d to serve three measures in late rebellious states: to promote social and political terror in the black man, to regain and maintain southern white control of governments and society, and as defense mechanism against an unpopular Reconstruction Policy enacted by a Radical Republican Congress. Through these means the southern whites accomplished the end of repressing the black class to a system of servitude little better than pre-war bondage. W. E. B. Du Bois said, "The former slaves were intimidated, beaten, raped, and butchered by angry and revengeful men.... Almost every law and method ingenuity could devise was employed by the legislatures to reduce the Negroes to serfdom, -- to make them the slaves of the state, if not of individual owners." This was true and proof can be found in the fact that when reconstruction was over new "Black Codes" were erected to segregate blacks and hinder most rights gained from the Civil War amendments.
             The Klan used terrorist acts to counter the conditions the Yankees imposed on their homeland. President U. S. Grant said in his message to the House of Representatives about the condition of affairs in the Southern states that: "Powerful combinations popularly known as "Ku Klux Klans"...by force and terror...prevent all political action not in accord with...members, to deprive colored citizens of the right to bear arms and of the right to a free ballot, to suppress schools in which colored children were taught, and reduce the colored people to a condition closely akin to that of slavery.... That they [KKK] had perpetrated many murders and hundreds of crimes to minor degree, all of which were unpunished." Grants message to the 42nd Congress told the Klan's goals and methods to subvert the black vote and freedman schools. Southern whites and many of their northern counterparts saw the Klan actions as justified while the Republicans and former abolitioni...