The two largest secret orders, however, were the Ku Klux Klan, from which the movement took its name, and the Knights of the White Camelia. The Ku Klux Klan originated at Pulaski, Tennessee, in the autumn of 1865, as a local organization for social purposes. The founders were young Confederates, united for fun and mischief. The name was an accidental corruption of the Greek word Kuklos, a circle. The officers adopted queer sounding titles and strange disguises. Weird night riders in ghostly attire thoroughly frightened the superstitious negroes, who were told that the spirits of dead Confederates were abroad. This terrorizing of the blacks successfully provided the amusement which the founders desired and there were many applications for admission to the society. The Pulaski Club, or Den, was in the habit of parading in full uniform at social gatherings of the whites at night, much to the delight of the small boys and girls. Pulaski was near the Alabama line, and many of the young men of Alabama who saw these parades or heard of them organized similar Dens in the towns of Northern Alabama. Nothing but horseplay, however, took place at the meetings. In 1867 and 1868 the order appeared in parade in the towns of the adjoining States and, as we are told, "cut up curious gyrations" on the public squares.
There was a general belief outside the order that there was a purpose behind all the ceremonial and frolic of the Dens; many joined the order convinced that its object was serious; others saw the possibilities of using it as a means of terrorizing the negroes. After men discovered the power of the Klan over the negroes, indeed, they were generally inclined, owing to the disordered conditions of the time, to act as a sort of police patrol and to hold in check the thieving negroes, the Union League, and the "loyalists." In this way, from being merely a number of social clubs the Dens swiftly became bands of regulators, taking on many new fantastic qualities along with their new seriousness of purpose. Some of the more ardent spirits led the Dens far in the direction of violence and outrage. Attempts were made by the parent Den at Pulaski to regulate the conduct of the others, but, owing to the loose organization, the effort met with little success. Some of the Dens, indeed, lost all connection with the original order.