*Includes pictures
*Includes contemporary accounts of the society
*Includes online resources and a bibliography for further reading
"This country without slave labor would be completely worthless. We can only live and exist by that species of labor; and hence I am willing to fight for the last." - William Nugent, letter addressed to Eleanor Nugent, September 7, 1863
In 1934, a pair of teenagers from Baltimore by the names of Theodore Jones and Henry Grob embarked on what they thought would be another lazy summer afternoon. They popped in at the soda shop and idly browsed through the aisles of few local mom-and-pop stores, but when they could not kill their boredom, they decided to return to Grob's place for an impromptu treasure hunt. Clunky metal detectors in hand, they roamed around the backyard, discovering and delighting in odd metal knickknacks along the way. What started out as just another slow-moving summer's day turned out to be anything but when one of the detectors began to go off. Intrigued, the pair grabbed a spade each and shoveled like their lives depended on it. What they found was none other than a rusted pot of 5,000 glittering gold coins, with the mysterious words "Great Seal of the K'S of the G.C." stamped onto the edges of each token. What ensued was a bitter dispute over the ownership of said coins, one that is still raging on via the parties' descendants to this day.
But who were these "K's," and why was this treasure so coveted? As it turned out, the boys had stumbled upon artifacts left over by an ambitious secret society that operated in the midst of the American Civil War, with no less an aim than to establish a brand new sovereignty composed of territories in Mexico, Central America, the Confederacy, and the Caribbean.
In the end, the plans would all go awry, and Emperor Maximilian's life would end before a firing squad in Mexico in 1867, but the group's aim to strengthen slavery in the Americas made plenty of contemporaries consider the Knights of the Golden Circle a threat, particularly in the Union, where suspected membership could land one in jail. Accusations implicated figures as high up as former President Franklin Pierce, and when the society went underground after the Civil War, conspiracy theories naturally began to emerge, often centered on the belief the group would attempt to spark a second rebellion. Indeed, when Jones and Grob found the cache of coins, some immediately theorized t