America’s Socialist Revolution Lincoln and the American System
If an individual acts like a Socialist, speaks like a Socialist, enacts legislation like a Socialist, abolishes freedom like a Socialist and provokes a revolution like a Socialist, then that person is probably a Socialist. Frederic Bastiat said, “Socialism is Legal Plunder” He also wrote, “The state is the great fiction by which everybody tries to live at the expense of everyone else.” Socialism, the collective ownership of the means of production and distribution, a political system attributed to Karl Marx, one of the architects of class warfare, predictably appeals to the downtrodden masses. The elite ruling class usually exploits the masses in most industrialized nations through their control over the currency, government policies and resources.
The telegraph, first established in 1839, expanded into a transcontinental telegraph line, completed on October 26, 1861, which brought the extensive borders of the U.S. into contact with Washington. Thomas A. Scott, a superintendent at the Pennsylvania Railroad, managed all telegraph lines, adjacent the railroads. Scott equipped a substantial military force and supervised the railroad and transportation lines. He facilitated the movement of supplies and troops on his railroads and once managed the transfer of twenty-three thousand soldiers, with provisions and baggage, a distance of 1,233 miles in eleven and a half days, from Bristoe Station, Virginia, to Chattanooga, Tennessee.[1347]
Early purveyors of the American System, John C. Calhoun and Henry Clay, advocated a national bank and a national currency, but without Congressional regulation, as mandated by the Constitution. They believed in protectionist high tariffs, a form of public plunder,[1348] to finance internal improvements including a national transportation and communication network. The federal government, through the Homestead Act, signed into law by President Lincoln on May 20, 1862, managed the distribution of land. They allocated an abundance of land to private mining, railroad, and timber corporations, making the Republican Party and its leaders very popular. The immigration bureau
encouraged unrestrained immigration. These two factors, the Homestead Act and immigration, contributed to the nation’s economic output and accelerated population growth into the American west.The Republican Party, during Lincoln’s War, implemented nearly every aspect of the American System, especially selective high tariffs which began in 1861 and lasted until 1932. The 1860 Republican National Convention, with Henry C. Carey’s guidance and Horace Greeley’s propaganda, placed a pro- tariff plank on their platform. Members of the House appointed Ohio Representative John Sherman as chair of the Committee on Ways and Means where he introduced it in the spring session of 1860 and it passed the House on May 10, 1860. They adopted the Morrill Tariff on March 2, 1861. Northerners in certain states supported the tariff while Southerners, who imported basic essentials, opposed it.
The American System, a mercantile economic system that Alexander Hamilton advanced was suspiciously similar to Rothschild’s European plan, as described in his Hazard Circular of July 1862 wherein capital controlled labor by controlling wages.[1349] Capital or capitalists, in collaboration with the government, control wages by creating corporate structures in which they employ thousands of people. Lincoln, a former railroad lawyer with close connections to that industry, focused on controlling transportation and communications during the war. Wartime also saw the growth of private industry related to supplying the troops and afterwards, these industries expanded as corporations because of their previous close connections to government legislators. The American System encourages and supports certain industries beneficial to the government’s purposes.
In 1848, Andrew Carnegie, from a family of radical reformers, had emigrated from Scotland with his
family. His father William Carnegie, belonged to the Chartist Movement, a British-based group composed of radical socialists who demanded revolutionary changes. William was the secretary of the local Chartist Association and wrote articles for Cobbett’s Political Register and letters in the Chartist newspaper, The True Scotsman.[1350]
Andrew Carnegie was working as a messenger boy in the Pittsburgh office of the Ohio Telegraph Company when he met Thomas A. Scott, of the Pennsylvania Railroad. Scott hired Carnegie as a telegrapher and his personal secretary. Carnegie worked his way up to Superintendent of the Pittsburgh Division and began investing his earnings in railroad-related industries. Prior to Lincoln’s war, Carnegie formed a partnership with George M. Pullman, the inventor of an upscale sleeping car for first class travelers.
Scott acquired the cooperation of Edward S. Sanford of the American Telegraph Company who set restrictions on ciphering messages to all operators. Civil cooperation and the management of the telegraph service in Washington were essential. The government appointed Sanford as an official censor. The military employed existing commercial systems to build more than 15,000,000 miles of lines exclusively for military purposes. Authorities attached the telegraph service, a civilian business, to the Quartermaster’s Department. Anson Stager, the co-founder of Western Union and the first president of Western Electric Manufacturing Company directed operations. To legitimize Stager’s actions, the military commissioned him on November 25, 1861. His subordinate, Thomas T. Eckert, a Western Union executive, later became Assistant Secretary of War (1865-1867).
People accused Scott of price gauging and profiteering so Congress convened an investigation. Simon Cameron, the Secretary of War, owned Northern Central Railroad stock. Both men allocated a disproportionate amount of business to their respective companies. The Pennsylvania Railroad’s earnings grew by forty percent while the Northern Central Railroad doubled its earnings in 1861. Unfortunately, the government was unable to prove any misconduct because of faulty recordkeeping.[1351] War Secretary Simon Cameron directed all telegraph operations. The individual field operators were independent of the generals that they worked with. They rendered complete obedience to the corporation representatives who now dominated the War Department. In 1864, the War Secretary would prohibit his commanding generals from interfering with the cipher-operators and restricted the use of cipher-books to civilian telegraph experts, approved and appointed by the War Secretary.[1352] Stanton centralized all essential telegraph operations in the telegraph room at the War Department.[1353]
Lincoln, with Republican support, created the Bureau of Agriculture on May 15, 1862, purportedly to feed the troops, but it actually imposed federal policies on farming, agriculture, and food, directed by a commissioner. They also authorized the first of the Morrill Land-Grant Colleges Act on July 2, 1862 to fund a system of industrial colleges, which allocated 30,000 acres of federal land to each eligible state, for its use in creating institutions to teach science, classical studies, agriculture, military strategies and other pursuits. This endeavor, like other such programs, encouraged political corruption, eased the way for a myriad of giant firms, and the robber barons, cohorts of big government.[1354] Skull and Bones, possibly the U.S. chapter of the Illuminati, acquired all of the Morrill Act land grant entitlements for New York and Connecticut, which they applied to any new construction at Cornell and Yale.[1355]
Lincoln, a consummate supervisor, managed every detail of the war efforts. Sanford and Eckert, Union censors, enlarged their military authority and actually made military decisions through censorship and withholding messages. Lincoln visited the telegraph room daily and spent long hours in the cipher room pondering political and military conditions. The telegraph room was the site of conferences held with cabinet officers, generals, congressional representatives, and others. Lincoln authored the first draft of the Emancipation Proclamation in the telegraph room. The Union intercepted and decoded Confederate cipher
messages which fell into their hands. During Sherman’s march to the sea, the Union tapped the Confederate wires. Lincoln communicated with western military commanders who were waging war against the Indians.[1356]
Wartime demand for oil and illuminants had dramatically increased. The region sixty miles north Pittsburgh became the center of the oil rush when oil bubbled to the surface of Oil Creek on the Storey family farm. William Coleman, Carnegie’s neighbor, leased the Storey family farm in 1859. He was making money even with the fluctuating oil prices, ranging from ten cents to five dollars a barrel. Coleman and his partners organized a joint-stock company to raise capital to build better facilities to increase profits. Carnegie visited the area and invested. In 1863, he earned $17,868.67 from an initial investment of a block of discounted $10 shares. He invited Scott and others to invest.[1357]
