-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
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Franklin's Freemasons Versus Boston's Scottish Rite
In 1766, ten years before the U.S. Declaration of Independence Dr. Benjamin
Franklin traveled to the continent of Europe, to begin assembling a vast,
transatlantic conspiracy, intended to provide the strategic correlation of
forces indispensable to American victory over its oppressor and adversary,
Lord Shelburne's Britain. This vast conspiracy brought together, under
Franklin's leadership, the surviving networks earlier associated with John
Milton of England, Richelieu, Mazarin, and Colbert of France, and of
Gottfried Leibniz. The network of Franklin's conspiracy extended, outside the
future United States itself, from Leibniz's Petrograd Academy in Russia,
through the court of Spain's King Charles III, into the republican circles of
the Spanish colonies in America.
The central feature of the conspiratorial form of Franklin's transatlantic
network was Franklin's position as international leader, and Grand Master of
one of the two contending forms of freemasonry in France, ally of Franklin's
own Free and Accepted Masons in the U.S.A. The British-allied opposition to
Franklin on the continent of Europe was centered in a circle of Jesuit,
Swiss-banking, and British SIS forces and assets, assembled in the Nine
Sisters' Scottish Rite freemasonic lodge in Paris, under that Lodge's Grand
Master for France, and Franklin's chief adversary in France, the Duke of
Orleans.
The leading edge of British subversion within the North American colonies
and, Later, the United States, was the build-up of a network of Scottish Rite
lodges in direct opposition to Franklin's own freemasonic conspiracy. An
outstanding feature of this spread of the Scottish Rite conspiracy against
the United States was the rote of the medical school at Edinburgh, Scotland
(and other medical centers controlled by the Scottish Rite in Europe).
The pace at which the families of the Essex Junto could realize their
treasonous objectives was limited, perforce, to the rate at which they could
embed their conspiratorial network into controlling positions of public and
private institutions around the nation as a whole. Exemplary was the degree
of control they achieved over the chairmanships of the state medical
associations by the 1840s, and the circumstantially conclusive evidence of a
physician's role in assuring the death of President William Henry Harrison.
It was this Scottish Rite freemasonic conspiracy, centered around close
collaboration between Newburyport and Charleston, South Carolina, through
which the traitorous, slave-trading, and opium-trading freemasonic families
of Essex County deliberately organized the Confederacy, and the same
secession of which George Cabot wrote on January 29, 1804, and Timothy
Pickering on July 4, 1813.
It is therefore the transatlantic "freemasonic war" erupting during the
eighteenth century, and continued in the United States into the 1980s, which
is the main thread of conspiracy which must be uncovered and traced to
discover how the Essex Junto of Jefferson's and Madison's presidencies nearly
succeeded in destroying the nation, until the Battle of Gettysburg settled
the matter in 1863. It is to that connection that we turn our attention in
these chapters of our report.
However, we would be guilty of fallacy of composition of the evidence, if we
restricted ourselves merely to the British elements of this treason. Just as
we have shown, in the case of Aaron Burr's treasonous activities, that the
war against the United States during 1776-1783 was prosecuted as much by the
Swiss families centered around Mallet, de Neuflize, Schlumberger, and Necker,
as by the British themselves, so the same nominally Protestant,
French-speaking financier families of Switzerland were integral to the
outrages against our republic leading into the Civil War.
The Swiss and Jesuits
Since the evidence we report focuses almost exclusively on the British
connection to the treason, we preface those features of our report with a
summary description of the characteristic features of the Swiss and Jesuit
participation in these events.
The afflictions which have beset Western European civilization since the
accession of Charlemagne, have been chiefly productions of a force determined
to destroy the direction of development of Western Christian civilization set
into motion by the writings of St. Augustine, and given powerful force with
the rise of Charlemagne. The adversary, at the beginning, was based in
Byzantium, in the powerful banking and mercantile families of the Levant,
called "Phanariots" because of the wealthy district of Constantinople,
together with a powerful, Gnostic faction of pseudo-Christians within the
Eastern Church, centered around the hesychastic cults of the so-called Holy
Mountain of Mount Athos. The most significant among the colonies of Byzantium
through which destructive operations were deployed against the West from the
ninth century A.D. onwards, has been Venice, the same city which was the
principal target of the United States' foreign counter-intelligence
operations during the period from 1815 into 1861.
During the period beginning A.D. 1230-1250, Venice and its allied competitor,
Genoa, nearly succeeded in destroying Western civilization by methods not
dissimilar to the effects of international debt- usury and promotion of
charismatic religious cults today. Over the period from the fall of the
Hohenstaufen in Germany, Italy, and Spain, during the period A.D. 1250-1268,
until the last quarter of the following century, half of the parishes of
Europe existing in A.D. 1250 vanished. The Black Death pandemic, which killed
half of the population of Europe living at the time of its onset, was merely
the concluding phase of a general collapse of European culture.
