In each populous precinct there was at least one council of the League, and always one for blacks. In each town or city there were two councils, one for the whites, and another, with white officers, for the blacks. The council met once a week, sometimes oftener, nearly always at night, and in a negro church or schoolhouse. Guards, armed with rifles and shotguns, were stationed about the place of meeting in order to keep away intruders. Members of some councils made it a practice to attend the meetings armed as if for battle. In these meetings the negroes listened to inflammatory speeches by the would-be statesmen of the new régime; here they were drilled in a passionate conviction that their interests and those of the Southern whites were eternally at war.
White men who joined the order before the negroes were admitted and who left when the latter became members asserted that the negroes were taught in these meetings that the only way to have peace and plenty, to get "the forty acres and a mule," was to kill some of the leading whites in each community as a warning to others. In North Carolina twenty-eight barns were burned in one county by negroes who believed that Governor Holden, the head of the State League, had ordered it. The council in Tuscumbia, Alabama, received advice from Memphis to use the torch because the blacks were at war with the white race. The advice was taken. Three men went in front of the council as an advance guard, three followed with coal oil and fire, and others guarded the rear. The plan was to burn the whole town, but first one negro and then another insisted on having some white man's house spared because "he is a good man." In the end no residences were burned, and a happy compromise was effected by burning the Female Academy. Three of the leaders were afterwards lynched.
The general belief of the whites was that the ultimate object of the order was to secure political power and thus bring about on a large scale the confiscation of the property of Confederates, and meanwhile to appropriate and destroy the property of their political opponents wherever possible. Chicken houses, pigpens, vegetable gardens, and orchards were visited by members returning from the midnight conclaves. During the presidential campaign of 1868 the North Carolina League sent out circular instructions to the blacks advising them to drill regularly and to join the militia, for if Grant were not elected the negroes would go back to slavery; if he were elected, the negroes were to have farms, mules, and offices.