiers on both sides of the conflict, Dickey sets the stage for the rise of the Ku-Klux Klan. Turns out, before there were ever haunted battlegrounds and cemeteries for us to travel to, tour, and try to catch a glimpse of something, the lore of war and loss of life provided the KKK with a gruesome opportunity at theatrics-as-psychological terrorism.
As written by Dickey, confederate ghost soldiers arose when the United States government excluded Confederate dead from their plans to build Civil War cemeteries. It would not be until 1906, when a Confederate section was established in the Arlington National Cemetery, that these men would be officially included in those commemorative civil projects. This left whites in south with the responsibility of accounting for and burying their fallen forces. Tales of the undead began circulating across the region. Post-war folklore would not just reflect the struggle to make sense of and process grief, though. It would also give rise to a new era in white supremacist mythos in America.
White Hoods In The Woods
The first generation of the KKK was Founded originally in Pulaski, Tennessee in 1865. It had been mere months after General Robert E. Lee’s surrender at Appomattox, Virginia. Historians describe the early days of the KKK in terms of pranks, disruptions, and nocturnal terror on Black communities. Shrouding themselves and their weapons beneath white cloaks, the men took the form of phantoms which were rising and escaping battlegrounds like Manassas and Antietam.
In 2011, The Klanwatch Project founded by the Southern Poverty Law Center wrote about one well-known ritual in their publication Klu Klux Klan: A History of Racism and Violence:
“A favorite Klan tactic had been for a white-sheeted Klansman wearing a ghoulish mask to ride up to a black family’s home at night and demand water. When the well bucket was offered, the Klansman would gulp it down and demand more, having actually poured the water through a rubber tube that flowed into a leather bottle concealed beneath his robe. After draining several buckets, the rider would exclaim that he had not had a drink since he died on the battlefield at Shiloh. He then galloped into the night, leaving the impression that ghosts of confederate dead were riding the countryside.” (10)
The Battle of Shiloh was a conflict which cost the lives of around 24,000 men, 13,000 of whom were Confederates. The battle took place in southwestern Tennessee in April of 1862, about 90 miles west of Pulaski.
In South Carolina, Dickey writes about an incident where a white man was awoken by fists banging on his front door. He answered, and all hell broke loose:
“Shadowy figures came forth, wanting to know how he’d voted in the recent elections — whether for the radical Republicans or for the Democrats — and when he told them he’d voted Republican, one ghost stuck the barrel of his pistol under his chin and dragged him into the woods. There they demanded that he remove his shirt. “What do you all want to whip me for,” he pleaded, “what have I done?” The figures replied, “Off with your shirt; if you don’t you shall go dead. We come from Manassas graveyard; and by Christ we want to get back to our graveyard and cover up before the day, by Christ.” These ghosts then whipped him ten to fifteen times, by his recollection, before releasing him, telling him, “You must promise to vote the democratic ticket, or you go dead before we leave you.” (Dickey, 208).
From the beginning, the idea of haunting the south for the KKK meant not just the capability for them to stage taunts, or get drunk and heckle their neighbors both white and Black. As Dickey argues, they strove for terror which could force Black people into staying-in-place, rather than flee to the North. After all, Black labor was still needed to help rebuild the south, it just had to be ensured through poverty and criminalization rather than enslavement. Klan Members — or “ghouls” — undoubtedly saw themselves as re-establishing their claim to the land beneath them as theirs, and the social and racial order enforced atop it.
Thus, the KKK revived their own form of slave patrols, stalking on foot and on horseback throughout the wilderness. Scholar Gladys-Marie Fry’s book Night Riders in Black Folk History (1977) provides pivotal insight not just into the construction of KKK identity, but how Black people subverted their claim to a successful ghostly charade. The SPLC report cites from her:
“appearing to believe what whites wanted them to believe was a part of wearing the mask and playing the game ... in another instance, on ex-slave who heard rumors of strange riders in his neighborhood went to his former master for information. the master told him, ‘there are Ku Klux here; are you afraid they will get among you?’ the black said, ‘what sort of men are they?’ the reply: ‘they are men who rise from the dead.’ according to the Congressional committee’s report, this informant gave the matter considerable thought and rejected it. in his own words: ‘i studied about it, but i did not believe it.’”
