[CTRL] [15b] 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
--15b--

During the Civil War, Samuel J. Tilden and August Belmont assumed a public
posture of opposition to the "excesses" of President Lincoln in carrying out
the war, while being careful to declare their loyalty to the United States.
But early in the war, Tilden and Belmont organized the Society for the
Diffusion of Political Knowledge, which was to serve as the main vehicle for
the dissemination of anti-war propaganda within the ranks of the Democratic
Party. Samuel Tilden was a director of the Society, and was its most
consistent coordinator and leader. One of the Society's speakers, John Van
Buren, the son of Martin Van Buren, called for North and South to get
together for the removal of President Lincoln from the presidency before the
expiration of his term.(37)

On July 4, 1863, nine days before the opening of the New York offices for
federal military conscription, Tilden's society organized a public meeting in
the Academy of Music, on the subject of Lincoln's conduct of the war. The day
was a proud and solemn occasion for the United States. The telegraph carried
the news that federal forces had completed the conquest of the entire
Mississippi River, and the Battle of Gettysburg had ended with a Union
victory.

But our New York Democrats were not assembling to celebrate Union successes.
Tilden's group paraded before the Music Hall audience a collection of
anti-war speakers, the most threatening of whom was Horatio Seymour, the
Governor of New York. Seymour warned Lincoln:

Do you not create revolution when you say that our
persons may be rightfully seized, our property confiscated,
our homes entered? Are you not exposing yourselves, your
own interests, to as great a peril as that with which you
threaten us? Remember this, that the bloody, and treasonable and
revolutionary doctrine of public necessity can be proclaimed by a mob as well
as by a government.(38)

Seymour then left town for a vacation, and was away when the draft was to
begin on July 13. But the draft headquarters were destroyed as bands of
rioters swept through the city; the office of the New York Herald was
destroyed by a mob; blacks in the city were murdered and the negro orphanage
was burned down; the telegraph wires connecting Superintendant Kennedy's
police headquarters with local precinct houses were cut, by what could only
have been professional saboteurs. Perhaps a thousand people died in the New
York Draft Riots, and troops had to be redeployed from Gettysburg to restore
order.

Tweed's Drive for Power

William M. Tweed (1823-1878) was a minor New York politician before the Civil
War. He began a slow political rise during the war, and at the end of the war
he vanquished Fernando Wood and the bulk of the pro-Confederate cabal that
had ruled local affairs for the previous decade.(39)

Tweed was not a great man, nor was he deeply cultured. The available evidence
would show that he was only "moderately" loyal to the Union in any active
sense. He, like other politicians, helped to raise troops for the war effort,
and pushed through legislation to help pay for New York's enlistment quotas.

But as a regular organization Democrat, he was at the Academy of Music
applauding Governor Seymour's July 4th, 1863 speech; and he is not known to
have protested, on the basis of the issues involved, against the outrages
perpetrated by the traitors leading the Party before and during the war.

But from the time the war began, William Tweed was in a more or less
continuous practical, political, power-seeking conflict with Fernando Wood
and Wood's regulars in the City Democracy.

Tweed and other "moderately pro-war Democrats" sought to wrest control of
Tammany Hall from the regulars in 1861. Tweed was nominated for Sheriff but
lost to Wood's candidate. At this point William Tweed was in bankruptcy, with
$57,000 in debts, and assets of only his clothes.(40) Having been a one-term
U.S. Congressman from 1853 to 1854, Tweed was now only a virtually powerless
member of the New York Board of Supervisors, a quasi-oversight body to which
he was reelected in 1862.

On January 1, 1863, Tweed was elected chairman of the city's Democratic
General Committee. This position carried no real authority until Tweed began
expanding the Committee membership the following year. But he was gradually
consolidating control. Fernando Wood sought to run again for mayor in 1863,
but Tweed was strong enough in Tammany to stop him, and Wood had to settle
for a run for U.S. Congress.

Tweed was elected chairman of the Board of Supervisors in 1864.
Starting in 1863, and continuing until 1870, William Tweed was Deputy
Commissioner of Streets, and, always employing large numbers of eager street
builders and menders, Tweed wielded great powers of patronage.
In the post-Civil War period, men closely associated with William Tweed—A.
Oakley Hall, Richard Connolly, and John Hoffman—won the offices of mayor and
comptroller of New York City and governor of the state.

Even the most hostile accounts credit Tweed's reign in post-Confederate New
York with being at least a moderate boon for the mass of the City's lower
classes. Tweed built his political machine on the simple basis of services
rendered to the largely immigrant masses, who were completely loyal to his
machine politicians.

No one was to go hungry, everyone was to have a job if possible. The Irish
were appointed en masse to the police and fire departments. Tweed used his
simultaneous positions in the city government, the state legislature and on
private corporate boards for the biggest outpouring of largesse New York had
ever seen. The state paid for private charities for all religious
denominations. The state, under Tweed's influence, subsidized Catholic
schools, orphanages and hospitals, spending more on charities from 1869 to
1871 than for the entire period from 1852 to 1868. The City paid half the
cost of the Hebrew Orphan Asylum.

