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

1. Powerful Antecedents

6 1 POWERFUL ANTECEDENTS T he mystic order of the Knights of the Golden Circle was the brainchild of a multitalented doctor and editor living in Ohio named George W. L. Bickley. George had been born at Bickley Mills (Russell County) in southwest Virginia to a poor laboring family on July 18, 1823. When he was five, George’s mother insisted that the family move to her home territory near Petersburg, Virginia, where George’s father died of cholera a few years later. George’s mother was left so destitute that a subscription had to be raised in Richmond for care of the family. George’s gallivanting mother moved between Petersburg and Richmond, and shunted her young son off to relatives in southern Virginia. Here the emotionally neglected and unhappy George lived until he reached the age of twelve, when he ran away. For the next ten years, George subsisted on the strength of his glib tongue and good looks while working at a series of odd jobs and then in a trading business at Geneva, Alabama (that was supplied out of New Orleans ). In October 1846, George wrote a relative asking for forgiveness due to the “sircumstances [sic] I deceived you last Spring.”1 By 1847, George was living with relatives in Greencastle, Indiana, and attending the local college. He then moved to North Carolina, fathering a son there named Charles Simmons Bickley, whom he placed with relatives when his first wife died in 1850. At this point, George headed back to Russell County, Virginia, where he studied medicine under a local doctor and then opened his own o∞ce at the Union Hotel in Jeffersonville (now Tazewell).2 7 powerful antecedents He is shown on the 1850 Russell County census as “G. W. L. Bickley (only one in family) 26 years old, male, Phrenologist, worth $400, native of Russell County, VA.” At the time, phrenology—the study of contours of the skull as a predictor of human behavior—was popular and regarded by many as a true science although subject to abuse by con men.3 As a result of his unstable background, Bickley developed incurable habits of prevaricating and scheming. He also displayed a driving ambition , resourcefulness, and a determination to make a name for himself in wide-open nineteenth-century America. Somehow along the way, he picked up a credible knowledge of world history and a command of the English language that enabled him to become a prolific writer and a notable speaker.4 By 1851, the fast-talking Bickley made a considerable leap in status from a country doctor to professor at Cincinnati’s Eclectic Medical Institute , a reform medical school started in the mid-1840s that focused on unconventional methods such as physical manipulation and herbal remedies. To obtain his faculty position, Bickley lied about his medical credentials, saying he had attended top medical schools in the East and on the European continent. His quick wit and brief experience as a country doctor allowed him to bluff his way as an accomplished phrenologist and as an authority on physiology and scientific botany.5 While at the Eclectic Institute, Bickley authored books on his medical specialties as well as several histories and a novel. He completed a History of the Settlement and Indian Wars of Tazewell County, Virginia that is relied on to this day. He finished a rustic novel set in a southwest Virginia cove, titled Adalaska, Or, The Strange and Mysterious Family of the Cave of Genreva.6 Bickley also wrote copiously in his fields of pseudo-medicine, including an introductory lecture that traced the ancient and modern history of medical science with Eclecticism at its apex (he later penned a biography of the Eclectic Institute itself).7 Students at the Eclectic Institute accused Bickley of being a “novelist” and unable to deliver an extemporaneous medical lecture. He nevertheless was a tireless worker, and claimed he dictated sixteen to twenty pages of foolscap an hour in writing a 209page volume on physiological botany and a 2,700-page written course of lectures.8 knights of the golden circle 8 Then, in early 1853, the ambitious Bickley freed himself from the mundane need to earn a living: he married Rachel Dodson, a wealthy widow and scion of Cincinnati’s Kinney family of bankers. He soon took a leave of absence from the Eclectic Medical Institute and moved to Rachel’s family farm...