Original subtitles

WILLIAM SHATNER: Supernatural beings

haunting blood-stained battlefields.

Mysterious spies infiltrating the inner sanctum of power.

And treasure hunters seeking a legendary fortune

in gold.

From 1861 to 1865,

the United States of America found itself

in a deadly conflict--

a four-year struggle that forged heroes, freed millions,

and would forever be known as the Civil War.

While history often focuses on the polarizing politics

and the bloody battles of this tumultuous era,

there are also many fascinating and shocking stories

to be found of the people and places that played a role

in the War Between the States.

From rumors of lost treasure

and haunted battlefields,

to mysterious premonitions and secret societies,

could these intriguing tales shed new light

on America's darkest days?

Well, that is what we'll try and find out.

♪ ♪

This historic landmark was built in 1829

to protect Charleston Harbor against naval attacks.

Every year, hundreds of thousands of people visit

this old sea fort to walk in the footsteps

of some truly remarkable American history.

Because on April 12, 1861,

it was here that the first shots were fired

during the American Civil War.

The Civil War is perhaps the most important thing

that ever happened in the history of this country.

It's often referred to as "The Brothers' War,"

not just because you had Americans from the South

fighting Americans from the North,

but within families, there was division.

You had sons growing up

in the same household with the same parents,

and one takes the side of the North,

and the other takes the side of the South.

There were between two and three million men who were serving.

The expectation was

that it would only be for a few months.

-(gunfire) -But the war actually lasted

from April of 1861

to April 1865.

MARTIN K.A. MORGAN: During the conflict,

the Confederate States of America

attempted to dominate the United States military

on the field of battle.

By the time that the war ends in 1865,

over 600,000 Americans have lost their lives

as a result of combat during the American Civil War.

That is a total number that is greater

than any other conflict we have ever fought.

So, more Americans die fighting the American Civil War

than die fighting the Second World War.

We should be comforted by the idea

that we're so far away from this conflict

and that nothing to equal the terror

of the American Civil War has happened

to the American people since.

SHATNER: The Civil War saw over 10,000 battles

and military engagements fought in 19 states,

between the Union army of the North

and the Confederate Army of the South.

And today, the most visited

of these former battlegrounds is in rural Pennsylvania

at the site of the conflict's bloodiest battle.

(soldiers yelling)

SHATNER: 1863.

For the first three days of July,

intense fighting

would leave 51,000 Americans wounded,

captured, missing or killed

at the Battle of Gettysburg.

The battlefield here at Gettysburg

looks very much like it did in 1863.

Here we are on the face of Little Round Top.

This was a scene of mass confusion.

The ridge in the distance is Seminary Ridge.

The attacking Confederates came across these rocks.

This was bloody, hand-to-hand fighting,

Confederates coming up the cliff.

It was just an amazing scene of bullets,

cannonballs, exploding shells.

The horror here was astounding.

My great-great grandfather was in the extreme right flank

of the Confederate attack here,

and he had served through the war.

The fact that I have stood here where my ancestors fought

and seen the battle in my mind's eye--

that was undescribable to me.

It's really a part of who I am spiritually.

SHATNER: Gettysburg is not only a place

of spiritual reflection, but for many,

it's also a place filled with restless spirits.

Many have wondered, is Gettysburg haunted

by the tens of thousands of soldiers that died here?

ALLISON: This is definitely not only hallowed ground,

but haunted ground.

People actually see spectral soldiers.

-(weapons firing) -They hear musket fire.

They hear phantom artillery fire to this day.

There are so many accounts by so many people

of their experiences here,

that it simply cannot be discounted.

I was a park ranger at Gettysburg

for six years in the '70s.

Having studied this for 40, 50 years,

I would have to say, without a doubt,

Gettysburg is one of the most haunted places

probably in the world.

What happened in Gettysburg stayed in Gettysburg.

The ghosts of the soldiers who died-- they're here.

And most everybody feels it in one way or another.

SHATNER: According to Mark Nesbitt,

the highest concentration of otherworldly reports come

from an area on the battlefield that is called "Devil's Den."

NESBITT: Right now, we're in Devil's Den,

one of the more recognizable places

on the battlefield of Gettysburg.