As a leader of the state legislature, Tweed pushed through the funding of a
teachers college, the prohibition of corporal punishment, the requirement of
the teaching of German in grammar school, and salary increases for school
teachers.

The aristocrats' attack against Tammany in the Tweed years combined vague
charges that Tweed and his cronies were personally corrupt—credible enough
because Tweed was becoming rich in office with denunciations of the lavish
spending of public monies on the mobs of undeserving immigrants. Of Scottish
ancestry himself, Tweed's championship of the Irish, German, and Jewish
immigrants drove the bluebloods, particularly the New York Times, into a
constant frenzy.

Lord Bryce's earlier quoted remarks warning that the population of the city
was being "swollen" by immigrant "foreigners" was representative of a
sentiment constantly expressed in the New York Times, and in the cartoons of
"reformer" Thomas Nast, who frequently pictured Irish-Americans as ape-like
creatures.

Following the Democrats' loss of the 1868 national elections, William Tweed
made a bid to unseat Samuel Tilden from his chairmanship of the New York
State Democratic Party.

Tilden's political views at the time are illustrated by the speech he gave at
the September 1869 Democratic State Convention, in which he attacked the
proposed Fifteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. Though the amendment
was allegedly designed to give negroes the right to vote, Tilden declared, a
half-million Chinese and a half-million African slaves might be brought into
New York and allowed to vote without New Yorkers having any say in the
matter. If the people of a state wanted to exclude certain groups from
voting, that was their right, according to Tilden, who was just as
unsuccessful in his bid against the 15th Amendment as Charles O'Conor had
been in his earlier attacks against the 14th Amendment, granting citizenship
to former slaves.

As it turned out, Tweed did not have sufficient political power to unseat
Tilden.

The "Free City"

Nothing daunted, Tweed immediately launched an attack on the chairman of the
Democratic National Committee, August Belmont. Tweed proposed himself as
Belmont's replacement for national party chief. He accused Belmont of being
an anti-democratic, unreconstructed European aristocrat, loyal only to the
interests of the wealthy foreign creditors of the United States. Tweed
charged that Belmont had connived at losing the 1868 election for the
Democrats, because he disagreed with the party platform when it didn't side
with the bondholders against the taxpayers.

It has been said that this challenge was absurd, because Tweed lacked a base
in the Democratic Party outside New York City. But the only "base" August
Belmont could count on was Belmont's circle of New York financiers and the
Rothschild banking family of Europe, for whom Belmont was the official United
States agent.

Tweed's assault on Belmont was, by the available evidence, quite popular. The
public sentiment prompted a cartoon defending Belmont by Thomas Nast,
published in Harper's Magazine (a publication whose editorial management
overlapped with that of the New York Times). Nast's cartoon depicted the
National Chairman as a pitiable scapegoat for the sins of the Democratic
Party, attacked by a gang including ape-like Irish caricatures. In the
background of the drawing was a chair in the Democratic National Committee,
shown as "reserved for William Tweed."

The September 11, 1869 issue of the New York Citizen and Round Table, carried
an editorial supporting Tweed's contentions and calling for Belmont's removal
from the party leadership, on the grounds that Mr. Belmont, as an agent of
the House of Rothschild, was interested in securing the success of the ticket
pledged to legislation looking to the payment of the United States debt,
principal and interest both, in specie. That therefore he was interested in
defeating the Democratic ticket, which was pledged to the taxation of
government bonds and their early payment in greenbacks....

That Mr. Belmont was under instructions from the Rothschilds at the time . .
. that the house was last Fall interested in United States bonds; that it was
opposed to any other policy than that looking to their full payment,
principal and interest, in gold . . .


It is interesting that the author of this particular anti-Belmont editorial
was Robert Roosevelt, brother of Theodore Roosevelt, Sr., and uncle of the
future President. He apparently jumped on the bandwagon long enough to get
Tweed's backing, as well as Belmont's, in the next year's Congressional
elections. As a congressman, Robert Roosevelt was to join the attack against
Tweed.

The New York Times, on September, 21, 1869, responded immediately and
forcefully to the attack against Belmont and the specie-resumptionists. They
accused his detractors of anti-Semitism, but then defended Belmont with the
taunt that "the great harvest of profit [on U. S. government bonds] was
gathered by other eminent Hebrew houses in Frankfort and London."

But the Times was "above all surprised" to see Belmont attacked as "retaining
foreign interests . . . allegiance . . . [and] bias toward European and
aristocratic institutions. " "Without its 'foreign influence,' [ie. its mass
of Irish-American and other immigrants], we would like to ask what would
remain of the so-called Democracy?"


What Was the New York Times?