Carnegie got rich by investing and manipulating stock in companies like Western Union and Union Pacific. He watched people merge and absorb small companies into what became Western Union, which rivaled the Pacific and Atlantic Telegraph Company. In 1863, he purchased a small amount of Western Union stock. The railroads had agreed to allow the telegraph companies to use their exclusive right-of-ways rather than go to the huge expense of acquiring their own. Then Carnegie and his associates at the Pennsylvania Railroad set up a front company – the Keystone Telegraph Company that would act as franchise brokers. He arranged for additional franchises on railroads controlled by the Pennsylvania Railroad and managed to acquire massive stocks in the Pacific and Atlantic Telegraph Company with very little effort.[1358]
Pittsburgh became a center for wartime production of iron products – gunboat armor, ammunition and other industrial products. Carnegie collaborated with others to establish steel production, which became the major source of his fortune. Before the war, he had invested in the iron industry. The steel industry would become the railroad’s biggest customer. Franklin Garrett of the Atlanta Historical Society said, “It was largely the railroad that enabled the North to win the war.” Each side attempted to destroy the other side’s rail lines. It was a constant battle of destruction and rebuilding.[1359]
In just seven weeks, during May and June of 1864, sixty-five thousand Union soldiers were dead, wounded or missing. With the Conscription Act of 1863, General Ulysses S. Grant, the Commanding General of the U.S. Army (1864-1865), knew he had an unlimited number of soldiers to squander in the war. Much to Carnegie’s surprise, the Union drafted him in the summer of 1864, at about the time that General William T. Sherman was preparing for his infamous March to the Sea, the Savannah Campaign in Georgia that lasted from November to December 1864. Carnegie had assumed that his service with Scott sheltered him from the Conscription Act. He was unwilling to exchange his cozy life and risk death for the hazardous life of a soldier, fighting in the South, so he paid $850 for a substitute. General Grant, justifiably denounced as a butcher by both the North and the South, had begun a relentless campaign toward Richmond, Virginia. The Union captured Richmond, the Confederate capital, in April 1865.[1360]
The federal bureaucracy grew to about 70,000 civilians by 1863.[1361] Lincoln’s War permanently transformed the character of the federal bureaucracy as it added thousands of employees just to initiate and maintain the war effort. This phenomenon actually introduced the military economy that exists today wherein a sizeable portion of America’s population and individual communities depend economically on warfare-related production. Following the war, the government became responsible for paying pensions and caring for the injured veterans. On June 22, 1870, the government created the Justice Department to accommodate the legal issues arising from a person’s “service” to the nation. The federal bureaucracy expanded from the single office of Attorney General, which Congress created on September 26, 1789, into an entire department.
The railroad and freight industry encouraged others in their entrepreneurial efforts. Philip Armour of
Chicago started a profitable meatpacking business selling pork to the Union Army. However, the high- priced pork of questionable quality and origin frequently made the soldiers ill.[1362] Armour had tried his hand at mining, farming and as a grocer. He anticipated Lee’s surrender at Appomattox, on April 9, 1865. Therefore, Armour quickly boarded a train for New York and the stock exchange where he began selling pork short on the local exchange. When Grant was victorious, pork prices dropped and Armour made $2 million, which he invested in his meatpacking company in Chicago, well served by the infamous stockyards and a railway network. His business grew as he began exporting canned meats to Europe. By 1900, Armour and Company had grown into one of the biggest meatpackers in the world. This industry was the subject of Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle.[1363]
Boston capitalists, headed by John C. Stanton, gained control of the Alabama and the Chattanooga Railroads after Lincoln’s War. Stanton and his associates merged the two railroads in November 1868. Due to non-payment of state bonds, the State of Alabama seized the property in mid-1871. In November 1877, Frédéric Emile d’Erlanger and other foreign investors, under the auspices of the Emile Erlanger and Company, an English corporation reorganized several separate railroads as the Alabama Great Southern Railroad (AGS). The corporation, by 1881, had purchased every main railway between the bankrupt South and Cincinnati. Baron Frederic Emile d’Erlanger was reportedly Cecil Rhodes’ partner in his apartheid projects in Africa.[1364]
Thomas A. Scott, president of the Pennsylvania Railroad, from 1874 to 1880, then the largest corporation in the world, played a leading role in drafting the Compromise of 1877, which signaled the end of Reconstruction following Lincoln’s War and ended the Federal occupation of the South. Scott proposed what people called the “Scott Plan” which required the southern politicians to endorse government subsidies for numerous infrastructure improvements, especially the Texas and Pacific Railway, which was federally chartered and given generous land grants on March 3, 1871. It was to construct a southern transcontinental railroad between Marshall, Texas, and San Diego, California. Scott became the firm’s president in 1872. By 1881, the company had completed only 972 miles of track. The firm went bankrupt in 1888 and then set up the Texas Pacific Land Trust with a net of 3.5 million acres of land, which it still owned as of December 31, 2006, the largest private landowner in Texas. The Trust receives oil and gas royalties to this day.
Carnegie, as a major stockholder in Atlantic and Pacific Railroad, steered their construction work to Carnegie, now a construction contractor. In December 1872, he made a secret deal with Western Union for the exchange of part of the vast amount of Pacific shares in his control for Western Union shares. Western wanted to buy controlling interest in Pacific – cheaply. Carnegie, still controlling a vast amount of Pacific shares under his crony’s names, then began selling and exchanging stocks and created a façade bonanza, which increased Pacific’s stock. People rushed to buy stock. He and his friends dumped their Pacific shares while acquiring significant interest in Western Union, a company that Jay Gould had been attempting to take over. Despite the 622,000 deaths, the war was highly profitable for many people.
While the spoils system began decades before Lincoln took office, it grew exponentially during his administration. The spoils system granted jobs to the associates, friends or relatives of whoever won the election, not based on merit but on association. New administrations meant the new administration fired the existing employees and replaced them with their own group of political supporters. The spoils system morphed into guaranteed federal or public employment, maintained at taxpayer expense, despite skills or aptitude. On January 16, 1883, Congress passed the Civil Service Reform Act, known as the Pendleton Act, to encourage a merit-based system of public jobs. While the bill’s intentions were commendable, it did not address the basic question of the federal government employing a growing segment of the nation’s citizens in non-product-related labor, paid for by another segment of the population.
The Civil Service Reform Act necessitated the creation of the bipartisan Civil Service Commission to oversee the reforms. With all new legislation, up to and including the PATRIOT Act and Obama’s healthcare, the government creates new departments requiring even more employees to execute that new legislation. The so-called merit system initially applied to only about ten percent of federal jobs but currently it applies to more than ninety percent. The merit system provides unequal job security to federal employees. Under the merit system, allegedly no longer based on political preferences or associations, civil employees enjoy job security unparalleled in the private sector. Meanwhile, the government facilitates the outsourcing of jobs in the private sector through trade agreements beneficial to big corporations that have financial connections to legislators.
Congressional leaders, financial benefactors of monopoly corporatism, allegedly broke up the Chicago- based beef trust (Armour, Cudahy, Morris, Swift and Wilson) through the Packers and Stockyards Act of 1921. Government regulations typically burden small business firms but leave the larger corporations who make healthy political contributions alone. Despite government regulations, reasonable competition existed until the Reagan Administration.
Reagan and his vice president, George H. W. Bush, ignored anti-trust legislation and allowed corporate mergers to devour smaller firms. In 1970, the top four meat packing firms slaughtered about 21% of the nation’s beef. By 2000, ConAgra, Iowa Beef Processors (IBP, nation’s largest red meat producer), Excel Corporation and National Beef (fourth largest processor) slaughtered about 84% of the nation’s cattle and consequently controlled prices.[1365] Since 1979, Excel Corporation has been a wholly owned subsidiary of Cargill, infamous for animal abuse.[1366]
Many meatpacking plants have returned to the exploitative, dangerous conditions described by Upton Sinclair. Wages, once protected by organized labor, have plummeted. By 1983, worker’s wages “fell below the average U.S. manufacturing wage” and had further declined by twenty-five percent in 2002. Immigrants, willing to work for less, have replaced many middle class laborers. Rather than outsourcing labor to Third World countries, the meat and poultry industries are importing Third World laborers and “reproducing developing country employment conditions here.”[1367] Transnational corporations enhance their profits by exploiting labor and sales elsewhere. Tyson Foods formed a joint venture with Jiangsu Jinghai Poultry Industry Group Co. Ltd., to raise, process and sell chickens in east China under the Tyson brand name with owning seventy percent of the venture.[1368]
Lincoln, the Great Divider
The North shaped the nation’s propaganda for the terrible war, before and after. Author Phillip S. Paludan writes that Lincoln deserves the title of “the Great Communicator” more than any contemporary politician does.[1369] Additionally, he deserves the title of “the Great Divider” because he used his communication skills to provoke division. He was a skillful propagandist and was what authors Anthony Pratkanis and Elliot Aronson call a “Persuasion Agent.”[1370] His propaganda shaped American society. Currently, the U.S. is the most propagandized nation in the world, a process that began early in the nineteenth century. The best propagandist includes adamant denial and he always downplayed his own influence. He said, “Public opinion is everything in this country.”[1371] He masterfully used allegory, parables, fables, and metaphors. His phrases and words were extraordinarily well chosen and appropriate to his audience and the power to persuade and mesmerize.[1372] Every “free” country uses propaganda to manipulate the populace. Democracies rely on persuasion to shape opinion instead of coercion as in a totalitarian society.
On June 17, 1858, in Springfield, Illinois, Lincoln gave his famous House Divided speech in which he pointed out numerous divisive factors as if he were making a case for war. He concluded by summarizing,
“We cannot absolutely know that all these exact adaptations are the result of preconcert. But when we see a lot of framed timbers, different portions of which we know have been gotten out at different times and places and by different workmen, Stephen (Douglas), Franklin (Pierce), Roger (Taney), and James (Buchanan), for instance, and when we see these timbers joined together, and see they exactly make the frame of a house or a mill, all the tenons and mortises exactly fitting, and all the lengths and proportions of the different pieces exactly adapted to their respective places, and not a piece too many or too few, not omitting even scaffolding, or, if a single piece be lacking, we see the place in the frame exactly fitted and prepared yet to bring such piece in, in such a case, we find it impossible not to believe that Stephen and Franklin and Roger and James all understood one another from the beginning, and all worked upon a common plan or draft drawn up before the first blow was struck.”[1373]
Senator Lincoln’s speech set up the battle lines for an imminent war designed to strengthen the federal government at the expense of states’ rights. Lincoln, not a religious man, quoted the bible, “A house divided against itself cannot stand. I believe this government cannot endure permanently half slave and half free. I do not expect the union to be dissolved. I do not expect the house to fall – but I do expect it will cease to be divided. It will become all one thing or all the other.”[1374]
There was a series of confrontational congressional actions – the Kansas-Nebraska Act, maneuvered through Congress by Senator Stephen Douglas on May 30, 1854, which instigated the Kansas Border War (1854-1858) between pro-slavery and anti-slavery factions where at least 200 people died. It functioned as a proxy war preceding Lincoln’s War. John Brown, certainly a paid agitator with no personal resources, directed the Pottawatomie Massacre on May 24-25, 1856 in retaliation for the attack on Lawrence in December 1855. Later Brown raided Harper’s Ferry (October 16, 1859). The Dred Scott case in 1856-1857 was obviously bankrolled by interested parties on both sides of the debate who certainly cared nothing about Dred Scott.[1375]
Brown certainly did not launch a bloody attack on Harper’s Ferry just because a few people were disgruntled over a bad law when officials could have easily introduced better legislation.[1376] In 1842, Allan Pinkerton (1819-1884), a Chartist, a member of a radical social movement in the United Kingdom in the mid-1800s, came to the U.S. to avoid an arrest warrant in Glasgow. He was the son of a Chartist police officer and the founder of Glasgow Democratic Club.[1377] He settled in Chicago, was an abolitionist and financially aided John Brown, an early-day terrorist. In February 1855, he started the Pinkerton National Detective Agency and was later the head of the Union Intelligence Service in 1861–1862.
The Dred Scott decision adjudicated that Congress could not prohibit slavery from any territory. Some Northerners denounced and denied the permanency of the court’s ruling. Some Southerners felt that even the Constitution was no assurance of their rights within the Union. In 1859 John Brown, an anti-slavery fanatic, raided Harper’s Ferry, Virginia, allegedly to liberate the slaves. Federal troops arrested Brown and after a trial executed him on December 2, 1859. Horace Greeley, of The New York Times wrote, “The noblest manhood in America swings off the gallows of a felon.” Some Southerners thought that Greeley expressed the majority opinion of the North.[1378] On January 11, 1860, Marx told Friedrich Engels, “In my opinion, the biggest things that are happening in the world today are on the one hand the movement of the slaves in America started by the death of John Brown, and on the other the movement of the serfs in Russia.”[1379]
The string of interconnected events propelling the country towards a four-year bloodbath were part of a diabolical, well-planned conspiracy beginning with the mass marketing of Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin, the Kansas-Nebraska Act in 1854 which precipitated the Kansas Civil War in 1855 and 1856, and then the Dred Scott case in 1856 and 1857, followed by Buchanan’s commendation of the Lecompton Constitution in 1858.[1380] Chief Justice Roger B. Taney wrote the Supreme Court’s decision in
the Dred Scott case. He was always close to the private bankers.
Lincoln persuaded the North to relinquish the ideals of individual equality in favor of “social order,” an environment where individual rights were subservient to “institutional authority.” The Emancipation Proclamation, September 22, 1862, an executive order, followed the wholesale slaughter of Antietam. He viewed it as a victory and was the “instrument” that “reconciled Lincoln’s view of liberty for all with his oath to preserve the Union.”[1381] The Springfield Republican, pronounced the Emancipation Proclamation as “the greatest social and political revolution of the age.” General Henry W. Halleck, who became general in chief, admitted that, “The character of the war has very much changed within the last year. There is no possible hope of reconciliation with the rebels...we must conquer the rebels or be conquered by them.”[1382] Lincoln exploited the bloodbath of Antietam to shift the focus of the war to emancipation. It is relatively easy to manipulate a traumatized, vulnerable citizenry until it acquiesces to the direction that a persuasive leader wishes to pursue. This also appears to have been the case with September 11, 2001.
