-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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Operation South Carolina and the Career of Caleb Cushing
They call the yoke they put upon our necks the "American System!" The
question, however, is fast approaching the alternative of submission or
separation.
�Thomas Cooper, South Carolina, 1827
We have made the proud flag of the stars and stripes, that never was lowered
before to any people on this earth� we have lowered it!
�Governor Francis W. Pickens, pupil of the above, 1861
Following the defeat of the British in the War of 1812, America showed great
national pride and unity of purpose. The Essex Junto disunionists in Boston
had been discredited, and their movement driven underground, by the exposures
of Mathew Carey�and the success of American arms.
The "War Hawks" who had demanded a war for America's defense in 1812, now
began pushing for a revival of the founding, Hamiltonian system of national
development, abandoned under the 12-year reign of the Swiss Albert Gallatin,
at the U.S. Treasury.
Henry Clay of Kentucky, John C. Calhoun, and the brilliant William Lowndes of
South Carolina, fought in Congress for the rechartering of the Second Bank of
the United States, the enactment of tariffs that would protect new American
industries, and a great system of canals and roads to unify different
sections and restore commerical prosperity to the prostrated economy.
Mathew Carey launched a broad American school of political economy with his
attacks on Adam Smith.(l) Secretary of State John Quincy Adams's protege and
minister at the Court of the Netherlands, Alexander Everett, published an
attack on the anti-population doctrine of East India Company instructor
Thomas Malthus,(2) whose views were then wholly unacceptable in American
society.
By 1823, the American System was back in business. In that year Mathew
Carey's ally, Greek scholar Nicholas Biddle,(3) became president of the
rechartered Bank of the United States; and President Monroe announced to
Congress that European colonial adventures in our hemisphere, or interference
with the free nations here, "for the purpose of oppressing them, or
controlling in any other manner their destiny," would no longer be
tolerated.(4)
During the next year Congress passed the most protective tariff system yet;
John Marshall's Supreme Court informed the New York Livingston family that
their attempted monopoly restrictions of steam shipping were illegal, that
Congress had full Constitutional power over interstate commerce; and the
Marquis de Lafayette returned for a triumphal two-year tour, that set the
mood for the election of John Quincy Adams to the presidency.
In 1825, the year the Erie Canal was completed, the United States was,
indeed, at the height of its creative powers. President Adams set the tone in
his inaugural address:
Since the first formation of our Union . . . the dominion of man over
physical nature has been extended by the invention of our artists.... With
the catastrophe in which the wars of the French Revolution terminated, and
our own subsequent peace with Great Britain, this baneful weed of party
strife was uprooted. From that time no difference of principle . . . has
existed or been called forth in force sufficient to sustain a continued
combination of parties or to give more than wholesome animation to public
sentiment or legislative debate....
If there have been projects of partial confederacies to be erected upon the
ruins of the Union, they have been scattered to the winds; if there have been
dangerous attachments to one foreign nation and antipathies against another,
they have been extinguished. Ten years of peace, at home and abroad, have
assuaged the animosities of political contention and blended into harmony the
most discordant elements of public opinion. (5)
In the view of President Adams, as it had been for his childhood teacher
Benjamin Franklin, the United States was the great instrument of world
civilization. With the champion of Latin American independence, Henry Clay,
as his Secretary of State; and South Carolina's Joel Poinsett as his minister
to Mexico, protecting her precarious independence from royalist intrigues,
Adams proposed to send U. S. delegates to the fraternal meeting of all the
American republics at the Congress of Panama.
President Adams showed the new nations the practical meaning of national
independence, by pushing for the fastest possible domestic economic growth,
backed by the "great system of internal improvements [up to] the limits of
the constitutional power of the Union."(6) Federal and state partnership
resulted in a surge of canal and road building; South Carolina chartered the
first railroad in 1827.
