Second photo section

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In reviewing Lincoln's role throughout this painful chapter of history, it is impossible not to feel ambivalence. On the one hand, he declared war without Congress, suspended the writ of habeas corpus, and issued the Emancipation Proclamation, not as an administrative executive carrying out the wishes of Congress, but as the Commander-in-Chief of the armed forces. Furthermore, the Proclamation was not issued out of humanitarian motives, as popular history portrays, but as a maneuver to generate popular support for the war. By participating in the issuance of the greenbacks, he violated one of the most clearly written and important sections of the Constitution. And by failing to veto the National Bank Act, he acquiesced in the delivery of the American people back into the hands of the international Cabal, an act which was similar in many ways to the forcible return of captured runaway slaves.

On the positive side, there is no question of Lincoln's patriotism. His concern was in preserving the Union, not the Constitution, and his refusal to let the European powers split America into a cluster of warring nation-states was certainly wise. Lincoln believed that he had to violate part of the Constitution in order to save the whole. But that is dangerous reasoning. It can be used in almost any national crisis as the excuse for the expansion of totalitarian power. There is no reason to believe that the only way to save the Union was to scrap the Constitution. In fact, if the Constitution had been meticulously observed from the very beginning, the Southern minority could never have been legally plundered by the Northern majority and there likely would have been, no movement for secession in the first place. And, even if there had been, a strict reading of the Constitution at that point could have led the way to an honorable and peaceful settlement of differences. The result would have been, not only the preservation of the Union without war, but Americans would be enjoying far less government intervention in their daily lives today.

WITH MALICE TOWARD NONE

There is one point that is clearly on Lincoln's side. While his political compatriots were howling for economic vengeance a g a i n st the South, the President stood firmly against it. "With malice toward none" was more than a slogan with him, and he was willing to risk his political survival on that one issue. The reason he had

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vetoed the Wade-Davis emancipation bill was because it would have applied a lien against Southern cotton at the end of the war to the benefit of New England textile manufactures. The cotton also would have been taken as security to pay off Southern debt which had been contracted before the war, thus providing the funds to buy back at face value all of the bonds which had been purchased at discount by Rothschild's agent, August Belmont. Such defiance of the financiers and speculators undoubtedly required great courage.

But the issue ran deeper than that. Lincoln had offered a general amnesty to any citizen in the South who would agree to take a loyalty oath to the Union. When ten per cent of the voters had taken such an oath, he proposed that they could then elect Congressmen, Senators, and a state government which would be recognized as part of the Union once again. The Republicans, on the other hand, had incorporated into the Wade-Davis bill the provision that each seceded state was to be treated like a conquered country. Political representation was to be denied until fifty-one per cent, not ten per cent, had taken an oath. Former slaves were given the right to vote—although women had not yet gained that right even in the North—but, because of their lack of education and political awareness, no one expected them to play a meaningful role in government for many years to come. Furthermore, those taking the oath had to swear that they had never taken up arms against the Union. Since almost every able-bodied white male had done so, the effect would have been to deny the South political representation for at least two generations.

Under Lincoln's amnesty policy, it would not be long before the Republicans would be overwhelmed in Congress by a large majority of Democrats. The Democrats in the North were already gaining strength on their own and, once they could be joined by the solid block of Democrats from the reunited South, the Republicans' political and economic power would be lost. So, when Lincoln vetoed the bill, his own Party bitterly turned against him.

Running throughout these cross-currents of motives and special interests were two groups which found it increasingly to their advantage to have Lincoln out of the way. One group consisted of the financiers, Northern industrialists, and radical Republicans, all of whom wanted to legally plunder the South at the end of the war. The politicians within that group also looked forward to further consolidating their power and literally establishing a military

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dictatorship.1 The other group was smaller in size but equally dangerous. It consisted of hothead Confederate sympathizers— from both South and North—who sought revenge. Later events revealed that both of these groups had been involved in a conspiratorial liaison with an organization called the Knights of the Golden Circle. KNIGHTS OF THE GOLDEN CIRCLE

The Order of the Knights of the Golden Circle was a secret organization dedicated to revolution and conquest. Two of its better known members were Jesse James and John Wilkes Booth, ft was organized by George W.L. Bickley who established its first "castle" in Cincinnati in 1854, drawing membership primarily from Masonic lodges. It had close ties with a secret society in France called The Seasons, which itself was a branch of the Illuminati. After the beginning of the war, Bickley was made head of the Confederacy's secret service, and his organization quickly spread throughout the border and Southern states as well.

In the North, the conspirators were seeking "to^seize political power and overthrow the Lincoln government." In fact, the Northern anti-draft riots mentioned previously were largely the result of the planning and leadership of this group. In the South "they tried to promote the extension of slavery by the conquest of Mexico."5 In partnership with Maximilian, the Knights hoped to establish a Mexican-American empire which would be an effective counter force against the North. In fact, the very name of the organization is based on their goal of carving an empire out of

North America with geographical boundaries forming a circle with the center in Cuba, and its circumference reaching northward to

Pennsylvania, southward to Panama.

1. For highly readable accounts of this movement, see Theodore Roscoe, The Web of Conspiracy: The Complete Story of the Men Who Murdered Abraham Lincoln (Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey: Prentice-Hall, 1959); also Claude G. Bowers, The Tragic Era: The Revolution after Lincoln, (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1957). 2. "No Civil War at All, Part Two," by Will^m Mcllhany, Journal of Individualist Studies, Fall, 1992, pp. 18-20. 3. Horan, p. 15. 4. Ibid., pp. 208-23. 5. Ibid., p. 16. Regarding the annexation of Mexico, also see the Columbia Encyclopedia, Third Edition, p. 1143.

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In 1863 the group was reorganized as the Order of American Knights and, again the following year, as the Order of the Sons of Liberty. Its membership then was estimated at between 200,000 and 300,000. After the war, it went further underground and remnants eventually emerged as the Ku Klux Klan.

J O H N W I L K E S B O O T H

One of the persistent legends of this period is that John Wilkes Booth was not killed in Garrett's barn, as generally accepted, but was allowed to escape; that the corpse actually was that of an accomplice; and that the government, under the firm control of War Secretary Edwin M. Stanton, moved heaven and earth to cover up the facts. On the face of it, that is an absurd story. But, when the voluminous files of the War Department were finally declassified and put into the public domain in the mid 1930s, historians were shocked to discover that there are many facts in those files which lend credence to the legend. The first to probe these amazing records was Otto Eisenschiml whose Why Was Lincoln Murdered? was published by Little, Brown and Company in 1937. The best and most readable compilation of the facts, however, was written twenty years later by Theodore Roscoe. In the preface to this work, he states the startling conclusions which emerge from those longhidden files:

Of the i m m e n se 19th century literature that exists on L i n c o l n 's assassination, m u ch of the writing treats the tragedy at F o r d 's theater as though it w e re G r a nd O p e r a . . .. O n ly a few h a ve seen the c r i me as a m u r d er case: Lincoln dying by crass felony, Booth a stalking g u n m an leading a g a ng of p r i m ed h e n c h m e n, the m u r d er plot c o n t a i n i ng i n g r e d i e n ts as b a se as the p r o f it m o t i v e. S e v e n ty years after the c r i m e, writers w e re garbling it with a dignity it did not deserve: Lincoln, the s t e r e o t y p ed m a r t y r; Booth, the stereotyped villain; the assassination a v e n g ed by classic justice; conspiracy strangled; V i r t ue (in the r o b es of G o v e r n m e n t) e m e r g i ng t r i u m p h a n t, a nd Lincoln " b e l o n g i ng to the a g e s ."

B ut the facts of the c a se are n e i t h er so satisfying n or so gratifying. F or the facts indicate that the criminals responsible for L i n c o l n 's death got a w ay with m u r d e r . 1

Izola Forrester was the granddaughter of John Wilkes Booth. In her book entitled This One Mad Act, she tells of discovering the

1. Roscoe, p. vii.

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secret records of the Knights of the Golden Circle which had been carefully wrapped and placed in a government vault many decades ago and designated as classified documents by Secretary Stanton. Since the assassination of Lincoln, no one had ever been allowed to examine that package. Because of her lineage to Booth and because of her credentials as a professional writer, she was eventually permitted to become the first person in all those years to examine its contents. Forrester recounts the experience:

It w as five years b e f o re I w as able to e x a m i ne the contents of the m y s t e r i o us old p a c k a ge hidden a w ay in the safe of the r o om which c o n t a i n ed the relics and exhibits used in t he C o n s p i r a cy T r i a l . . .. ] w o u ld n e v er h a ve seen them, had I not knelt on the floor of the cell five years a go and seen into the b a ck of the old safe w h e re the p a c k a ge lay. It is all p a rt of the o dd m y s t e ry thrown a b o ut the c a se by the officials of the w ar p e r i o d — t he c o n c e a l m e nt of these d o c u m e n ts and articles, and the hiding a w ay of the two flakes of b o ne with the b u l l et and p i s t o l. W h a t m i n d e v er g r o u p ed t o g e t h e r s u ch a p p a r e n t ly i n c o n g r u o us and m a c a b re exhibits?...

