KGC I

The KGC, we demonstrate, existed not only during the Civil War but for decades thereafter. It included many powerful men of the times - politicians and outlaws, statesmen and generals - and some ordinary citizens as well. Its leadership, which took organization fully underground in 1864, was fiercely determined that the American South would somehow, someday, prove victorious in a Second War of Rebellion. Toward that tomorrow, the KGC put in place a vast and extraordinarily ingenious network of underground caches of arms and money - much of it stolen US payroll (xiv).

The Knights of the Golden Circle was a secret society with members sworn to blood oaths, and it left virtually no written records. As a result we rely on some limited primary material but are forced to work largely with circumstantial evidence - symbolism, place names, odd turns of event - in an interpretative, analytical framework...(xiv)

The KGC was the most powerful subversive organization ever to operate within the United States. It helped rip America apart in the Civil War. And it stealthily planned a Second War of Secession years after the surrender at Appomattox(15).

The KGC's strategists planned the firing of the opening salvos against Ft. Sumter on April 12, 1861; one of its members, Cherokee Chief Stand Watie, was the last Confederate general to surrender, on June 23, 1865. In between these milestones, the KGC carried out extensive guerilla-warfare - including terrorism against civilian populations - on behalf of the Confederacy. And the secret order probably played a hidden hand in the April 14, 1865 assassination of President Abraham Lincoln by rogue agent John Wilkes Booth. The war's formal end in the spring of 1865 notwithstanding, the KGC's underground and seditious activities would continue to swell into the 1900s(15).

...the clandestine paramilitary order functioned first in the South and only later in the North. It was a potent, long-lived Confederate underground army, with a cross-border command structure, unconventional fighting and espionage tactics, secret code and a complex system of buried financial assets...(16)

The core hidden KGC was a truly "secret" society - one that left very little written record and whose members swore blood oaths of silence. This, in part, explains why so little has been revealed about of group of zealots that not only helped foment a "War for Southern Independence" but, following the July 1863 defeats at Gettysburg and Vicksburg, took the Rebel cause underground with gold, silver, and arms aplenty to fight again. To understand the KGC is to appreciate that the Confederacy did not simply die in 1865. It hid, for decades. The South's being-the-scenes power elite resorted to oral commands, coded missives, encrypted photographs, and treasure maps - passed on from generation to generation - in preparation for another war(16).

KGC central strategy:
to maintain a powerful, hidden base of politico-military operations in the American Deep South, no matter the outcome of the Civil War itself, and with ample treasure to finance them.

-Warren Getler, Shadow of the Sentinel (Simon and Schuster, NY 2003)