Charles A. Dana assured us that Lincoln knew exactly when to issue the proclamation. If it were premature, it would not have been as efficacious. The North would have rejected the proclamation at the beginning of the war.[1383] Lincoln drafted the document, probably in November, and gave a copy to each of his private secretaries, John Nicolay (the first draft) and John Hay. However, proper timing for the document’s public presentation was essential. The proclamation altered the direction of the war from mere containment of slavery to the southern states to complete elimination. On Thursday, November 19, 1863, Lincoln delivered the Gettysburg Address at the dedication of the Soldiers’ National Cemetery in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, four and a half months after the battle. In this address, he justified the Emancipation Proclamation, which led to a war surge in which he talked about healing the nation, preserving the Union and reuniting with the “rebels.” More than anything, he had to provide a reason why all of these soldiers died.[1384]
Edward Everett, who studied at Göttingen University, was a powerful speaker and orator and a huge Lincoln supporter. He gave a two-hour oration at Gettysburg that preceded Lincoln’s Gettysburg address. The facilitators actually scheduled him to be the main speaker. They invited Lincoln to dedicate the grounds and nothing more. He was a Republican elector from Massachusetts for the 1864 election.[1385] He had been Secretary of State, U.S. Senator, U.S. Representative, Governor of Massachusetts, president of Harvard University, and Vice Presidential candidate. Interestingly, this old photo clearly shows him giving the sign of Satan, the horned god referred to as “El Diablo,” also known as the mana cornuta, the international sign of Satan.
Folks, It Wasn’t About Slavery
President Abraham Lincoln said, “My paramount objective is to save the Union and it is not either to save or destroy slavery. If I could save the Union without freeing any slave, I would do it.”[1386] In 1867, Lysander Spooner, the political philosopher, wrote, “On the part of the North, the war was carried on, not to liberate slaves, but by a government that had always perverted and violated the Constitution, to keep
the slaves in bondage; and was still willing to do so, if the slaveholders could be thereby induced to stay in the Union.”[1387]
Slavery ended peacefully in other areas of the world except for the slave revolt in Haiti in 1794, which occurred under entirely different circumstances. Oligarchs resort to revolution, in every generation, in order to expand state powers. Some of New England’s militant, vocal abolitionists demanded immediate abolition of slavery in the South. They called for violent slave uprisings, which would have inevitably led to massive deaths as in Haiti. Northern abolitionists published a terrorist manifesto and attempted to smuggle 100,000 copies into the South. This hateful publication depicted examples of how slaves might murder their masters. In 1859, the Harpers Ferry attack increased political and racial tensions. Lincoln and other Republicans endorsed and financed such terrorist acts against the South.
Contrary to everything that Establishment historians have told us, the misnamed Civil War was not about abolishing slavery. The mythical justification of immediately liberating the slaves, demanded by the Radical Republicans, caused the battle-field-related deaths of at least 622,000 people and the serious injury to another million people. Lincoln provoked an unnecessary, bloody war to further his political vision of a strong state, which also happened to be an Illuminati goal. Lincoln, the so-called “constitutional dictator” was never concerned with the moral injustices of slavery.[1388]
Contemporary Neo-Conservative and Neo-Marxist talking heads still claim that the North fought the war to free the slaves. In that, they agree with Marx who deceptively claimed that the South wanted to expand slavery to the rest of the country. Marx argued, “The war of the Southern Confederacy is, therefore, not a war of defense, but a war of conquest, a war of conquest for the extension and perpetuation of slavery.” Lincoln, agreeing with Marx, claimed, “One section of our country believes slavery is right, and ought to be extended, while the other believes it is wrong, and ought not to be extended.”[1389] Lincoln, Marx and the contemporary left and right repetitively propagate the same hoax, which apparently makes if official regardless of the facts. Marx and others purposefully perpetuated the misleading interpretation of the war during and after that bloody revolution. His explanation is now a part of the traditional historiography in the U.S. and Britain.
Before the Revolutionary War, the Southern colonies wanted to petition England’s king to end the African slave trade. Jefferson wanted to insert criticism about the African slave trade into the Declaration of Independence but someone removed the statement to avoid infuriating the New Englanders who were making huge profits from slave trading. Jefferson ceded the Louisiana Purchase to the Union on the condition that the government prohibits slavery in the territory. Slavery received a twenty-year grace period when the states adopted the Constitution. In 1808, Congress legislated against slave trading and 95% of the Congress, of all the states, agreed. Representatives from four states wanted to retain slavery – two from the South and two from the North. The South never attempted to expand slavery.[1390]
In 1850, the total number of slaveholders in the South’s slaveholding areas was 347,525 out of a total white population of about six million. Slave owners, mostly elite planters, made up less than a third of the Southern whites.[1391] The Fugitive Slave Act of September 18, 1850 demanded the return of runaway slaves. Even before his election, Lincoln endorsed that act, and by default, endorsed slavery, as evidenced in two letters to Salmon P. Chase, dated June 9 and June 20, 1859. He wrote, “Although I think Congress has Constitutional authority to enact a Fugitive Slave law, I have never elaborated an opinion upon the subject.”[1392] If a Southern slave-owner wanted assurance of retaining his “property,” staying in the Union would have been the best choice.[1393] Lincoln said that he would not interfere with slavery and supported a new constitutional amendment that would further protect the institution. Northern businessmen were not interested in interfering with Southern slavery; it financially benefited them. The slavery issue was a pretext used by both sides. The tariff issue would not have ignited so much passion and unanimity.
Therefore, they selected slavery, a huge emotional political ploy.[1394]
Leading Freemasons directed the slave trade, owned the plantations, and managed the cotton industry. They, with their wealth, controlled U.S. politics and installed compliant politicians in both the North and the South. Slavery and states’ rights were the justifications used to execute the horrific war. Most Americans were not in the slave trade, did not own slaves or plantations. Nor did the average citizen own a textile mill where the cotton was processed. The wealthy elite, the minority, used their influence and money to agitate the rest of the population into a hateful frenzy, sufficient to wage a fratricidal war and kill their fellow citizens.[1395]
In his first inaugural on March 4, 1861, Lincoln said, “I have no purpose, directly or indirectly, to interfere with the institution of slavery in the States where it exists. I believe I have no lawful right to do so, and I have no inclination to do so.”[1396] The Crittenden Resolution, passed July 25, 1861, confirmed Congress’s agreement that they would wage the war only for the reunion of the states, and not for abolishing the South’s “peculiar institution” of slavery. The war was not about “overthrowing or interfering with the rights or established institutions of those States,” but to “defend and maintain the supremacy of the Constitution and to preserve the Union.” If the seceding states returned to the Union, slavery could remain intact.
In April 1861, when Lincoln called for volunteers, Boston’s black community willingly responded to defend the government with their “lives, fortunes and sacred honor.” People responded willingly from all over the North. Blacks were willing to raise their own regiments as they hoped that military service might result in gaining full citizenship rights. Others still had relatives enslaved in the South and military service demonstrated their condemnation of slavery. However, white troops, supported by Washington’s top officials, had resolved to keep their battle against the South a white man’s conflict. Lincoln did not think blacks would make good soldiers and said he did not want to make the war about slavery.[1397]
The Union enacted a draft on March 3, 1863 authorizing the president to draft citizens between the ages of twenty and forty-five for a three-year term as of July 1863 with additional drafts in March, July and December 1864. An individual could provide a suitable substitute or pay the government a $300 commutation fee to avoid service. Conscription provoked the New York Draft Riots (July 13-16, 1863). Of the 2,100,000 Union soldiers, about 2% were conscripts, and about 6% were paid substitutes. Confederate conscripts accounted for 25% to 33% of the army’s forces between April 1864 and early 1865. The variance in the draftees was indicative of how the war was progressing. Both sides used the draft to stimulate voluntary enlistment. The Union assigned the counties to enroll the names of eligible men.
