Rebel Gold Read online

  Bob flew in over two hundred missions in Navy helicopters and fixed-wing aircraft in Vietnam. He received the Air Medal with four flight/strike awards, the Commendation Medal with combat “V” and other citations for his role in supporting the Navy’s riverine forces in the Mekong Delta. During those years of combat, thoughts of the Arkansas hill country remained distant. But Will Ashcraft had cast a long shadow.

  News of the old man’s death at ninety-four in 1971—a few months after Bob’s return from Southeast Asia but before he could get home on leave—hit him hard. The loss of his mentor—a larger-than-life figure, in turn avuncular and remote—had left a mark. So did the fact that Grandpa’s potent secrets—the rumors of treasure and the people behind it—went with him to his grave in Six Mile Cemetery, where a handful of Confederate soldiers lie buried on the adjacent hill. The one heirloom that would come Bob’s way was Bill Wiley’s old 1899 Savage 25-35-caliber rifle. Wiley had passed it to Grandpa, who, in turn, had given it to Uncle Ode. Ode’s wife, Bessie, had promised it to Bob.

  Bob Brewer’s decision to leave a successful Navy career and return to tiny Hatfield, to launch a quest that would shed light on Grandpa and Uncle Ode’s secrets, seemed preordained. He knew, even at this early stage, that he had no choice but to unravel a mystery that had been thrust at him. It was a mystery that would turn out to be far bigger and far older than he could have ever imagined at the time. And it was one that would require him to immerse himself first in the history of his native Arkansas hill town and then in the history of the United States at its most turbulent time, the Civil War.

  3

  Knights of the Golden Circle

  THE Knights of the Golden Circle, or KGC, was the most powerful subversive organization ever to operate within the United States. It helped rip America apart in the Civil War. And it stealthily planned a Second War of Secession years after the surrender at Appomattox.

  The KGC’s strategists planned the firing of the opening salvos against Fort Sumter on April 12, 1861; one of its members, Cherokee chief Stand Watie, was the last Confederate general to surrender, on June 23, 1865. In between these milestones, the KGC carried out extensive guerrilla-warfare—including terrorism against civilian populations—on behalf of the Confederacy. And the secret order probably played a hidden hand in the April 14, 1865, assassination of President Abraham Lincoln by rogue agent John Wilkes Booth. The war’s formal end in the spring of 1865 notwithstanding, the KGC’s underground and seditious activities would continue well into the 1900s.

  Yet few Americans today have ever heard of the KGC, whose rank-and-file membership may have swelled to several hundred thousand during the Civil War, according to U.S. intelligence estimates at the time.1 No mainstream history book has been devoted to the subject; few accounts of the Civil War even mention the Knights of the Golden Circle, much less its covert efforts aimed at demoralizing the North.2 None records its existence after 1864.

  The KGC, according to the scant references in today’s textbooks and encyclopedias, was a secret pro-South political society that was mostly active in the North and quietly dissolved before the end of the war. In fact, the clandestine paramilitary order functioned first in the South and only later in the North. It was a potent, long-lived Confederate underground army, with a cross-border command structure, unconventional fighting and espionage tactics, secret code and a complex system of buried financial assets. Relegated to a skimpy footnote in America’s bloodiest conflict, the postwar KGC falls off the pages altogether, leaving a void in the annals of the nation’s uncertain and painful transition from division to reunion.

  The core hidden KGC was a truly “secret” society—one that left very little written record and whose members swore blood oaths of silence. This, in part, explains why so little has been revealed about a group of zealots that not only helped foment a “War for Southern Independence” but, following the July 1863 defeats at Gettysburg and Vicksburg, took the Rebel cause underground with gold, silver and arms aplenty to fight again. To understand the KGC is to appreciate that the Confederacy did not simply die in 1865. It hid, for decades. The South’s behind-the-scenes power elite resorted to oral commands, coded missives, encrypted photographs and treasure maps—passed on from generation to generation—in preparation for another war.

