Chapter 36 The Ruling Elite: Financing the Bloodbath, 1861-1865, a Pattern for the Future by Deanna Spingola

 

Financing the Bloodbath, 1861-1865, a Pattern for the Future

Before Lincoln’s War, several Jewish banking houses, representing foreign entities, existed including August Belmont, Speyer and Co., J. and W. Seligman and Co., Kuhn, Loeb and Co., Lehman Brothers, J. S. Bache and Co., Landenburg, Thalmann and Co., and Goldman, Sachs and Co. A large community of

Jews lived in New Amsterdam (New York). By 1860, there were at least 40,000 Jews in New York prior to Lincoln’s War.[1561]

The London Rothschilds positioned agent provocateurs in the U.S. including Judah P. Benjamin, a “staunch supporter of slavery,”[1562] who became General Lee’s top financial advisor, among the other offices he held in the Confederacy. August Belmont, Rothschild’s agent in New York and John Slidell, a native New Yorker and Belmont’s nephew by marriage, was in New Orleans. They each maneuvered circumstances to initiate conflict. The Confederacy issued some of its own money but also sent Slidell and James Mason to France in 1861 to borrow money.[1563]

The Union paid their soldiers with interest-free Treasury notes, authorized by Congress on July 17, 1861, for $50,000,000. These notes circulated at par with gold. When the Union needed additional financing, the government negotiated with New York’s Rothschild financiers who offered Lincoln a high-interest $150 million loan. However, Lincoln’s advisors suggested that the government issue its own interest-free money to fund the war rather than incur debt. Congress enacted a bill to issue $150 million, full legal tender for every debt in the U.S. It passed the House of Representatives on February 25, 1862.[1564] There was one stipulation; the Congressmen who actually represented the bank’s interests permitted the issue of greenbacks only if individuals could convert the bills into bonds. This convertibility feature would allow the bankers

and their agents to enact legislation, which would authorize the redemption of the bonds into specie.[1565]

Congress passed the Revenue Act of 1861, on August 5, 1861, Chapter XLV, An Act to provide increased Revenue from Imports, to pay Interest on the Public Debt, and for other Purposes.[1566] In their efforts to raise money, Congress, “under the instructions of the Treasury Department,” imposed a 3% federal income tax, beginning in January 1862. This flat-rate tax applied to “the annual income of every person residing in the United States, whether such income is derived from any kind of property, or from any profession, trade, employment, or vocation carried on in the United States or elsewhere... on the amount...above eight hundred dollars. For those citizens living outside of the country, the rate was 5%.[1567]

In March 1862, Congress passed the Revenue Act of 1862 which Lincoln signed on July 1, 1862, introducing the first progressive rate income tax in the country. It was “An Act to provide Internal Revenue to support the Government and to pay Interest on the Public Debt.” The act also established the Office of Commissioner of Internal Revenue. To facilitate a timely collection, the employer “withheld” the income tax “at the source.”[1568] This act, while repealing the previous flat-rate tax, retained the “temporary” income tax of 3% tax on incomes that exceeded $600 and imposed a 5% tax on incomes above $10,000, the beginning of the graduated income tax. The termination date of this act was 1866.[1569]

Interestingly, on June 19, 1862, just prior to the passage of the first progressive income, advocated by Karl Marx in The Communist Manifesto, Congress enacted general emancipation, another Marxist concept, in all the federal territories, “An Act to secure Freedom to all Persons within the Territories of the United States.” The act reads, “Be it enacted by the Senate and House of Representatives of the United States of America in Congress assembled, That from and after the passage of this act there shall be neither slavery nor involuntary servitude in any of the Territories of the United States now existing, or which may at any time hereafter be formed or acquired by the United States, otherwise than in punishment of crimes whereof the party shall have been duly convicted.”[1570] People, now and then, require money and employment to exist, rather than living off the land and the fruits of their own labor. Yet, the imposition of income tax, associated with one’s labor enslaves the whole population and extracts the very essence of one’s freedom. Emancipation of everyone is necessary as it places everyone at the same level, except those who secret their monies in tax-exempt foundations or 501.3c organizations or corporations.

Thaddeus Stevens of the House of Representatives explained that bank agents in the Senate further

compromised the greenback by tacking an amendment onto the bill that required the Exception Clause phrase on each note, “Good for all debts both public and private except duty on imports and interest on Government debts.” This act devalued the greenbacks to about thirty cents on the dollar, one of the factors that led to the passage of the National Banking Act.[1571] This bill benefited only one class of people, the Rothschilds’ Wall Street branch.[1572] Stevens, the Chairman of the House Committee of Ways and Means authored the earlier version of the Legal Tender Act, which read, “These U.S. Notes, legal tender for all debts, to be used by the masses but not redeemable in gold.”[1573]

The Rothschilds had possession of 80% of the country’s gold. They created inequity against the greenback through the addition of the Exception Clause on each note, which made a market for their gold. Importers had to visit Wall Street to buy gold to pay duties. Since Rothschild had a monopoly, they set the price. If they had not devalued and restricted the greenbacks, if they had retained their full legal tender, gold would have been unnecessary to pay import duties. Gold prices increased rapidly by the war’s end. Importers used the gold they had purchased on Wall Street to pay import duties to the government that was then paid back to Wall Street as interest on the public debt. The bankers merely recycled the gold. The gold speculators, merchants of death, made fortunes from the slaughter of individuals on both sides of the conflict.[1574]

In July 1862, Congress issued another $150 million in greenbacks with the same flexible bond feature. With the ability to convert notes into bonds, the bankers hoped to be able to convert the bonds into specie. Although the government declared the money legal tender, it was not redeemable for coin. This was the first government-generated U.S. currency since the founders ratified the Constitution. In March 1863, the government issued another $150 million in greenbacks except this time they retracted the conversion feature. The bankers began denouncing the greenbacks as fiat money. Then, working with Congress, they passed a law in December 1865 to contract this debt-free money to get rid of all three issues of the greenback, which they did by 1879.[1575]

International banking empires build massive wealth through government bonds. Therefore, it is essential to accrue government debt. The higher the debt the more interest the taxpayer pays. War creates more debt than any other endeavor.[1576] International bankers discredited the greenbacks and then ironically, Congress authorized Secretary Chase to obtain foreign loans. Chase, rather than traveling abroad, talked to Belmont, his good friend, who offered to unofficially represent the Treasury abroad. He negotiated with British, French, and German bankers and after a month reported that current circumstances “are not at all propitious” (favorable) for a loan. He told Chase that the relevant bankers preferred neutrality, an unusual response given that the bankers were/are always internationalists. However, it was merely leverage. They wanted Congress to repeal the unpopular Morrill tariff, of March 2, 1861, designed with the advice of Henry C. Carey. This, the bankers implied, might help bring the necessary financing.[1577] By summer of 1861, Secretary Chase, though usually an advocate of free trade, and Morrill passed another tariff, which added another ten points, not what the bankers were seeking.

Congress ultimately repealed the Morrill Tariff Act of March 2, 1861. President Woodrow Wilson, a pawn for the international banking cabal, convened a special joint session of Congress in April 1913 to confront the tariff question. He claimed that tariff reform was essential. The Democrats controlled both houses of Congress for the first time in eighteen years. Oscar W. Underwood guided a reform measure through the House and Furnifold McLendel (F. M.) Simmons did the same in the Senate. Wilson, while warning the public of the lobbyists who represented international firms, adequately intimidated the Democrats into tariff reform. Meanwhile, the newspapers promoted reform, which generated a public demand for tariff reform. Constituents wrote to members of Congress pleading for tariff reform. Congress replaced the Morrill Tariff Act of March 2, 1861 with the Revenue Act of 1913, on May 8, 1913, also

known as Underwood Tariff of 1913, after one of its sponsors, Oscar Underwood.

It lowered basic tariff rates from 40% to 25%, below the Payne-Aldrich Tariff Act of 1909, the lowest rates since the Walker Tariff of 1857, which benefitted the South. It opened the door to international, rather than national interests – essential to the objectives of the emerging multinational corporations. However, and most significantly, this act re-imposed the federal income tax after the states had allegedly ratified the Sixteenth Amendment. Wilson and Congress justified the income tax as a means to compensate for the anticipated loss of revenues because of the reduction of tariff duties. Wilson signed it into law on October 3, 1913.

Eastern Republicans endorsed Chase’s idea about a bank loan to fund the war. Certain economists insisted that the capital and interests of the government were compatible. As Alexander Hamilton had pointed out, financiers had rescued the nation during the Revolutionary War. Moreover, if patriotism failed, financiers had an interest in the Union’s survival. Republicans advocated Hamilton’s idea of linking the nation’s currency with its government. Chase’s bond offer began that process. Others resisted his alliance with the financiers due to their bad experiences with “wildcat banking,” coupled with their general distrust of banks. One of them said, referring to the bankers, “This army of little leeches is sucking the life blood, in small quantities, out of the laboring people of this country.”[1578]

Before 1862, state-regulated banks conducted all banking. Instead of borrowing, Lincoln enacted legislation to create a national bank and subsidiaries to which the government would supply notes based on the security of U.S. bonds deposited in the Treasury. The greenbacks would be backed by and exchangeable with coins. This would purportedly protect labor against flexible insecure currency while assisting commerce through safe exchanges. Congress and the general population adopted honest Abe’s suggestion, despite skepticism. Currency went from the jurisdiction of the state to a national currency but this was merely a step towards a national bank and ultimately, the Federal Reserve.

In July 1862, the English moneylenders distributed the Hazard Circular, literally Rothschild’s threat against the greenback. They could not control the greenback but they controlled the bonds and through them the bank-issued currency. Rothschild’s plan declared that capital (banks, inflation and deflation) must control labor (the population) by controlling wages. They wanted the U.S. to fund the war with bonds in order to accrue debt. They were quite blatant in admitting that all they needed was for Treasury Secretary Chase, a Freemason to promote this idea to Congress. He worked with Jay Cooke & Company in order to successfully sell the first $500 million in government war bonds.[1579]

Chase appointed Cooke as special agent in charge of certain bonds, called five-twenties. The Cooke family developed a close relationship with Chase when he was Ohio governor (1856-1860). Henry Cooke, Jay’s brother, was the editor of the Ohio State Journal in Columbus, a newspaper that had supported Chase for the presidency in 1860. Henry Cooke also backed Senator John J. Sherman and Ulysses S. Grant. After Chase became Treasury Secretary on March 7, 1861, he asked Jay Cooke to be Assistant Treasurer in charge of the sub-treasury in Philadelphia. He declined, as he did not want to relinquish his new enterprise.[1580] He could make more profit and advance his own business if he were an agent for the sale of government bonds during the imminent war.

In July 1861, Cooke had opened a Washington office under the direction of his brother Henry. Chase allowed Cooke’s firm to manage the government-issued loans for a small commission. Chase also appointed Cooke as Subscription Agent for the National Loan. Cooke had previously accompanied Chase to New York to help him negotiate a $50 million loan and then worked to find buyers for the bonds, particularly small subscribers who were proud of their patriotic efforts.[1581]

Cooke, using patriotism, negotiated loans for the government and handled the sale of government bonds.

He obtained $3 billion in loans for the war effort, which put the government deeply in debt by the war’s end but U.S. currency was stable and investors considered U.S. bonds as good investments. He used his war profits to invest in coal and iron mining, life insurance and railroads, including the Northern Pacific, part of the transcontinental railroad.[1582] Chase intimidated bankers into accepting the bonds he issued and flooded the country with notes, to the point that it required $1,000 of such currency to buy breakfast.[1583]

Secretary Chase and the northern banking trust designed the National Banking Act, which passed on February 25, 1863. They had already devalued the greenback, which prompted its passage. It called for a federally chartered national bank and interest-bearing currency. Lincoln signed the legislation and thereby shifted the nation’s money into private hands. In 1863, there were approximately 1,600 different circulating bank notes issued by state-chartered banks with a specie redemption feature. This was a negative factor in advancing the new legislation with a national currency, something that Lincoln had promoted. Its true objective was to shift to government bonds as the foundation for banking. The Hazard Circular read, “It will not do to allow Greenbacks, as they are called, to circulate as money for any length of time as we cannot control that. But we can control the bonds ...” National Banks issued bank notes until Executive Order 6102 in 1933.[1584] Chase’s actions were critical in instituting a national bank and putting it into private hands. John Thompson, founder of Chase National Bank, memorialized him. The government printed his photo on $10,000 U.S. Treasury notes (1928-1946).