The central feature of this destruction of European civilization over that
period of approximately 100 years, was an institution of banking called
"Lombard banking, " typified by the families of the Peruzzi and Bardi. It was
the "conditionalities" imposed upon debtor governments by these Lombard
usurers, much like International Monetary Fund "conditionalities" today,
which caused a collapse of agricultural production—the activity of about 95
percent of the households living at that time, with a resulting collapse of
towns, and forcing both urban and rural populations into vagabondage and
banditry. As "Khomeini-like" charismatic cults destroyed the rationality of
populations, no rational opposition to the Lombards' practice was
successfully mustered until after the conclusion of the Black Death pandemic.
Then, when England repudiated its debts to the Bardi, the chain-letter of
usury collapsed, wiping out, in chain-reaction, most of the Lombard financial
institutions of Europe, and weakening their political power to the point that
the conspiracy earlier set into motion by Dante Alighieri could establish the
beginnings of the fifteenth-century Golden Renaissance.
The Golden Renaissance, brought together as a force by the fifteenth-century
Cardinal Nicolaus of Cusa, and continued by Leonardo da Vinci, France's King
Louis XI, and the Erasmian reformers of England, reestablished government and
society ordered according to the principles of St. Augustine and Charlemagne,
but also with the addition of several new features of utmost importance.
Dante Alighieri had proposed, through such influential writings as his De
Monarchia, a system of nation-states, each based on the speakers of a common,
literate form of language, as a replacement for the Holy Roman Empire form of
government of Christendom. The possibility of such a new order in society was
provided by the work of Cusa, beginning his 1431 Concordantia Catholica,
which provided for the existence of sovereign nation-state republics, all
bound together by share of a common body
of natural law based on Augustinian Neoplatonic principles. Cusa also set
into motion, through his writings on geometry and physics, the entirety of
modern European mathematical science, chiefly through his influence upon
Leonardo daVinci, and through his own and da Vinci's influence, directly and
indirectly, upon such figures as England's William Gilbert, Germany's
Johannes Kepler, and France's Gaspard Desargues, all the latter at the turn
of the seventeenth century.
So, emerged, as Italian thought, and as the practice of France's Louis XI and
the English Erasmians, a new form of civil society, based on the sovereign
nation-state republic and the promotion of increase of the productive powers
of labor through scientific progress. Forces such as Les Politiques in France
(Henry IV, Pere Tremblay, Richelieu, Mazarin, Colbert), the Commonwealth
Party of John Milton in England, and the networks of Gottfried Leibniz, were
the leading bearers of this advancement in the human condition into the time,
1766, Benjamin Franklin began assembling his vast, transatlantic conspiracy
The opposition to this was by no means destroyed by the financial
bankruptcies of the fourteenth-century Lombard houses. They had been greatly
weakened, but a powerful kernel, centered in Venice, survived. Their
come-back to power was established with the Ottoman conquest of
Constantinople, in A. D. 1453.
Briefly, the opposition to Mount Athos and the Phanariots in Byzantium had
seized power there with the rise of the Paleologues, a Greek branch of the
Italian family of Viterbo. Through the masterstatesman of the Paleologues,
George Gemisthos (Plethon), an alliance was struck between the Paleologues
and Cosimo de Medici of Florence, leading into the ecumenical Council of
Florence of A.D. 1439, where the Paleologues attempted to outflank the
hesychasts of the Eastern Rite by unifying the Eastern Rite and Roman
Catholic Confession through adoption of the Augustinian filioque doctrine by
the Eastern Rite.
Venice, Genoa, Mount Athos, and complicit, nominally Catholic wealthy
families in Rome itself, struck back, determined to destroy the insurgence of
Augustinianism accomplished by the Council of Florence. These parties,
including Mount Athos's spokesman, Gennadios, entered into a plot with the
Ottoman ruler for the conquest of Constantinople. Mount Athos (Gennadios)
prohibited Greeks from defending Constantinople. The Venetians and Romans
supplied Muhammed the Conqueror with artillery and gunners. Four thousand
mercenaries, hired to defend the city, opened the city's gates by night. So,
Constantinople fell in A.D. 1453.
As payment for these services, Muhammed the Conqueror passed only
long-lasting concessions to his accomplices. Venice was given large portions
of the subjugated Byzantine domains in Greece, and Venice was given control
of the Ottoman intelligence and diplomatic services: the dragoman's
positions. Gennadios was made Patriarch of the Eastern Rite, and given
authority over the affairs of all non-Islamic peoples of the Ottoman Empire.
The Ottoman Empire so created was modeled upon the ancient Persian, Roman,
and Byzantine empires—a system of captive nations, each defined by ethnic or
ethnic- plus-religious particularism, or what we would term "world
federalism" today.