It was perhaps true, as Lord Bryce indicated in his "American Commonwealth,"
that he had first given the word for a general attack to commence against
"Boss" Tweed. It was certainly true that this attack was launched by the
Times in 1870, with sensational charges of fraud on Tweed's part, while the
Times was busy trying to contain Tweed's attack against the leadership of the
Democratic Party.

We are so accustomed to the Times and similar news media playing judge, jury,
and executioner against scandalized persons that we tend to shy away from
inquiring who it is that has assumed these roles.

Since 1860, the principal owner of the New York Times had been Leonard
Jerome. Mr. Jerome was known to take great pride in his newspaper, conferring
frequently with his first editor, Times founder Henry Raymond, who died in
1869.(4l)


Leonard Jerome was a "high roller. " He was one of the richest of the Wall
Street broker-private bankers. He backed certain speculations, and made
several fortunes. At other times, when he thought it appropriate, he would
give the word for a company to be destroyed, and its stock would be dumped
and its owners bankrupted.(42)

Jerome's power derived from his unique combination of political, financial,
and journalistic associations. In 1852 he was appointed American consul to
the Hapsburg Court for the city of Trieste in the Austro-Hungarian Empire. He
and his wife revelled in the life of the court, emulating the Austrian dukes
and duchesses. They became friends with the Hapsburgs, and with Archduke
Maximillian, who was later to be imposed on Mexico as its Emperor by invading
European colonial armies during the American Civil War.

In the 1850s the Jerome family established a kind of second home in Paris,
and had very close and mutually admiring relationships with the Emperor Louis
Napoleon and his family, his court and his officers.

On Wall Street, Leonard Jerome was an inseperable[sic] companion, a virtual
twin with one other "bon vivant" banker—Mr. August Belmont. Jerome, Belmont
and British-born financier Henry Clews were known on the Street as The Three
Musketeers.

Jerome and Belmont had a great deal in common. Belmont had been the Consul
General for the Hapsburgs in New York until 1850. Belmont was the King of
Fifth Avenue—he lived high and displayed his wealth, especially through his
horses, as did Jerome. Probably no men did more for the establishment of race
tracks and horse-gambling in the United States than August Belmont and
Leonard Jerome; Jerome Park is no more, but Belmont Park is still with us.
And then there were their relations with the British.

August Belmont and Company was the official United States banking
representative of the House of Rothschild, a combination banking and
political-intelligence empire which was born and bred in the service of the
British Crown. Mr. Jerome's status with the British will become evident as we
proceed.

The Battle Is Joined

In response to the Tweed faction's attack on the Democratic Party leadership,
August Belmont wrote to New York attorney Samuel L.M. Barlow, "Enlist some of
our prominent friends to counter Tammany's blows [and] you would render me a
real and essential service . . . But pray be discreet."(43)

In its 1869 coverage of the fight in the Democratic Party, the Times, though
defending Belmont, and describing the "Belmont faction" in its news stories
as representing the respectable men of the community, maintained that "We
have no inclination to take part in the family jars of the Tammany Democracy."

But by mid-1870, Leonard Jerome and the New York Times were ready for battle.
They had equipped themselves with a new editor-in-chief and a new political
reporter; both could be counted on to "counter Tammany's blows."
The new editor was Louis Jennings, who was put in charge of the paper after a
few months' stint as a specialist in exposes that "stirred up the animals,"
as the Times' own official company historian phrased it.(44) Jennings had
previously been the special agent of the Times of London in India, the Editor
of the Times of India, and the chief American correspondent of the London
Times after the Civil War.

The new political reporter was John Foord, who had also come across from
Britain in 1869, having previously served Scottish and English newspaper
companies.

Jennings initiated the editorial attacks on William Tweed, with Foord
providing street-level intelligence, both of them doing whatever was required
to "get Tweed. " Leonard Jerome's relative and biographer, Anita Leslie,
tells us that "the New York Times . . . attempted to emulate that unique
organ, the London Times, regarding politics and foreign affairs."(45) It
succeeded admirably with Louis Jennings, who remained Times editor until
1876. Jennings then went back to England, mission accomplished, and became a
Tory member of Parliament. He was replaced as Times editor by Foord, who
served in that capacity for ten years.

In response to the opening gun from the Britified Times, a mass meeting was
held at Cooper Union on September 4, 1871, to create a prosecution against
William Tweed.(46)


Presiding at the meeting was William F. Havemayer, a former New York mayor
whose family fortune had been made as the American representatives of a
British sugar company.

Joseph H. Choate, lawyer for the Astors' slum holdings and the former legal
spokesman for the transatlantic Confederate financial axis known as the Great
Western Insurance Company, presented the resolutions calling for action.
Choate proposed the creation of a Committee of 70, which was formed
immediately.

