-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
--[15a]--
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The Pot and the Kettle
What is a liberal?
We might attempt to define him as "one who does not believe in conspiracies."
Political assassinations, catastrophic events such as the Nazi holocaust,
wars, depressions—in his view these things "just happen," as the New York
Times assures him now and again.
But this definition would be a serious mistake. When Senator Harrison
Williams and other congressmen were prosecuted for "conspiracy" by Abscam
investigators, liberals applauded, though Senator Williams was one of the
leading defenders of civil rights. When the Nixon administration collapsed
under press attacks against the Watergate conspiracy, liberals cheered,
though Nixon's Director of National Security, Henry Kissinger, walked away
scot-free.
We may safely correct our definition of a liberal to "one who does not
believe in conspiracies unless they are characterized as such by the New York
Times." It has been precisely that way for more than a century.
In the early 1870s the world watched in fascination as New York City was
caught in the grips of a Conspiracy Theory— promoted by the New York Times.
The Conspirators had seized control of local and state government behind the
scenes, were stealing people's money and destroying their liberties; they
must be stopped before they expanded their Hidden Power.
The Times and its political allies succeeded in crushing the Conspiracy and
saved the people from William M. ("Boss") Tweed and his cohorts. The story of
this crusade, the victory of the reformers and Tweed's destruction, has since
been told and retold as the classic example of good government triumphing
over corruption.
This standard account of the Tweed case is, to echo the liberals, simplistic
conspiracy-mongering. The purveyors of this conspiracy tale deceived the
public and used the Tweed scandal as a smokescreen for a power grab by the
conspiracy-theorists and their friends.
The following, fairly typical description of the Tweed Conspiracy and its
downfall is taken from The Rise of American Civilization, written in 1927 by
Charles A. Beard, the revisionist historian, and his wife Mary Beard:
About the end of the middle period appeared a leader in Tammany Hall who was
not hampered in his ambitions by any such moderations as stayed the hand of
the English administrator in India. This man was William Marcy Tweed.... By
1869, the Tweed group had possession of the mayor, the common council, the
district attorney, the municipal judges, the legislature at Albany, and even
the governor of the Empire State.
With reckless indifference to all amenities, Tweed and his band scooped in
the rewards of their labors, multiplying the debt of the city tenfold in a
decade and putting no small part of the proceeds into their own pockets . . .
huge sums were fraudulently paid out of the city treasury under the specious
title of 'general purposes,' enriching politicians, contractors and real
estate speculators at the expense of the taxpayers.
. . . they might have gone on indefinitely if they had not fallen out among
themselves over the division of the loot,
- creating dissensions which led to exposures in 1871. On the motion of a
committee of indignant citizens formed to prosecute the malefactors, Tweed
was arrested on a charge of having stolen $6,000,000, convicted and sent to
prison.
Escaping by connivance, he fled to Spain in 1875, only to be discovered,
rearrested, brought back to New York, and kept in jail until his death soon
afterward. (l)
Here we have a fine example of "revisionism" in action. The facts of Tweed's
prosecution bear only a slight resemblance to this tale by Columbia
University Professor Beard.
Tweed was indeed "arrested." He was also "charged with having stolen
$6,000,000." However, he was acquitted on this charge.
Yes, he was "convicted," but of a different charge, a misdemeanor involving
not having done his duty as a member of an auditing board, in which there was
no legal imputation of personal gain. With a controlled judiciary the
prosecution got a 12-year prison sentence imposed for this misdemeanor, but a
higher court threw out this travesty as unconstitutional.
The prosecution then filed a civil suit against Tweed, a judge imposed a
$3,000,000 bail (in a non-criminal case!), and under this pretext the
bankrupt Tweed was, as Beard says, "sent to prison," to await trial of this
lawsuit.
He was encouraged, apparently by a police agent, to escape from prison. He
did flee to Spain, where he was kidnapped by the American ambassador, the
former secessionist master-politician, Caleb Cushing. He was returned to
America, where, in his absence, judgment had been rendered against him on the
civil suit, and he was sent to prison when he could not pay this new debt.
Tweed died in prison, a broken man.
As far as the public knew then, or knows to this day, the New York Times
began a crusade against the Tweed Conspiracy (or "Ring"); a Committee of 70
composed of indignant private citizens responded to the evidence the Times
presented and mobilized various agencies to begin a prosecution; indignant
private citizen-attorney Samuel J. Tilden organized the prosecution, seeing
to it that indignant private citizen-attorney Charles O'Conor was made a
special deputy State Attorney and conducted the prosecution.
The Motivations of Witch-Hunters
A recent, very valuable book by Queens College history professor Leo
Hershkowitz, "Tweed's New York: Another Look," thoroughly discredits the
Tweed prosecution as a shameful witchhunt. While detailing the outrageous
denials of due process in the case, Hershkowitz pictures the Times and allied
reformers as motivated by bigotry and an anti-urban bias.
This is correct, as far as it goes. The reformers were indeed enraged at the
"lower-class, " immigrant population of New York.
William Tweed, Grand Sachem of Tammany Hall, had created a powerful New York
City political machine based on the organization and votes of hundreds of
thousands of recent immigrants and their children, mostly Irish and German.
President Abraham Lincoln's wartime economic mobilization had continued after
Lincoln's assassination, with government-sponsored railroads, the new
government-protected steel industry, and government-promoted creation of new
farms and cities in the west.
Immigrants streamed into the victorious republic, an annual average of
294,000 entering from 1866 through 1870, compared with 138,000 in the war
years 1861 through 1864, and 175,000 during the chaotic and depressed years
of 1855 through 1860.
What the "well-born" had to say about Tweed and his immigrant constituency is
exemplified by Lord James Bryce in his 1888 book, The American Commonwealth.
Bryce, as an English visitor to New York, had apparently been the first to
propose a crusade against Tweed; he would later serve as British ambassador
to the United States and confidential advisor to President Theodore Roosevelt.
