Knights of the Golden Circle

thumb|260px|Map of the proposed "Golden Circle" in dark green. Light green designates the remnants of the [[United States.]]

thumb|175px|Seal of the president of the Knights of the Golden Circle, [[National Archives and Records Administration|National Archives]]

The Knights of the Golden Circle (KGC) was a secret society founded in 1854 by American George W. L. Bickley. Its objective was initially to expand the United States into Latin America, adding slave states and ensuring the permanent continuance of slavery. This later became a plan for the southern states to secede and then add Latin American territory. The 'golden circle' was a circle of 16 degrees radius (about 2400 miles) centered on Havana, and covering territories whose climate was suitable for large-scale plantation agriculture. It would have consisted of the Southern United States, Mexico (which was to be divided into 25 new slave states), Central America, Cuba, Haiti, the Dominican Republic, Caribbean South America and most other islands in the Caribbean.

The KGC's proposal grew out of previously unsuccessful proposals to annex Cuba (the Ostend Manifesto), parts of Central America (the Filibuster War), and all of Mexico (the All of Mexico Movement). In Cuba, the issue was complicated by the desire of many in the colony for independence from Spain. Mexico and Central America had no interest in being part of the United States. Initially, the KGC advocated that the United States should annex the new territories to increase the number of slavery states vastly, and thus the power of slaveholders.

In response to the increased anti-slavery agitation that followed the Dred Scott decision (1857), the Knights changed their position: the Southern United States should secede, forming their own confederation, and then invade and annex the other areas of the Golden Circle.

During the American Civil War, some Southern sympathizers in Northern states such as Ohio, Illinois, Indiana, Minnesota, and Iowa, joined the KGC, which was renamed first the Order of American Knights, and then, in a deliberate reference to the Sons of Liberty of the American Revolution, the Order of the Sons of Liberty.

The KGC has been called a "model" for the Ku Klux Klan.

Early history

George Washington Lafayette Bickley, a doctor, newspaper editor, adventurer, and "somewhat itinerant promoter" who was born in Virginia However, records of the KGC convention held in 1860 state that the organization "originated at Lexington, Kentucky, on the fourth day of July 1854, by five gentlemen who came together on a call made by Gen. George Bickley". Hounded by creditors, Bickley left Cincinnati in the late 1850s and traveled through the eastern and southern United States, promoting an armed expedition to Mexico.

The KGC's original goal was to colonize the northern part of Mexico and add it to the U.S. as multiple states, either by negotiation with Mexican President Benito Juarez,

In August 1861, The New York Times described the order as a successor to the Order of the Lone Star, which had been organized to conquer Cuba and Nicaragua, succeeding in the latter cause in 1856 under William Walker before being driven out by a coalition of neighboring states. At that time, the order's prime objective was said to be to raise an army of 16,000 men to conquer and "Southernize" Mexico, which meant making slavery, not legal in Mexico, again legal while supporting the "Knights of the Columbian Star"—those in the KGC's highest level of membership—for public office.

In the North, the KGC was cited by a Senator from Wisconsin as an exemplar of "Southern fanaticism", an exposé of the organization was published in Indiana in 1861, and its secret rituals were publicized in Boston in that year as well.

Historian David M. Potter commented that the KGC played no role in either forming or supporting the Confederate States of America. as well as Virginia's secessionist Senator James M. Mason.

Civil War

With the onset of the American Civil War, it was difficult for the KGC to garner support for their filibustering schemes, since the South needed to expend its resources on preparing for war with the Union. Several KGC "castles" joined the Confederate Army as a group, and in early 1863 Bickley gave up his leadership of the organization to become a surgeon in a regiment from North Carolina.

Southwest

In 1859, future Confederate States Army brigadier general Elkanah Greer established KGC castles in East Texas and Louisiana. Although a Unionist, United States Senator Sam Houston introduced a resolution in the U.S. Senate in 1858 for the "United States to declare and maintain an efficient protectorate over the States of Mexico, Nicaragua, Costa Rica, Guatemala, Honduras, and San Salvador." This measure, which supported the goal of the KGC, failed to be adopted.

With the election of Abraham Lincoln as President of the United States, the Texas KGC changed its emphasis from a plan to expand U.S. territory into Mexico to focus its efforts on providing support for the Southern States' declared secession from the United States. On February 15, 1861, Ben McCulloch, United States Marshal and former Texas Ranger, began marching toward the U.S. Army arsenal at San Antonio, Texas, with a cavalry force of about 550 men, about 150 of whom were Knights of the Golden Circle (KGC) from six castles. As volunteers continued to join McCulloch the following day, United States Army Brevet Maj. Gen. David E. Twiggs surrendered the arsenal peacefully to the secessionists. Twiggs was appointed a major general in the Confederate States Army on May 22, 1861.

