Preparing for the Revolution Mexico, then Cuba, Imperialistic Targets
The Provocation
Chief Justice Roger B. Taney administered the oath of office to the newly elected President James K. Polk,[1110] a Freemason and an expansionist, on March 4, 1845, the first inauguration reported by telegraph. He accepted the imperialistic view that the U.S. had a “right” to Texas, formerly a part of Mexico, from 1821 to 1836, when it became an independent Republic. Mexico refused to recognize its independence but it was already a reality. Polk’s election was, as President Tyler surmised, a mandate for annexation. Tyler, in the last hours of his administration, received a joint resolution from Congress. Texas did not ratify it immediately but Polk considered it a part of the U.S. and entitled to military protection.[1111] The boundary was also in dispute, involving land, 120 miles wide, between the Nueces River and the Rio Grande. Texas claimed this territory while Mexico claimed that it belonged to the states of Tamaulipas and Nuevo León. It was really of little consequence but Polk viewed it as significant as he had objectives on land far beyond just Texas. Polk and his collaborators would manipulate this land issue to provoke a military incident where they could soon acquire the land on the Pacific coast, territory that became the State of California. Military assertiveness was the first step.[1112]
Accordingly, on April 23, 1845, General Zachary Taylor, a Freemason, took command of U.S. troops on the Rio Grande, the Army of Occupation. In mid-June 1845, before Texas officials ratified the state’s annexation, President Polk directed War Secretary William Marcy to deploy Taylor’s troops to a point south of the Nueces.[1113] On June 24, 1845, because the U.S. government had strained its relationship with Mexico, George Bancroft, Secretary of the Navy ordered Commodore John Drake Sloat of the Pacific Squadron to avoid any act that they might interpret as aggression but to be vigilant.[1114] Taylor and his men were to treat any Mexican troops they encountered with courtesy. He already had
between 3,000 and 4,000 troops at Fort Jesup, Louisiana. By the end of July, he moved his forces to Corpus Christi, just inside the disputed area. Polk’s intentions were obvious. He was not going to make any aggressive military moves, just send in the troops and wait for an inevitable incident between two antagonistic military groups and then lay the blame on Mexico for initiating a war. Taylor was still at Corpus Christi on January 1, 1846.[1115]Meanwhile, in November 1845, President Polk, allegedly attempting diplomacy, sent John Slidell to Mexico. Slidell was a shirttail relative of Rothschild agent, August Belmont and a former member of Aaron Burr’s New York political machine. Slidell, an obvious choice for the questionable peace mission, arrived in Mexico City on December 6, 1845. Polk directed him to reaffirm the Monroe Doctrine, offer $25 million for what then constituted New Mexico and California, discuss the long unpaid claims against Mexico by U.S. citizens and to establish the Rio Grande as the acknowledged boundary and to transfer the disputed strip to Texas.[1116] American expansionists wanted California in order to acquire a Pacific Ocean port. Polk authorized Slidell to forgive the $3 million due to U.S. citizens who suffered damages during the Mexican War of Independence (1810–1821) if they accepted the proposals. Mexico rejected all offers, Slidell left in March 1846, convinced that the U.S. should chastise Mexico for their decisions.[1117]
The U.S. claimed that the Rio Grande was the border, based on the Velasco Treaties, of April 21, 1836, and May 14, 1836, between Mexico and the Republic of Texas, following the Texas Revolution that lasted from October 2, 1835 to April 21, 1836. However, Mexico had never officially ratified those treaties. General Antonio López de Santa Anna, known as Santa Anna or López de Santa Anna, former and future President of Mexico, had signed them, under duress, when his opponents imprisoned him in
Velasco for six months. At the time he signed them, he did not hold the office of president, a position he had nine times, both before and after the Mexican-American War. The U.S. officially annexed Texas on December 29, 1845. In January 1846, General Taylor received new orders – march to the disputed boundary, the Rio Grande and take up a position. However, try not to do anything to antagonize the Mexicans.[1118] How preposterous, obviously the Mexican troops would react to the presence of antagonistic U.S. troops over an ongoing dispute over this strip of land. Inevitably, clashes would occur between Mexican troops and the U.S. forces. These would provide the rationale for a Congressional declaration of war on May 13, 1846.[1119] Because Polk anticipated and conceivably hoped that Mexico would make the first move, he put U.S. troops in a very vulnerable, dangerous position.
On April 25, 1846, the Mexican cavalry attacked a group of seventy men led by Captain Seth Thornton. The Mexicans killed sixteen of Thornton’s and five suffered wounds. The Mexicans took Thornton and forty-nine of his men as prisoners. Polk notified Congress that Mexico had initiated a war against the U.S. so Congress declared war against Mexico on May 13, 1846. His superiors ordered Commodore Sloat to blockade any and all ports as soon as possible. The U.S. fleet had already blockaded Vera Cruz. Sloat proceeded to Mazatlan to verify information about Mexico’s attack and on May 17, 1846, learned of Thornton’s defeat. He quickly executed his blockade orders.[1120]
Just before the impending Mexican-American War, Texas officials issued numerous bonds, which Jay Cooke, as E. W. Clark’s employee, sold. If the U.S. won the war, the nation would annex Texas, even before the war erupted, and the bonds would increase in value. Government officials, recognizing the probabilities, bought more bonds than anyone else did. Initially, the Whig Party and the northern states vehemently opposed the war but the potential insider profits acquired through “public plunder” dispelled all opposition and any moral outrage against war. E. W. Clark and Company, Cooke and many others soon discovered that their greatest profits resulted from war.[1121]
John Anthony Quitman, Freemason
John Anthony Quitman, plantation and slave owner was the Whig governor of Mississippi (1835-1836) and again as a Democrat (1850-1851). He was president of the Mississippi Railroad Company, president of the Mississippi Cotton Company, had a directorship of the Planter’s Bank, had a lucrative law practice, admitted to the bar in Natchez, Mississippi, and owned or supervised cotton and sugar plantations with 150 slaves. He was the captain of the Natchez Fencibles, a Grand Master Freemason, president of the local Anti-Abolition Society, and president of the Adams County Anti-Gambling Society, and a trustee of Jefferson College and a trustee of Natchez Academy.[1122] Overtly, he was, for all practical purposes, a socially acceptable member of the local and state community.
Quitman moved to Mississippi to become Grand Master of that state, a position he held for seventeen years. His dedication to the Masonic agenda assisted him in establishing a significant network of political connections.[1123] His grandfather, his mother’s father, had been the governor of Curaçao, the Dutch West India Company’s slave center. His father, German-born Reverend Frederick Henry Quitman and mother, Anna Elizabeth, fled to New York with their slaves during the Caribbean slave revolts. The first was the Haitian Revolution, which began in 1791, led by Toussaint L’Ouverture, culminating in the independent
black republic of Haiti. Tula, a slave, led the slave revolt in Curaçao, beginning in 1795 for which government officials executed him on October 3, 1795. As early as 1830, Quitman established Freemasonry in Mississippi in order to initiate a secession movement in that state.[1124] In 1863, the Dutch abolished slavery in Curaçao and allowed many of its residents to emigrate to Cuba and other islands where they worked on the sugarcane plantations.
When the Mexican-American War began, Quitman enlisted and became a Brigadier General of Volunteers serving first under General Taylor. He later joined Winfield Scott’s expedition. Scott was also a Freemason. Quitman entered Mexico City on September 14, 1847 at the head of the Fourth Division of Scott’s army.[1125] He occupied Mexico City as Military Governor and advised President Polk that the U.S. should forcibly annex all of Mexico rather than just California and Texas because Mexico would be an excellent area for plantations.[1126] He received a military discharge on July 20, 1848 and returned to Mississippi.
The Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo
On December 7, 1847, in his Third Annual Message to Congress, President James K. Polk, said, “In the enjoyment of the bounties of Providence at home such as have rarely fallen to the lot of any people, it is cause of congratulation that our intercourse with all the powers of the earth except Mexico continues to be of an amicable character.” He claimed that it was “our cherished policy to cultivate peace and good will with all nations,” a course that he “steadily pursued.” He also reiterated that Mexico forced the U.S. to engage in war.[1127]
Polk referred back to his message of May 11, 1846 when he spoke of “the serious causes of complaint which we had against Mexico before she commenced hostilities.” He referred to the present and “the wanton violation of the rights of person and property of our citizens committed by Mexico, her repeated acts of bad faith through a long series of years, and her disregard of solemn treaties stipulating for indemnity to our injured citizens not only constituted ample cause of war on our part, but were of such an aggravated character as would have justified us before the whole world in resorting to this extreme remedy.” He claimed that he had “an anxious desire to avoid a rupture between the two countries, we forbore for years to assert our clear rights by force, and continued to seek redress for the wrongs we had suffered by amicable negotiation in the hope that Mexico might yield to pacific counsels and the demands of justice.” President Polk said, “The Mexican Government refused even to hear the terms of adjustment which he (Slidell) was authorized to propose, and finally, under wholly unjustifiable pretexts, involved the two countries in war by invading the territory of the State of Texas, striking the first blow, and shedding the blood of our citizens on our own soil.”[1128]
American officials devised the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, the peace treaty that ended the Mexican- American War (1846-18 48), signed on February 2, 1848. The U.S. defeated the Mexican Army and General Winfield Scott toppled Mexico’s capital in August 1847. The city of Guadalupe Hidalgo was north of the capital where Mexican government officials had fled as U.S. troops advanced. Mexican officials surrendered and they began the negotiations to end the war. Nicholas Trist, of the State Department and President Polk’s representative, and General Scott presided over the peace talks. Trist and General Scott had attempted unsuccessfully to negotiate with Santa Anna previously. Don Bernardo Couto, Don Miguel Atristain, and Don Luis Gonzaga Cuevas represented the interests of Mexico. Scott and Trist insisted that Mexico cede Upper California and New Mexico to the U.S. in what they called the Mexican Cession. This included present-day Arizona and New Mexico and parts of Utah, Nevada, and Colorado, about 525,000 square miles.[1129]
The treaty mandated that Mexico relinquish the said land in exchange for $15 million (equivalent to $380
million today) as compensation for war-related damage to Mexican property. The U.S. also assumed the $3.25 million that Mexico owed U.S. citizens. Mexico owed millions of dollars to the Rothschild bankers at this time, and presumably, the Mexican officials gave the majority of the cash to them.[1130] The House of Rothschild had interests in Havana as early as 1837, when they sent Belmont there to develop the sugar, cotton, tobacco and coffee trade but Barings handled most of Havana’s sugar business. In 1849, during his visit to Cuba, Baron Alphonse Rothschild stated, “The sugar business here is a monopoly of the exporters, Drake, Burnham, Picard and Albert. However they are not doing the most important or weighty business; this is being done by Baring, Coutts, and Fruhling & Goschen in London, who are making all of the profit from commission, credits and consignments.” Barings and Fruhling & Goschen were key Rothschild rivals.[1131] The Rothschilds had numerous financial interests in North and South America, the Caribbean, and Mexico. In addition, the Rothschilds functioned as financiers to many other countries. They loaned money to finance Brazil’s coffee production and had been Brazil’s bankers since 1840.[1132]
The Treaty also required that Mexico cede Texas, another 389,166 square miles, in as much as Mexico had never officially recognized the independence of the Republic of Texas (1836) or the U.S. annexation of the state (1845). Consequently, Mexico lost about 55% of its prewar territory. The treaty also stipulated that the Rio Grande function as the Texas border. The treaty provided for the protection of the civil rights and property of about 80,000 Mexican nationals living within the new borders. The U.S. promised to control its side of the border and fairly arbitrate any future disputes between the two countries. The U.S. Senate ratified the treaty on March 10, 1848. However, it deleted Article X guaranteeing the protection of Mexican land grants. After the Senate’s ratification, the U.S. troops left Mexico City.[1133]
Mexicans refer to the Mexican-American War as The North American Intervention (La Intervención Norteamericana). Mexico initially claimed and sparsely settled some portion of the area in question from the time of its independence from Spain after the Mexican War of Independence (1810-1821). Spain had subdued the indigenous population and had seized territory over the previous three centuries. Some Indian tribes remained powerful and independent within the northern section of Mexico. Because the land was somewhat inhospitable due to low rainfall, people did not settle there until others invented new methods of irrigation and until the area opened up after the advent of the telegraph; the railroad; the telephone; and later, electrical power.
The Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo gave the United States land that now comprises what became part of the State of California (1850), Nevada (1864) Colorado (1876), Wyoming (1890), Utah (1896), New Mexico (1912), part of Kansas (1912) and Arizona (1912) as well as the entire State of Texas. The U.S., via the 1853 Gadsden Purchase, acquired the southern parts of New Mexico and Arizona. The U.S. paid an additional $10 million for this land, as U.S. officials intended to construct a transcontinental railroad west from the State of Georgia, through Texas, through El Paso, all the way to San Diego, California. This plan never came to fruition though they did build a railroad farther north between Tucson, Phoenix, and other locations to the west.
The Mexican–American War (April 25, 1846 - February 2, 1848) with its resulting land acquisitions altered the Indian’s relatively peaceful existence west of the Mississippi. Opportunists, looking for gold, went west on the Santa Fe Trail and along the Platte and the Sweetwater. The U.S. opened routes through Texas for a continuous stream of freight and supplies for the army on the Rio Grande. The gold discovery at Pike’s Peak in 1858 brought an onslaught of people to Colorado.[1134]
The Havana Club
An aristocratic group of Cuban Freemason plantation owners, known as the Havana Club, created in
1848, advocated the overthrow of the Spanish colonial government in Cuba. They were worried that Spain would adopt England and France’s abolitionist policies and ruin Cuba’s sugar economy from which they profited. The Havana Club sent New York City-educated Ambrosio José Gonzales, a twenty-nine year old college professor and Freemason to meet with William Jenkins Worth, a Freemason and a Mexican war hero. Gonzales offered Worth $3 million to hire 5,000 veterans to invade Cuba. Worth accepted the proposal, which included his share of $100,000. Worth and Gonzales then traveled to meet West Point Professor Woodson Smith, a Freemason, and others who were sympathetic towards the Cuban’s campaign for emancipation from Spain. Then, unexpectedly, the War Department transferred Worth to Texas where he contracted cholera and died shortly after his arrival.[1135] Horace Greeley, a Freemason,[1136] referredtoGeneralWorthas“thelastofourmilitaryIlluminati.”[1137]
The Havana Club then made their proposal to Whig leader Caleb Cushing, also a Freemason, who then introduced Gonzales to President Polk.[1138] Cushing, a pro-slavery politician and William H. Russell were business partners. Cushing’s family made their fortune through opium trafficking. Russell, with Alphonso Taft, co-founded Skull and Bones at Yale University (1833), probably an Illuminati chapter. He had been in Germany (1831-1832), where he learned about Hegel, who was “almost certainly Illuminati” and adopted their principle that “the end justifies the means.”[1139]
Cushing, because of pressing family matters, could not join the invasion. Gonzales remained in Washington where he met several sympathetic politicians including Senator Stephen Douglas and Senator Daniel Dickinson, both Freemasons. In June, the conspirators adopted a flag on which they imposed an equilateral triangle and the five-pointed star from the Texas flag for their Masonic significance. They began recruiting for the Cuban invasion in July 1849 in New York City, Boston, Baltimore and New Orleans. About 400 conspirators attempted to assemble a military contingency on Round Island, three miles south of Pascagoula, Mississippi. However, President Zachary Taylor took office on March 4, 1849. He discovered the plan and on August 11, 1849 and ordered the navy to blockade the island. The conspirators dispersed but did not abandon their plans.[1140]
In September 1849, Gonzales met John Henderson, a Freemason, lawyer and former Mississippi senator and a Quitman crony. In 1836, Quitman had fought for the independence of Texas, considered a Masonic state. They intended to motivate the Cubans to revolt instead of mounting a military invasion. Quitman planned to resign as governor and lead the expedition to reinforce General López, a Freemason and leader of the people’s revolt in Cuba’s central Trinidad region. He and his followers fled to the U.S. on July 4, 1848 when officials discovered the plot. He, for a time, resided with Laurent Sigur, editor of the New Orleans Delta. Sigur’s father founded the first Masonic Temple in Louisiana in 1794.[1141] It is significant that certain Cubans attempted to initiate a revolution in Cuba at the same time that others were revolting in several places in Europe.
In the fall of 1849, Quitman convened an assembly of anti-Union agents operating throughout the South. They organized a secession convention in Nashville with delegates from nine states from June 3-12, 1850 to orchestrate the breakup of the U.S. Quitman determined to lead a private army to conquer New Mexico, a new territory recently acquired from Mexico through the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo. He thought that this would provoke an immediate war between the North and the South. On June 21, 1850, President
Taylor, aware of the conspirators, had Quitman arrested and indicted for violating U.S. Neutrality Laws for his involvement in the well-financed conspiracy to emancipate Cuba from Spain. On July 3, 1850, President Taylor threatened to execute those who were planning rebellion against the Union. The court delayed Quitman’s prosecution because of President Taylor’s sudden death.[1142] The court, during the ultimate trial, acquitted Quitman and he went on to win a seat in Congress.
Known as “Old Rough and Ready,” President Taylor (1784-1850), a Freemason and Southern slaveholder, opposed the spread of slavery into the territories. He had never held a political office. Officials from the Whig Party recruited him to run for president in 1848, after Lincoln ascertained that he was truly a big government Whig. The citizens elected Taylor as president and he served from March 4, 1849 to July 9, 1850.
On July 4, 1850, the Freemasons held a huge celebration, attended by twenty-one lodges, to lay the cornerstone of the Washington Monument. Workers would complete the Egyptian obelisk, a phallic symbol, ultimately measuring 555 feet in height in 1884. Taylor attended the celebration, and although enemies surrounded him, he did not imagine that someone would attempt to kill him, especially other Freemasons. They do kill their own noncompliant members. President Taylor immediately became ill after consuming iced cherries and milk and samples of several dishes given to him by well-wishing citizens. Arsenic was then the poison of choice for eliminating people. It may cause nausea, vomiting, abdominal pain, and diarrhea. He exhibited all of those symptoms and died five days later on July 9, 1850. He had been engaged in numerous quarrels over slavery and succession. Taylor, a slaveholder, was Jefferson Davis’ father-in-law, and he supported California’s admission to the Union as a free state, but opposed succession. Vice President Millard Fillmore, a Northerner, sympathetic to the South, assumed the presidency and facilitated the Compromise of 1850, legislation that Taylor had opposed.
In 1991, Professor Clara Rising requested that authorities exhume Zachary Taylor’s body. Oak Ridge National Laboratory tested samples of his hair and fingernails to evaluate any residual arsenic residue. The results, according to the New York Times, revealed that Taylor died of severe gastroenteritis, which includes nausea, vomiting, abdominal pain, and diarrhea.[1143] The Oak Ridge National Laboratory, established as part of the Manhattan Project in 1943, is just one of the national laboratories under the jurisdiction of the U.S. Department of Energy. The University of Tennessee and Battelle Memorial Institute currently manage the facility in a 50-50 limited liability partnership. It began in 1929 in Columbus, Ohio, as a non-profit charitable trust with annual revenues of more than $3 billion. Yale- educated Gordon Battelle launched the facility. He was the son of the president of the Columbus Iron & Steel Company. The Institute researches issues like global climate change, sustainable energy, and healthcare.
Yale-educated John M. Clayton was Taylor’s Secretary of State. Clayton was an ardent Federalist, politician and lawyer who supported Henry Clay’s Socialist American System. Clayton embraced Anglo- American friendship, stressed U.S. economic expansion, especially into the Pacific markets. He negotiated the U.S. treaty with Hawaii but failed to secure a commercial treaty with Japan, which led to Matthew C. Perry’s expeditions to Japan (1853-1854). Clayton negotiated the Clayton-Bulwer Treaty, April 19, 1850, an indication that the U.S. intended to expand her foreign commercial efforts and alleviate the Anglo-American tensions generated by the Nicaragua canal project.[1144]
An army, according to the constitution, is for defense only. In 1850, the military had increased to almost 14,000 men and the military budget increased from a million dollars in 1845 to about $5 million by 1851. The military posts in 1845 were adjacent to rivers for easy access to supplies. Those in the 1850s were in sparsely inhabited land, which increased transportation costs for supplies. Cavalry horses needed food that was not always naturally available.[1145] Congressional pleas for a larger Army to accommodate the
needs of the frontier resulted in fifty-four new stations in the west.
Since the national domain had increased because of the war against Mexico, some argued that an army was essential to police it. During the 1850s, Congress grudgingly agreed but took no actions. On July 6, 1848, President Polk informed Congress that the army, as it existed before the Mexican War, would suffice for peacetime. By the end of the year, prospectors discovered gold in California. In 1848, Treasury Secretary Robert Walker argued that the Indian Bureau should promote peace and not war and should be detached from the War Department.[1146] Polk authorized a military force of more than 10,000 officers and men.
In the summer of 1851, after Quitman’s exoneration, he traveled with fellow Mississippian, Jefferson Davis to Boston to collaborate with Whig leader Caleb Cushing on the most appropriate Democrat presidential candidate for 1852. They decided on Franklin Pierce, a Freemason and a Mexican War ally. August Belmont, Democratic Party boss financed Pierce’s presidential campaign. After Pierce’s victory, he appointed Belmont chargé d’affaires and Minister for the United States at The Hague.[1147] Belmont amply rewarded the conspirators, Quitman, Cushing and Davis, when they got their man into the White House. Pierce appointed Cushing, as the Attorney General and Jefferson Davis became Secretary of War (1853-1857).
Secretary Davis and other Southerners promoted the enlargement of the military and a standing army, allegedly for frontier defense.[1148] In 1854, Davis demonstrated with statistics that the Indian population was more than 400,000 of which 40,000 might be warriors, just waiting for the opportunity to attack.[1149] He said, “It is argued that if we raise volunteers they can be got rid of...we can get rid of the Treasury of the United States in the same way.” In addition, the authorization for border volunteers was really a mandate “to exterminate the Indians.”[1150] Davis maintained, in the New York Times in 1886, that he was never a Freemason.[1151] Other sources claim that he was. Pierce was a cousin to James Garfield, Grover ClevelandandBenjaminHarrison.[1152] PierceisallegedlyabloodrelativeofBarbaraPierceBush.
After the presidential inauguration in 1853, Quitman agreed to direct the Cuban revolution, after their failed first attempt. He would receive $1 million out of the earnings of the bonds that the financiers had provided. He recruited several thousand mercenaries but Spanish authorities squelched the plot and emancipated, and then armed most of Cuba’s slaves. Officials arrested Captain James D. Bulloch, Quitman’s criminal crony, when he brought his ship into Havana Harbor. Slidell demanded that the government repeal the U.S. neutrality laws and Cushing, now Attorney General, asked for sanctions around Cuba. Quitman relented and his mercenaries dispersed into another organization, the Knights of the Golden Circle.[1153]
Again, in 1855, per Davis’ recommendation, they raised the number to 18,000 military personnel and created four new regiments. The government sent troops to Kansas to keep the peace between the slavery and free-soil forces. During 1857-59, they sent troops to Utah to coerce the Mormons to submit to U.S. authority.[1154]
An article in The New York Times of June 12, 1856 claims that John Slidell, the U.S. Congressman from Louisiana (1853-1861) was an unscrupulous politician, a native of New York who went to New Orleans in about 1819 “to introduce the New York system of politics.” In 1856, Isaiah Rynders of New York and his Empire Club, consisting of 250 men, tried to persuade James Buchanan to accept the presidential nomination against incumbent Franklin Pierce. Buchanan was the Master of the Masonic Lodge #43 in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, and a District Deputy Grand Master of the Grand Lodge of Pennsylvania. Belmont who promised another $80,000 if the delegates nominated Buchanan financed their trip. Slidell devised the Plaquemine Fraud, aided by money from his nephew, Belmont. The Plaquemine Fraud was a scheme to steal Louisiana’s electoral vote in order for Buchanan to win the presidential election.[1155]
On February 23, 1857, President Elect James Buchanan and a few friends met at the National Hotel in Washington, DC where they had a reserved table. Buchanan was a habitual tea drinker, typical for many Northerners. Purportedly, conspirators sprinkled arsenic into the sugar bowls destined for his table. Approximately fifty to sixty persons dined at that table that evening. Allegedly thirty-eight of them died because of what some suspected as deliberate poisoning. Buchanan was poisoned but recovered through the quick actions of his doctor and was inaugurated on March 4, 1857.[1156] It might have been something altogether different, a factor, like food poisoning, unknown at the time.
