[CTRL] [12a] Treason in America -- From Aaron Burr to Averell Harriman

[Kris Millegan]

 -Caveat Lector-

Treason in America -- From Aaron Burr to Averell Harriman
ANTON CHAITKIN (C)1984
New Benjamin Franklin House
P. O. Box 20551
New York, New York 10023
ISBN 0-933488-32-7
--[12a]--

-12-
How the Eastern
Establishment Ran Southern
Secession

With the weak Vice President, Millard Fillmore, now temporarily occupying the
White House, the Young America movement began openly preparing to seize power
in the United States. Senator Stephen Douglas, the new Compromise hero,
thought he had a deal with the Eastern and European financiers behind the
movement to make him the next President. With this in mind, he sponsored the
purchase of the Democrats' party journal, the Democratic Review, by Young
America intriguer George Sanders, who was supposed to promote his candidacy.

We have met with Sanders before, the reader may recall; his "Texas interview"
trick helped defeat the Henry Clay presidential campaign in 1844, and thus
receives part credit for the Mexican War.

Sanders was an official American political agent of the British Hudson's Bay
Company, employed by Sir George Simpson, Hudson's overseas governor, and Sir
John Henry Pelly, governor of the Company and governor of the Bank of
England.(l) Sanders, like Caleb Cushing, was at the same time a very loud
"anti-British" demagogue.

The Democratic Review issues published by Sanders in 1852, readily available
in public libraries today, are crucial documentary evidence for the
historical investigator, and they ought to be a terrible embarrassment to
academic historians.


In a 9,000-word piece entitled "Mazzini and Young Europe," Sanders gushes
praise for the efforts of Giuseppe Mazzini and his revolutionary
organizations throughout Europe, and he demands that the United States aid in
the overthrow of European tyrants; a thoroughly sinister portrait of Mazzini
appears on the frontispiece of the bound volume containing the 1852
Democratic Review issues.

In a later issue that year, the same George Sanders warns Democrats that
"This continent is for white people, and not only the continent, but the
islands adjacent, and the negro must be kept in slavery at Cuba and Hayti,
under white republican masters."(2) The word "republican," so deliberately
abused by using it to connote a type of slavery, is supposed to distinguish
"Americans" like the secessionist leader Quitman, from the "monarchist"
Spaniards who then ran Cuba and might decide to liberate its slaves.

Like Thomas Cooper, who was a violent "leftist" in England before coming to
South Carolina to create that state's "rightist" rebellion against the
republic in the 1820s, George Sanders combined "left-wing" and "right-wing"
revolutionism in his own person, as they were combined in the movement
Sanders represented: Mazzini-worshipper William Lloyd Garrison, proposing the
breakup of the United States on the grounds of abolitionism; Sanders and
Quitman proposing disunion and universal slavery in the name of the very same
Mazzini revolution.


'The Champion of My Race'

In August 1851, John Anthony Quitman, who had resigned the governorship of
Mississippi over his still-pending indictment in the Cuba conspiracy, arrived
in Boston. He was accompanied by secessionist Jefferson Davis, his sometime
political collaborator, and two others Generals Pillow and Clingman—who had
been members of the Cushing-Quitman clique of officers in the Mexican War.


Caleb Cushing met the generals in Boston, and took them home with him to
Newburyport, the site of his commission three decades earlier from Essex
Junto member John Lowell to be "my champion and that of my race. " There, in
a famous, several-days-long strategy session, the Boston Brahmin, the
Scottish Rite secessionist leader, and their friends planned the next
administration of the United States. Midway through the meeting they brought
in General Franklin Pierce from New Hampshire to join them; Pierce was to be
chosen the Democratic presidential nominee in a prearranged convention
"surprise" the following year. Cushing's collaborators now fanned out to
prepare the stage show.

The disgracefully laudatory Cushing biography by his family member, Claude M.
Fuess, may be consulted for a detailed and somewhat candid description of
this fakery. We reproduce here a quote from a Pierce associate carried in the
Fuess book:

They [the Mexican War generals] fixed up all the arrangements to make Frank
Pierce the Democratic nominee for President. All of them but Pierce will be
in the Convention.... They will [at first] conspicuously try to secure
two-thirds of the Convention for one or the other of the three [prominent
candidates] but their influence, though strong enough to give one after
another a majority, will somehow always fail to bring together two-thirds for
either. When the Convention begins to get tired and delegates are asking who,
then, can we nominate, the Gen'l--is to nominate Gen'l F. Pierce and Gen'l is
to second his nomination. Other generals and others besides the generals will
join them, and Pierce will be the nominee."(3)

Indeed, quoting Fuess:

As the reading of states for the forty-ninth ballot began, the stampede which
Cushing had been preparing actually occurred. Pennsylvania . . . came forward
for Pierce. Others followed, until, in one of those strange bursts of mob
mania which sometimes explode when tension runs high, everybody seemed
simultaneously to wish to cast his vote for the winning candidate. The hall
was a shouting mass of humanity . . . Pierce received 282 out of 288 votes
cast. To the general public, he seemed like a far more mysterious 'dark
horse' than Polk had been in 1844. In reality, he was nominated by a plan
more successful in its immediate results that any similar scheme in our
political history.(4)


The nearly moribund Whigs nominated patriotic General Winfield Scott for the
presidency. He was beaten by a coalition of precisely the kind which had met
in Caleb Cushing's parlor. The "Cotton Whigs"—Northern textile manufacturers
(i. e. the Cabots and the Lowells) with strong ties to Southern planters—
defected from Scott, and their main representative, Daniel Webster, bitterly
opposed his candidacy, splitting the party.

During the years 1847 through 1852, 1,875,000 immigrants had entered the
United States. Of this total, 920,000 escaped from the Irish famine and
487,000 were German refugees from revolutionary chaos. The pro-slavery lords
of Boston and New York, specifically including the Astors, Vanderbilts and
Roosevelts in New York, organized anti-Negro sentiment and anti-Whig votes
from the miserable Irish, many of them tenants in Astor's disease-infested
slums.