At the same time, Venice transformed its clients, the Hapsburgs, into rulers
of an Austro-Hungarian empire in the making, and thereafter controlled the
Middle East, and most of Eastern Europe through playing the two empires, the
Ottoman and Austro- Hungarian, against one another, and also largely
controlled the emerging Russian Empire.
Venice acted in concert with Genoa, which controlled Burgundy (i.e.,
French-speaking Switzerland, and adjoining portions of France). The Genoese
began to take control of Spain as well as Portugal, through Queen Isabella.
The houses of Burgundy and Hapsburg were unified, Essex Junto-style. With the
death of the obstacle, Ferdinand of Spain, and the Hapsburg sack of Rome in
A.D. 1527, the rule of Venice through the Hapsburgs was uncontested
throughout Europe (and the New World) except by France and Tudor England.
Venice organized the Reformation in Germany, Genoa in Switzerland, and
Venice, which had just created the Protestant Reformation, organized the
Counterreformation, too. The Venetian house of Contarini detained Ignatius
Loyola, and obliged him to head up a new worldwide secret intelligence
service to serve the Venetian interests, the Jesuits.
Among the believers, the religious issues of the wars of the sixteenth and
seventeenth centuries were real and bitter, and often enough not without
reason. At the time, with a few exceptions, Venice controlled both sides of
the conflict, and profited in wealth and power whichever won.
The downfall of Tudor England began with Henry VIII's Reformation. It is
probably the case that Henry VIII was clinically insane, but no less
manipulable on this account. His curious matrimonial practices are much
noted, and were perhaps a leading consideration in the poor, twisted mind of
that monarch. Less noted, but of lasting importance, Henry VIII was bribed
massively, by Genoa. Henry's wealth came from sale of titles and confiscated
Church properties. The means to purchase those estates and titles came
chiefly through loans extended to the purchasers by Genoese families such as
the Pallavicini. Old Judge Lowell would have understood the point perfectly.
Henry VIII did not touch the theology of the English Church in any formal
way. Cranmer's Book of Common Prayer may be noted on this point. The decisive
act was the legal murder of the great English Erasmian, Sir Thomas More;
Henry VIII destroyed the Erasmian faction which had brought his father to the
throne, the political forces within England representing the new institution
of the technologically progressive sovereign nation-state. Thereafter, the
Catholics in Britain were divided chiefly into two groups, the
crypto-Catholic Erasmians, typified by the Dudleys and the family of William
Shakespeare, and the Jesuitical tribes associated with the Genoese colony
known as Scotland. It is in the latter that the origins of Scottish Rite
freemasonry are to be found.
Following the 1588 defeat of the Spanish Armada, the Genoese faction in
England struck, launching a bloody de facto coup d'etat to secure the
succession to the Stuart James VI of Scotland. The Cecil family, including
Francis Bacon, were prominent, among others, in this plot. When their Stuart
candidate ascended the throne of England as James I, in 1603, he gave his
foreign financial backers a monopoly over the collection of taxes and public
debt of Britain. The Venetian-Genoese Levant Company took over the commerce
of Britain much as the Essex Junto did through operations centered in the
China opium trade. This foreign monopoly, reconsolidated from the 1660
Restoration of the Stuarts onward, is the Bank of England today, and was the
British (and Dutch) East India Company of the eighteenth and nineteenth
centuries, of Baring Brothers bank.
The Scottish Rite was created in the following way.
During the period of the Stuart household's exile, the most influential
intellectual figures were Bacon's personal secretary, Thomas Hobbes, and one
Robert Fludd, a Jesuit better known as the leading spokesman for a synthetic
cult created by the Jesuits, the Rosicruceans. This was an oriental cult,
identified as "hermeticist," which was used as a "secret society" by the
Stuarts, a conspiratorial freemasonic sort of network deployed to assist
their return to power. When the Stuarts returned to power, this
secret-society cult was first organized in the open form of the London Royal
Society, under the direction of a crypto-Jesuit, Sir William Petty, the
grandfather of the Second Earl of Shelburne controlling the Essex Junto.
However, the London Royal Society of Petty, Locke, Hooke, Newton, Boyle, et
al., was merely the "above-ground" form of the cult—as the chest of Newton's
private laboratory papers illustrates the point. Steps were taken under
Petty's overall direction to recodify and reorganize the secret networks. A
protege of Petty's, Elias Ashmole, was employed to piece together the old
Templar cults of Scotland and Fludd's Rosicruceanism. (Robert Bruce, the
founder of the modern Scottish royal bloodline, had been a fourteenth-century
Genoese mercenary, who had conquered Scotland with aid of a force of Templars
fleeing the Inquisition and Philip le Bel of France.) The result was the
Scottish Rite of speculative freemasonry, as distinguished from craft, or
Free and Accepted Freemasonry.