  The Snapshot View

  The limited historic literature on the Knights of the Golden Circle yields a blurred and misleadingly simple snapshot of the organization. Missing are the historical and ideological roots—the KGC’s legs, so to speak, stretching back to early-nineteenth-century America and perhaps much earlier in Europe—as well as its outstretched arms, its reach into Reconstruction and then into the twentieth century. Also absent from the record are the names of its hidden command, its “inner sanctum,” with its powerful Masonic ties. Most of all, the ill-defined image misses the KGC’s central strategy: to maintain a powerful, hidden base of politico-military operations in the American Deep South, no matter the outcome of the Civil War itself, and with ample treasure to finance them.

  First, the established history. Most popular references depict the KGC as a militant pro-slavery, pro-secession movement that surfaced with some fanfare in the mid- to late-1850s. Its self-anointed leader in the run-up to the Civil War was George W. L. Bickley, a Virginia-born eccentric of questionable character who ran his recruiting operations initially out of Cincinnati and then later from Louisiana, Texas and Alabama before returning to the Midwest.

  Whatever Bickley’s personal shortcomings—he was often accused of being an unsavory character of limited financial integrity—the self-styled KGC promoter was a master propagandist. At a minimum, he knew how to play the politicized editorial boards of the pro-South newspapers to obtain positive coverage of his organization’s controversial aims and to help demonize Lincoln and the “abolitionists.”

  According to one historian, whose work focused on the frothy mix of secret societies bubbling up during the Civil War period, pro-Union editorial writers in turn deliberately exaggerated the threat of the KGC to create a political bogeyman for pro-Union candidates in Midwest gubernatorial and Congressional elections. Historian Frank Klement, in his Dark Lanterns: Secret Political Societies, Conspiracies, and Treason Trials in the Civil War, called reports of KGC activity little more than “rumors” and myths.3 These reports, Klement writes, were based on nationalism, wartime propaganda and career-enhancing efforts of local politicians and Union military authorities. Nevertheless, Klement’s book cites numerous official documents of the period that warn that the KGC posed an ominous threat to the Union.

  The KGC’s chief prewar aim in the North was to generate popular underground support for the secessionist cause among pro-slavery and “states’ rights” sympathizers above the Mason-Dixon line, in the Midwest and in the border states of Kentucky and Missouri.4 California, which had entered the Union as a free state, was also a key target for subversive KGC operations. The reasons for targeting the Bear State were obvious: gold and other mineral resources, shipping routes and a large Southern-sympathizing population in various parts of the state.5

  More fundamentally, the KGC called for the creation of a geographic “Golden Circle”—an independent political and economic zone to include the southern and border states, Mexico, Central America and Cuba. At the productive center of this “circular” Southern Empire, with a radius of 1,200 miles extending from Havana through the Gulf of Mexico and the Caribbean, would be a slave-based, agrarian society. Plantations producing cotton, tobacco, sugar, indigo and coffee would power its economic engine. This Southern slave empire would attract investment from Europe, build an extensive rail network (with links westward to California that would make the West depend more on the South than on the North) and develop some manufacturing capacity—thus becoming a competitive self-sufficient trading zone. The acquisition of new territories south of the border would maintain the balance of power in Congress between free and slave states until the South could secede to esta
blish full independence. Or so the vision, as articulated by Bickley, promised.6

  The secret order’s immediate task was to incite rebellion—to “fire the Southern Heart”—through its “castles,” its local cells or chapters spread across the South, North and border states. Tens of thousands of supporters from a cross-section of society (doctors, judges, craftsmen, editors, lawyers, clergymen, laborers, etc.) were reported to have taken secret oaths and joined such castles. For a fee of $1, $5 or $10, for the first three degrees of initiation, respectively, as well as payment of a prorated property tax, initiates became rank-and-file members.