Among the members of the Committee were

• Edwards Pierrepont, the prosecutor of John H. Surratt in the Lincoln
assassination case; he would be U.S. Ambassador to England in 1875 and 1876;

• Henry Clews, financier, one of the "Three Musketeers" with Leonard Jerome
and August Belmont, trained to be an Anglican priest before emigrating to the
U.S.A.;

• Robert Roosevelt, uncle and next-door neighbor of future President Theodore
Roosevelt (then 13 years old), president of the Union Democratic Association,
which was called "the Belmont faction" by the Times;

• Frederick Schell, banker, broker for Vanderbilt and Astor; brother of
Augustus Schell, who had been national chairman of the secessionist wing of
the Democratic Party;

• Joseph Seligman, private banker, member of the international banking
syndicate which was to blackmail the U.S. government into resuming specie
payments or face a syndicate-directed dumping of American securities on
European markets; Seligman's bank soon merged into the Anglo-California Bank;

• John Dix, Assistant Treasury Superintendent for Franklin Pierce; Buchanan's
last Treasury Secretary; supporter of secessionist Breckenridge campaign;
Union general; elected Governor of New York in 1872; his son Morgan Dix
married the daughter of Confederate financier, spy and weapons procurer James
Soutter, and became the Rector of Trinity Church and the most powerful
national leader of the Episcopal Church from 1862 to 1908;

• Adrian Iselin, private banker, American head of a Swiss banking family,
Swiss Vice-Consul from 1853 to 1873, Swiss Consul from 1873 to 1883; the
Iselin family later provided the Central Swiss backing for the I. G. Farben
Company of Germany, before, during and-after World War II.

The Committee pressed attorney Samuel J. Tilden into service to organize the
prosecution. Tilden arranged for Charles O'Conor to be appointed special
state deputy attorney general to carry out the prosecution; O'Conor had been
the leading public spokesman for secession and slavery in New York, and had
volunteered as lead attorney in the post-Civil War treason trial of the
Southern Confederacy's President Jefferson Davis. O'Conor chose several
lawyers, including Choate's partner William Evarts, to do the detail work.

Perhaps even more remarkable than the prosecution, in the case of the doomed
"Boss" Tweed, was Tweed's defense staff. The chief of these was David Dudley
Field, who had gone to England after the Civil War, to be commissioned by the
British Association for the Promotion of Social Reform. Field's assignment
was to write a model set of laws for America and the British colonies; the
Field code was adopted in India and, in part, in several of the states of the
American union. David Dudley Field was president of the American Free Trade
League, organized in London. He and his brother Cyrus Field, who laid the
Atlantic Cable and built a stone monument to British spymaster Major Andre,
were passionate devotees of the British cause in world affairs.

Field at first denounced Tweed as a scoundrel, then was "won over" to
represent him as chief counsel. It remains good advice today, as it would
have been in 1871, for someone who is under attack by the Eastern
Establishment to pay careful attention to the actual loyalties of his own
legal staff.

They Go to Their Rewards

When Tweed ended up in jail, he was replaced by Augustus Schell as Grand
Sachem of Tammany Hall. Under the new Grand Sachem, the other new Sachems or
co-leaders for 1872 were Charles O'Conor, Samuel J. Tilden, John Kelly,
Horatio Seymour, August Belmont and Abram S. Hewitt.(47)

Augustus Schell later took the place of August Belmont as national Democratic
Party chairman. Immediately following the Tweed case, Schell served nineteen
years as chairman of the executive committee of the New York Historical
Society and was twice the society's president. Charles O'Conor served as the
vice-president of the society.

It frequently occurs that persons who have played an active and somewhat
messy historical role, insert themselves into the institutions for the
preservation and consideration of the historical event in which they
participated.

For Samuel Tilden, the reward was nearly the moon and the stars. He travelled
to Switzerland in the summer of 1873. From Geneva he sent a letter to New
York Democrats calling for the United States to be saved by a process similar
to that of

the political revolution of 1800, [which had rescued the
country from] Alexander Hamilton . . . [who] believed that
our American people must be governed, if not by force, at
least by appeals to the selfish interests of classes, in all
the forms of corrupt influence. I recently met here—in the
birthplace of Albert Gallatin a son of that great man, and
himself a distinguished American.... he said that the job-
bery and corruption . . . were as great, proportionally, then
[i.e. under George Washington and John Adams] as now.
[But] Thomas Jefferson . . . [and his Treasury Secretary
Gallatin] stayed the advancing centralism.... He re-
pressed the meddling of government in the concerns of
private business....(48)

Tilden had been given introductions to the loftiest levels of
British high society, including members of the "Apostles" group from
Cambridge University, by letter from attorney William Evarts earlier in the
summer.

This, his first tour of Europe, was apparently a great success; his
reputation for vanquishing Tweed was spread among all the right people. He
was elected Governor of New York in 1874. He was the Democratic nominee for
U.S. President in 1876, but despite the assistance of the shameless British
monetarist agent David Wells as his campaign manager, Tilden lost the race to
Rutherford B. Hayes.