Benjamin Franklin's Initiative
>From this standpoint of historical reference, the general character and form
of secret organization of Franklin's opponents in France is easily
documented. Franklin organized a network of Free and Accepted Masons, tied
historically to the Grand Orient Lodge of himself and the Marquis de
Lafayette. The Prince Hall freemasons, in the United States, for example,
were chartered by Lafayette, as were the liberal freemasons of Benito
Juarez's circles in Mexico. The Society of Cincinnatus, which George
Washington and Lafayette co-founded in 1783, was a freemasonic organization
attached to the Free and Accepted Freemasonry associated with the Grand
Orient of France. This freemasonic network was the basis for the
secret-intelligence organization of the patriots of the United States into
the 1860s, with echoes of those old associations existing around the world
today.
Although Burgundian-Swiss tribes such as the Mallet, entered England with
William the Conquerer in A. D. 1066, since Robert Bruce, a special connection
has existed between Edinburgh and Geneva, to such families as Mallet, de
Neuflize, and, since about 1770, Schlumberger. These tribes show up in
history as early as the campaigns of Julius Caesar, a history we do not
propose to elaborate here. The crux of the matter is that in
eighteenth-century France, as in France today, Scottish Rite freemasonry,
Swiss banking families of Geneva, Lausanne, and Berne, and the Jesuits, are
so tightly intermeshed in joint projects that their occasional squabbles
among themselves are merely intramural, if sometimes bloodily so.
It was this combination, coordinated around the figure of the Duke of
Orleans, which was Franklin's deadly opponent during the 1776-1788 period,
and the tightly intermeshed forces deployed in coordinated use of treasonous
circles such as the families of the Essex Junto.
The important thing which the reader must bear in mind, as we trace through
the incestuous begatting of the freemasonic and Jesuit networks deployed to
organize the secession, is that a conspiracy of this sort, spun out over
successive generations, does not operate in the fashion most persons today
would assume a conspiracy to work. One must not imagine that the essence of
such conspiracies are secret meetings in obscure places, and so forth. The
covert features of conspiracies are merely the necessary (usually) auxiliary
means to the end in view. The essential thing about the great conspiracies
which have, in fact, shaped most of human history, is not the dark plottings,
and the begattings. The essential feature of any great conspiracy of this
sort is the motivation which causes the leaders of a conspiracy to conspire
together.
The mere desire for power and wealth cannot sustain a great conspiracy over
successive generations. The mere appearance of better opportunities to reach
the same goals would tear apart any conspiracy based on mere greed as such.
All great conspiracies are glued together and energized by some very special
and powerful sort of ideological motive.
In the case of the Essex Junto and its outgrowths, the ideological motive is
a hatred against the distinctive form of Augustinian principles identified
with the fifteenth-century Golden Renaissance. This hatred of the
institutions of the sovereign nation- state, of the checks of principles of
natural law on the behavior of individuals and associations, and of
technological progress, is complemented by a desire for the kind of
world-order and ethics typified by the case of the Roman Empire, in which
syndicates of wealthy families, organized as the Italian black nobility's
fondi, rule over a world-empire.
In the early correspondence of the Essex Junto, their treason has the form of
a search for quick projects for destruction of an American federal republic,
whose very existence is repugnant to their adopted British-imperialist
world-outlook, a British ideogical version of the philosophical outlook of
the Roman Empire. What is clear from that earlier correspondence is a
consistent mass of prejudices; they know what they hate, but are less certain
of what they desire in its place. They are guided only by the ideology of the
prejudices. As the conspiracy ages in experience, numbers, and resources, the
nebulously defined ideology of the early period gives way to a highly
organized set of long-range projects and goals. The conspiratorial world of
freemasonic plotting serves as the medium though which this development of
their ideological prejudices assumes an elaborated form.
Creating a Spy Ring: The Scottish Rite in America
There is a vicious game associated with the story told by the "Ancient and
Accepted Scottish Rite" about its own history in the United States. According
to the Rite's historians,(1) it was primarily Jewish merchants and rabbis who
established the organization in North America.
The game works as follows. First, it is alleged that certain Jews brought the
"patents" for this freemasonic system from France in the 1760s, and that
these and other Jews set up a system of rituals in Philadelphia, Charleston,
and elsewhere. No biographical information is furnished about these
individuals, that would in any way explain how they are tied to the French,
English, and Scottish noblemen who originated the order; no motives are
suggested for actions of these obscure "founders."
Then, spurious "attacks" appear against the misdeeds of the Scottish Rite and
other secret societies, which ascribe the problem to a "Jewish Conspiracy"!
One such piece of lying garbage is the Occult Theocrasy(2) by a Lady
Queenborough. Its author uses the source material provided by the Scottish
Rite, and denounces a long list of Jews as conspirators, who had no other
supposed object in mind than Jewish control of the world.