I was in New York in the summer of 1870, and saw the [Tweed] Ring flourishing
like a green bay-tree . . . I inquired why such things were endured . . . I
asked what . . . the respectable citizens proposed to do . . . [when] a
robber should hold the keys of the public treasury, and a ruffian be set to
pollute the seat of justice....(2)
>From the end of the [eighteenth] century . . . New York . . . [was] the seat
of intrigues and the battleground of factions . . . These factions were for a
long time led, and these intrigues worked, by men belonging to the upper or
middle class . . . In the middle of the [nineteenth] century, however, there
came a change. The old native population of the city was more and more
swollen by the immigration of foreigners; first of the Irish, especially from
1846 onwards; then also of the Germans from 1849 onwards; finally of Polish
and Russian Jews, as well as of Italians and of Slavs from about 1883
onwards. Already in 1870 the foreign population . . . constituted a half or
perhaps even a majority of the inhabitants.... These newcomers were as a rule
poor and ignorant. They knew little of the institutions of the country, and
had not acquired any patriotic interest in it. But they received votes....
They were cohesive, influenced by leaders of their own race, and not . . .
capable of exercising an independent judgement upon current issues. From
among them there soon emerged men whose want of book-learning was overcome by
their natural force and shrewdness, and who became apt pupils.
While these causes were transferring power to the rougher and more ignorant
element in the population, the swift development of trade . . . had more and
more distracted the thoughts of the wealthier people from local politics. The
leading men, who fifty years earlier would have watched municipal affairs and
perhaps borne a part in them, were now so much occupied with their commercial
enterprises or their legal practice as to neglect their civic duties, and saw
with unconcern the chief municipal offices appropriated by persons belonging
to the lower strata of society.
Even had these men of social position and culture desired to retain a hold in
city politics, the task would not have been easy, for the rapid growth of New
York . . . brought in swarms of strangers . . . organizing these newcomers .
. . was work not attractive to men of education, nor suited to them. It fell
naturally to those who themselves belonged to the lower strata, and it became
the source of the power they acquired.(3)
Lord Bryce's indicated contempt for the "lower strata" would later be
translated into action by a powerful Anglo-American movement for "eugenics"
(race purification) and immigration restriction. In the twentieth century
this movement worked for the creation of Nazism in Germany, and continues
today as an attack against "overpopulated" developing nations' "swarms" of
wrong-colored people.
In order to gain useful insights into the methodology of New York
Times-approved anti-conspiracy crusades, however, we must be able to
determine why the reformers picked the particular target (Tweed) at the
particular time (18713 they did so. To do this we will explore the political
situation in New York leading up to the Tweed affair; the identity and
background of the reformers and Tweed's relationship to them; and, to see who
might have benefitted from Tweed's downfall, what were the political
consequences of the prosecution. We must start with a brief excursion to
earlier days.
Aaron Burr's New York
When Aaron Burr created the Tammany Hall electioneering apparatus in the
1790s, he was the greatest power in New York State politics. He had been
appointed attorney general and elected U.S. Senator by the state legislature.
He was the attorney for British, Dutch, and Swiss interests holding millions
of acres of land on the frontier with British Canada. He had established
himself through his marriage as a family member of a Swiss clan (the
Mallet-Prevosts) operating on the very highest levels of the British secret
intelligence service. Burr's Swiss clan had an intimate relationship with
Albert Gallatin, the Genevan who would be U.S. Treasury Secretary from 1801
to 1814.
Gallatin selected Burr as Thomas Jefferson's running mate in the 1800
presidential election, and Burr used Tammany Hall to win the New York
electoral votes and thus the national election.
When U.S. Vice-President Aaron Burr killed Alexander Hamilton in 1804, his
seconds in the duel were Mathew Davis and William Van Ness. Davis continued
as Burr's closest aide, and eventually took over as Grand Sachem of Tammany
Hall, running New York City's Democratic Party apparatus until 1826.
Burr had prepared in other ways to maintain his close associates in power in
New York, despite Burr's own treason trials, exile, and disgrace. Martin Van
Buren was his most successful political protege, personally trained by Burr
as a lieutenant in Tammany. The rumor that Van Buren was Burr's illegitimate
son reflects widespread popular knowledge of Van Buren's actual political
parentage.
Van Buren was New York's attorney general, U.S. Senator and governor between
1816 and 1829. He was Andrew Jackson's Secretary of State, but was not
confirmed as ambassador to England because the Senate thought him to be too
much of a slave to the British. He was elected U.S. President in 1836,
following Jackson's closing of the Bank of the United States.
Upon his inauguration, the worst depression up to that time devastated the
country. Van Buren declared it beyond his power to ameliorate the economic
destruction in any way. He told Congress, "The less government interferes
with private disputes, the better for general prosperity."(4) In that crash
and depression, the fortunes of several well-connected anglophiles were made
in the purchase of depressed property, including that of George Peabody,
founder of the House of Morgan.
The man who was to organize the prosecution of "Boss" Tweed in 1871, Samuel
Tilden, was a product of Van Buren's Albany Regency, the group that ruled New
York State in the 1820s and 1830s. Tilden was a life-long intimate of Martin
Van Buren, of the Van Ness family and of Edward Livingston—the latter Aaron
Burr's partner in treason in Louisiana.
All of Tilden's training was as a warrior for Van Buren and Jackson, learning
his trade authoring free-trade attacks on Henry Clay and the Bank of the
United States.
The Origin of the Slum System
One other product of Aaron Burr's malevolent influence remained to dominate
New York's political and economic life for decades after Burr's heyday: the
millionaire slumlord John Jacob Astor and the Astor family.
Before his ascent to the U.S. vice-presidency, Aaron Burr arranged to have
the New York state legislature appoint him chairman of a committee to
investigate the real estate affairs of Trinity Episcopal Church in Manhattan.
