Groups such as the Pale Faces, the Sons of Midnight, and the Knights of While Camelia began to appear across the South. A group of former Confederate soldiers formed a similar such group called the Ku Klux Klan. The smaller groups were eventually absorbed into the KKK, which became the premier group of its kind as numerous branches sprang up all across the South. .
In Pulaski, Tennessee, under the rule of General Nathan Bedford Forrest, the "invisible empire of the South" was born in opposition to the further destruction done to the South by Reconstruction. The Klan formed as a fraternal order similar in structure and hierarchy to Masonic groups. The KKK was a quasi-military group that purportedly traced its roots back to the military and social clans of Europe and Scotland. The mission of the early Klan was plain and straightforward: it sought to use scare tactics to keep blacks from asserting their political rights and to keep liberal whites from allying too completely with these blacks. Equipped not only with armed weapons, but also with an equally dangerous mob mentality, the members of the Klan would pay midnight visits to those they saw as potential threats to their way of life. Concealing their identities bearing white robes and white hoods and riding on robed horses with muted hooves, these men would also resort to more violent means in order to achieve their goals. Lynch law became their prime method of choice for what they saw as law enforcement. .
The issue of labor force in the agricultural South created another topic of dispute for the KKK. The Klan was an advocate of the post-Civil War South in which the aristocratic, white planter class ruled over the black slave class. In an effort to maintain some semblance of this society, efforts were made by the Ku Klux Klan to keep blacks "in their places" within Southern society. White supremacy over those who had been formerly used as a labor force was required, in their point of view.