When the Union Army finally inducted blacks, the military issued them inferior weapons. The whites regularly used the black forces as slave labor and referred to them as “damned niggers.” They received harsher punishments than the white soldiers did for the same infractions. They comprised about 10% of the total number of troops but received about 80% of the court Martials and executions. The military summarily executed many of the blacks without the formality of a trial.[1398] For an army that was supposedly fighting for the freedom of the blacks, the Union soldiers committed numerous acts of plunder, rape and other brutalities against the blacks.
Slaves were regularly “captured” and conscripted into the Union Army where they used them as cannon fodder. These individuals did not enlist; the Union seized them against their will. On September 1, 1864, General Benjamin Butler received a report from General Innis N. Palmer, a West Point graduate, regarding the challenges he was having getting the blacks to help in their fight for liberation – “The negroes will not go voluntarily, so I am obliged to force them...The matter of collecting the colored men for laborers has been one of some difficulty but I hope to send up a respectable force...They will not go
willingly...They must be forced to go...This may be considered a harsh measure, but...we must not stop at trifles.” Fighting or laboring against one’s will constitutes slavery. However, to the North, it was “trifles.” War Secretary Stanton was very aware of the conscription of black slaves into the Union Army. Some of these conscripts were as young as fourteen years of age. The Union forces hunted and seized blacks from the fields where they were working. They placed their captives into regiments without the knowledge of their families.[1399]
About 70% to 80% of the non-slave owning Confederate soldiers would not have fought to preserve slavery. Most Southerners fervently believed that the more militarized, numerically superior North did not have a Constitutional right to liberate slaves who they considered the legitimate property of others in the sovereign states. The Constitution protected slavery even after the government prohibited slave trade. Many Southerners favored gradual, organized emancipation in order to allow the stabilization of the economy and the assimilation of the slaves while adjusting from a slave economy and integrating paid labor. The South had already stopped purchasing slaves while hypocritical Northerners, who had initiated the slave trade in the mid-1600s, continued to seize and sell Africans.
In the North, white residents segregated the “free” blacks in every aspect of their lives. Additionally, they literally had no right to defend themselves or to earn a living. They could not travel on the same railway cars, stagecoaches or steamboats. They could not enter hotels or restaurants except as servants. The whites emphatically denied the blacks social equality, as they were educated in their own schools, prayed in their own churches, received care in their own hospitals, and when they committed a crime, the authorities incarcerated them in their own prisons. Black codes, often a part of amended state constitutions, prevailed in every northern state. These codes extracted heavy fines from blacks and mulattoes who even entered any state that prohibited their residency. Blacks could not enter into a contract, vote or legally marry a white person if they were even one-eighth black. Interracial marriage carried a fine of as much as $5,000 and ten years’ imprisonment. Blacks could not testify against whites in court and could not hold a political office. These discriminatory codes and laws, publicized by the press, prevented blacks from receiving the protection of the law and made them highly vulnerable to a multitude of abuses at the hands of the whites. Ohio, the site of so much abolitionist activism, prohibited, by armed force if necessary, the resettlement of emancipated slaves from the South.[1400]
Mildred Lewis Rutherford (1852-1928), a Georgia educator, was the historian of the United Daughters of the Confederacy. In her recently reprinted book, Truths of History, she wrote, “Confederate General Lee freed his slaves while Union General Grant maintained his slaves. In the Confederate Army there were 200,000 slaveholders while in the Union Army, there were 315,000 slaveholders.”[1401] In most major battles, Confederate non-slave holding soldiers were fighting against Union officers and soldiers who had not been required to relinquish their slaves. This is certainly hypocritical duplicity perpetrated by the “great emancipator.”[1402]
Lincoln, Marx and Emancipation
Emancipation is an ambiguous double-edged sword. In order to equalize all citizens to the lowest possible level, it is essential to guarantee basic freedoms to everyone. Motivation gives name to any action – calling for the freedom of a particular ethnic group, if motivated by compassion, is a moral act of genuine benevolence. Calling for their emancipation in order to regulate and subjugate the entire population is an act of tyranny. Lincoln, in the final Lincoln-Douglas debate, said, “I will say then that I am not, nor ever have been in favor of bringing about in any way the social and political equality of the white and black races.”[1403]
Attorney James Alexander Hamilton, the son of Federalist Alexander Hamilton, was the U.S. attorney for
the Southern District of New York in 1860, a position he had held for thirty years. He was president of an emancipation group at the Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art, known simply as Cooper Union, founded in 1859 in downtown Manhattan, the site of Lincoln’s speech on February 27, 1860 before the delegates selected him as the Republican candidate.[1404] In late 1859, New York’s elite invited Lincoln to speak to them; the speech made him an overnight political star. Hamilton, a strong Lincoln supporter, early in the war began urging the emancipation of the slaves, a consistent Illuminati maneuver. Hamilton, a member of the Philolexian Society, frequently advised Lincoln’s Treasury Secretary Salmon P. Chase, a Freemason, on federal financial matters.[1405]
The Washington Lecture Association arranged a series of lectures, from December 1861 to April 1862, at the Smithsonian lecture hall. On January 3, 1862, with Lincoln, Salmon P. Chase, and ten Republican congressmen on the platform, Horace Greeley, editor of the New York Tribune presented the lecture, The Nation wherein he advocated emancipation of the slaves and the “vigorous prosecution of the war.”[1406] Lincoln later met with each of the speakers privately – George B. Cheever, a New York Congregational minister; Ralph Waldo Emerson, American philosopher; and Wendell Phillips, a Boston lawyer. Some of the speakers apparently persuaded him to view emancipation as a viable war issue.[1407] Emerson, a Transcendentalist, regularly contributed articles to The Dial: A Magazine for Literature, Philosophy, and Religion, a magazine promoting the Transcendentalist ideology.[1408] He was, according to Oliver Wendell Holmes, the greatest inspiration to the movement. Holmes wrote, “So far as his own relation to the circle of illuminati ... lies himself (Emerson) is the best witness.”[1409] Dr. Holmes, part of the literary elite and a contributor to The Atlantic Monthly, belonged to Boston’s Saturday Club, where, once a month, the illuminati met.[1410] Dr. Holmes was the father of Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., the U.S. Supreme Court Justice who issued the sterilization verdict in the case of Carrie Buck in 1927.
A week after Greeley’s lecture, Reverend George B. Cheever spoke on the Justice and Necessity of Immediate Military Emancipation. He complained that the “crushing of the rebellion has been promised, but is not yet seriously undertaken.” Further, he stressed, “It will never be accomplished till we strike Slavery to the heart.”[1411] Wendell Phillips said the war “is primarily a social revolution... . The war can only be ended by annihilating that Oligarchy which formed and rules the South and makes the war, by annihilating a state of society...The whole social system of the Gulf States must be taken to pieces.”[1412]
On January 31, 1862, Emerson rebuked Lincoln and his administration for its “half-hearted prosecution of the war.” Emerson argued that if they fought the war on high moral principles, it would repair a deeper wound than it created. The Smithsonian lectures were instrumental in convincing Lincoln to issue the Emancipation Proclamation and fight a total war against the Confederate army and the Southern noncombatants.[1413] Emerson had previously remarked about the “inferior” race, which would “follow the Dodo into extinction.”[1414] New Englanders, many of whom were Unitarian or Calvinist, viewed themselves as “God’s Chosen People.” Therefore, they did not want “inferior people” mingling among them.
