Cornelius Boyle
[1] Due to his role in founding the Knights of the Golden Circle, and control of what amounted to a clandestine "Intelligence Center" during the war,[2] he was named in conspiracies surrounding the assassination of Abraham Lincoln and Thomas F. Harney's April 1865 effort to bomb the White House.
Given his father's stature in Andrew Jackson's administration, it was noted that "by the time Cornelius grew up, there was money, position, glory - still he wasn't an idle person...an intensely proud man".
[23] Historians have often speculated about the bizarre Conclusion of the American Civil War, in that surrender appeared unintentionally delayed by the Confederates long after their army had been overcome and stood no chance of returning to the battlefield.
One dominant theory is that the delay was simply to allow time for the Confederate Secret Service and specific individuals such as Mosby and Boyle to carry out spectacular reprisal actions such as the assassination of Lincoln.
[24][1] One day before Richmond was scheduled to be evacuated, on April 1 1865 President Davis approved the release of $1500 in gold from the Confederate Secret Service - $200 was given to Surratt, and the rest seemingly was split between Mosby and Harney.
[1] During his 12-day flight after assassinating Lincoln, John Wilkes Booth told Confederate Signal Corps officer William Rollins[b] that his intention was to escape, presumably with the assistance of Mosby's Rangers, to the Orange County Courthouse near Boyle's encampment at Gordonsville.
While it was Lewis Powell, of the Confederate Secret Service and Mosby's Rangers, who stabbed Seward, reports by War Department investigator Lt. David D. Dana initially named a separate bushwhacker, Capt.
I believe he will never be a happy or content man so long as he remains in it and under those circumstances if he desires to leave the country and thinks he would be better satisfied and that it would be better for the children that he should do so, I am willing to go.After the war, Boyle requested and was sent an Oath of Amnesty on August 14, 1865, but it was never deposited with the government; Boyle preferred to travel to Mexico to assist many among the Confederate veterans and Knights of the Golden Circle with mapping out their plans for an alternate resolution with a confederacy running through Central America and the Caribbean,[3] at the same time Gnl.
[31] CSA Col. Alonzo Ridley had refused offers to return to loyalty to the United States and aligned himself firmly with Maximilian, and now served as the colonization agent for Mezatlan where he'd secured land for Judge D. O. Shattuck in the Comacho Valley.
[32] Boyle wrote to his wife that William Quantrill was accompanying him, as a bodyguard of sorts, under the false name "Wilson" - one of several rumors that the notorious bushwhacker had survived his alleged death; one of five Confederate sympathizers he tasked with surveying and setting out the residential development.
[34] Boyle was nonetheless among the 34 key architects of the war named in the 1869 filing of Treason charges for the purposes of dismissal, alongside Davies, Lee, Ewell, Longstreet, Early, Breckinridge and others.
[35] Returning to Virginia, Boyle took up running the White Silver Springs Spa in Fauquier, and in June 1868 invited the American Medical Association to hold their next convention on his property.
Boyle listed residents of his home including Thomas Atkins, who had drawn up the expansion draftwork for the Silver Springs Spa, as his "Clerk" and Martha Journey as his homekeeper, with a 10-year old Alice Courtney living alongside his own children.
[5] Boyle's relationship with Cherry Bethune was a stressor inside the home, as his eldest daughter resented the replacement of the family's matriarch - and Eustacia, then under 8 years old, was sent to live with maternal relatives.
