-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
--[12b]--
Virginia
Virginia's pro-Union vote reflected the state's proud history of American
leadership—George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, John Marshall, James Madison,
James Monroe, Henry Clay, William H. Harrison, Zachary Taylor, Winfield Scott
and Sam Houston were its native sons. When the insurrectionists eventually
seized control, a portion of the state holding to that tradition broke away
and declared itself the separate, loyal state of West Virginia. But there was
another, non-American tradition in Virginia, which ultimately overpowered the
patriotic impulse in that state.
In the early nineteenth century, the U.S. Congress was frequently the scene
of vulgar antics by one of its Virginia members, a drunkard and drug addict
styling himself "John Randolph of Roanoke." Randolph's acid tongue and bitter
polemics were constantly directed against Northerners and the North in
general, frequently doing battle against the South-hating Congressman Josiah
Quincy, who was later to be president of Harvard for a quarter-century. One
may still find, in the surviving correspondence between these two gentlemen,
evidence of their deliberate collaboration to produce Union-splitting tension
and rancor between North and South.
There was something quite substantial behind this stage show. Mr. Randolph
had, it seems, a stepfather by the name of St. George Tucker(46) (1752-1827),
who had become the sole guardian of John Randolph after his mother died. Mr.
Tucker's nephew, Henry St. George Tucker (1771-1852), was the chairman of the
British East India Company, a wild colonial racialist who spent six months in
prison for "attempted rape."(47) Another Tucker nephew (and Randolph cousin)
was British Admiral Thomas Tudor Tucker (1775-1852), who was wounded battling
the U.S.S. Essex during the War of 1812, while Congressmen Randolph and
Quincy stridently denounced the American war effort.
St. George Tucker, and his two sons Henry St. George and Nathaniel Beverly,
completely dominated the legal profession and the writing and teaching of
laws in the State of Virginia. Henry Wise, the Virginia governor who
gleefully used John Brown's raid on the, Harper's Ferry arsenal to prod his
state toward secession, had been the Tuckers' pupil at the University of
Virginia.
Judge Nathaniel Beverly Tucker (1784-1851) was, aside from Englishman Thomas
Cooper, the most radical Southern disunionist and "states-rights" advocate
from the 1820s on.(48) His nephew, Nathaniel Beverly Tucker (1820-1890),
served as the U.S. consul in Liverpool from 1857 until 1861.(49) With his
British family in high military, intelligence, and colonial positions, he was
in an ideal position to begin the Confederate navy-building efforts, which
were then carried out at Liverpool entirely under the direction of Theodore
Roosevelt's uncle James D. Bulloch, the director of the Confederate Secret
Service in Europe. The ships contracted for at Liverpool and built at
Birkenhead caused devastating loss of American life and swept more than half
of the American merchant fleet from the seas.
During the Civil War, Nathaniel Beverly Tucker was one of the four leading
members of the "Canadian Cabinet"—the crossborder Confederate spy ring which
tried to burn American cities and ran the draft riots in New York. He was
indicted after the war, along with George Sanders and others, for allegedly
helping to plan the assassination of Abraham Lincoln, but he got the charges
dropped. In 1872 he quietly returned to the U.S. and served as an official
lobbyist for the Pennsylvania railroad. His brother, John Randolph Tucker
(1823-1897), was president of the American Bar Association, and his son and
grandchildren were bishops of the Episcopal Church.
William Seward and the Arming of the Insurrection
Two weeks before the 1860 presidential election, the U.S. secretary of war,
John Floyd, quietly concluded an agreement with South Carolina's governor
William Gist to sell 10,000 U.S. government rifles to his state, which had by
this time been whipped into a frenzy by anti-American revolutionists. After
Lincoln's election to the presidency was announced—four months before his
inauguration—the South Carolina insurrectionists began a military buildup
aimed at seizing the set of United States fortifications in the Charleston
harbor. The American commander, Major Robert Anderson, was determined not to
yield the forts, but could not hold them indefinitely unless his position was
reinforced with men and supplies.
Governor Gist informed President Buchanan that his state was "likely" to
secede, and it could be accomplished quietly and bloodlessly if the
government would promise not to send reinforcements. Gist's plea for the
government's acquiescence in the destruction of the Union-was taken in hand
by Treasury Secretary and Scottish Rite Supreme Council member Howell Cobb,
who stiffened the will of the somewhat more nervous traitor, War Secretary
Floyd. Cobb and Floyd received backing from a remarkable source: New York
Sen. William Seward, otherwise known as the leader of the radical-
abolitionist wing of the new Republican Party. With this combination behind
him, President Buchanan felt safe in assuring the insurrectionists that he
would not interfere.