The fighting here gradually grew

into some of the most savage fighting

of the battle, and hence, of the American Civil War.

From 4:00 p.m. on July 2

to 4:00 p.m. on July 3, 1863,

at Gettysburg was the bloodiest 24 hours

in American history.

These granite boulders formed tunnels and passageways

through these great rocks in Devil's Den.

Soldiers had to fight through these.

This area is very much like a maze.

There are great cracks in these boulders.

Wounded men fell into them,

and then, after the battle, when the burials were going on,

there's no place to dig a grave,

so, sadly, a number of these men were just tossed

into these crevices between the giant rocks.

And so it's no surprise

that this is one of the most haunted spots in America.

(wind whistling)

Perhaps the most frightening story I ever heard

about Gettysburg took place here in Devil's Den.

Two women were up on these rocks.

And they were hopping across one of these cracks.

And one woman stepped over, and all of a sudden,

her leg got caught.

And she looked down, and there was a hand

that had come up and grabbed her leg.

And she screamed and pulled away.

And when they went over to look down in the crevice,

no one was there.

SHATNER: Why is there such a high concentration

of haunting reports at Devil's Den?

Some believe it could trace back

to the most chilling photograph ever taken at Gettysburg.

JEFF BELANGER: The Home of the Rebel Sharpshooter photograph

was taken at Devil's Den.

It's one of the most famous photos

from the whole of the Civil War.

You see this dead body, and you see a rifle.

And it is a powerful, powerful photo.

It's also staged.

The photographer, Alexander Gardner,

moved the body, he had positioned the head,

so the face was a little bit more toward the camera,

he had set the rifle in a certain place,

because he was trying to tell a story.

That fallen sharpshooter haunts Gettysburg.

I can't recall any other time

when, um, soldiers were... were actually posed.

Here's a young man, obviously young, killed.

They're desecrating his memory.

So, if there is a perturbed spirit

at Devil's Den,

no doubt it's this young man

who was dragged back and forth and posed

just to make a photographer some money.

SHATNER: Could the desecration of this unidentified soldier

be connected to paranormal activity reported in Gettysburg?

It's an intriguing thought.

But there are other Civil War mysteries

that may be much easier to unravel,

like the legends of lost gold just waiting to be found.

SHATNER: Treasure hunter Brian Cerniglia

scours farms, fields

and former battlegrounds of the American Civil War

searching for lost pieces

of 19th-century history.

Here we have a six-pound cannonball.

SHATNER: Brian and others have managed

to find all kinds of historic Civil War artifacts,

from simple buttons and buckles

to objects of remarkable value.

I've been hunting for Civil War relics almost my entire life.

The passion for history and the search

for the unknown constantly drives me

to pick up a metal detector and get out and explore.

We stumble across quite a bit of relics

from the Civil War era.

Of course, the favorite of everybody is the coins.

So, here's just a small example

of all the different types of coins that can be found

when you're out treasure-hunting for Civil War relics.

And this coin is actually made out of silver.

Large coins like this were how the soldiers got paid.

This could have been in the pocket

of a Civil War soldier.

SHATNER: The prospect of finding a stash

of Civil War coins is every treasure hunter's dream,

but just how much silver and gold might still be out there,

waiting to be found?

There are real mysteries of Civil War treasure,

because we know quite a lot

of gold and silver was used during the war.

Quite a lot of payrolls were going out during the Civil War.

And a lot of it went missing.

-(men shouting) -A great example of that

at the end of the Civil War

is when it's clear that the Union is coming to Richmond.

It was really the end for the South.

The Confederate government leaves Richmond,

and they call it "evacuation day."

Confederate President Jefferson Davis left Richmond

with a train that had the entirety

of what was remaining of the Confederate Treasury,

millions in gold and silver.

And six weeks later, when he's captured,

he's got essentially a few dollars in his pocket,

and in between, we don't know what happened to all that money.

And that's not the only case

during the entire American Civil War

where large dollar amounts went missing.

And we don't know where that money went.

SHATNER: The tales of missing fortunes

have motivated many history sleuths

to try and piece clues together to find lost loot.