In question were some lands owned by Trinity which were leased to others for
99 years from 1768. As a result of his "investigation," Burr came to hold the
leases! He then sold these leases to John Jacob Astor for tens of thousands
of dollars, along with some other lands he controlled. This financed Burr's
escape from New York in the 1804 killing of Hamilton.
Astor paid Burr for this bargain with money almost entirely derived from his
China trade—including the first substantial sale of opium to China by
Americans. This was Astor's initial big break in New York real estate, for
which he rewarded Burr handsomely. Astor money was again made available for
Burr to flee from justice on various states' charges relating to Burr's
secession conspiracy in 1807. From Burr's return to New York in 1812, until
his death in 1836, he served on several occasions as Astor's lawyer.(5)
The value of the Trinity lands is explained in the official church history,
"Trinity: Mother of Churches":
By 1866 the property . . . comprised some 355 lots in twelve blocks of city
streets . . . yet Trinity's total income from the ground lease (i.e. what
Astor had to pay the church-owner) was only $269 per year.
With the expiration of the lease, now held by [John Jacob's son] William B.
Astor, the land reverted to the church, and the vestry received, in 1867, a
net income from this property of $138,586, with a similar or increasing
annual amount in succeeding years.(6)
One other crucial source of bargain real estate boosted Astor into the status
of lord of the city. The New York City government simply gave John Jacob
Astor large amounts of land, much of it lying under shallow water just off
dry land on Manhattan Island. The city then would fill in the sunken lots,
place sewers, open and grade streets by them—most often at little or no cost
to Astor. (The same generosity was extended to several of the old Dutch New
York families which carried their colonial feudal outlook past the
establishment of American independence Astor clubbed with them in the Holland
Lodge).
Expanding his base of real estate holdings throughout Manhattan Island, John
Jacob Astor and his family deliberately created the slum system in New York.
Their tactic was simple. Astor would lease (or sub-lease) a parcel of land to
a sub-landlord on a 21-year lease. By this arrangement the sub-landlord would
build some sort of tenement apartment house, make as much money in rents as
possible, and put as little as possible in improvements or maintenance into
the building, because at the end of 21 years, the land and any building or
improvement on it would revert to Astor.
This criminal system was constantly supplied with fresh crops of immigrant
tenants, who generally lacked the knowledge, money, or contacts to seek
shelter elsewhere.
Sometime early in his New York real estate career, John Jacob Astor turned
over the management of his gigantic fortune in the form of a family fund—to
Albert Gallatin, former U.S. Treasury Secretary. Astor created the National
Bank of New York—later called the Gallatin Bank—and made Albert Gallatin its
president. For many years Astor made his primary residence in Geneva,
Switzerland, near the Gallatins. Albert Gallatin's son James eventually took
over from his father the management of the Astor family fund.
Astor tenement slum holdings continued to grow, making the Astors perhaps the
richest family in the world. In 1879, well after the reform movement had
cleaned out William Tweed, Board of Health inspectors investigated conditions
in the Astor slums on the Lower East Side. Harvey O'Conor in his book, "The
Astors," reports on the investigators' findings:
At the first Astor tenement . . . on each floor were four dark bedrooms. The
hall was lighted from a skylight. Little water got to the upper floors
because of low pressure. The water closet in the court was foul . . . [The
second building] was neat and healthful—the lessee was conscientious. In the
rear apartment at 138 East Fourth Street a man, three women and two children
lived in three rooms, two of them dark bedrooms measuring eight by eight.
[In] the kitchen . . . a woman with a broken leg, who had had no medical
attention for weeks, lay upon an old lounge. Two pale children attended her.
The rooms . . . were 'stifling;' polluted by the stench from the privies in
the court....
At 152 East Fourth [were] fourteen families with forty-one children and
thirty-one adults. The hall, filled with women and children, had a skylight
which "illuminated a scene of misery and dirt-below. A pump in the hall was
able to force a few drops of tepid water which the children greedily
drank.... A sick child lay in a rear room gasping for breath while its mother
stirred up a fire, the heat of which made the atmosphere terrible. The
bedrooms were small and dark with windows 13 by 15 inches in size for
ventilation. These opened on stifling hallways and admitted an atmosphere
almost as bad as that within. The yard was unclean as were the closets
[toilets—ed.] which gave forth terrible stenches . . . "
The Board of Health figures for 1880 showed 17,816 deaths in 10,609 tenements
of which 10,101 had been of children under five . . . there had been [only]
7,538 deaths in 6,864 private houses, of whom [only] 2,999 had been children
under five . . .(7)
As this system of organized death for immigrant families persisted over the
decades, the Astor family's primary real estate attorney was Joseph H.
Choate, who in 1871 organized the "Committee of 70" for the crusade against
the Tweed Ring Choate's partner Charles F. Southmayd was a trustee of the
Astor estate, and the firm Evarts, Choate and Southmayd made a fortune
representing the Astor real estate holdings.
Insurrectionists in Power in New York
Before dealing directly with Boss Tweed, let us first review the political
situation in New York during the decade or so preceding his rise to power. We
will then inspect the challenge Tweed made to the poltical Establishment, and
the organization of their counterattack: the prosecution of the "Tweed Ring."
Finally, we will discuss the political and social power relationships in New
York after Tweed was gone.
The reader may then be in a better position to decide for himself whether
Tweed, or the people who purged him, represented "the classic case of
American municipal corruption."
Traitors and- gangsters ruled the United States from 1853 to 1860. Virtually
the first act of the administration of President Franklin Pierce (1853-1856)
was the creation of a bloody civil conflict in Kansas though the repeal of
the Missouri Compromise of 1820. Dominated by Attorney General Caleb Cushing
of Massachusetts, the government contentedly watched New Englanders fight
Missourians in Kansas.
The Knights of the Golden Circle, organized in 1853 under the supervision of
the Scottish Rite of Freemasonry, pushed south from Cincinnati, Ohio, into
the states on the Gulf of Mexico, recruiting armed men for the conquest of
Latin America and the secession of the American South—a replay of Aaron
Burr's 1807 program.