KGC members also figured prominently among those who, in 1861, joined Lt. Col. John Robert Baylor in his temporarily successful takeover of southern New Mexico Territory. In May 1861, members of the KGC and the Confederate Rangers attacked a building that housed a pro-Union newspaper, the Alamo Express, owned by J. P. Newcomb, and burned it down. Other KGC members followed Brig. Gen. Henry Hopkins Sibley on the 1862 New Mexico Campaign, which sought to bring the New Mexico Territory into the Confederate fold. Both Baylor and Trevanion Teel, Sibley's captain of artillery, had been among the KGC members who rode with Ben McCulloch.

North

In early 1862, Radical Republicans in the Senate, aided by Secretary of State William H. Seward, suggested that former president Franklin Pierce, who was exceedingly critical of the Lincoln administration's war policies, was an active member of the Knights of the Golden Circle. In an angry letter to Seward, Pierce denied that he knew anything about the KGC and demanded that his letter be made public. California Senator Milton Latham subsequently did so when he entered the entire PierceSeward correspondence into the Congressional Globe.

Appealing to the Confederacy's friends in the North and the border states, the Order spread to Kentucky and Tennessee, as well as the southern parts of such Union states as Indiana, Ohio, Illinois, and Missouri. It became strongest among Copperheads, who were Democrats who wanted to end the Civil War by a settlement with the South. Some supported slavery, and others were worried about the power of the federal government. In the summer of 1863, Congress authorized a military draft, which the administration soon put into operation. Leaders of the Democratic Party opposed to Abraham Lincoln's administration denounced the draft and other wartime measures, such as the arrest of seditious persons and the president's temporary suspension of the writ of habeas corpus.

During the 1863 Gettysburg campaign, scam artists in south-central Pennsylvania sold Pennsylvania Dutch farmers $1 (~$ in ) paper tickets purported to be from the Knights of the Golden Circle. Along with a series of secret hand gestures, these tickets were supposed to protect the horses and other possessions of ticket holders from seizure by invading Confederate soldiers. When Confederate Maj. Gen. Jubal Early's infantry division passed through York County, Pennsylvania, they took what they needed anyway. They often paid with Confederate States dollars or with drafts on the Confederate government. The Confederate cavalry commander J. E. B. Stuart also reported the alleged KGC tickets when documenting the campaign.

That same year, Asbury Harpending and California members of the Knights of the Golden Circle in San Francisco outfitted the schooner J. M. Chapman as a Confederate privateer in San Francisco Bay, with the object of raiding commerce on the Pacific Coast and capturing gold shipments to the East Coast. Their attempt was detected and they were seized on the night of their intended departure.

Reorganization

In late 1863, the KGC reorganized as the Order of American Knights. In 1864, it became the Order of the Sons of Liberty, with the Ohio politician Clement L. Vallandigham, the most prominent of the Copperheads, as its supreme commander. In most areas, only a minority of its membership was radical enough to discourage enlistments, resist the draft, and shield deserters. The organization held numerous peace meetings. A few agitators, some encouraged by Southern money, talked of a revolt in the Old Northwest intending to end the war. In some cases, Sons of Liberty members were imprisoned, deported, or tried by military tribunal and sentenced to death for their activities.

Among the many acts of guerrilla warfare attributed to the Sons of Liberty were the burning of the Walnut Ridge Friends Meetinghouse in Rush County, Indiana in 1864 and the Northwest Conspiracy, which plotted regime change uprisings aimed at forcibly bringing Iowa, Ohio, Illinois, and Indiana into the Confederacy.

Influence

In The Idea of a Southern Nation (1979), historian John McCardell called the KGC "that most bizarre offshoot of Southern expansionism." He wrote: <blockquote>In reality, the influence of the K.G.C. was practically nonexistent. ... Viewed in isolation, the K.G.C. would seem to be an aberration hardly deserving attention. But viewed in the context of the developments of the 1850s, the organization seems perhaps the logical extension of Southern expansionist rhetoric."

The History Channel Show Brad Meltzer's Decoded features an episode that focused on the KGC and their possible connection to hiding $20 million worth of missing coins from the Confederate treasury in or near Danville, Virginia.