  Yet, the vast majority of KGC initiates into the “lower degrees” of indoctrination were probably unaware of the full scope of the Southern leadership’s ruthless plan for cementing secession.7 Many of the Northern members were merely opposed to prosecuting a war against the South, and later opposed President Lincoln’s perceived heavy-handedness on the home front during 1862–63. The president’s call for Congress to provide authority to suspend the writ of habeas corpus (the requirement that the government bring charges against those that it arrests) and a subsequent wave of seemingly arbitrary arrests of alleged Southern sympathizers in Indiana and Ohio provoked sharp outcries. These acts, derided by KGC agitators as the new U.S. “despotism,” served as rallying points for proliferating KGC castles in the region.8

  The consensus history also maintains that the KGC, during the latter half of the Civil War, functioned primarily as a political fifth column in the North and Midwest with the aim of weakening the Union’s resolve and thus its prospects for total victory. Known as Copperheads or Peace Democrats, these Northern-based associates of the secret order were tasked toward war’s end with undermining the fabric of society in the Old Northwest (today’s Ohio Valley/Midwest), and thus opening up a new front for the South. According to Klement and others, these operatives were supposed to stir up trouble before congressional, gubernatorial and presidential elections in Ohio, Indiana, Illinois and Iowa; interfere with the draft (launched in March 1863); encourage desertion; provide intelligence; smuggle supplies; assassinate U.S. military and state government officials; and eventually generate fear about rumored general uprisings at a time when war fatigue had taken root.9

  Ultimately, the KGC and its derivative “political” offshoots—the Order of American Knights (1863) and the Sons of Liberty (1864)—were accused by Republican governors in the region and by pro-Union editorial writers of attempting to carve out a “Northwest Confederacy” that would close forces with the rebel army and the Confederate States of America.10 Confederate Gen. John Hunt Morgan’s bold but abortive raid north of the Ohio River into Indiana and Ohio in July 1863—precisely when local newspapers had speculated about a so-called Copperhead-sponsored insurrection—provided some evidence for that thesis.11

  According to the consensus history, the failure of those “Northwest” raids to achieve their intended results sent the KGC into rapid decline and eventual oblivion by 1864. Standing in the way of success were a number of factors: effective counter-espionage measures; decisive troop deployments; preemptive arrests; and seizure of arms ordered by pro-Union governors and Union military officials assigned to the region.12 Some historians, like Klement, argued that the feared organizing capacity of the KGC and Copperheads was overblown to begin with, fanned by Republican jingoism, and that the overall mission was doomed to fail.

  The KGC’s nominal public “leaders”—Bickley, Sons of Liberty head Clement L. Vallandigham and the Order of American Knights’ Phineas C. Wright—were all at some point arrested and thrown into jail for their seditious activities, along with numerous other KGC associates or affiliated operatives.

  It was through the capture of Bickley and his wife later in July 1863, while traveling in Indiana after the failed Northern Uprising, that a number of revealing KGC documents and artifacts came to light. These included an 1859 handbook, Rules, Regulations and Principles of the K.G.C., most likely penned by Bickley. Also seized were a KGC cipher (written inside a pocket-sized prayer book), the order’s “great seal” insignia, as well as an assortment of medals and pins. The documents and regalia—found either in Bickley’s suitcase at the time of his arrest or in the undergarments of his wife, who was searched by a female detective—are on file at the National Archives. They form the basis of much of what has been written about the traitorous secret order. (Historians have overlooked a revealing reference in one of the primary source documents found in Bickley’s possession. A card containing nineteen items of the KGC’s principles describes a key fraternal hand signal used to indicate KGC membership. It calls, in code, for placing the index finger against the thumb to make a circle. “A golden circle, encasing a dark or iron hand clasped on a scroll; whole [sic] to be about the size of a dime.” Numerous tintypes and photographs of leading secessionists and, later, Confederates, reveal this KGC signal being given.)

