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 regime; 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.