Members and alleged members

George W. L. Bickley founded the KGC, so he is a known member, but as a secret society, its membership cannot otherwise be known with accuracy. The following people have been suggested as possibly having been members, with differing degrees of certainty:

Asbury Harpending, a San Francisco financier, who joined in a failed conspiracy to create a "Pacific Republic" in California and Oregon, and with other members of the KGC outfitted a schooner as a Confederate privateer.
John C. Breckinridge, Vice President of the United States before the Civil War, and the candidate of the Southern Democrats in the 1860 presidential election won by Lincoln.
Parker H. French, adventurer, entrepreneur, swindler and spy for the confederacy. French had interest in the KGC and was tried, but was not convicted, of being a member.
Elkanah Greer, an antebellum cotton planter and merchant, and then a general in the Confederate States Army.
Jesse James, Confederate "bushwhacker" who after the Civil War robbed trains and banks. Other members of the James-Younger Gang may also have been involved in the KGC.
John S. Marmaduke, an officer in the antebellum U.S. Army, he became a Confederate general of cavalry in the Trans-Mississippi; later he was the 25th Governor of Missouri.
Buckner Stith Morris, a Chicago politician who opposed the Civil War, and appeared to sympathize with the Copperheads, anti-war Democrats.
Albert Pike, an American author, poet, orator, editor, lawyer, jurist and Confederate States Army general who served as an associate justice of the Arkansas Supreme Court in exile from 1864 to 1865.
Joseph O. Shelby, a wealthy businessman from Kentucky who participated in Bleeding Kansas as an advocate of slavery; after secession he became a Confederate officer who commanded cavalry in the Trans-Mississippi.
Robert Toombs, a U.S. Senator, who became the first Secretary of State of the Confederacy, and later a Brigadier General in the rebel army.
William L. Yancey, a well-known and influential "fire-eater" who campaigned vigorously for Southern independence.
In the novel Bring the Jubilee (1953) by Ward Moore, a victorious Confederacy annexes all of Latin America in the late 19th century (renaming Mexico City as "Leesburg"), leading to a mid-20th-century cold war with the German Empire, the world's only other superpower.
The Night of the Iron Tyrants (1990–1991), written by the novelist Mark Ellis and drawn by Darryl Banks, is a four-part comic book miniseries based on The Wild Wild West television series. It features the Knights of the Golden Circle in an assassination plot against President Ulysses S. Grant and Dom Pedro II of Brazil during the Philadelphia Centennial Exposition of 1876.
In the Southern Victory Series (1997–2007) by Harry Turtledove, the Confederacy's post-war territorial expansion into Latin America amounts only to the purchase of Cuba from Spain in 1878 and the purchase of Sonora and Chihuahua from the Second Mexican Empire in 1881, to construct a transcontinental railway and establish a Confederate naval presence in the Pacific. In the 1890s, the Confederacy attempted to build the Panama Canal but was dissuaded by an ultimatum from Union President Alfred Thayer Mahan.
The KGC are the villains of the 2003 graphic novel Batman: Detective No. 27 by Michael Uslan and Peter Snejbjerg.
The 2004 film C.S.A.: The Confederate States of America explores the results of a Southern victory in the Civil War and posits the Golden Circle as a plan enacted after the war.
The KGC are portrayed as conspirators in the Lincoln assassination in the 2007 Disney movie National Treasure: Book of Secrets.
In the 2012 film Lincoln, the KGC is indirectly alluded to by President Lincoln to Thaddeus Stevens of the Radical Republicans. Lincoln specifically states that slavery would "spread out of the American South into South America” had Stevens' policies been pursued.
In the William Martin novel The Lincoln Letter (2012), the KGC is a group of conspirators in Washington, DC during the Civil War.
The KGC and their potential involvement in President Lincoln's assassination are discussed in the episode "Lincoln's Secret Assassins" of the History Channel series America Unearthed (season 2, episode 12, first broadcast February 15, 2014).
The KGC are the antagonists in a story that is featured in the Atomic Robo webcomic in 2015.
The KGC is referenced during a discussion concerning a potential assassination plot in the second season of the PBS television series Mercy Street in 2017.
The KGC is the subject of a historical fiction novel by Steve Berry, The Lost Order, published on April 4, 2017.
The KGC are the subject of the "Gold Diggers" episode of the TV show FBI: Most Wanted (season 4, episode 4, first broadcast October 11, 2022), when the team hunts a gang looking for the KGC's secret treasure.

References

Notes

Bibliography

Franklin, John Hope [1956] (2002) The Militant South 1800-1861 pp. 124–128 Urbana, Illinois: University of Illinois Press.
(currently published under the title of Rebel Gold )

External links

Sons of Liberty (American Civil War) – Ohio History Central
Joseph Holt, Report of the Judge Advocate General on "The Order of American Knights," alias "The Sons of Liberty." A Western Conspiracy in aid of the Southern Rebellion (Washington, D.C.: Union Congressional Committee, 1864).