On June 25, 1863, Senator John Sherman wrote a letter to the London Rothschilds about the National Banking Act, actually formulated by the British Bankers Association. He wrote, “The few who understand the system will either be so interested in its profits, or so dependent on its favors that there will be no opposition from that class, while on the other hand, the great body of people, mentally incapable of comprehending the tremendous advantages that Capital derives from the system, will bear its burden without complaint, and perhaps without even suspecting that the system is inimical to their interests.” The act, a federal law based on a system of national charters for banks advocated a national currency based on the holdings of U.S. Treasury securities. It established the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC) as part of the Treasury Department. They devised it to be highly profitable to the international banking fraternity.[1585]

Sherman, with his eager eyes on the White House, cozied up to the bankers who he thought might subsidize his aspirations. Often those with massive resources are not particularly discriminating in their methods of acquiring or eliminating political influence.[1586] Sherman became chairman of the Senate Finance Committee in 1864. His older brother was General William T. Sherman. Senator Sherman was influential in the creation of the Union’s financial policies and was friends with Secretary Chase and Jay Cooke.[1587]

The National Currency Act of 1863, together with Lincoln’s greenbacks raised funds for the Union by persuading banks to purchase federal bonds while taxing state bank-issued currency out of existence. Congress replaced the law with the National Bank Act of 1864, which authorized the OCC to examine and regulate nationally chartered banks. Another act, passed on March 3, 1865, imposed a 10% tax on State bank notes, effective July 1, 1866. The tax forced all non-federal currency out of circulation. The number of national banks increased to 1,644 by October 1866. Bank regulations changed again in 1908 with the enactment of the Aldrich-Vreeland Act, preparatory to the Federal Reserve.

On December 6, 1864, Lincoln, in his annual message to Congress, said, “The national banking system is proving to be acceptable to capitalists and to the people. On November 25, 1864, five hundred and eighty-four national banks had been organized, a considerable number of which were conversions from State banks...it is hoped that, very soon, there will be in the United States, no banks of issue not authorized by Congress, and no bank-note circulation not secured by government ...The national system

will create a reliable and permanent influence in support of the national credit, and protect people against losses in the use of paper money.”[1588]

Nationalizing the currency facilitated the takeover of the U.S. monetary resources. Lincoln’s War gave bankers an opportunity to finance profitable mass slaughter. They replaced state-chartered free banking with privately owned national banks, under the control of a few people. Lincoln’s War is a prime example of Hegelian conflict designed to implement sweeping changes. The most significant change was the loss of monetary independence.[1589] On July 1, 1857, the public debt was $29,060,387.00 with a cash balance of $17,710,114.[1590] In 1863, England, long engaged in imperialistic warfare, had a public debt of $4,000,918,944 on which the interest totaled $127,564,548. By 1866, because of the war, the public debt of the U.S. was $4,000,000,000 with interest totaling $292,000,000.[1591]

On January 14, 1875, Senator John Sherman, a Wall Street minion throughout his lengthy career, got the Specie Resumption Act through Congress. This provided for the redemption, in gold, of greenbacks, issued, beginning in 1862. This took effect on January 1, 1879. During his advocacy of this act, he was, according to Henry L. Stoddard, New York Republican publisher, very chummy with the bankers at the First National Bank of New York. People even referred to the bank as Fort Sherman.[1592]

The Confederacy issued its own currency and borrowed money from European sources. In 1861, John Slidell and James Mason went to France to negotiate a loan for the South. Negotiations began with the Erlanger & Company. The Erlangers, also agents for the Crédit Mobilier, underwrote the sale of a $15 million bond issue for the Confederacy, redeemable in cotton. When they issued the bonds, cotton was expensive. Consequently, people immediately over-subscribed the bonds. August Belmont immediately discredited the bonds making the price fall, which left some British investors with major losses while those who floated the bonds made huge profits.[1593] In 1863, J. H. Schröder and E. Erlanger both provided loans to the Confederacy.[1594]

The Erlanger bonds, for sale at 90% of the value, were issued in five cities, Paris, London, Liverpool, Frankfurt and Amsterdam on March 19, 1863. Their sale totaled £1,759,894 ($8,535,486), issued in four denominations: £100 (4000 lb. of cotton), £200 (8,000 lb.), £500 (20,000 lb.) and £1,000 (40,000 lb.). People could exchange the bonds for Confederate government-owned cotton, obtainable only by running the Union’s blockade.

Judah P. Benjamin’s English connection was James Bulloch, a John Quitman confidant, who officials later charged with procuring arms for the Confederacy. On October 3, 1864, Slidell’s daughter Mathilde married Baron Frédéric Emile d’Erlanger, a French, German Jewish banker with influential British connections as well as ties to Freemasonry. His father Baron Raphael Erlanger of Frankfort functioned as a confidential Rothschild agent. Erlanger managed a series of Confederacy war bonds, which well- connected Brits who detested American independence happily purchased. The Union-imposed blockade necessitated smuggling the slave-produced cotton. Cotton collateralized the bonds.[1595]

When it became apparent that the Union would win the war, the Rothschild agents bought huge blocks of Union Bonds, previously purchased by insiders for less than half their value. This became an issue in the 1868 elections. General Grant, influenced by the bankers, led by Belmont, supported the repayment of the bonds in specie. When the citizens reelected Grant, he signed the Credit Strengthening Act of March 18, 1869, which made the bonds redeemable in specie, which increased their value by about 100%.[1596] The Rothschilds cashed in.