By promoting this fakery, the Scottish Rite—which strictly prohibits Jews
from its leadership—has succeeded in doubly obscuring the actual nature of
its origins in this country, and in the bargain has helped to promote the
Anglo-Saxon racism that has always been central to its aims.
Among the many names provided by the Rite as its American pioneers and
progenitors, all but one have such obscure, elusive historical identities
that, if they existed at all, they appear to have played the role of
messengers or go-betweens for the principal world-historical figures involved
in this business.
The one exception is a man whose historical existence was all too palpable
for the hundreds of American and allied patriots who died at his hands.
British Major General Augustine Prevost is still remembered today in South
Carolina as the "filthy" enemy commander during the American Revolution,
whose largely Loyalist troops looted and maliciously destroyed the homes and
farms of residents in wide areas of that state.(3) Augustine Prevost and his
brother, Colonel James Marcus Prevost, were responsible for the recruitment
of the largest force of Crown Loyalists used in the British war effort.
Indeed, the struggle in South Carolina has the character of a
Patriot-versus-Tory civil war.
As we have seen in earlier chapters, these Prevosts of Geneva represented the
very highest levels of the British-Swiss alliance forming the British Secret
Intelligence Service. When Colonel James Prevost died, Aaron Burr married his
widow, adopted his children, and took his place in the family and the British
Secret Service. The substantial Tory element in South Carolina would serve
Burr and the Prevosts as a fertile recruiting ground for
political-conspiratorial activities after the Revolution, under the overall
coordination of the supervisor of Loyalist affairs, Secret Intelligence chief
Lord Shelburne.
The History of the Supreme Council, 33°, Ancient Accepted Scottish Rite of
Freemasonry, Northern Masonic Jurisdiction of the United States of America,
and Its Antecedents, by Samuel H. Baynard, Jr., states that Augustine Prevost
was Grand Steward of the Lodge of Perfection set up in Albany, New York, in
1768.4 This lodge was said to have been established by one of the traveling
"patent" bearers named Henry Francken. The lodge was "abruptly terminated" as
the troubles with the British came to a head in 1774, but not before
responsibility for the "Ancient" system was passed on:
In February 1774, Francken appointed Augustin[e] Prevost a deputy Inspector
General at Kingston, Jamaica, and thereafter, so far as previous writers have
recorded, Francken passed out of our picture. The official Rite historian
states further that Prevost, in 1776, commissioned a fellow British army
officer "to establish the Rite of Perfection in Scotland, [this commission]
was afterwards to form the basis of its constitution."
General Augustine Prevost had two sons who were important to American
history. One of them, Sir George Prevost, gained notoriety because, as
Governor General of Canada and Commander of British Forces in North America,
he invaded the United States in the War of 1812.
The other son, named Augustine like his father, is a most elusive quarry for
the historical hunter. It is known that he was a major in the British Army,
who died in 1824. The initial information available to us came from his
correspondence with his uncle and lawyer, Aaron Burr. The Canadian Government
Archives were requested to search for traces of the major.
No record of his existence as a Canadian was returned, but the Archivist sent
us copies of letters which indicate that Major Prevost was stationed within
the new United States, rather than in Canada.
He is first encounted in a 1785 letter written to Sir Frederick Haldimand, a
native Swiss who had just returned to England after serving as governor
general and commander in chief in Canada during the Revolution. Haldimand had
overall responsibility for settling the hordes of embittered, revenge-seeking
Tory refugees who came up to Canada during and after the war.
Major Prevost writes to accept Haldimand's request that he serve as
Haldimand's agent, supposedly to be concerned with managing Haldimand's lands
in western Pennsylvania.(5) In later correspondence, Prevost discusses his
plans to establish a Swiss settlement(6)—not far from where the Genevan
immigrant Albert Gallatin did indeed establish the base from which he
launched the Whiskey Insurrection in the 1790s.
Prevost tells Haldimand that Pennsylvania will be strategically important
because Philadelphia has been chosen as the site for the first capital of the
new U.S. government.(7)
The Scottish Rite History by Baynard tells us: "The old Minute Book of the
Lodge of Perfection in Philadelphia, shows that on Oct. 5, 1785. 'Bro.
Augustin Prevost, a Prince of the Royal Secret . . . [was] admitted as
visitor . . . a Patent [was] issued by Deputy Inspector General Prevost, Aug.
19, 1789, to William Moore Smith, at Philadelphia, and . . . February 1,
1790, to Pierre Le Barbier Duplessis . . . whereby each of the recipients was
appointed a Deputy Inspector General."(8)
The William Moore Smith "appointed" by Prevost advertised in 1797 that he was
the general agent for the Tory refugees, for the prosecution of their claims,
and those of other British creditors, against the United States.(9)
Prevost's other appointee, Pierre Duplessis, traveled to Massachusetts, and
in 1790 he established the Knights Templars organization in Newburyport. (10)
The commander of that organization from 1823 to 1866 was Richard Spofford,
father of Caleb Cushing's private secretary.