Over the period before the March 4, 1861, Lincoln inauguration, the
secessionists built powerful batteries around the harbor. On Dec. 26, 1860,
U.S. Major Robert Anderson—acting on his own initiative moved his men and
equipment from an onshore installation out to the more defensible Fort
Sumter, which lay on an island in the harbor. Fort Sumter now became the
focus of strategic concern for the nation; the failure of the government to
send reinforcements symbolized to enraged patriots the manifold treason of
the Buchanan administration.
When Abe Lincoln came to Washington to assume the presidency, the armed
Knights of the Golden Circle were prepared to assassinate the new President
and seize the capital. But General Winfield Scott, who had moved the
headquarters of the U.S. Army out of Washington, D.C. when Franklin Pierce
was elected President in 1852, had other ideas.
Scott deployed thousands of troops, bomb experts, and special police to every
conceivable assassination vantage point. On hearing that secessionists
planned to disrupt the official counting of the electoral college ballots in
the Capitol, General Scott announced "that any man who attempted by force . .
. to obstruct or interfere with the lawful count of the electoral vote . . .
should be lashed to the muzzle of a twelve-pounder gun and fired out of a
window of the Capitol. I would manure the hills of Arlington with fragments
of his body, were he a senator or chief magistrate of my native state! It is
my duty to suppress insurrection—my duty!"(50)
Lincoln's inauguration was quiet.
The new President was strongly advised by William Seward, whom he had
appointed his secretary of state (in a politically "balanced" cabinet), that
he must not reinforce Fort Sumter. Better let the extremist Southerners
secede, said Seward— "they will come back to the Union in two or three years."
Rather than stand up to South Carolina, Seward proposed, Lincoln should
immediately send sharp notes to Spain and France. If no satisfactory replies
were given, war should be commenced with those nations which would "divert
the attention" of the nation from its sectional struggles!(51)
President Lincoln, however, knowing that every department of the federal
government was riddled with traitors, sent his own personal agents into South
Carolina for some first-hand political intelligence. His friends confirmed
what he had suspected, that South Carolina was not acting from rage or
resentments, but from "decades of a false political economy"; that its
leaders had completely crushed out Unionist elements in the state, and would
never come back to the Union unless compelled to do so.
Lincoln determined to send reinforcements to Fort Sumter; at the same time,
Seward began a series of meetings with agents of the South Carolina
secessionists whom he assured, directly contrary to Lincoln's policy, that
their steady preparations for aggression would not be resisted (52).
When Lincoln arranged for a squadron of gunships and troopships to be sent to
reinforce Sumter, Seward secretly arranged for the gunships to be diverted to
Florida. When Lincoln found out about this, he ordered Seward to reverse his
interference. Seward stalled long enough so that the gunships were already
steaming southward, and their commander, mistakenly believing he was going to
Florida on Lincoln's order, refused to turn back on Seward's mid-course
directive. The reinforcement troops arrived off Charleston harbor, and waited
and watched in agony as the insurrectionists started pouring their murderous
fire onto Fort Sumter: without the gunships, the troops could not get into
the harbor. After 36 hours of sustaining this terror, the heroic Anderson
surrendered Fort Sumter.
The new governor of South Carolina, Francis Pickens, yet another student of
the British revolutionist Thomas Cooper, exulted at this humiliation of
national power, crowing "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!"(53)
President Abraham Lincoln had been prevented from crushing the insurrection
while the secession was still confined to the lower South, and possibly
preventing the tragedy that was to occur. Still advised to compromise by the
majority of his own cabinet, criticized for taking the "narrow view" that the
rebellion was the work of a small minority of conspirators rather than the
broad expression of sectional sentiment, Lincoln nevertheless assumed
personal responsibility for saving the nation.
Though faced with a fait accompli, he acted as he was never expected to act.
He immediately called for 75,000 volunteers to put down the insurrection, and
the bloodiest war in American history had begun. For the next four years,
Lincoln invoked the full powers of the presidency; he called into existence
massive productive powers—creating the steel industry from scratch and
starting the world's greatest railroad system; and he gradually forged an
unbeatable military machine. By the war's end, the United States armed forces
were the largest and toughest in the world; and the continuing productive
momentum of Lincoln's restored Hamiltonian policies were to give the U.S. the
world's largest industrial economy within less than two decades.
Lincoln and Juarez
The American Civil War, like the American Revolution, was an international
conflict upon whose outcome the fate of civilization rested—and it was fought
on both sides of the U.S.-Mexican border. We will briefly sketch here the
outline of a struggle which pitted the presidents of the United States and of
Mexico as allies against their common foreign enemies.
At about the same time as Abraham Lincoln took over the U.S. presidency,
Benito Juarez assumed that office in Mexico. Juarez was a full-blooded
Indian, a former physics professor, and a terrifying threat to his opponents
because he was a thoroughly honest man. He had been trained in political
economy by neo-Platonic teachers, and had spent several years of his
ascendency toward power in exile in New Orleans, Louisiana.
During the 1850s a Swiss banker, Jean-Baptiste Jecker, had carried out a
series of swindles and depredations against Mexico, operating from the office
of his firm Jecker and Torre in Mexico City. Along with the Crocker Bank and
other Boston-linked financial interests in California, Jecker had financed
attempted landings of anti-Mexican mercenary armies in the West, part of the
wave of Young America imperialism under the Cushing-Pierce administration.
Jecker had also concluded a wildly fraudulent loan with the corrupt Mexican
leader General Miguel Miramon: Jecker agreed to pay $750,000 into the Mexican
treasury, and received in return bonds worth $15 million, and the rights to
all the silver that could be found in the states of Sonora and Baja
California!
General Miramon absconded with 600,000 pesos and fled to Cuba, and Benito
Juarez became Mexico's President. Juarez and the Mexican Congress declared a
two-year moratorium on foreign debt payments, and Juarez announced that the
fraudulent Jecker loan could never be honored.
When the Southern Confederacy began its insurrection against the United
States, the colonial powers of Europe contrived to use the "injustice" done
to the Swiss banker Jecker—who had since emigrated to France as a pretext to
invade the Western Hemisphere. The governments of Great Britain, France and
Spain concluded an agreement in the fall of 1861, arrangements for which had
been made by the diplomatic efforts of Britain's special envoy, Louis Mallet.
The plan was the particular brainchild of America's greatest enemy in
continental Europe, King Leopold I of Belgium.(54) He was the head of the
Saxe-Coburg house and the uncle of Britain's Queen Victoria and of her
husband Prince Albert; Leopold's family members would take over more and more
European kingdoms as the nineteenth century progressed.
Leopold I of Belgium was the only European monarch to openly advocate the
recognition of the Confederacy; the Young America plotters had earlier issued
the Ostend Manifesto from within his kingdom, calling for the conquest and
permanent enslavement of Cuba. His son, Leopold II, was to carry this
racialist experimentation to new limits as the founder and ruler of the
Belgian Congo, whose Leopoldville was named for him.
The colonial powers of Europe agreed to send the Hapsburg Prince Maximilian
to be the Emperor of Mexico as their representative. Maximilian's wife
Carlotta was Leopold's daughter, and through her the Belgian Coburg would
have a direct managing hand in the conquest.
President Abraham Lincoln had from the very first assured President Benito
Juarez of all possible U.S. support against European intervention. Juarez'
envoy to Washington Matias Romero had traveled out to Lincoln's home in
Springfield, Illinois, to meet with the newly elected President and to avoid
having to deal with the Secretary of State-designate, William Seward, whom he
thoroughly distrusted. Lincoln and Juarez maintained their alliance on this
personal basis for the rest of the war.
Despite Lincoln's warnings to the Europeans that the Union would prevail,
that the Monroe Doctrine would eventually be enforced, the armed forces of
Britain, France, Spain, Austria and Belgium invaded Mexico in 1862; "Emperor
Maxmilian I of Mexico" and "Empress Carlotta" came in behind the troops.
During the few years of this bloody adventure, Maximilian signed and the
largely French army enforced the so-called Black Decree, ordering the
execution of all persons belonging to "unauthorized societies . . .
regardless of character."
Juarez and the Mexican patriots were compelled to fight a guerrilla war,
gradually weakening but never completely destroying the invading imperial
forces. But when the Union Army finished its cruel work against the Southern
Rebellion, its generals were ordered to proceed to the Mexican border, where
they began openly supplying the Juarez forces with arms and equipment.
President Lincoln resisted the advice that the United States ought to send
troops into Mexico "to help Juarez, " and President Andrew Johnson, taking
over for the murdered Lincoln, held to the same policy.
It would be enough to pressure the foreign army to leave Mexico, then "Juarez
and the Mexicans can take care of Maxmilian."
At the end of the American Civil War, a large group of Confederate officials
fled to Mexico and joined the war of Maximilian against the people of Mexico.
Prominent among them were Confederate diplomat Pierre Soule, formerly the
Mazzini-allied U.S. ambassador to Spain under the Cushing-Pierce
administration; Nathaniel Beverly Tucker, Virginia's Confederate spy and
cousin of the East India Company chairman(55); and Confederate General
Sterling Price, who had been governor of Missouri during the Kansas-Missouri
border war of the 1850s, was the leading Western controller of the Knights of
the Golden Circle, and had created a Confederate terrorist organization known
as the Corps de Belgique "in honor of the Belgian Consul in St. Louis."
The hundreds of Confederate emigres were given a million acres by Maximillian
upon which they set up the "Carlotta Colony," hoping to luxuriate in a
tropical empire though they had lost the northern war.
But the imperialist army withdrew to France in March of 1867, and
Maximilian's regime fell soon after. Maximilian was executed by the Mexicans,
despite the pleas of European "liberals," while the Empress Carlotta returned
to Belgium, to live out her life confined as a psychotic well into the
twentieth century.
Most of the high-ranking Confederates in Mexico then drifted back into the
United States, where many of them simply reentered-the mainstream of American
life. In fact there was no accounting done, no sorting out, no "Nuremberg
Trials" for the insurrection of 1861, which killed more than a half-million
Americans more than died in both of the World Wars.
A particularly chilling example of the failure of post-Lincoln Americans to
appreciate the nature of this Rebellion is the case of Edward House. His
father Thomas House was a British merchant who came to the Texas province of
Mexico in the 1830s. The elder House did not stick by Sam Houston when
Houston fought against Secession; Thomas House made a fortune as a British
national, carrying arms from Britain through the Union blockade to Texas.
After the Rebellion was defeated, Thomas House returned to England and
educated his son Edward at Bath. Years later, the young man returned to
America to tend his father's cotton plantations; he despised the United
States as an enemy land, and retained a fierce loyalty to Great Britain. This
was "Colonel" House, who directed the foreign policy and much of the domestic
affairs of the United States during the administration of President Woodrow
Wilson . . . the years of the World War and the League of Nations. President
Wilson was not unsympathetic to House's viewpoint—his own father had been a
Confederate Army chaplain and slaveowner.
The political backgrounds of the earlier presidents, Grover Cleveland and
Theodore Roosevelt, were completely bound up with the treason of the 1861
Insurrection. Cleveland, brought into politics by the Confederate spy ring in
New York,(56) returned the favor and made dozens of Rebel officials the top
men in his two administrations. The arch-racialist Roosevelt took office when
President William McKinley was shot to death. He led the world to believe
that the bullying, imperialist antics echoing his uncle, Confederate Secret
Service chief James Bulloch, represented America's natural outlook rather
than the policies which Abraham Lincoln and hundreds of thousands of
Americans had died to defeat.
pps. 213-259
--notes--
1. Curti, M. E., "Young America,"in Amencan Historical Review, Vol. XXXII,
October, 1926, pp. 34-55.
2. United States Democrattc Review, Nov.-Dec., 1852, p. 440.
3. Fuess, Life of Caleb Cushing, Vol 11, p. 119.
4. ibid.. D. 123.
5. Quoted in Barr, Mazzini, p. 217.
6. Inaugural Addresses of the Presidents. p. 109.
7. Buchanan to William L. Marcy, Feb. 24, 1854, quoted in Curb, 'Young
America," p. 48.
8. Potter, David M. The Impending Crisis, Harper and Row, New York, 1976. D.
188.
9. ibid., pp. 189-190.
10. ibid., pp. 186-187.
11. Andrews, Wayne, The Vanderbilt Legend, Harcourt, Brace and Company,
1941, pp. 54-55: "Two days before the sally, the [Vanderbilt-owned Accessory]
Transit [Company] agent C. J. Macdonald presented Walker with $20,000 and a
steamer to transport his men. It is not apparent [sic] that Cornelius
Vanderbilt, in New York, sanctioned this use of the company's funds or the
loan of the company's steamboat."
12. ibid., pp. 56-58: "the Commodore protested to Secretary of State Marcy
against '. . . the unlawful seizure of a large amount of property';
notwithstanding, the United States Government did not intervene . . . William
Walker, on the 12th of July, rose to the presidency of Nicaragua."
"This election [sic], and the inactivity of our State Department, decided
Vanderbilt. He alone would destroy Walker.... In the summer, he persuaded the
governments of Honduras, Guatemala, San Salvedore, and Costa Rica to build a
defensive alliance against the new administration in Nicaragua. In the fall,
he ordered William R.C. Webster and Sylvanus Spencer to lead and organize
invading forces. Webster, an Englishman, resented the spurious sovereignty of
the amateur revolutionist."
13. Baynard, Northern Supreme Council, Vol. I, p. 286.
14. ibid., p. 286.
15. Fesler, Mayo, "Secret Political Societies in the North during the War,"
in Indiana Magazine of History, 1918, Bloomington, Indiana, Vol XIV, No. 3,
p. 190.