In New York City, the "Cuban Revolutionary Junta" planned an insurrection
against the authorities in Spanish-ruled Cuba. Their stated object was to
prevent possible Spanish emancipation of Cuba's black slaves; Cuba would have
been added to the political base of the U.S. slave South.
The military chief of this "Cuban Junta" was John Anthony Quitman, a New
Yorker who had moved to Mississippi and was now (1853) the tactical leader of
the Southern secessionist movement. Quitman had been arrested by President
Zachary Taylor and indicted for masterminding an identical plan against Cuba
in 1850. With Taylor having immediately, conveniently died, the indictment
was dropped and Quitman's operation was back in business in New York City.
To be certain that Quitman's gang would have no interference 0 this time from
meddling law officers, Pierce appointed Charles O'Conor, a fanatical,
Northern, pro-slavery lawyer as the United States Attorney for New York City.
New York was to be the Northern tactical base, in tandem with Charleston,
South Carolina, for the creation of the Southern armed insurrectonary
movement of 1861. For the crucial first 15 months of the Pierce
administration Mr. O'Conor would serve Attorney General Cushing well in
protecting this treason project.
The reader should bear in mind that Charles O'Conor is well known to American
history, not for his relationship to the secession of the South, but as the
prosecutor of William M. ("Boss") Tweed in the 1870s.
The Times, the Pirates, and Cuba
>From its initial publication in 1851, the New York Times founders Henry
Raymond and George Jones had been crusading for the Quitman project. The
Times kept a "pro-revolutionary" (i.e. pro-slavery) correspondent in Havana,
sending back to New York dispatches under the pseudonym Ocator.(8) On
February 28, 1853, a few days before the inauguration of President Franklin
Pierce, the Times carried a snide article from Ocator, reporting on the lack
of aggressive American response to Spanish self-defensive legal and military
moves in Cuba. The Times asked, "Are the people of the United States ignoble
enough to endure these continued insults?.... We will see on the advent of a
new administration."
On December 5, 1853, with Pierce and Cushing in power in Washington, with
Charles O'Conor looking out for the Quitman gang in New York, the New York
Times ran an "Address of the Cuban Junta to the People," occupying three full
columns. The declaration warned of
a scheme for liberating the Cuban slaves . . . by England, France and
Spain.... We are to be pitted against the savages of Africa—let there spring
in our hearts the holy thirst for vengeance, and let us slay the Caesars [the
Spanish] who desire to immolate us, let us shed our blood in torrents.
Let us hazard the Revolution as the only plank to preserve us from shipwreck
. . . we'll certainly march in mass with the people, and we believe even the
government of the United States, which already from the present moment, form
common cause with those who . . . share the destinies which await them.
The following February a provocation was arranged which could serve as a
pretext for the United States, under its proslavery leaders, to invade and
conquer Spanish Cuba. The Black Warrior, a cargo ship bound from Alabama to
New York, stopped in Havana. The Spanish officials looked into the hold of
the ship and found undeclared cargo, and so they seized the ship and arrested
its captain, James D. Bulloch of Georgia.
The ship captain was the brother of Martha Roosevelt, who would give birth to
future President Theodore Roosevelt four years later. James Bulloch and Mrs.
Roosevelt's husband, Theodore Roosevelt, Sr., were political and business
collaborators throughout the 1850s, spending long days together in the
Roosevelt home in New York.
The cargo of the Black Warrior was being delivered to Charles Tyng, a Boston
Brahmin merchant who was an intimate, lifelong friend of Attorney General
Caleb Cushing and a grandson of Essex Junto member Stephen Higginson. Tyng's
son would later be Cushing's private Secretary, when Ambassador Cushing was
kidnapping William Tweed in Spain.
When the Black Warrior was seized, Cushing called for a naval blockade of
Cuba, the President demanded immediate action from Congress, and all the
"Young America" friends of the administration called for war.
In this episode, however, the American people were decidedly not in sympathy
with the gangsters, and war never materialized. It would have to await
another scheme, 50 years later in the Havana harbor, at the hands of Theodore
Roosevelt and his friends.
In 1853, New York's "Commodore" Cornelius Vanderbilt sent his agent,
Cornelius Garrison, to San Francisco to run the Pacific Coast operations of
Vanderbilt's Accessory Transit steamship line to Central America. When all
was ready in 1855, adventurer William Walker and his mercenaries set sail
from San Francisco in Vanderbilt's boats, his expedition financed and
equipped by Vanderbilt.
William Walker conquered Nicaragua, reinstituted black slavery, and
proclaimed himself president; his regime was recognized by the Pierce-Cushing
administration. But when he had a falling-out with Vanderbilt, the New York
financier equipped and unleashed opposition Central American forces in a war
against Walker that took over 10,000 Central American lives (see Chapter 12).
New York's Democratic Party was badly split in the early 1850s, reflecting
that process of fictionalization which would break up the party nationally by
the end of the decade. But when President Franklin Pierce backed a candidate
in the 1854 New York City mayoral election, the chairman of New York's
Democratic State Committee, Augustus Schell, was able to unite the city's
party apparatus behind the President's choice.
State Chairman Schell was a close friend of Commodore Vanderbilt, and would
serve as Vanderbilt's broker, financial manager and representative on
corporate boards for the next two decades. The choice of Schell and Pierce
for mayor, Fernando Wood, was a former radical abolitionist who had served
for a time as a Van Burenite in the U.S. Congress. Elected mayor in 1854,
reelected in 1856 and 1860, Wood developed a reputation as a wildly corrupt
city boss. But since it was against Fernando Wood that William Tweed was to
struggle in Tweed's rise to power in New York, and since Tweed's relative
reputation for corruption must be maintained at all costs by Eastern
Establishment historians, Wood has been let off the hook. A paper published
for a 1984 conference at the New-York Historical Society even praised Wood as
a "progressive," while allowing that he did have one minor flaw: he had, as
we shall see, strongly overcome his earlier leanings towards the abolition of
slavery.(9) Nevertheless, all accounts of New York's political scene in the
1850s show voting-place thuggery, election-stealing, extortion and official
protection of vice as flourishing under Mayor Wood's supervision.
