Kentucky's Nineteenth Century Secret Societies

I have decided to start a new feature in my blog discussing Kentucky's Secret Societies. Anyone who has followed me knows a little about the Knights of the Golden Circle, who figure prominently in CIRCLE OF DISHONOR. The KGC was just one of the many organizations active at that time.The Nineteenth Century was home to a plethora of Secret and Semi-secret Societies. These societies rose in membership and power in Kentucky as the political structure of the state divided and rushed headlong into Civil War.

No state was more divided, more pivotal, or more ill equipped to deal with war than Kentucky. That fact is perhaps best demonstrated by the formation of Kentucky’s shadow legislature, which formed for the express purpose of keeping a Confederate government in Kentucky during the Civil War.

Secret Societies were not all related to the hostilities that threatened to dissolve the United States into two nations. The Nineteenth Century was a time of rapid growth in these types of organizations in Europe and the Americas. Many scholars attribute the spread to the repressive nature of the Victorian Age combined with the rapid social changes forced by industrialization. The world was changing. Immigration, secessionism, industrialization, and social reform placed pressure on every community. Kentucky was ill prepared for change as it shifted from its former place as a western frontier state and struggled with its new identity as a hinge pin in the conflict between slave and free states.

Whatever the problem facing Kentuckians, for good or evil, a society formed to fill the gap. Most were benevolent organizations taking on the monumental task of improving conditions in their communities. Some were church or community outreach societies where members banded together to perform charitable work, often anonymously, within their community. The level of secrecy each organization kept varied by the wishes of organizers or the needs of members.

Kentucky harbored societies with far ranging goals. Men and women organized to explore the occult, engage in acts of evil, and gain mystic power. There were societies planning overthrow the government, establish a new world order, and defend white supremacy. Kentuckians also banned together to fight slavery, protect homes and families, maintain peace, and above all survive the long, bloody war that touched every life in the nation. The history of these societies play a part in the history of every county. Together they tell us a great deal about where we came from and who we are as Kentuckians.

Secret societies divided along the lines of color, creed, political affiliation, opinion on social ills, and ethnic origin. To understand why they had such an enormous growth in the 1800's, we must look at them through these lenses. We must consider their successes and failures, the impact on the time, and why some of them no longer exist. If the feature is successful, we may also take a look at those that remain and the changes that have taken place within their ranks to keep them active today. I invite you to step back in time with me as I explore this aspect of Kentucky's past.

Thursday's Thugs: Knights of the Golden Circle

A group of five men met in Lexington, Kentucky on Independence Day of 1854 and took the first steps toward organizing the Knights of the Golden Circle. They placed a compass on a map of the Americas, with its center point being Havana, Cuba and drew a circle that encompassed the entire Southern United States, portions of Mexico, Central and South America. These men claimed they would unite in a Golden Circle and take over the production of cotton, coffee, sugar, chocolate, rice and tobacco. Through controlling these New World crops they believed they could control the world.

Dr. George Washington Lafayette Bickley was the moving force behind organizing the Knights of the Golden Circle. He and his friends supported the reopening  and expanding of the slave trade, buying up huge tracts of land in the countries he wished to control, and most of all, building a Southern-controlled empire around the plantation model.

A lot of Southerners would take exception to the Knights of the Golden Circle being called thugs, but the bad guys in Circle of Dishonor deserve the name. The KGC was behind a rash of payroll robberies in Kentucky and Ohio. These robberies probably led to the rumors of a secret stash of Confederate gold that the KGC was charged with protecting. They were also behind the reported 5th column of the Confederacy. John Hunt Morgan believed that the KGC would rise up and take arms when he led his command into Kentucky and Indiana.

Counting on thieves, profiteers, and assassins to form an army was a mistake that cost Morgan dearly. The KGC plot to burn New York City was closer to their type of rebellion. The one Castle that did take action, by stealing a train and attempting to invade Mexico, gave up without firing a shot before their train got out of Kansas.

The KGC appeared on the scene with a plot to assassinate Lincoln before his inaugural train could reach Washington. Nobody knows if the story is accurate or if it was the invention of Alan Pinkerton to establish himself as the newly elected president's bodyguard. Certainly there were members of the KGC in Maryland, but how effective they were at that stage of their growth is impossible to know.

By the end of the Civil War, the KGC had established Castles (local chapters of the Knights) in every Southern state. At their peak, there were 20 Castles in Texas alone. Kentucky is estimated to have produced 400,000 members of the KGC. The population of the state and the pro-Union factions active in Kentucky make me believe that the actual number of members was far lower.

One of the problems I have run into when researching the KGC is the "Golden Ticket." A group of New York con men managed to travel through most of Kentucky, Ohio, Indiana and Illinois selling gold/yellow tickets that could be presented to General Morgan and his men to would keep them from stealing horses and other livestock from Confederate sympathizers. But as one parses through fact and fiction, the pieces clearly form a picture of men intent upon ruling the world at any cost.

A World of Secrets

When I talk about the Nessa Donnelly mysteries as a "World of Secrets" it is partly because secrets were such a strong undercurrent to the Victorian Era. Technology, industry, immigration, economic inequity and social upheaval created an atmosphere ripe for the rise of Secret Societies.

The Knights of the Golden Circle were estimated to have over 400,000 members in Kentucky. I would like to think that nobody in my family belonged, but the odds are that someone somewhere in my family tree was a loyal member of the KGC. If not, there were the Regulators, the Klan, or some other secret society to besmirch the family tree (at least by our standards today.

The ground between the public and private worlds of men and women became unstable in the aftermath of the Civil War. Middle and upper-class men turned to secret Societies, fraternal orders, and private clubs as a way of holding on to some semblance of the social order they understood. This didn't exempt the lower classes: the Klan was particularly popular with working class white men who deeply resented newly freed men competing with them for jobs and housing. Through the secret societies, they hoped to regain the social position the war had taken from them.