Comprehending the Booth Bombshell

We had little time in our last Chronicle to absorb the implications of Booth's successful escape and the village it took to kill a president. It is time to reflect upon the seemingly irreconcilable juxtapositions implied by the assassination.

To be clear, John Wilkes Booth, Lincoln's killer, escaped capture. The fairy tale told about Garret's Farm and barn was a deception to take the public's attention from the murder and to let it die a deserved death. The man killed at the farm was John Boyd. The body was disposed with the swiftest dispatch by men who were completely under Edwin Stanton's control, many of whom owed their careers and prominence to him. Many private and public persons expressed doubts about the identification of the corpse, but the very powerful Stanton and the Radical Republicans could easily ignore the screamers.

Thanks to Dr Arnold's research, we know that a military convoy was stationed outside the Navy Yard bridge which facilitated Booth's escape. Initial vectors of search were misdirected to the north and any which way but south. However, all of a sudden, a 25 man mounted infantry unit miraculously found "Booth", killed him, and moved on with the rest of the cover-up.

In Arnold's telling, the Garrett sons, Booth, and Stanton and his army were accomplices in the assassination of Lincoln. Booth, who was an intelligence officer in the Confederacy, implicates the Southern leadership although we have to take care where to assign the responsibility in that government - most notably Judah Benjamin who was a Rothschild agent.

It may seem odd that both Union and Confederate forces would be allied in the removal of Lincoln from office. On the one hand, Lincoln had spoken clearly about restoring the Confederate states to full statehood with alacrity. As such he would have been the South's best friend in contrast to the Radical Republicans who were hellbent on imposing a draconian brutal revenge from which the former Confederate states would never recover.

So why would the Confederates take the chance of removing Lincoln? Johnson had not made many pro South speeches or noises, and though from Tennessee himself, seemed much more aligned with the Radicals. I suspect that private assurances were made by Johnson to the Confederates that he would continue Lincoln's policies, thus assuring the Confederates that they could exact revenge for Lincoln's brutalities and not lose any of his lenient policies.

On the other hand, Stanton was a power mad psychopath who saw himself as the rightful president if not Caesar. He was the point man for the plutocratic industrialists who had put Lincoln into office to destroy the South because of its advocacy of low tariffs which were inimical to the protectionist policies they favored. Stanton was the operational director of the assassination. Northern powers saw him as the man to eliminate Lincoln's conciliatory policies. With Lincoln gone, they could continue to plunder and rape the South.

The man in the middle was the duplicitous Andrew Johnson who played both sides against the middle. Some historians have argued that Johnson had nothing to do with the assassination because of the hostility he endured from Stanton and Congress which was firmly under the control of radicals. But I dismiss this idea as bit too idealistic.

Johnson and Booth knew each other quite well and had a close relationship going back several years when the actor was in Tennessee. Booth's visit to Johnson at his his hotel indicates the closeness and was doubtless a signal regarding the assassination. Johnson was the only man who had contacts with Booth and could act as his handler, namely to launch the operation against Lincoln. As an insider in Lincoln's administration, he had contact with Seward and would be able to act as the liaison between Union and Confederate operatives.

Johnson's master plan was to remove Lincoln which assuaged the Confederates, and gratified Stanton and the plutocrats. Once the evidence of the murder was buried, and innocent men and women were murdered to serve as patsies and Oswald would later say, Johnson could consolidate power, and push Stanton aside, an action which nearly cost him the presidency.

Yet Johnson prevailed, rid himself of Stanton, and followed as much of Lincoln's policies as he could, though he was clearly stymied by the very powerful Radical Republicans. Congress overrode Johnson's vetoes with the ease of a hot knife through butter.

One of Stanton's cronies, the once all powerful Lafayette Baker, revealed the tryst in a  poem he wrote in the margins of an obscure British military journal. The encrypted message was decoded in the late 1950s or early 1960s which disclosed that a couple of dozen very powerful private and public persons were behind the assassination. Most telling was his exposure of Booth, Stanton, and Johnson as co-conspirators.

When Baker revealed the Booth diary two years after the assassination trials, Stanton took revenge by poisoning the former chief security officer, a fact also discovered in the 1960s.

Stanton himself, we believe, was murdered under the guise of suicide, a topic we have covered in an earlier Chronicle.

Lincoln's assassination was not the work of a lone nut. Removing a head of state is never so easy. There are way too many moving parts which have to be lubed and managed, and Lincoln's case was no different.

Copyright 2020 Tony Bonn. All rights reserved.

