Free The 13th Enumeration by William Struse, Rachel Starr Thomson Page A

1861, ordered the attack on Fort Sumter, South Carolina, which was acknowledged as the first shot fired in the Civil War. Beauregard, a Freemason and member of the Knights of the Golden Circle, was praised throughout the South as the “South’s first Paladin.” Jesse James and John Wilkes Booth were also purported members of the Knights of the Golden Circle. After the war, due to the publicity of the conspiracy trials surrounding Lincoln’s assassination, Albert Pike and several others met and decided to change the name of the Knights of the Golden Circle to the Knights of the Ku Klux Klan. Their new name was taken from the Greek term Kuklos, or “circle.”
    President Lincoln’s push for the thirteen amendment was a direct affront to the South both economically and symbolically. Economically, the thirteenth amendment undermined the ability of the South to compete—much of the wealth of the South was built upon the efforts of their slaves. Symbolically, the South, as a stronghold of Templar Masonry, saw the thirteenth amendment as an insult to these institutions as well.
    After the death of Lincoln, Frishmuth became interested in law. He also served for some time as a colonel in the Pennsylvania National Guard. Later, in the 1870s, he returned to his interest in chemistry and for several years was one of the few producers of pure aluminum in the United States. He sought and was awarded many patents for his process of chemical separation of aluminum. An article in The New York Times on November 25, 1884, indicated the backers for his patents were “foreign capitalists . . . Their intentions . . . similar to the policy pursued by the Rothchilds.” These “English capitalists,” Darius knew, were the same capitalists who only twenty-five years later sought to control the oil resources of his homeland, Persia. Every time Darius read over this file, his blood boiled.
    In 1884, William Frishmuth was requested to submit a bid for a copper, brass, or bronze capstone, plated with platinum, for the Washington Monument. Frishmuth had done other plating work for the monument, so Colonel Thomas Lincoln Casey of the Corps of Engineers sent over the request for the bid. Instead of proffering a bid based on the specifications of Colonel Casey, Frishmuth suggested an aluminum capstone be cast for a price of seventy-five dollars. Due to the difficult nature of refining aluminum at the time, it was approximately the same cost as silver. Colonel Casey agreed, and William Frishmuth, after some difficulty, cast the single largest piece of aluminum up to that point in history. After the capstone’s completion, Frishmuth, to the chagrin of Colonel Casey, loaned the capstone to Tiffany’s for a few days in order that members of the public might view the work. The capstone was placed on the ground, and the general public was allowed to step over it in order to say, “I stepped over the top of the Washington Monument.” After Frishmuth finally relinquished the capstone to Colonel Casey, he gave a bill for the work of $256.10. Colonel Casey was enraged to find the bill was $175 more than agreed upon. They finally settled on $225.
    What had first sparked Darius’s interest in the story was Frishmuth’s commissioning of the 113 th Regiment of the 12 th Cavalry. Often, Darius had found that members of the Order used the language of symbols and symbolism to communicate information that most did not understand. Darius did not know, nor could he find, whether the 113 th designation was just the natural order of numbering for the Frishmuth regiment or something more. In his mind, anyway, it was the casting of the capstone which told him there was more to the story than history recorded.
    The capstone of the Washington Monument consisted of two parts. The main body of the capstone was thirty-three-hundred pounds and made of stone. The very tip was made of one hundred ounces of aluminum cast by Frishmuth. Having been a member of Freemasonry for