In the summer of 1859, several stock actors from the Dramatic Star Company in Richmond, Virginia, joined the Knights of the Golden Circle (KGC), a clandestine pre-Civil War secret society that was the progenitor of the Ku Klux Klan. Among them was a 20-year-old nepo baby from Baltimore who was drawn to the promise of military adventure and foreign treasure. His name was John Wilkes Booth.
Five years earlier, the group’s founder, George Bickley, had chosen the “Golden Circle” for a name to underline his intent to organize pro-slavery invasions of Mexico, Cuba, and South America, encircling the Gulf of Mexico in a ring of chattel slavery. To vet potential members, representatives of the group asked, “Do you believe that negro slavery is right?” and “Will you defend the institution on any and all occasions from the assaults of abolitionists?”
New members would then bow their heads solemnly during the KGC initiation ritual, reciting a sacred oath of secrecy. For many, enlistment in the KGC was the first step toward death in the killing fields of Shiloh, and few knew that their sacred club was essentially being run by a huckster. Bickley had assembled the KGC ritual out of bric-a-brac from 19th-century American culture, and for a while, made a lot of money on dues. He was happy to send his Knights to their deaths in Mexico or Gettysburg — whichever came first.
Born poor in Virginia in 1823, George Washington Lafayette Bickley ran away from home in 1835 at the age of 12 and bounced to Alabama, Indiana, North Carolina, and then back to Virginia, where he fathered a son and studied phrenology under the guidance of a local doctor. He moved to Cincinnati in 1851, lied about his medical credentials, and became a lecturer in medicine at the Eclectic Medical Institute, as David C. Keehn relates in his 2013 history of the Knights of the Golden Circle. From there, he failed at a series of money-making schemes ranging from a conservative newspaper in New York City to land speculation boondoggles. He invented, and then gave up trying to assemble a theatrical military drill team that would “perform exhibitions all over the world.” In 1853, seeking to capitalize on the success of Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Bickley penned a flop of an antislavery novel titled Adalaska. His financial troubles were temporarily halted when he married Rachel Dodson, a wealthy widow of the Kinney family of bankers in Cincinnati. It was around this time that Bickley shifted to trying to make money from the pro-slavery set.
Long before the Western frontier was enclosed, settled, and divided up amongst white landowners, the American plantation class had become fixated on expanding the borders of slavery into South and Central America as an insurance policy against Northern antislavery legislation. Cuba would be “defensively colonized” and used as a stepping stone to do the same to Mexico, then Nicaragua, on and on, building a continent-spanning slave system “from Virginia to Brazil,” as Robert Barnwell Rhett, the South Carolina “father of secession” put it.
The federal government, these planters believed, would be a secondary player in this expansionism. The lead actors would be “filibusters” like Narciso López, who in the 1850s attempted multiple invasions of Cuba on behalf of people in the United States. Filibuster comes from the Dutch word for “freebooter,” and before it was a congressional stalling tactic, it was a term for freelance colonists.
Though they offered good wishes, Robert E. Lee, Jefferson Davis, and Mississippi Senator John Quitman all declined to lead such expeditions. Nevertheless, in 1850, López landed 600 filibusters in Cuba, but was forced to retreat and disband. He came back in 1851 with another 450-man invasion force, but upon reaching Cuba’s northern coast, López’s men were captured by Spanish-led troops. Leadership was executed in Havana, and the rest were sent to work in mining camps.
This was the context in which George Bickley, in 1854, met with five other founders to organize a secret society called the Knights of the Golden Circle. It would be devoted first to the invasion of Mexico, and later reoriented to target Washington, DC. “His target market was the Southern slaveholders,” according to historian Mark Lause. cSlaveholders saw colonial expansion as essential to the preservation of their system, and Bickley “would offer to put his group at their disposal for a price.”
Membership in the group was open, as Keehn writes, to all “Southern men of good character” as well as Northern men “who stood by the constitutional claims of the South.” The KGC was arranged in three divisions:
- The Knights of the Iron Hand: the “military” degree held by the rank-and-file of the KGC army. While the historical record is sketchy, it is believed this division numbered around 7,000 by 1859.
- The Knights of the True Faith: a smaller degree that provided logistical and fundraising support: ammunition, horses, provisions, logistical support.
- The Knights of the Columbian Star: the highest and most discrete degree reserved for political leaders who wished to be kept anonymous. This level, per Keehn, “established laws, policies, and overall objectives for the KGC and then passed them down to lower-degree members who had sworn an oath to obey.”
