On 18 August 1868 Richard Moore, a former slave and Union veteran, journeyed from rural Lincoln County in Middle Tennessee to testify in Nashville before a Republican-controlled committee of the Tennessee State Assembly investigating incidents of violence against freedmen. Richard Moore's appearance in Nashville came three weeks after he had been taken by force from his home and whipped by a gang of masked men. Moore testified before the committee that on 30 July 1868 sixteen members of what he called the Ku Klux Klan broke into his house and struck him about the head with pistols and sticks. They then took him outside and, in Moore's own words, "stripped me and whipped me with a strap of leather, with a buckle on its end, striking me 175 licks." After inflicting their punishment, Moore's assailants asked him if he was a Radical Republican. They then demanded his pistol and voter registration certificate. "They told me," Moore testified, "that I nor no other colored man should vote in the Presidential election" that fall. Finally his assailants goaded him to take his bloodied shirt and "carry it to [the] legislature" in Nashville, threatening to kill him if he did so. In concluding his testimony, Moore named Calaway G. Tucker and Allen L. Anderson as the ringleaders among his assailants, identifying the entire gang as "all my near neighbors, and all rebels." Note: Circumstantial evidence suggests that Moore's employers, Tucker and Anderson may have been among his assailants and considered Moore a 'bad Negro' likely meaning that he was seen as a difficult and insubordinate worker; and an unstable labor force was especially troubling to the white landowners of Lincoln County after the war. Moore's assailants ordered him not to vote for the Radicals, saying that "all would be right ... if I would join them and be a good Conservative...".

(Exerpt from 'The whipping of Richard Moore: Reading Emotion in Reconstruction America Journal of Social History;, Winter, 2002 by Edward John Harcourt

Most whites in Lincoln County had supported the Confederate cause. Indeed, Calaway G. Tucker and Allen L. Anderson, two men named by Richard Moore as his leading assailants, were both local landowners (Calaway G. Tucker owned 173 acres and Allen L. Anderson 93 acres) and were veterans of the 'Swan Creek Guards,' a Lincoln County unit of the 32nd Tennessee Confederate Infantry. Men like Captain Tucker took issue with every aspect of the new social world that Radical Republicans in Nashville and Washington seemed determined to secure. As Stephen Ash has observed, whites throughout Middle Tennessee bristled at assertions of black independence, insisted on treating freedmen as they had treated slaves, persisted in their conviction of black inferiority, and withdrew from the paternalistic arrangements of slavery that had provided a measure of support to the black family in an otherwise brutally exploitative world. The editor of the Fayetteville Observer, Lincoln County's leading Conservative newspaper, spoke for many local whites in declaring that "...if the negro is entitled to vote, he is certainly entitled to hold public office. We maintain that he is entitled to neither..." In effect, the maintenance of white supremacy became the social and political goal for most whites. Without access to the franchise, many whites found that the Ku Klux, gangs of disguised white terrorists who first emerged after the war in neighboring Pulaski, Tennessee, gave hopeful expression to their anti-Republican sentiments. In 1867 a chapter of the Pulaski Klan became active in Lincoln County.)