Solving the Lincoln conspiracy is not the purpose, or within the scope, of this book. Suffice it to say that some federal government insiders believed that Booth and his small band of Lincoln-assassination co-conspirators were KGC operatives. How else to explain that official Washington turned immediately to Maj. Henry Lawrence Burnett to prosecute the “co-conspirators” tied to the assassination plot, four of whom were hanged. At their trial in military court, in which Judge Advocate General Joseph Holt (author of the Holt Report on the KGC) presided as chief judge, the defendants were repeatedly probed about their knowledge and possible involvement in the Knights of the Golden Circle by Burnett, who by then had been promoted to colonel.
Burnett hitherto had been a little-known lawyer in the Union army. But his life would change late in the war when he was assigned to lead the government’s case in two high-profile treason trials involving alleged KGC members, the first in Indianapolis and the second in Cincinnati. He was making closing arguments as judge advocate in the Cincinnati trial against Confederate spy and KGC operative Thomas Hines (in absentia) and associated squads from bases in Canada when he received the urgent call to investigate the murder of the president.85
For his part, Burnett, who ultimately would be promoted to major general, had won convictions against KGC subversives in the earlier treason trials. His success at the Lincoln trial seemed preordained, at least when it came to the lesser bit players in the conspiracy. It should be noted that Jefferson Davis (who had been labeled a KGC member, despite his comparatively moderate stance on secession, in various exposés during the war) was also named one of ten co-conspirators in the Lincoln murder plot. The same was true of the mysterious George Sanders: a former colleague of Caleb Cushing in the Pierce administration and comrade of Hines in running KGC operations in Canada. Historian James D. Horan depicts Sanders as one who seemed to be “pulling wires … to manipulate the actions of the Confederate agents.”86 Sanders, prior to the war, had been the leader of the territorial-expansionist “Young America” movement, which attracted the likes of Pike and Bickley and was allied with European radical movements led by Giuseppe Mazzini.
More than 135 years after Lincoln’s murder, the notion that a Confederate underground may have facilitated the assassination plot is gaining support. In his recently published Blood on the Moon: The Assassination of Abraham Lincoln, Lincoln biographer Edward Steers, Jr. observes:
Booth also benefited greatly from the Confederate leadership in Richmond. Whether he was an agent of that leadership or simply a beneficiary can be debated. But in putting together his plans to strike at Lincoln, Booth was aided by key members of the Confederate underground at every step. After [Lincoln’s] capture turned to assassination, that same Confederate apparatus used all of its resources to help Booth in his attempt to escape. If it had not been for key members of the Confederate underground, Booth would never have made his way as far as he did or for as long as he did.87
The Postwar KGC
With Lee’s surrender and Lincoln’s murder coming in quick succession in the spring of 1865, the country would hold its collective breath. The fog of war would linger for several more months before the traumatized nation began to make tentative steps toward reconciliation and reunion.
Yet, despite or perhaps because of such steps, sentiments of revenge and retribution boiled below the Mason-Dixon line. Die-hard rebels within the KGC’s highest echelons were determined to see the Confederacy rise again: at the proper time and choosing. For Albert Pike and other “inner sanctum” leaders of the Knights—now in exile in Canada, England or Mexico, with some operating under deep cover in Nashville and elsewhere in the South—there were two burning issues. The first was how to maintain the order’s underground operations as the hated Radical Reconstruction regime was imposed; the second was how to protect their hidden hoards of gold, silver and munitions scattered across the South and West.
Pike had a more immediate and personal postwar problem—his status as an American citizen. At war’s end, he had been excluded from President Andrew Johnson’s general amnesty granted to Confederate soldiers and officials. He also faced an indictment for treason for his responsibility in the scalping-and-mutilation massacre at Pea Ridge. Ultimately, he turned to some well-placed Scottish Rite underlings to help see him through his exclusion from the amnesty rolls.
Certainly, Pike had well-placed friends. As the incoming Supreme Council leader before the outbreak of war, he had appointed a leading Scottish Rite Mason in Washington, D.C., Benjamin French, to the Council. French had served as personal secretary to President Franklin Pierce, and thus was in close contact with Pike’s friend, Caleb Cushing, the activist attorney general at the time. A deft Washington operator who had worked the floor of the 1860 Democratic Convention for Cushing, French would later become commissioner of public buildings in Washington. A year after Appomattox, French and a group of other prominent Scottish Rite Masons met with Johnson inside the White House and secured a presidential pardon for Pike, at the same time conferring several advanced Scottish Rite degrees on the president himself.88 The stage was set for the next phase of KGC inspired subversion.