Lamar's Slave Empire
A crucial question began to be asked in the late 1850s by American patriots
in diverse sections of the country: what were the political leanings—the
loyalties—of the citizenry, and what were the important leadership groups
which might be pulling the citizens towards or away from support for the
Union?
To begin to answer that question retrospectively for New York, one must begin
with a look at the Lamar family. They were-"chivalry," sir. Family histories
now, as then, trace the Lamars (or de Lamars) back to French nobility.
(Virtually all of our self-proclaimed American bluebloods locate their
ancestors among the French-named Norman conquerors of England).
Mirabeau Buonaparte Lamar was the out-front leader of the anti-American
faction in Texas, opposing the American nationalists who were identified with
Texas' first president Sam Houston.
As the second president of the Texas republic—before Texas joined the
Union—Mirabeau Lamar dispatched the Texas navy to Vera Cruz to assist the
separatist movement there in military attacks against the Mexican federal
government. He sought constant war against the Indian tribes, countering Sam
Houston's attempts at conciliation. He sent James Hamilton, nullificationist
former governor of South Carolina, to England to work for British acquisition
of Texas as a colony or satellite.
Mirabeau Lamar's political base of support was centered in the town of New
Washington, Texas, a settlement owned by Samuel Swartwout of New York and
Swartwout's Texas lieutenants including James Morgan and James Treat.
Swartwout played a leading, behind-the-scenes role in Texas politics from the
1830s until the Knights of the Golden Circle arrived in the middle 1850s. In
1804 Samuel Swartwout's older brother John had arranged a site in New Jersey
for his political boss, Aaron Burr, to hold a duel with Alexander Hamilton,
and had awakened Burr on the morning of that encounter. After killing
Hamilton, Burr fled to South Carolina with Samuel Swartwout, and later used
him as a confidential agent in Burr's plans for insurrection and conquest in
Louisiana and Mexico.
It was Swartwout's Texas machine—Treat, Morgan, and others—the continuation
of Aaron Burr's anti-American apparatus in the American West, which made up
the base of advisors, financial backers and political operatives for Mirabeau
Lamar. (10)
Mirabeau's cousin Gazaway Bugg Lamar (1798-1874) was the most aggressive
central figure in the secessionist conspiracy operating in the New York
region. Beginning in the family's Georgia banking, shipping and
slave-plantation enterprises, Ga- zaway Bugg Lamar wove a web of financial
and political-intelligence contacts which were to put him in a unique
position from which to wage war against the United States:
• He was a business partner and close friend of James Hamilton, (11) cousin
Mirabeau's minister to England, the prize politician of the Prioleau family
and the British and Venetian banking circles which dominated South Carolina.
• He married, in 1839, the daughter of Anthony Charles Cazenove of Geneva,
Switzerland. Cazenove's cousin Theophile Cazenove had managed the land
purchases and all business affairs of the Holland Land Company in New York
and Pennsylvania, working with Company attorney Aaron Burr. Anthony Cazenove
was himself a business partner of Albert Gallatin, and Gallatin's personal
agent and representative in the Washington, D.C. area. He served as the Swiss
consul at Alexandria, Virginia, and negotiator for Switzerland of a
commercial treaty with the United States.(12)
• In the 1840s Gazaway Lamar founded the Bank of the Republic in New York
City, which would manage the New York financial affairs of the Southern
secessionists. Richard Lathers of South Carolina then established the New
York-based Great Western Marine Insurance Company, maintaining an
interlocking directorate and joint political operations with the Bank of the
Republic. In his memoirs, Lathers tells us, "At a dinner in London during the
Civil War I was introduced to the president of the Bank of England, who . . .
remarked [the Great Western] 'is one of the New York corporations in which I
know personally or by reputation most of the directors."(13)
The list of the directors of the Great Western at that time is fairly
representative of the trans-Atlantic oligarchical syndicate backing the
secessionist movement in the United States and providing financial depth for
Lamar's operations. It included Richard Lathers, president; J.J. Crane,
president of the Bank of the Republic; W.C. Pickersgill of London and
Liverpool; James M. Brown, of Brown Brothers & Co., bankers, New York and
London; J.L. Aspinwall, of Howland & Aspinwall, commission merchants;
Gustavus Kutter, of Loeschigk, Wesendonck & Co., Switzerland; Wm. M. Evarts,
of Evarts, Southmayd & Choate; Robert M. Olyphant, of Olyphant, Son & Co.,
China merchants; J. Pierpont Morgan & Co., bankers; and George A. Phelps,
Jr., of Chamberlaine, Phelps & Co., Sicilian merchants. (14)
The attorneys for the Great Western were partners in the Astor firm, Evarts,
Southmayd and Choate. Joseph H. Choate, who was to organize the Committee of
70 to plan the prosecution of William Tweed in 1871, had his first commercial
law case defending the Great Western. (15)
Thus honored with such a distinguished roster of international and
inter-regional businessmen, New York City in the 1850s returned to a line of
business that had been illegal and suppressed for many decades: the African
slave trade. In his 1941 book, "Business and Slavery," Philip S. Foner
presents the historians' consensus that the trade began in 1857 and that
"from January 1859 to August 1860, it was conservatively estimated, close to
one hundred vessels left the city for the slave trade."(16)
Tremendous fortunes were made by certain New York merchants and marine
insurers, who backed expeditions from New York, to the African coast and back
to the South or to Cuba with the kidnapped cargo. Just who these "certain New
York merchants" were has remained something of a mystery to this day. One of
them, however, has left us with a permanent record—a letterbook of Charles A.
