Secret Society Agitation

But extremists on both sides, encouraged by agents of the European financiers, continually fanned the fires of discontent.

The spearhead of this agitation came in the form of yet another secret society: the Knights of the Golden Circle (KGC).

The secretive Knights organization was the creation of surgeon and author Dr. George W. L, Bickley, who in 1854 founded his first knightly "castle" in Cincinnati, Ohio, drawing heavily from local Freemasons. This society "had dose ties with a secret society in France called The Seasons, which itself was a branch of the Illuminati," charged G. Edward Griffin.

Patterned after Masonic lodges, the Knights had similar passwords, handshakes, "temples," and grand, lesser, and supreme councils. Initiates were sworn to secrecy with a live snake held over their head accompanied by this bloodcurdling oath:

Whoever dares our cause repeat, Shall test the strength of Knightly steel; And when the torture proves too dull. We'll scrape the brains from out his skull And place a lamp within the shell To light his soul from here to hell.

The name Knights of the Golden Circle was derived from Bickley's grandiose plan to create a huge slaveholding circular empire 2,400 miles in circumference with Cuba as the center point. This new nation was to include the southern United States, Mexico, part of Central America, and the West Indies in order to gain a dominance over the world's supply of tobacco, sugary rice, and coffee.

While modem hisrorians either ignore or downplay the significance of the KGC, it is evident from contemporary writings and newspaper coverage that the organization was considered an extremely credible threat at the time. Bickley was certainly a mysterious individual, always claiming to be in need of money, yet constantly traveling and entertaining dignitaries.

The "financial nucleus" of his order was the American Colonization and Steamship Company, organized in Veracruz, Mexico, and capitalized for $5 million. Somebody other than Bickley was paying the bills.

He also had demonstrable ties to Great Britain, claiming to have been an 1842 graduate of the University of London. Early in the war Bickley was in the Confederate capital of Montgomery, Alabama, identifying himself as a correspondent for the London Times, and after the war he lectured extensively in England.

Bickley appeared to have shifting allegiances and philosophies. Previously, he had founded a society called the Wayne Circle of the Brotherhood of the Union, which purported to seek constitutional unity. Just before the war started, Bickley wrote an article for his Cincinnati paper Scientific Artisan in which he predicted the end of slavery, stating "this institution is one altogether unenviable, [as] every reasonable man in America will at once admit."

Despite the ideas put forth in his article, the first step in Bickley"s plans for the Knights of the Golden Circle was to create a separate slaveholding Southern nation, then move southward to Mexico. Like the Nazis much later, the KGC were concerned with purity of blood, as demonstrated by his call for "Anglo-Saxon blood" for the "Texasizing" of the Mexican population.

By 1860 there were more than fifty thousand Knights, mostly in Texas, awaiting orders to march on Mexico. Headquartered in San Antonio, Bickley gained popularity by pledging to "kill Wall Street" bankers, who he said were scheming against the South. He also said that if Lincoln was elected president, "Washington, not Mexico, would become the target" of the Knights.

In fact there were two tentative invasions of Mexico in the spring of 1860, but both were repulsed after Bickley failed to provide his men with promised reinforcements and supplies.

Texas hero and governor Sam Houston reportedly was a member of the Knights at the time but resigned when the Knights turned their attention from the invasion of Mexico to the secessionist movement.

It was in the cause of Southern secession that Bickley proved more successful, as the KGC came to form the nucleus of the Southern military. According to writet Ollinger Crenshaw, "The Southern press received the plans of the order with enthusiasm and many newspapers became its exponents. . .. The Vicksburg Sun said the Knights of the Golden Circle

gave the South a military organization capable of defending het rights at home and abroad."

The KGC was divided into three sections or "degrees"—the "Foreign and Home Guard Militia," the "Foreign and Home Guard Corps" of civilian support, and the "American Legion" which was the political and governing arm. Reportedly, by 1860 membership in the KGC was more than sixty-five thousand and constituted the "brains" of the South. Bickley made their objective clear when he declared, "The face is, we want a fight, but how to get it is the question."

Through constant agitation, the Knights stirred up hatreds and fears throughout the North and South. "After Abraham Lincoln was elected in 1860, this minority of the Southern minority conspired to bring off a last gamble. In 1861, to the extremists" amazement, disunion triumphed," wrote historian William W. Freehling.

KGC activity in Nordrern states involved a plan to create a "Northwest Confederacy" composed of pro-Southerners in several states, including Ohio, Indiana, Minnesota, and Michigan. Illinois alone was reported to have a KGC membership of some twenty thousand. The plan was to seize federal arsenals, then take control of the states and release all Confederate prisoners. One state official, Edmund Wright, tried to opposed the Knights, only to have his wife poisoned and his home burned. In August 1862 sixty KGC members—out of a reported fifteen thousand members in Indiana—were indicted for conspiracy and treason but later released. Federal prosecutors were fearful of creating martyrs and rhe conspiracy cases were weak.

