After the beginning of the war, Bickley was made head of the Confederacy's secret service, and his organization quickly spread throughout the border and Southern states as well.
In the North, the conspirators were seeking "to^seize political power and overthrow the Lincoln government." In fact, the Northern anti-draft riots mentioned previously were largely the result of the planning and leadership of this group. In the South
"they tried to promote the extension of slavery by the conquest of Mexico."5 In partnership with Maximilian, the Knights hoped to establish a Mexican-American empire which would be an effective counter force against the North. In fact, the very name of the organization is based on their goal of carving an empire out of North America with geographical boundaries forming a circle with the center in Cuba, and its circumference reaching northward to Pennsylvania, southward to Panama.
1. For highly readable accounts of this movement, see Theodore Roscoe,
2. "No Civil War at All, Part Two," by Will^m Mcllhany,
3. Horan, p. 15.
4.
5.
GREENBACKS AND OTHER CRIMES 393
In 1863 the group was reorganized as the Order of American Knights and, again the following year, as the Order of the Sons of Liberty. Its membership then was estimated at between 200,000 and 300,000. After the war, it went further underground and remnants eventually emerged as the Ku Klux Klan.
J O H N W I L K E S B O O T H
One of the persistent legends of this period is that John Wilkes Booth was not killed in Garrett's barn, as generally accepted, but was allowed to escape; that the corpse actually was that of an accomplice; and that the government, under the firm control of War Secretary Edwin M. Stanton, moved heaven and earth to cover up the facts. On the face of it, that is an absurd story. But, when the voluminous files of the War Department were finally declassified and put into the public domain in the mid 1930s, historians were shocked to discover that there are many facts in those files which lend credence to the legend. The first to probe these amazing records was Otto Eisenschiml whose
was published by Little, Brown and Company in 1937. The best and most readable compilation of the facts, however, was written twenty years later by Theodore Roscoe. In the preface to this work, he states the startling conclusions which emerge from those long-hidden files:
Of the immense 19th century literature that exists on Lincoln's assassination, much of the writing treats the tragedy at Ford's theater as though it were Grand Opera.... Only a few have seen the crime as a murder case: Lincoln dying by crass felony, Booth a stalking gunman leading a gang of primed henchmen, the murder plot containing ingredients as base as the profit motive. Seventy years after the crime, writers were garbling it with a dignity it did not deserve: Lincoln, the stereotyped martyr; Booth, the stereotyped villain; the assassination avenged by classic justice; conspiracy strangled; Virtue (in the robes of Government) emerging triumphant, and Lincoln "belonging to the ages."
But the facts of the case are neither so satisfying nor so gratifying.
For the facts indicate that the criminals responsible for Lincoln's death got away with murder.1
Izola Forrester was the granddaughter of John Wilkes Booth. In her book entitled
394
THE CREATURE FROM JEKYLL ISLAND
secret records of the Knights of the Golden Circle which had been carefully wrapped and placed in a government vault many decades ago and designated as classified documents by Secretary Stanton.
Since the assassination of Lincoln, no one had ever been allowed to examine that package. Because of her lineage to Booth and because of her credentials as a professional writer, she was eventually permitted to become the first person in all those years to examine its contents. Forrester recounts the experience:
It was five years before I was able to examine the contents of the mysterious old package hidden away in the safe of the room which contained the relics and exhibits used in the Conspiracy Trial.... ]
would never have seen them, had I not knelt on the floor of the cell five years ago and seen into the back of the old safe where the package lay.