From the Revolution Forward

The majority of the Battle of Antietam, the bloodiest single-day battle in American history, occurred on September 17, 1862 resulting in 23,000 casualties. President Abraham Lincoln, under his war powers,

issued the Emancipation Proclamation, an executive order, on January 1, 1863. The proclamation declared the freedom of the majority, 3.1 million of the nation’s four million slaves, immediately liberating 50,000 people, with the promise of freedom for the remaining slaves as the Union armies subdued and occupied the southern states. The Battle of Gettysburg occurred July 1–3, 1863 resulting in between 46,000 and 51,000 casualties.

President Lincoln, on November 19, 1863, in a two-minute speech at Gettysburg said, “Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent a new nation, conceived in liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.”

“Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation, so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure. We are met on a great battle-field of that war. We have come to dedicate a portion of that field, as a final resting place for those who here gave their lives that that nation might live. It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this.”

“But, in a larger sense, we can not dedicate, we can not consecrate, we can not hallow this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it, far above our poor power to add or detract. The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here. It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us—that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion—that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain— that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom—and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.”

Author George P. Fletcher suggests that the Gettysburg Address, written in stone at the Lincoln Memorial, “functions as the preamble to the second American constitution,” followed by the Thirteenth (December 6, 1865), Fourteenth (July 9, 1868) and Fifteenth Reconstruction (February 3, 1870) Amendments, between 1865 and 1870.[1597] In the first part of the address, he said, “our fathers brought forth on this continent,” reminiscent of the biblical story of God’s interaction with Moses the Book of Exodus. Lincoln, though not overtly Christian, made use of the Bible, along with the works of Shakespeare and Aesop’s Fables. He referenced the Bible in his second inaugural address. Lincoln, like other wartime presidents, viewed what he referred to as the Civil War, as the “righteous judgment of the Divine.” Therefore, it was rather incumbent upon him to use biblical imagery and rhetoric to make his case. In a previous speech, in 1861, he referred to the American citizens as “His almost chosen people,” implying a covenant relationship with God, the same specialty that the Jews have always claimed.[1598]

The Pilgrims apparently had this sense of coming to a promised land in the new world after their exodus from the old world to found their first settlements, which the Indians already inhabited. Lincoln possibly adopted this idea in his phrase, “brought forth on this continent.” While the Declaration of Independence contains numerous references to the Creator, the Constitution of 1787 is secular in nature. Lincoln chooses to use the religiosity of the 1776 Declaration.[1599]

His use of the word nation, “brought forth on this continent a new nation,” establishes the major theme of the speech. He uses the word four more times and in doing so, he differs with the first preamble in the declarative declaration written by “We the People,” the original sovereigns who chose to unite. By emphasizing the word “nation,” Lincoln legitimizes a new authority, the national government, as a permanent replacement for the “people.” Presumably, the fratricidal war forcibly birthed a new nation, which apparently reverts to and transforms its original founding documents eighty-seven years before. After all, at least 73,000 men have “given their lives” and those who survive the war will “flourish in its aftermath.”[1600] HeinrichvonTreitschkesaid,“Itiswarthatturnsapeopleintoanation.”[1601]

Revolutionary Constitution: Dates:
Proposed 1787
Effective 1789

Amended w/ Bill of rights 1791

Authority: We the People Primary value: Freedom Mode of government:

Lincoln’s War Constitution: Dates:
Preamble 1863 Reconstruction Amendments 1865, 1868, and 1870

Authority: the nation
Primary value: Equality
Mode of government: Democracy Republican style and form

Highest power: will of the living Highest powers: Command of history, Divine mission[1602]

President Lincoln implemented some preliminary acts, the two Confiscation Acts, the first on August 6, 1861, and the second on July 17, 1862. Looking at certain rebellious states already under Union control, on March 3, 1862, he installed Democrat Senator Andrew Johnson as Military Governor of the state of Tennessee. In May 1862, Lincoln assigned Edward Stanly Military Governor of the coastal area of North Carolina. He installed Brigadier General George F. Sheply as Military Governor of Louisiana in May 1862. In July 1862, Lincoln installed Colonel John S. Phelps as Military Governor of Arkansas.

Senator Benjamin F. Wade and Representative Henry W. Davis, two Radical Republicans sponsored the legislation for the appointments of provisional military governors in the seceded states. Senator Ira Harris of New York first introduced the ideas contained in the Wade–Davis Bill in February 1863. Harris was a Whig from Albany County, was in the New York State Assembly (1845-18460, a delegate to the New York State Constitutional Convention (1846), a member of the New York State Senate (1847), and a justice of the New York Supreme Court (1847-1859). Harris was good friends with William H. Seward. His son, William Harris, was an officer in the Army Ordnance Department. Lincoln’s guests, at Ford’s Theater on April 14, 1865, were Harris’ daughter Clara Harris and her future husband, Henry Rathbone, a stepson of Ira Harris. Clara and Henry married in 1867. Ira Harris had remarried to Pauline Rathbone, Henry’s mother. Harris was on the Joint Committee on Reconstruction, the group that drafted the Fourteenth Amendment.

The Wade–Davis Bill passed both houses of Congress on July 2, 1864. They proposed this legislation to counteract Lincoln’s more lenient Ten Percent Plan with the Ironclad Oath, which made re-admittance to the Union for former Confederate states contingent on a majority in each Southern state. Congress initially conceived of the oath in July 1862 for all federal employees, lawyers and all federally elected officials.

As soon as a majority of a state’s white citizens swore allegiance to the Union, they could call a constitutional convention. The officials in each state, in its constitution, had to abolish slavery, repudiate secession, and disqualify Confederate officials from voting or holding an official position. To gain the franchise, be a part of the Union, officials required a person to take an oath that he had not willingly given assistance to the Confederacy. President Lincoln vetoed the Wade–Davis Bill and set the stage for the future struggle between President Andrew Johnson and the Radical Republicans in Congress. Lincoln vetoed the Wade-Davis bill on July 4, 1864, after Congress had adjourned.[1603]

Our government schools, the serial purveyors of false versions of history, have always taught us that John Wilkes Booth shot Lincoln over the Greenback currency issue. However, given the exchange stipulations surrounding the greenback and the money the international bankers made, it was not an issue. The so- called alternative media, possibly controlled opposition, would have us believe that Booth may have been a Rothschild agent. Booth may have associated with Rothschild agents and may have been an agent and even the shooter but one must evaluate who the benefactors of Lincoln’s death were – the Radical Republicans and probably the British. William H. Seward, a friend of Ira Harris, worked for a New York-based British political faction after the war.