At this point, it is worth recalling the KGC’s modus operandi during the war. In the North, where the order was vulnerable to penetration by federal moles, it had operated semi-publicly through front organizations and frontmen, such as Bickley and Vallandigham. These Northern-based above-ground operations provided a protective buffer for the KGC’s inner core, operating out of the South, as they did for various clandestine missions in the North and West. An argument can be made that the postwar KGC rooted in the Deep South deliberately unleashed the Knights of the Ku Klux Klan (KKK) for the same purposes: to sabotage and distract at the same time. A core goal was to achieve certain out-in-front political ends: the destabilization of Reconstruction through repeated acts of intimidation and terrorism against newly emancipated blacks and Republican officials. Yet, in the likely event that KKK members got caught, the KGC could remain invisible, that is, logistically and legally out of reach of government troops, prosecutors and the news media. The Klan, with its provocative white-robed regalia, would serve as an expedient militant arm of the KGC but also, longer-term, would act to deflect any potential crackdown on the KGC’s continuing subsurface operations, now that the “oppressive” mechanisms of federal government had been “imposed” throughout the former Confederacy.
There can be little doubt that the hidden KGC spawned the original KKK. Ample circumstantial evidence supports this. There is the ever-important symbolic trail and the persistent whiff of a familiar modus operandi. Here a noted scholar of Masonic history, John J. Robinson, writing about the origins of the KKK in his Born in Blood: The Lost Secrets of Freemasonry, provides insight:
A few years later, during the War Between the States, Masonic officers and men found themselves facing their Masonic brothers on the other side. There are many Civil War legends of help rendered in response to Masonic signs of distress, but the most significant event happened just after the war was over. Angered by the erosion of their way of life and the enforced growing political power of men who had been their slaves until the war was lost, a group of Southerners decided to fight back by means of a secret society. Many of them were Freemasons, who drew upon their knowledge of Masonic rites to develop a ritualistic infrastructure for the society that was to save the South through the maintenance of white supremacy. They adopted the circle of the lodge as their formal meeting arrangement for members, named their society for it, and demonstrated their educational level by using the Greek word for “circle,” which is kuklos. The pronunciation and spelling quickly became Ku Klux, and they styled themselves as the Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, as terms of chivalry were introduced into the ritual. The single All-Seeing Eye of Masonry became the Grand Cyclops. There were hand-signals, secret passwords, secret handgrips and recognition signals, even a sacred oath, all adapted from Masonic experience. Some Klansmen even boasted of offici
al connections between the Klan and Freemasonry. A society that had begun as the South’s only recourse against the postwar invasion of the South quickly degenerated into something else. Violence took hold, with beatings, lynchings and even torture, so it was decided by the leadership that the Klan should be disbanded. In 1869, the Grand Master and former Confederate cavalry general Nathan Bedford Forrest issued his only General Order, which was for all Klans to disband and disperse. It was too late. The general’s order was ignored by many who still smarted under the humiliation of defeat in the war, and what they felt was the even greater humiliation of its aftermath. As the violence grew, and the target for Klan hatred widened in scope from blacks to Jews, to Catholics, to all foreign-born, the talk of the Masonic connection continued. Finally, state Masonic Grand Lodges in both North and South felt called upon to declare publicly their total rejection of the philosophy, the motives, and the actions of the Ku Klux Klan. Nevertheless, a shadow had been cast on Freemasonry. …89
What Robinson does not mention in his examination of the early Klan era is that the same descriptions largely applied to the long-extant KGC and its Scottish Rite–influenced infrastructure. What link might Albert Pike, head of the Scottish Rite for most of the latter half of the nineteenth century, have had to the original KKK, which functioned from 1865 through the 1870s? (A so-called resurrected Klan emerged in 1915, under a William Joseph Simmons, as an anti-black, anti-Jewish and anti-Catholic nationwide organization.)
In his well-documented biography of Pike, Walter Lee Brown states that there is no evidence that Pike was a member of the KKK. Yet, he writes, “one might reasonably surmise that Pike, considering his strong aversion to the Negro suffrage and his frustration at his own political impotence, would not have stood back from the Klan.”90 No doubt Pike’s possible parentage or patronage of the KKK is awkward for the Southern Jurisdiction of the Scottish Rite, today the world’s largest Masonic body. Membership and possible leadership of the prewar and wartime KGC is one thing: Charleston was a hotbed of secessionist sentiment and, at the same time, hosted the southern headquarters of the Scottish Rite. So, for the officially apolitical Supreme Council to have linked temporarily with the “South”—as a wartime exigency—could be explained away or, better, quietly ignored. But the question of a direct link between Pike and the post–Civil War, racist and murderous KKK was far more troubling. In a recently published analysis of the KKK’s reign of terror, author Philip Dray points out that by 1892, reported lynchings of black Americans were averaging three a week “chiefly in Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas and Kentucky.”91
The modern Scottish Rite has denied that its revered former Supreme Commander had any involvement whatsoever with the KKK, whether as its founder or—as some have charged—as its chief judicial officer. William Fox, official historian of the Supreme Council and a thirty-third-degree Scottish Rite Freemason, addresses the subject in his recent volume, Lodge of the Double-Headed Eagle: Two Centuries of Scottish Rite Freemasonry in America’s Southern Jurisdiction. Fox’s denial is measured, not categorical. “Whether or not Albert Pike was ever involved with the Klan is a matter of conjecture…. Pike never admitted, nor did Forrest ever reveal, that he was a member of the notorious Ku Klux Klan. Many men came forward years later to admit their former involvement in the Klan of early Reconstruction, almost as a proud badge of honor, but Pike never said or intimated a word. He seemingly had nothing to admit because he probably had nothing to hide.”92
Officially, Pike and his supporters could deny that he was ever a member of the KKK, precisely because of the KKK’s deliberate distancing from the true hidden power, the KGC.
