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Dark lanterns: Secret political societies, conspiracies, and treason trials in the Civil War
Klement refutes the past historical theories and shows that such subversive, secret Civil War societies as the Knights of the Golden Circle, the Order of American Knights, and the Sons of Liberty were never much more than paper-based organizations with vague goals and little ability to carry them out.
- GenresHistory
263 pages, Hardcover
First published December 1, 1984
About the author
Frank L. Klement
7 booksA specialist in political dissent in the North during the American Civil War, Frank L. Klement was professor of history at Marquette University.
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Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews
February 15, 2024
The author pulls back the curtains in this insightful look at subversive societies during the War Between the States. Along the way, we get the opportunity to meet many diverse characters, and also some outright scoundrels. Although the book is heavily footnoted, I didn't agree with all the author's conclusions about the secret societies mentioned. I guess that's the beauty of narrative history; we can agree to disagree on certain chapters from our past. Overall, though, a very good read!!
March 31, 2018
This book is a massive disappointment, but the disappointment sets in so early that you have time to get used to it.
Basically Klement wants to prove that secret societies didn't exist during the Civil War, and he chooses an exhaustively researched and footnoted path to this that ends up proving that yes, secret societies did exist during the Civil War.
One gets the impression that this book only makes sense in the context of changing patterns of Civil War history, and that it was written in the 1980s by a man who was responding to things that were written in the 1930s and the 1940s. Maybe secret societies such as the Knights of the Golden Circle were over-discussed in the early years of the 20th century, and maybe the only way to correct that was to write a book pretending that they didn't exist at all, allowing the rest of us to chart a middle path.
But it's pretty funny when Klement goes on for pages and pages about how H. H. Dodd was a meaningless dreamer who never amounted to anything or headed any group of subversives larger than the inside of his own head and by the way Confederate agents literally gave him $10,000 (equivalent to about a million bucks today) to try to break Confederate soldiers out of prison and start riots in Indiana during the 1864 presidential election but anyway Dodd was a patriot through and through and only took their money to keep it out of trouble. The armory of weapons and ammunition recovered from the raid on his office were technically for personal use.
Whatever, Frank.
Klement bends over backwards to show that there were no secret societies in Indiana and Ohio (there were), that they had no Confederate intentions (they did), that they were harmless (they weren't), and that their machinations amounted to nothing (mostly because people kept stopping them). He adheres to an older school of historiography, where any historical source that had anything that he saw as a bad reputation could be disregarded entirely -- goodbye to Mary Ann Pittman, goodbye to Felix Stidger, goodbye to Isaiah Ayer. Fortunately for us, he includes his reasons for dismissing them, and to the modern reader, they're quite bad. He says Mary Ann Pittman pretended to be a Confederate soldier, which is obviously impossible because she was a woman, but to us that's obviously not impossible, so there ya are. He also accuses Ayer of having a girlfriend who lived with him. Shocking stuff, but I don't think that's enough to discredit the man.
He also manages to write an entire book on the Knights of the Golden Circle without mentioning Albert Pike, Ben McCulloch, or the state of Texas. So it's fair to say that this is an "if the glove doesn't fit you must acquit" view of secret societies in Civil War era.
The best piece of detective work in the entire thing is where he found that Thomas Hines, a contemporary, wrote some mean stuff on stuff on the margins of an issue of the Atlantic Monthly back in the 1870s. I also enjoyed his explanation of Ex Parte Milligan, an important court case.
But, Frank, there were well-funded ill-intentioned pro-slavery secret societies in pre-Civil War America. Of course there were.
Basically Klement wants to prove that secret societies didn't exist during the Civil War, and he chooses an exhaustively researched and footnoted path to this that ends up proving that yes, secret societies did exist during the Civil War.
One gets the impression that this book only makes sense in the context of changing patterns of Civil War history, and that it was written in the 1980s by a man who was responding to things that were written in the 1930s and the 1940s. Maybe secret societies such as the Knights of the Golden Circle were over-discussed in the early years of the 20th century, and maybe the only way to correct that was to write a book pretending that they didn't exist at all, allowing the rest of us to chart a middle path.
But it's pretty funny when Klement goes on for pages and pages about how H. H. Dodd was a meaningless dreamer who never amounted to anything or headed any group of subversives larger than the inside of his own head and by the way Confederate agents literally gave him $10,000 (equivalent to about a million bucks today) to try to break Confederate soldiers out of prison and start riots in Indiana during the 1864 presidential election but anyway Dodd was a patriot through and through and only took their money to keep it out of trouble. The armory of weapons and ammunition recovered from the raid on his office were technically for personal use.
Whatever, Frank.
Klement bends over backwards to show that there were no secret societies in Indiana and Ohio (there were), that they had no Confederate intentions (they did), that they were harmless (they weren't), and that their machinations amounted to nothing (mostly because people kept stopping them). He adheres to an older school of historiography, where any historical source that had anything that he saw as a bad reputation could be disregarded entirely -- goodbye to Mary Ann Pittman, goodbye to Felix Stidger, goodbye to Isaiah Ayer. Fortunately for us, he includes his reasons for dismissing them, and to the modern reader, they're quite bad. He says Mary Ann Pittman pretended to be a Confederate soldier, which is obviously impossible because she was a woman, but to us that's obviously not impossible, so there ya are. He also accuses Ayer of having a girlfriend who lived with him. Shocking stuff, but I don't think that's enough to discredit the man.
He also manages to write an entire book on the Knights of the Golden Circle without mentioning Albert Pike, Ben McCulloch, or the state of Texas. So it's fair to say that this is an "if the glove doesn't fit you must acquit" view of secret societies in Civil War era.
The best piece of detective work in the entire thing is where he found that Thomas Hines, a contemporary, wrote some mean stuff on stuff on the margins of an issue of the Atlantic Monthly back in the 1870s. I also enjoyed his explanation of Ex Parte Milligan, an important court case.
But, Frank, there were well-funded ill-intentioned pro-slavery secret societies in pre-Civil War America. Of course there were.
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews