Was the Confederacy a Tool of International Finance?
The Secession-War arose on the issue of whether the Southern states, comprising a unit based on an aristocratic-traditional life-feeling, with an economic basis of muscle-energy, could secede from the union, which had been captured by the Yankee element. The Yankee territory was organized on a financial -industrial basis, with an economic basis of machine-energy…
…The anti-financial heroic attitude of the South gave it an immense advantage in the field overt the Yankee armies, who were inoculated with a war propaganda of jealousy of the superior life in the South. The war was a contest – not last in Western history – between quality and quantity. …
This war had many lessons for Europe… It showed the enormous military potentiality in America, it showed the Yankee character, which was thenceforth to be the American spirit, it showed the enormous will-to-power of the New York plutocracy – it showed, in short, that a base for a world-power had been laid here. Francis Parker Yockey, Imperium.[i]
There is a dichotomy within the Right, and particularly the American Right (for obvious reasons) in regard to the Confederate Sates of America (CSA). When much of the Right was defined by the Ku Klux Klan, segregation, and states’ rights there was a natural tendency to defend the Southern heritage in the name of white supremacy or race purity. There is of course still a significant element of opinion within the Right that glorifies the Confederacy, and even outside America there are many who honour the “Stars and Bars” as a flag of “white rebellion” worldwide.
There are however other significant factions within the Right who see the Confederacy as a tool of international finance, and in particular of the Rothschilds, and consider Lincoln as the heroic fighter against plutocracy.
This essay reconsiders the Confederacy with a focus on the CSA’s methods of finance, and contends that the CSA was not only not in the thrall of international finance, but that its banking system was designed to break free of plutocracy in the process of seeking to defend its unique and European traditional way of life.
An alleged quote from Bismarck is often cited by conspiracy theorists in regard to the American Civil War having been instigated by Rothschild interests, which supposedly controlled the CSA. Dr Henry Makow[ii], for example, refers to passages from a book published in 1926[iii] by Czarist émigré Count Cherep-Spiridovitch in this regard:
Cherep-Spiridovitch cites an interview with the German chancellor Otto von Bismarck in 1876. Bismarck explained that the Rothschilds who controlled Europe were afraid the United States would become independent of them if it remained one nation.
“They foresaw tremendous booty if they could substitute two feeble democracies indebted to the Jewish financiers for the vigorous republic confident and self providing. Therefore they started their emissaries in order to exploit the question of slavery and thus to dig an abyss between the two parts of the republic.”
Dr Makow continues:
The Illuminati used the Masonic “Knights of the Golden Circle” formed in 1854 by George W. L. Bickley, to spread racial tension by making slavery an issue. Members included Lincoln assassin John Wilkes Booth, Confederate President Jefferson Davis, and his adviser Judah P. Benjamin, the Confederate Secretary of War, a Rothschild agent.
The plan was to divide the United Sates between England controlled by Lionel Rothschild and France, controlled by James Rothschild. France was to take over the whole South while Canada annexed the defeated North. In 1863 France and Spain invaded Mexico with 30,000 troops. The embattled Confederate States actually offered Louisiana and Texas to France in exchange for assistance.
Britain and France were ready to snuff out the young republic but were deterred by Russia, the only European power not in the Rothschild’s thrall. Czar Alexander II sent his fleets to New York and San Francisco and declared that an attack on Lincoln would be an attack on Russia.
Meanwhile Lincoln created “greenback” dollars to finance the war and escape indebtedness to the foreign financiers. “They understood at once that the United States would escape their grip,” Bismarck said. “The death of Lincoln was resolved upon. Nothing is easier than to find a fanatic to strike.”
This passage from Dr Makow succinctly describes the position of many conspiracy theorists and others on the Right in regard to the Confederacy and the American War of Secession. How reliable this reference to Bismarck is in regard to the War of Secession should be considered questionable, like the “Hazard Circular” which is cited just as often by conspiracy theorists, but never seems to have a reference beyond vaguely stating that it was carried in the London Times in 1865.[iv]
JUDAH P BENJAMIN: THE ANTI-SEMITE’S BUGBEAR
The CSA’s alleged subservience to Rothschild interests centres around Judah P Benjamin, who became Confederate Secretary of State, and is generally termed by friend and foe alike as the “brains of the Confederacy.”[v] That he was Jewish places him beyond the pale of redemption or at least makes him highly suspect for many Rightists. However, such knee-jerk “anti-Semitism” is not helpful in arriving at an objective, accurate opinion in regard to the position of the South.
There seems little reason to doubt Benjamin’s loyalty to the Confederacy, which should not be read as loyalty to a Rothschild-controlled South. Benjamin became a Senator in 1853, and was noted for his eloquent and sharp-witted defence of Southern interests, becoming a friend of Jefferson Davis in that first year. He resigned his Senate seat in 1861 when Louisiana seceded. That year he was appointed by Davis to be the first Attorney General of the Confederacy because of his noted abilities as a lawyer and an orator, and soon after became Secretary of War, and then Secretary of State of the CSA in 1862. With the defeat of the Confederacy, although Benjamin reached the safety of Britain after a hazardous escape, he continued to provide generous financial help to friends in the South; in particular the Davis family during the brutal Reconstruction era.
Often Benjamin is called not only a “Rothschild agent,” but also a “Rothschild relative.” These claims are made as stand alone allegations and are not accompanied by documentation. Benjamin’s association with Rothschild agencies is said to have started early in his career. The LaRouche sponsored “Modern History Project,” for example, states:
Judah P Benjamin (1811-84) of the law firm of Slidell, Benjamin and Conrad in Louisiana was a Rothschild agent who became Secretary of State for the Confederacy in 1862. His law partner John Slidell (August Belmont’s[vi] wife’s uncle) was the Confederate envoy to France. Slidell’s daughter was married to Baron Frederick d’Erlanger in Frankfurt who was related to the Rothschilds and acted on their behalf. Slidell was the representative of the South who borrowed money from the d’Erlangers to finance the Confederacy.[vii]
The conspiracy theorist Commander William Guy Carr, although quite an interesting writer in general, nonetheless writes without evidence or references that, “Judah P Benjamin, a Rothschild relative, was appointed as their professional strategist in America.”[viii] There does not appear to be any evidence of, or reason for believing, that Benjamin was a “relative of the Rothschilds.”
Benjamin was raised in an Orthodox family but his parents rebelled against Orthodoxy and were early members of the Reform movement of Judaism.[ix] His mother Rebecca received the ire of Orthodox Jews for her trading on Saturday.[x] Into adulthood Judah attended synagogue on few occasions, although he remained a firm believer in immortality and a personal Divinity.[xi] According to his first biographer, Pierce Butler, Benjamin “ceased to hold any active communion with Judaism.”[xii] He married a Catholic.[xiii] Naturally, many would object that like the marronos in Spain, he was attempting to beguile the Southerners. However, Benjamin made no efforts to conceal his Jewish identity, such as by changing his obviously Jewish name – as was the case with the Rothschilds’ Northern agent August Belmont.[xiv].
What is of particular interest is that in 1863, upon being asked for ideas on a national Seal for the CSA, Benjamin suggested “a cavalier” based on the equestrian statue of Washington in Capitol Square at Richmond. He stated of this:
It would do just honor to our people. The cavalier or knight is typical of chivalry, bravery, generosity, humanity, and other knightly virtues. Cavalier is synonymous with gentleman in nearly all of the modern languages… the word is eminently suggestive of the origin of Southern society as used in contradistinction to Puritan. The Southerners remain what their ancestors were, gentlemen.[xv]
It is notable that Benjamin emphasized a dichotomy between the North which he identified with Puritanism, and the Southerner, which he identified with the Cavalier; an allusion to the English Civil War where Cromwell’s Puritan victory meant the defeat of the traditional European moral and cultural order of England and the epochal victory of Money. Benjamin hence saw the conflict as one of opposing ethics and cultures and fought as an enemy of those values which are generally regarded as being of “Jewish” inspiration.[xvi]
What can be summarized in regard to Judah P Benjamin is that:
- He was not a Talmudic Jew. In fact both he and his parents were in rebellion against Orthodox Judaism.
- There is no reason to believe he was a “Rothschild relative.” He was born in humble circumstances in the West Indies.
- There is no evidence to believe he was a “Rothschild agent.”
- The only personal links between Benjamin and banking interests were tenuously connected through law partner and future Confederate representative Slidell, whose mission in London for the Confederacy failed.
- Of particular significance, Benjamin recognized the dichotomy between the Puritan ethos and the chivalric-cavalier, identifying the South with the ethos of Old Europe before the Puritan revolts that resulted in the ascendancy of Money.
If the British policy of the period was Rothschild policy, then Rothschild policy was not pro-Confederacy. Despite Benjamin’s efforts, diplomatic recognition by Britain was never obtained, and as early as 1863 Benjamin closed the CSA mission to England, and evicted the remaining British consular agents from the South.[xvii] This latter expulsion was at the direct instigation of Benjamin when he called a Cabinet meeting while Davis was en route to Tennessee, an action which nonetheless brought prompt agreement from Davis.[xviii] Efforts to secure French recognition were also unsuccessful, again in contradiction to the oft-repeated claim that France and England, under the thrall of the Rothschild dynasty, were only thwarted from military intervene in favour of the Confederacy because of a threat from the Czar to come into the conflict in support of Lincoln, one primary conspiratorial theory being that the Czar and Lincoln stood together in defiance of the Rothschilds and their Confederate underlings.[xix] Indeed, in a breach of supposed British neutrality, by 1863 around 75,000 Irishmen had volunteered to fight with the North, as did Germans and other foreign recruits.[xx] Hence, if it is generally concurred that the Rothschild banking dynasty had a decisive influence over Britain, and other European states, then what is to be made of the willingness of the rulers of those states to allow their citizens to volunteer for the Union army, and for Benjamin having personally instigated an end to attempts to foster diplomatic relations with Britain?
In summary, with regard to the Confederate relationship with the Money-dominated European powers:
- Neither Britain nor Continental Europe extended diplomatic recognition to the CSA, despite the vigorous efforts of Confederate emissaries.
- Both Britain and the German states allowed their nationals to volunteer for the Union army, in breach of neutrality.
- The Confederacy, at the direct instigation of Benjamin, broke off diplomatic efforts with Britain as early as 1863.
RELATIONS WITH INTERNATIONAL FINANCE
The primary allegation in regard to “Rothschild” (sic) funding of the Confederacy is that an important loan was secured from the Erlanger bank in Paris. This financial arrangement was nothing but Shylockracy and was not favourable to the Confederacy. From a conspiratorial viewpoint, much is made of CSA emissary and Benjamin’s former law partner John Sliddell’s daughter being engaged to Baron Erlanger; Slidell’s niece being married to August Belmont, the Rothschild representative to the Northern States.[xxi] Despite the family connections, the Erlangers were not about to do the Confederacy any favors. Benjamin personally negotiated the $2.5 million loan with Baron Emile Erlanger, in Richmond, Virginia. He hoped that involvement with the banking house of Erlanger and Cie, and with the Erlanger family, who were close friends and advisors to France’s Emperor Louis Napoleon, would succeed in establishing diplomatic relations,[xxii] which had failed to make any headway with Britain. The original plan had been for a loan of $25 million to be repaid with bonds and the sale of cotton, with the Erlangers reaping a huge profit of 23% commission and 8% for handling the bonds.[xxiii]
It should be noted that Benjamin considered the terms “usurious,” but the Confederacy had no choice. These are the typical actions of rapacious bankers out for sheer profit; not the actions of cunning strategists conspiring with a fellow Jew to destroy the USA by backing the South and taking over the entire nation. Extensive face-to-face negotiations by Benjamin reduced the rate from 8% to 7%. Speculators and investors in Europe bought up the bonds and the Erlangers made a quick profit.[xxiv]
What can be deduced from this is that:
- The most significant loan obtained by the Confederacy, that of the Erlangers, was only gained through tough negotiation by Benjamin, who nonetheless regarded the terms as “usurious.”
- The family connections of Slidell made no difference in gaining favourable terms.
- The Erlangers were out for quick and exorbitant profits as a business proposition, and were obviously not involved in any plot to promote the Confederacy against the North as part of any long-term strategic plan.