It should be noted that while establishing these Lodge networks, Major
Prevost was in constant contact with his lawyer, uncle, and advisor, Aaron
Burr, who came to Philadelphia in 1791 as the U.S. Senator from New York.
Burr represented Prevost in his long feud with the pioneer father of novelist
James Fenimore Cooper over the title to the Cooper lands in upstate New
York—a conflict which ended when William Cooper was assassinated in 1809 by a
blow on the head from behind.
The Charleston Founders
With these antecedents, the Scottish Rite organization in Charleston, South
Carolina—later to be called the Mother Lodge of the World—was officially
founded in 1801. Of the 11 gentlemen mentioned(11) as founders, seven have
the shadowy identity of messenger boys or even fictitious characters; the
other four were definite historical personalities, though the surviving
record of their lives are full of gaps and shrouded in mystery.
John Mitchell (1741-1816) was an Irish immigrant trading in the West Indies
in the 1760s. Living in Philadelphia during the Revolution, Mitchell got
himself assigned Deputy Quartermaster for the American army. He seems to have
remained in the city under British occupation, and to have nonchalantly
resumed his quartermaster role after the city was liberated in 1778.
When Benedict Arnold was court-martialed in Philadelphia in 1779, on
corruption charges relating to the use of supplies from the Quartermaster,
Commander Washington wrote Mitchell to inform him that Arnold had requested
Mitchell to be a witness on his behalf. It was in this period that Benedict
Arnold's wife Peggy, Aaron Burr's step-sister, was intensifying her campaign
of persuasion, which coupled with financial corruption by the British, led to
Arnold's treason the following year at West Point.
Whether John Mitchell testified at the Arnold trial is not known. Later the
Continental Congress held a trial to determine if Mitchel was guilty of
falsifying(12) his quartermaster's books. Mitchell and Arnold were both
acquitted. But for some reason the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania sequestered
Mitchell's records for investigation, and they are still kept as such, on
file in the state archives. (13)
In one of Aaron Burr's postwar letters to Augustine Prevost, (14) Burr
mentions that he has sent "John Mitch" as a messenger to Prevost. Mitchell
moved to Charleston either in 1787 or 1790.
Count Alexandre Francois Auguste de Grasse (1865-1845) played no significant
role in Charleston after co-founding the Scottish Rite there in 1801, but he
later served as as crucial intermediary between the American conspirators and
their European aristocratic wire-pullers. De Grasse was the son of the French
Admiral de Grasse, whose fleet helped George Washington defeat the British in
the decisive battle of Yorktown. The Admiral seemed unenthusiastic about
remaining in place to fight the British—the Marquis de Lafayette had to
convince him to stay for the action. Whatever his father's real loyalties,
the younger de Grasse's most prominent military activity was in fighting to
save his own and other plantations from the San Domingo slave insurrection in
the 1790s.
De Grasse set up Scottish Rite Supreme Councils in France (1804), Milan
(1805), Spain (1809) and Belgium (1817). Following the British conquest of
France in 1815, de Grasse became Scottish Rite Supreme Commander in France,
coordinating with the Americans throughout the creation of the
insurrectionary machine in South Carolina in the 1820s and 1830s.
Fnderick Dalcho (1770-1836), born in London, came to America with his uncle
after the Revolution. A medical doctor in Charleston, Dalcho became editor of
the Tory-Federalist newspaper The Courier in 1806, when the British were
stepping up their piracy against American shipping. Federalist attacks
against U. S. defensive efforts became very unpopular in South Carolina
during the War of 1812, and Dalcho resigned from The Courier in 1813.
Dalcho was ordained a deacon of the Episcopal Church in 1814, and from 1819
until 1833 he was the effective head of St. Michael's Church and the leader
of Charleston's Episcopalians. This Scottish Rite Founder was therefore
spiritual leader of South Carolina's "English Party" during the Nullification
Crisis of the 1820s and 1830s.
James Moultrie (1766-1836) has a very famous name in South Carolina—his last
name. James's uncle, William Moultrie, was a great Revolutionary War hero who
fought General Augustine Prevost, and later became governor of South Carolina.
But James Moultrie was the son of William's brother John, who was a leading
British official in the South during the Revolution, the British lieutenant
governor of Florida and the head of the Royalist party of that province. It
was from his base in Moultrie's Florida that General Augustine Prevost
launched his invasion of Georgia and South Carolina. James Moultrie would not
feel ill-at-ease joining a secret, conspiratorial organization set up by
General Prevost and his son, because James Moultrie's father had played so
prominent a part in Prevost's military attack on America, and had lost all
the family's hopes for empire in this country.
