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Joint Select Committee on the Condition of Affairs in the Late Insurrectionary States, Testimony: North Carolina (1872): Sworn testimony taken by Congress, published with the committee's majority and minority reports. Witnesses offered conflicting accounts; each entry says whose testimony it is.Open the sourceAll sources
Searched the full chronology of 9,006 dated events and 77 storylines, not only the highlights. Showing 1–8.Back to highlights
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Reconstruction and the New South · 1866–1899
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Black men from Orange who rode in disguise to retaliate are sent to the penitentiary
Some Black men in Orange County who disguised themselves and went out, as they said, to retaliate against men they accused of punishing them were caught, tried and sent to the state penitentiary, according to the testimony of James M. Justice before the Joint Select Committee in July 1871. Justice said they were the only disguised night riders in the central counties he knew to have been convicted, and that Conservative speakers cited them to claim the only Ku Klux were Black.
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Disguised men shave the heads of white women in Orange County
Before March 1870, disguised men in Orange County shaved the heads of some white women and otherwise mistreated them, according to the testimony of Dr. Pride Jones before the Joint Select Committee on June 5, 1871. Jones gave no names or places and said he knew of no white men attacked.
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Orange County votes 1,740 to 970 for the Conservative congressional candidate Rogers
In the 1870 congressional election Orange County gave Rogers, the Conservative candidate, 1,740 votes to 970 for the Republican Harris, figures the committee chairman read from Greeley's almanac during Pride Jones's testimony on June 5, 1871. In 1868 the county had given Rogers 1,897 and the Republican Deweese 1,446, a fall in the Republican vote that the chairman put at 496; Jones agreed and said the Conservative vote had fallen too.
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Orange County Klansmen agree to disband after Pride Jones carries the governor's offer
Starting on March 8, 1870, when he rode eight miles into the country, Captain Pride Jones went to men he suspected of leading the Klan in Orange and told them, on Governor Holden's word passed through John W. Norwood, that past offenses would be overlooked if they disbanded. By his sworn account in June 1871, several said they were tired of it, the klans disbanded within about four weeks, and after four to six weeks he wrote Holden that the county was quiet.
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Governor Holden tells Captain Pride Jones he cannot promise the Orange Klan amnesty
Writing from Raleigh on March 17, 1870, Governor Holden told Pride Jones, his new militia captain for Orange County, that the executive had no power to proclaim amnesty and could pardon only after a conviction. He told Jones to discourage secret political societies, above all disguised and armed ones, to back the Orange sheriff with a posse if process was resisted, and to arrest men who came into Orange from Alamance. The letter was read into Jones's testimony before the Joint Select Committee on June 5, 1871.
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Dr. Pride Jones of Hillsborough testifies before Congress on the Orange County Klan
Dr. Pride Jones of Hillsborough, the militia captain Governor Holden had sent against the Klan in Orange, testified before the Joint Select Committee in Washington on June 5, 1871. He said four or five Black men had been hanged and several people whipped by disguised men in the county before his commission, that no one had been tried for it, and that the Klansmen were mostly Democrats who had disbanded in the spring of 1870.
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The congressional committee splits over making Pride Jones name Orange Klansmen
Asked on June 5, 1871 to name the Orange County men he had approached as leaders of the Klan, Dr. Pride Jones refused, saying he had dealt with them in confidence as Governor Holden's agent. The Joint Select Committee divided 3 to 3 on a motion to excuse him and postponed the question, and no names appear in the rest of his testimony.
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A federal commissioner tells Congress the Klan is still at work in southern Orange
A. Webster Shaffer, the U.S. commissioner at Raleigh who heard Ku Klux cases, testified before the Joint Select Committee in mid-1871 that disguised night riding continued in the lower part of Orange County, one of eight or ten counties from which complaints still reached him. He said the order had been campaigning in Orange since 1868 and that William A. Graham of Hillsborough could stop it there but tolerated it by saying nothing, though he did not think Graham a member. His account differs from Pride Jones's statement that the Orange Klan disbanded in the spring of 1870.
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Compiled and maintained by the Friends of the Orange County Public Library from county records, the sources named on each card, and the index’s event pages. Last updated October 4, 2026.