It was by means of transforming the country into a great industrial power,
and in doing so, bringing to the South a system of new factories and mines,
and an urban culture, by which the American System proposed to end black
slavery in this country The Founding Fathers had universally advocated an end
to slavery. But the only practical path to that end was the nationalist
program of Hamiltonian economics, the Clay-Calhoun American System, with full
partnership in technological progress for the South, wherein the relatively
unproductive, inefficient, and unprofitable slave system would be undermined
and abandoned by a developing Southern population. Even after this plan was
sabotaged, and the 1861 insurrection was launched and defeated, the
victorious Abraham Lincoln proposed just this program for the reconstruction
of the South. But when Lincoln died, the South died with him.
America's government-backed progress now threatened the future of the new
Dark Ages system that Britain, the Hapsburgs and other feudalists of Europe
had concerted at Vienna to impose on the world, back in 1815.
The enemy responded to the threat by creating a "popular uprising," entirely
stage-managed by the British Secret Intelligence Service, which posed
"Southern" interests against the North, and threatened to dissolve the Union.
To avoid a civil war, Congress passed the Compromise Tariff of 1833,
eliminating protection for American manufactures. By 1837 the Free Trade
movement, which had emerged from this Nullification Crisis, had achieved
nearly all its objectives. The Bank of the United States was permanently-
dosed, and American industry was left completely unprotected from the
worldwide credit collapse initiated by Bank of England credit restrictions.
The "popular uprising" which set the stage for this American defeat took
place entirely within the state of South Carolina, whose people were armed
and trained and rehearsed for a war against the United States. The war was
postponed, but it was to begin again in deadly earnest in 1861, the script
only slightly altered.
That untiring scrapper, Mathew Carey of Philadelphia, published a series of
pamphlets(7) in the 1830s, calling for American patriots to help him fight
what he termed "the British Secret Service" in their South Carolina disunion
project.
Now, for the first time since these events occurred 150 years ago, we shall
make available to the public the background of the project which Carey
confronted. To understand "Operation South Carolina," one must become
familiarized with the individuals who initiated the Nullification Movement,
and the key families within the state with whom these individuals were
connected. What follows is their story, told for the first time.
>From at least 1687, the social and political life of South Carolina was
dominated by men who, by deeply ingrained family tradition, were hostile in
the extreme to concepts of human liberty. For in the year 1687, Elias
Prioleau and his family arrived in South Carolina, accompanied by a group of
refugee followers.
Under the name Priuli, the family had for seven centuries been ranked among
the upper nobility of the slave-kingdom of Venice, in Italy.(8) While they
maintained an system of absolute tyranny over their own terrorized subjects,
the Venetian nobility manned their galleys, shops, and colonies with white
slaves captured from European countries, and sold Christian children for
slaves to Muslim chieftains. It was Venice and its sister-state Genoa which
began the European practice of trafficking in African slaves. In the late
16th and early 17th centuries, Venetian financiers moved northward and took
control over the merchant economies of England and Holland�bringing the slave
trade with them.
In this crucial period, the merchant-banker Priuli family provided three of
the ruling Doges of Venice and one of the Patriarchs of the Venetian church.
A branch of the family living in France and Switzerland�the Prioleaus�served
as Venetian State Intelligence agents, one of them being knighted for this
service in 1660. The Jesuit order and other Venetian agents were chiefly
responsible for whipping Protestant and Catholic against each other in the
terrible religious wars over two centuries.
When the wealthy Elias Prioleau got to Charleston, South Carolina, he
organized the French and Swiss Protestants, from among those "Huguenots"
already arrived, into a congregation, and became the first pastor and the
patriarchal community leader of the French Huguenot Church in South Carolina.
Later immigrants swelled the Prioleau congregation; and while the French
bluebloods�known as Cavaliers or the Chivalry� became the backbone of South
Carolina's aristocracy, the Prioleau family naturally took on the character
of great patrons and lords among the aristocratic plantation owners. They
had, after all, been in the slavery business for seven hundred years.
As the Venetian Prioleaus gained power and social connections in the colony's
political and military life, the DeSaussure family(9) arrived in South
Carolina, joining the 600 Swiss and French settlers at Purrysburg near the
Savannah River.
