John C. Calhoun emerged as the intellectual father of the KGC, and a number of Civil War–era commentators describe him as such.16 He was so inspirational for the pro-slavery secret society that KGC members initially used “Nuohlac”—Calhoun spelled backwards—as their password.17 A brilliant orator and debater, he stood apart as the Southern Rights advocate who held the respect of even his toughest foes in Washington. In addition to representing South Carolina as a distinguished congressman and senator, Calhoun would ably serve the nation in various high-level positions, twice as vice president, and as secretary of war and secretary of state, before his death in 1850.
Calhoun did not start off as a Southern separatist and states’ rights advocate. As a young congressman, he had campaigned hard for a strong national response to Britain’s invasion in 1812 and for strong nationwide economic initiatives, including a national bank, for years after the War of 1812. But, as a plantation owner and son of a South Carolina farmer, he also was extremely devoted to Southern interests, namely the protection of the South’s slave-based economy. An owner of dozens of slaves himself, Calhoun described the relations between whites and blacks in slaveholding states in the 1830s as not an evil but “a good—a positive good.”
Eventually, two perceived threats to the South’s economy and “way of life” emerged—the federal tariffs of 1824–1832 and Northern-based abolitionism. In their wake, Calhoun took up the cause of resisting (nullifying) the will of Congress by a single state. Later, he would foment a movement toward the ultimate act of rebellion: secession.
Secession, Calhoun emphasized, should be considered only as a last resort to secure sovereignty that resided with the states as the agents for their respective populations. A state, he argued, could rightfully and legally withdraw its consent from an oppressive federal government only if that government was perceived to have overstepped its constitutionally delegated powers. Such a government would then become an “intruder” that rightfully had to be “expelled.”
Although Calhoun expressed hope that a Union-preserving compromise could be reached merely by demonstrating a unified Southern threat of secession, he recognized that the slavery issue could lead, inexorably, to disunion. Over time, his pro-secessionist bent would only grow stronger in light of what he saw as a Northern tidal wave of abolitionist agitation and legislation.
Under the political and intellectual influence of Calhoun, deep political fault lines ran through antebellum Charleston and other Southern cities, creating a fertile environment in which secret societies could germinate. The first slavery-expansionist associations to sprout from this environment were the so-called Southern Rights Clubs. Direct precursors of the Knights of the Golden Circle, these hidden “clubs” emerged in Charleston around 1835. “About the close of the year 1834, there were to be found, in Charleston, New Orleans, and some other Southern cities, a few politicians who earnestly desired the re-establishment of the African slave trade and the acquisition of new slave territory,” writes the anonymous author of an important exposé, An Authentic Exposition of the K.G.C., Knights of the Golden Circle; or, A History of Secession from 1834 to 1861.18 The booklet, published in 1861 as one of the few “insider” documents tracing the origins of the KGC, points out that these conclaves were more than social gatherings: they provided a subversive secessionist infrastructure in the Cotton South. Building that infrastructure would be a coterie of leaders from the 10 percent of Southern society that comprised its plantation-owning aristocracy.
Such infrastructure required clear lines of communication and command, as well as geographic demarcation. So, these Southern Rights Clubs used secret passwords, recognition handshakes, initiation rites and other rituals that were hardly distinguishable from those used by the Masonic fraternity and its Charleston-based Supreme Council. “These men formed themselves into secret juntos, which, without any particular form or ritual, were called SRCs (Southern Rights Clubs). They had certain signs of recognition, by which they made themselves known to each other, and met weekly, semi-weekly, or otherwise, as the cause which they labored to promote seemed to demand,” the unnamed author of the Exposition writes.19 The author goes on to note that the name “Knights of the Golden Circle” did not surface publicly until some twenty years later, in 1855.
