The Knights of the Golden Circle were a pro-slavery secret society in the
mid-nineteenth-century United States. The original objective of the KGC was to
annex a "golden circle" of territories in Mexico, Central America, northern
South America, and Cuba and the rest of the Caribbean for inclusion in the
United States as slave states. As anti-slavery agitation increased after
the Dred Scott Decision was issued, the members proposed a separate
confederation of slave states, with U.S. states south of the Mason-Dixon line to
secede and to align with other slave states to be formed from the golden
circle. In either case, the goal was to increase the power of the Southern
slave-holding upper class to such a degree that it could never be dislodged.
During the American Civil War, some Southern sympathizers in the Northern
states such as Ohio, Illinois, Indiana, and Iowa, were accused of belonging to
the Knights of the Golden Circle, and in some cases they were imprisoned for
their activities. Early history
George W. L. Bickley, an Indiana-born doctor, editor, and "adventurer" who
lived in Cincinnati, founded the association. Records of the K.G.C.
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". He organized the first castle,
or local branch, in Cincinnati in 1854. Hounded by creditors, he left Cincinnati
in the late 1850s and traveled through the East and South, promoting an
expedition to Mexico. Following the Mexican-American War of 1846, the
group's original goal was to provide a force to colonize the northern part of
Mexico and the West Indies. This would extend pro-slavery interests.
Civil War and demise = In the Southwest=
The South's secession and the outbreak of the Civil War prompted a shift in the
group's plans for Mexico to support of the new Confederate government. On
February 15, 1861, Ben McCulloch, Texas Ranger, began marching toward the
Federal arsenal at San Antonio, Texas, with a cavalry force of about 550 men,
about 150 of whom were Knights of the Golden Circle from six castles. As
volunteers continued to join McCulloch the following day, the U.S. Army Gen.
David E. Twiggs decided to surrender the arsenal peacefully to the secessionists.
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 Confederate
Rangers attacked a building which 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. = In the 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
greatly 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 Pierce-Seward correspondence into
the Congressional Globe. Appealing to the Confederacy's friends
in the North and in the border states, the Order spread to Kentucky as well as
the southern parts of such Union states as Indiana, Ohio, Illinois, and
Missouri. It became strongest among Copperheads, some of whom felt that the
Civil War was a mistake. 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.
Loyalist 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 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 Jubal Early's infantry division passed
through York County, Pennsylvania, they took what they needed anyway. They often
paid with Confederate currency or with drafts on the Confederate government.
The 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.
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, 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 KGC
held numerous peace meetings. A few agitators, some of them encouraged by
Southern money, talked of a revolt in the Old Northwest, with the goal of
ending the war. = Conspiracy theory=
According to a few fringe historians, after the Civil War, the KGC went
underground and became a secret society. They claim that the KGC's new mission
was to support a second, former confederate, uprising against the U.S.
Federal Government. Furthermore, it has been alleged in the History Channel
program 'America Unearthed,' that the James-Younger Gang was the principal
source of funds for a second U.S. Civil War that never occurred. No evidence has
been provided for these suppositions. The Los Angeles Times noted that one
theory—among many—of the origin of the Saddle Ridge Hoard of gold coins is that
it was cached by the KGC, which "some believe buried millions in ill-gotten
gold across a dozen states to finance a second Civil War."
Alleged members Confederados
Buckner Stith Morris Lambdin P. Milligan
John Wilkes Booth Jesse James
Sam Houston In popular culture
The Night of The Iron Tyrants, 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 Emperor Pedro II of
Brazil during the Philadelphia Centennial Exposition of 1876.
The KGC are the villains of the graphic novel Batman: Detective No. 27 by
Michael Uslan and Peter Snejbjerg. The KGC are portrayed as conspirators in
the Lincoln assassination in the Disney movie National Treasure 2: Book of
Secrets. In the novel Queen of the Northern
Mines, the KGC plots to seize a gold shipment from Nevada County, California,
on its way to San Francisco. In the William Martin novel The Lincoln
Letter, the KGC are a group of conspirators in Washington, DC, during
the Civil War. The KGC and their potential involvement
with President Lincoln's assassination are discussed in an episode of the
History Channel series America Unearthed.
The KGC are the antagonists in a story featured in Atomic-Robo web comic.
See also Camp Douglas Conspiracy
Filibuster Judah P. Benjamin
Slave Power References
Further reading External links
Sam Lanham Digital Library Schreiner University
Knights of the Golden Circle entry in the Handbook of Texas
eHistory Sons of Liberty