Cotton had heard the stories since he was a little boy. His great-great-grandfather on his mother’s side, Angus Adams—who’d fought in the Civil War as a spy for the Confederacy—had also been a knight of the Golden Circle. Letters and papers in his grandfather’s attic talked of a conference held in 1859 at the Greenbrier resort in what was then Virginia. Nearly 1200 came, including cabinet members, governors, and congressmen. They approved a sixty-page booklet—Rules, Regulations and Principles of the American Legion of the Knights of the Golden Circle—which expressed the organization’s intents
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