  Bickley, who languished in federal prisons for months after the war (all the while denying involvement in the KGC and its treasonous plots), was questioned by federal agents about possible complicity in the assassination of President Lincoln. The nominal KGC leader vehemently disclaimed any role in the murder of the president, who had received multiple direct communications from U.S. military intelligence in the last two years of his life about the personal danger posed by the KGC.13

  An emotionally and physically drained Bickley died two years later in Baltimore, a free man never formally charged with a crime. With Bickley’s imprisonment, the established history of the KGC comes to an abrupt end.

  The problems with the above conventional view of the Knights of the Golden Circle are manifold. First, as often occurs with personality-driven history or journalism, it attaches far too much weight to a high-profile individual—in this case, the front man, Bickley. No doubt, Bickley’s grandstanding drew significant press attention and disproportionately elevated his persona through North and South alike in the antebellum and early war years. But in the end, Bickley—who got off to a questionable start by organizing a failed raid into Mexico in 1860—was a crank. Although well-acquainted with the symbolism, rituals and grand designs of a mysterious political underground movement, he was someone unequipped to lead the KGC. He was, at best, a pamphleteer, or, in today’s parlance, a marketer, for the organization.

  Whether sanctioned by the true powers behind the KGC or not, Bickley brought to public light the rough outline of the cabal’s broad political agenda. An early anti-KGC exposé, appearing in the May 1862 issue of Continental Monthly, aptly described Bickley’s propagandist role: “George Bickley [is] a miserable quack and ‘confidence man,’ a person long familiarly spoken of by the press as a mere Jeremy Diddler, but who has been a useful tool to shrewder men in managing for them this precious order.” The essay’s author pointed out that building state-to-state momentum for secession was a mission for powerful—albeit hidden—political machinery, and not the province of a single man:

  The prompt and vigorous action of the whole Secession movement, by which states with a majority attached to the Union were hurled, scarce knowing how, into rebellion, would never have been accomplished save by a long established and perfectly drilled organization. It is not enough to sway millions that the leaders simply know what to do, or that they have the power to do it. There must be organization and subordination, if only to control the independent action of demagogues and of selfish politicians, who abound in the South, as elsewhere. Had the existence of the K.G.C. never been revealed, the historian would have detected it by its results, and been compelled in fairness to admit that it was admirably instituted to fulfill its ends, evil as they were, and that its work was well done.14

  An earlier exposé, in the same magazine in January 1862, makes the case that the KGC’s sole mission, going back to presecessionist drum-beating from South Carolina in the mid-1830s, was always the dissolution of the Union and the establishment of a Southern Empire. It asserts that these twin goals were foisted u
pon an unwitting, and moreover unwilling, public in the South by a clique of wealthy plantation owners. “And it was solely by means of its secret but powerful machinery, that the Southern States were plunged into revolution, in defiance of the will of their voting population,” it postulates.15

  Front men such as Bickley and Vallandigham (the latter having legitimate credentials and a real following as a former prominent congressman from Ohio) offered certain benefits for the concealed, well-oiled machine. They not only provided a populist link to the citizenry but also insulated the KGC’s true leadership from damage. If trouble came, as it inevitably did, how convenient to have charismatic front men languish in jail. The burden of association with a hidden traitorous organization would lie squarely on their shoulders, and theirs alone.

  Historian I. Winslow Ayer, author of The Great North-Western Conspiracy, captured the essence of this strategy when he wrote in 1865 that the KGC’s leaders “put forward the most irresponsible persons at their command, as the mouthpieces and official representatives of the Order, to the end that if detected, the theory of crazy, powerless fools, could be wielded upon public sentiment by an undisturbed partisan press, to save the scheme from thorough investigation and development by the authorities.”16 Moreover, if the front men were arrested and emerged looking like martyrs to Southern sympathizers—as in the case of Vallandigham—all the better. Lincoln, a shrewd reader of hinterland sentiment, or, as he put it, “fire in the rear,” was clever enough to minimize the political fallout in the fragile Midwest by reducing Vallandigham’s sentence to banishment to the South, as historian James McPherson has noted.17