The Knights' actions created havoc with the national government, prompting President Lincoln to lament, "The enemy behind us is more dangerous to the country than the enemy before us."

The Lincoln administration was compelled to imprison more than thirteen thousand people on charges of "disloyalty," which meant anything from speaking against the government to discouraging military enlistment. "Those who before the war had been called 'the loyal opposition' found themselves after 1861 commonly referred to as traitors," wrote author Larry Starkey.

Such repression incensed Democrats and anti-Republicans, who charged federal officials with exaggerating the KGC threat in order to suppress criticism of the administration. Membership in the Knights' organization and its spin-offs, the Order of American Knights and the

Sons of Liberty, grew to number in the hundreds of thousands. According to Griffin, the Knights went underground after the war, eventually emerging as the Ku Klux Klan.

In 1863 Bickley was arrested as a spy in Indiana and held without trial until his release in 1865. A broken mac, Bickley died in Baltimore on August 10, 1867.

With national attention focused on the Southern Rebellion and disunity in the North, far-reaching financial measures were being taken in Washington.

In mid-1861, with the war just beginning, U.S. Treasury secretary Salmon Chase (the namesake of Chase Manhattan Bank) asked for and received from Congress the first income tax instituted in America. It began as a meager three percent federal tax on all income, but only a year later the tax was raised to five percent on all income over $10,000. "It was a graduated income tax, just as proposed by Karl Marx just 13 years before," noted Epperson, intimating that hidden agendas were being pressed behind the contingencies of war.

As the war progressed, Lincoln desperately needed more money. Instead of borrowing from the European banks as expected, in 1862 he issued about $450 million in currency printed with green ink called "greenbacks." This paper money was legalized by an act of Congress with nothing to secure it. Endorsing this debt-free, fiat money, Lincoln proclaimed, "Government, possessing power to create and issue currency ... need not and should not borrow capital at interest.. . . The privilege of creating and issuing money is not only the supreme prerogative of the government but it is the government's greatest creative opportunity."

It is fascinating to note that the two U.S. presidents who have issued debt-free currency—Lincoln in 1862 and John E Kennedy in 1963—were assassinated. Lincoln's assassin, Southern sympathizer John Wilkes Booth, has been established as a member of the Knights of the Golden Circle (along with the famous outlaw Jesse James). Various conspiracy researchers have connected Booth to the previously mentioned Illuminati, the Italian Carbonari, and through Southern secretary of state Judah Benjamin to the House of Rothschild. After the war, Benjamin, often called the "sinister power behind the throne" of Southern president Jefferson Davis, fled to England where he became a successful attorney.

As in the Kennedy assassination, Lincoln's death sparked cries of conspiracy which still echo today. The Lincoln assassination conspiracy

involved several persons, four of whom were hanged, including Mary Surratt, the first woman executed in this country for a capital offense. It is historic fact that the Lincoln assassination case was a complex plot including smuggling and kidnapping plans that involved Knights of the Golden Circle agents. "The fact remains that the story of why Abraham Lincoln was murdered can only be completed within the confines of the Confederate cabal in Canada [which included KGC members as well as British agents) ..." noted author Starkey. The plot also involved some of the highest offices in Washington, including Lincoln's secretary of war Edwin Stanton. The full story of this plot has yet to reach a wide audience.

Despite pervasive use of the term, the conflict between 1861 and 1865 was never truly a civil war, which is defined as a conflict between factions or sections within a nation. The majority of citizens in each Southern state freely elected to leave the Union. Confederate President Davis, a former United States senator and secretary of war, in his inaugural address on February 18, 1861, cited "the American idea that governments rest on the consent of the governed, and that it is the right of the people to alter or abolish them at will whenever they become destructive of the ends for which they were established. . . . Thus the sovereign states here represented have proceeded to form this Confederacy; and it is by abuse of language that their act has been denominated a revolution." "Secession—or rebellion, as the Jacobins preferred to call it—might be treason, but no court had ever said so—or ever would say so—no matter what the opinion the radicals had on the matter," observed historian Shelby Foote.

But Lincoln and the radical Republicans did proclaim that secession was treason and prepared huge armies and a naval blockade to force the Southern states back into the Union. And while twenty-two million Northerners were locked in strife with nine million Southerners, France and Britain made moves to encircle the conflicted nation.

With regimental bands playing "Dixie," Britain sent eleven thousand additional troops to Canada, which had become a haven for Confederate agents. France's Napoleon III installed Austrian Archduke Maximilian as emperor of Mexico, which promptly opened negotiations with the Confederacy and allowed the transportation of supplies into Texas, bypassing the Union blockade. French troops were poised on the Texas border. Both France and England were ready to step in just as soon as the North and South had bled each other dry.