Mongin de Saussure had been created Lord of Monteuil in 1440 by the Duke of
Lorraine, and the DeSaussure family served the Dukes of Lorraine as agents
and advisors, as the House of Lorraine fanned the flames of religious war in
France. In 1556, Antoine de Saussure escaped the religious conflagration,
migrating to Lausanne, Switzerland. His grandson lean Baptiste de Saussure,
Lord of Morrlens and a Knight of Lausanne, moved to Geneva, where the de
Saussures joined the Prevosts, the Gallatins, and the du Pans on the Council
of 200 the "Committee of Europe's Spymasters."
Henri de Saussure of Lausanne, Switzerland, moved to South Carolina in 1730,
receiving a British Royal grant of land. His son Daniel became a rich
merchant in the Beaufort district. In 1777, while South Carolina's patriots
dug in and prepared for assault by the British forces, Daniel DeSaussure
traveled to Switzerland and met with his cousins.
On this visit, the American-born DeSaussure registered his children as Swiss
citizens, a legal designation which the family retained throughout the
nineteenth century. He also received a silver medal from the Geneva de
Saussures, whose inscription admonished the entire DeSaussure family to stick
closely together; it is retained to this day by the DeSaussure heirs.
The son of Swiss traveler Daniel DeSaussure, Henry William DeSaussure, was
the leader of the South Carolina Federalist Party, which in 1800 ordered its
congressional delegation to vote for Aaron Burr for President. DeSaussure was
the Southern collaborator for the treasonous Essex Junto; his correspondence
with these gentlemen may be viewed at Harvard among the papers of Timothy
Pickering.
In 1801, Henry DeSaussure brought a Boston editor, Loring Andrews, down to
South Carolina to commence publishing the Charleston Courier, through which
Federalist newspaper Mr. DeSaussure's party could attack the "radical
democrat" presidents, Jefferson and Madison. The following year, the Courier
published a plan for the armed seizure of Spanish territories in the Western
Hemisphere; the author was James Workman, who had written the proposal for
the British War Minister Henry Dundas. Workman was now in South Carolina, and
would soon proceed to Louisiana where he would guide Aaron Burr's steps in
his planned seizure of Mexico and the western United States. From 1806 to
1813, the Courier was edited by Scottish Rite leader Fredrick Dalcho.(10)
We complete this pre-history of the Nullification stage-show of the 1820s and
1830s, by adverting to the unfortunate anticlimax suffered by South Carolina
after the American Revolution. Like Boston, Charleston saw the return of
unrepentant Loyalists at the war's end, many of them regaining wealth and
influence in the nineteenth century.
Patrick and Robert Cunningham, for instance, had been Tory commanders in the
fiercest fighting,(11) but Robert Cunningham somehow eased back into postwar
life and became a state legislator; his son was the uncle and political tutor
of William L. Yancey, who went on to lead Alabama out of the Union in
1860-1861.
Politically, the most important Loyalist family to slip back into South
Carolina were the Trenholmes.(12) London-born William Trenholme came to
America in 1754, setting up as a merchant in Charleston. He fled the country
on the outbreak of the Revolution, moving first to Holland, then to San
Domingo. In 1787, he quietly returned with his family to Charleston.
Trenholme was re-established in business with the help of Robert James
Turnbull, who then married Trenholme's cousin and joined the Trenholmes as a
partner. Robert James Turnbull's father, Andrew Turnbull, had been an
official of the British colonial government of Florida during the war, and
was one of the founders of the British outpost at Smyrna in Turkey. Andrew
Turnbull moved to Charleston, South Carolina when the British Army occupied
that town. When the war ended adversely for the British, he refused outright
to become an American citizen. His son, Robert James Turnbull, tied so
closely to the Loyalist Trenholmes, would be one of the instigators of the
Nullification Crisis.
Swiss citizen Henry William DeSaussure played the leading role in the
founding of South Carolina College in 1801. He made the new state school his
personal project for the next three decades, never missing an important
meeting of the board of trustees, of which he was the most prominent and
powerful member.
In 1820, the Board appointed the College's second president, a newly hired
chemistry teacher named Thomas Cooper. Dr. Cooper was to unleash in South
Carolina the full fury of sectarian violence, similar in many ways to the
European religious wars so familiar to his Swiss sponsors. (13)
Cooper was well qualified for this mission.(14) An Englishman born in 1759,
Thomas Cooper had been elected to the British Parliament as a leader of
England's radical anti-slavery abolitionists. As a devoted follower of
Satanist Jeremy Bentham, he stressed the righteousness of revolution to cure
the oppression of women and of religious minorities. Britain's Jacobin Clubs,
under the control of Lord Shelburne's Secret Intelligence Service, sent
Cooper to France as their official "delegate" to the French Revolution.
