The total membership was never made known.

In North Carolina the order claimed from seventy-five thousand to one hundred and twenty-five thousand members; in states with larger Negro populations the membership was probably quite as large.

After the election of 1868, only the councils in the towns remained active, many of them transformed into political clubs, loosely organized under local political leaders.

The plantation Negro needed less looking after, and except in the largest towns he became a kind of visiting member of the council in the town.

The League as a political organization gradually died out by 1870.* * The Ku Klux Klan had much to do with the decline of the organization.