Still another source of Pierce support was the Young European himself.
Giuseppi Mazzini wrote in 1853:

Kossuth [Hungarian radical] and I are working with the very numerous Germanic
element in the United States for his [Pierce's] election, and under certain
conditions which he has accepted. Of these conditions he has already
fulfilled enough to give us security that he will carry out the rest. He was
to appoint American representatives in Europe who would be favorable to us
and would help us; and almost all his nominations are such as we desired. He
was to give to all battleship commanders instructions opposed to Austria and
the despotic governments: he has done it . . . He had promised to give orders
to all his diplomatic agents to recognize immediately whatever
insurrectionary republican government should be established in an Italian or
Hungarian province, and he states that he has done so.(5)


The election of Franklin Pierce, indeed, gave the signal for the revolution
to begin. We will restrict our treatment here, due to space limitations, to
two, intimately connected objectives of this revolutionary project:
• The destruction of the liberties of the emerging republics of Latin
America, and their colonial reconquest; and
• the breakup of the United States and the overthrow of its republican
government.

These two objectives had been combined in the plans of America's enemies
since the mercenary army of Aaron Burr sailed from Ohio to the Gulf South,
and remain so in the twentieth century.


The Cushing-Pierce Administration

President Franklin Pierce, after pledging that his administration would be
devoted to ensuring that "no sectional, or ambitious, or fanatical excitement
may again threaten the durability of our institutions,"(6) made the following
appointments:

Caleb Cushing Attorney General of the United States;
Jefferson Davis—Secretary of War;

James Buchanan, who had been Secretary of State during the Mexican War—U.S.
Ambassador to England;

George Sanders, revolutionist, official political agent of an arm of the
British government—U.S. Consul in London;

Edwin DeLeon, Thomas Cooper's disciple and father of the Young America
movement—U.S. Consul in Egypt;

August Belmont, official U.S. agent of the British Rothschild bankers and
American Consul of the Hapsburgs' Austrian Empire - U.S. Ambassador to
Holland;

Pierre Soule, exiled French Revolutionary, Jesuit-trained, Young America
Senator from Louisiana—U.S. Ambassador to Spain;

William L. Cazneau, husband of Aaron Burr's agent and mistress, Jane
McManus—U.S. Consul in Santo Domingo.


A decade later, in the Civil War, Davis was to be president of the Southern
Confederacy; Belmont would be Democratic national chairman and not-so-loyal
leader of the opposition to President Lincoln; Soule would be an important
Confederate diplomat; Edwin DeLeon was to become the chief Confederate
propagandist in Europe and reputedly the closest adviser to Jefferson Davis;
and Sanders was to engage in the most audacious anti-American operations as a
Confederate spy, fleeing to Europe after the war with a $25,000 price on his
head for allegedly having participated in planning the murder of Abraham
Lincoln
When George Sanders arrived as U.S. Consul in London, he immediately set up
his house there as the headquarters of European revolution. At a single
dinner party on Feb. 21, 1854, Sanders hosted the "very English" Italian
Giuseppe Mazzini, terrorist assassin Felice Orsini, Italy's Giuseppe
Garibaldi, Louis Kossuth of Hungary, Arnold Ruge of Germany, A. A.
Ledru-Rollin of France, Alexander Herzen of Russia and U.S. Ambassador James
Buchanan. Buchanan later explained that he had joked to Mrs. Sanders that
night, "I asked her if she was not afraid the combustible materials about her
would explode and blow us all up."(7) Eventually, when the U.S. Congress
found out what Sanders was doing, he was recalled from London.


Meanwhile, Caleb Cushing's old comrade-in-arms, Scottish Rite Supreme Council
member John A. Quitman, flew into furious activity on the election of his and
Cushing's man Pierce. The prosecution of his federal indictment for the first
anti-Cuba conspiracy had collapsed after the surprise death of President
Taylor. Quitman signed a formal agreement with the "Cuban Junta"
revolutionists in New York in August, 1853.


He became "the civil and military chief of the revolution, " with complete
control of all funds, the power to issue bonds and military commissions, the
power to raise troops and charter vessels, and all the prerogatives of a
dictator. Quitman was to devote these powers to the creation of an
independent government in Cuba which would retain slavery; he was to receive
$1 million if and when Cuba became free.(8)


The Spanish government moved to defend its Caribbean possessions in the
following month, by appointing the Marques de Pezuela as Captain General of
Cuba. Pezuela promptly suppressed the slave trade, freed many slaves,
encouraged racial intermarriage, organized freed slaves into a militia, and
forbade whites to arm themselves thus counteracting the attempted
insurrection by Quitman-linked planters.

On February 28, 1854, Pezuela confiscated the American merchant ship Black
Warrior in Havana harbor, and arrested its Young America intriguing captain,
James D. Bulloch. In response to the Black Warrior seizure, Pierce told
Congress this "wanton injury" demanded "immediate indemnity"; Louisiana
Senator John Slidell, the Burrite New Yorker who had married his niece to
August Belmont and brought the Rothschild representative into Democratic
politics, pushed for repeal of the neutrality laws which formally blocked
Quitman's adventures; and Attorney General Caleb Cushing called for an
immediate naval blockade of Cuba.(9)

It should be noted here that the focus of this war fever, Black Warrior
Captain James D. Bulloch, lived in New York with his sister's family; his
sister had a baby four years later who was to grow up and become President of
the United States, following the revered steps of his Uncle Jimmy—this was
Theodore Roosevelt, and his Uncle James D. Bulloch was to become head of the
Confederate Secret Service in Europe, and the procurer of the Confederacy's
entire navy.