After what he described as "the most thrilling time in my life," the
revolutionist moved to America, accompanying his fellow chemist Joseph
Priestley They settled in Pennsylvania, and before very long Thomas Cooper
was serving a six-month sentence for sedition�the only person jailed by
President John Adams under the Alien and Sedition Acts.
Cooper became a Pennsylvania judge, but was impeached for "arbitrary conduct"
on the bench. Using the name of former President Thomas Jefferson, who
admired Cooper's revolutionary reputation, he tried to get a teaching job at
the University of Virginia, but was rejected by the Virginia trustees because
he was a self-avowed atheist.
When he was quietly hired by Henry W. DeSaussure's South Carolina College,
the revolutionary abolitionist's first act in his new home was to purchase
two families of black slaves. If he was to lead a revolt of "outraged
Southerners," the strange little (4'11") Briton must try to look the part.
Operation South Carolina may be said to have begun with the "Vesey
Conspiracy," in 1822, shortly after Thomas Cooper's installation as President
of South Carolina College. A former slave, Denmark Vesey, was allegedly
caught planning a fiendish uprising among Charleston's slave
population�caught before any acts were committed.
At this time, Chancellor Henry W. DeSaussure was president of the South
Carolina State Court of Appeals. Samuel Prioleau was chairman of the
Judiciary Committee of the state legislature. Prioleau's double
brother-in-law and business partner, James Hamilton, was Intendant (mayor) of
the city of Charleston. Under Hamilton's guidance, with the judicial sanction
of Prioleau and DeSaussure, a spectacular inquiry and trial was held.
After the citizenry had been thoroughly terrorized by stories of intended
mass murder in the night, Vesey and 34 slaves were executed. The African
(Christian) Church of Charleston, to which Vesey belonged, was burned to the
ground. In an atmosphere of paranoia, laws were passed setting up an armed
fortress in the city and a substantial "white" military force to guard
against further menaces of the same variety. In 1824, Samuel Prioleau took
over as Intendant of Charleston.
Cooper on Stage: The Tariff and Religion
In 1823, as the U. S. Congress began gearing up for the passage of the
nation's first effective protective tariff act, South Carolina College
President Cooper suddenly took the field with a stinging pamphlet attacking
the "oppression" of the South by Northern manufacturers. (15) Cooper's
diatribe took advantage of a depression in Charleston, due to the temporary
drop in cotton prices and the obsolete status of the city relative to the
bustling steamy boat ports of the Gulf South, which Cooper knew was no
"sectional" phenomenon.
This tract was immediately circulated through the North by the�as yet�still
very cautious and very unpopular agents and heirs of the Essex Junto, who
wished to promote a Free Trade movement.
At the same time, Dr. Cooper launched an all-out war against organized
religion in South Carolina. Haranguing meetings and issuing printed
broadsides, Cooper charged that the clergymen were attempting to enforce
morality upon his, and all other students, in the state. He gave a special
lecture series devoted to the proposition that the Bible was a fake. He told
his students that man has no such thing as a "soul"�and he began teaching
what was certainly the first official political economy class in the United
States, bringing to social philosophy the practical expression of his
chilling Benthamite doctrine.
A traveling observer of that time would have been able to notice a remarkable
similarity of circumstances between South Carolina College and Harvard. In
the Northern School, a generation of anti-industrial mystics and anarchists
was turned out by the Essex Junto trustees in an atmosphere of rioting and
cruelty. In Cooper's college there were repeated riots, strikes, theft, and
brigandage off-campus at a cost of thousands of dollars to the townspeople;
the atmosphere was best summed up by a famous campus duel, in which two
high-living aristocratic students killed each other over which of them had
first touched a piece of bread at dinner.