With the Union’s victory, and Lincoln out of the way, the Radical Republicans in Congress, led by Thaddeus Stevens and Charles Sumner initiated the Reconstruction (1863-1877), of the southern states, policies they had devised far in advance. In 1867, the Union divided the ten southern states, with the exception of Tennessee, into five military districts, all supervised by the U.S. Army. The Union readmitted each state between 1868 and 1870 on the condition that they accept the Thirteenth, Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments allegedly intended to secure the civil rights of the freed slaves.

The Republican majority in Congress enacted the Civil Rights Act of 1866, the Reconstruction Acts of 1867, and the Thirteenth, Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments. Thereafter, Congress ignored the guarantee clause – “The United States shall guarantee to every State in this Union a Republican Form of Government” in favor of the Thirteenth, Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments, authority for persistent intervention in each state’s affairs. These amendments shifted the primary explanation and enforcement of citizenship rights from the states to the national government and centralized power in Washington while depriving the states of their separate and autonomous political responsibilities. They demonstrated this in 1873 when the federal courts, supported by the military force of the U. S. Army, emerged as the primary agencies to enforce equal rights in the South.[1604]

In March 1865, Socialist Robert Dale Owen had given Lincoln the initial draft of the Fourteenth Amendment, which officials slightly altered before they approved it on July 9, 1868. The Fourteenth Amendment created corporate personhood, which is a legal fiction. The choice of the word “person” arises from the way that the drafters worded the Fourteenth Amendment. Eric Foner wrote, “This idea of birthright citizenship, later enshrined in the Fourteenth Amendment, was a truly radical departure from the traditions of American life.”[1605] The Fourteenth Amendment made every citizen a federal citizen and accordingly, the federal government maintains all of our birth certificates in the District of Columbia. We are essentially commodities in a giant hedge fund.

Southern whites and northern Democrats criticized the Fourteenth Amendment, which authorizes the Federal Government to meddle between a state and its citizens for any plausible reason. Devised by a socialist, it expanded Washington’s authority and strength. Republican congressmen were also fully aware of the impact of the revolutionary Civil Rights Bill of 1866. Senator Lot M. Morrill of Maine, in talking about it said, “I admit that this species of legislation is absolutely revolutionary. However, are we not in the midst of a revolution? This civil and political revolution has changed the fundamental principles of our Government.”[1606]

Congress purportedly created the Fourteenth Amendment, incorporating the Bill of Rights, to assure the political rights, grant citizenship and facilitate the cultural assimilation of recently released slaves. Manipulative well-paid lawyers working for industrialists hijacked this law, with built-in loopholes, supposedly ratified on July 9, 1868. However, a quarter of the states rejected the unconstitutional amendment. Government officials deprived eleven states of their equal suffrage in the Senate, which is in violation of Article V. These officials excluded the political leaders of those states from the deliberation and decision process regarding the proposed Fourteenth Amendment.

The Union installed new state governments, for more efficient governance, that were generally Republican in nature but composed of political coalitions of blacks, northern carpetbaggers and southern scalawags. The imposition of government officials in former enemy states (or countries) in conjunction with military occupation and the aggressive re-education of the population became a pattern for the future. Many southern residents viewed these installed governments with hostility and resentment.[1607] They especially disliked the activities of the Freedmen’s Bureau, an agency that Congress established on March 3, 1865 in order to feed, protect, and assist in the education of the newly emancipated blacks. This bitterness led to formation of such organizations as the Ku Klux Klan. By 1877, the Democrat Party resumed power in most of the southern states.

By 1886, lawyers perverted and exploited the law to grant “personhood” to corporations, artificial entities, in order to shelter the owners and their assets from culpability. It further enabled them to ignore reasonable environmental regulations and ethical standards while consolidating worldwide power and influence. The courts grant a special legal status and privileges to corporations not given to ordinary unincorporated business or groups of individuals. Corporations now have inalienable rights, or constitutional rights, like people, despite their artificial nature. From 1819 until 1886, the wealthy elite attempted to use the Federal Government, especially the courts, to get their corporations out from under the control of the states and their citizens. Because corporations dominated U.S. business, they soon began to dominate the politicians, lawyers and the courts. Many corporate moguls systematically bribed members of Congress. Many of the Supreme Court judges were former corporate lawyers who also entered politics as appointees or through manipulated elections.

Merging Socialism and Christianity

John Robison, in his book, which he wrote in 1798, defines some of the objectives of the Illuminati by quoting one of their social engineering goals, “We have to struggle with pedantry, with intolerance, with divines and statesmen, and above all, princes and priests are in our way. Men are unfit as they are, and must be formed; each class must be the school of trial for the next.”[1608] In other words, the elite view us as guinea pigs.

In the eighteenth century, intellectual forces, influenced by the Pietist movement, a faction within Lutheranism, in northern Prussia, altered German society more than economic conditions. The Enlightenment in Britain and France had a German independent counterpart in the Aufklärung, which began earlier. The origin of the German Enlightenment was largely religious and emanated from places like the Pietist University of Halle from reformers like August Hermann Francke who distorted traditional theology, calling for religious liberalism.[1609]

Calvinist Timothy Dwight (1752-1817) was the son of a merchant, a Yale graduate and Yale’s eighth president. He had strong connections to New York’s wealthiest families through his 1777 marriage to the daughter of a New York merchant and banker, Benjamin Woolsey. Dwight headed the Federalist Party of Connecticut, proponents of a big federal government and a central bank. He was the leader of the evangelical New Divinity faction of Congregationalism — composed of Connecticut’s emerging commercial elite who opposed the emerging equality of the common people. In Boston, as early as 1784, the business community was disrupting town meetings in an attempt to replace them by professionally managed meetings, supposedly to enhance public safety. The elite feel they are more qualified to control the affairs of the remainder of society, which certainly does not include self-government.[1610]

Timothy Dwight’s brother was Theodore Dwight (1764-1846), a lawyer and journalist and a leader in the Federalist Party. He was a member of Congress in 1806-1807 and the secretary of the Hartford Convention in 1814. 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 was a cousin. Vice President Aaron Burr, in alliance with the Massachusetts Tories, thought that the United States should have remained a British colony and attempted to make that a reality. Burr’s cousin and law partner, Theodore Dwight devised some political moves to destroy the unity of the United States.