In 1858, Senator John P. Hale (1847-1853; 1855-1865) of New Hampshire reminded Congress that, according to the Constitution, which he hoped would endure, that standing armies are dangerous to liberty. To bypass the constitution and increase the military informally, officials encouraged the enrollment of volunteer units to fight Indians. Volunteers, like paid mercenaries, are less amenable to control. Volunteerism was a device for funneling public monies into the deep, private pockets of well-connected citizens.[1157]
Lincoln, an Illinois Whig
Lincoln’s political idol was Henry Clay, a Freemason, was the Grand Master of Masons in Kentucky during 1820-1821. Though Lincoln was not a Freemason, it is possible that some of Clay’s Masonic involvement influenced his beliefs.[1158] Lincoln, though invited to join, opted to wait until he was out of office. Clay was a U.S. Senator and the Speaker of the House of Representatives who advocated programs to modernize the economy, advocated programs to revise the economy, establish a central bank, empower the federal government, and enact high protectionist tariffs only for certain industries, which resulted in the form of corporate welfare. He favored foreign expansion and overseas markets. Lincoln was an advocate of the American system, actually the British system, and a legacy of Alexander Hamilton. Lincoln urged the Illinois state government to create and subsidize new ports, and other infrastructure such as canals and railroads. The problem with this system is that the taxpayers usually foot the bill while big, politically connected corporations make huge profits. The Illinois and Michigan Canal nearly bankruptedthestateuntilforeignersinvestedintheproject.[1159] Illinois-stylepoliticsisLincoln’slegacy.
The Whigs, who were purveyors of the American System, believed, “The appropriate function of Government is a parental care of the people.” Especially during a depression, the Whigs believed that a beneficent government should take steps to repair the economy rather than leave it to the people and the free market. Whigs argued that, during good times, private capital was insufficient for economic development. They maintained that the national government should function in a managerial capacity of the people. Whigs promoted the idea that state governments should give special privileges to corporations, including limited liability to entice capital to them. From their perspective, the economy needed government subsidies to expand and prosperity depended on institutions that only the government could initiate – banks, manufacturing firms, or private canal building and railroad corporations, all subsidized with public funds. Others viewed this methodology as favoritism of the rich at the expense of the middle class.[1160]
In March 1832, Abraham Lincoln (1809-1865) announced his candidacy for the Illinois General Assembly but he was unsuccessful in his bid. However, Illinois residents elected Lincoln, a Whig, when he ran again in 1834. He studied to become a lawyer and officials admitted him to the bar in 1837. Thereafter, he moved to Springfield, Illinois and went into practice under John T. Stuart. Lincoln was a member of the Illinois House of Representatives for four two-year consecutive terms as a Whig representative from Sangamon County. He had argued over 200 cases before the Illinois Supreme Court but failed, as demonstrated by his later actions, to apply simple constitutional principles.
In 1837 and 1838, Illinois had lost $12 million dollars and accrued a mountain of debt through a state- subsidized project to widen and deepen every canal, a scheme that Lincoln had fervently backed. He wanted to construct a canal to the Illinois River then to Lake Michigan in order to make Illinois the “Empire State of the Union.” He also wanted to be the Clinton DeWitt of Illinois. Despite the ineffectiveness and financial abuse of the Illinois program, he continued to promote the Whig’s American System, which advocated, not just state subsidies, but the use of federal subsidies for internal improvements, including public funds for private railroad and canal-building corporations. Several states, those entering the Union in the 1860s, wrote their constitutions to prohibit such subsidies.[1161] One of the South’s biggest complaints against the North was their use of the majority of the tariffs for internal improvements made exclusively in the North. There was major opposition to state subsidies by 1861, especially from southerners.
On December 26, 1839, Lincoln, a Whig, gave a speech against the Independent Treasury System, an arrangement whereby the government would maintain its funds in the Treasury and its subsidiaries, independent of a national banking and financial system. Officials passed the legislation in July 1840, despite Whig opposition. Lincoln, in 1840 and 1844, functioned as the Whig’s preeminent presidential elector in Illinois. He traveled throughout Illinois, powerfully promoting and defending Whig financial policies like a national bank, protective tariffs, and the distribution of federal land revenues to the states. [1162] Essentially, according to Frederic Bastiat, protectionism, socialism, and communism are the same plant in three different stages of its growth. In protectionism, the plunder is limited to specific groups and industries.[1163] Lincoln was a protégé of Henry Clay, the Father of the American System, really a spin-off of Hamilton’s Federalist system. In 1840, Lincoln grounded his campaign efforts for William Henry Harrison on the need for a national bank that could provide credit to the average person.[1164] The Whigs argued that a national bank would reverse the decreasing economy, the same rhetoric that the international bankers disseminated immediately following the orchestrated Panic of 1907.
The citizens’ elected Whig candidate William Henry Harrison (1773-1841), a Virginia aristocrat promoted as the common man, as president in 1840. He had studied medicine under Dr. Benjamin Rush at the University of Pennsylvania until his father died in 1790, leaving him with no funds. His family’s administrators placed Harrison under the guardianship of Robert Morris, the “Financier of the Revolution” who he had boarded with when he was a student. In the election of 1840, the Whigs also recaptured both houses of the legislature. Harrison’s Whig supporters immediately wanted him to repeal the Independent Treasury Act. President Harrison scheduled a special session of Congress to discuss the issue. Harrison was inaugurated president on March 4, 1841. He became ill with a cold on March 26; it quickly developed into pneumonia and pleurisy. His doctor was Dr. Frederick May who had been trained by Dr. John Warren and Dr. William Eustis (both Freemasons). The treatments of opium, castor oil and Virginia snakeweed made him even sicker. He became delirious and died on April 4, 1841, just short of thirty-two days into his administration. His death created a state of confusion regarding the process of succession in the event of a presidential death.