The state's Presbyterians, based mostly in the non-slaveholding upcountry
areas, procured two well-documented grand jury presentments calling on the
state legislature to investigate the college. One of their friends addressed
the legislature: "Mr. Speaker! Would I commit the care of my son to a man who
believes he has no more soul than an Opossum?" By 1834 the resentment of the
nationalists and churchgoers would finally force the dismissal of Cooper and
the entire faculty of the College. But in the 1820s the legislature, the
courts, the Episcopal Church, the "Cavaliers" of the coastal plantations,
answered like the single, little well-organized family that they were: "Dr.
Cooper is doing a fine job." And to to prove it, they sent their own sons to
be personally taught by the now-controversial revolutionist.
Thomas Cooper's political economy classes, given in the state capital of
Columbia, produced the equivalent of a British battalion within-American
society; all his students were expected to transfer immediately into an
internship in the political arena. In Cooper's class of 1825, the
valedictorian was Thomas Jefferson Withers, the great grandfather of today's
AFL-CIO president, Lane Kirkland. Withers and his brother-in-law James
Chesnut would later play important roles in starting the Civil War. Cooper's
reputed favorite pupil that year was John Floyd of Virginia, later to be
notorious for treason as President Buchanan's Secretary of War In fact, all
four of the men who would be governors of South Carolina during the secession
and Civil War period, 24 of those who were to be delegates to the state's
Secession Convention, and many of the leaders of the secession movement in
the South generally, were pupils of this tiny British atheist.
To the startled American public, Thomas Cooper became the father of the
Southern secession movement when, at an 1827 anti-tariff meeting, he declared
that "a drilled and managed majority" in the U.S. House of Representatives
had determined "at all hazards to support the claims of the Northern
manufacturers, and to offer up the planting interest on the altar of
monopoly." The system, which after all had been designed to give farmers
adequate domestic markets and to industrialize the South, he termed "a system
by which the earnings of the South are to be transferred to the North.... the
planter and the farmer under this system are to be considered as inferior
beings to the spinner, the bleacher and the dyer . . . serfs and operatives
of the North . . . of the masterminds of Massachusetts, the lords of the
spinning jenny and peers of the power loom, who ... tax our earnings .. to
swell their riches.... a system of fraud, robbery and usurpation.�(16)
Then, in phrases which were burned into the national memory�which would be
repeated and denounced by Daniel M. Webster in the Senate debates on
Nullification�the Englishman said:
We shall 'ere long be compelled to calculate the value of our Union; and to
enquire of what use to us is this most unequal alliance, by which the South
has always been the loser and the North always the gainer. Is it worth our
while to continue this union of States, where the North demands to be our
masters and we are required to be their tributaries? who with the most
insulting mockery call the yoke they put upon our necks the "American
System!" The question, however, is fast approaching the alternative of
submission or separation. (17)
This sensational speech stunned the nation. No public figure in the South had
ever publicly advocated disunion, since Aaron Burr's friend Senator Pierce
Butler had blustered about civil war in 1789. Cooper was called a "traitor,"
a "disunionist," a "revolutionary." A storm of protest broke over his head.
But within several months a new political movement was formed in South
Carolina, based entirely on Thomas Cooper's radical states-rights, extreme
pro-slavery, anti-government, anti-industry doctrines which became known as
the South Carolina Doctrines.
The movement was immediately given direction by the publication of The
Crisis; or, Essays on the Usurpations of the Federal Government, (18) by
Robert J. Turnbull. The author was the son of the Royalist diehard, Andrew
Turnbull, who had been in regular communication with the chief of British
Intelligence, Lord Shelburne, after the Revolution. Andrew Turnbull had been
a Royal official in Florida under Lt. Governor John Moultrie, and Moultrie's
son James was now, in 1828, the leader of the Scottish Rite in the Southern
United States, and the official American liaison agent for the European
Scottish Rite.
Andrew's son Robert James Turnbull, the author of The Crisis, was now a
business partner and family member of the Loyalist Trenholmes, who would play
the central role of financiers of the Confederacy (George Trenholme, the
final Confederate Secretary of the Treasury, would be business partner of
Samuel Prioleau's son Charles Kuhn Prioleau, Confederate Financial Agent in
England).