One of the most sought-after hidden fortunes is said

to have belonged to a Confederate colonel

named John Singleton Mosby, also known as "The Gray Ghost."

GEIGER: John Singleton Mosby

is a really interesting character in the war.

He's with the 43rd Virginia Cavalry,

but his unit, which comes to be called "Mosby's Rangers,"

their specialty was to just pop up, you know, ten miles

behind the lines where no one was expecting it.

They'd grab sentries, or they would steal things.

And so he almost becomes like a boogeyman.

DENNIS E. FRYE: John Mosby-- he was known

as "the Gray Ghost," because the ghost would appear,

and the ghost would vanish.

He would strike railroad lines

that were carrying supplies to the army.

He would attack messengers and couriers

so that communication would be broken up.

And then, if they needed to hide,

Mosby's men would disappear

in that part of Virginia, to the Blue Ridge Mountains.

Once you were in the mountain, the enemy was not going

to follow you there.

SHATNER: Mosby was also rumored

to have cleverly made a stash

of gold, silver and jewels disappear

from a federal building in Fairfax, Virginia.

It is said that on March 9, 1863,

the Gray Ghost snuck behind enemy lines

and robbed the Fairfax Courthouse,

making off with a fortune that, if found today,

would be worth six million dollars.

FRYE: Mosby's men go right to Fairfax Courthouse.

Mosby sends parties out to capture horses

and officers associated with the Union army.

But then he discovers something.

$350,000 dollars' worth of loot there,

stored in Fairfax County at the courthouse.

So, the story goes, he decides to bury it.

And so, in the darkness, somewhere in Virginia

between Fairfax Courthouse and Centreville,

there Mosby buries the loot.

CHUCK MAURO: Mosby found $350,000 dollars' worth of gold,

silver and family heirlooms

that had been taken by the Union soldiers

from Southern homes.

And as they left, the legend states

that Mosby buried the gold and silver

between two pine trees that he marked with an "X"

with his knife.

And only he and his sergeant knew the location.

GEIGER: Mosby's treasure was never recovered,

but there is a story that, on his deathbed,

he said something to the effect of,

"There's a fortune in the hills of Virginia,"

to suggest that maybe it had been left behind.

So people ever since

have been looking for trees with Xs carved in them,

trying to find Mosby's treasure.

SHATNER: Could the Gray Ghost's fabled lost treasure

really be hiding in a Virginia forest?

While it could be easy to dismiss the story as pure myth,

remarkably, a very real Civil War treasure

has recently been discovered.

MORGAN: In the summer of 2023, on his property,

a farmer in Kentucky

made a pretty interesting discovery.

This man looks down in the dirt

of the recently plowed field and sees some gold coins.

By the time he's done rooting around

in the recently plowed field,

he's pulled out over 800 coins,

over 700 of which are gold.

These coins are all minted

in the years before the Civil War

and during the Civil War, up until 1863.

And here we are in 2023,

and a man has just found this mother lode of coins

that date to the era of the Civil War.

It's a significant find.

SHATNER: The massive cache of riches

is estimated to be worth more than two million dollars,

and is a priceless incentive to relic hunters

to continue their search for treasures of the Civil War.

Growing up and exploring Virginia,

I find myself retracing the paths,

the steps those soldiers would have taken,

searching for any trinkets or treasures

they may have dropped along the way.

I was out detecting one day and stumbled upon

this small pocketknife, which doesn't look like much,

but given the context and the story of General Mosby

marking the treasure with his knife,

I thought to myself, "Maybe, just maybe,

this could be the knife."

Unfortunately, the knife was all that was there,

but it gives me the thought that possibly, maybe,

treasure could be buried nearby.

There is always the possibility

that John Mosby's treasure is still out there,

and that I could be the one to find it.

Will the Gray Ghost's treasure ever be found?

(inhales)

I guess it depends on whether anyone can locate

those two pine trees, if even they're still standing.

But sometimes the most intriguing secrets

are hiding in plain sight.

For instance, there's the story

of a prominent Southern socialite

who controlled a spy ring

inside the headquarters

of the Confederate States of America.

