The Shoffner Act was intended to restore order in

North Carolina North Carolina () is a state in the Southeastern region of the United States. The state is the 28th largest and 9th-most populous of the United States. It is bordered by Virginia to the north, the Atlantic Ocean to the east, Georgia and So ...

counties where

Ku Klux Klan The Ku Klux Klan (), commonly shortened to the KKK or the Klan, is an American white supremacist, right-wing terrorist, and hate group whose primary targets are African Americans, Jews, Latinos, Asian Americans, Native Americans, and ...

(KKK) violence raged. Introduced by Alamance County Republican senator T. M. Shoffner, the act, which was passed by the North Carolina General Assembly in 1870, empowered the governor to suspend

habeas corpus ''Habeas corpus'' (; from Medieval Latin, ) is a recourse in law through which a person can report an unlawful detention or imprisonment to a court and request that the court order the custodian of the person, usually a prison official, t ...

and use the state

militia A militia () is generally an army or some other fighting organization of non-professional soldiers, citizens of a country, or subjects of a state, who may perform military service during a time of need, as opposed to a professional force of r ...

. Local indignation over the klan's excesses caused Governor

William W. Holden William Woods Holden (November 24, 1818 – March 1, 1892) was an American politician who served as the 38th and 40th governor of North Carolina. He was appointed by President Andrew Johnson in 1865 for a brief term and then elected in 1868. He ...

to declare

Alamance Alamance is a village in Alamance County, North Carolina, Alamance County, North Carolina, United States. It is part of the Burlington, North Carolina Metropolitan Statistical Area. The population was 951 at the 2010 United States Census, 2010 cens ...

and Caswell counties to be in a state of insurrection and invoked the Shoffner Act, and brought in Colonel George Kirk to restore order; the acts of Colonel Kirk's troops to end klan terrorism came to be known as the Kirk-Holden War. Senator Shoffner was burned in effigy in several counties, and the KKK unsuccessfully tried several times to kill him. To escape revenge by klansmen against him, he and his family fled to

Hendricks County, Indiana Hendricks County is a county in the U.S. state of Indiana. As of the 2010 United States Census, the population was 145,448. The county seat is the town of Danville. Hendricks County is the third largest county in the Indianapolis-Carmel-Anderso ...

.Martin Shofner 1758-1838 of Orange NC and Bedford TN- his life, family and ancestry, by Susie Helme

References

1870 in North Carolina North Carolina statutes {{NorthCarolina-stub