H e re at last w as a link with my grandfather. I k n ew that he had b e en a m e m b er of the secret order f o u n d ed by Bickley, the K n i g h ts of the G o l d en Circle. I h a ve an old p h o t o g r a ph of him taken in a g r o up of the b r o t h e r h o o d, in full u n i f o r m, o ne that H a r r y 's d a u g h t er h ad discovered for me in o ur g r a n d m o t h e r 's Bible. I k n ew that the n e w s p a p e r s, directly following the assassination, had d e n o u n c ed the o r d er as h a v i ng instigated the killing of Lincoln, and had p r o c l a i m ed B o o th to h a ve b e en its m e m b er a nd tool. A nd I w as r e m i n d ed again of those w o r ds I h ad h e a rd f r om my g r a n d m o t h e r 's lips, that her h u s b a nd h ad b e en " t he tool of other m e n . " 1

An interesting comment. One is compelled to wonder: The tool of what other men? Was Forrester's grandmother referring to the leaders of the Knights of the Golden Circle? To agents of European financiers? Or was it to conspirators within Lincoln's own Party? We shall probably never know with certainty the extent to which any of these groups may have been involved in Lincoln's assassination, but we do know that there were powerful forces within the federal government, centered around Secretary of War Stanton, which actively concealed evidence and hastily terminated the investigation. Someone was protected.

1. Izola Forrester, This One Mad Act (Boston: Hale, Cushman & Flint, 1937), p. 355

I

GREENBACKS AND OTHER CRIMES

SUMMARY It is time now to leave this tragic episode and move along. So let us summarize. America's bloodiest and most devastating war was fought, not over the issue of freedom versus slavery, but because of clashing economic interests. At the heart of this conflict were questions of legalized plunder, banking monopolies, and even

European territorial expansion into Latin America. The boot print of the Rothschild formula is unmistakable across the graves of

American soldiers on both sides.

In the North, neither greenbacks, taxes, nor war bonds were enough to finance the war. So a national banking system was created to convert government bonds into fiat money, and the people lost over half of their monetary assets to the hidden tax of inflation. In the South, printing presses accomplished the same effect, and the monetary loss was total.

The issuance of the Emancipation Proclamation by Lincoln and the naval assistance offered by Tsar Alexander, II, were largely responsible for keeping England and France from intervening in the war on the side of the Confederacy. Lincoln was assassinated by a member of the Knights of the Golden Circle, a secret society with rumored ties to American politicians and British financiers. Tsar Alexander was assassinated a few years later by a member of the People's Will, a Nihilist secret society in Russia with rumored ties to financiers in New York City, specifically, Jacob Schiff and the firm of Kuhn, Loeb & Company.

As for the Creature of central banking, there had been some victories and some defeats. The greenbacks had for a while deprived the bankers of their override on a small portion of government debt, but the National Banking Act quickly put a stop to that. Furthermore, by using government bonds as backing for the money supply, it locked the nation into perpetual debt. The foundation was firmly in place, but the ultimate structure still needed to be erected. The monetary system was yet to be concentrated into one central-bank mechanism, and the control was yet to be taken away from the politicians and placed into the hands of the bankers themselves.

It was time for the Creature to visit Congress.

President Andrew Jackson put his political career on the line in 1832 by vetoing renewal of the charter for the Second Bank of the United States. He called the Bank a monster and declared: "I am ready with the screws to draw every tooth and then the stumps." Voters approved and re-elected him by a large margin.

Nicholas Biddle was head of the Second Bank of the United States. With many Congessmen and Senators financially beholden to him, he wielded great political power. He deliberately created a banking panic and a depression for the purpose of frightening the voters and blaming Jackson's anti-bank policy. Biddle declared: "All other banks and all the merchants may break, but the Bank of the United States shall not break." In the end, he lost the contest. The Bank's charter expired in 1836.

During the Civil War, Lincoln had an insurrection on his hands in the North as well as the South, These two Leslie's engravings depict the 1863 anti-draft riots that occurred in Ohio, Illinois, and New York. In New York, over 1,000 civilians were killed or wounded by federal soldiers. The Civil War was started over economic issues, not slavery. The War was not popular in the North until the issue of slavery was added at a later time to turn it into a moral crusade.

Above and below: New YorV Historical Society

The crew of the Russian ship, Osliaba, posed for this photograph at Alexandria. Virginia, in 1863. Tsar Alexander II had dispatched his Baltic fleet to Alexandria and his Asiatic fleet to San Fransciso where they were committed to assist the Unions blockade against the South. This had little to do with freeing the slaves. France l^" designs on Mexico, and England wanted a divided America. Russia was merely reacting against France and England who were her enemies. The powers of Eur°Pe were deeply involved in the American Civil War for purposes of their own. Withou Russia's intervention, the outcome of the War could have been quite different.

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