While real men, North and South, were
laying down their lives for their principles, these make-believe
men were holding bombastic initiations and taking oaths such as
this from the ritual of the American Knights: "I do further
solemnly promise and swear, that I will ever cherish the sublime
lessons which the sacred emblems of our order suggest, and will,
so far as in me lies, impart those lessons to the people of the
earth, where the mystic acorn falls from its parent bough, in
whose visible firmament Orion, Arcturus, and the Pleiades ride in
their cold resplendent glories, and where the Southern Cross
dazzles the eye of degraded humanity with its coruscations of
golden light, fit emblem of Truth, while it invites our sacred
order to consecrate her temples in the four corners of the earth,
where moral darkness reigns and despotism holds sway.... Divine
essence, so help me that I fail not in my troth, lest I shall be
summoned before the tribunal of the order, adjudged and condemned
to certain and shameful death, while my name shall be recorded on
the rolls of infamy. Amen."
The secret orders fought hard to prevent the Lincoln victory in
the elections of 1863. Even before that time their leaders had
talked mysteriously of another disruption of the Union and the
formation of a Northwestern Confederacy in alliance with the
South.
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