After the seizure of the Black Warrior, ambassador to Spain Pierre Soule
issued an ultimatum, which the Spanish ignored. Quoting Potter's The
Impending Crisis again, "two months [later] Spanish republicans attempted a
revolution; Soule was already in touch with them, and it was believed that he
had subsidized them; he had publicly hailed the revolution 'with all the
fervor of holy enthusiasm' . . . Before the end of his mission, he had become
involved with an international network of revolutionists. "(10) Before the
Cuban adventure collapsed, facing Spanish-Cuban resistance and congressional
opposition, Pierre Soule, James Buchanan, and the U. S. ambassador to France
had met in Belgium and issued the famous Ostend Manifesto, threatening to
invade Cuba if Spain did not sell the island to the United States.

In May of 1855 adventurer William Walker and a mercenary band backed by New
York's Cornelius Vanderbilt(11) sailed for Nicaragua and began a civil war in
Central America. Walker had earlier failed to conquer western Mexico, but now
he won a brief struggle and became dictator of Nicaragua. There he
reinstituted slavery and prepared plans to dig a transoceanic canal under
European colonial auspices. The Cushing-Pierce administration officially
recognized "President" Walker's Nicaraguan dictatorship in May of 1856. When
Walker confiscated Vanderbilt's ships and Nicaraguan properties, however,
Vanderbilt subsidized the neighboring regimes(12) to resist the little
Hitlerian, and many people died in battle or from war-related disease over
10,000 in Costa Rica alone. Walker was finally executed in 1860.


The Scottish Rite Begins the Insurrection

While Scottish Rite Supreme Council member and secessionist John A. Quitman
was trying to conquer Cuba, the Swiss master of the Scottish Rite in the
Northern Jurisdiction, J. J. J. Gourgas du Pan de Rengers, set in motion the
machinery to blow up the United States.

Gourgas delegated Killian Henry Van Rensselaer a "patroon" of the old
unreconstructed Dutch feudal lords in New York—to take personal charge of
initiating a military organization with insurrectionary potential in the
heart of the country. According to Van Rensselaer's Scottish Rite biography,
he had been "irregularly knighted in Rochester, New York in 1830 by three
officers of the British army in Canada."(13)

Piecing together the truth about what Gourgas and Van Rensselaer did to the
United States has cost investigators many hours of painstaking work shoveling
through mounds of Iying cover stories and a good bit of discussion with
relevant families and Masonic organizations.

In 1851, K. H. Van Rensselaer was named Deputy to the Northern Supreme
Council for the states of Pennsylvania and Ohio. Over the next two years, he
made his way westward, carefully probing for local openings, testing the
political waters.


In 1853, he set up the first consistory, or regional headquarters, west of
New York—in Cincinnati, Ohio.(14) He then made his home in Cincinnati,
becoming there a "revered" Scottish Rite personage whose grave is still the
site of yearly ceremonies.

Another secret organization very coincidentally began in Cincinnati, Ohio, in
1854. (15) It was called the Knights of the Golden Circle, and it utilized
very un-Ohioesque mummeries such as the Maltese Cross by way of symbolism. We
would still know very little about this Scottish Rite front organization if
its official founder, George W. L. Bickley, had not talked after being put in
the Ohio State Prison by military authorities during the Civil War.

The Knights of the Golden Circle was the military organization of what was to
become the Confederate States of America. The name was derived from the
circle with a 1,200-mile radius from Cuba, cutting through North and South
America. The Knights' ritual stated that the purpose of the order was "the
entire and speedy conquest of Mexico and the establishment of a separate and
independent nation upon such a basis as to render it subservient to the march
of American civilization."(16)

Base slander! To thus pervert the name of American civilization to the end of
treason against our existence in the mode, alas, of Henry Kissinger, Robert
McNamara, and Paul Volcker today.

After the first "castles" of the Knights were set up in Cincinnati and
surrounding towns, the new order sent organizers and recruiters southward to
the Gulf Coast and eastward to Washington, D.C. Recruits signed up in
Mississippi, Alabama, Louisiana, and in Texas all along the Rio Grande river
bordering on Mexico. General P. T. Beauregard, brother-in-law of Louisiana's
Burrite political boss John Slidell, joined the order; Beauregard was to be
in command of the South Carolina troops in 1861 to supervise the attack on
Fort Sumter which started the Civil War.

According to Bickley, "Men were enlisted as colonists or emigrants [for
Mexico] openly drilled in Baltimore, Washington, and in all the large cities
of the South. It was a matter of newspaper notoriety both in this country and
in Europe."(17)

By the time the Civil War started, the Knights of the Golden Circle claimed
at least 65,000 armed and drilled recruits in the deep South—and in the area
of the nation's capital (this made the successful inauguration of President
Abraham Lincoln a tricky business). The order gradually stepped up its
molding of Southern "public opinion" toward the necessity of secession from
the Union. At the point secession was being resolved upon, it was of great
value to the leaders of the insurrection to have an armed secret organization
numbering in the thousands, to enforce "unanimous" public support for their
actions.

After Lincoln unexpectedly ordered a national mobilization to crush the
rebellion, the Knights of the Golden Circle engaged in paramilitary and
espionage operations in the North, along with parallel and successor groups
under different names none, however, publicly carried its proper name:
Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry.


The Bleeding of Kansas

Before the republic could be overthrown, the general population had to be
convinced that a North-South conflict was inevitable, or "irrepressible, " as
New York's Senator Seward had gleefully put it when Henry Clay's compromise
seemed defeated in 1850.

President Pierce had promised his administration would look to domestic
tranquility and security, above all else. But virtually the first order of
congressional business during the Cushing-Pierce administration was the
introduction of the Kansas-Nebraska Act. Drawn up by Stephen Douglas after
conferring with Caleb Cushing, the act repealed the Missouri Compromise of
1820, which had prohibited the establishment of slave states above the
southern border of Missouri, apart from that state itself. The
Kansas-Nebraska Act directed that what was then called the Nebraska Territory
would be divided into the Territories of Kansas and Nebraska, and that
whether slavery was to be permitted there would be left to the "residents" to
decide.