Joseph H. Choate, originator of the Committee of 70, continued his upward
climb into the princely regions of Anglo-Americanism. He was U.S. ambassador
to England from 1899 to1905. At Choate's death in 1917, tributes poured into
the elite Century Club, of which he had been president.
The Rt. Hon. Viscount Bryce said, "No American ever did more to make more
close and more tender the ties of affection that bind Britain and America
together . . . he passed from us happy in the knowledge that that for which
he had so earnestly hoped and striven [the entrance of the U.S.A. into World
War I] had been achieved."

Lord Balfour said "he perceived with unerring dearness the fundamental unity
of ideals and of character which bind together America and Britain. Next to
his own country, I believe he loved mine."

Former President Theodore Roosevelt said that the "fifty years' period during
which the average American demagogue has sought publicity by being
ill-mannered towards England" was ended "by the men of the caliber of
Choate."(49)

Lamar for the Ages

Gazaway Bugg Lamar, the capo di tutti Confederate spies in New York, fared
rather well in the Great Cleanup of Corruption. Receiving amnesty after a
short prison sentence for treason, Lamar began suing the United States
government for the return of his seized property, the fruits of his
slave-trading, blockade-running and arms-smuggling. With such unflappable
nerve, Lamar recovered hundreds of thousands of dollars.

In the process he made a small fortune for a number of lawyers, who continued
to represent the Lamar family heirs long after Gazaway's death, suing the
American government for more and more money. The last set of these Lamar
lawyers was the firm Sullivan and Cromwell, whose founder Algernon S.
Sullivan had himself been briefly imprisoned during the Civil War for
collaborating with the enemy.

It was not until the middle of the 20th century that the Lamar family's
affairs were wrapped up by their last Sullivan and Cromwell lawyer, Arthur
Dean, who was John Foster Dulles' successor as head of the firm. Arthur Dean
later negotiated the anti-nuclear test ban treaty with the Soviet Union,
which was signed by Averell Harriman.


The Atlantic Bridge

In the year 1880 a bill was passed by the New York State legislature to
require tenement apartment houses to cover no more than two thirds of the
surface area of their lots. New York State Senator William W. Astor, great
grandson of John Jacob Astor, succeeded in amending the bill so that it could
be entirely evaded.(50)

But the plunder afforded his family enterprises by such tactics must have
been insufficient, because this Astor heir emigrated to England in the
mid-1880s, renouncing his American citizenship—he called America "not a fit
place for a gentleman." He bought the London Times, the Pall Mall Gazette . .
. and a British Lordship for himself. William Astor's son Waldorf was a
member of Lord Milner's Kindergarten; a founder of the Round Table and
Chatham House, which spawned the New York Council on Foreign Relations; and
master of the family home called Cliveden, which served as the base for the
pro-Nazi element in England before World War II.

And what of our debonair horseman, Leonard Jerome, whose New York Times
called the troops to battle against Tweed?

In 1873, Jerome's daughter Jennie was married to Randolph Churchill, the
hereditary Lord Marlboro. Jerome's daughter thus became mistress of the
massive Blenheim Castle, realizing the dreams of her youth among the feudal
emperors of Europe. Randolph Churchill soon emerged as the leader of the
radical feudalist wing of the British Parliament, and for a time was the
leader of the Tory Party. Churchill was thus the leader of Tory member of
Parliament Louis Jennings, his father-in-law's old employee as editor of the
New York Times.

Included in the intimate family circle of the Jeromes and the Churchills were
Lord Arthur Balfour, Benjamin Disraeli, Randolph Churchill's brother-in-law
Lord Curzon . . . and Randolph and Jennie's young son, the future Prime
Minister Winston Churchill.(51)

Leonard Jerome's other two daughters also married Britishers, one a landlord
in Ireland, the other a world-roving intelligence agent of the British
foreign office. Papa Leonard Jerome himself came to England to die among the
Churchills.

We close our present chapter with a final word on the adventures of Augustus
Schell, whose charmed political life extended from the treason of slavery,
filibustering, secession, and insurrection, to the honor of replacing the
corrupt "Boss" Tweed as Tammany's Grand Sachem.

In 1872 Schell's brother Richard approached a small-time Wall Street broker
named Edward H. Harriman with a proposition. If he would agree to open up a
first-floor office so that Schell "wouldn't have to walk up to the third
floor," the Schell brothers would see to it that Harriman was brought in as a
Wall Street insider, with Vanderbilt and Astor as his clients. This was
done.(52)

Today, 112 years later, Edward Harriman's son Averell is married to the
former wife of Leonard Jerome's great-grandson Randolph Churchill, son of the
famous Winston. Pamela Churchill Harriman is the daughter of English nobility
in her own right. Averell and Pamela, this archaic, feudal-minded couple,
rule over the pro-Moscow wing of the Democratic Party; the liberal wing; the
"anti- corruption" wing.