Fry continues,
“It is significant that the early Klan made such great efforts to frighten and terrorize blacks through supernatural means. the whole rationale for psychological control based on a fear of the supernatural was that whites were sure that they knew black people. they were not only firmly convinced that black people were gullible and would literally believe anything, but they were equally sure that blacks were an extremely superstitious people who had a fantastic belief in the supernatural interwoven into their life, folklore, and religion…”
Unsurprisingly, the appeal of getting to mask oneself to commit crime against innocent people, particularly Black people, was immense. In a couple of years the KKK official membership had a crisis on their hands: apparently, it had become too easy for “just anyone” to put on a white robe and ride around assaulting, robbing, and murdering people. Who could have foreseen?!
In order to fix this glaring issue in their PR, a large gathering was held in Nashville in 1867. There, both a leadership hierarchy and agenda were solidified. By 1868, there were calls within Union army headquarters to suppress the KKK or risk further rebellion in the south. Governmental contempt would increase until 1869, when the supposed disbandment of the KKK took place. By that time, however, the agenda, ideology, and purpose of a white supremacist domestic terror group had been established, and the end of the organization did not mean the end of the violence.
Disputing the Haunt
In the decades since the rise of the ghostly klan, the question of whether Black people believed in their rouse attests to wider problems concerning white people’s conceptualizations of Black intellect, spirituality, and culture. As Fry wrote in her book, Black peoples’ testimonies about the KKK’s violence showed anything but true belief: “they were terrified of living, well-armed men who were extremely capable of making black people ghosts before their time.”
In 1951, H. Grady McWhiney and Francis B. Simkins wrote in their article “The Ghostly Legend of the Ku-Klux Klan” that the problem with the assumption of Black gullibility and superstition is that its source is, overwhelmingly, whites:
“These and other interesting cases of black men quailing before ghosts are based on the recollections of the white klansmen themselves or on hearsay recorded by willing retailers of a myth too precious not to be accepted…
Is it not reasonable to assume that the “superstitious” blacks were realists enough to be terrorized by the weapons hidden beneath the ghostly robes of the klansmen rather than by ghostly decorations of which the robes were a part?”
McWhiney and Simkins add that during the Congressional investigations of the klan in 1871-1872, Black interviewees were never asked whether they believed the acts to be of true ghosts, because “such an inquiry would have appeared obviously stupid when addressed to persons who were able to prove that the fear of actual physical violence was the only reason why they were frightened by their klan visitors,” (111). In spite of this, the idea of Black people being genuinely afraid of klansmen ghosts was retrofitted to serve the overarching narrative of Black superstitiousness, fearfulness, and intellectual inadequacy (112).
Klansmen had the ability to spin the story not just within their ranks and for their own egos, but in the way white news publications decided to chronicle them. An excerpt taken from The Grenada Sentinel in late-March of 1868 features an article used to announce the arrival of the KKK into the Mississippi city by way of mocking the fears of a Black Preacher caricature named “Uncle Ike.” The short clipping consists mostly of “Uncle Ike’s” supposed testimony of fear for his life, followed by an ending line: “Who will doubt the presence the Mystic Order now! Negroes and Loyal Leagues, beware!”
The South Rises Again - And Not Solely in The South
While the KKK spent the years immediately after the war claiming that the ghosts of fallen Confederates were reclaiming their homes and their power over communities, the first specifically Confederate memorial was erected in Cynthiana, Kentucky, in 1869. The construction was spear-headed by The Cynthiana Confederate Monument Association, a collective of women who raised funds for the marble obelisk to the tune of $2,200. Yet, the number of places like Cynthiana — build in the immediate aftermath of the war’s end — are a stark minority compared to those build post-1900.
Speaking on numbers alone, Kentucky provided the Union with more soldiers than it did the Confederacy. However, today there are 64 confederate monuments, whereas the Union has 11.