Like almost all clandestine men’s clubs of the 1800s, the KGC was modeled on Freemasonry. But instead of esoteric knowledge, the KGC offered a vision of the future in which men who enlisted entered the ground floor of an enterprise that would make them as rich as the plantation owners. At initiation, members were promised 640 acres of Mexican land with a “sliding scale” that increased by rank. Commander-in-chief Bickley would receive 3,200 acres for himself.
The acres in Mexico might as well have been tracts on the moon, but the KGC captivated many with its camaraderie, secrecy, and violent authority, regardless of its larger aims. Knights and knighthood had a stranglehold on the male imagination of the 1800s. The myth of knighthood — the gallant man on horseback eulogized by popular writers like Sir Walter Scott, elevated physically and spiritually above society, sworn to an oath — obscured the crass life of frontier brutality. Rituals, oaths, and passwords in the Knights came with $5 to $10 memberships, along with number-word codices for clandestine communication.
Membership drew heavily from the filibustering set, who had been left frustrated by the earlier failures. One of the Bickley’s first and most important successes was convincing leaders of the Texas-based Order of the Lone Star (OLS) to integrate into his Knights. At the time, the OLS was already said to be a pro-expansionist “shadow organization” within the Democratic Party. The KGC emblem, which pro-slavery politicians like future vice president John C. Breckinridge wore as a pin in Washington, was a Maltese cross superimposed on a star.
Bickley’s society hit the U.S. at just the right moment, capitalizing on Southern masculinist trends, a series of panics and recessions, and escalating pro-slavery fervor. By 1856, KGC meeting houses — fancifully called “castles” — were cropping up across the country. Bickley’s KGC militias drilled in public, sometimes not far from the White House. Volunteers organized torchlight parades, including one in Baltimore in which 5,000 people participated. What began as drilling exercises escalated into a standing, armed, vigilante mob — ready to defend the planter class system, especially when it came to slave uprisings or escape. But the for-hire conquest army caught the stronger winds of Southern outrage, fury at the North, and the all-cost defense of slavery. Fanaticism had been building, and the KGC proved a perfect vessel for young men to become partisans in the war of Northern aggression. Even some slaveholders criticized the KGC as secret police; in 1860, amid mob violence in East Texas sparked by rumors of slave uprisings, one such skeptic said the KGC “establishes a police above the law” and was an “institution of the order of Robespierre, which will plunge us into a sea of revolution worse than the bloodiest days of France.”
But the KGC’s unwieldy surveillance and enforcement wouldn’t exist without the ecosystem created by the people now wary of it. As the cotton industry had grown over the preceding decades, so had the police state necessary to maintain and coerce people bound in chattel slavery. The Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 made it illegal to aid, or fail to arrest and return, runaway slaves. In addition to formalizing the slave-catcher posse, the law ultimately deputized every U.S. citizen as an implicit spy for the plantation system. Legally, if a citizen knew of someone harboring slaves, they were required to report it. Thus, there was a demand for an authority to report to; a pro-slavery man on horseback, wielding a gun. The authority himself needed a narrative that would justify his arrest of a person fleeing bondage, and the violence required to scare others out of doing the same. This elevated dictatorial sadism above what it was — the nauseating brutality of plantation violence — to the lofty realms of King Arthur’s nobility.
By the late 1850s, the KGC had grown from a money-making scheme into an existential threat for many in the North. Wisconsin Senator James Rood Doolittle charged that the drive to acquire “Cuba, Mexico, Central America, all tropical America” and the “reopening of the slave trade” represented “Southern fanaticism” and “the solution of slave propagandists, or the Knights of the Golden Circle.” Albert Gallatin Brown, Mississippi’s expansionist senator, didn’t deny it: “I want Tamaulipas, Potosi, and one or two other Mexican States; I want them all for the same reason; for the planting and spread of slavery.”
Bickley’s work with the Knights was interrupted in 1857 when his wife discovered her beloved husband was attempting a property coup. Bickley had attempted to list the assets of her fortune in his name, leading her banker brother to kick Bickley off their property. He retreated to Cincinnati but was further pursued by creditors there. In 1858, Bickley donned a disguise and headed South, where he would solicit millions of dollars for “defensive colonization” from “Southern Rights Associations” in North Carolina and Virginia. He told everyone that he had massive support and thousands of Knights ready to ride, but in 1860, “the roof caved in,” writes historian Frank Klement in his 1984 book on secret societies during the Civil War, Dark Lanterns. “Several New Orleans recruits checked his story about supportive funds in local banks, decided he was both liar and imposter, read him out of the Golden Circle, and exposed him in the press.” The KGC expelled Bickley from leadership, and elected replacements from within their ranks.
