I should have known better, but then, I was a writer of novels researching the topic of my next one. If I'd had any sense at all, I'd have stayed in Chicago and done my research in a library. If I'd done that, I wouldn't have been on my hands and knees and following the woman in front of me as we crawled our way through a coffee plantation just outside of Sao Paulo, Brazil.
The woman stopped at the edge of the field, raised up until her eyes were just above the coffee bushes, and put her finger to her lips. She watched and listened for almost a minute, then whispered, "I don't see or hear them, so I think they've stopped chasing us. We need to leave here though, and you must leave Sao Paulo as soon as you can. If you stay, they will find you, and when they find you, you won't like what they do. I've seen this before. These people do not want outsiders asking questions about anything."
What had started out as my fifth novel since I got out of the US Army following my tour in Iraq had ended up as a run for my life. That night in my hotel in Sao Paulo, I was hoping I'd live long enough to write that novel.
My novel was supposed to be the story of the last days of the Confederacy at the end of the American Civil War. My main character was a young seaman in training on the steamer "Patrick Henry" commanded by Captain William H. Parker, Confederate States Navy. The Patrick Henry was moored in Richmond, Virginia, the capital of the Confederacy. My seaman was to participate in the destruction of the Patrick Henry to prevent it from falling into Union hands and then set out for his hometown of Charleston, South Carolina.
The novel was to be about his adventures and the ways he avoided the Union Army that was then swarming over the defeated South. He would arrive in Charleston to find his family all dead, but a girl of his acquaintance still alive. The end of the novel would be his rise to fortune via hard work and the support of that same girl who he married.
I picked the name of the ship based upon it being a training ship because that was necessary for my plot. On such a training ship, the midshipmen would all be young and relatively naïve. My character would be different, having been raised on a farm near Charleston and therefore more self-reliant than his shipmates raised in the city. I needed a character with practical skills as well as the skills taught in the military.
It was in doing further research into the Patrick Henry's roll in the Civil War that I stumbled upon an interesting fact. That fact had nothing to do with my character, but rather with the Patrick Henry's captain.
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On April 2, 1865, Captain Parker was ordered to report to the rail yard in Charleston with his current crew. He received no explanation for this order, but being a military man he complied. Also being a man with a few connections in the Confederate States Navy in Richmond, he inquired as to the nature of his new assignment. He was somewhat shocked to learn that he and his crew were to be placed in charge of the Treasury of the Confederacy in order to convey it to a place where it might be secured.
In his own account of the journey, Captain Parker stated the route he took, sometimes by train, and sometimes by wagon, from Richmond to Augusta, Georgia and then back to Abbeyville, South Carolina. He also related the amount of the treasury, that being approximately half a million dollars in gold and silver coinage.
In addition to this sum, he was to convey the assets of the Bank of Richmond which amounted to four hundred and fifty thousand dollars in coinage and bullion, and fifty kegs of Mexican silver worth four thousand dollars a keg. There was also a chest of jewelry donated to the Confederate cause by women of the Confederate States. The value of this chest was estimated at forty thousand dollars. The total of all entrusted to Captain Parker was a little over one million dollars.
As I read through Captain Parker's account of the journey and final disposition of the treasury, I was struck by two facts and one mystery.
I found it odd that neither the Secretary of the Treasury was present when Captain Parker took charge of the Treasury. Apparently that task had been delegated to a junior officer who Captain Parker did not know or name.
It was also odd that while Captain Parker did witness the loading of the boxes of coins and bullion, the kegs of Mexican silver, and the box of jewelry onto railroad cars, he never actually saw the contents.
The mystery was that at the end of the journey, Captain Parker's arrival in Abbeyville, South Carolina, not all the contents of the treasury could be accounted for. He made reference to a hundred thousand dollars in coins being paid to the Confederate Calvary and another forty thousand given to two naval officers. The forty thousand dollars was to be taken to England and placed in deposit in order that the Confederacy would have finances when it was resurrected, probably in the western territories and states of the US.
Other than those two amounts, to Captain Parker's knowledge the Treasury was intact. If these amounts were accurate, the Treasury of the Confederacy should have contained over eight hundred thousand dollars in coins, bullion, and Mexican Silver plus the jewelry.