SHATNER: Evidence of this Southern city's strategic importance

during the Civil War can still be found.

There is the Tredegar Iron Works,

where over half the cannons

used by the Southern states were made;

the Chimborazo Hospital,

which treated over 76,000 injured soldiers;

and the White House of the Confederacy,

the South's base of operations.

In 1861, Richmond becomes the capital of the Confederacy,

and then basically, all the government

is gonna flood to it

and massively increase the population.

So, Richmond becomes the center of Confederate legislation,

but also the center of moving food and weapons

and war materials to all the theaters of war.

It will have Confederate government departments,

so a war department, a navy department,

all the stuff that comes with trying to run a government

is grafted onto Richmond.

SHATNER: In addition to President Jefferson Davis,

other key figures

like Vice President Alexander Stephens

and General Robert E. Lee,

the supreme commander of the Confederate Army,

all made Richmond their home.

As local residents of status and wealth

began to socialize with the men

who were tasked with saving the South,

an unlikely spy was secretly plotting to defeat them.

Her name was Elizabeth Van Lew.

HALL: Elizabeth Van Lew was from a wealthy family.

She was born and raised in Richmond, Virginia.

Throughout the 1840s and 1850s,

she's vocally advocating for abolition of slavery,

which is a fairly dangerous thing to do

in Richmond, Virginia, of the 1840s and 1850s.

When war came, Elizabeth Van Lew ended up

leading an espionage network

to collect military information--

information that would be of value--

and transmit it successfully to the United States Army.

So, the Van Lew spy ring is the story of

the most successful spy network of the Civil War.

MORGAN: The consequences for spying were severe.

You could be sentenced to death if you were found

to be guilty of spying in Richmond.

But she helped to get information out

about the Confederate government and the Confederate military

at a time when the U.S. really needed

valuable, actionable intelligence.

So it says a lot about the people

who were willing to do this

because they were willing to gamble with their lives.

SHATNER: With the ever-present threat

of being caught and punished by death,

how did an established Southern belle

become the most successful spymaster of the Civil War?

Well, some believe it was because she employed

secret agents that could easily hide in plain sight

among Richmond's Confederate leadership.

Van Lew recruited African Americans as spies.

Van Lew understood Southern culture

because she was a part of it.

She understood how they thought, how they viewed Black people.

And so, she understood

that if she sent Black people out to spy,

that they could be very successful,

because no one would ever expect

that they had the intelligence or the courage

to carry any of her plans out.

And she realized that if she was going to be successful,

if she was going to aid the Union,

she would have to use Black people

to help her in that endeavor.

And she brought them into this whole thing.

But we're still trying to find out

the extent to which African Americans were involved

in intelligence gathering during the Civil War.

We can't always put a name to these people,

because their operations were clandestine.

SHATNER: The identities of Elizabeth Van Lew's spies

remain largely a mystery.

But remarkably, there is evidence to suggest

that she was able to place an African American spy

inside the most important Confederate residence

in all of Richmond,

the home of the Confederate president himself,

Jefferson Davis.

In 1911,

Harper's Monthly Magazine published a story,

and that story detailed that Elizabeth Van Lew

had been a spy in Richmond during the Civil War

on behalf of the United States.

And it said that an African American woman

had been placed in the home of Jefferson Davis as a spy.

It named that woman as Mary Elizabeth Bowser.

And that story from 1911 has been kind of repeated

and re-repeated and embellished for a hundred-plus years.

The person that we certainly celebrate more than anyone else

is Mary Elizabeth Bowser.

She was a young woman who grew up

in the Van Lew household.

Historians have grappled in recent years

with her true identity, because she used

a variety of aliases during her life.

And it makes sense,

because if she's engaging in espionage,

she doesn't want anyone to know her true identity.

So, it's been very difficult, as a consequence,

for historians to really trace her life.

Historians would love to know

if she was actually in the Confederate White House,

and what she actually discovered while there

and how that might have impacted the war,

but we just don't have that information.

SHATNER: Did an African American spy named Mary Elizabeth Bowser

really infiltrate the Confederate White House?

While the mystery lives on,

we do know that Elizabeth Van Lew's spy ring

proved hugely successful.