Timothy Dwight, New England’s consummate moralist, encouraged by protégé Reverend Lyman Beecher, created a national evangelical movement to re-church America, in conjunction with compulsory education. Timothy Dwight’s The Nature and Danger of Infidel Philosophy (1798) helped influence the Second Great Awakening (1790-1840s). The historian Berk says that Dwight contrived the Second Great Awakening, which began at Yale, and then Dwight’s students led the awakening as it spread out from the campus.[1611] Dwight’s philosophy called for a major socialization of American religion, driven by ministers like Charles Grandison Finney and Lyman Beecher who promoted evangelical participation in social issues. Beecher was the father of writer, Harriet Beecher Stowe.

Regarding the French Revolution, Heinrich Heine (1797-1856) said, “When all is said and done, it was hatred for the Church that caused the French Revolution ... The throne had been destroyed because it protected the altar.” I wish to borrow Heine’s statement and using creative liberties, apply it to another revolution, Lincoln’s War. My version – When all is said and done, it was hatred for Southern Christianity that caused Lincoln’s War...they destroyed the South as it was the nation’s Christian altar.

To facilitate the socialization of religion, especially in the north, Dwight helped found the Andover Theological Seminary (1807), the American Bible Society, and the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions which had a particular missionary (merchant) interest in China. In 1829, church officials sent missionaries to the “heathen” in China. Its original mission was to India in 1816 then work among the Cherokees and Choctaws in 1818, the Hawaiian Islands in 1819, Syria in 1823, Persia in 1833, India’s Madura District in 1834, Zululand in 1835, Japan in 1869, Spain, Mexico and Austria in 1872 and Central Africa in 1880.[1612]

Henry Edwin Dwight (1797-1832), youngest son of Timothy Dwight, praised the new quasi-religious teacher seminaries in Prussia where school officials screened prospective teachers for correct attitudes toward the State.[1613] Henry Dwight, after a short stint at Andover Theological Seminary, studied at the Universities of Göttingen and Berlin from 1824 to 1828. On May 1, 1828, Henry and his brother, Sereno (Yale 1803) opened the New Haven Gymnasium for boys, a mile away from Yale.[1614]

In 1849, Members of Skull and Bones initiated Dwight’s namesake grandson, Timothy Dwight (1828- 1916); thereafter he studied at the Universities of Berlin and Bonn (1856-1858).[1615] He became Professor of Sacred Literature at Yale Divinity School from July 1858 until 1886, and then became the twelfth president of Yale. In 1869, the Rockefeller-financed Chicago Theological Seminary gave Dwight the honorary degree of Doctor of Divinity. By 1870, Skull and Bones controlled policy at Yale. Every president since Timothy Dwight has been a member of Skull and Bones, known as the Brotherhood of Death, or at the very least, has been closely associated with this very secretive society.[1616]

McCormick Theological Seminary, established 1829, is one of eleven schools of theology of the Presbyterian Church (USA), named after the Protestant magnate Cyrus McCormick. The seminary shares a campus with the Lutheran School of Theology at Chicago, bordering the campus of the University of Chicago in Chicago, Illinois. McCormick directed funds from his successful business into the McCormick Theological Seminary. John D. Rockefeller helped support the University of Chicago Divinity School, established 1891, a seminary that authorities fully integrated into the host university, which he also funded.

Arthur Tappan and Lewis Tappan, wealthy New York merchants and co-founders of the New York Journal

of Commerce and founders of the Mercantile Agency, a forerunner of Dun and Bradstreet, founded Lane Theological Seminary. The philanthropic Tappan brothers embraced temperance and supported the abolition of slavery through the establishment of theological seminaries and educational institutions, which helped them to decide to partially finance Ohio’s Oberlin College, founded in 1833 by two Presbyterian ministers, John Shipherd and Philo P. Stewart. They also funded Kenyon College, founded in 1824 by Episcopal Bishop Philander Chase (1775-1852), the uncle and caretaker of Salmon P. Chase. The Tappans co-founded the American Anti-Slavery Society, which began supporting women’s suffrage and feminism in 1840. The Tappan brothers also founded the American and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society in 1840, and the American Missionary Society in 1846.

Lewis and Arthur Tappan joined the American Bible Society, the American Tract Society, the New York City Mission and Tract Society, and the Young Men’s Christian Association. In the 1850s, the Tappans and others were seeking to enlarge the role of the state in religion.[1617]

In 1847, New York Unitarian minister Harvard -educated Henry Whitney Bellows founded a Unitarian newspaper, the Christian Inquirer. In 1849, he said, “There is no rightful authority which is not in a sense divine.” New England Unitarian ministers elevated and glorified both Lincoln and the state. On April 20, 1861, Bellows preached at All Souls on The State and the Nation, Sacred to Christian Citizens. In 1863, when opposition to Lincoln was growing, Bellows published a pamphlet, Unconditional Loyalty, in which he declared that a national political leader was a “sacred person.” Bellows was one of the loudest advocates in the suppression of growing opposition to Republican policies and their total war.[1618] Bellows justified the use of military or official violence against rioters.[1619] He said at the culmination of the war, “The state is indeed divine, as being the great incarnation of a nation’s rights, privileges, honor, and life.”[1620]

