But in came the Klan and the congregation scattered.
Smith and the others were so angry and frightened that their good feelings were dissipated, and the devil reentered them, so that Lakin said he was never able to "get a hold on them" again.

For the souls lost that night he held the Klan responsible.

Lakin told several marvelous stories of his hairbreadth escapes from death by assassination which, if true, would be enough to ruin the reputation of northern Alabama men for marksmanship.
The reconstruction ended with conditions in the churches similar to those in politics: the races were separated and unfriendly; Northern and Southern church organizations were divided; and between them, especially in the border and mountain districts, there existed factional quarrels of a political origin, for every Northern Methodist was a Republican and every Southern Methodist was a Democrat.
The schools of the South, like the churches and political institutions, were thrown into the melting pot of reconstruction.

The spirit in which the work was begun may be judged from the tone of the addresses made at a meeting of the National Teachers Association in 1865.

The president, S.S.Greene, declared that "the old slave States are to be the new missionary ground for the national school teacher." Francis Wayland, the former president of Brown University, remarked that "it has been a war of education and patriotism against ignorance and barbarism." President Hill of Harvard spoke of the "new work of spreading knowledge and intellectual culture over the regions that sat in darkness." Other speakers asserted that the leading Southern whites were as much opposed to free schools as to free governments and "we must treat them as western farmers do the stumps in their clearings, work around them and let them rot out"; that the majority of the whites were more ignorant than the slaves; and that the Negro must be educated and strengthened against "the wiles, the guile, and hate of his baffled masters and their minions." The New England Freedmen's Aid Society considered it necessary to educate the Negro "as a counteracting influence against the evil councils and designs of the white freemen." The tasks that confronted the Southern States in 1865-67 were two: first, to restore the shattered school systems of the whites; and second, to arrange for the education of the Negroes.