Attorney General Caleb Cushing now wrenched from every member of the Pierce
cabinet support for the bill and he wrote articles making its support the
crucial test of the loyalty of Democrats to the President. (18) The
administration had the political muscle to pass the bill, and Pierce signed
it May 30, 1854.

A month before passage of the act, the Commonwealth of Massachusetts had
issued a charter to the Massachusetts Emigrant Aid Company "for the purpose
of assisting emigrants to settle in the West." Horace Greeley's New York
Tribune trumpeted the Company's plan as the means to bring 20,000
abolitionists storming into Kansas. A "Platte County Self-Defensive
Association" was organized in Missouri with the avowed aim of "removing any
and all emigrants who go [to Kansas] under the auspices of Northern Emigrant
Aid Societies."

Just after House passage of the act, William Seward exclaimed before the
Senate: "Come on then, Gentlemen of the Slave States, since there is no
escaping your challenge, I accept it in behalf of the cause of freedom. We
will engage in competition for the virgin soil of Kansas, and God give the
victory to the side which is stronger in numbers as it is in right."(19)

"Border Ruffians" now poured into Kansas from Missouri, and fighting
abolitionists poured in from New England. The outrages of murder and arson,
committed mostly by the proslavery Missourians, and the savage cold-blooded
murders committed by white abolitionist John Brown, are familiar in outline
to all history-minded Americans. The overseer of this carnage is not so
familiar as he should be. U.S. Attorney General Caleb Cushing approved all
the fraudulent elections held by the thugs who moved in to steal the
territory for slavery. Cushing made no attempt to stop the mobs from raging
up and down the area, wrecking and burning towns. He couldn't "catch" John
Brown.

George Cabot, leader of the Essex Junto, had written a half-century before on
the subject of what the United States would have to be put through to be
successfully disunited and destroyed—the end to which the Junto was dedicated:

"The essential alterations . . . will be the consequences only of a great
suffering, or the immediate effects of violence . . . Separation will be
unavoidable, when our loyalty to the union is generally perceived to be the
instrument of debasement and impoverishment. If a separation should, by and
by, be produced by suffering, I think it might be accompanied by important
amelioration of our theories."(20)

On May 24, 1856, John Brown, four of his sons, and three other followers went
in the middle of the night to the cabin of a pro-slavery Kansas settler named
James Doyle. While Mrs. Doyle pleaded for mercy, Brown dragged Mr. Doyle and
two of his sons outside, shot the father, split open the skulls of the sons,
and hacked all their bodies to pieces. This, he announced, was done in the
name of the Army of the North.

Then they went to the house of Allen Wilkenson, a pro-slavery member of the
legislature, and hacked open his skull in front of his wife. Finally, they
went to another pro-slavery settler's house, dragged the man's house guest
outside, split his skull, slashed open his side, and chopped off his hand.

Brown's deeds that night, known as the Pottawatomie Massacre, were actually
defended by abolitionist newspapers.

John Brown was not, in fact, his own man. His actions were always closely
controlled by his financial sponsors: feeding and arming followers whose only
business is murder depends entirely on a constant resupply of money, and
requires well-supervised security for transportation and hiding places.

Brown's first financial angel was Gerrit Smith of upstate New York,
beginning-in the late 1840s. Smith was by that time well established as a
bankroller of radicals. When his father, John Jacob Astor's original business
partner, had died in 1837, Astor loaned Gerrit Smith $250,000 without even a
signed contract. Smith then owned a million acres of land inherited from the
days of the Astor partnership, on which John Brown came to live in 1848.
Smith ultimately gave away $8,000,000 to radical causes, according to his
admiring biographers. (This Astor-affiliated funding of assassins, starting
with John Jacob Astor's financing of the escape of Aaron Burr after his
killing of Alexander Hamilton, continued into the twentieth-century Astor
family backing of the pro-Nazi movement within England, based in their house
"Cliveden.")

As the Kansas violence was increasing, "Samuel Cabot [grand nephew of George
Cabot and grandson of opium syndicate founder Thomas H. Perkins] and Amos A.
Lawrence, a principal stockholder in the Emigrant Aid Society, sent $4,000
worth of Sharp rifles into Kansas."(21) The exact nature of John Brown's
direct Cabot connection may never be known, because all but one of his
sponsors burned their papers. But this much is certain when Brown failed at
an earlier attempt to establish himself as a wool merchant, Perkins syndicate
member John Murray Forbes donated a chunk of cash to keep Brown going; and
the Cabot Bank loaned Brown $57, 000;(22) how or whether this was repaid is
unknown.

But the most determined backer of John Brown, and later his controller, was
Thomas Wentworth Higginson of Newburyport, Massachusetts, whom we encountered
earlier.

In January, 1857, after James Buchanan was elected President to replace the
disreputable Franklin Pierce, John Brown went to Boston and met with
Higginson, fellow Newburyporter William L. Garrison, and several of their
friends. Their Massachusetts State Kansas Committee made Brown its official
agent, and one of them gave Brown $1,300 for 200 revolvers. In New York, the
National Kansas Committee, meeting in the Astor House, transferred all their
guns to the Massachusetts Committee for Brown, and pledged additional
supplies for 100 men and $5,000.(23)

Back in Boston, Brown met with Transcendentalist author Ralph Waldo Emerson.
A Young America supporter, Emerson praised Brown as "a true idealist with no
ends of his own," and gushed: "A shepherd and herdsman, he learned the
manners of animals and knew the secret signals by which animals communicate."
Brown also met with nature-loving writer Henry David Thoreau. A sometime
family employee of the Swiss grand master of the Scottish Rite, J. J. J.
Gourgas,(24) Thoreau called Brown a man of "rare common sense. " Both authors
gave Brown money.

