George W. L. Bickley

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George Washington Lafayette Bickley was the founder of the "Knights of the Golden Circle" around the time of the American Civil War. Bickley was arrested by the United States government and it was during this time he wrote a letter to Abraham Lincoln expressing his distastes with Lincoln's running of the government.

Bickley was a Virginia-born doctor, editor, and "adventurer" who lived in Cincinnati. He organized the first castle, or local branch, in Cincinnati in 1854 and soon took the order to the South, where it was well received. It grew slowly until 1859 and reached its height in 1860.

Hounded by creditors, Bickley left Cincinnati in the late 1850s and traveled through the East and South promoting an expedition to seize Mexico and establish a new territory for slavery. He found his greatest support in Texas and managed within a short time to organize thirty-two chapters there.

In the spring of 1860 the group made the first of two attempts to invade Mexico from Texas. A small band reached the Rio Grande, but Bickley failed to show up with a large force he claimed he was assembling in New Orleans, and the campaign dissolved. In April some KGC members in New Orleans, disgusted by Bickley's inept leadership, met and expelled him, but Bickley called a convention in Raleigh, North Carolina, in May and succeeded in having himself reinstated. Bickley attempted to mount a second expedition to Mexico later in the year, but with Abraham Lincoln's election he and most of his supporters turned their attentions to the secessionist movement.

the outbreak of the Civil War prompted a shift in the group's aims to that of supporting the Confederates and engaging in Copperhead activity.

In late 1863 the Knights of the Golden Circle was reorganized (san Bickley) as the Order of American Knights and again, early in 1864, as the Order of the Sons of Liberty, with Clement L. Vallandigham, most prominent of the Copperheads, as its supreme commander but with growing Union victories in 1864 it soon dissolved.

Bickley served for a time as a Confederate surgeon and was arrested for spying in Indiana in July 1863. He was never tried but remained under arrest until October 1865; broken and dispirited, he died in August 1867.

[edit] Sources

G. F. Milton, Abraham Lincoln and the Fifth Column (1942, reprinted 1962)
R. O. Curry, A House Divided (1964).
Donald S. Frazier, Blood and Treasure: Confederate Empire in the Southwest, (College Station, Texas: Texas A&M University Press, 1995).
Ollinger Crenshaw, The Knights of the Golden Circle: The Career of George Bickley, American Historical Review 47 (October 1941).
Roy Sylvan Dunn, The KGC in Texas, Southwestern Historical Quarterly 70 (April 1967)
Jimmie Hicks, ed., Some Letters Concerning the Knights of the Golden Circle, Southwestern Historical Quarterly 65 (July 1961).
Robert E. May, The Southern Dream of a Caribbean Empire, 1854-1861, (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1973).
Scott L. Mingus, Flames Beyond Gettysburg: The Gordon Expedition, (Columbus, Ohio: Ironclad Publishing, 2006).