If you log onto the National Park’s Service website and search for locations related to the Civil War, over 400 results crop up. Civil War memorials and sites are now a part of a greater landscape of “heritage tourism,” which many states have come to depend on for revenue. In 2017, a Virginia Commonwealth University Center for Urban and Regional Analysis report found that tourists considered “heritage travelers” spent a whopping $7.7 billion per year, which in turn generated $1.3 billion in taxes and supported over 100,000 jobs. Civil War sites and confederate memorials are a part of a big business. They depend on taxpayer funds for upkeep and are hallmarks in historical education for people both young and old. Families take their pictures and school field trips surround them year after year.
Confederate iconography is about more than just attesting to the history of the surrounding space and its connection to the Civil War. It is about designating public space as beholden to a specific reading of history, whiteness, and the nation. They are, like all good tools, expensive, intimidating, and intentionally-designed.
While the original klansmen may have intended to prevent Black migration up north, post-war and into the first half of the 20th century, KKK groups made considerable moves out west. Anaheim, California, the same town where Disneyland is located, was originally founded by late-19th century German immigrants seeking out a settlement which with fertile soil for growing wine grapes. In 1924, the town’s central powers were shaken up by the election of several klansmen to the city council, arising in tumultuous conflict with the predominantly German-Catholic community.
Though the existence of the KKK in Anaheim is long-believed to have dissipated in 1925-26, after they lost their city council positions, in reality the story is not nearly so neatly-concluded. In 1964, Savanna High School erected a fiberglass statue of their new school mascot, “Johnny Rebel,” a confederate soldier. There he would remain until 2019, when calls to restore him by the school’s art teacher pushed the issue to the school board, who denied the estimated $45,000 project due to its racial insensitivity.
Just several years prior, in 2016, a KKK rally at Pearson Park became violent due to fights between the klansmen and counter-protestors. The violence sent several people to the hospital and left the town reeling from the truth that racism and xenophobia still dwell in Anaheim.
What Goes Unburied
The production of confederate monuments in the early 20th-century is deeply connected to rise of the KKK. They are both iterations of white supremacist grief over the abolition of slavery, and the disruption of the social and racial order which relied upon enslavement as a legal bone structure. Though calls to destroy monuments reached a particular pitch in the late-2010s, leading to 73 successful removals in 2021 alone, over 700 confederate monuments are still standing in the United States. The ire continues.
And those hundreds of monuments have been made akin to ghosts in their own right: described as “Stone Ghosts,” “Stone-Faced Ghosts of the Confederacy.”
Thanks in part to the exacerbation of haunting by the KKK, Civil War ghosts are part of American iconography. Likewise, there are still many who deeply believe in confederate convictions and see no problem in venerating them as heroes, because they very much are. Whether it be a fascination with paranormal phenomenon which attracts people to walk battlegrounds or stakeout cemeteries overnight, or the proximity to a heritage bigger than oneself, or a rationale which balances both.
If you asked me whether I think dismantling confederate statues will eradicate white supremacy, I’d tell you no, and I would say it easily. Nevertheless, they should be destroyed. Why? For one, the land they are built upon is not theirs to oversee. Moreover, it is the right thing to do. They are the supposed-ghosts of the confederate soldiers who terrorized countless people; they enact a kind of spacial politic about who belongs and who does not, and who’s history is believed.
That is one of the sticking points of ghosts and hauntings, right? That no matter how different the space is from when the ghost first occupied it, they stick around to enforce presence. People in power, or those who are positioned to profit off of them, adopt them as tools of maintenance for their social order. No matter if the institution of slavery is struck down, the presence of white terrorists in the woods at night with hoods will still make themselves known and their violence felt. No matter if statues of confederates, including the man who became the first Grand Wizard in 1868, get taken down forever, those who are invested in their mythology will remain. That means resistance cannot and should not remain in the realm of the symbolic.
In many ways, those in power are given the ability to put on costumes and the style of their predecessors lost on the battlefield. But it is the sharing of the Manual that matters. Black people in the Reconstruction Era south knew that, and said as much: it is one thing to be a ghost, and another to be a ghost with a gun.