President John Quincy Adams counterattacked The Crisis in his 1828
State-of-the-Union address to Congress, (19) and the national controversy was
on.
Samuel Prioleau's partner and double brother-in-law, James Hamilton, now
actively organized a statewide political movement based on Cooper and
Turnbull's initiative. In 1830 Hamilton became Governor of South Carolina,
and began arming the militants for war against the United States government.
It was James Hamilton who finally convinced South Carolina's John C. Calhoun,
the former co-sponsor of Henry Clay's nationalist program, that it would be
the politically wise thing to do to put himself at the head of this "popular
movement." It was really all in the family: Calhoun had finished his law
training in the office of Henry W. DeSaussure.
And that was the nature of things in South Carolina. The Venetian Prioleau
now was Judge of Charleston's City Court. Cooper's employer and backer, the
Swiss Henry W. DeSaussure, was Chief Justice of the state. His son Henry
Alexander DeSaussure was Grand Master of the Masons of South Carolina as the
crisis exploded in 1832 and 1833.
The DeSaussure family relates that following Daniel DeSaussure's reunion with
the Swiss during the American Revolution, the family maintained a strong,
steady contact with their headquarters-castle, Frontenex, two miles east of
Geneva. This was a beehive of activity for visiting English noblemen; and the
DeSaussure's were "intimates" of the aggressively anti-American intriguer,
Lord Palmerston, who became Britain's Foreign Minister in 1830, and would be
Prime Minister of Britain from 1859 to 1865, all through the Southern
secession and the American Civil War.
Mathew Carey reacted bitterly as he watched the South Carolina legislature
set up the 1832 convention which declared the United States laws on tariffs
to be null and void, and provided heavy penalties for citizens who might try
to obey the U.S. Iaws. Carey said that "the British Secret Service" was
behind the Nullifiers, and that pro-industrial forces had stood by in silence
despite Carey's warning that the enemy was rehearsing an American Civil War.
Was Carey correct, dear reader?
The Ugly Inheritance of Milton Friedman
With South Carolina's threats to secede if the American tariff laws were not
repealed, Aaron Burr's friends in the North� the Boston Brahmins, Astor and
Gallatin in New York�came onto the stage again with the Free Trade movement.
The Brahmins' pride was Bostonian Theodore Sedgwick, who had married a member
of the Loyalist Vassal family, John Lowell's clients. Sedgwick's in-laws ran
Holland House in England, the political center for Lord Shelburne's Whigs.
Sedgwick arranged for William Cullen Bryant to be editor of the New York
Post, which then served as the primary Free Trade organ in the country;
Sedgwick and Bryant eagerly reprinted everything Thomas Cooper put out in
South Carolina.
Theodore Sedgwick organized a national Free Trade Convention in 1831, in
Philadelphia.(20) At this conference the seditious South Carolina Doctrines
were given a respectable veneer, portrayed as honest expressions of
repectable Southerners, backed by respectable men of the North. The leader,
in fact the dictator of this convention, was the Swiss Albert Gallatin, who
had virtually dissolved the American armed forces under his budget-cutting
regime prior to the War of 1812.
Gallatin arrived at the Convention as a bank president; John Jacob Astor,
financier of Aaron Burr's two escapes from justice, had set up the National
Bank of New York expressly as a vehicle for Gallatin's objectives. Gallatin
was made chairman of the Convention's committee to lobby the Congress.
Gallatin, the Brahmins, and the Carolina Cavaliers won the day�the American
System was repealed. Later attempts to restore the Hamiltonian economic
policy were murderously sabotaged, as we shall see�until it was too late.
Thomas Cooper's Doctrines were to be rewarmed for the insurrectionists in
1861, and were put down by the armed power of the United States in a terrible
war.
Today, historians friendly to Milton Friedman's extreme laissez-faire
economic theories refer uncritically to the nineteenth-century fight over the
"constitutionality" of government backing for industrial growth. Theodore
Sedgwick, organizer of the 1831 Free Trade Convention, was very candid on
this question.
