George W. L. Bickley

George Washington Lafayette Bickley (1823 – August 1867) was the founder of the Knights of the Golden Circle, a Civil War era secret society used to promote the interests of the Southern United States by preparing the way for annexation of a "golden circle" of territories in Mexico, Central America, and the Caribbean which would be included into the United States as southern or slave states. Bickley was arrested by the United States government and it was during this time he wrote a letter to Abraham Lincoln expressing his distastes with Lincoln's handling of the government.

Early life
Bickley was born in Russell County, Virginia July 18, 1823. His father died of cholera in 1830 and Bickley ran away from home to live an adventurous life around the country.

Medicine
By 1850, Bickley was a practicing physician in Jeffersonville (now Tazewell), Virginia. In Jeffersonville, he founded a local historical society and began writing the manuscript for the History of the Settlement and Indian War of Tazewell County, Virginia.

In 1851, Bickley moved to Cincinnati, Ohio, after being offered to serve as "Professor of Materia Medica, Therapeutics, and Medical Botany" at the Eclectic Medical Institute, an institution teaching a form of alternative medicine known as eclectic medicine. Bickley had secured the offer by claiming to have been a graduate in the Class of 1842 of the University of London. Bickley stated that he had studied medicine under the renowned English physician John Elliotson, who supposedly had signed his diploma. The University of London failed to find Bickley's name in their records for the list of university graduates. Furthermore, Elliotson had resigned from the university in 1838, which would falsify Bickley's claim.

Writing
In 1853, Bickley published Adalaska; Or, The Strange and Mysterious Family of the Cave of Genreva, an anti-slavery novel based on the premise of the Young America movement and Manifest Destiny, and the Principles of Scientific Botany. Bickley was also the publisher of the Western American Review, a New York-based conservative publication.

The Knights of the Golden Circle
Hounded by creditors, Bickley left Cincinnati in the late 1850s and traveled through the East and South promoting an expedition to seize Mexico and establish a new territory for slavery. He found his greatest support in Texas and managed within a short time to organize thirty-two chapters there. In the spring of 1860 the group made the first of two attempts to invade Mexico from Texas. A small band reached the Rio Grande, but Bickley failed to show up with a large force he claimed he was assembling in New Orleans, and the campaign dissolved. In April some KGC members in New Orleans, displeased with Bickley's inept leadership, met and expelled him, but Bickley called a convention in Raleigh, North Carolina, in May and succeeded in having himself reinstated. Bickley attempted to mount a second expedition to Mexico later in the year, but with Abraham Lincoln's election he and most of his supporters turned their attentions to the secessionist movement.

The outbreak of the Civil War prompted a shift in the group's aims to that of supporting the Confederates and engaging in Copperhead activity. In late 1863 the Knights of the Golden Circle were reorganized (sans Bickley) as the Order of American Knights and again, early in 1864, as the Order of the Sons of Liberty, with Clement Vallandigham, the most prominent of the Copperheads, as its supreme commander but with growing Union victories in 1864 it soon dissolved.

American Civil War
Bickley joined Confederate States Army at the beginning of 1863 to serve as a surgeon under General Braxton Bragg. However, he left for Tennessee in June 1963, and he was arrested as a Confederate spy in New Albany, Indiana in July 1863. He was never tried but remained under arrest until October 1865.

Personal life, death and legacy
Bickley married a widow who owned a farm in Scioto County, Ohio in the 1850s. They separated when he tried to sell her farm. In 1863, he had a child out of wedlock with a woman in Tennessee.

Bickley died on August 10, 1867 in Baltimore, Maryland or Virginia. Meanwhile, the Knights of the Golden Circle became the inspiration for the Ku Klux Klan.