Van Rensselaer family privately printed material, (including A Legacy of
Historical Gleanings, by Mrs. Catherine Van Rensselaer Bonney, Albany, 1875,)
in the rare book section of the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute's library,
Troy, New York, shows that "the Knight" Mr. Killian H. Van Rensselaer was
earlier a principal organizer of another project with other members of his
family: the 1837-38 cross-border raids, supposedly to support a Canadian
"uprising" against the British government in Canada, deliberately provoking
the defensive reactions of Canadians and giving the British the pretext for
police actions to destroy the Canadian republican movement.
Rensselaer Van Rensselaer (sic), was the volunteer "General" of the
"Patriots" in this British military intelligence-coordinated provocation.
>From Vol II, pages 86-87 of Ms. Bonney's Gleanings, here is a letter from
Killian H. Van Rensselaer, in Rochester, to Gen. Rensselaer Van Rensselaer at
Navy Island, Jan. 10? 1838:
441 et me introduce to you our friend Mr. Huff of Mendon. He has a few
gentlemen with him for your cause, together with some money, clothing, &c.,
&c.; he is warmly in favor of the Patriot's claims. He has also One Hundred
in money from our Committee, we hope it will be of service to you. There are
about 30 gentlemen to leave in the morning for your camp, and the prospect of
as many more following in their track. You will want to make good
arrangements on our shore, so that what means we can send will find a safe
harbor, and you be able to receive them. How does Henry do? We are all
anxious for some news of blood [emphasis in original]. I heard from Albany
today, friends all well. Yours, K. H. Van Rensselaer. "
"General" Rensselaer Van Rensselaer was arrested by United States General
Winfield Scott, acting on the northern frontier to break up the operation,
under orders from Secretary of War Joel Poinsett. (Elliott, Charles Winslow,
Winfi eld Scott: The Soldier and the Man, Arno Press, New York, 1979, pp.
339-340). He was sentenced to six months imprisonment (Young, Andrew, The
American Statesman, p. 715).
16. ibid., pp. 190-191. See also Bell, William Henry, The Knights of the
Golden Circle, Its Organization and Activities in Texas Prior to the Civil
War master's thesis, 1969, call no. B4139K in the Texas A&l University
Library, Taftsville, Texas. This is an extremely interesting treatment of the
Knights, the result of several years of independent study. See also Morrow,
Curtis Hugh, Politico-Military Secret Societies of the Northwest, 1860-1865,
dissertation for Clark University, Worcester, Massachusetts, 1929, p. 6.
17. Milton, George Fort, Abraham Lincoln and the Fifth Column, The Vanguard
Press, New York, 1942, p. 68.
18. Fuess, Life of Caleb Cushing, Vol. II, pp. 147-149.
19. Potter, David M., The Impending Crisis, pp. 202-203.
20. Documents Relating to New England Federalism, p. 349.
21. Oates, Stephen B., To Purge This Land With Blood: A Biography of John
Brown, Harper and Row, New York, 1970, p. 158.
22. ibid., p. 66.
23. ibid., p. 193.
24. Information from an interview with the Gourgas family. Thoreau worked for
the Gourgases as a gardener. Francis R. Gourgas (1811-1853) was a wealthy
nephew and political co-thinker of J.J.J. Gourgas, whose family seat at
Weston, Mass., J.J.J. Gourgas kept as his home-base. Francis R Gourgas was
the financial backer of the Social Circle in Concord, the elite group to
which Emerson and other transcendentalists belonged. See Memoirs of Members
of the Social Circle in Concord, The Riverside Press, Cambridge, 1888.
25. Higginson, Thomas Wentworth, Life and Times of Stephen Higginson
Houghton, Mifflin Co., Boston and New York, 1907, pp. 279-281.
26. Proceedings of the State Disunion Convention; held at Worcester
Massachusetts, January 15, 1857, Boston; printed for the Committee 1857, pp.
29-31.
27. Oates, To Purge This Land With Blood, pp. 200-201.
28. ibid., p. 216.
29. Harris, Southern Supreme Council, p. 244.
30. See Duncan, Robert Lipscomb, Reluctant General: The Life and Times of
Albert Pike, E.P. Dutton and Co., New York, 1961. This is the closest thing
to a serious biography of Albert Pike yet written. It is a shameless,
ludicrous apology.
31. ibid., p. 162.
32. Harris, Southern Supreme Council p. 283.
33. ibid., p. 271.
34. Gist family geneological records at the South Carolina Historical
Society, Charleston.
35. See Wooster, Ralph A., The Secession Conventions of the South, Princeton
University Press, Princeton, New Jersey, 1962, pp. 14-15. An "election" for
delegates to the South Carolina secession convention took place amid
secession-mania mob scenes, involved virtually no discussion, in many
parishes offered only one candidate, and published no returns.
