Rogue History

- In the years before the Civil War, terror often gripped white Americans in the South.

More than anything, they feared an uprising of the people they held in bondage.

The Knights of Liberty, a top secret all-Black militant organization, prepared to justify their fears by launching the largest enslaved rebellion in American history.

But before they could revolt, secret orders called them off.

I'm Joel Cook, and this is Rogue History.

[dramatic music] It all began in August of 1846 when a traveling barber named Moses Dickson convened a secret meeting in St. Louis, Missouri, to, as he would put it, "Prepare for business."

His plan called for the infiltration of the Southern states to recruit and train men who were courageous, patient, temperate, and possessed of sound common sense.

Recruits were required to take an oath of secrecy until death.

After 10 years of training, these Knights of Liberty would launch a war on slavery.

The participants in the St. Louis meeting, made up of Dickson and 11 trusted friends, would come to be known as the Order of Twelve.

These 12 men spread out across the South to establish the Knights of Liberty, but even as they chipped away at this 10-year plan, they made an immediate impact on the Underground Railroad.

In a 1901 Denver Post interview, Dickson stated that the Knights operated a network capable of moving freedom seekers all across the United States.

Disguise was often part of their success.

In one case, Dickson rescued a mother and daughter from Louisiana by coordinating tailors and barbers to disguise them as sailors.

A fellow Knight of Liberty snuck them onto a steamboat as part of the crew and they successfully made their way to freedom in Canada.

In the same interview, Dickson said that the Knights of Liberty had an unbreakable telegraph code that remains hidden to this day, but we do have evidence of coded language from other underground resistance groups who operated during the same time period.

The African Mysteries, a group based in Detroit, Michigan, communicated with freedom seekers through what we would know today as call signs.

One nonverbal signal required a person to touch the knuckle of their right index finger to the knuckle of their left.

The other person would respond by reversing the signal left to right to confirm that they were also part of the organization.

But while groups like the African Mysteries were focused on escaping from the South, the Knights of Liberty wanted to seize land for Black people in the South.

The plan was to attack Atlanta and form a stronghold of Black resistance.

Moses Dickson's plans for a separatist state were rooted in life experience.

His parents were born into slavery, and as a boy, he survived race rides in Cincinnati, intended to drive Black people out of the city.

He learned that Black liberation was needed by any means necessary and would come to know exactly what that meant when he lived through Nat Turner's rebellion.

On August 21st, 1831, Turner and at least 40 compatriots launched a bid to end slavery by attacking several plantations in Southampton County, Virginia.

While it was never truly clear what Turner's plan was, the rebels executed 55 people before being stopped by state and federal militias.

Black people suffered the consequences of rebellion, with hundreds being beaten and murdered across the South.

Slave patrols formed by state and local militias began an early version of stop-and-frisk policing, and laws known as slave codes prevented enslaved people from gathering in large numbers, traveling without permission, or testifying in court.

None of this was lost on the Knights of Liberty as they prepared for their own revolution.

In discussing the secrecy needed for them to succeed, Moses Dickson wrote, "We know of the failure of Nat Turner and others."

Previous rebellion leaders struggled with stealth and planned for just weeks or months without building a real infrastructure to support their operations.

Dickson gambled that army with 10 years of training gave them a real chance.

Now, they just needed funding.

To raise money for a secret plan, Dickson appealed to sympathetic abolitionists in the North and the South.

They willingly donated thousands to Dickson's underground railroad work, unaware that they were funding a revolution.

By 1856, they had everything they needed to launch their war against slavery, but when the time finally came, they didn't strike.

As Moses Dickson surveyed the landscape, it became clear to him that a civil war was coming, whether the Knights initiated it or not.

Not far from his home in St. Louis, anti-slavery and pro-slavery guerrillas were already fighting a civil war along the Missouri-Kansas border.

Dickson recognized that a larger movement was forming and decided to wait.

But not everyone accepted the order to call off the rebellion.

From Texas to Louisiana, and eventually all the way to Maryland, uprisings and rumors of uprisings struck terror among the slave holders in the fall of 1856, but Dickson was vindicated when Confederate forces officially started the US Civil War in 1861.

Almost immediately after the start of the conflict, Black Americans began providing intelligence to the Union Army about the Confederates.

Coded broadly as Black dispatches, this information could come in the form of debriefs from the people who escaped the Confederacy, or from missions specifically orchestrated by the Union Intelligence Office, but Black people weren't officially allowed to join the Union Army until 1863, so who was the intelligence office working with?

Because the Knights of Liberty maintained strict secrecy, there are no documents confirming their participation in the early years of the war, but there are lots of coincidences.

Take the Loyal League, for example.

This all-Black spying organization was formed at an Ohio convention in 1851, not far from Dickson's hometown.

When the Civil War began, this league of Black spies hit the ground running because they already had a strong communications network operating all over the South.

Sounds awfully familiar, doesn't it?

Though the arm rebellion didn't play out the way they planned, the Knight's work was not in vain.

The network Moses Dickson built remained intact after the war, transitioning into a mutual benefit society, known as the International Order of Twelve of Knights and Daughters of Tabor.

Dickson played a major role in organizing schools for Black Americans in St. Louis and served as a founding member of what is now Lincoln University of Missouri, one of the oldest historically Black universities in the nation.

After his death in 1901, his legacy continued on through the Taborian Hospital in Mound Bayou, one of the first hospitals in the country with an all-Black staff.

Whether through clandestine means, like those used on the Underground Railroad, or the violent insurrections that move the United States closer to a reckoning with slavery, there has been a continuous through line of Black agency and organizing from this country's founding through the present day.

We'll never know what would've happened if Moses Dickson and the Knights of Liberty had launched their own war on slavery in 1856, but what their plans do tell us is that the narrative that Lincoln and the Union Army freed the enslaved doesn't even begin to tell the entire true story of African American emancipation.

[upbeat banjo music]