It Wasn't About Slavery - Really

With dumbed down education, and fraudulent historians, it is easy to sell the fake story of the American Civil War as being first and foremost about slavery. While slavery was the fermentation of the zeitgeist, it was not the cup of trembling itself. We will bring you a perspective you haven't heard before. but which is quite obvious if you know one of the leading causes of the first War of Independence.

If you think about to the Revolutionary War, you may recall the tea tax, the Stamp Act, and other impositions which the British placed upon the colonists. And if you think about the events, you will notice that taxes were the burning issues prompting the colonists to rebel against King George III.

It was much the same leading to Fort Sumter when southerners clamored for a more equitable distribution and benefit of taxes, namely in the form of tariffs, a topic which had been most nettlesome for most of the 19th century leading up to the secession of southern states from the union.

Various compromises and see-saw politics managed to keep the pot from boiling over, but the Nullification Crisis of 1828-33 set the stage for the eventual fruition of the Confederacy.

In short, the agricultural and slave powered South depended upon imports, whether northern or European, for its goods, whereas the industrial North sought to protect its fledgling industries from cheap imports. Ultimately no one could craft a compromise, and with Lincoln's anti-conciliatory stance to the South, particularly along the lines of tariffs, there was no pressure escape valve left to ameliorate the frictions between the two sections of the union.

Lincoln was a Whig-Republican who was the puppet of northern industrialists who were intent upon establishing high tariffs to protect their economic interests and empire. Few people know that Lincoln's rise out of the lawyerly slums owed to his work for railroad tycoons in downstate Illinois. This work, plus his political aspirations, finally brought him to the attention of the power brokers at the Chicago Republican convention of 1860 as a compromise candidate who would do their bidding.

Lincoln did not disappoint. Using the pretext of "preserving the union," Lincoln issued a series of blustery statements which gave southerners no doubt about his sentiments on taxes and where his loyalty lay. Without any congressional support, he immediately issued a flurry of unconstitutional orders declaring war on the South, raising initially a 75,000 man army which would grow to over 1 million, and shredding constitutional liberties as though the document was, as George Bush famously said, nothing but a goddamned piece of paper.

But wasn't Lincoln elected to free the slaves? Absolutely not. Many northern states had Black Codes which forbad blacks from residing in their states, owning property, and other activities which we take for granted today.

Lincoln made it very clear during his inaugural address that he would take no actions against the "peculiar institution" of the south, and that he had no constitutional basis for doing so. Even during the war, he fired General Fremont for issuing a statewide emancipation in Missouri - but first he rescinded the order.

But everyone says that the Civil War was about slavery - you are out of your mind. Slavery was the race card par excellence of the 19th C. The abolitionists were an extremist group with not a terribly broad following. However, they made a lot of noise, and were funded by foreigners, giving them a voice outsized to their ranks.

Northerners used the religion of abolition to rouse support for their cause of "preserving the union" while southerners used the religion of slavery to rouse support for their cause of secession. In fact northerners were quite willing to let the south go for a while - until it realized the tax revenues it would lose, and the crumbling prospect of Manifest Destiny.

Yes heated editorials were written both for and against slavery, the southerners usually falling back to states' rights as the basis to repel northern interference, a position with which Lincoln largely agreed. But as Charles Adams noted in his grand book, the more dispassionate Europeans generally reviewed the conflict between north and south as one over tax policy - not about slavery.

The curious exception was John Stuart Mill, but Adams notes his uninformed understanding of the situation in America, and Mill never came to terms with the prospect of freeing 4 million people who did not have the education or standing to make their own ways in the world if freed overnight. Lincoln's solution was to ship the slaves back to Africa. But there is nothing like singing a few choruses of the Battle Hymn of the Republic to rile up a lot emotional blather and calls for war - and the slavery issue fit the bill for a get-down camp meeting full of fulsome self-righteousness.

Adams demonstrated that the critical issue, as expressed in contemporary editorials and political action, all centered around dominating and controlling the south for its tax revenues to both fund the government and to protect northern industries.

The brutality Lincoln used in demolishing the south made him a war criminal of the worst sort - the Adolf Hitler of the 19th century. In fact Hitler borrowed Lincoln's phrase, the final solution, in addressing the concerns brought about by Jews in Germany.

There is no doubt that slavery was a hot topic leading up to and during the war, but it was ultimately a dead end as an issue. The Confederate Constitution outlawed it, and required the states to pass enabling legislation to support it. The South was well on its way to ending slavery although it may have taken some generations to accomplish it.

On the other hand, the Soviet Lincoln would not wait to collect his tax revenues, and so launched the most brutal war in human history by terrorizing combatants as well as civilians - something which his owners required.