In fact, her clandestine operations

even garnered praise

from the commander of the Union army,

General Ulysses S. Grant.

HALL: Ulysses Grant said about Elizabeth Van Lew,

"You provided me with the most valuable information

I received from Richmond during the war."

That's pretty high praise.

Similarly, George Sharpe, head of military intelligence,

said that Elizabeth Van Lew was all that was left

of the power of the U.S. government in Richmond.

So, the people that are most positioned

to say whether or not this was valuable

unequivocally said how valuable the Richmond spy network was.

The courage shown by Elizabeth Van Lew

and the African Americans

who participated in the Richmond spy ring

must have outweighed the fear

they felt conducting such a dangerous mission.

But there's another mystery

that's frightening for a very different reason.

It involves a grotesque monster said to roam

one of the Civil War's bloodiest battlefields.

SHATNER: Overlooking the winding Tennessee River,

this picturesque site spans 9,000 acres

across the border of Tennessee and Georgia.

In 1863, this was the site of the second bloodiest battle

of the Civil War after Gettysburg.

It's the Battle of Chickamauga.

BELANGER: The Battle of Chickamauga took place in Tennessee

a few months after the Battle of Gettysburg.

And the carnage was awful.

Confederate General John Gordon

would write in his book about the battle

that he had heard that the word "Chickamauga"

translates to "river of blood."

He got the translation wrong,

but he got the spirit of it right.

It was the river of death.

SHATNER: More than 100,000 soldiers

met at the Battle of Chickamauga,

and 34,000 were either killed or injured.

In addition to this river of death,

according to local legend,

soldiers on the Chickamauga battlefield

saw an even more disturbing sight,

a terrifying creature picking through the corpses

that has come to be known as Old Green Eyes.

RUSSELL: Old Green Eyes

is a very difficult story to pinpoint

because there are so many variations of the legend.

One of the prevailing theories is that he is possibly a demon

that has come to feed on that negativity.

And so, in Chickamauga, with such a large loss of life

that was protracted over several days,

that may have attracted the interest

of something that's malevolent.

Old Green Eyes has been described as a predatory cat.

He's been described as a small goblin-like creature.

He's also been described as a soldier

who possibly lost his head to a cannonball

during the battle...

...and he is out searching for it.

The one thing that's consistent is they always described him

as having glowing green eyes.

NESBITT: The legend is that soldiers

would see this indistinct shape out in front of them.

As it got closer, they would see

these piercing green eyes staring at them.

But of course, we're not 100% sure

about any of this.

Is Old Green Eyes a real thing?

Is this a hallucination?

That I don't know. That's-that's the mystery.

But we do know that the savagery was real

and it was an awful thing to witness.

The men, they didn't have a term

called post-traumatic stress syndrome,

but no doubt, they all went home with it.

SHATNER: Is the legend of Old Green Eyes

based on a real flesh-and-blood monster,

or is it a story meant to describe the madness of war?

Clues might be found in Indigenous folklore

that is surprisingly similar

to the stories of the horrific creature.

In Native American lore, there are several places

where there are mounds that they believe are protected

by entities and spirits,

much like what Old Green Eyes would be described as.

In the middle of the Chickamauga battlefield

stands Snodgrass Hill,

and it's about 900 foot tall at elevation.

It is possible that that mound had some spiritual significance

to Native Americans who lived in that area,

because during the battle,

it was where Green Eyes is seen the most.

Strange stories of creatures, monsters and ghosts

have been around for millennia,

and they cross all cultures.

So it's quite possible that Native Americans

had some belief in something in this region,

and that after the battle,

they sort of got mixed and merged together.

We're trying to put a name on something we don't understand.

SHATNER: While it's hard to pinpoint the true origin of this legend,

and it's easy to dismiss the idea of a monster

with glowing green eyes,

to this day, locals claim they've seen the beast.

One of the earlier ones that I researched

was about a young man who was on his way to pick up a date.

He lived in Tennessee and he was driving down

into Georgia to pick her up.

And on the way through, it was a foggy night.

And in the distance, he noticed an oncoming car

had green headlights.

