uch societies all organized on a
military plan and with a great pretense of arming their members. This,
however, had to be done surreptitiously. Boxes of rifles purchased
in the East were shipped West labeled "Sunday-school books," and
negotiations were even undertaken with the Confederacy to bring in arms
by way of Canada. At a meeting of the supreme council of the Sons of
Liberty, in New York, February 22, 1864, it was claimed that the order
had nearly a million members, though the Government secret service
considered half a million a more exact estimate.

As events subsequently proved, the societies were not as formidable as
these figures would imply. Most of the men who joined them seem to have
been fanciful creatures who loved secrecy for its own sake. 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. The scheme was
known to the Confederates, allusions to it are to be found in Southern
newspapers, and even the Confederate military authorities considered it.
Early in 1863, General Beauregard thought the Confederates might "get
into Ohio and call upon the friends of Vallandigham to rise for his
defense and support; then...call upon the whole