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Allen W. Trelease's White Terror, originally published in 1971, was the first scholarly history of the Ku Klux Klan in the South during Reconstruction. With its research rooted in primary sources, it remains among the most comprehensive treatments of the subject. In addition to the Klan, Trelease discusses other night-riding groups, including the Ghouls, the White Brotherhood, and the Knights of the White Camellia. He treats the entire South state by state, details the close link between the Klan and the Democratic party, and recounts Republican efforts to resist the Klan.
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Reviews
"Professor Trelease's pages stand as a monument to the heroic minority, those freedmen and white Republicans who resisted the seemingly endless Democratic terror and who often paid for their determination with their lives."
Journal of American History
"This splendid study has stripped the Klan of the heroic imagery . . . and has revealed it for what it really was: a vicious organization manned by white Southerners of all classes, who hated, bullied, tortured, murdered, and betrayed, apparently without shame or remorse."
Journal of Southern History
"White Terror is an important revisionist contribution to Reconstruction historiography-well-researched, well-organized, well-written."
Civil War History