Abraham Lincoln

Photograph of Abraham Lincoln by Alexander Gardner, taken on November 8, 1863, eleven days before his famed Gettysburg Address

The archetype of America’s emergent Christhood through a path of individualism, Abraham Lincoln, was born in humble surroundings in a log cabin in the backwoods of Kentucky. As president he fought to preserve the Union. His secondary goal was to free the Negro slaves, although he said he would not free them at the expense of the Union. He was opposed by business and financial interests in both the North and South.

With his assassination the balance of power shifted from “we the people” to a power elite that has controlled the higher levels of government, the economy and our cultural life ever since. As a result, the Union for which Lincoln gave his life has been steadily subverted in an ongoing revolution that has nearly destroyed the delicate architecture of the American republic with its limited powers, checks and balances, and individual sovereignty. Concurrently, the people of America have become progressively disenfranchised.

The Civil War

The history of the Civil War (1861–65) is complex. Lincoln was opposed not only by the Confederacy but also by Northerners who wanted to trade with the South. Lincoln’s blockade of Southern ports hurt Northern moneyed interests who had been making it rich off the war. A coalition of speculators, financiers and a group of congressmen known as the Radical Republicans determined to do anything they could to restore trade—and thus their profits. Lincoln’s blockade was also slowly strangling the South. And so, in this matter the Northern bankers had a common interest with Southern Confederate leaders, businessmen and bankers.

Lincoln opposed the financial powers in other ways as well. At the beginning of the war, Lincoln tried to borrow money from national and international bankers to finance the Union Army. According to one source, they wanted to charge him 24 to 36 percent interest. Rather than accept the bankers’ terms, he decided to print paper money—greenbacks—which became legal tender. Had Lincoln borrowed money at those usurious rates, the bankers would have essentially owned the United States government at the close of the war.

Next, the bankers proposed a national banking system which would allow them to issue bank notes backed by U.S. government bonds. These notes would be just short of legal tender since the law said that they could be used in payment for all debts except duties on imports. The National Bank Act which incorporated their plan would allow expansion of the money supply through a fractional reserve system: banks could lend out more money than they had on deposit.

After heavy lobbying by bankers led by Jay and Henry Cooke, the act was passed in 1863 and it resulted in a surge of inflation. Furthermore, as economist Murray Rothbard writes, it also “paved the way for the Federal Reserve System by instituting a quasi-central banking type of monetary system.”

An undocumented source says that during his second term in office Lincoln planned to repeal the National Bank Act or restrict the powers it had granted bankers. Had Lincoln repealed this privilege, banks would have lost a huge money-making opportunity.

Edwin Stanton, Lincoln’s Secretary of War, one of the conspirators in the assassination plot

The assassination plot

In their book The Lincoln Conspiracy, David Balsiger and Charles E. Sellier, Jr., demonstrate that bankers and politicians North and South plotted to eliminate Lincoln. The authors worked from the missing pages of John Wilkes Booth’s diary and recently uncovered letters and documents to show that the plot against Lincoln included not only the frustrated racist, John Wilkes Booth, but also Edwin Stanton, Lincoln’s Secretary of War, who coveted the presidency, and greedy bankers who wanted Lincoln out of their way.

Booth talked with financier Judah Benjamin, a Confederate cabinet minister who took him to meet the president of the Confederacy, Jefferson Davis. Davis arranged funds for Booth to conduct trade for the Confederacy and Benjamin arranged for him to meet with important Northern speculators, including Philadelphia financier Jay Cooke.

Cooke invited Booth to a meeting at Astor House in New York. There he met gold and cotton speculators, bankers and industrialists. Among them were Cooke’s brother Henry, political boss Thurlow Weed, cotton broker Samuel Noble and the Radical Republican senator Zachariah Chandler.

Balsiger and Sellier point out that for Booth this was a curious situation—“one of the top men in the Confederacy’s cabinet had sent him to meet the very bankers who financed Lincoln’s war.” Booth was dedicated to the victory of the Confederacy and could not understand why important figures from opposing camps were cooperating.

At the meeting Jay Cooke declared, “I will continue to have dealings with the Confederacy. Not out of fear of betrayal, but because, in peace and in war, a businessman must do business, whatever the stakes.” At the end of the meeting Cooke told Booth, “There are millions of dollars in profits to be made, and we’re being denied our share. We’ll be ruined if Lincoln’s policies are continued.”

The leaders of this alliance, both North and South, hired Booth to kidnap President Lincoln, write Balsiger and Sellier. After failing in six attempts, Booth became desperate and on the night of April 14, 1865, shot the president as he sat with Mrs. Lincoln in the balcony of Ford’s Theater.