The British ceded Florida to Spain in 1783, so John Moultrie and his son
James went to live in England. James was trained in medicine at Edinburgh
University, and emigrated to Charleston. Since he had been born there a year
before his family moved to Florida, James Moultrie is proudly referred to by
the Scottish Rite as their one "native Carolinian" among the 1801 founders.
He married a Charleston Moultrie cousin and quietly set about acquiring power
through local social contacts. He was elected president of the South Carolina
Medical Society in 1804, and his son, also named James Moultrie and also
trained in Edinburgh, was president of the American Medical Association in
1851, four years after its founding.
During the Nullification Crisis of the 1820s and 1830s, James Moultrie was
Grand Secretary General and effectively the chief of the Scottish Rite in the
American South.
The Swiss Master Takes Charge
John James Joseph Gourgas DuPan de Rengers (1777-1865) arrived on the scene
soon after the Charleston founding. He was to consolidate the Scottish Rite
organization in the North, and ran most of the Rite's affairs in the United
States from 1813 until his death at the end of the Civil War. Gourgas's
mother, Ulbiana Nicasia DuPan,(15) was the daughter of a captain of the
Geneva Garrison who held a hereditary seat on the Geneva Council of 200;
along with his cousins the Gallatins, the Mallets, the Prevosts, and the
DeSaussures.
The Gourgas family, according to their tradition, had been French Protestants
who were threatened with the stake and fire if they would not return to the
detested Roman Catholic faith. Coming to Geneva in the late 1600s, they
emigrated to England during the French Revolution, and young John James
Joseph became "well known as a merchant on the Royal exchange."
The family sailed from England to Boston in 1803, finally settling in Weston,
Massachusetts. J. J. J. Gourgas went to New York around 1806, quickly taking
control of the Scottish Rite organization there (the headquarters was later
moved to Boston). In 1813, Gourgas worked out a national territorial
arrangment with the Southern Supreme Council, and began to put his Swiss
imprint on American freemasonry, against the heirs of Franklin and Lafayette.
British oligarchs had sent the Swiss Jean Paul Marat and others of his ilk
into France during the revolution, to destroy that nation with bloody
anarchy. But the slogan "liberty, equality, fraternity"—insincere on their
lips—was no longer needed. France had been crushed by the armies of Britain
and a Dark Ages combination of continental monarchs. Now such ideas as the
French-American alliance for republicanism were merely dangerous relics to be
swept aside.
As Gourgas put it, "Grand Lodges in the United States, if wise, ought to
follow in the footsteps of the Grand Symbolic Lodge of England and beware
that with all their foreign intercourse and corresponding that they do not
become sooner or later Frenchified."(16)
Gourgas's nephew, Francis R. Gourgas (1811-1853) moved to Concord,
Massachusetts, bought the local newspaper, the Freeman, and became a state
senator, member of the Governor's Council, and the Democratic political boss
of Concord. Francis Gourgas was a member of the tiny, select Social Circle of
Concord, the cultural "Politburo" of trancendentalists Emerson, Thoreau, and
their friends. Ralph Waldo Emerson was a Gourgas family intimate from 1839
through at least 1853. Henry David Thoreau worked for the Gourgas family as a
surveyor. And in 1851, Francis joined fellow member Caleb Cushing on the
speakers' platform at a meeting of their elite Ancient and Honorable
Artillery Company.
Cleaning Out the Americans
In September 1826, William Morgan of Batavia, New York, was kidnapped,
terrorized, and murdered. It was said that he was about to publish certain
secrets of freemasonry, and that Masons conspired together to shut him up. A
national furor arose, and the short- lived Anti-Masonic Party was organized.
Working on this single issue, the party's efforts brought about only two
lasting results:
1) Votes were drawn away to a third candidate from Henry Clay in the 1832
presidential election, on the grounds that he refused to quit the Masons;
Clay's opponent, President Andrew Jackson—himself a Mason—was narrowly
re-elected.
2) Freemasonry was discredited, and membershipe declined—for a time. In
Massachusetts, Caleb Cushing advised all the Masonic Lodges to dissolve
themselves for the time being Cushing's own lodge was dissolved as were more
than 3,000 other lodges throughout the country. From that time on, there was
only sporadic interference by American-tradition Masons in the hegemony of
the Swiss over the Masonic movment. The Americans had been, in effect,
cleaned out.