New England Unitarian ministers elevated and glorified both Lincoln and the state. Reverend Bellows said at the culmination of the war, “The state is indeed divine, as being the great incarnation of a nation’s rights, privileges, honor, and life.”[1621] Henry Ward Beecher (1813-1887) was one of the Union’s most effective pro-war preachers. He inflamed his parishioners with fervor for the war. He wrote articles, published his sermons, and edited a prominent wartime periodical. He met with Lincoln to discuss war policies, and whether the president embraced Beecher’s ideas or not, Beecher supported the president. He was, like his famous sister and best friend, Harriet Beecher Stowe, a gifted propagandist. He was the principle speaker at Fort Sumter in April 1865 when the Union ceremoniously reclaimed the fort.[1622]

Connecticut native, Morris Ketchum Jessup (1830-1908), a Pilgrims Society member, a banker and philanthropist, presided over the New York Chamber of Commerce (1899-1907) and was president of the American Sunday School Union, founded in 1817, and the American Museum of Natural History, established in 1869. He was a trustee of the Union Theological Seminary, established in 1836, the Peabody Education Fund, established by George Peabody in 1867, and was treasurer of the John F. Slater Fund for the Education of Freedmen, created in 1882, which later became the Rockefeller Foundation, chartered in 1913. He was a member of the Rockefellers General Education Board, created by John D. Rockefeller and Frederick T. Gates in 1902.[1623] In 1905, Czar Nicholas II knighted him for his philanthropic work.

On November 14, 1861, Jessup helped organize the United States Christian Commission. He helped found the New York City chapter of the Young Men’s Christian Association and served as its president in 1872. Individuals established the first YMCA in Boston on December 29, 1844. Within eleven years, the YMCA had become an international movement. George Williams (1821-1905) established the original quasi- Masonic YMCA on June 6, 1844 in London, England. He had seen the unhealthy social conditions in London because of the industrial revolution and did for the YMCA what Lord Baden-Powell had done for scouting. The Order of the Rag is a secret society within the YMCA, an allegedly Christian institute.

Queen Victoria knighted George Williams in 1894. After his death in 1905, artists designed a stained glass window for the nave of the Westminster Abbey to commemorate his life. They buried Sir George Williams in St. Paul’s Cathedral, the Anglican cathedral on Ludgate Hill, in The City of London, the financial capital of the world.

Top leaders in the Pilgrims Society traditionally invite the Archbishop of Canterbury and the head of the Church of England, and the Episcopal Bishops of New York to fill senior positions in the society. Bishop Henry Codman Potter (1835-1908), the head of the Episcopal Diocese of New York (1887-1908), was

very interested in social reform and politics. Potter regularly journeyed to London to preach at Canterbury Cathedral, St. Paul’s Cathedral, at Westminster Abbey. Potter was the president of the Pilgrims Society (1903-1907). Members of the Pilgrims Society staff St. Paul’s Cathedral.[1624]

The Pilgrims Society and Masonic offshoots like the YMCA, Elks and Rotary Clubs are philosophically integrated sects within the Masonic framework. Though the many organizations and sects are different, some of the rituals, objectives and idiosyncrasies have commonality. Many are identical to Freemasonry. Pope Leo XIII wrote, “Let us remember that Christianity and Freemasonry are essentially incompatible, to suchanextent,thattobecomeunitedwithonemeansbeingdivorcedfromtheother.”[1625] PopeBenedict,on November 5, 1920, warned against such organizations as the YMCA and other similar sects, while different in name, apply similar Masonic principles. Pope Benedict XV (1914-1922) stated, “The YMCA intends to purify and spread a more perfect knowledge of real life, placing itself above all Churches and outside of any religious jurisdiction.” He said, in his letter of November 5, 1920, that the YMCA is fundamentally Masonic.[1626]

Leading theologians and prestigious seminaries promoted an agenda of progressive reform and international expansion. John D. Rockefeller and J. P. Morgan wholly supported the theologians and seminaries as they set America’s moral course at home and abroad. Progressive reform was compatible with Woodrow Wilson’s vision of building a new world order. The membership of the Student Volunteer Movement for Foreign Missions, founded in 1886, increased as its representatives recruited college and university students in the United States for missionary service abroad.[1627] Arthur Tappan Pierson (1837- 1911), named after abolitionist Arthur Tappan, initiated the Student Volunteer Movement. Pierson, the author of numerous books, was determined to evangelize the world. Librarians have housed the records of the Student Volunteer Movement in the Yale Divinity School Library.

As early as 1890, Socialism was well entrenched in all of the major seminaries by American theologians trained in England and Germany. One of these was a man named Walter Rauschenbusch (1861-1918). In 1885, he graduated from Rochester Theological Seminary, indoctrinated in the tenets of Illuminism — a philosophy that substitutes faith in man for faith in God. His father August Rauschenbusch, a Baptist minister and German immigrant (1846), taught at the Rochester Theological Seminary. August, an ardent abolitionist, was from a long line of Lutheran preachers.[1628] In 1892, Rauschenbusch, with others, organized the Brotherhood of the Kingdom to promote socialism, starting in the churches.[1629] Walter Rauschenbusch declared, “If ever Socialism is to succeed, it cannot succeed in an irreligious country. It must start in the churches.”[1630]

Society is full of inequality, either deliberately imposed or inherent, making it a highly viable issue for the elite to manipulate for their own benefit. As mentioned elsewhere in this book, the function of equalization, while sounding desirable, is to level everyone to the lowest status. Each individual inherently has an unequal amount of skill, intelligence, talent, and personality, emotional and physical characteristics that are not dependent on environment or economic situation but are inherent. Individual inequality is a normal phenomenon. However, everyone warrants fairness and equality before the law. The elite who use both left/right political philosophies to impose tyranny easily exploit sincere individuals seeking to assist the poor and the downtrodden, or the poor and the downtrodden.

