| Knights of the Golden Circle | |
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An alleged secret history of the Knights of the Golden Circle published in 1863 |
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| Abbreviation | KGC |
| Formation | 1854 |
| Type | Paramilitary |
| Purpose/focus | U.S. annexation of the Golden circle |
| Headquarters | Cincinnati, Ohio, United States |
| Official languages | English |
| Leader | George W. L. Bickley |
The Knights of the Golden Circle (KGC) was a secret society. Some researchers believe the objective of the KGC was to prepare the way for annexation of a golden circle of territories in Mexico, Central America, and the Caribbean for inclusion in the United States as slave states. During the American Civil War, some Southern sympathizers in the Northern states such as Ohio, Indiana, and Iowa, were accused of belonging to the Knights of the Golden Circle.
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George W. L. Bickley—a Virginia-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….”[1] 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 seize Mexico to establish a new territory for slavery. This was to be the first step in forming the Golden Circle.
The South’s secession and the outbreak of the Civil War prompted a shift in the group's aims from Mexico to support of the new Confederate government. On February 15, 1861, Texas Ranger Ben McCulloch 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 (KGC) from six castles. While volunteers continued to join McCulloch the following day, 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 also attacked the building which housed a pro-Union newspaper, the Alamo Express, owned by J. P. Newcomb, and burned it down.[2] Other KGC members followed Brig. Gen. Henry Hopkins Sibley on the 1862 New Mexico Campaign, which sought to bring the entire 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 early 1862, the Order was in the national headlines when 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. Pierce, writing an angry letter to Seward, denied that he knew anything about the KGC, and then demanded that his letter be made public. California Senator Milton Latham subsequently did so when he entered the entire Pierce-Seward correspondence, which tended to exonerate the former president, into the Congressional Globe.
Appealing to the Confederacy's friends in the North, the Order soon 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 and that the increasing power of the federal government was leading to tyranny, though others were just supporters of slavery. In the summer of 1863, Congress authorized a military draft, which the administration soon put into operation. Loyalist Leaders of the Democrat 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.[3] When Jubal Early's infantry division passed through York County, Pennsylvania, they scoffed at the ticket holders and took what they needed anyway. They often paid with Confederate currency or drafts on the Confederate government. Cavalry commander J.E.B. Stuart also reported the alleged KGC tickets when documenting the campaign.[4]
Also in 1863, 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.[5][6]
In late 1863, the Knights of the Golden Circle reorganized as the Order of American Knights. In 1864, it became the Order of the Sons of Liberty, with 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, which could have ended the war.[7]
A four-part comic book miniseries based on The Wild Wild West TV series entitled "The Night of The Iron Tyrants" was published in 1990–91, scripted by novelist Mark Ellis, penciled by Darryl Banks. It featured the Knights of the Golden Circle enlisting the aid of Dr. Miguelito Loveless to assassinate President Ulysses Grant and the president of Brazil during the Philadelphia Centennial Exposition of 1876. The plot of the series was optioned for motion picture development.
The Knights of the Golden Circle were featured as the villains of the graphic novel Batman: Detective No. 27 by Michael Uslan and Peter Snejbjerg and published by DC Comics in 2003.
The Knights of the Golden Circle are featured as the villains in the CD-ROM game PONY EXPRESS RIDER, published by AMERIKIDS USA and McGraw-Hill's new division, McGraw-Hill Home Interactive.
The Knights of the Golden Circle were portrayed as the conspirators in the Lincoln assassination in the 2007 Disney movie National Treasure 2: Book of Secrets.
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