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Knights Of The Golden CircleThe Knights of the Golden Circle (KGC) was a secret order of Southern sympathizers in the North during the American Civil War. Its members were known as Copperheads and by 1863 its membership came to include many citizens and active politicians north of the Ohio River. The association was organized in 1835 by George W. L. Bickley, a Virginia-born doctor, editor, and adventurer living 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. Its original object was to provide a force to colonize the northern part of Mexico and the West Indies and thus extend proslavery interests, and the Knights became especially active in Texas. Bickley's main goal was the annexation of Mexico. Hounded by creditors, he 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. The Souths secession and the outbreak of the Civil War prompted a shift in its aims from freebooting in Mexico to support of the new Confederate government. 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. He 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. 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. Appealing to the Confederacy's friends in the North, particularly in areas that were suffering economic dislocation, the Order soon spread to Kentucky, Indiana, Ohio, Illinois, and Missouri. Its membership in these states, where it became strongest, was largely composed of Peace Democrats, who felt that the Civil War was a mistake and that the increasing power of the federal government was leading to tyranny. In the summer of 1863, a military draft that had been authorized by Congress was put into operation by the President. This act, together with the suspension of the writ of habeas corpus, the arrest of seditious persons, and other measures that the Government deemed necessary for the maintenance of national authority, were denounced by the leaders of the party opposed to Lincoln's administration as unconstitutional and outrageous. In late 1863 the Knights of the Golden Circle was reorganized 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. In most areas only a minority of its membership was radical enough to discourage enlistments, resist the draft, and shield deserters. Numerous peace meetings were held and a few agitators, some of them encouraged by Southern money, talked of a revolt in the Old Northwest, which, if brought about, would have ended the war. Southern newspapers wishfully reported stories of widespread disaffection, and John Hunt Morgan's 1863 raid into Kentucky, Indiana, and Ohio was undertaken in the expectation that the disaffected element would rally to his standard. Governor Oliver P. Morton of Indiana and General Henry B. Carrington effectively curbed the Sons of Liberty in that state in the fall of 1864. With mounting Union victories late in 1864, the order's agitation for a negotiated peace lost appeal, and it soon dissolved. Sources - G. F. Milton, Abraham Lincoln and the Fifth Column (1942, reprinted 1962)
- R. O. Curry, A House Divided (1964).
- 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).
External Links - http://www.tsha.utexas.edu/handbook/online/articles/view/KK/vbk1.html
- http://www.bartleby.com/65/kn/KnightsG.html
*http://www.ehistory.com/uscw/library/periodicals/ahotcw/section11/0338.cfm
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