But by then, the organization was already doomed. Pro-slavery forces in America had turned away from expansion, toward secession, and a new army was taking shape to achieve the goals of the plantation owners. “Every castle is, in truth, a regular military company,” a former KGC member had noted. “Thousands of castles have been drilling two or three times per week, for several years.” As states like Texas began to leave the union, KGC men like Booth and his friends in Maryland were readied to join the secessionist military, and march into battle.
The Civil War began in April 1861 with the attack on Fort Sumter. By then, the Republican counterpart of the KGC — the activist clubs known as the “Wide Awakes” — had chapters in nearly every Northern city. Still, secessionists were much more organized. Keehn credits the KGC for laying the foundation for the Confederate Army to ramp up from “nothing to around 200,000 men by October 1861.”
From the beginning of the war, Unionist politicians saw secret KCG castles everywhere, with agents lurking behind every tree. The bumbling and ineffective commanding general of Lincoln’s army, George McClellan, was even accused of being a secret Knight. The Frankfort Commonwealth reported that if the Knights show up in the state capital to try to remove the star-spangled banner, “every Union man, woman and child in Franklin County will welcome them with bloody hands to hospitable graves.”
In the summer of 1861, Union authorities declared the KGC a treasonous organization, and several newspaper stories exposed the KGC rituals, demystifying the group in the eyes of many. The KGC’s full colonial-slavery ambitions were seen for what they were — simultaneously absurd and sinister. Publicity hastened the organization’s subsummation into the Confederate Army and retreat from public view.
A barrage of arrests sapped the remaining strength of the organization. In 1863, Bickley and his girlfriend were tailed by a detective and nabbed in New Albany, Indiana. The couple’s possessions were confiscated, and found to include KGC paraphernalia, pamphlets, and “a strange white powder” that was determined to be part opium. While incarcerated, Bickley wrote to all kinds of Union officials seeking appeal, including Lincoln. He offered to get the Knights to turn coat and serve the Union. The president did not respond.
Henry Burnett, the special judge who presided over the Lincoln assassination trial, believed the slaying was part of the KGC conspiracy. He observed that men of “a perverted nature” had drifted up to Washington, DC, from the South: “I find the footprints of the old Order of the Knights of the Golden Circle crossing my path in all directions.”
What role the Knights had in radicalizing Booth, delivering him to Ford’s Theatre, securing his escape, or otherwise facilitating the successful assassination of the president, is unknown, although it’s likely that previous assassination attempts had KGC connections. But it doesn’t really matter. Secret societies draw power from speculation, and the Knights of the Golden Circle was a product of its cultural-economic-political milieu; Southern pro-slavery fanaticism was the parent, not the offspring, of the group. In the end, some 490,000 Confederates were killed, wounded, captured, or missing out of an army of 591,000. Most died brutally on battlefields like Shiloh, far away from home, and not one received 640 acres in Mexico.
It’s a familiar plot — downwardly mobile young men are offered a knight-filled narrative that casts them as iron-clad heroes protecting purity and innocence. Through the KGC, poor whites doing dirty and violent work on behalf of slaveholders were led to believe that they were defending the realm from invaders and darkness. This kind of story takes on many masks, but fundamentally, always boils down to a pyramid scheme that targets directionless men of the dying economic order. They’re promised Arthurian glory bestowed by oligarchs, when instead they’re being tricked into the ranks of cannon fodder, marched into a war against their own class.
Some say the KGC assisted in the robberies carried out by Frank and Jesse James, and buried Knights Templar gold from Jerusalem all over the U.S. for the day when the South could one day rise again. The gold stories are probably fake, but a secret knighthood composed of theatrical racists would rise up during Reconstruction in the form of Ku Klux, which also deployed chivalry as a cover for white supremacist violence.
In 2013, a cache was discovered in the Shasta Cascade region of Northern California. The “Saddle Ridge Hoard” contained $10 million worth of coins. The oldest were from 1847, and the stash is the largest known discovery of gold coins ever recovered in the U.S. Still, no one knows who buried it or why. Some believe it was a KGC downpayment on a second Civil War. Then again, far-right secret societies tend to exaggerate.