This was not a political offense, and the verdict of many will be that he was served right. But the point is that the man was hung by a body of persons in uniform, and uniforms are not improvised for such purposes between three o clock in the afternoon and midnight. The uniform was prepared for a purpose, and was the sign of an organized body of lawless men. The significant fact in all this lawlessness and terror is that it is chiefly political. The masked blow of the Ku-Klux always falls upon some loyal man, black or white, and always upon a Republican.
Democrats are unharmed.
It is not a terror for those who attempted to destroy the government during the war, but for those who sustained it. The conclusion is irresistible that it is an organization of Democrats. This fact is made still more unquestionable by the denials and sneers of Northern Democrats. They call it rawhead and bloody-bones, a bugaboo of scared radicals, and a device invented to authorize military coercion of Democratic districts. Of course the darkness and the mystery with which the Ku-Klux is enveloped serve both to exaggerate and to conceal the truth.