On January 27, 1862, Karl Marx, in a meeting at the Saint Martin’s Hall in London, merged several left wing groups into what would later become the International Workingmen’s Association. He urged the workers to vigorously oppose their government’s intentions of intervening in the American Civil War on the Confederate side. James Murray Mason and John Slidell were in London at the time seeking financial support for the Confederacy. The purpose of Marx’s meeting was to create mass opposition, according to the newspaper, to “those slaveholders from the rebel states of America.” The attendees unanimously concluded that those two agents were “utterly unworthy of the moral sympathies of the working classes” of Britain. The radicals in Britain portrayed Mason and Slidell as agents of a tyrannical rebellious faction against the American republic making them “sworn enemies against the social and political rights of the
working classes of all countries.” They voted that “it is the duty of the working men to express their sympathies with the United States in their gigantic struggle for the preservation of the Union.”[1415]
On February 2, 1862, news of the meeting at Newhall appeared in Die Presse of Vienna, “A London Workers’ Meeting,” written by Marx, the first in his series covering the British working class and their thoughts about the American Civil War. Marx pointed out that the British working class, despite their vast numbers, no one represented them in Parliament but they were not “without political influence.” They could exert force by external pressure through massive demonstrations. By inciting outrage, “pressure from without,” the working class could provoke important legislation. Previously, the British ruling class had effectively manipulated the working class, though unrepresented, to pass unpopular policies in the interests of certain parties.[1416]
The Union Naval blockade had stopped the majority of cotton from getting to the British textile mills resulting in work stoppages and shorter hours, which produced “incredible misery among the workers in the northern manufacturing districts and was growing worse daily.”[1417] Marx was so charismatic and manipulative that he could inspire the most desperate people to make personal sacrifices for what they supposed were moral principles. Marx, always promoting a violent Proletarian Revolution, shifted the circumstances and issues, manipulated, and exploited the workingman to support the revolution in America. He apparently had little regard for the starving textile workers.
Between 1861 and 1865, Richard Cobden, siding with Marx, and other radical British manufacturers, fearing that the outcome of America’s war might jeopardize the elite status quo in England, propagandized the Lancashire workingmen, who then voted to sacrifice their wages in support of the North. The stories spread to top U.S. politicians who wanted a guarantee that the starving British workers actually rejected, of their own free will, the opening of the blockade that Lincoln had imposed on April 19, 1861. William E. Gladstone, who once supported Jefferson Davis, used the story of the suffering workpeople to withhold support to the South.[1418]
Marx, in his regular dispatches to the Tribune, characterized the British textile workers as self-sacrificing and heroic, for despite the grievous hardships resulting from the cotton blockade, they were willing, as their sacrifices prevented England’s ruling class from supporting the Confederacy. Americans accepted the notion that ultimately, Britain’s wealthy elite compensated the British workers for their sacrifices in support of the Union.[1419] Of course, the wealthy had sufficient resources to live quite comfortably, despite the fact that their factories were not manufacturing clothing from the southern cotton.
Marx characterized the South as having secretly planned a war for years and portrayed Jefferson Davis as a Southern dictator. Marx said the Confederate Constitution recognized slavery as a “good thing” as opposed to the Constitution of the founders. He claimed that Southern slaveholders controlled the Supreme Court, referring to the controversial Dred Scott decision.[1420] Rothschild’s European plan of labor, as cited in the Hazard Circular, was incompatible with slavery. The wealthy bankers could control and manipulate wage slaves, people who were dependent on the elite who owned the factories. There was a huge influx of cheap labor from Europe making slavery economically burdensome. It would have ended without compulsion, simply by economic necessity.[1421] It was more expensive to take care of all of the daily needs of the slaves – housing, food, clothing, and medical care than to hire laborers for a wage. When slaves became elderly and could no longer labor, their owners took care of them in their old age. Factory owners simply replaced aged employees who were no longer able to work.
On September 7, 1862, Socialist Robert Dale Owen, Congressman from Indiana, wrote to Lincoln urging the immediate emancipation of the slaves. On September 22, 1862, Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation, which took effect January 1, 1863. Owen’s letter was reportedly one of the crucial factors in his decision. Owen is the same politician who drafted the act establishing the Smithsonian Institution.
As a previous member of the Indiana Constitutional Convention, he was instrumental in the enactment of the liberal provisions for woman’s rights and he introduced the free public education system in Indiana.[1422] Secretary Chase, with his own agenda, added the final clauses to the Emancipation Proclamation.[1423]
Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation freeing the slaves in the South on September 22, 1862, claiming it his right as the Commander-in-Chief of the Army and Navy. This was not an act of Congress but rather a presidential Executive Order, enforceable by law.[1424] The proclamation did not free any slaves within the Union. The legislation only freed slaves in a country in which Lincoln had no authority anddidnotapplytothepeopleenslavedunderhislegaljurisdiction.[1425] Nordiditincludefreedomforthe slaves within the states that the Union had already taken control of – six parishes within Louisiana. General Grant did not free his slaves by January 1, 1863. It required the 13th Amendment, December 6, 1865,forhimtofreehisslaves.[1426] SlaveownersinDelaware,Kentucky,MarylandandMissouri,loyalto the Union, were allowed to keep their slaves. The Confederates were aware that the Emancipation Proclamation did not apply to northern slaves.[1427]
Three Russian historians discovered several letters from Karl Marx published in the Vienna Presse, for which Marx was a correspondent during the Civil War. The original appeared in Die Presse on October 12, 1862, shortly after the Emancipation Proclamation. Marx said, “Lincoln is a figure sui generis in the annals of history...He always gives the most significant of his acts the most commonplace form...And this is the character the recent Proclamation bears, the most important document of American history since the founding of the Union, a document that breaks away from the old American Constitution, Lincoln’s manifesto on the abolition of slavery...In the history of the United States and in the history of humanity, Lincoln occupies a place beside Washington...everything of significance taking shape in the New World makes its appearance in such everyday form...The ordinary play of the electoral system bore him to its summit...a man without intellectual brilliance, without special strength of character...Never yet has the New World scored a greater victory than in this instance, through its demonstration that, thanks to its political and social organization, ordinary people of good will can carry out tasks which the Old World would have to have a hero to accomplish!”[1428]
Jefferson Davis said the proclamation was the “most execrable measure of a guilty man.” It promised freedom only to slaves living in regions unoccupied by the Federal armies. Slaves in the Border States, Maryland, Missouri and Tennessee, remained in bondage. The London Spectator reported, “The principle asserted is not that a human being cannot justly own another, but that he cannot own him unless he is loyal to the United States.”[1429] Marx was overjoyed with Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation. He then exclaimed, “Never has such a gigantic transformation taken place so rapidly.” Because of this liberation, “a new and vigorous life” would emerge.[1430] The Springfield, Massachusetts Republican, a wartime newspaper, envisioned that Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation would produce “the greatest social and political revolution of the age.”[1431]
On December 1, 1862, Lincoln proposed three constitutional amendments that called for compensated emancipation and colonization, a benign word for deportation.[1432] Lincoln, who believed in white supremacy and apartheid, sought to colonize or exile the blacks to West Africa, the Caribbean or Central America, Henry Clay’s solution for the black problem. Lincoln did not believe in the “fundamental equality” of the races or general assimilation into the population.[1433]
The proclamation was a political ploy; either obey or risk military action. Lincoln admitted the proclamation was a military measure and was not a humanitarian gesture.[1434] The troops did not actively support Emancipation but they were motivated by their passionate determination to save the Union rather than the hatred of slavery. The radical abolitionists and Republicans promoted emancipation. The New York Tribune advocated emancipation, a moral rather than a practical measure. The Union army did not
have a sufficient foothold in the South to enforce the policy.[1435]
Lincoln’s Message to Congress on December 8, 1863 called for a Constitutional amendment to ban slavery. He offered lenient terms for the readmission of some of the former “rebellious” states. Most of the Republicans thought he was far too lenient. The Democrats objected to Lincoln making slavery and emancipation a war issue.[1436] The media mythmakers portrayed the Northerners, especially after the proclamation, as morally superior and the Southerners as treasonous villains and concealed the North’s real reason for their aggression. Contemporary warmongers utilize the same moralistic phrases against current “evil-doers.”