Captain Parker wrote that the box of jewelry was left with a woman near Abbeyville who buried it in her garden. Some days later, soldiers visited the woman to retrieve the box, though Captain Parker was not certain they were indeed Confederate soldiers.
In Abbeyville, Captain Parker turned over the boxes and kegs to General Basil Duke, but there was no formal transfer documented. It appeared to me as if Captain Parker just said, "Good luck, General" and then made his way home. I would have expected both men would have insisted upon some documentation of the transfer, but perhaps the threat of the Union capturing them both was their motivation for the quick transfer of responsibilities.
I was intrigued by this story of Confederate gold and silver, and spent some time doing further research. I had no interest in searching for the actual treasure, but I was contemplating changing my plot to include my character in the journey of the Confederate Treasury.
Further research revealed a more complete accounting of the money, but still left some loose ends that were even more intriguing.
In various accounts of the time and also by later historians, the bulk of the actual Confederate Treasury was simply spent in paying soldiers and redeeming Confederate bank notes. Some was also used to pay for accommodations and rations for President Davis and his family.
The forty thousand dollars of which Captain Parker spoke was determined to actually be eighty-six thousand dollars and was consigned to three men, with a man named James Semple in charge. It is generally agreed that at the final collapse of the Confederacy, this money was split by the three men entrusted with its transportation to England, and was used by two of them to establish businesses after the war. James Semple used his share in an attempt to start a war with England. He thought that would end the current war because the North would need the men and resources of the South and would leave the South as slave states.
At the end, just before the capture of President Davis and his cabinet, only twenty five thousand dollars remained of the Confederate Treasury proper. This seemed very odd to me. It was possible the money was indeed used to pay soldiers, but one would think both Captain Parker and General Duke would have documented those transactions in order to avoid accusations that one or both of them had stolen the money.
On May 24, 1865 the remaining boxes of coins and bullion were seized in Danburg, Georgia by Union troops. The accounting of the money seized was only of the assets of the Bank of Richmond. Those assets had not been touched and remained the original four hundred and fifty thousand dollars. This sum was confiscated by the Union, loaded into wagons, and started North. After one day though, the wagon train was attacked during the night by unknown assailants and about a quarter million dollars in coinage was carried off. Of this, some was recovered, but a hundred and seventy nine thousand dollars was still missing.
The Mexican silver also has a mysterious story. At the start of the journey from Richmond, the fifty kegs were taken off the train to an unknown location. Only ten were returned to the train before its departure the next day. It is assumed that one keg, four thousand dollars, was used to pay Confederate Soldiers. The other thirty-nine kegs, a sum of a hundred and fifty six thousand dollars, were never recovered.
The end result of all this reading left me with a question. What happened to the money? After doing some reading about the value of that money in today's economy, I discovered if found today it would be worth a little over thirty four million dollars.
Some possible explanations had been offered by several historians.
One explanation was that President Davis simply divided what was left of the Treasury between the members of his cabinet as payment for their service to the Confederacy and sent them on their way. I had serious doubts about this. Though several of the Confederate cabinet members did indeed become successful businessmen after the war and this success has been attributed to the funds supposedly distributed by Davis, most were successful businessmen with foreign bank accounts before the war, so they had funds already available.
The other strange thing was that Davis apparently reserved none of the funds for himself and his family. When he was captured, he had less than a hundred dollars to his name. Upon discharge from prison, he faced continual financial difficulties for most of his remaining life.
One explanation that made logical sense to me was a secret organization called "The Knights of the Golden Circle". This organization was made up of wealthy businessmen from the South. The original charter of the KGC was to colonize northern Mexico and the West Indies and make these areas US states so that slave states would be more powerful in the US House and Senate than the free states. This would effectively crush any attempts to outlaw slavery in the US. Obviously this didn't happen.
When the South was defeated, it wasn't logical that the KGC would simply accept the defeat. The original members were wealthy businessmen who had achieved that wealth through the use of slave labor. They would instead have been planning ways to again split the Union into free states and slave states, and doing so would have required funding.
It seemed at least plausible to me that the KGC could have taken the money given the circumstances surrounding the movement of the Confederate Treasury during those final days of the war.