Meanwhile, on Jan. 15, 1857, Thomas Wentworth Higginson convened the
Massachusetts State Disunion Convention (sic). He was determined to complete
the several-generations-long project: terminating the American republic which
was so hateful to his embittered family. It was at this Disunion Convention
that the ingredients for the disastrous Harper's Ferry raid were put together.

While many children in America grow up thinking they might like to become the
President, some children only want to kill the President. Higginson, whose
family had fought the United States as "irregulars" with the British Secret
Service since sometime before 1800, was such a child. This flaming radical
"leftist," Thomas W. Higginson, in his biography of his grandfather,
"rightist" leader Stephen Higginson, describes that Essex Junto member as
follows:

[He] wished for cordial alliance with Great Britain; in a word, [he] was a
thorough-going, uncompromising, ardent, steadfast Federalist, and as such a
zealous and devoted patriot in every fibre of his frame....

His fireside . . . was a centre of earnest discussion of the great practical
controversies of the day, and without in the least comprehending the full
import of their meaning, my boyish ears drank in and my boyish heart and
imagination retained political impressions, which remained unaltered till the
widening experiences of life . . . gradually modified them.... On the whole,
it was a healthful stimulation to a child's intellectual power of
discernment, honorable feeling, and patriotic devotion to great practical
principles inculcated by such men as my grandfather and George Cabot and
Henry Lee and many men of mark whom [grandfather] gathered around him as
guests; and as all my relatives on my father's side, as well as on my
mother's, were zealous and uncompromising Federalists, my whole form of
thought and feeling took from the first a highly conservative and
aristocratic form.

These practical associations and convictions, which unconsciously framed . .
. my character, were rounded out and completed by the social influences
spread around me by my grandmother—an English woman by birth and breeding,
married to my grandfather in his widowhood....(25)


Thomas Wentworth Higginson told his Disunion Convention:

But give me a convention. of ten men who have drawn the sword for the right,
and thrown away the scabbard, and I will revolutionize the world. (Loud
applause.)

You say, we are "traitors," "fanatics." That is what we came here to be. That
is a clear compliment. You say we are "weak," "powerless." Are we? Give us
five years, and let us see . . . all we ask is, Open the doors of your powder
magazine, and let us try!. .; .

I tell you . . . that there are men on this platform to whom these thoughts,
that are new to many of us to-day, have been the deliberate purpose of years!
.... How many years is it since, in the city of Boston, the action of half a
dozen men lined the streets with bayonets from Court Square to Long Wharf,
and brought the country to the very verge of civil war? Unprepared,
unpremeditated, unpracticed, half a dozen men [i.e. abolition-activists] did
that; and there has not been a fugitive slave case in Boston since. Give us
another one, another chance to come face to face with the United States
government, on such an occasion as that, and see if we have not learned
something by the failure.... Talk of treason! Why, I have been trying for ten
years to get the opportunity to commit treason, and have not found it yet....

No, sir! disunion is not a desire, merely; it is a destiny. It is in vain to
talk of difficulties in effecting the process. The laws of human nature are
taking care of those difficulties very rapidly. If our calculations are
correct, it will be easier to hasten it than to postpone it.... I tell you,
let another war come in Kansas, and no power on earth can prevent a border
war between Missouri and Iowa. The line will be drawn for us soon enough by
the passions of men. The calm deliberations of conventions like these, only
prepare the way for it. If we cannot bring it about peaceably, it will come
forcibly, that is all. The great forces of nature are sufficient. The vast
antagonistic powers are brought into collision—the earthquake comes—and all
we disunionists say is, if it is coming, in God's name, let it come quickly!

(Applause.)(26)

Higginson had invited to his convention a British soldier of fortune, Hugh
Forbes, who had served in Garibaldi's forces and was now editor of the
Italian-language newspaper The European. Forbes and Brown were introduced,
and Forbes set out for Mount Tabor, Iowa, where he set up a military training
school to drill John Brown's private army.(27)

When Higginson later had doubts about John Brown's willingness to go the
lengths required, Higginson was reassured by Franklin Sanborne, an associate
of Higginson and Gerrit Smith in managing the Brown project:

Brown . . . is as ready for a revolution as any other man . . . I believe he
is the best Disunion champion you can find, and with his hundred men, when he
is put where he can use them and drill them, (and he has an expert drill
officer with him) will do more to split the union than a list of 5,000 names
for your convention—good as that is.(28)

John Brown and about 20 followers attacked and temporarily captured the
United States Arsenal at Harper's Ferry, Virginia, on Oct. 16, 1859. During
this insane raid, Brown's men first killed a free black porter who did not
"halt" on command because he had never heard the word; they also killed the
mayor of the town, whose slaves were then freed by a clause in the man's will
These were the only slaves freed in the raid, though Brown's announced
objective had been a widespread slave insurrection. Brown was captured, many
people died, many were injured, and disunionists, North and South, were
ecstatic. During his trial and after his hanging, Brown was celebrated as an
heroic martyr by the Boston Brahmins and by their poets and politicians. The
secessionist Southern newspapers then played the "Northern sympathy for
Brown" and "hatred for the South" to a Southern population whose pro-Union
element was already beginning to despair.

How Secession Was Run

American society, in 1859, was demoralized and disoriented. The abandonment
of American System economics the Free Trade, no-tariff, no-national-bank
policies of the Young America Democrats had set up the economy for a crash in
1857, a repeat of the panic and business depression that had brought mass
poverty and hunger in 1837. By the time the next President, Abraham Lincoln,
was inaugurated in 1861, the United States Treasury was literally
bankrupt—the salaries of congressmen could not be paid. Pro-Confederate
plunder by the Buchanan administration, and an economic program fostering
speculative paper empires, were both to blame.