And as he got closer,

he noticed that they weren't headlights at all,

but glowing green eyes,

and they appeared to be running towards him.

This, of course, startles him,

and he wrecks his car off to the side of the road.

It's a very strange occurrence. Very odd.

BELANGER: Every legend is real to some extent.

So if people are seeing things and then giving it that label,

like Old Green Eyes, that was real to them.

A story can't endure and stick around

if it's not getting reinforced by other people

having an experience.

So, in that regard, yeah, it's absolutely real.

Did the terrible carnage on the Chickamauga battlefield

attract the attention of a bloodthirsty monster?

Or was the legend of Old Green Eyes

created to try to make sense of the horrors of war?

Whatever the case, there's another

chilling Civil War mystery,

one of deadly premonitions, not from a battlefield

but from the mind of Abraham Lincoln himself.

SHATNER: In the oval-shaped parlor known as the Red Room,

where America's first ladies traditionally held receptions

for visiting dignitaries,

President Abraham Lincoln's wife Mary Todd Lincoln

welcomes guests for an unusual event.

The group is holding a séance

to contact the Lincolns' dead son.

In February 1862, the Lincolns lost

their favorite son, Willie Lincoln,

and that was a very dark time for the Lincoln family.

And Abraham and Mary Lincoln

fell into an extraordinarily deep grief.

They had lost another son earlier in their lives,

but this one really hit hard.

BELANGER: During the Lincoln presidency,

Mary Todd Lincoln was holding séances in the White House.

She was so distraught,

so she would bring in mediums

to try to communicate with his spirit.

And we know President Lincoln attended at least one of them,

because he paid a bit

of a political price in the newspapers

that said, "What's this president doing

consulting with mediums and psychics"

and things like that.

SHATNER: Despite the flak President Lincoln received,

the notion of spiritualism,

the belief that the dead could communicate

with the living via psychic mediums,

was actually on the rise during the Civil War,

and Lincoln himself was no exception.

MORGAN: During the Civil War,

this is an, a time period when people

all over the world believe in this "spiritualist idea"

of communicating with the dead.

And over the course of the Civil War,

there are intense casualties on the battlefield.

So, people are having séances

to speak to their long-lost dead.

BELANGER: I think President Lincoln was probably more

spiritually in tune than most,

especially considering the pressure he was under.

His son died while he was in the White House.

His nation's at war with itself.

Tens of thousands of people dying on both sides,

you're desperately trying to hold this country together.

It's now your charge, you're the president.

And, of course, he paid the ultimate price

for the office.

SHATNER: Just five days

after the South's surrender ends the Civil War,

President Abraham Lincoln and his wife

attend a play at Ford's Theatre.

And as the show is about to begin,

a gunshot rings out.

Lincoln slumps forward in his seat, mortally wounded

by an assassin named John Wilkes Booth.

DAVID KEEHN: John Wilkes Booth was a Confederate sympathizer

and a very famous actor.

That night, he went in,

secretly went outside the president's box,

uh, opened the door, he had a derringer,

rushed in and shot the president in the head.

GEIGER: When John Wilkes Booth assassinates Lincoln,

he jumps down, he catches his leg in a bunting,

but he yells "Sic semper tyrannis,"

which means "thus always to tyrants."

So, it's personal for him.

He hates Abraham Lincoln.

And there were people who thought of Lincoln

as a tyrant.

SHATNER: While Lincoln's assassination is well-known,

in the wake of this tragic event,

Lincoln's biographer and friend Ward Hill Lamon

claims that Lincoln had told him of a terrible dream he had

just three days before his murder.

WHITE: Ward Hill Lamon was Lincoln's self-appointed bodyguard.

They were very close to one another.

In 1872,

Lamon published a biography of Lincoln.

And according to Lamon,

Lincoln had a dream that he was in the White House,

and Lincoln heard all sorts of weeping and wailing.

And in his dream,

he made his way through the White House

and went downstairs into the East Room,

and when he got there, he saw a catafalque

with a corpse on it being guarded by a soldier.

And Lincoln went up to the soldier and said,

"Who is dead in the White House?"

and the soldier replied, "The president.

