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.

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.

See also

President of the United States

Sources

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