Marx repeatedly credited British workers as being responsible for Britain avoiding involvement in the war. In November 1864, he wrote to co-conspirator Joseph Weydemeyer, a Union military strategist and referred to the “labor kings of London” who had “prevented Lord Palmerston from declaring war upon the United States” because of the protest meeting in St. James’ Hall. Later, he wrote that it was the heroic opposition of the working classes in Lancashire, who absolutely refused to permit the Confederate sympathizers to exploit their abject sufferings.[1437]
The International Workingmen’s Association sent Lincoln a congratulatory message when the voters reelected him in 1864. Marx drafted the message to the “son of the working class” because of his “noble struggle to emancipate an enslaved race.”[1438] Marx maintained that white labor was incapable of emancipating itself as long as slavery was constitutionally legal in the U.S.[1439] In February 1865, Charles Francis Adams, the U.S. Ambassador to Britain told Marx that his comments “are accepted by him (Lincoln) with a sincere and anxious desire that he may be able to prove himself not unworthy of the confidence which has been recently extended to him by his fellow-citizens, and by so many of the friends of humanity and progress throughout the world.”[1440]
Lincoln was encouraged by foreign immigration. Some 615,000 men, women and children had arrived during the war whom he regarded as “one of the principal replenishing stream which are appointed by Providence to repair the ravages of internal war.”[1441] Lincoln assigned guilt and stipulated the requirements for peace, “In stating a single condition of peace, I mean simply to say that the war will cease on the part of the government whenever it shall have ceased on the part of those who began it.”[1442] The Northerners accepted the propaganda then and the media and government currently persuade the majority of Americans to accept it now.
Marx and Engels exchanged at least sixty-one letters between them regarding the war. They actually functioned as propaganda agents for the Union cause in Europe through their articles in several European newspapers.[1443] The European radicals who remained in Europe saw the war in America as a revolution. Marx described the war as a “world transforming ... revolutionary movement.”
Marx was an Illuminist. Author Terry Melanson, expert on the Illuminati wrote, “A direct doctrinal link is detectable from Rousseau (Weishaupt and the Illuminati) to Robespierre to Buonarroti/Babeuf to Blanqui to Marx.”[1444] Marx and Engels designed the Communist Manifesto to create a super-State based on international slave labor and the destruction of liberty. The Illuminati leadership changed after the publication of the Manifesto, which determined the course for the twentieth century. Illuminism, a centuries-old force unleashed by Weishaupt, became Communism. However, the strategy for the destruction of the existing order remained unchanged from the tactics revealed by Weishaupt’s papers. The Bavarian government seized his documents in 1787 and forced the movement underground until 1848. The original Illuminist plan has been static in every revolution. The dupes or initiates of the outer circle believe they are engaged in something noble, which promises independence and unity in their country. Those in the higher degrees gradually learn the real objectives of the order – and may even participate in the destruction of society, religion and legitimate government. They then intend to replace people’s
religious feelings with the deification of the State, communal ownership of land and capital and abolition of private property.[1445]
The word Illuminati is the plural of Illuminatus, Latin for the one who is illuminated.[1446] Lucifer’s name denotes that he was the “holder of the light.” An Illuminati symbol is a lighted torch to signify Lucifer.
Frederic A. Bartholdi, a Freemason and an established sculptor residing in Paris, began his monumental work after the successful culmination of America’s Bolshevik revolution. His colossal work, “lady of liberty,” or holder of the light took two decades to complete. Its name is actually Liberty Enlightening the World. People conceived the idea for the statue at a dinner party at Glatigny, a country estate near Versailles in 1865. This was possibly a majestic celebratory gift to memorialize the great socialistic achievement of infiltrating and instituting a powerful central government in the U.S., which would then direct the tyrannization of the rest of the world.
On October 14, 1875, Bartholdi was a member of the Lodge Alsace-Lorraine, Paris. Membership in that lodge consisted of leading intellectuals, government officials and authors. On June 19, 1884, prior to the unveiling of the statue to the U.S. delegation, Bartholdi gathered his lodge members and they “marched in procession” to review the statue. On November 13, 1884, he presented a lecture to his lodge covering the history and diverse methods he used in building it. On August 5, 1884, 33rd degree Mason, William A. Brodie, Grand Master of the Grand Lodge of New York, laid the foundation stone for the Statue of Liberty holding the Masonic torch of Enlightenment in New York harbor.[1447]
Lincoln repeatedly said that the right of revolution, the “right of any people” is to “throw off, to revolutionize, their existing form of government, and to establish such other in its stead as they may choose” was “a sacred right, a right, which we may hope and believe, is to liberate the world.” The Declaration of Independence, he insisted often, was the great “charter of freedom” and in the example of the American Revolution, “the world has found...the germ...to grow and expand into the universal liberty of mankind.” Lincoln championed the leaders of the European revolutions of 1848 and Karl Marx praised Lincoln in 1865 as “the single-minded son of the working class” who had led his “country through the matchless struggle for the rescue of an enchained race and the reconstruction of a social world.”[1448]
Lincoln repeatedly, through the years, clarified his beliefs in the inferiority of the blacks versus the superiority of the whites. The emancipation and the war was not about equality for the blacks, a group that Lincoln thought should be deported. However, they were useful for the socialist propaganda machine. Both Marx and Lincoln, in their public speeches, used the blacks or the poor to further another agenda. The war was really all about a successful Marxist revolution.
Lincoln, the Machiavellian Dictator
Brian Danoff wrote, “Some see Lincoln as a virtual dictator, others as an icon of democracy; some see him as a revolutionary, others as a conservative; some as a civic humanist, others as a kind of Christian theologian. What then are we to make of these disparate interpretations of Lincoln and Machiavelli? First of all, we should notice that the debate about Machiavelli to a large extent parallels the debate about Lincoln. Like Machiavelli, Lincoln has been construed as both a cynical pragmatist and as a lover of
liberty. And like Machiavelli, Lincoln has been associated with republican government, on one hand, and with authoritarian government, on the other. Lincoln can legitimately be called Machiavellian, then, in part because we find in Lincoln the same paradoxical combinations that we find in Machiavelli.”[1449]
On April 15, 1861, Lincoln, through an Executive Proclamation, called for an aggregate number of 75,000 from the northern states to put down a rebellion. He invaded the South without a Congressional Declaration of War. On April 19 and 27, he imposed an unconstitutional blockade on the ports of the seceded states. This was wholly unacceptable to the law of nations except when governments are embroiled in war. On April 20, he ordered an additional nineteen vessels for the Navy for defense purposes. On May 3, he asked 42,034 volunteers to serve for a period of three years and sought to enlarge the regular army by 23,000 and the navy by 18,000, an invasion of legislative powers.