After the Cabinet consulted with Chief Justice of the Supreme Court Roger B. Taney, John Tyler assumed the presidency on April 6, 1841, the first president to obtain that lofty position without the benefit of an election. He was a Freemason, pro-secessionist, and a member of Virginia’s slave-owning elite. John Smith Dye in his 1964 book The Adder’s Den claims that pro-slavery agents poisoned Harrison in order to put Tyler, possibly a person who would be more compliant to their interests, in the White House.[1165]
President John Tyler appointed Bostonian Caleb Cushing as Secretary of the Treasury but the Senate refused to confirm him. Therefore, on May 8, 1843, Tyler appointed him as U.S. Envoy to China’s Qing Empire, a position he held until March 4, 1845. Cushing’s family, as well as many others, made a fortune
trading opium in China.[1166] Tyler then appointed Thomas Ewing, father of the Union Army general, as Treasury Secretary. Ewing, the stepfather of William T. Sherman, also became the first Secretary of the Interior on March 8, 1849. On June 7, 1843, under the direction of Henry Clay, the House began writing bills to increase tariffs while the Senate structured bills to repeal the Independent Treasury Act, initiate a new national bank, and allocate land revenues.[1167]
The Whigs unsuccessfully attempted to establish a national bank with the Fiscal Bank Act of August 7, 1841 but President Tyler (1841-1845) vetoed the bill. The Whigs, especially those in New England, were adamant about repealing the Independent Treasury Act in 1842 but officials passed it again in 1846 under James Knox Polk (1845-1849). In 1846, President Polk vetoed a bill mandating appropriations for internal improvements because he determined such actions violated the Constitution in two ways – the Federal Government is not empowered to make internal improvements in the States nor take funds from the treasury for those purposes.
The Independent Treasury System removed government funds from privately owned banks and mandated that the government transact all business in specie or Treasury notes. They enacted the bill in 1846 and it became effective as of January 1, 1847 with a stipulation regarding specie and Treasury notes that became effective on April 1, 1847.[1168] This system functioned until the Lincoln administration enacted legislation in 1863 and 1864, which created national banks. The Whigs won the 1848 elections but they did not attempt to create another national bank.[1169]
Horace Greeley wrote an editorial in 1845 denouncing the Democrats (Loco-Foco Party), the party of discord,” for causing the depression of 1837. He accused the Democrats who opposed the Whig idea of a Nation as “an agency of the community” and the champion of general or “united interests.” Greeley wrote, “THE COMMONWEALTH is the term best expressing the Whig idea of a State or Nation, and our philosophy regards a Government with hope and confidence, as an agency of the community through which vast and beneficent ends may be accomplished.” Meanwhile the Democrats viewed the government with distrust, “an agency of corruption, oppression, and robbery.”[1170]
In March 1848, as the presidential campaigns were gearing up for November, as proof of Zachary Taylor’s Whig credentials, Lincoln wrote a letter for Taylor to sign that promised, if elected president, he would not veto a national bank, protective tariffs or permit slavery in any territorial acquisition from Mexico. Lincoln had some reservations about Taylor, as he was a large slaveholder.[1171]
The Whig Party, which evolved from the big government Federalist Party, and had now evolved into the
Republican Party in about 1854. In 1856, Lincoln had spoken before Congress and requested an
“extension of the Federal powers.” Additionally, the Republicans made federal-sponsored internal
improvements part of their first platform, another step towards the development of the New Nationalism.
[1172]
In 1856, John Pierpont Morgan Jr. (1837-1913), future industrialist, left for Germany to study at the University of Göttingen. Simultaneously, Karl Marx was advocating Communism. Author Ralph Epperson suggests that it is quite conceivable that the two met because Marx, financed by the bankers, made regular visits to that area of Germany.[1173] The Hanover Courier of Berlin reported on July 16, 1903, that J. P. Morgan, “always manifested deep interest in the University of Göttingen,” where he studied as a young man. He commissioned a well-known American author to write a history of the American colony, composed of the numerous students from America, at Göttingen.[1174] Lionel Nathan de Rothschild (1806- 1879), the oldest son of Nathan and grandson of Mayer Rothschild, also studied at the University of Göttingen.
Morgan, like Mayer Amschel Rothschild, recognized that certain political ideologies when employed by the rich would enable a person to amass an even greater fortune. The state, he thought, must control the
nation’s money supply through a centralized banking system such as the American System, the program that the Whigs had promoted, now embraced by the newly organized Republican Party. Rothschild allegedly made a similar observation. He said, if he, as a banker, issued and controlled a nation’s money rather than Congress, whose job it was, through the Treasury, then he cared not who wrote the laws. Fredric Morton reported these sentiments in The Rothschilds, a Family Portrait, in 1962.[1175]
Lincoln had always been a confirmed Whig. He never discarded this socialistic philosophy. During his administration, he oversaw the development of the transcontinental railroad in which private, well- connected companies received massive land grants and loans from the federal government. He argued that a modern economy whether in peace or war required adequate infrastructure and that it was up to the government to assist.[1176] Henry C. Carey, an economist who embraced Hamilton’s system of big government was Lincoln’s chief economic advisor and one of the architects of his Reconstruction Program.
The Right of Secession
In 1798, during America’s undeclared naval war with France, the Federalists in the United States Congress passed four bills known collectively as the Alien and Sedition Acts. John Adams signed the all of the bills, the Naturalization Act, the Alien Friends Act, the Alien Enemies Act, and the Sedition Act into law. In opposition, Vice President Thomas Jefferson secretly wrote the Kentucky Resolutions countering the federal government’s unconstitutional legislation in defense of states’ rights. The Kentucky state legislature passed the first resolution on November 16, 1798 and the second on December 3, 1799. James Madison wrote the Virginia Resolution regarding the same issue. The Virginia state legislature passed it on December 24, 1798.
