The KGC Theory Again

[L Verge]

I asked for Bill Richter's thoughts on Gen. Shelby, and got a lot more history to boot - which is what I love about my favorite codger. This is being posted with his permission:

Hell, Laurie, I am going to give you my thoughts on this whole thing, not just General J. O. Shelby.

Now anyone who knows me or has read my stuff on Booth and the Confederacy knows that I am an unreconstructed Confederate, if there ever was one. I have been accused by a fellow student from LSU of writing Confederate history in my treatment of Texas Reconstruction. At least he did not call me some of the epithets others have used.

Mind you, I agree with Scott Wolter that a lot of US history did not happen the way we all were taught. But this Scott Wolter piece is really bad news. It takes a bunch of unrelated incidents and ties them together with suppositions and a liberal use of the word "might" to make them sound true and related. He does this on a lot of things--I have followed his show over the years. What follows is just off the top of my head with no real research, as most of my Forum posts were, and for which I was roundly and constantly criticized for knowing next to nothing by my professed betters, and for which they were correct.

First of all, John H Surratt, Jr., did not introduce JWB to his whole gang. JWB knew Arnold and O'Laughlen from boyhood, and Dr Samuel Mudd introduced JWB to Surratt.

Any history of the KGC leads one to suspect that they were a bunch of disorganized weirdos--dangerous under certain conditions but loud mouths in most cases. Albert Pike never headed the KGC, George Bickley did and he was arrested during the Civil War in Tenn. He never could get these guys off the ground and into real operation. As for the initiation rites, I would take a lot of it with a grain of salt. More than anything else, it smacks of Masonic Order rites, as revealed in the William Morgan affair where he revealed Masonry's secrets and was killed by being dumped over Niagara Falls. Out of that grew the Anti-Masonic political party that became part of the National Republicans, then the Whigs, then the Republicans. Linda Anderson knows about some of that as William H Seward and his propagandist Thurlow Weed were prominent in it. So was Thaddeus Stevens, if I remember correctly. For that matter, JWB was probably a member of the KGC in the 1850s, at least. this is in his sister's book, I think.

As for the Northwest Conspiracy, the show leaves out George N Sanders and the fact that while the Rebels were ready to fight, their alleged Northern allies all wimped out in the end. Hence the hanging of John Yates Beall.

Underground deposits of gold all over the South and Southwest? That is pure B.S. Stelnick fell for some of this in Dixie Reckoning. But whatever gold was stolen from the Confederate treasury went to the cavalry escorts and prominent fleeing Confederates like J P Benjamin and Jacob Thompson and the rest of the Confederate Secret Service after the war. They had to live on something. If there were gold deposits and the KGC as potent and organized as Wolters tells us, do you think that the gold would not have been dug up by now? Especially if the KGC lives on as the New World Order. I doubt the Georgia Guide Stones have anything to do with any of this.