Knights of the Golden Circle: Secret Empire, Southern Secession, Civil War

Epilogue

185 epilogue W hile it is possible that cells of the KGC continued around Washington City, it does not appear that the KGC’s prewar state regimental commanders were in a position to help orchestrate Booth’s 1864–65 abduction/assassination plots against President Lincoln. Ben McCulloch, the first KGC leader to be appointed to the Confederate provisional army as a brigadier general, had been mortally wounded at the July 1862 Battle of Pea Ridge/Elkhorn Tavern, Arkansas. Paul Semmes, Georgia’s KGC regimental commander, had been killed in July 1863 leading the Confederate assault on Little Round Top during the Battle of Gettysburg .1 Maryland’s former KGC commander, now Confederate Brigadier General Robert Tyler, was recuperating from the loss of a leg at West Point, Georgia, in early 1865. On April 16, West Point came under attack, and Tyler led a contingent of “old men and boy volunteers” in defense of the town. Union sharpshooters cut Tyler down as he was peering over a defensive wall of the earthworks.2 James H. R. Taylor, a KGC leader from Mississippi who had served as a lieutenant colonel under Tyler in the Fifteenth Tennessee Regiment, was threatened with a court-martial in November 1861 and resigned from Confederate service shortly thereafter.3 Virginius Groner, the KGC’s Virginia regimental commander, was at Appomattox Courthouse on April 9, witnessing Lee’s surrender with the remnants of his Sixty-First Virginia Infantry Regiment. Groner had been appointed colonel of Virginia’s Sixty-First Regiment on October 1, 1862, and except for a short period when recuperating from wounds, led knights of the golden circle 186 it through the bloody campaign of the Wilderness and Lee’s failed defense of Richmond.4 Elkanah Greer, the KGC’s former Texas grand marshall, was at Marshall , Texas, in April 1865, serving as the commander of the Reserve Corp of Texas as well as for the Conscription Bureau for the Confederate army’s Trans-Mississippi Department.5 George Chilton, who succeeded Greer as the KGC’s Texas grand marshall, resigned his commission in the irregular Duff’s Partisan Rangers that operated on the Texas frontier during late 1864, and returned to Tyler to edit the Confederate Journal.6 Tennessee’s KGC commander, H. C. Young, had written Stanton from Cincinnati on April 20, 1865, offering details to assist in the identification of the body of John Wilkes Booth, whom Young said he had “known well . . . for several years.” Perhaps Young was afraid he would come under suspicion and was trying to exonerate himself from Booth’s heinous act. After the war, Young served as the passenger agent on railroads at Cleveland , Pittsburgh, and other cities.7 James Ross Howard, from Alabama/Louisiana, had served as a colonel of Alabama’s Third Confederate Cavalry and was severely wounded at the September 1862 Battle of Stones River. He resigned from field duty in March 1863 and served out the war as a judge for the military court in Major General Joseph Wheeler’s cavalry corps of the Confederate army of Tennessee.8 Louisiana’s KGC commander Henry Castellanos joined the Confederacy’s Twelfth Battalion Heavy Artillery in 1862, and fought in Virginia, Alabama, and Mississippi, but was discharged in 1863 due to a hospitalization. After the war, Castellanos became a respected member of New Orleans’s legal fraternity and penned hundreds of vignettes on city life that were collected in the book New Orleans As It Was.9 Languishing as a prisoner at Fort Warren, George Bickley’s mental and physical health continued to deteriorate, and he increasingly engaged in flights of fantasy.10 During 1865, he tried to present the KGC as simply a prewar colonization society. In a March 1865 letter published in the New York Times, Bickley contended that the KGC had been solely dedicated to helping establish a constitutional government in Mexico. Bickley said that French royalist Louis Napoleon’s 1864 establishment of a “Latin Monarchy ” in Mexico had now subverted the KGC’s goal. In his letter, Bickley 187 epilogue claimed that the total membership of the KGC as of July 1, 1862, was 486,398 in the United States and 42,000 in Mexico.11 Bickley’s March letter was followed by an even more curious “Circular Letter and Order” published in the New York Times on July 11, 1865, in which he claimed that the KGC was not in...