The cause being promoted behind closed doors was the establishment of “The Golden Circle”—the imperial expansion of the Southern slave economy, which required both new slaves and new territory. International prohibitions against the slave trade notwithstanding, the Southern Rights Clubs clandestinely sent out “slaver” ships to Africa between 1834 and 1844. These voyages met with mixed results. Numerous slave ships were captured by British and U.S. naval vessels on patrol off West Africa. But others successfully reached secret ports in Louisiana, Mississippi and Florida with their illicit cargo, according to the Exposition and other accounts.20 The Ashburn Treaty of 1842, committing both Britain and the United States to enforce maritime efforts to suppress the slave trade, made the SRCs’ overseas slave trafficking ever more complicated. The importation of slaves—mostly via Cuba—would continue right up until the Civil War. But, by the mid-1840s, the SRCs’ focus shifted largely to slave-oriented territorial expansion to the south, under the rubric “filibustering.”
The United States’ 1846–48 war with Mexico—which yielded New Mexico (then comprising much of modern-day Arizona) and California—encouraged the SRCs to look for new targets further south, in Central America and Cuba. Leading the charge on the Cuban front was a high-ranking Scottish Rite Mason and hero from the Mexican-American War, Maj. Gen. John A. Quitman, who later became governor of Mississippi.21
A transplanted New Yorker who would marry into a wealthy plantation-owning family and move to Natchez, Mississippi, Quitman was a pivotal player in the early KGC and its march toward secession. Symbolism provides a trail. A famous portrait of Quitman astride his stallion during the Mexican War reveals a telltale emblem: on the lower-left corner of his equestrian blanket can be seen a five-pointed star floating above a crescent moon—two of the key symbols of the KGC.22 That precise symbolic juxtaposition—of the star poised above an upturned crescent moon—can be seen in an illustration of a secret lynching within a KGC castle in a revelatory book on the Knights of the Golden Circle, dated 1864 and written under a pseudonym.23
As both skilled lawyer and owner of several plantations with more than four hundred slaves, Quitman emerged as an early and ardent defender of slaveholders’ rights and states’ rights. Not surprisingly, he rapidly became a leading protégé of Calhoun. In short order, the Mexican War veteran carried Calhoun’s secessionist torch beyond Carolina into his adopted state of Mississippi, where he also built a major beachhead for Scottish Rite Freemasonry, beginning in 1830. There, the pro-slavery firebrand would serve as the state’s highest-ranking Mason for many years and would also play a prominent national Freemasonic role as a thirty-third-degree Scottish Rite Mason on the Rite’s Supreme Council in Charleston, beginning in 1848.24 This occurred precisely when he began plotting his slavery-expansionist strategy on the “filibustering” front. Not coincidentally, the borders of the Scottish Rite’s southern jurisdiction were greatly expanded soon after the Mexican War to include the new territories of New Mexico and California. Such a move surely would have involved Quitman’s influence as a Scottish Rite Supreme Council member.25
As a leader of a zealous pro-slavery camp and a mysterious Southern-based fraternal society, Quitman found himself in a position of considerable influence at mid-century. He was not one to stand idle. Within Mississippi social and political circles, he created States’ Rights Associations that operated on a countywide and statewide basis.26 Calhoun and other national figures were invited to attend some of these meetings. The core mission was promoting the belief—so boldly pronounced by Calhoun—that there did not exist a consolidated “perpetual” Union but rather a voluntary confederation of sovereign states. These conventions often conducted their most important bus
iness—discussions of slavery expansion in the territories and, ultimately, the forming of a “free Southern government”—in secret committee. But occasionally, these discussions would be floated publicly, most certainly to prepare the Southern masses for the idea of secession and the need to face the growing “threat” of Northern “abolitionist” aggression.
In late 1849, with President Zachary Taylor calling for the admittance of California and New Mexico as free-states, Quitman and other pro-slavery leaders called for a slave state convention in Nashville. Then, after becoming Mississippi’s governor, in early 1850, Quitman floated the idea of Mississippi and South Carolina seceding simultaneously from the Union. He soon called for a special session of the Mississippi legislature to that effect. But, when a southern convention opened the following June in Nashville and failed to inspire much support for rebellion, the secessionist impulse faded. It was a movement ten years ahead of its time. Yet it set the stage for the subsequent insurrection that would divide and then batter the nation.