To quote the Scottish Rite's own biography of J. J. J. Gourgas:
"It was not until after the revitalization of Freemasonry, following the
anti-Masonic excitement of 1826-1840, that many of the methods prevailing
today were inaugurated."(17)One could drop out of a regular Symbolic—i.e.,
lower—masonic lodge, and still be part of the Scottish Rite, which no longer
pretended to be attached to the structure of American Masonry, but exercised
a veto power over it. Put in twentieth-century language, "The Scottish Rite
has definitely relinquished its control of the Symbolic degrees wherever a
regular and legitimate Grand Lodge controls them.''(18)
pps 142-162
--[notes]--
1. The three main sources of Scottish Rite history consulted in preparation
of this chapter were:
Harris, Ray Baker, Eleven Gentlemen of Charleston: Founders of the
Supreme Council, Mother Council of the World; published by the Supreme
Council 33°, Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite, Southern Jurisdiction,
Washington, D.C., 1959;
Harris, Ray Baker, History of the Supreme Council . . . Southern
Jurisdiction, 1801-1861, published by the Supreme Council 33°, Ancient and
Accepted Scottish Rite, Southern Jurisdiction, Washington, D. C., 1964
(hereinafter "Southern Supreme Council")-Baynard, Samuel Harrison, Jr.,
History of the Supreme Council, 33° . Northern Masonic Jurisdiction of the
United States and its Antecedents, Published by the Supreme Council, Northern
Jurisdiction, Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite, Boston, 1938 (hereinafter
"Northern Supreme Council").
2. Miller, Edith Starr ("Lady Queenborough"), Occult Theocrasy, (first
published 1933, reprinted by "The Christian Book Club of America," Hawthorne,
California, 1980.
3. See, among many sources, Fraser, Walter J., Jr., Patriots Pistols and
Petticoats, Charleston County Bicentennial Committee, Charleston, South
Carolina, 1976, p. 112: "Prevost's . . . marauders devastated the coun-
tryside . . . rum and wine cellar pillaged . . . Library scattered and mostly
carried away . . . took all the best horses, burnt the dwelling house and
books, destroyed all the furniture, china, etc. killed the sheep and poultry
and drank the liquors...."
4. Baynard, Northern Supreme Council, Vol. 1, p. 67.
5. Augustine Prevost and Thomas Hutchins (in New York) to General Haldimand,
March 12, 1785, Public Archives of Canada, Manuscript Group 21, Haldimand
Papers, Additional Manuscript 21736, p. 36.
6. Major Augustine Prevost (in Montgomery [County], Pennsylvania) to General
Sir Frederick Haldimand, K.B. (in London), Aug. 18, 1788, ibid., Additional
Manuscript 21737, p. 67-71. Prevost comments without much pleasure on
America's new strong Constitution: "The General adoption of the new Federal
Government appears to rise the expectation of the people to the highest
pitch, their Political Salvation seems to hinge on the Event, how far their
hope will be realised time must unfold, for it will require time to Organize
such an Unwieldy a [sic] Machine."
7. Major Augustine Prevost (in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania) to General Sir
Frederick Haldimand, K.B. (in London), Nov. 28, 1789, ibid., Additional
Manuscript 21737, pp. 129-130.
8 Baynard,Northern Supreme Council, Vol. I, pp. 67-68.
9. ibid, p. 83
10. Masonic clippings file, Public Library, Newburyport., Massachusetts.
11. Harris, Eleven Gentlemen. One not regarded as a founder of the Charleston
Mother Lodge, but an early Scottish Rite activist, Moses Michael Hayes, was a
Jewish businessman, who went back and forth between Rhode Island,
Philadelphia and Boston on Masonic business. He refused to affirm his
allegiance to the American cause during the Revolution, when asked to do so
by a Rhode Island tribunal which believed him to be a Tory. He was one of the
founders of the Bank of Massachusetts (later First National Bank of Boston)
with John Lowell, and Arthur Hays Sulzberger of the New York Times was a
collateral descendant of his. Rather more definite biographical data about
him, than is now available, would have to be found to show him to have been
more than a messenger boy for the Tory faction of New England.
12. Papers of the Continental Congress, No. 19, I, Folio 127, p. 345, March
20, 1779. William Paca gives the report of "The Committee, to whom was
referred the Information respecting Col. Mitchell's obliterating and
expunging certain entries contained in one of his office books."
13. See Pennsylvania State Archives, MG 92, John Mitchell Papers. The
Archives' Notes to the Mitchell papers quotes from "American Generals and
Staff Officers" in Pa. Magazine, VI, 126, "Notes and Queries" series: "John
Mitchell, QM General, was a merchant, had been bankrupt at
divers times, and for having taken a false oath, had been committed to the
Common Jail. "
14. Aaron Burr, New York, to Augustine Prevost, Mill Grove, Montgomery
[County], Pennsylvania, Oct. 16, 1789, Burr Papers.
15. For Gourgas Family history see Tatsch, J. Hugo, John James Joseph
Gourgas, 1777-1865, Conservator of Scottish Rite Freemasonry, privately
printed by the Supreme Council 33°, Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite
Northern Masonic Jurisdiction, Boston, 1938; data also from private
interviews of the present author with the Gourgas family.
16. Tatsch, Gourgas, pp. 25-26.
17. ibid, pp.24-25
18. ibid, p. 25
--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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