The nation was politically split, despite strong pro-Union sentiment
remaining alongside disunionism in South and North. And in 1861, an armed
insurrection began, an insurrectionary army eventually totaling a million men
was put into the field, and the United States was nearly destroyed.
But no "demoralization," no mere "political sentiments"can put a million men
into the field. Disunionism was translated into armed insurrection, and the
historian must answer the question, "By whom was this done?"
Answering this question involves great difficulties—which is not to excuse
the academic historians, who have never tried to do so. The investigator
faces two principal problems:

1) Treason, armed rebellion per se, being a capital offense, its
practitioners have a strong interest in preventing evidence of their acts
from being available to the curious;

2) The traitors, and their Northern and foreign controllers, later came back
to dominate American political life we are speaking here of the
administrations of Presidents Grover Cleveland, Theodore Roosevelt, and
Woodrow Wilson, the Dulles family, and others; the powerful do not appreciate
people snooping in their bloody closets.

By and large, the men the public identifies with the Southern Rebellion had
little or nothing to do with originating the insurrection; they were front
men, like Jefferson Davis and Robert E. Lee, who were left with the horror
and the tragedy to deal with when the rebellion was challenged and
successfully put down.

While the Knights of the Golden Circle, the military preorganization of the
Confederacy, was being organized under the control of the Scottish Rite's
Northern chief, the Swiss J. J. J. Gourgas, and his lieutenant Killian Henry
Van Rensselaer, the Southern Jurisdiction of the Rite was organizing the
political leadership for the secession itself. The man in charge of this
project was Albert Pike of Newburyport, Massachusetts.

Pike had been a life-long friend and a decades-long protege of his townsman
Caleb Cushing. On March 20, 1853, two weeks after Cushing rose to power as
the attorney general of the United States, the Rite's Southern Secretary
General Albert Gallatin Mackey conferred the Rite's exalted degrees upon
Albert Pike at a ceremony in Charleston, South Carolina. As Pike commented in
his last speech as grand commander in 1890, "I never heard of the Scottish
Rite until 1853."(29)

Albert Pike(30) is one of the most physically and morally repulsive
individuals in American history. Horribly obese easily 300 Ibs. or more- Pike
was known in his adopted state of Arkansas as a practitioner of Satanism. His
reported sexual proclivities included sitting astride a phallic throne in the
woods, accompanied by a gang of prostitutes. He would bring to his revels one
or more wagon-loads of food and liquor, most of which he would consume over a
period of perhaps 48 hours, until he passed into a stupor.

Pike was thrilled at the chance he got to kill Spanish-Americans in the
Mexican War; he pushed himself forward in Arkansas politics with noisy
anti-Negro and pro-slavery rhetoric; and in the 1850s he became the leading
Southern organizer and boss of the American Party or "Know-Nothings"—the
third-party grouping based on hatred and fear of immigrants.

In 1858 Albert Pike and 11 of his collaborators issued a circular calling for
the expulsion of free Negroes and mulattoes from Arkansas, citing "the
laziness and bestiality of a degraded race," their "immorality, filth and
laziness," and calling the Negro "so worthless and depraved an animal."(3l)

In 1859, Albert Pike was called upon to become the grand commander of the
Southern Scottish Rite. The activities of Pike's South Carolina-based
organization are, of course, as closed to public scrutiny as were the minutes
of Hitler's cabinet meetings. But the Scottish Rite's official histories have
given us some names to reckon with.

The gap Pike was to fill came from the sudden death, in 1858, of Mississippi
secessionist and Scottish Rite leader John A. Quitman. Over the next two
years—until the records suddenly stop a week before Fort Sumter—Pike set up a
Scottish Rite Supreme Council extending for the first time over the entire
South.

In March, 1860, Howell Cobb of Georgia was made a sovereign grand inspector
general and an active member of the Supreme Council.(32) Cobb was at that
time Secretary of the Treasury of the United States, and the most powerful
member of the Cabinet. A close friend of President Buchanan, Cobb was to be
the leader of the secessionists in Georgia and the chairman of the Convention
which organized the Confederacy in Montgomery, Alabama.

John C. Breckinridge of Kentucky became a sovereign grand inspector general
and an active member of the Supreme Council in September, 1859.(33)
Breckinridge was at that time Vice-President of the United States. To better
understand his significance in this business, we must return to the checkered
career of the Boston Brahmins' agent Caleb Cushing.

The 1860 national convention of the Democratic Party was held at Charleston,
South Carolina. Caleb Cushing, who held no particular national office at that
time, was selected as convention chairman.
Under the supervision of Chairman Cushing, the Gulf States delegations staged
a walkout in supposed reaction to a platform decision by the convention.
Following the walkout, Cushing then ruled that no candidate could be chosen
without the consent of two-thirds of the original delegates. Stephen Douglas
and his northern backers were amazed and furious, and the convention broke up
without choosing a candidate.
The extremist Southern delegates, whooping it up in this dress rehearsal for
Secession, now set up their own Convention—and Caleb Cushing of Massachusetts
presided. The secessionists nominated Vice-President Breckinridge as their
candidate for President, while Stephen Douglas was nominated by the remnants
of the party. Yet another slate, headed by John Bell of Tennessee, was
nominated by quasi-Democrat Unionists calling themselves the Constitutional
Union Party.

>From then until the election of Republican Abraham Lincoln, the Breckinridge
"election campaign" had its unofficial headquarters in the White House, and
its commander was the celebrated Caleb Cushing of Massachusetts. The purpose
of this arrangement, as we shall see, was no mere minority candidacy.

The Union's armed forces were imprisoned, while the insurrectionists were
armed by Northerners, foreigners and by the federal government- itself.


What Secession Was—And Wasn't

We shall present here a compressed record of the 1861 insurrection: the
creation of the Southern Confederacy, state by state, and the arming of the
insurrectionary forces. It is an aspect of American history for which the
academic historians have had peculiarly little curiosity. They have offered
us accounts of the events which have lamely reproduced the insurrectionists'
own testimony, or some other explanations which somehow transform an armed
attack on the United States into a "geographical" problem.