With the blockade on the southern seaports, ships and cargoes belonging to private parties could be confiscated and retained. On July 13, 1861, Congress convened, and approved of all seizures that had already taken place, all acts, proclamations and presidential orders that had previously occurred – the war, the embargo, and the plundering of private property.[1450]
On April 20, Lincoln asked Treasury Secretary Chase to advance him $2 million of unappropriated funds to give to three private New York citizens to be used by them for certain military requisitions and naval measures as needed for defense and support. He declared martial law, suspended the writ of habeas corpus, and imprisoned his political opponents and anti-war protestors and journalists – all without a legal trial. He discontinued mail service, the method of distribution, for anti-war newspapers. He shut down twenty-one newspapers for speaking out against his policies. He nationalized the railroads and censored all telegraph communications. He incarcerated some Maryland legislators who he suspected might vote to secede from the Union. He imposed military conscription. During the war, his administration imprisoned at least 14,000 civilians.[1451]
On May 10, 1861, by public proclamation, Lincoln suspended habeas corpus in Florida, a Confederate state. Then in an order to General Scott, dated June 20, 1861, he suspended habeas corpus “at any point where resistance occurs” through military officers in command between Washington and New York City. [1452] On April 27, 1861, he suspended habeas corpus in Maryland and in parts of some Midwestern states. He believed that the Southerners who seceded had relinquished all civil liberties. His dictatorial administration instigated military trials in Missouri that the U.S. Supreme Court condemned. Union authorities arrested and tried countless citizens of Missouri in these courts.[1453]
In 1867, Lysander Spooner wrote, “The principle, on which the war was waged by the North, was simply this: That men may rightfully be compelled to submit to, and support, a government that they do not want; and that resistance, on their part, makes them traitors and criminals.”[1454]
In August 1861, Lincoln, a micro manager, appointed Thomas A. Scott, then Pennsylvania Railroad president as the Assistant Secretary of War (1861-1863), due to his knowledge of railroads. Scott and War Secretary Simon Cameron, a Freemason, were friends prior to the war and invariably collaborated during the war. Congress authorized Lincoln to seize all commercial telegraph systems. Companies accordingly placed their personnel and resources at the Union’s disposal. Scott hired Andrew Carnegie, his former employee, as his assistant in the War Department. Carnegie organized the Military Telegraph Corps and helped build a critical communications network for the Union.[1455] Cameron directed all telegraph operations and would not allow his generals to interfere with their cipher-operators.[1456] Lincoln, who spent a lot of time in the telegraph room, authored the first draft of the Emancipation Proclamation there. The Union intercepted and decoded Confederate cipher messages and frequently tapped their wires during Sherman’s march to the sea.[1457]
Lincoln appointed John George Nicolay as his private secretary. Nicolay persuaded Lincoln to hire John Hay as part of his personal staff. In Springfield, Hay, an attorney, had worked next door to Lincoln’s office. Ironically, during another invasive war, Hay was President McKinley’s Secretary of State (1898- 1905). He referred to the Spanish American War as a “splendid little war.” Certainly, the Filipinos did not view the destabilization and destruction within their country in the same way. Nicolay and Hay lived in the White House and were constantly on call. In 1881, Nicolay, a former journalist, wrote The Outbreak of the Rebellion. Nicolay and Hay collaborated on Lincoln’s official life story, which appeared in The Century Magazine from 1886 to 1890. Later it was printed as a ten volume set. They also wrote the Complete Works of Abraham Lincoln. Later these cover-up artists edited Lincoln’s Works, a twelve- volume compilation. These works concealed and amended rather than divulged actual history.
Lincoln apparently viewed the Constitution as prohibitive to his political aspirations. Clement Laird Vallandigham, U.S. Representative from Ohio (1858-1863) supported states’ rights. General Ambrose Burnside issued Order #38 regarding dissenters. Officers arrested Vallandigham for speaking against the war on May 1, 1863, and brought before a military commission and condemned to confinement for the remainder of the war. Lincoln heard of Vallandigham’s arrest but saw no alternatives to Burnside’s actions.[1458]
Vallandigham wrote a letter to the editor of the Cincinnati Enquirer and sent copies to a dozen Democratic journals, including the Dayton Empire and the Crisis. He blamed Lincoln for what he called a coercive war. He deplored “the surging sea of madness” wherein Americans were “butchering each other.”[1459] Arrests were most frequent in states under military authority. Vallandigham, branded as a traitor, reviled Lincoln for suspending habeas corpus without Congressional sanction.[1460]
On April 4, 1864, Lincoln said, “I did understand, however, that my oath to preserve the Constitution to the best of my ability imposed upon me the duty of preserving, by every indispensable means, that government, that nation, of which that Constitution was the organic law... I felt that measures, otherwise unconstitutional, might become lawful, by becoming indispensable to the preservation of the Constitution, through the preservation of the nation.”[1461]
The Union engaged in plundering. The Louisiana sugar planters supported the Confederacy, and accepted a leading role in the secessionist movement and sent delegates to the convention. Most Southerners, including the sugar planters, thought the slaves would continue to labor, the young would fight the war and England and France would finance the battle. The 1861 and 1862 crops were abundant but with falling sugar prices, they were unable to market their 1862 crop. The Confederates in New Orleans surrendered and the Union occupied the city on May 1, 1862. Some plantations owners and their families fled leaving their homes vulnerable to plunder by squatters, Confederate deserters, runaway slaves and Northern troops and their remaining sugar cane to rot. Others stayed but were still subject to pillaging.[1462]
If the owners abandoned their plantation, it immediately became subject to federal confiscation and the national government could sell or lease it for nonpayment of taxes. Blacks opposed such policies – they equated ownership of land with freedom. They had worked the land all of their lives and they felt that it was theirs by right. Ex-slaves had no voice and no rights. Prior to January 1, 1863, the effective date of the Emancipation Proclamation, plantation owners kept their land and their slaves by simply renouncing their Confederate loyalties when Union troops occupied the area in question.[1463]
Federal authorities seized large properties, especially the estates of those who had played a primary part in the secession movement or acted as official Confederate officers, like Judah P. Benjamin, the Confederate Secretary of State. Braxton Bragg and Richard Taylor, both Confederate army generals, lost their properties. Many planters retained their property by taking an oath of allegiance to the federal government. The war disrupted the entire labor force. Slaves who left their familiar surroundings were unable, in most cases, to take care of themselves now that they were free.[1464]
Lincoln, like other presidents since, always justified his actions based on necessity, akin to the contemporary claim of “national security.” He said, “Necessity knows no law” in referring to his actions during the war. To restore the American republic, to implement “a new birth of freedom,” he justified seizing power. He once told his audience that they must worship the laws of the republic, “Let every American...swear by the blood of the Revolution never to violate in the least particular the laws of the country, and never to tolerate their violation by others...Let every man remember that to violate the law is to trample on the blood of his father, and to tear the charter of his own and his children’s liberty. Let reverence for the laws...become the political religion of the nation.”[1465]
At the end of the war, people discovered the truth about the events at Fort Sumter. By then, of course, it was too late. The Union had destroyed the South, both physically and culturally, along with constitutional government. Lincoln’s principal objective during the war was to maintain and then strengthen the unified republic, or as Machiavelli uttered, mantanere lo stato. His goal paralleled Machiavelli’s emphasis on maintaining the state, whatever the cost, in other people’s liberty, blood and property.[1466]
Socialist Revolutionaries in the Union Army
No comments:
Post a Comment