Taking his cue from Calhoun, Quitman took an aggressive stand not only on states’ rights but also on the issue of slavery’s expansion into new territories, the proximate cause for the Civil War. During the Mexican War, the major general had proposed the complete annexation of Mexico, not just the northern part (where the terrain did not lend itself to plantation farming). After that war, Quitman went so far as to threaten to march a pro-slavery army into New Mexico from Texas to ensure its slave-state status.
Not surprisingly, Quitman rapidly became a prime target of the Taylor administration. Zack Taylor was a slaveowner but, as president, forcefully stood against slavery’s expansion into the territories.27 He had a demonstrative personality and could only be pushed so far. It was Taylor who had Quitman, a national war hero, and a handful of other slavery-expansionist southerners indicted in 1850 by a federal grand jury in New Orleans. The alleged crime: involvement in planning a failed military raid on Spanish-owned Cuba. As it turned out, all key members of the failed raid, including its organizer, American-based Cuban exile Narciso Lopez, were Masons and believed to be members of a KGC precursor, the Order of the Lone Star, based in New Orleans and east Texas.28 Due to a series of hung juries on the charge of their having violated the 1818 Neutrality Law, Quit-man and his alleged co-conspirators eventually were absolved of all charges by the Justice Department. Coincidentally, after the Quitman-Lopez indictment in 1850, Quitman’s nemesis on the national stage, President Taylor, died suddenly under peculiar circumstances: the president, according to the official record, had eaten a bad batch of cherries.
Significantly, the lawyer who had been hired by the government to prosecute Quitman (and then hand-pick the jurors) on the Cuba case was New Orleans attorney Judah P. Benjamin. The former Charleston native was subsequently elected senator from Louisiana and appointed secretary of war and then secretary of state of the Confederacy. He later would appear to play a key role in the upper echelons of the KGC, during the Civil War and its immediate aftermath, in the areas of intelligence gathering and procuring funding for secret missions.
It is in this period, in the early- to mid-1850s, that Quitman and a clique of other hard-core secessionists moved to ensure that the KGC’s underground recruitment and propaganda network expanded well beyond its Charleston-based anchor and its early Southern moorings in Natchez and New Orleans. By this time, a “firing of the Southern Heart” had been partially achieved in the Deep South by staging regional semi-open assemblies—variably referred to as States Rights Associations, Southern Rights Conventions and Southern Commercial Conventions.29 Such conclaves trumpeted the need for a vigorous defense of Southern rights and for an increasingly competitive Southern economy. At critical moments, these table-thumping meetings could be called on to whip up emotion—at elections—for secession and territorial expansion.
Still, Quitman and others recognized that the South’s secessionist plan lacked an effective, locally based army of militant supporters that could be called on to mobilize quickly. This was to become the purview of the successor group to the imperialist Southern Rights Clubs—the Knights of the Golden Circle. Quitman, with his ample political, military and Scottish Rite fraternal connections, was uniquely equipped to lead this underground mobilization until his sudden death in 1858. According to authoritative reports, the KGC could call on 100,000 trained and armed men by late 1860.30
Quitman’s service in the Mexican War had led to his connection to Caleb Cushing, another suspected leading light of the KGC. Like Quit-man, Cushing had served as a volunteer officer in the war (although, unlike Quitman, he never saw action). A scion of one of the wealthiest pro-British shipping families of Newburyport, Massachusetts, Cushing was also a high-ranking Freemason and, like Quitman, harbored strong secessionist and slavery-expansionist sentiments.31 (When Cuban separatist Lopez began plotting his Masonic, pro-slavery revolution against Spanish Cuba, he first turned to Cushing and then Quitman as potential sponsors.32 A newspaper editorial in 1860 accused Cushing of admiring slavery so much that he all but believed the “normal condition” of poor people everywhere was “that of slavery.”)33 Like Quitman, Cushing was a prominent player in Democratic Party circles, who could, in turn, parlay this political clout behind the scenes for the KGC. According to the insightful 1861 Exposition of the Knights of the Golden Circle, “a certain Mr. C——, of Massachusetts,” and “a Mr. V——, of Ohio,” were “said to be about the only reliable members of the Order claimed among the prominent Northern politicians.”34 The unnamed well-informed author of the exposé was referring, ostensibly, to Caleb Cushing (former congressman of Massachusetts) and Clement Vallandigham (former congressman of Ohio).
