I’ll bet you’ve never heard or seen that question anywhere before, huh? Everybody says the Knights of the Golden Circle were responsible for amassing a fortune and hiding it underground. You can pick your own reason why, there are several theories floating around, none of which, in my opinion, make a lot of sense. But could they have caused the downfall of the south because they weren’t as smart as everyone thinks they were?
It is known that the KGC operated in several states including some of the northern states. It is known that the KGC had a few “operatives” or spies in the North and that some of those operated in New York City. But could some of those spies have caused the downfall of the South because they were careless with how they passed messages to each other and because of the ciphers they used?
In December of 1863 the North intercepted a letter addressed to Alexander Keith of Nova Scotia. That letter was intercepted because Mr. Keith was known to associate with Confederate agents. This would seem to have been a very big mistake on the part of the confederate agents sending the letter to a known collaborator even though the letter was coded. When intercepted, this letter was sent to Washington to have the North’s most famous code breakers take a look at it. Those code breakers, three men known as the “Sacred Three” included Charles Tinker, Albert Chandler and David Bates.
The “Scared Three”, called this because except for his cabinet and private secretaries no one was closer to President Lincoln than these three men, determined that the letter contained coded information using what is now known as the “Rosicrucian Cipher”. This was a cipher that took on the appearance of a tic-tac-toe board and allowed the shapes and lines of the board along with dots to be used to designate the letters in the cipher. If you have ever read the book “The KGC, An Authentic Exposition” you will see a code written out in line form that appears to have been partially derived from the Rosicrucian Cipher. I have posted a photo of the code from this book at the top of this article. Now, back to the Sacred Three. About the time the three men broke the cipher a second coded letter arrived using the same cipher.
By breaking the Rosicrucian Cipher the Sacred Three determined that confederate agents were using a company in New York City to build printing presses and engraving plates for the sole purpose of printing money for the Confederate states. It seems the confederates didn’t have the technological know how to make their own presses and engraved plates. These presses and plates, along with several million dollars of already printed confederate money were scheduled to be shipped to the south in January of 1864 but because the code was broken, a raid was conducted on “Hilton’s Engraving Shop” in Manhattan, NY. The money, presses and engraved plates were all seized on December 31st 1863.
You are probably wondering how this could cause the downfall of the south. Well, the South was already fairly poor and they were unable to print their own money in sufficient quantities and needed those presses, not to mention the money that had already been printed. Once the North had the presses they stopped the South from being able to print large quantities of money and at the same time the North had their own spies use these presses to print their own counterfeit Confederate currency and flooded the market, so to speak. This put a tremendous drain on the already poor South. To add insult to injury, the money printed from the seized presses and plates was considered to be superior in quality to the currency actually printed by the South. That had to be embarrassing!
It’s all about the money!
I'm sure some of you will jump onto the conspiracy wagon and say this proves that the KGC was connected to the Freemasons and even the Knights Templar because both groups were said to have used a version of the Rosicrucian Cipher. I would say that maybe the Confederacy was too lazy or not smart enough to come up with their own cipher or code. Some of you will probably ask if I have proof that the Confederate agents in charge of the money debacle were actually part of the KGC? Nope, but not having proof of something doesn’t seem to bother the believers in the KGC mega-bucks so I’m going to say it’s possible one or more of them may have been members of the KGC since the KGC was supposed to be in charge of the spying for the south. Someone else can do the fine detail researching on this one if you're really interested.
No comments:
Post a Comment