pps. 337-386

--(notes)--

1. Beard, Charles A., and Beard, Mary R., The Rise of American Civilization,
The Macmillan Company, New York, 1944, Vol. 11, pp. 309-310.
2. Bryce, James, The American Commonwealth, Macmillan and Company, New York
and London, 1895 [third edition], Vol. II, pp. 390-391.
3. ibid.. Vol. II. DD. 377-379.
4. President Martin Van Buren's speech to a specially-called session of
Congress Sept 4, 1837.  The Speech is in Richardson, James D. ed. Messages
and Papers of the Presidents, Vol. III, pp. 324-346- quoted from The Annals
of America, published by Encyclopedia Britannica Inc. Chicago, 1968,
Vol.VI,p. 315
5. Porter, John Jacob Astor, Vol. II, p. 884.
6. Morehouse, Clifford P., Trinity: Mother of Churches, The Seabury Press,
New York, 1973, p. 154.
7. O'Connor, The Astors, pp. 169-172.
8. The present-day management of the New York Times contends that it has no
way of knowing the actual identity of Times reporter "Ocator".
9. Mushkat, Dr. Jerome, "Fernando Wood and the Commercial Growth of New York
City," paper submitted to the New-York Historical Society, 1984; the paper
begins: "Much of the historiography of nineteenth-century urban politics
stresses the corruption involved in municipal government the graft and
kickbacks practiced by its leaders- the unethical politcial machines that
exchanged favors for votes and formed alliances with criminals; and the
failure of those machines to provide effective government. Very often,
historians cite Fernando Wood, New York's three-time mayor during the 1850s,
as the worst example of that system and the creator of its most notorious
features. A closer examination of Wood's career suggests that he was an
imaginative leader who was a forerunner of the Progressive movement."
The last sentence of the paper "On the whole, Fernando Wood was a forerunner
of the great reforms of the twentieth-century and well within the mainstream
of political liberalism."
10. See Bass, Feris A. Jr., and Brunson, B. R., editors, Fragile Empires: The
Texas Correspondence of Samuel Swartwout and James Morgan, 1836
1856, Shoal Creek Publishers, Inc., P. O. Box 9737, Austin, Texas 78766.
11. Hay, "Gazaway Bugg Lamar," pp. 91-92.
12. ibid., p. 93.
13. Lathers, Richard, Reminiscences of Richard Lathers, Sixty Years of A Busy
Life in South Carolina, Massachusetts and New York, Alvan Francis Sanborn,
editor, The Grafton Press, New York, 1907, p. 66.
14. ibid., pp. 66-67.
15. ibid., p. 67.
16. Foner, Philip S., Business and Slavery: The New York Merchants and the
Irrepressible Conflict, University of North Carolina Press, Chapel Hill
North Carolina, 1941, p. 164.
17. "A Slave-Trader's Letter-Book," in North American Review, Vol. CXLIII,
No. ccclx, Nov. 1886, pp. 447-461. On page 448, the Review demonstrates
C.A.L. Lamar's financial support and promotion for John A. Quitman's
expedition to revolutionize Cuba. On Feb. 12, 1855, Lamar wrote to "John Dow,
Esq.:
'Dear John: Don't you want some Cuban bonds? Trowbridge can give you all the
information you want on the point. I am in $1,000, Trow $1,000, and I want
you in $1,000. It is a good egg.'
[and on Feb. 25, 1855, to] 'J. S. Thrasher, Esq., New Orleans,' Mr. Lamar
alluded to a starting point he had in mind for the expedition:
'I mentioned Montgomery, a small summer retreat 11 miles back from Savannah
[Georgia] on the Vernon River. The largest frigate, U.S.N., can pass in and
out with perfect safety.... The Collector of the Port is a Lone Star Man
[i.e. Knights of the Golden Circle], and can be sent away for a few days. The
Judge (Circuit Court, U.S.) will not trouble himself, nor do anything more
than his duty requires of him. I have no fear Myself of the consequences of
an infringement of the neutrality laws. Gen'l [i.e. President] Pierce and his
whole cabinet, were they here, could not convict me or my friends. That is
the advantage of a small place. A man of influence can do as he pleases. . ‘”
The Lamars showed that men of influence could do as they pleased in New York
as well.
18. To demonstrate the flavor of the relationship between the slave-smugglers
and the pre-Tweed Democratic Party regime in New York, we return to the North
American Review article, cited in footnote 17, which quotes a letter from
C.A.L. Lamar, in Savannah, April 1, 1857, to George N. Sanders, Esq., Navy
Agent, N. Y.:
"Let me congratulate you, and Fowler too, on your appointments. I'm glad to
see it, independent of any selfish motive—and I am glad on that account too.
I want none of the officers of 'Honor and Trust,' but want a contract for
making money. You have the power of disposing of the contract for the
supplying of timber and lumber at the Navy Yard, and I have the means and
ability of supplying. Will you give me the point to enable me to get it? I
have 11,500 acres of pine land which is just the 'ticket'. . . "
19. 'Negro Slavery not Unjust': A Speech by Charles O'Conor at the Union
Meeting at the Academy of Music, New York City, Dec. 19, 1859, a pamphlet
in the Research Library, 42nd St., New York.
20. New York Times, May 14, 1884.
21. "Augustus Schell," in National Cyclopaedia of American Biography, Vol.
III, p. 464.
22. Quoted in Foner, Business and Slavery, p. 199.
23. Memorial addressed to Simon Cameron, Secretary of War, August 28 1861, in
The War of the Rebellion, A Compilation of the Official Records of the Union
and Confederate Armies, United States Government Printing Office, Washington,
1902, Chapter LXII [in "Additions and Corrections : to Series I-Volume L.],
pp. 589-591. See also the wonderful book, Ken
nedy, Elijah Robinson, The Contest for California in 1861: How Colonel E. D.
Baker Saved the Pacific States to the Union, Houghton Mifflin Co.
Boston, 1912, pp. 217-219.
24. Hay, "Gazaway Bugg Lamar," p. 106.
25. ibid., pp. 106-107.
26. Quoted in Foner, Business and Slavery, p. 299n.
27. Hay, "Gazaway Bugg Lamar," pp. 109-110.
28. Quoted in Black, David, The King of Fifth Avenue: The Fortunes of August
Belmont, The Dial Press, New York, 1981, pp. 199-200.
29. Lathers, Reminiscences, p. 91.
30. ibid., p. 94.
31. Quoted in The Annals of America, published by Encyclopaedia Britannica,
Inc., Chicago, 1968, Vol. IX, pp. 234-235.
32. Hay, "Gazaway Bugg Lamar," p. 105.
33. ibid., pp. 89-90.
34. ibid., pp. 110-122.
35. Milton, Abraham Lincoln and the Fifth Column, p. 243.
