>>519557760
>Founding the Klan: 1865-1871

>During the American Civil War, the Confederacy was a nest of Freemasons. Many Brothers held positions in the Confederate States Army, most likely because of the South’s strong Masonic tradition which had taken off in the early 19th century. Indeed, the most widespread Masonic rite in the world, the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite, was launched in Charleston, South Carolina, in 1801. Exactly 60 years later, again in Charleston, the civil war started. Southerners created the KKK just after the war, in December 1865, as an extension of the Confederation, and it proved to be a landmark for Freemasons, too. As a result, Albert Pike is often credited for founding the KKK, which, in reality, he did not. That said, Pike maintained an unquestionable intellectual closeness to the KKK, as is evident from the words he published in 1868, in his own newspaper, The Memphis Daily Appeal, of which he was the editor:

>"If it were in our power, if it could be effected, we would unite every white man in the South, who is opposed to Negro suffrage, into one great Order of Southern Brotherhood, with an organization complete, active, vigorous, in which a few should execute the concentrated will of all, and whose very existence should be concealed from all but its members."