L. Lamar, son of Gazaway Bugg Lamar, excerpts of which were printed in the
North American Review, volume CXLIII, in the late 1880s. In two of the
included letters the young Lamar explains the profits to be made from a
typical such expedition:
I propose to purchase the "Vigo," an iron screw-steamer of 1,750 tons, now in
Liverpool for sale at £30,000 cash ... G. B. Lamar can give you a good
description of her.... If I can buy here, I will put six Paixhan guns on
deck, and man her with as good men as are to be found in the South. The
fighting men will all be stockholders and gentlemen.... My estimate runs thus:
Steamer $150,000; Repairs, guns, small arms, coal, etc.,
$50,000 $200,000 Supplies $25,000; Money for pur-
chase of cargo, $75,000 $100,000
Cost of the expedition $300,000
Say we bring but 1,200 Negroes @
$650 $780,000 Deduct 1st cost $300,000
Leaves nett profit and steamer on hand $480,000
Foner quotes from House Executive Documents, No. 7, for the 2nd Session of
the 36th Congress, the insertion of a letter from the same Charles A. L.
Lamar written in 1860, claiming that "the trade cannot be checked while such
great percentages are made in the business. The outlay of $35,000 often
brings $500,000."(17)
According to his New York Times obituary October 8, 1874, Gazaway Bugg Lamar
was the owner of the famous yacht The Wanderer, which was seized by a United
States marshal for landing slaves at Brunswick, Georgia. His son Charles
Lamar bought the seized ship at auction and put it right back into the slave
trade, defying the U.S. government to arrest him.
In the late 1850s New York was, in fact, the center of the world's existing
slave trade. Such trade was strictly illegal in New York. How then did Lamar
and his fellow adventurers get away with it?
Part of the answer must lie in the fact that Lamar had two extraordinary
friends in key positions within the regional law enforcement apparatus.
Augustus Schell, who had engineered Fernando Wood's mayoral election in 1854,
was, with August Belmont, the principal New York backer of James Buchanan's
bid for the U.S. presidency in 1856. The victorious Buchanan gave Schell the
greatest available patronage plum, the job of Collector of the Port of New
York. Thus Schell was in charge of the United States Customs operations for
New York, and was in a position to notice, or not to notice, that ships were
embarking from his bailiwick for the enslavement of tens of thousands of
blacks, and the included, usual deaths of thousands of them in transit.
It will be important for the reader to keep this in mind as our story
progresses, because when the "corrupt' Boss Tweed was to be thrown out of
Tammany Hall, Augustus Schell would be put in his place as Grand Sachem.
The other official crucial for the protection of the New York-based- slave
merchants was the United States Naval Agent responsible for New York at the
time, George Sanders.(18) This gentleman had been the notorious American
Consul in London who, in 1853, had made his house the headquarters for
Europe's Mazzini-led revolutionaries; President James Buchanan had then been
the United States Ambassador to England, and well understood Mr. Sanders'
insurrectionist proclivities. Sanders' main public reputation a century later
comes from his adventures as a Confederate spy, culminating in his wanderings
as a fugitive wanted in connection with the assassination of Abraham Lincoln.
New York's Treason Machine In Secession and
Wartime
John Brown's October 1859 raid on the Harper's Ferry arsenal in Virginia gave
a tremendous momentum to the drive for Southern secession. Meetings were held
by Northerners anxious to placate the Southern fire-eaters; but in some
instances the positions advanced at these meetings went far beyond
"appeasement."
Take for example the speech given December 19, 1859 by Charles O'Conor,
former U. S. Attorney for Franklin Pierce and Caleb Cushing, and the future
prosecutor of William M. Tweed. The address, given the title "Negro Slavery
Not Unjust" in its reprinting as a pamphlet, was delivered before some 20,000
persons at the Academy of Music.
I do not see anything unjust or unreasonable in the declaration often made by
Southern members [of Congress].
They tell us: ". . . if you will thus create a spirit in your country which
leads to violence and bloodshed among us . . . much as we revere the
Constitution . . . we cannot longer depend on your adherence with its
injunctions, or adhere with the Union."
I insist that negro slavery is not unjust. It is not unjust; it is just,
wise, and beneficent. (Hisses, followed by applause, and cries of "Put him
out.") . . . The people of the United States, at the formation of our
Government, were, as they still are, in some sense, peculiar and radically
distinguishable from other nations. We were white men, of ... the Caucasian
race.... As a white nation, we made our Constitution and our laws, vesting
all political rights in that race. They and they alone, constituted, in every
political sense, the American people.
As to the negro . . . He has ample strength, and is competent to labor, but
nature denies him either the intellect to govern or the willingness to work .
. . That same power [nature] . . . gave him, in our country, as a recompense,
a master to coerce that duty, and convert him into a useful and valuable
servant.... This is the ground that we must take, or abandon our cherished
Union. (19)
When Charles O'Conor, a New Yorker who had never lived in the South, died in
1884, the New York Times was to laud him as a great and exemplary lawyer,
who, to the end of his life, "seems to have ever enjoyed a conscientious
conviction that the colored race, being the natural inferiors of the white,
were not entitled to the same political rights or legal standing as their
masters. He never abandoned this conviction."(20)
With the approach of the 1860 presidential elections, the insurrectionists'
plans went into all-out operation. The secessionists walked out of the
national Democratic convention in Charleston, and the convention chairman,
Caleb Cushing, went with them. They then held a rump convention—again under
Cushing's chairmanship—and nominated Vice-President John C. Breckinridge for
President on a platform calling for expanding slavery into the western
territories.
Massachusetts' Caleb Cushing was the campaign manager for the secessionists'
ticket in 1860, operating out of the Buchanan White House. New York's
Augustus Schell was the National Chairman of the secessionists"'wing of the
Democratic Party," as a very complimentary nineteenth-century biographical
sketch politely put it.(21)
Schell's pro-secession faction was a tiny minority in New York City, and the
Democratic voters united behind the regular party nominee, Steven A. Douglas.
Nationally, Douglas received 1,379,000 votes to 854,000 for Breckinridge and
591,000 for another, non-secessionist Democrat. Lincoln won the election with
1,867,000 votes.