36. ibid., p. 244.
37. The Society, whose pamphlets are on microfilm at the Library of Congress,
seems to have had a parent organization, or at least an inspiration, in a
British organization by the exact same name, among whose founders in 1834
were Edwin Chadwick, employed as the assistant to radical gamemaster Jeremy
Bentham; Sir Isaac Lyon Goldsmid, financier of London University; George
Grote, editor for Jeremy Bentham, co-founder with James M11 and Henry
Brougham of London University and later its president, Greek historian who
called the sophists champions of intellectual progress- George Cornewall
Lewis, member of Parliament, later British Secretary for War, 1861-63, at the
time Tilden's New York copperhead organization was set up; James Mill,
director of intelligence for the British East India Company; and Nassau
Senior, British economist.
The British founders are listed in The Companion to the Newspaper; and
Journal of Facts in Politics, Statistics and Public Economy, Charles Knight,
London, August, 1834, p. 168.
38. Page 5 of pamphlet No. 7, "Ovation at the Academy of Music," of the
Papers From The Society for the Diffusion of Political Knowledge, July 4,
1863, microfilm at the Library of Congress. This pamphlet contains an
interesting little introduction presenting British Premier and intelligence
chief Lord Shelburne as a great friend of civil liberties.
39. For details of Tweed's career, see Hershkowitz, Leo, Tweed's New York:
Another Look, Anchor Press/Doubleday, Garden City, New York, 1978. Whether
the reader agrees with Hershkowitz's viewpoint, he at least treats Tweed as a
politician, with ordinary dates and facts to his life rather than
hysterically, as in most other, "Satanizing" treatments of the man.
40. ibid, p. 85.
41. Leslie, Anita [Jerome's great-granddaughter], The Fabulous Leonard
Jerome, Hutchinson, Stratford Place, London, 1954, p. 75. and "Leonard
Jerome," National Cyclopaedia of American Biography, Vol. X~, p.
449. In Leslie, Anita, Lady Randolph Churchill, The Story of Jennie Jerome
Charles Scribner's Sons, New York, 1969, p. 15: "When the Civil War broke
out, Leonard Jerome, as owner of America's only serious newspaper, the New
York Times, devoted himself to political issues...."
42. Leslie, The Fabulous Leonard Jerome, pp. 62-63: "The Three Musketeers
[Leonard Jerome, August Belmont and Henry Clews] exasperated Wall Street.
They were ruthless, frivolous and a law unto themselves. In a luxurious room,
high above the junction of Pine and Nassau Streets, the firm of Travers,
Jerome inaugurated what it airily called its 'Observatory.' Here, in a
setting of red plush and polished woods, Leonard entertaining his business
acquaintances thoughtfully 'observed.' The luncheons and dinners served in
this room were kept unhurried and the conversations stimulating . . . tycoons
and businessmen seldom realized their views were being dissected as under a
microscope. Among the most frequent visitors to the 'Observatory' were the
financial editors of two New York papers, the Herald and the Tribune.... If
these men wished, they could break a company, and in the instance of the
Cleveland and Toledo, Leonard decided that such action would be beneficial.
After careful research he knew the whole company to be rotten but only an
unprecedented Press campaign could reveal its true state. Both the Herald and
the Tribune started to publish the facts dug up by Leonard, and not only was
this company exposed and smashed, but also the corrupt Michigan Southern
(which Leonard had sworn to break even if it carried down the whole market) .
. . during the panic that followed the Press exposure of these companies,
Leonard made a far greater fortune than the one he had lost [by involvement
with them]."
43. Quoted in Katz, Irving, August Belmont:A Political Biography, Columbia
University Press, New York, 1968, p. 190.
44. Davis, Elmer Holmes, History of the New York Times, published by the New
York Times, New York, 1921, p. 85.
45. Leslie, Fabulous Leonard Jerome, p. 75.
46. The names of the attendees at the cited meeting who formed the resultant
Committee of Seventy were printed in Townsend, Hon. John, New York in
Bondage, [the liberal style does not much change], privately printed New
York, 1901, copy in the New-York Historical Society, pp. 85-86. The personal
benefits to Committee members from the purge of Tweed's faction were also
shown (pp. 86-87):
"Mr. Joseph H. Choate read the following list of names for officers of the
Committee. . . . For President, Harry G. Stebbins. For Vice-President,
William F. Havemeyer. Secretary, Roswell D. Hatch.... These gentlemen were
very fortunate, for shortly afterward, Mr. Stebbins became President of the
Park Board, Mr. Havemeyer became Mayor, and Mr. Hatch became Fire
Commissioner.
"A working Sub-Committee, which was called the 'Committee on Remedies,' was
also appointed, consisting of the following gentlemen Jackson S. Schultz,
George C. Barrett, John Wheeler, Joseph Blumenthal. These gentlemen were
equally fortunate, for they were advanced as follows:
Jackson S. Schultz to be a Health Commissioner, George C. Barrett to
be a Justice of the Supreme Court, John Wheeler to be a Tax Commissioner,
Joseph Blumenthal to be member of Assembly.
"Francis C. Barlow, Abraham R.- Lawrence, George C. Barrett and
Wheeler H. Peckham were employed as Counsel to this Committee.
These gentlemen were likewise fortunate, as Mr. Barlow soon became
Attorney-General, Mr. Lawrence was elected Justice of the Supreme
Court, as was Mr. Barrett . . . and Mr. Peckham was appointed District
Attorney."
47. Ibid., p. 105.
48. Letter published as "Mr. Tilden Resigns the Chairmanship of the
Democratic State Committee, Dated Geneva, in Switzerland, August, 1873," in
Letters and Literary Memorials of Samuel J. Tilden, Kennikat Press, Port
Washington, New York, 1971 reprint of 1908 edition, Vol. 1, pp. 320-321.
49. John Hodges Choate Memorial Addresses, Delivered before the Century
Association, January 19, 1918, printed for the Century Association, New York,
1918, p. 18 (Bryce), pp. 25-26 (Balfour), p. 30 (T. Roosevelt).
50. O’Connor, The Astors, pp.168-169
51. Leslie, Fabulous Leonard Jerome, pp. 214, 217, 224.
52. Kennan, George, E. H. Harriman: A Biography, Houghton Mifflin Company,
Boston, 1922, p. 15.
pp 337-386
--cont--
--chart--
The Lamar Family