36. Potter, David M. The Impending Crisis, p. 505: "about 41,000 votes were
cast, of which some 12,000 were for candidates whose positions were not
specified or are now unknown, but of the remaining 29,000, some 16,800 were
for secessionists and 12,218 for cooperationists."
37. Swanberg, W. A., First Blood: The Story of Fort Sumter, Charles
Scribner's Sons, New York, 1957, p. 67.
38. Potter, David M. The Impending Crisis, p. 505 (Florida and Alabama
results).
39. Van Rensselaer family privately printed material cited in footnote 15
above, establishes:
1) that the Van Rensselaer family, the virtual feudal lords of the area
around Albany until the 1840s, exercised dose personal control over the
affairs of the school during the long period of Nathaniel Beman's presidency;
Patroon Stephen Van Rensselaer, who founded the school in 1824, had earlier
revived the moribund Scottish Rite in the Albany area
2) that Beman was a raving kook; as Yancey's stepfather he was someone to be
kept out of the sanitized versions of Southern secession history.
40. Bulloch, James D., The Secret Service of the Confederate States in
Europe; or, How the Cruisers Were Equipped, G.P. Putnam's Sons, New York,
1884, pp. 52-53.
41. The Cushing memorial volume is shelved in the Cushing House, maintained
as a museum by the Historical Society of Old Newbury, at 98 High St.,
Newburyport, Mass.
42. Potter, David M., The Impending Crisis, p. 506: Georgia "Governor Joseph
E. Brown . . . declared that 'the delegates to the convention who voted for
the ordinance of secession were elected by a clear majority . . . 50,243 for
secession and 37,123 against secession'. . . Brown did not say that 50,243
votes were cast for candidates pledged to secession . . . [but] for
candidates who later voted for secession . . . many delegates who had voted
against immediate secession on preliminary votes decided on the final vote to
acquiesce in the will of the secessionists...."
Potter quotes the new research of Michael P. Johnson, "A New Look at the
Popular Vote for Delegates to the Georgia Secession Convention," in Georgia
Historical Quarterly, LVI (1972), pp. 259-275: ". . . the most generous
estimate that is probably more accurate places the majority for cooperation"
i.e. against immediate secession at just over 50% of the voters.
43. ibid, p. 506.
44. Wooster, The Secession Conventions of the South. The Arkansas vote for
convention delegates was 23,626 for Unionists to 17,927 for secessionists
(Wooster, p. 157);
North Carolina voters rejected even holding a convention to discuss
secession, but the secessionists got the state government to declare
secession (Wooster pp. 193-195;
Virginia voters elected 120 anti-secessionists to 32 secessionists as
delegates (Wooster, p. 142);
Tennessee cast 91,803 votes for Unionist delegates against 24,749 for
secessionists, and at the- same time rejected even holding a convention to
discuss it by 69,675 to 57,795 (Wooster, p. 180). After the attack on Fort
Sumter began the Civil War, the Tennessee state government simply declared
secession, then held-a referendum under war conditions, won by secessionists.
The state was occupied by the Confederate army to control the pro-Union
unrest.
The reader should keep in mind the crucial historical difference between the
origin of secessionism, which we are discussing here, and the popular feeling
in the South after the outbreak of the Civil War, supporting what most
Southerners viewed as a defensive struggle.
45. Duncan, Reluctant General, p. 167.
46. For the Tucker family, see Hess, Stephen, America's Political Dynasties:
from Adams to Kennedy, Doubleday, Garden City, New York, 1966, pp. 367-392
and pp. 641-642- and Brugger, Robert J., Beverley Tucker: Heart Over Head in
the Old South, Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore, 1978.
47. Henry St. George Tucker, or "India Henry," was the private secretary to
Sir William Jones, the great British philologist whose study of Sanskrit
language and Hindu culture gave Britain great power to manipulate and grab
the subcontinent. See The trial of Henry St. George Tucker, esq., for an
assault, with intent to commit a rape, on the person of Mrs. Dorothea
Simpson; held in the Supreme court of judicature, at Fort William, in Bengal,
published by J. F. Hughes, London, 1810, in the Library of Congress. In 1834
Tucker became the chairman of the British East India Company and remained so
until 1851, calling publicly for the banning of all public education in India
as "dangerous, " and for total press censorship.
Henry St. George Tucker wrote from East India-House, London, to John
Randolph's step-brother, Nathaniel Beverly Tucker, on Jan. 29,1847, "We had
the pleasure of seeing a good deal of your relative, Mr. Randolph, when he,
on different occasions, visited this country—we admired his talents, but
could not always keep pace with his Enthusiasm." Before Randolph's death in
1831, cousin "India Henry" was not yet Chairman, but a powerful, rising
Director of the East India Company during Randolph's visits.