Reference

Charles Adams, When in the Course of Human Events: Arguing the Case for Southern Secession, Rowman and Littlefield, [city], 2000, 257pp

Copyright 2020 Tony Bonn. All rights reserved.

The Origins of Confederate Black Operations

We often associate the emergence of American black operations (black ops) with the CIA and its post war atrocities. However, the tradition is well documented from the Civil War with some interesting cases from the Confederate States of America involving biological warfare which brought war into its modern phase.

Edward Steers, though not a professional academic historian, has produced some of the best material on the assassination of Abraham Lincoln starting with his scholarly Blood on the Moon which we recommend for, if for no other reason, its debunking of the many ridiculous Lincoln legends associated with his assassination on April 14, 1865. If you still harbor any suspicions that Booth escaped or that Mary Surrat or Samuel Mudd was innocent, then please read Steers’ book.

When we say that the Civil War propelled war into its modern phase, we mean to say that the chivalrous ideals, even if acknowledged only in word, evaporated into smoke in the prosecution of this war. Steers documents how emancipation triggered a sequence of actions leading to covert terrorist activities against civilian populations.

The Confederates maintained two prison camps outside of Richmond whose conditions were deplorably inhumane, due in part to the South’s declining ability to feed itself. When Lincoln discovered from his generals that Richmond was lightly defended, he ordered them to undertake a raid against the camp at Belle Isle, south of the city, to liberate the suffering prisoners.

Colonel Dahlgren, operating under orders from Major General Benjamin Butler and his subordinate Brigadier General Isaac Wistar, led 500 men around the Confederate troops to execute a surprise raid against the prison. Unfortunately Dahlgren’s raid failed in an ambush costing the colonel his life. The Confederates discovered orders on him, in Dahlgren’s hand, whose mission included the killing of CSA president Jefferson Davis and his cabinet.

The CSA made much political hay of this including incensed outrage that anyone would include civilian leadership in such a despicable deed. The North under General Meade strongly denounced the orders in a bid to exculpate his command and president. Steers argues that Meade and Lincoln were certainly aware of the raid and more likely than not to have known about the assassination attempts on southern leadership.

This episode of warfare may have possibly signaled the next major act of aggression by the South which, under the operational direction of Luke Pryor Blackburn, planned a Yellow Fever infection of the populations of Norfolk, VA, New Bern, NC, and President Lincoln.

During the mid 19th century, medical science believed that Yellow Fever was highly contagious, with Blackburn regarded as one of its foremost authorities who was hailed for saving certain southern communities from Yellow Fever epidemics. Fortunately for the targeted victims, this “medical fact” turned out to be false, in much the same way as the farce about HIV causing AIDS.

When one epidemic broke out in Bermuda, Blackburn was dispatched there to assist in the quarantine efforts but also to gather infected garments to be sold in the above named localities in order to precipitate Yellow Fever outbreaks. Union troops were stationed in these areas, thus they were deemed suitable targets.

The trunks of clothing were sequestered until the time to unleash the menace was ordered from either Secretary of War Seddon or Secretary of State Judah. The plot was brought to light during the trial of Lincoln’s murderers and by a Canadian court case in which that nation’s neutrality had been violated by the operations of the CSA's secret service on Canadian soil. The trunks had been shipped through Nova Scotia but was outside Canadian jurisdiction at the time, resulting in a dismissed case.

The key man in both trials was Godfrey J Hyams who was the runner for the trunks who first appeared in the Lincoln trial. His testimony, according to Steers, has been dismissed as unreliable in connection with other Union witnesses who were discovered to be known perjurers during testimony. However, the Toronto case and subsequent correspondence from an Episcopal minister turned spy, Kensey John Stewart, corroborates his story. On December 12, 1864 Stewart notified Jefferson Davis in writing of the plot involving Blackburn. Furthermore, payments owed Hyams and others operating in Canada were specified in gold, a transaction requiring Davis’ explicit authorization.

Thus we see that the Southerners had envisaged, even if on bad medical advice, acts of mass terrorism involving the murder of civilians in an effort to win the war. However, the burning of Georgia and other parts of the South was not a gentleman’s war act either, so we do not claim that either side held the moral high ground.

But the more interesting revelation is that the Civil War was by no means confined to the battle field, a perception which prevails in certain quarters due to the well documented and published narratives of the campaigns and battles fought in the bloodiest American war. We find it interesting that in many ways the war brought the art into the modern age where rifled and automatic weapons gained prominence as did covert operations with spooks operating on Canadian soil for sanctuary. War would never be the same but always hell.

Reference

Blood on the Moon, Edward Steers

Copyright 2010-12 Tony Bonn. All rights reserved.