John Lamar II [patriarch]


Howell Cobb=Ann Lamar
Governor of Georgia; U.S.
Treasury Secretary and Cabi-
net Leader under President
Buchanan, 1857-60, chairman
of convention which estab-
Iished Southern Confederacy;
Supreme Council, Scottish Rite;
Secured financial operations in
New York through Gazaway
Lamar.

Basil Lamar

Gazaway Bugg Lamar [son of Basil]
Business partner of James Hamilton,
former South Carolina governor who
organized Nuilification movement.
New York banker, organized Great
Western Insurance Co. (board included
J.P. Morgan and British and Swiss
directors) to back his operations;
Confederate intelligence chief in
New York City; got American Bank
Note Company to print Confederate
notes; smuggled arms to South; organized
slave trade revival out of New York
in the 1850s; his heirs represented
by Sullivan & Cromwell, Dulles law
firm, got millions from U.S. to recover
property confiscated during the Civil War.

Mirabeau Lamar
Second president of Texas Republic;
plotted overthrow of Texas government
in early years; tried to break up Republic
of Mexico; sent James Hamilton to England
to negotiate British control of Texas; affair
with Jane McManus former mistress of Aaron
Burr; "New Washington Association of Swartout,
Morgan,and Treat was the Burr machine in Texas
under Lamar.

John Lamar III

Lucius Q. C. Lamar [son of John III]

Lucius Q. C. Lamar II
University -7 Mississippi professor in
"Moral Philosophy"; drafted Secession
Resolution for stab of Mississippi;
appointed U.S. Interior Secretary
and Supreme Court Justice by
President Grover Cleveland.
p 353.
-----
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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