48. The following letter, marked "1806 Fall" on the upper right-hand corner,
was addressed to and was received by Nathaniel Beverly Tucker and is in the
Tucker-Coleman Collection in the Swem Library, William and Mary College,
Williamsburg, Va.:
Table of Figuires
4 5 6 7 8 9 0 1 2
1 a d g j m p s v y
2 b e h k n q t w z
3 c f i l o r u x v
Letter
The execution of our project is postponed till December, want of water in the
Ohio rendered [crossed out: "delay expedient"] movement that way
impracticable. Other reasons rendered delay expedient. The ["operation" ?] is
enlarged and comprises all that Wilkinson could wish Confidence limited to a
few.
[signed] A. BURR
J. Dayton
Letter
./= - = -. =, = -. - = =@=#=; =;'./,’=-=;=-/
./=-=-.-,=-.-==@=#=;=;’./,
-=( (*%))*%&&%-.-==@=#=;=;'./,’=-=;=-/./
= - = - . =, = - . - = = @ = # =; =; './, = = [i.e. a scribbled code]
On the reverse is written the name of the addressee, N. B. Tucker, Esq., and
the following list
Gill . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 23
Bo [indecipherable] . . . 22
Heard............................... 25
C L Wells . . . . . . . . . . 32
Shader............................... 22
Bailey . . . . . . . . . . . . . 20
[adding to] 145 [sic]
Gilbert . . . . . . . . . . . . . 132
75.
[adding to] 352
Pitman.............................. 29
Gu [indecipherable] 11
[adding to] 392
In 1806 Aaron Burr floated a mercenary army down the Ohio and Mississippi
Rivers towards New Orleans, there to take as much territory from the United
States and Mexico as he could to create for himself a British-supported
empire. The above letter from Burr is addressed on its face to Jonathan
Dayton of New Jersey, later an indicted co-conspirator with Burr, and
addressed on its back to Nathaniel Beverly Tucker, one of those "few" in whom
Burr seems to have reposed "confidence."
This letter is in the New York Historical Society published microNm of Burr
Papers, but not identified in any way, in the microfilm, with the name of
Nathaniel Beverly Tucker—it is only listed as Burr to Jonathan Dayton—except
that the microfilm gives the letter's physical location as the Tucker-Coleman
(ie. Tucker Family) collection at William and Mary.
The secession movement in pre-Civil War Virginia was first built around this
N.B. Tucker (1784-1851) at the College of William and Mary, where Tucker,
like his father before him, was a law professor. In the very intimate Tucker
circle at the College was John Tyler (U.S. President 1841-1845, Civil War-era
secessionist; see Chitwood, Oliver Perry, John Tyler: Champion of the Old
South, D. Appleton-Century Company, New York and London, 1939, p. 152,
197-198). The school served as a subversive base in Virginia, as did South
Carolina College and Harvard in their states. William and Mary was, before
the Tuckers began to dominate it in the 1790s, the seat of great classical
learning, led by Plato-disciple and Declaration of Independence signer George
Wythe. N.B. Tucker's father St. George Tucker replaced Wythe in the Law and
Police chair, after opposing the adoption of the U.S. Constitution, and began
preaching "states rights," Adam Smith and British law; George Wythe, whom he
replaced, was an ardent Unionist and had written the rules of procedure for
the Consitutional Convention in Philadelphia.
John Randolph wrote to Aaron Burr (April 16, 1802, Burr Papers), speaking of
himself in the third person, as would a queen: "John Randolph . . . despairs,
utterly, of getting away [from Congress] before the middle of next week. He
is not vain enough to suppose that Col. B. will postpone his departure on
that account:—but he shall be highly gratified by any cause of detention not
disagreeable to Col. B. which shall give J.R. the pleasure of accompanying
him thro Virginia." Nathaniel Beverly Tucker's most recent biographer, Robert
J. Brugger, expressed the following view, in a private interview with the
present author: "John Randolph probably told Beverly Tucker what he knew
about Burr's plans for his Western expedition.... Randolph may well have made
himself acquainted with it...there was such strong anti-Jefferson feeling at
that time...."