In 1851, Cushing joined Quitman and another powerful friend from the Mexican War, Jefferson Davis, in promoting yet a fourth war veteran and friend, Franklin Pierce, as the Democratic Party’s candidate for president. Cushing would later serve in the Pierce cabinet, as attorney general, alongside Davis as secretary of war—both men subsequently bending the Pierce administration’s domestic and foreign policy toward their slavery-expansionist, KGC point of view. Pierce, a virtual nobody in Washington prior to his election, would be accused soon after the outbreak of the Civil War of direct involvement with the KGC.35 (It would not be the last time that suspected top-ranking members of the Knights of the Golden Circle would serve in high-level cabinet positions and have a major impact. Under the administration of President James Buchanan that followed, Treasury Secretary Howell Cobb and Secretary of War John B. Floyd reportedly played seditious roles—redirecting federal funds and arms into Southern hands—for the KGC on the eve of the Civil War.)36
Where Quitman had taken up the Southern aristocrats’ torch from Calhoun, Cushing would serve as a master conspirator operating backstage for a decade or more before the Civil War.37 His subversive efforts would have far-reaching impact on both sides of the Mason-Dixon line. His role as a secessionist-minded KGC agitator is particularly intriguing, given his long association with numerous radical abolitionists (some of whom promoted Northern secession and disunion as a price for being rid of slavery) in the prewar years. Among high-profile New Englanders in Cushing’s social circle was the anti-slavery fanatic and newspaper publisher, William Lloyd Garrison.
Perhaps, as some have speculated, Cushing’s hidden sociopolitical agenda was broader than just Southern secession—perhaps, in fact, his main objective was fomenting disunion, specifically the disintegration of the American Republic over the predictably divisive issue of slavery. If so, he may have had powerful European interests backing such an objective. An anonymous column in the March 30, 1861, edition of Vanity Fair alludes to such a scenario. It mentions by name several vitriolic “Fire-eater” secessionists, but does not mention Cushing, who preferred quiet, backroom intrigues:
Of all the reptiles with which this country is cursed, the Blowing Viper is the worst. It is confined to no section, but is a native of all. The most deadly specimens belong to the Nor
th and South. They are called Abolitionists and Secessionists. The former is known by his seeing all things through a dark medium; a great smoked glass is continually before his eyes, and every object that he beholds through it becomes the long-lived denizen of Africa or, in the vernacular, the Everlasting Nigger. … The reptile is undoubtedly honest in his delusion, but he should be crushed, notwithstanding. The Secession viper is of a different breed, and is continually casting his skin. He was warmed into life by a political madman, named John C. Calhoun, who christened him Nullifier. He became a Democrat, and running for Congress, wormed himself into a thousand fat offices, and became the bosom friend of Floyd, Thompson, Wigfall and Toombs, and other blowing vipers. He affects to hate the abolitionist, which is odd, considering that he helps him in his dirty work of Disunion. He should be crushed at once, or at least confined to the Cotton States, in whose slime he was bred. Put your heels on him. Let him be Anathema Maranatha.38
Cushing was able to orchestrate his disunionist grand strategy with the help of two key colleagues, each of whom would rise with his steerage to key positions within both Confederate circles and that of the elite inner circle of Scottish Rite Masonry in Charleston: Albert Pike and John C. Breckinridge.
Cushing and Pike, longstanding friends from Massachusetts, shared much in common beyond a passion for the Southern cause. They both spent their youth in Newburyport, Massachusetts; were accepted by Harvard (Pike declining to attend out of an inability to pay enrollment fees); served as military officers in the Mexican War; developed reputations as talented, peripatetic lawyers, linguists and writers; joined advanced-degree Freemasonry; transferred their political allegiance from the Whigs to states’ rights Democrats; and demonstrated multifaceted talents. (Both were extremely adept at mathematics, for instance, and Pike was an accomplished poet and a reputable musician. Pike, in fact, wrote the lyrics to the Confederate version of “Dixie,” the war anthem of the South.)
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