South Carolina

The 1860 election results are themselves somewhat annoying to the purely
"sectional" view of the ensuing conflict. Republican Abraham Lincoln was
elected President with 1,867,000 popular votes, to 1,379,000 for Democrat
Stephen Douglas, 854,000 for secessionist candidate Breckinridge and 591,000
for Constitutional Union candidate Bell. The secessionist Breckinridge
received only 45 percent of the vote within the slave states, 115,000 less
than Douglas and Bell combined, while Lincoln was routinely excluded from the
ballot.

South Carolina, the Scottish Rite's Southern headquarters, completing 30
years of attempts to destroy the American Union, began the secession process
immediately after Lincoln's election. The state's governor, William Gist,
like the three who were to succeed him during the war, had been trained in
politics under the British revolutionary import, Dr. Thomas Cooper, at South
Carolina College.

Gist's own family background was appropriate to his actions. His grandfather
of the same name had been a loyalist captain with the British forces during
the American Revolution, serving under General Augustine Prevost.(34)

The South Carolina legislature called a convention which met on Dec. 20,
1860, and passed an Ordinance of Secession, announcing that the state's
ratification of the U.S. Constitution was "repealed."

Interestingly enough, it was the great-grand-uncle of our present-day AFL-CIO
President Lane Kirkland, South Carolina's Senator James Chesnut, who first
officially proposed the secession action. In his speech to the legislature he
promised the insurrection would come off so smoothly that he would "drink all
the blood that will be spilled." Chesnut was later to order the commencement
of firing on Fort Sumter, which began the Civil War. Mr. Kirkland has
defended his family's actions by asserting that "Northern aggression" was
responsible for the war.

Utilizing an atmosphere of hysteria, which had been increasing from John
Brown's raid on Harper's Ferry to the Lincoln election, the insurrectionists
proposed elections to state conventions throughout the South, which would
adopt secession ordinances as South Carolina had done. (It should be noted
that South Carolina held no popular election for President in 1860, and none
for the commencement of the insurrection.(35)


Mississippi

Mississippi, whose secessionist organization had been created by the recently
deceased Scottish Rite leader from New York, John A. Quitman, acted first
after South Carolina. While Jefferson Davis called for delay, the "Young
America" leaders in the state called for a convention against his counsels.
In an election held Dec. 20, 1860, secessionist delegates were said to have
received 16,800 votes to 12,200 for their opponents.(36)

The Mississippi Ordinance of Secession was drawn up by L.Q.C. Lamar, nephew
of the second President of the Texas Republic Mirabeau Lamar. The Lamars were
a banking family based in Georgia and New York; Gazaway Bugg Lamar was the
founder of the Bank of the Republic in New York City, and the leading partner
in a massive transatlantic financial trust involving the cream of the
British, Swiss, and "Yankee" oligarchs. We shall look more closely at the
crucial New York arrangements in Chapter 15.

On the same day as the Mississippi secession was decided, Dec. 20, 1860, the
U.S. Secretary of War, John Floyd, who had been the "favorite pupil" of the
British revolutionist Thomas Cooper, ordered the Allegheny arsenal at
Pittsburgh to send 113 heavy columbiad cannons and 11 32-pounder cannons to
the unfinished, undefended U.S. forts at Ship Island, Mississippi and
Galveston, Texas, where they could be seized by the insurrectionists.(37)

Florida

Florida held an election December 22, 1860, in which a tiny scattered vote
favored secessionist delegates by approximately 3 to 2. That state's leading
secessionist, Senator David Yulee, was a prominent spokesman for the
Mazzinite "Young America" movement.

Alabama

In Alabama's election, Dec. 24, 1860, the secessionists received 35,000 to
28,000 for the opposition.(38) A sizeable portion of the state attempted to
break off and form a new state, loyal to the Union, but their resistance was
crushed. The leader of the Alabama secessionists, William Lowndes Yancey, had
led the walkout from the Democratic National Convention in Charleston under
Caleb Cushing's supervision.

Yancey, formerly a South Carolina politician, had appeared to be a strong
Unionist until the 1840s, when he suddenly arose as the most dramatic
"fire-eating" mouthpiece for Southern defiance of the Union. No biographer
has yet bothered to pose an explanation of this curious switch-over in
outlook. Certain facts, however, might help clear up the mystery.
William Lowndes Yancey's father died when he was an infant in Georgia. His
mother remarried a Presbyterian minister and accompanied her new husband,
Nathaniel Beman, up to Troy, New York. Beman was a radical abolitionist and
raised his stepson Yancey in an atmosphere of wild crusades and intrigues
against the moderate churchmen, rising to become moderator of the
Presbyterian Church. From 1845 through 1865, Beman was president of the
Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, under the dose control of the Van
Rensselaer family.(39) Patroon Killian Henry Van Rensselaer, as we have seen,
was the Northern Scottish Rite leader who personally set up the Knights of
the Golden Circle in the United States. It was the Knights who provided the
military backbone and the thuggish enforcement for the Confederate
insurrection—particularly in the Gulf South from Texas to Alabama.

Two other Alabama secession leaders are of interest to the historical
investigator although they do not seem to have aroused any interest within
the "history profession."

Caleb Huse was the leader of the Alabama militia, training his troops at the
University of Alabama. At the beginning of the Civil War, Huse was
immediately sent to England to begin acquiring arms for the insurrection. He
was credited by James D. Bulloch, the Confederacy's European Secret Service
chief, with being the "unsung hero" of the arms procurement effort, bringing
back from Europe hundreds of thousands of rifles with which to kill
Americans.(40) Caleb Huse was a Northerner—from Newburyport, Massachusetts.
His family owned the Newburyport Herald—the same paper that Caleb Cushing and
William Lloyd Garrison had worked on. The Huse family published a special
memorial volume in tribute to Caleb Cushing in the 1870s, which included a
gushing speech by Albert Pike about his lifelong friend Cushing.(41)

John William Mallet was another visiting insurrectionist at the University of
Alabama. A British chemist, in the international spy family into which Aaron
Burr married, Mallet was appointed head of the Confederate Ordinance
Laboratories heading up the effort to devise bombs, torpedoes, poisons, etc.
Mallet never bothered to give up his British citizenship, and after the Civil
War he was a founder of the American Chemical Society and got off scot free.

