Seal of the Knights of the Golden Circle, 1860
In the piece I wrote for the Scene's three-part cover story on right-wing extremism, I marked the start of white supremacist organizations in Tennessee with the Ku Klux Klan. There was an earlier group — the Knights of the Golden Circle, which was formed by George Bickley in 1854, a doctor from Cincinnati who fled creditors and moved to Texas where he and his Golden Circle friends invaded Mexico a few times, trying to expand U.S. slavery.
The Golden Circle referred to the circle of slavery they intended to surround the Gulf of Mexico with. Considering that these Caribbean and Latin American countries were also slavocracies, what the Golden Circle wanted was for those places to be satellite territory of the U.S. South, run by U.S. Southern white men. The Knights of the Golden Circle in real life didn’t last very long. In 1863, it dissolved and reorganized into first the Order of American Knights, and then the Sons of Liberty, and by 1864, after members had been tried for treason, it fizzled out. It’s not even clear if anyone in Tennessee was actually a member in real life.
But in legend among white supremacists and treasure hunters, the Knights of the Golden Circle has a more glorious and intriguing past. Bickley is out, and now the Knights of the Golden Circle have an inner circle of leaders — Nathan Bedford Forrest, John Wilkes Booth and Jesse James among them — and an outer circle of secret members. The story goes that these men ran around the South before the Civil War (note that Jesse James was born in 1847, so he would have been one heck of a precocious child if this story was true) burying gold treasure, two caches of which are said to be here in the Nashville area.
According to Knights-of-the-Golden-Circle.blogspot.com, the KGC had a headquarters on Fatherland Street, where it buried one cache of gold: “Reportedly, the old building stood where the ‘Grand Ole Opry’ got its start.” The Grand Ole Opry got its start in the National Life building downtown, but it was briefly at the Dixie Tabernacle on Fatherland. According to old newspapers, the Dixie Tabernacle was at 410 Fatherland St., which means that if there were a large cache of gold buried there, it seems like it might have been uncovered when the apartment buildings were put in. Unless, of course, Jesse James dug it up himself when he was living on Fatherland when he was hiding here in Nashville. The other cache is supposed to be down in Brentwood in a hill near a body of water behind a bunch of elaborate booby traps, which narrows it down to ... the whole city of Brentwood!
I would watch a whole movie in which Forrest, Booth and James run around America making elaborate booby traps to hide gold behind. A 50-something Forrest mentoring a kid Jesse James on how to be a blight upon the country? John Wilkes Booth constantly dipping out to act in plays? It’s like the inverse A-Team, where this motley band of misfits travels around seeing destitute people being held captive by rich sociopaths and they do nothing to help. (They don’t have a B.A. Baracus, for obvious reasons.)
I mean, Forrest was a slave trader. He was exceedingly wealthy, and he enslaved a lot of people. We could all sit around and speculate on when we believe the last time Forrest ever did actual hard labor in his life was, but I’m betting it was around 1843. After that? He owned people to do his hard work for him. He, himself, did not run around anywhere burying gold.
If — and I am using the term “if” very generously here — the KGC buried gold in a hill in Brentwood after constructing elaborate booby traps, we need to realize that the KGC most certainly ordered some Black people to construct elaborate booby traps and stick the gold in the hill. Either they brought their own enslaved people — in which case, you’d think any paper in the state would have commented on Forrest being the first slave trader in U.S. history to bring a bunch of people back up river — or, more likely (and again, this is not at all likely, because this did not happen), they borrowed a team of enslaved people from a local KGC member. There aren’t any stories of a group of Black people in Brentwood being killed before the Civil War (in order to prevent them from telling anyone where the gold was), which means that, if the gold ever existed, probably as soon as the Union Army moved into the area, the people who buried the gold dug it back up and fled into Nashville. If they didn’t, surely Frank and Jesse James would have dug it up when they lived here in the late 1870s.
The Knights of the Golden Circle were a huge influence on the Ku Klux Klan, being a secretive group with designs on holding onto Southern power who consider themselves knights. (Also, Ku Klux Klan literally comes from kyklos, which means "circle" in Greek.) And just judging by the comments on treasure-hunting forums, the KGC still holds a place of importance in the minds of history-minded racists, though it’s not always clear if they are holding onto the memory of the actual group or the legend of the mythological version.
I truly thought that racists playing Oak Island about Brentwood would be the funniest racist thing I would hear about, but then the Southern Poverty Law Center released a report on the Lewis Country Store. Apparently, the racists not lucky enough to be in the treasure-hunting contingency are punching each other in a gas station attic out in the country halfway to Ashland City. It is an attic, so I guess it is literally a step up from working out at the racist werewolf gym, but it feels like a step down.
But the best part is where the SPLC says: “A message posted May 21 on a Telegram channel run by Tennessee Active Club, a white nationalist hate group, led Hatewatch to photographs of the property on a real estate listing website.” That’s right. The Lewis Country Store is apparently for sale. Brad Lewis is selling the racist clubhouse right out from under them!
Shit, I just realized the obvious solution. The punchy racists should go in search of the Brentwood treasure. If they find it, they can buy the gas station. Then they’d have a steady source of income and access to their attic clubhouse whenever they wanted it.
Man, you know, with as much as they go on about the importance of securing the future, it’s kind of surprising that Lewis hasn’t facilitated the sale of the place to the punchy racists already. I guess when it comes down to it, Lewis is more loyal to the green than the white.
Well, boys, you’d better hope Nathan Bedford Forrest has left you a fortune, because it doesn’t seem like Brad Lewis is going to.