The second Kentucky Resolution states, “That the several States composing, the United States of America are not united on the principle of unlimited submission to their general government.” The states “delegated to that government certain definite powers, reserving, each State to itself, the residuary mass of right to their own self-government; and that whensoever the general government assumes undelegated powers, its acts are unauthoritative, void and of no force.” The states, presumably participants in the Federal compact, have obligatory rights to evaluate potential and actual constitutional violations through the process of nullification. States, then and now, supposedly have the right to take action against Federal abuses of power through the nullification procedure wherein states can refuse to enforce laws considered unconstitutional.[1177]
On March 4, 1801, Thomas Jefferson, in his inaugural address, had favored “support of the state governments in all of their rights, as the most competent administrations for our domestic concerns and the surest bulwarks against anti-republican tendencies.”[1178]
Alexander Hamilton, the architect of the Federalist Party, a party of bankers and businessmen, was in the process of increasing the army and suggested sending the military into Virginia to put down their resistance to federal legislation. The New England states, Federalist strongholds, rejected the resolutions. The state governments of Massachusetts, Connecticut, and Rhode Island, acting in behalf of the merchants and shippers, objected to President Thomas Jefferson’s (1801-1809) anti-foreign trade policy defined in the Embargo Act of 1807 and President James Madison’s (1809-1817) Non-Intercourse Act of 1809, allegedly based on their questionable constitutionality but probably based more on commercialism. In 1812, Federalist officials in Massachusetts and Connecticut resisted sending their militias to defend the coast during the War of 1812.
Officials in Connecticut and Massachusetts opposed the embargo the federal government passed in 1813. A Harvard-educated Federalist and Chief Justice of the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court (SJC),
established by the British Crown (1692), Samuel Sewall issued the following statement on February 22, 1814,
“A power to regulate commerce is abused, when employed to destroy it; and a manifest and voluntary abuse of power sanctions the right of resistance, as much as a direct and palpable usurpation. The sovereignty reserved to the states, was reserved to protect the citizens from acts of violence by the United States, as well as for purposes of domestic regulation. We spurn the idea that the free, sovereign and independent State of Massachusetts is reduced to a mere municipal corporation, without power to protect its people, and to defend them from oppression, from whatever quarter it comes. Whenever the national compact is violated, and the citizens of this State are oppressed by cruel and unauthorized laws, this Legislature is bound to interpose its power, and wrest from the oppressor its victim.”[1179] However, noting the first sentence in the court’s statement, one must question the loyalties of the commercial interests in the North who apparently were not willing to use their militias to fight the British invaders and who still demanded the opportunity to do business with a country that was killing their fellow citizens.
On October 10, 1814, during the War of 1812 (1812-1815), the Massachusetts state legislature called for the Hartford Convention, convened from December 15, 1814 to January 4, 1815 with delegates, most of whom were Federalists, from Rhode Island, New Hampshire and Vermont. They discussed their opposition to the war and possible secession from the United States. One of the objectives of the Hartford Convention was to amend the Constitution to improve and insure states’ rights. Theodore Dwight (1764- 1846) a lawyer, journalist, a member of Congress (1806-1807), and a leader of the Federalist Party, was the secretary of the Hartford Convention. He was the editor of the Hartford Mirror and the Albany Daily Advertiser. He moved to New York City and founded the New York City Daily Advertiser in 1817. Aaron Burr, his cousin, allied with the Massachusetts Tories and thought that the U.S. should have remained a British colony. Burr’s cousin and law partner, Theodore Dwight devised some political moves to destroy the unity of the U.S. Dwight’s brother, Timothy Dwight, was the president of Yale. Jonathan Edwards was the grandfather of the Dwight brothers and Aaron Burr.
Jonathan Edwards, a preacher and philosophical theologian, advocated a puritanical Reformed theology and embraced the principles of The Enlightenment. He played a major role in shaping the First Great Awakening and revivalism (1733–1735). He delivered the sermon Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God during another revivalist wave in 1741. He died from a smallpox vaccination shortly after he accepted the position as president of the College of New Jersey (later named Princeton University).
Senator John Randolph (1825-1827) later reminded Congress, “the federal government was created by the states and was restricted in its power. He argued that the federal government must never become “the sole judge of its own usurpations.”[1180]
On January 13, 1848, just before the simultaneous outbreak of socialist revolutions in several countries in Europe, Lincoln said, “Any people anywhere, being inclined and having the power, have the right to rise up and shake off the existing government, and form a new one that suits them better. This is a most valuable, a most sacred right, a right which, we hope and believe, is to liberate the world. Nor is this right confined to cases in which the whole people of an existing government may choose to exercise it. Any portion of such people that can may revolutionize, and make their own of so much of the territory as they inhabit. More than this, a majority of any portion of such people may revolutionize, putting down a minority, intermingled with, or near about them, who may oppose their movements. Such minority was precisely the case of the Tories of our own Revolution. It is a quality of revolutions not to go by old lines, or old laws; but to break up both, and make new ones.”[1181]
Lincoln either drastically changed his views regarding secession or he was endorsing something else – perhaps the revolutionary seizure and replacement of an “existing government” here or “anywhere.” A
critical reading of his words, his presidential actions and the centralized government that followed his war provides circumstantial evidence of a selective application of secession principles. He mentioned the word revolution three times, which certainly denotes warfare. Secession could have occurred peacefully but Lincoln resisted all diplomatic debate, which might have ended or initiated secession efforts. Secession is withdrawal whereas revolutions, like those in Europe and ours against Britain, involved violence and a takeover of an “existing government.” He claimed to uphold the founder’s writings, including the Declaration of Independence, yet he failed to defend them and utterly ignored them when it came to the South.
Lincoln, an experienced lawyer, would have known that secession was a viable option. However, once he allowed a legal discussion and an open debate on the subject, he would lose. The Declaration of Independence, with its statements about a government deriving its just powers from the consent of the governed, was squarely against him. The South claimed a right to secession through the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, the contract of the sovereign states with the federal government.[1182] A party of individuals founded the Union on the principles of popular sovereignty and rule by the consent of the governed, not on the principle of indivisibility.