Both Caleb Huse and John William Mallet were chemistry teachers at the
University of Alabama Yet a third chemistry teacher there, Frederick A. P.
Barnard, went on to a bizarre career of secession and subversion in
Mississippi and New York. Huse and Barnard were from Massachusetts, Mallet
was British. Alabamians should be interested to inquire, what was being
brewed in the university chemistry lab?

Georgia

Georgia's leading secessionists were the Scottish Rite Supreme Council member
Howell Cobb, Albert Pike's dearest friend Robert Toombs (later a Supreme
Council member), and the previously described Lamar family. Georgia held
elections for a secession convention on January 2, 1861, in which the
secessionists claimed victory by a 44,000 to 41,000 margin. There is some
evidence that the anti-secessionists actually achieved a slim majority.(42)

Louisiana

John Slidell was the political boss of Louisiana, the leader of the state's
secessionists and the single most powerful backer of the 1856 election of
president James Buchanan. Slidell was born and raised in New York City,
entirely a product of Aaron Burr's political machine. His father was the
president of the Mechanics Bank of New York, a partner therein with Matthew
Davis, Burr's lifelong henchman and executor. Slidell was trained and placed
in Louisiana politics by Edward Livingston, Burr's indicted coconspirator in
the 1807 secession attempt. Little more than this is known about Slidell in
New York—he burned all his papers and letters, and every personal effect from
which his history might be accurately reconstructed.

Two other powerful Louisiana secessionists were the state's U.S. senators,
Pierre Soule and Judah Benjamin. We have described Soule, the French,
Jesuit-trained revolutionist, in the context of his Young America intrigues
under the Cushing-Pierce administration.

Judah Benjamin, a British subject from the West Indies, was hired as a law
clerk by John Slidell. He later became Confederate secretary of state and a
close advisor to Confederate President Jefferson Davis, and after the Civil
War managed to escape to a luxurious life in England as a Queen's Barrister.

Though he undoubtedly played a role in the British Secret Service's post-war
operations in the U.S. (Klu Klux Klan, etc.), Judah Benjamin has been been
posthumously promoted into some sort of super-conspirator of the Civil War.
When his actual biography is compared to the treasonous activities of
socially prominent, Anglo-Saxon leaders in Boston and New York, and to Swiss,
Dutch and Venetian gentlemen who would prefer to remain anonymous, it would
seem that Benjamin—born a Jew— is supposed to take the rap for the
bluer-blooded elites. (An Ohio senator, attacking Benjamin's extreme pro-
slavery rhetoric, called him "a Hebrew with Egyptian principles.")

Louisiana's secessionists held an election for a state convention on January
7, 1861. The secessionist delegate-candidates received 20,000 votes to 18,000
for their opponents.(43)

Texas

Sam Houston, chief of staff of the victorious army of Texas in their
revolution against Mexico, was governor of Texas when Lincoln was elected
President. Secessionists including the powerful Lamar family, backed by
thousands of armed paramilitary Knights of the Golden Circle called for a
Texas secession convention. Sam Houston said no. He ruled, as governor, that
all efforts to pull his state out of the union were illegal, and refused to
call a special session of the legislature to set up a convention.

The secessionists simply pulled a coup, deposing Governor Houston and calling
a rump "election." Their announcement that seccesionists delegate-candidates
received 40,000 votes, to 10,000 for their opponents, must be matched against
the state's official 600,000 population at that-time.
That, in fact, constitutes the entirety of "popular support for the
Insurrection of 1861. with only the elections just described, the
secessionists controlling the state governments of South Carolina,
Mississippi, Florida, Georgia, Alabama, Louisiana, and Texas met at
Montgomery, Alabama, under the chairmanship of Scottish Rite Supreme Council
member Howell Cobb. They announced the establishment of the Southern
"Confederacy," and designated Jefferson Davis of Mississippi as President of
their rump nation. He made fairly good window-dressing for their
insurrection, being both a Southerner and an American.

Lincoln's presidential inauguration was still a month away, in March 1861.
Secessionists attempted to compel each of the other slave states to join the
"Confederacy, " and failed in every case. Opponents to secession won
clear-cut victories in the elections held in Virginia, North Carolina,
Tennessee and Arkansas.(44) The secessionists were defeated as well in
Missouri, Kentucky, Maryland, and Delaware.

The Arkansas convention was a personal embarrassment for the enormous
Scottish Rite leader, Albert Pike. When he heard that the convention in
Little Rock was likely to vote Unionist, Pike made a hurried trip out west to
personally harangue the delegates: "Things have gone so far that you have
only one choice in the matter. You must go out voluntarily, or be kicked out
or dragged out. South Carolina is going to drag you out, or the government is
going to drag you out by calling on you for troops. . . "(45) The Arkansas
delegates refused to be intimidated, and voted to stay with the Union.

Having voted to stay in the Union, North Carolina, Virginia, Tennessee and
Arkansas were, indeed, eventually "dragged out." After the insurrection's
headquarters in South Carolina started the war, those four states were
unceremoniously declared to be out of the Union and part of the Southern
Confederacy.

--cont--
Aloha, He'Ping,
Om, Shalom, Salaam.
Em Hotep, Peace Be,
Omnia Bona Bonis,
All My Relations.
Adieu, Adios, Aloha.
Amen.
Roads End
Kris

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