He's been shot by an assassin."

And according to Lamon,

Lincoln told this story to Mary and to several other people,

and that Lincoln looked very disturbed

by the dream he had had.

SHATNER: Did President Abraham Lincoln

have a premonition of his own death?

It's a question that has intrigued historians

for over 150 years.

MORGAN: Did Lincoln actually have a premonition,

or was this simply what

the exhausted and stressed mind

produced in moments of unconscious sleep?

By the time you get to April 1865,

Lincoln's exhaustion is total.

Think of all of the deaths on the battlefield

that must have just sort of bounced around

in his consciousness

before he drifted off to sleep each night.

And a troubled person,

their troubles will be reflected in their dreams.

BELANGER: I don't know if Lincoln was psychic or clairvoyant,

but the night Lincoln went to Ford's Theatre,

there was a-a story about how

he always said good night to one of his guards.

It was always "good night."

But that night, he said "goodbye."

And maybe he knew. Did he know it would be that night?

When we can't get answers, mysteries are born.

SHATNER: Members of a mysterious secret society wait

for Abraham Lincoln to pass through the city by train.

Their goal is to murder the newly-elected president

before he ascends to the highest office in the land.

While this secret plot was ultimately discovered

and prevented by legendary detective Allan Pinkerton,

it revealed the existence of a shadowy organization

known as the Knights of the Golden Circle.

The Knights of the Golden Circle was a secret society

that was born in the mid-1850s

by a man named George Bickley.

The Knights of the Golden Circle was a secret society

with 25,000 or 50,000 members.

The Knights' secrecy was composed of rituals,

but the rituals were kept oral.

So what they were saying was really never disclosed.

There was passwords needed to get into Knights meetings.

And because of the secrecy, it's very hard to decipher

what the Knights actually did and didn't do.

MORGAN: The Knights of the Golden Circle wanted to create a new world,

a new country designated the "Golden Circle,"

and that is the Southern states stretching all the way

around Mexico and circling the Caribbean,

where slavery would be enshrined as a part of the constitution.

And so Lincoln became an annoyance

that they had to deal with.

WHITE: The Knights of the Golden Circle operated largely in the North,

and they were seen as a secret traitorous society

that may have wanted to overthrow the Union from within.

When Lincoln was assassinated in 1865,

Americans at the time

believed that the Knights of the Golden Circle

may have been behind the assassination conspiracy.

SHATNER: While we know the Knights of the Golden Circle

plotted to kill Abraham Lincoln in 1861, many have wondered,

was the assassination of Lincoln in 1865

also the work of this secret society?

There was an 1865 wood print

that says, "theory, practice, effect."

And under the "theory," it shows George Bickley,

who was the head of the Knights of the Golden Circle.

Under "practice," it shows Booth

as having been the one that assassinated Lincoln

and the "effect" was Lincoln's assassination.

So I believe that the wood panel alleges

some connection between

the Knights, Booth and the Lincoln assassination.

So, that's one of the mysteries involved here.

Was that really true?

SHATNER: Was a secret society the hidden hand

behind one of the most infamous assassinations

in American history?

We may never know.

But like so many stories from the Civil War,

solving each mystery may be as complicated

as the history of the United States itself.

MORGAN: The Civil War continues to capture our imagination

because the conflict remains incredibly important

to the overall broader narrative of the American experience.

And there are still going to be mysteries

that need to be solved

because, in many respects,

we are still living in the shadow

of the American Civil War.

MEDFORD: There's so much

still that we don't know that we're trying to unpack

about the Civil War.

There will always be questions.

We will never know all of the answers,

but we have to get as close to the truth as we can.

The idea that a secret society with radical plans

may be responsible

for the tragic assassination of President Lincoln

just goes to show us that, even today,

160 years after the last shots were fired,

there are still many mysteries yet to be solved

about the American Civil War.

Whether it's spy rings or premonitions

or even monstrous creatures,

historians, researchers and treasure hunters

will continue to explore the fascinating stories

of millions of Americans who experienced

the bloodiest days to ever occur on U.S. soil.

These tales continue to be a source of curiosity

and fascination,

and may forever remain...

...unexplained.

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