Knights of the Golden Circle: Secret Empire, Southern Secession, Civil War by David C. Keehn (review)

The Knights of the Golden Circle (KGC), a secret organization devoted to slavery’s expansion, white supremacy, and southern power, have long hovered in the background of Civil War history. In 1860, their leadership claimed to possess tens of thousands of members across the South and West, including key allies in the federal and state governments. Such high enthusiasm was matched only by the anxieties of their northern and Unionist opponents, who seldom missed an opportunity to attribute proslavery or secessionist activities to this mysterious southern cabal. In the first book-length treatment of “the shadowy Knights,” the author has bravely undertaken to separate fact from fiction about these dark figures on the margins of southern history.

It is a treacherous task. The trouble begins with the founder of the Knights, the Virginia-born phrenology professor, novelist, drill captain, and newspaper editor George W. L. Bickley. A renaissance man in the true spirit of the nineteenth-century America—a bewildering compound of pure energy, bottomless confidence, and self-promotional genius—Bickley was also, as Keehn acknowledges, “an incurable liar” (7). Whether he was boasting of a 100,000-man army poised to conquer Mexico in 1860, offering the Confederacy 30,000 Knight soldiers in 1861, or promising to throw the Knights’ support to Abraham Lincoln in return for his release from a northern prison in 1864, Bickley’s only reliable characteristic was his utter unreliability. Bickley organized the KGC into a pyramidal structure, with an elite leadership (the Knights of the Columbian Star) on top of a commercial and fundraising division (the Knights of the True Faith) and a military rank-and-file (the Knights of the Iron Hand). Keehn’s volume does not explore the cultural significance of the Knights’ private rituals, medieval pretensions, or elaborate conspiratorial vocabulary (thus “the effort to reduce 88 to 89” in KGC argot, translated to “the effort to reduce the Peon System to Perpetual Slavery,” 163), and he does not seriously probe the social origins, personal motivations, or ideological goals of the men who joined the order. Instead, he focuses almost exclusively on the Knights’ impact on Civil War-era politics—an impact, he argues, that historians have underestimated.

If anything, however, this solidly researched and lucidly written book demonstrates the opposite. Keehn divides the KGC’s career into two periods: in the first phase, from 1859 to mid-1860, Bickley and other Knights canvassed the South, seeking funds and troops for a proslavery filibuster invasion of Mexico. But despite their leader’s extravagant boasts, Keehn estimates the Knights’ strength stood at just 8,000 members in the summer of 1860. The much larger army intended to gather in Texas and march on Mexico never materialized; from Keehn’s account, it is unclear if any army materialized at all. This failure led to an internal reorganization in which state-level KGC commanders took power from Bickley and threw the organization’s energies into promoting southern secession.

Keehn accepts Bickley’s claim that the Knights “built up practical secession and inaugurated the greatest war in history” (190). But this is a major overstatement. Keehn demonstrates that many secessionist leaders, from Thomas Hindman in Arkansas to Henry Wise in Virginia, sympathized with the Knights, but he does not prove that the Knight organization itself took any charge of secession campaigns. Except for in Texas, where Keehn follows historians Roy S. Dunn and William H. Bell in arguing that KGC networks helped mobilize armed volunteers, it is not clear what difference the Knights actually made. Southern secession, after all, was not a conspiracy: it was a public movement that depended on popular politics and open-air organization, not secretive scheming. Based on the evidence in this volume—chiefly self-aggrandizing testimony from KGC leaders themselves and unconfirmed rumors in the press—the Knights of the Golden Circle appear to have been more of a northern bugaboo...