The Montgomery advertiser., 1906-06-12
FIRST KU UKLUXKL WAS
 ORGANIZED IN TUSKEGEE
BY WILL T. STEPHAN.


 Reverend Thomas Dixon, the per- fervid writer on the race question. has set the whole country wrong on re- construction history. It is no difficult wrong path and the man who wrote The Leopards Spots" more probably by carelessness. has done this very
 MT Dixon was fortunate enough to first portray, so that the country could understand the very picturesque chap Ku Klux Klan. The story of the pie turesque organization means con Quered and superior race adopted the means to rid themselves of the domin- ion of an inferior race. There never was perhapo such romantic chapter of racial history lived as the chapter wherein the Ku Klux Klsn rode and
 MT Dixon was first at this literary spring of interest and seeing his re- ward others are following after. Mir not been in the purpose of the organi- ration. nor in the way the purposes were obtained The error has not been in the description of the meetings in the caves. the hidden places, the oath of death and the swift and mysterious rides at midnight. He went wrong in the minds of Southern men and of the scenes where the order did its first
 
 the success of his novels MT. Dixon credits Pulaski. Tenn. with being the birth place of the Ku Klux Klan du- ring the fall of 1866: He .Sst wopid dsdtion naoe and rapidly spread over the Southern
 A few weeks ago General Fred s, Ferguson met Judge A. E. Caffee on the streets of Birmingham. and calling him by the name his familiars use' said: Ku Klux Klan originated in Tennessee in the fall of 1866. know you haven't forgotten that in December of 1865 and your other friends. in Tuskegee you away from the Yankee soldiers for some of these Ku Klux outrages.
 The Judge had S not forgotten noiet the in in his career. He remembered vividly that he and Dr. Rice had been arrested by a squad of Federal soldiers and thrown into prison for the mysterious work which had been done by the rid CTS of the night in terrorizing ne- groes. punishing them for overt acts They were perhaps the first white men who were arrested for the work of the Ku Klux, but in due time any number of other southerners were, were thrown iss, t,eee ees may have been earlier arrests in some Southern town, but no records are ex- tant of any such arrest:
 
 charge of a mercantile business in Tuskegee, a branch house of A. Strass- burger, who is today we'll known cit- fzen of Montgomery.
 Judge CafIee's Romantic Career.
 Judge Caffee was fresh from the war then. He had run away from school and was carrying a Confederate rife before he was 16 years old. But the years which followed the war were for him hardly less picturesque and hardly less eventful than the years he spent In the army His unadorned ,iogra- phy would read like a romance. tho story of the time in the army, his rides with the terrors of the night and his arrest by the Yankee soldiers with the imminent danger of drum head court martial and a dangling moose.
 The Tuskegee trouble over, he left country so deeply turned as Alabama In reconstruction days and went to Mexico. There he was a soldier of fortune with the Emperor Maximilian This chapter of his life, spent in the service of the ill-fated royalist would hatch in interest any imaginary story Of adventure. It would have to do fited Maximilian to come to Mexico and reign as Emperor over that dis iurbed country, to be supported on his throne with the bayonets of Cpaln and Austria.
 There would be place for the telling of his desertion by France and Austria knd of the rising of Juarez and Diaz. Sry of the Mexicans who had brought Maximilian to the country to die with his face to a firing squad, but to die like a soldier and gentleman. There Is a place in the story for telling how trusted lieutenant of Maximilian. for