Immediately after Lincoln’s election as president, the following statements appeared in the New York Tribune, “The union of these States is in its nature irrevocable, and only the earthquake of revolution can shiver it. Still we say, in all earnestness and good faith, whenever a whole section of this Republic, whether a half, a third, or only a fourth, shall truly desire and demand a separation from the residue, we shall earnestly favor such separation...If the Union be really oppressive or unjust to the South nay, if the South really believes it so we insist that a decent self-respect should impel the North to say, ‘we think you (are) utterly mistaken, but you have a right to judge for yourselves; so go if you will.”[1183]
On December 3, 1860, before Lincoln’s inauguration, President James Buchanan said in his Fourth Annual Message to Congress, “The question fairly stated is, has the Constitution delegated to Congress the power to coerce a State into submission which is attempting to withdraw or has actually withdrawn from the Confederacy? If answered in the affirmative, it must be on the principle that the power has been conferred upon Congress to declare and to make war against a State. After much serious reflection I have arrived at the conclusion that no such power has been delegated to Congress or to any other department of the Federal Government.”[1184]
Buchanan further stated, “The fact is that our Union rests upon public opinion, and can never be cemented by the blood of its citizens shed in civil war. If it cannot live in the affections of the people, it must one day perish. Congress possesses many means of preserving it by conciliation, but the sword was not placed in their hand to preserve it by force.”[1185]
The framers voted to deny Congress the power to direct the military power of the Union against the citizens of any state to coerce obedience. The framers also voted to prohibit Congress from sending the Federal army or navy into the territory of any state, except to repel a foreign invasion as requested by the governor or the state legislature to manage an incident of domestic violence. The Federal Government does not have the constitutional right to obstruct any state from seceding from the Union. John Remington Graham, author and attorney, claims that the founding fathers deliberately omitted this power from the Constitution in order to support the state’s right of secession.[1186]
A Peace Convention began on February 4, 1861, directed by John Tyler. One hundred and thirty-one delegates attended it from both sides with the intentions of resolving the precarious situation. The convention met for three weeks. Attendees included John J. Crittenden and Stephen Douglas from Kentucky, and Robert A. Toombs from Georgia, Thomas Ewing, from Kansas and Salmon P. Chase from Ohio. Seven states had already committed to secession. John J. Crittenden proposed the Compromise of
December 18, 1860, which Lincoln rejected. It called for negotiations before committing to a bloody war. Officials adopted the Crittenden-Johnson Resolution on July 25, 1861, which clarified that the war was to reunite the states and not to abolish slavery. Further, the Union was to take no action against the institution of slavery.
Lincoln refused to negotiate with Confederate agents, as it would legitimize their claims of sovereignty. The delegation remained in Washington for thirty days and finally returned to Richmond. Lincoln, because he rejected the opportunity to settle the differences between the two diverse parts of the country apparently preferred a show of military force against the southern states in order to enforce the Union’s authority in a section of the country where the people believed in state sovereignty.
John Slidell and Judah P. Benjamin, Louisiana’s two senators, withdrew from the U.S. Senate at the Peace Convention. Benjamin, a British subject, was born in St Thomas in the West Indies. He had moved, with his parents, to Charleston, South Carolina in 1818. He went north to attend Yale (1825-1828). In 1827, the Charleston Hebrew Orphan Aid Society, a forerunner to B’nai B’rith, inducted Benjamin into their society. In 1832, he moved to New Orleans where he married Natalie St. Martin. Benjamin and Thomas Slidell, John’s brother, were partners, along with Charles Magill Conrad in a New Orleans law firm.[1187]
Before July 1861, Massachusetts native, John Lothrop Motley, who attended Göttingen, wrote two provocative letters to The Times defending the Federal position for a war. An interested party reprinted these in London, as a propaganda pamphlet, entitled Causes of the Civil War in America, which favorably impressed Lincoln. Lincoln rewarded Motley with the position of U.S. minister to the Austrian Empire in 1861, a position he held until his resignation in 1867. He was the U.S. Ambassador to the United Kingdom from 1868 to 1870.
Motley wrote, “The Constitution was not drawn up by the States, it was not promulgated in the name of the States, it was not ratified by the States.”[1188] He argued, “Secession is civil war.” Additionally, he wrote, “It is probable that a long course of years will be run, and many inconveniences and grievances endured, before any one of the Free States secede from the reconstructed Union.”[1189] With the threat of death and property seizure hanging over their heads, people will think twice before even considering secession.
Motley further wrote, “The States never acceded to it, and possess no power to secede from it. It was ‘ordained and established’ over the States by a power superior to the States— by the people of the whole land in their aggregate capacity, acting through conventions of delegates expressly chosen for the purpose within each State, independently of the State Governments, after the project had been framed.”[1190]
Lincoln concurred with Motley’s deception, “The Union is older than the states and, in fact created them as states. The Union, and not themselves separately, procured their independence and their liberty. The Union threw off their old dependence for them and made them states, such as they are.”[1191] Motley further wrote, “As for the civil war, nothing could have averted it. It is the result of the forty years’ aggression of the slavery power. Lincoln’s election was a vote by a majority of every Free State that slavery should go no further, and then the South dissolved the union. Suppose we had acknowledged the confederacy, there would have been war all the same.”[1192]
Lincoln’s “government of the people,” the right of self-determination, was merely euphemistic rhetoric. Though he talked about it, he obviously did not believe the principle. He went to war to preserve profit- producing territory. Secession wars, throughout history, have always been about land and resources. Moral issues are contributory but are not legitimate motivating factors. With the passage of time and the application of the victor’s pen to paper, certain historians subject Americans to a sanitized version of history. The Civil War, as people commonly call it, is the most sanitized of all wars. The South, rather
than suffer total destruction, could have succeeded as an independent nation if that were the legitimate objective on both sides.[1193]
Lincoln maintained that people who even talked about secession were traitors.[1194] He claimed that secession was illegal and that the Confederate states, under the control of insurrectionists, were still part of the Union. He further argued that the government had an obligation to suppress the insurrection and restore the control of the southern states to the Union. The real reasons for the war would be evident within months after the war started. He imposed laws and policies that forever altered the country and set terrible precedents.
The Union’s victory destroyed the right of secession in America. British historian and political philosopher Lord Acton understood the deeper meaning of Southern defeat. In a letter to former Confederate General Robert E. Lee, on November 4, 1866, he wrote, “I saw in States’ Rights the only available check upon the absolutism of the sovereign will, and secession filled me with hope, not as the destruction but as the redemption of Democracy. I deemed you were fighting the battles of our liberty, our progress, and our civilization and I mourn for that which was lost at Richmond more deeply than I rejoice over that which was saved at Waterloo.”
South Carolina Secession, the Powder Keg
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