The country has never been the same.

Aftermath

The Civil War had destroyed the power of the Southern landholding aristocracy and established the Northern industrial powers. “A new plutocracy emerged from the War and Reconstruction, masters of money who were no less self-conscious and no less powerful than the planter aristocracy of the Old South,” wrote historians Samuel Eliot Morison and Henry Steele Commager. “The war, which had gone far to flatten out class distinctions in the South, tended to accentuate class differences in the North.” This set the stage for the emergence of the Northern banking establishment as a national ruling class.

The era of political chaos which followed Lincoln’s assassination was to be instrumental in the rise of this power elite. Lincoln’s successor, Andrew Johnson, fought to carry out his lenient reconstruction plan. Echoing Lincoln’s sentiments he said, “If a State is to be nursed until it again gets strength, it must be nursed by its friends, not smothered by its enemies.”

Lincoln had promised to recognize governments of Southern states that would emancipate their slaves and pledge loyalty to the Constitution and the Union if they were backed by at least 10 percent of the number of voters in the 1860 presidential election. Johnson’s plan followed the same basic lines.

The Radical Republicans virulently opposed both plans. Over Johnson’s repeated vetoes, they passed their own more extreme reconstruction legislation. With fiery rhetoric they called for the punishment of the South in the name of morality and justice. But their real aim was to see that their own power remained unchallenged.

Johnson turned out to be as much of an obstacle to the Radicals as Lincoln had been. He declared himself the enemy of their goals of monopoly, centralization of power in a national government, and the unlimited exploitation by corporations of the country’s natural resources. “Wherever monopoly attains a foothold,” he said, “it is sure to be a source of anger, discord, and trouble.” As Professor Howard K. Beale writes, “For the future of industrial America, Johnson’s championship of public interest and the common man was far more dangerous than any Southern policy he might conceive.”

During his term Johnson took a firm stand against the attempts of big business to use the federal government to exploit unsettled Western lands. He opposed grants of public lands to railroads and favored reserving them for pioneer farmers. Of interest is his veto of two bills which would have permitted corporations to purchase public lands in Montana and thus monopolize the mineral and coal resources of the state for their own private gain.

The Radical Republicans counterattacked. They set out to strip the presidency of its power and render Congress omnipotent, even if it meant bypassing the Constitution and its system of checks and balances. In March of 1867, Congress passed three bills that were unconstitutional, one of them taking from the president his role as commander in chief.

When Johnson openly defied another of these laws by removing from office his secretary of war, Edwin Stanton, who had been plotting with the Radicals against him, they voted articles of impeachment against him and he missed being convicted by only one vote. After Johnson’s term was finished, a more compliant president was elected—Gen. Ulysses S. Grant—who allowed the Radicals to control the executive branch.

While Johnson was able to slow down the industrialists and protect the powers of the presidency, he could not stop them and the lawmakers they controlled from ushering in a new economic order and an age of big business. Following the Civil War, the robber barons—men such as Jay Gould, John D. Rockefeller, Cornelius Vanderbilt and John Jacob Astor—and other financiers and industrialists seized control of the institutions of the country through their unscrupulously gained wealth.

The example of Lincoln

The Goddess of Freedom has called us to follow in the footsteps of Lincoln:

Contemplate with me now yourself as an individualization of the flame of freedom. Think of yourself multiplied by the action of this body of the Lord. Then think of Abraham Lincoln as he stood alone in the White House, as he stood alone and withstood all of the rebellion of the fallen ones who sought to separate out of the Union and to defy all the fiery core of the Father-Mother God in the original thirteen—the mandala of initiation of Christ and his apostles.

Think how he had encountered already the international bankers, the Illuminati and those who sought to use the Civil War to take over America for their schemes of power and control. Think how he defied all of those who had their selfish interests. Think of how he stood for the flame of Mother. Think of how that president was willing to lay down his life for the love of the Mother and her children, and then ask yourself: “Can I not do the same? Can I do less? And if I will do the same, will not the same hosts of the LORD buoy up my soul in the light of victory?”

See also

President of the United States

For a detailed account of Lincoln’s life, including his embodiments as a pharaoh in ancient Egypt and as Charles Lindbergh, see Elizabeth Clare Prophet, 9 Cats, 9 Lives: Karma, Reincarnation & You.

Sources

Elizabeth Clare Prophet, “The Abdication of America’s Destiny,” Part 1, Pearls of Wisdom, vol. 31, no. 9, February 28, 1988.