Still, Fox seems to be on far less solid ground when he writes: “Pike held no sympathy with nor expressed any sentiment for the Lost Cause myth…. Pike, even when portrayed as an authority on fraternal ritual, does not fit the profile of a rabid southern patriot.”93 But, leaving epithets like “rabid” aside, the evidence to the contrary is powerful. Pike, as part-owner and editor-in-chief of the Memphis Daily Appeal, wrote the following editorial in the April 16, 1868, edition:
The disenfranchised people of the South, robbed of all the guarantees of the Constitution … can find no protection for property, liberty or life, except in secret association. Not in such association to commit follies and outrages; but for mutual, peaceful, lawful, self-defense. If it were in our power, if it could be effected, we would unite every white man in the South, who is opposed to Negro suffrage, into one great Order of Southern Brotherhood, with an organization complete, active, vigorous, in which a few should execute the concentrated will of all, and whose very existence should be concealed from all but its members.94
Pike, between the lines, has laid out what already was long under way: the hidden-government mission of the KGC, with its postwar militant arm, the KKK, serving to “protect” Southern whites from perceived injustices of federal occupation. He would go on to use the bullhorn of the Appeal’s editorials to defend the South’s “honorable” and “just” decision to secede and would attack the “dishonoring measures of Reconstruction.”
After the war, Pike settled in Memphis as a lawyer and newspaper editor. His move followed numerous months in exile in Toronto, Montreal and elsewhere in Canada. He is believed to have associated there with Confederate spy Hines, who had started studying law in Toronto after the war under Confederate exile John C. Breckinridge. Were these studies a smoke screen for the regrouping of the postwar KGC? Hines, notably, would follow Pike to Memphis and serve under him at the Appeal. Both Pike and Hines were probably drawn to postwar Memphis by native Tennessean and famed Confederate cavalry officer Nathan Bedford Forrest.
Before the war, Forrest had become a wealthy Memphis-based businessman, as a cotton planter and slave trader. During the war, the dashing officer was deemed by many to be the South’s most brilliant tactician. But his wartime legacy would forever be marred by his actions following the April 1864 capture of Fort Pillow, in western Tennessee. There, hundreds of Union troops, most of them black infantrymen, were reportedly massacred—after surrendering—by troops under Forrest’s command. While some Southern reports disputed the account—asserting that the black troops were killed defending the outpost or retreating to the nearby Mississippi River—official U.S. charges of “atrocity” and “massacre” stuck.95
Given Forrest’s racist tendencies, it came as little surprise to official Washington that the decorated former general (a Freemason who undoubtedly was well familiar with arcane symbols and exotic regalia) would be described as the first Grand Wizard of the Klan. But Forrest refused to confirm that status during lengthy congressional hearings on the Klan in 1871.
As to the Invisible Empire’s true origins, the consensus history is that a group of six restless ex-Confederates banded together in Pulaski, Tennessee, at the end of 1865 for the “entertaining” purpose of harassing newly liberated blacks. As the intimidating practice of hooded night-riding spread—and eventually led to more sinister violence against people and property throughout the South—greater Klan organization, its leaders decided, was needed. Hence, at a conclave at the Maxwell House in Nashville in 1866, the Klan turned to Forrest as its grand commander, or so the accepted history maintains.
This, however, might be nothing more than a classic KGC cover story. Forrest and other high-ranking KGC members perhaps were behind the semi-public Klan from the beginning and expected, if not outright wanted, the KKK to become a high-profile target of investigation by federal authorities. The early Klan would achieve certain short-term goals; ultimately, however, it would serve as a smoke screen, a decoy, to let the hidden, postwar KGC remain undetected once the KKK was declared officially dead in front of congressional panels.
The plan appeared to work. The federal government, under President Ulysses S. Grant, lost little time in descending upon the Klan: first with federal investigations launched in the late 1860s; then, a few years late
r, with Congress holding extensive hearings (the largest to date at the time); and, finally, with the enactment of legislation to suppress the Klan in 1871. Here is how Fox, the Scottish Rite historian, summarizes Forrest’s bowing out:
Nathan Bedford Forrest, the renowned Confederate cavalier, had resigned as Imperial Grand Wizard and officially dissolved the Klan by 1869. Forrest spent the rest of his life denouncing the remnants of the Ku Klux Klan he had tried to deactivate once the guerilla tactics had crossed over the proprieties of the order’s original purpose (and began damaging, too, Forrest’s own business interests in railroads and insurance). Forrest appeared before a congressional hearing in June 1871, revealing very little of the Klan’s membership or secrets. In spite of his cagey evasions during the interrogation and testimony, he insisted that the organization was “broken up in 1868, and never existed since that time as an organization and [was] to be no longer countenanced.”96
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