Schell's unusual pre-election tactics had backfired. It seems that Schell, a
stock broker and banker, and other opponents of Lincoln, had engineered a
severe panic on the New York stock market, in hopes of convincing investors
that a Lincoln victory would bring on an even greater disaster. Schell's
boasts to the effect that the panic would convert everyone, that "one more
turn of the screw will fetch 'em," were quoted in most of the newspapers.
The Detroit Advertiser remarked, "The efforts of a majority (sic) of New York
merchants . . . to create a financial panic, and prostrate the whole business
of the country, for the purpose of coercing the people of the north into the
support of the disunionists, has created a feeling of deep, widespread and
universal resentment at the west. It is looked upon by all classes of men . .
. as a treasonable effort to encourage the south in their threats of
secession should Lincoln be elected."(22)
The New York Times, which had now become a Republican newspaper, described
the bearish plot in an editorial, printed October 10, 1860, under the
headline, "Wanted—A First-Rate Panic!":
The Brokers and Stock speculators . . . join their howl-
ings . . . to the croakings of the politicians, in the hope
that between the two they may create a temporary panic
in Wall Street. . .
Following the election of Abraham Lincoln, South Carolina's state government
made known its determination to secede from the Union. The loyalty of the
other slaveholding states, and of other areas of the country, was now the
most important question before the population of the United States.
Of all the non-slaveholding sections, New York City and the Pacific Coast
were the most in doubt, if the outlook of the areas' political elite is the
primary criterion for judgment.
A large body of prominent merchants in San Francisco addressed an urgent
appeal to the Secretary of War just after Lincoln's inauguration and the
start of the Civil War, pleading that plans to move 5,000 troops out of
California to Texas be scrapped. A majority of the state officers were
disloyal and 16,000 armed Knights of the Golden Circle were operating
unchecked throughout the state, said the merchants; moving the troops would
leave California defenseless to the secessionists.(23)
The West Coast, inaccessible as yet by railroad, and thus out of range for
any Union recapture mission, represented a potentially dangerous military
problem for the Union. But New York was a far greater strategic problem. The
influence of its port, its money, its newspapers, and its role as the
Northern headquarters of the Democratic Party, gave New York the potential
for inflicting grave harm on the Union cause.
Just after Lincoln's election, the state of South Carolina arranged through
Buchanan's Secretary of War, John B. Floyd, to buy 10,000 muskets from the
United States arsenal at Watervliet, New York. But South Carolina needed a
cover, and the purchase was made for the secession-planners by New York
banker Gazaway Bugg Lamar, a close relative and confidante of the Buchanan
Cabinet's leader, Howell Cobb. Following this shipment, Lamar hurriedly
arranged other arms purchases and shipments south to Georgia.(24)
Lamar's arms supply operation increased in tempo until it ran into an
unexpected snag. The Superintendant of the New York Metropolitan Police, John
A. Kennedy, was employed by the New York State government and was thus not
under the control of Mayor Fernando Wood or United States Customs chief for
New York Augustus Schell, both national leaders of the secessionist movement.
On January 22, 1861, three days after secession was proclaimed in the state
of Georgia, New York Police Superintendent Kennedy seized 38 boxes of arms
from a ship lying in New York's Harlem River, arms purchased by Gazaway Bugg
Lamar for the Georgia insurrectionists. President Lincoln had not yet been
inaugurated—Kennedy was acting on his own initiative.(25)
Georgia Senator Robert Toombs telegraphed an inquiry on the seizure to Mayor
Fernando Wood, to which Wood replied by disclaiming responsibility for what
Wood termed "the outrage" by Kennedy.
Kennedy, meanwhile, wrote to Republican political boss Thurlow Weed on
January 24, "If something is not done by somebody to arrest this traffic, we
shall be nearly destitute of small arms at the North in a short time."(26)
The governor of Georgia began seizing New York vessels in Savannah in
retaliation for Kennedy's action, but Kennedy would not give up the captured
weapons. Now Richard Lathers, President of the Great Western Insurance
Company, swung into action to free up the arms shipment and prevent a
precedent for pro-Union law enforcement from being set. Working with Great
Western Vice President John A. Parker, Lathers coordinated the political
mobilization of high officials in New York and Georgia on behalf of Lamar.
The release of the seized weapons was finally obtained, as Parker put it, "by
bringing a strong pressure to bear on Kennedy's security."(27) Arms shipments
southward by Lamar and his associates now continued under the contented
authority of Fernando Wood, Augustus Schell and Secretary of War John B.
Floyd.
The "Free City"
During the presidential election campaign, the "Union Electoral Committee, "
under the supervision of Augustus Schell and Rothschild family agent August
Belmont, warned voters through the Journal of Commerce that a Lincoln victory
would force New York City to secede from the Union:
Will not New York be driven to separate from New England and Pennsylvania to
avoid their practically shutting up her harbor? There are a million and a
half mouths to be fed daily in this city and its dependencies; they will not
consent to be starved by any man's policy. They will sooner set up for
themselves against all the world.
Belmont himself was very careful, confining his personal remarks on the
subject to private correspondence. In one letter published later in the
century, Belmont wrote to a Southern business associate on the eve of
Southern secession, "New York, in such a catastrophe, would cut loose from
the puritanical East and without linking our fortunes with our kind, but
somewhat exacting Southern friends, she would open her magnificent port to
the commerce of the world. As an independent city state, New York would
become to the Americas what Venice was once on the sluggish lagoons of the
small Adriatic."(28)
On December 10, 1860, Richard Lathers, President of the Great Western
Insurance Company, James T. Soutter, G.B. Lamar's second-in-command at the
Bank of the Republic, Augustus Schell, Collector of the New York Port,
William B. Astor, son of John Jacob Astor; and thirteen other men sent a
circular letter to several hundred prominent New Yorkers, calling a meeting
for the 15th of December to be held in the offices of the Great Western
Insurance Company at 33 Pine Street. The proposed purpose of the meeting was
compromise to save the Union.(29)
Known to history as the Pine Street Meeting, the gathering was chaired and
opened by Charles O'Conor, who defended secession:
. . . when an utter detestation of the life and morals of the people of
Carolina has become the basis of a political party in New York, and that
political party acquires an ascendency in the political affairs of the
government, these two States cannot live together, except in the relation of
oppressor and oppressed.' The more powerful will trample on the weaker.... A
political Union of distinct organized communities thus opposed in moral
sentiment, can only be upheld by force . . . whilst I deplore secession as
much as any man who breathes . . . I have looked upon it as an inevitable
event . . . It is the natural, the necessary, the inevitable consequence....