The Hamiltonian system was "unjust, oppressive . . . an abuse of power. " But
if you "tell the people, that what the Government has been doing, ever since
its foundation, it has had no power to do! The people . . . will not
understand you. Fifty years ago, " said Sedgwick, "the principle of Free
Trade was unknown. Adam Smith then rose as a sun to illuminate the world.
When [the Constitution] was formed, all was monopoly. Many gentlemen found it
impossible to get over the arguments in Mr. Madison's speech, in defense of
the constitutional power of Congress to protect manufactures. One of the
first acts of the General Government, was for the protection of
manufactures.(21)
In our time, economist Milton Friedman has brought Thomas Cooper's doctrines,
the rallying slogans for the terrible 1861 insurrection against the United
States, to Chile's General Pinochet; he claims that they are "American"
principles.
Friedman must be more of a vassal to the British Lords than even Theodore
Sedgwick was.
Caleb Cushing:
The 'Young America' Insurrectionist
If we trace back any great civil convulsion, we will find its
source originating in some quarter equally unsuspected and
obscure.(22)
�Edwin DeLeon, father of the Young America movement
One of the most glaring gaps in the heretofore published version of American
history is the utter omission of the career of Caleb Cushing of
Massachusetts. Cushing was probably the single most important U.S. government
official in the development and staging of the insurrectionary Southern
secession movement throughout the 1840s and 1850s. those original republican
foreign policies with which the Founding Fathers had challenged the worldwide
rule of the old European oligarchy.
In correcting this omission, we shall follow Cushing's astonishingly evil
career in sabotaging the U.S. national economy, threatening war against China
and unleashing it against Mexico, terrorizing Kansas, and coordinating with
the Scottish Rite of Freemasonry the step-by-step buildup of an enemy army
within and against the United States.
As we have seen, John Lowell ("The Rebel"), Boston agent of the chief Tory
emigres and principal publicist for the Essex Junto disunionists,
commissioned young Caleb Cushing to be "my champion and that of my race."
Cushing was well qualified for the assignment. He was a cousin of John
Perkins Cushing, the richest American in the business of selling illegal
opium to the Chinese, and he was the son of a Tory-Federalist China trader.
In 1824, a year after receiving his commission and first remuneration from
Lowell, Cushing married the daughter of arch-Tory Maine Chief Justice Samuel
S. Wilde, who had been a leading member of the secret Hartford Convention in
1814.
Caleb Cushing's first attempts to break into national politics were abortive.
Seeking election to Congress from Essex County in 1826, Cushing quickly
developed his talent for representing "odious" objects in "more gorgeous
colors," as instructed by Lowell. His opponent was accused of having "shady
dealings with the Essex Junto"!
During the campaign, William Lloyd Garrison, whom Cushing had trained in
politics and philosophy, sold to a friend of Cushing's a prominent local
newspaper he had just acquired, and it was immediately pressed into service
as the Cushing campaign organ. By this time Garrison had started on his
career as an anti-Union slavery-abolitionist, and Cushing's opponent accused
Cushing of having made a secret deal with Garrison.
To demonstrate that the "leftist" Garrison was not in league with his
"conservative" trainer Cushing, Garrison wrote a letter to the opponent's
newspaper defending himself, and charged into a Cushing campaign rally
shouting tirades against Cushing. In the future they were more careful;
Garrison biographer John L. Thomas notes that "Garrison, once he became an
abolitionist, denounced Cushing for every sin he could think of."(23)
Though Cushing lost that and other elections, his Brahmin connections finally
elevated him to the U.S. House of Representatives. In 1839, William Lloyd
Garrison quietly asked Congressman Cushing, who did not represent Garrison's
district, to get Garrison's brother out of the Navy. Cushing used his
connections to fulfill the request within a few days.
Cushing's opportunity for power came just after the 1840 elections. Still
reeling from the 1837 crash and the consequent unemployment and starvation,
the voters had thrown out the "Free Traders" and put the Whig Party into
power with a program for a new national bank, high tariffs and public works.
Cushing, meanwhile, had presented himself to the voters as a Henry Clay Whig;
he had published a small anti-Free Trade book; he had regularly presented
anti-slavery petitions from his constituents; he had even written a campaign
biography for the Whig presidential candidate, General William Henry Harrison.