With the industrial revolution, 1780s through the 1870s, large corporations, coast-to-coast travel and wealthy industrialists – people like Andrew Carnegie and John D. Rockefeller set a new standard. Americans suddenly accepted a new ideal for personal success. A dog-eat-dog mentality replaced personal virtues, such as thrift, diligence, and honesty. Individuals acquired the stealthy ability to secure natural resources, both natural and human, for personal wealth. Many individuals then fostered the virtues of shrewdness, sophistication and specialization. Darwinism, for the more progressive Americans,

replaced traditional values and beliefs.[1631]

Nikolai Lenin, the Marxist Communist who communized the Russian nation in the years following the Russian Revolution of 1917, wrote, “We have to use any ruse, dodge, trick, cunning, unlawful method, concealment,andveilingofthetruth.”[1632] OnDecember2,1908,theFederalCouncilofChurchesadopted the Social Creed of the Churches, written by Communist-leaning Harry F. Ward, an English protégé of Walter Rauschenbusch, earlier submitted to Nikolai Lenin.

Karl Marx, a member of an Illuminati front organization called the League of the Just, partly financed by the Rothschilds, advocated class warfare through economic, political, moral and spiritual changes. He encouraged the abolition of the family and advocated that the state should raise children. He said, “We must war against all prevailing ideas of religion...the idea of God is the keynote of a perverted civilization.”

Alaska, the Bargain of the Century

The international bankers had no control over Russia, because that nation had rejected their imposition of a central bank. Lincoln, looking for a European ally sought the assistance of Russia’s huge fleet, which pledged its support to Lincoln prior to the war.[1633] Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation possibly encouraged the Russians to send their fleet to America as a show of force. The Russians could relate to it in as much as their Czar emancipated the serfs with a comparable document in 1861 in a humanitarian gesture. Lincoln hoped this show of solidarity would persuade the Russians to support their government when it assisted the Union.

Czar Alexander II directed his navy to sail for the ports of New York and San Francisco and put France and England on notice that it would be wise not to come into the war in support of the South. In October 1861, officials in Baltimore specially invited the Russian ship officers to partake of Baltimore’s hospitality and praised the Russians for abstaining from supporting the “rebellion.” The Czar had instructed his officers to take orders from Lincoln, be ready to fight and, if necessary, destroy the enemy’s commercial shipping lines.[1634] The Russian fleet under Admiral Liviski arrived in New York harbor on September 24, 1863, and anchored there. The Russian Pacific fleet, under Admiral Popov, arrived in San Francisco on October 12. This show of force caused England and France to think twice about even considering assistance to the South.[1635] The fleet did not come cheap. Lincoln agreed to pay $7.2 million for the Russian’s services. Andrew Johnson would become responsible for that payment.

Johnson had no constitutional authority to pay money to a foreign government so he authorized Secretary of State William Seward to arrange for the purchase of Alaska from the Russians for $7.2 million.[1636] Researcher and writer, the late Sherman Skolnick suggested that it was a 99-year lease rather than an outright purchase. Whatever, it was, Seward successfully negotiated the price and the arrangements, completed on March 30, 1867. The Russian fleet possibly prevented the nation from going to war with England and France. Alaska was more than twice the land mass of Texas, 586,412 square miles, at a cost of about two cents per acre. People referred to the purchase as “Seward’s folly” as they viewed it as a piece of worthless real estate instead of a very fortuitous purchase. Author Lindsey Williams maintains

that Alaska’s North Slope has as much crude oil as Saudi Arabia.[1637] On March 18, 2005, Governor Frank H. Murkowski said that there is enough oil on the North Slope to supply the entire U.S. for 200 years.[1638]

Seward believed that we should not stop our imperialistic endeavors with Alaska. He thought that America should take possession of the Danish West Indies, Panama, Samaná and Hawaii. He established unofficial influence in the Hawaiian Islands, Japan, and China. On August 28, 1867, the U.S. formally claimed ownership of the Book Islands, which Captain N. C. Middlebrooks discovered on July 5, 1859. Officials called them the Midway Islands or the Midway Atoll – because they are strategically located halfway between North America and Asia.

Just before the battle of Appomattox, Secretary Seward, per Lincoln’s approval, initiated discussions with the Danish government in order to purchase St. Thomas and St. John, part of the Danish West Indies, for use as naval stations in the West Indies. After three years of pressure by the U.S. State Department, the Danish government conceded to sell the islands for $7,500,000 per a treaty executed in 1867. However, the Senate failed to ratify the treaty. After pressing a reluctant government to agree to the sale, the U.S., at thelastmomentrefusedtoacceptdelivery.[1639] TheyfinallyconsummatedthedealbyatreatyonMarch31, 1917. The U.S. government purchased St. Thomas, St. John and St. Croix for $25 million, as a defensive strategy for control over the Caribbean and the Panama Canal during World War I.

It was not just Seward who believed in the expansion of American commercial interests in China and elsewhere. In his State of the Union address on December 6, 1864, Lincoln said, “The rebellion which has so long been flagrant in China has at last been suppressed, with the cooperating good offices of this Government and of the other Western commercial States. The judicial consular establishment there has become very difficult and onerous, and it will need legislative revision to adapt it to the extension of our commerce and to the more intimate intercourse, which has been instituted with the Government and people of that vast Empire. China seems to be accepting with hearty good will the conventional laws which regulate commercial and social intercourse among the Western nations.”[1640]

Lincoln mentioned Japan in his remarks on December 6, 1864, “Owing to the peculiar situation of Japan and the anomalous form of its Government, the action of that Empire in performing treaty stipulations is inconstant and capricious. Nevertheless, good progress has been affected by the Western powers, moving with enlightened concert. Our own pecuniary claims have been allowed or put in course of settlement, and the inland sea has been reopened to commerce. There is reason also to believe that these proceedings have increased rather than diminished the friendship of Japan toward the United States.”[1641]

After the discovery of gold in Alaska and the resulting gold rush of 1897 to 1898, Britain and the U.S. formulated the Alaska Boundary Commission to determine the boundary between Canada and the U.S. in Alaska. The commission composed of British and American members concluded their findings in 1903. The Pilgrims Society of London celebrated the committee’s conclusions with a lavish dinner in their honor held at the Claridge Hotel on Thursday, October 15, 1903. One of the special guests was Elihu Root, U.S. Secretary of War. The Foreign Secretary, Lord Lansdowne, proposed the health of the Anglo- Saxon race, proclaiming “the United States and Great Britain as the two great branches of the race.”[1642]

The Pledge of Obedience