When Burr was arrested, John Randolph was his loudest supporter in the
Congress, full of sarcastic venom against President Jefferson. It is perhaps
not only a fascinating coincidence that John Randolph somehow became the
foreman of the grand jury which was to indict Aaron Burr for treason in
Richmond, Virginia. In the furious struggle that occured in the jury room and
in the Richmond political arena surrounding the trial, Randolph strained to
shift the spotlight of incrimination onto prosecution witness General
Wilkinson, thereby to call into question the government's whole case against
Burr. Randolph failed to indict Wilkinson; but his efforts must have
contributed somewhat to the overall process of the trial, in which Burr
escaped conviction. Randolph's (and Burr's) focus on Wilkinson as the real
villain was picked up by Henry Adams in his famous histories of the period,
helping to make Burr's guilt vaguely questionable for posterity. At this
time, the Treasurer of the United States—the man who ran the day-to-day
business affairs of the Treasury, under the Secretary of the Treasury, Albert
Gallatin, was Thomas Tudor Tucker, brother to St. George Tucker and uncle to
Nathaniel Beverly Tucker, to John Randolph and to "India Henry" Tucker.
Thomas Tudor Tucker was Treasurer throughout and well beyond Gallatin's reign
at Treasury, serving from 1801 to 1828. Thus the known Burr-Tucker
communications run the gamut from the high plane of polite functioning—Thomas
Tucker transmitting reports on War Department finances, and other official
messages from the Treasury to Vice-President Burr (presiding over the
Senate)-to conversations more in the nation's "back alleyways," so to speak.
49. This Tucker's brother David was married to the daughter of George Mifflin
Dallas- from 1856 to 1861, Mr. Dallas was the United States Ambassador to
England. He had previously been the private secretary to Albert Gallatin,
sent by London to mediate Gallatin's communications with "Lord Castlereagh,
Count Lieven [anti-American Russian Ambassador to England] and Mr. Baring"'
according to the Diary of James Gallatin entry of Oct. 24, 1813, p. 12.
50. Swanberg, First Blood, p. 199.
51. Seward is quoted in Nicolay, John G., and Hay, John, Abraham Lincoln: A
History, The Century Co., New York, 1917, Vol. m, p. 446: "I would demand
explanations from Spain and France, categorically, at once. I would seek
explanations from Great Britain and Russia, and send agents into Canada,
Mexico, and Central America, to rouse a vigorous continental spirit of
independence on this continent against European intervention. And, if
satisfactory explanations are not received from Spain and France, would
convene Congress and declare war against them."
52. Swanberg, First Blood, pp. 226-232.
53. ibid., p. 324.
54. The standard (apologetic) account (ie. the one the Belgian consulate in
New York keeps in their library) of Leopold and the invasion is O'Connor
Richard, The Cactus Throne: The Tragedy of Maximilian and Carlotta New York,
G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1971.
55. Nathaniel Beverly Tucker was given, for his management and as a front-man
owner, the property of Baron Escandon and other Mexican hacienda landlords
who had invited Maximilian to seize their country. Tucker took over their
property, 1.5 million acres and 190,000 head of livestock, and received a
large cut of the proceeds. With the popularity of Juarez's Republican
movement, backed by the U.S.A., these landlords became so unpopular they
dared not visit their own property. As they escaped to Europe, transfer was
accomplished thru English merchant banker Davies and Co, in Mexico. Tucker
himself fled Mexico March 5, 1867, three months before the execution of
Maximilian. See Tucker, Jane Ellis, Beverly Tucker: A Memoir by his Wife, The
Frank Baptist Printing Co., Richmond, undated, in the State Library of
Virginia, at Richmond; pp. 31 -37
56. Grover Cleveland was recruited as a young man, with perhaps vague
Copperhead sympathies, into the political family of Augustus Schell Political
boss of the insurrectionary machine based m New York; see Chapter 15.
--cont--
Aloha, He'Ping,
Om, Shalom, Salaam.
Em Hotep, Peace Be,
Omnia Bona Bonis,
All My Relations.
Adieu, Adios, Aloha.
Amen.
Roads End
Kris
DECLARATION & DISCLAIMER
==========
CTRL is a discussion and informational exchange list. Proselyzting propagandic
screeds are not allowed. Substance—not soapboxing! These are sordid matters
and 'conspiracy theory', with its many half-truths, misdirections and outright
frauds is used politically by different groups with major and minor effects
spread throughout the spectrum of time and thought. That being said, CTRL
gives no endorsement to the validity of posts, and always suggests to readers;
be wary of what you read. CTRL gives no credeence to Holocaust denial and
nazi's need not apply.
Let us please be civil and as always, Caveat Lector.
========================================================================
Archives Available at:
http://home.ease.lsoft.com/archives/CTRL.html
http:[EMAIL PROTECTED]/
========================================================================
To subscribe to Conspiracy Theory Research List[CTRL] send email:
SUBSCRIBE CTRL [to:] [EMAIL PROTECTED]
To UNsubscribe to Conspiracy Theory Research List[CTRL] send email:
SIGNOFF CTRL [to:] [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Om