Harrison was elected president in November 1840, and assumed office on March
4, 1841. One month later he died. No autopsy was performed on the previously
robust hero of the War of 1812. His death was first attributed to acute
intestinal distress, and then, variously, to "bilious pleurisy" and
"pneumonia."
One of the two attending physicians, Frederick May, has an interesting
background. He was trained at Harvard by Dr. John Warren, brother of the
celebrated patriot Joseph Warren who died on Bunker Hill. Though John Warren
inherited his brother's high offices in Massachusetts freemasonry, he does
not seem to have inherited his political outlook. John's son was sent on an
extended tour of England after the Revolution, where he became scandalously
intimate with the exiled traitor Benedict Arnold and the emigrant Tory
community.
(Besides Frederick May, who attended the unfortunate Harrison, John Warren
also trained Dr. William Eustis, who was coincidentally a physician for the
West Point garrison and "often frequented the house" of Benedict Arnold, the
West Point commander, in the period of his famous treason. (24) Later Eustis
was protege and personal physician to Aaron Burr and the Prevost family; he
was Secretary of War until fired by President Madison for nearly losing our
national independence in the War of 1812; his family then moved south, and a
grand nephew was private secretary to Confederate Commissioner John Slidell.)
While little positive knowledge exists as to the cause of the sudden death of
President Harrison, the events which followed it throw a lurid light on that
national tragedy. The economic policy of the nation was forcibly returned to
the British System, and the foreign policy veered wildly toward a repudiation
of the founding republican concepts.
The Vice-President, John Tyler of Virginia, immediately took over the
presidency; he was the first to succeed to the office in this manner. Tyler
soon made it clear that he had no intention of carrying out the program of
the Whigs or of the dead President. When Congress passed the long-awaited
bill restoring the Bank of the United States, Tyler vetoed it. A battle soon
raged between Henry Clay and Tyler all along the lines of the American System
policy. The entire cabinet, save Secretary of State Daniel Webster, resigned
rather than lend support to the presidential mole.
The crucial question was, would the Congress be able to rally itself to carry
out the Whig program, on a two-thirds vote sufficient to overcome Tyler's
vetoes?
At this juncture, the "Whig" Caleb Cushing stood up in Congress with a series
of astonishing speeches and maneuvers which decided the issue: "I appeal to
the Whig Party, to the friends of the Administration�and I recognize but one,
and that is the Administration of John Tyler . . . to be friends of the
administration of John Tyler, that at this hour they come to the rescue of
their country, and organize the House, under whatever rules. . .� (25)
On the recommendation of Webster, who had owed Cushing a great deal of money
for five years and would be increasingly, pathetically in debt to him for the
rest of his life, Cushing was appointed chairman of the House Foreign
Relations Committee, defeating Congressman (former President) John Q. Adams
for that post.
Caleb Cushing, now wielding the balance of power in Washington, proceeded to
organize the Congress to sustain the President. The anti-slavery
Massachusetts Whig, the friend of American System economics, suddenly
appeared in opposite colors as the intimate friend and advisor of the
Virginian Tyler, who had just as suddenly become the President.
Responding to the national bank veto, Henry Clay told Congress, "There is a
rumor abroad that a cabal exists�a new sort of kitchen cabinet�whose object
is the dissolution of the regular cabinet, the dissolution of the Whig Party,
the dispersion of the Congress without accomplishing any of the great
purposes of the extra session, and a total change, in fact, in the whole face
of our political affairs."(26)
The "accidental" President's veto was sustained, and consequently the United
States has never again, to this day, had a national bank under public control.
>From this period of Caleb Cushing's emergence as a feudalist political
gamemaster in Washington, we have evidence�never before published�of a
political alliance that would prove to be crucial in creating the anti-Union
insurrection of the coming decades. Cushing arranged for his Newburyport,
Massachusetts colleague and lifelong acquaintance, Albert Pike, to become a
political power in the frontier state of Arkansas. Surviving letters from
Pike to Cushing, in the huge unpublished Cushing Papers at the Library of
Congress, show Pike thanking Cushing for making the patronage appointments
from the national capital that Pike needed to rise to power.(27)
--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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