All whites agreed that the Negro was inferior, but there were many who were grateful for his conduct during the war and who wished him well.

But others, the policemen of the towns, the "loyalists," those who had little but pride of race and the vote to distinguish them from the blacks, felt no good will toward the ex-slaves.

It was Truman's opinion "not only that the planters are far better friends to the Negroes than the poor whites, but also better than a majority of the Northern men who go South to rent plantations." John T.Trowbridge, the novelist, who recorded his impressions of the South after a visit in 1865, was of the opinion that the Unionists "do not like niggers." "For there is," he said, "more prejudice against color among the middle and poorer classes--the Union men of the South who owned few or no slaves--than among the planters who owned them by scores and hundreds." The reports of the Freedmen's Bureau are to the same effect.

A Bureau agent in Tennessee testified: "An old citizen, a Union man, said to me, said he, 'I tell you what, if you take away the military from Tennessee, the buzzards can't eat up the niggers as fast as we'll kill them.'" The lawlessness of the Negroes in parts of the Black Belt and the disturbing influences of the black troops, of some officials of the Bureau, and of some of the missionary teachers and preachers, caused the whites to fear insurrections and to take measures for protection.

Secret semi-military organizations were formed which later developed into the Ku Klux orders.