"(30)
The Pine Street Meeting did not completely agree with Mr. O'Conor's views,
and opposing voices were heard. But this was apparently not the only Pine
Street meeting of the day, but perhaps merely a cover for a more important
one. The New York Herald reported on December 15, 1860, a plan for the
removal of New York City from the Union: "A secret meeting of its promoters
is to be held today. The object is in the event of a secession of the
Southern states, to throw off the yoke of the Western part of the state, and
make New York a free city." On January 6, 1861, Mayor Fernando Wood made a
formal demand to the Common Council that New York City secede from the United
States, with these words:
It would seem that a dissolution of the federal Union is inevitable . . . It
cannot be preserved by coercion or held together by force. A resort of this
last dreadful alternative would of itself destroy not only the government but
the lives and property of the people.... We must provide for the new
relations which will necessarily grow out of the new conditions of public
affairs. . .
Being the child of the Union . . . when deprived of her maternal advantages,
we must rely upon our own resources and assume a position predicated upon the
new phase which public affairs will present....
With our aggrieved brethern of the slave states we have friendly relations
and a common sympathy. We have not participated in the warfare upon their
constitutional rights or their domestic institutions....
New York may have more cause of apprehension from aggressive legislation of
our own state than from external dangers. . . The legislature . . . has
become an instrument by which we are plundered to enrich their speculators,
lobby agents, and Abolition politicians....
It is certain that a dissolution cannot be peacefully accomplished except by
the consent of the legislature itself [which] is, in my judgment, doubtful....
Why should not New York City, instead of supporting by her contributions in
revenue two- thirds of the expenses of the United States, become also equally
independent? . . . If the confederacy is broken up . . . it behooves every
distinct community, as well as every individual, to take care of themselves.
. . . why may not New York disrupt the bands which bind her to a venal and
corrupt master.... But I am not prepared to recommend the violence implicit
in these views. In stating this argument in favor of freedom, "peacefully if
we can, forcibly if we must," let me not be misunderstood....(31)
New York in Wartime
The city council rejected Wood's proposal for treason, and it may be said
with confidence that the vast majority of New Yorkers, merchants and workers,
were loyal to the Union. Gazaway Bugg Lamar, however, stepped up his
anti-government career. The Southern Confederacy's Treasury Secretary, C.G.
Memminger, asked Lamar to have the engraving and printing of Confederate
notes and bonds performed in New York. Lamar arranged for this to be done by
the American Bank Note Company(32)—which was at the same time under contract
to the United States government to print U.S. notes.
In the opening days of the Civil War, Gazaway Lamar was the chief New York
recipient of the covert communications of the Confederates. His New York and
Georgia contact networks overlapped and complemented those of the Roosevelt
family and Teddy Roosevelt's uncle, James D. Bulloch. Since Bulloch's
adventures as the captain of the Black Warrior in Cuba, Bulloch had become
the head of the Confederate Secret Service in Europe, with the special
responsibility of working with the British to construct a raiding fleet for
the Confederates. Lamar's agents in Georgia, North and South Carolina, the
American West, London and Paris, were utilized by the Chief of the
Confederate Ordnance Bureau, Josiah Gorgas, for European purchases of arms
from 1863 through the end of the war in 1865.(33)
Forced to leave New York in May, 1861, Gazaway Lamar proceeded to Georgia,
assumed the presidency of the Bank of Commerce of Savannah, and presided as
chairman of the first and second Bank Conventions of the Confederate States
in June and July. Lamar engaged, to his personal profit, in blockade-running,
while his underling at the Bank of the Republic, James T. Soutter, toured
Europe on Lamar's behalf, buying arms for the war against the United
States.(34)
Before the war broke out, New York Mayor Fernando Wood and his brother
Benjamin bought the New York Daily News, and were to keep the paper in their
direct control for the rest of the nineteenth century. When Fort Sumter fell
in April 1861, the New York Daily News attacked the Lincoln policy so
vehemently that a federal grand jury returned a presentment against it,
charging that its printed utterances were "calculated to aid and comfort the
enemy. " The publishers were not prosecuted, but for a time the U.S.
Postmaster General prohibited the transmission of the paper through the
mails.(35)
On January 18, 1864, the Woods gave editorial control of the Daily News to
Phinias C. Wright, the Supreme Grand Commander of the Order of American
Knights. This was a renamed version of the Knights of the Golden Circle,
responsible for preparing sabotage and disruptions behind Federal lines.
Wright sent the following circular letter to leading members of the order
throughout the Northern states:
New York, January 18, 1864
New York Daily News
Office 19, City Hall Square
Dear Sir:
I have this day connected myself with the editorial Department of the New
York News. You will remember that the News has, from the first, advocated the
principles inculcated by Jefferson and his illustrious compeers, and has
fearlessly and openly denounced the usurpations of the power which have
wrested from the citizen his cherished rights, and thrown down the last
barrier between him and irresponsible Despotism.
The News will be our especial organ and will be a medium of the interchange
of sentiments and opinions of the friends of peace touching the momentous
concerns involved in the existing crisis.
I entreat your kind offices and influence in extending the circulation of the
News throughout the entire field of our labour.
Yours sincerely,
P.C. Wright(36)
--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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