The seminal study on funding and diplomacy during the American Civil War is Jay Sexton’s[xxv] Debtor Diplomacy.[xxvi] Sexton does not try to obfuscate the role of international finance in politics. He states that the desire of the American states to gain European capital influenced foreign policy, and that the primary influence was that of Britain, and this influence was particularly evident during the Civil War. “Furthermore, the financial needs of the United State (and the Confederacy) imparted significant political power to an elite group of London-based financiers who became intimately involved in American foreign relations during this period,”[xxvii] which Sexton describes as: “The unprecedented power of an elite group of international financiers.”[xxviii]
The mid-nineteenth century witnessed the great British-based banking houses reach the pinnacle of their power and influence in American affairs. Led by Baring Brothers, the Rothschilds, and George Peabody and Company (the predecessor to the house of J P Morgan), banks in the City of London were the architects of nearly every facet of the Atlantic economy. In addition to negotiating loans and marketing American securities abroad, banks such as the Barings and Rothschilds underwrote transatlantic trade, provided insurance, exchanged currencies, and compiled influential market reports. During the westward flow of capital across the Atlantic, however, remained the central function of the leasing transatlantic banks. Ninety percent of the United States’ foreign indebtness in 1861 was of British origin.[xxix]
The financial and commercial power of these banks “extended to them significant political and diplomatic influence on both sides of the Atlantic,” adds Sexton, and he alludes to the poem “Don Juan” by Lord Bryon, where it is stated that the Barings and the Rothschilds are the “true lords of Europe.” [xxx]
In the USA these bankers also exercised considerable influence through the connections of their emissaries; in particular August Belmont, the Rothschilds’ representative based in New York; and Thomas Ward and Daniel Webster acting for Barings, in Massachusetts, whom Sexton describes as “highly influential politicians and lobbyists.”[xxxi] “These transnational banks established a network of high finance and high politics that connected Britain and the United State and merged international finance with international relations.”[xxxii]
Hence, Sexton has confirmed what so-called “conspiracy theorists” are often scoffed at for by academe and media; that there was – and is – an international elite of bankers who weld political power through their use of money and trade. This is also how another eminent historian, Dr Carroll Quigley of Harvard, described these same international bankers when he wrote that they are, “devoted to secrecy and the secret use of financial influence on political life.”[xxxiii] Quigley described their aim as being:
[T]o form a single financial system on an international scale which manipulated the quantity and flow of money so that they were able to influence, if not control, governments on one side and industries on the other. The men who did this aspired to establish dynasties of international bankers and were at least as successful at this as were many of the dynastic political rulers.[xxxiv]
However, there are variables that are often misinterpreted or overlooked,[xxxv] frequently colored by a wish to see conspiracies behind anything where there is a Jew such as Benjamin, around which an intricate, and spurious, conspiracy theory can be woven.
What can be said is that CSA emissaries secured Enfield rifles from the London Armoury, which provided arms for both North and South throughout the Civil War;[xxxvi] the result of non-partisan profit motives, rather than plutocratic conspiracies to favor the South.
What can also be said is that one bank that was sympathetic to the Confederacy – on principle – was that of Fraser, Trenholm and Company, Liverpool, under the directorship of Charles Prioleau, which became the Confederacy’s “unofficial bank.” This hardly amounts to collusion between international finance and the Confederacy, let along with the Rothschilds. As Sexton observes, “the bank was far from a financial powerhouse by most estimations,” but by 1860 had become a leading cotton importer.[xxxvii]
Charles Prioleau was a South Carolinian, “who had long attempted to free the South from, as he viewed it, the economic hegemony of the North.”[xxxviii] Hence the motivation of the firm, headed by a Southerner, was not only one of Confederate sympathies but that the primary individual concerned, Prioleau, aimed as a matter of principle to assist the South in opposing the plutocratic interests centred in the North. The company was responsible for arranging for the ships that ran the Northern blockade, and its own ships even flew the Confederate Flag. In 1861 CSA President Jefferson Davis authorised the use of the bank as the Confederacy’s depository.[xxxix] However, the agency of this relatively modest bank could not compensate for the lack of credit from international finance, and already by 1862 the CSA’s account with Fraser, Trenholm had been severely overdrafted.
Despite the disruption of the cotton trade to England as the result of war what is remarkable is the lack of support that Britain showed the Confederacy, despite turning a blind eye to the supply of ships from Britain. What the international financiers of The City of London, led by the Rothschilds, sought by 1862 was a quick diplomatic solution to the war. However, Sexton emphasizes that:
It is important to note that the Rothschilds, whose holdings of Southern states securities were minimal and were only tangentially involved in the cotton trade, did not financially nor politically support the Confederacy. Rothschild records clearly reveal the firm’s disdain for slavery. Nor, despite the myth, did the bank loan money to the Confederacy during the war.[xl]
Sexton states in a footnote in regard to the “myth” of Rothschild funding of the Confederacy that there is only one instance when the bank brokered (as distinct from purchased) a sale of Confederate bonds for only $6,000 on behalf of Jospeh Deynood in 1864. “This sole instance pales in comparison to the hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of Union bonds that the bank brokered in the same period.”[xli]
What can be stated from the seminal work of Professor Sexton is that:
- There was indeed a powerful coterie of international bankers headed by the Rothschilds.
- These interests did not provide any significant assistance to the Confederacy.
- The Confederacy was starved of credit from Europe and Britain.
- The only bank that was sympathetic and helpful to the CSA was Liverpool’s Fraser, Trenholm and Co., whose director Charles Prioleau was a patriotic Southerner who wished to see the South free of Northern-based plutocracy.
Lincoln’s hero status among sections of the Right and monetary reformers rests in large measure on his issue of the famous Greenbacks to bypass the debt-finance system of the international bankers. From this a theory proceeds that this means the Union was in a fight against international finance, which was using the Confederacy to destroy the USA and thereafter impose its financial dictatorship.
Hence in describing Lincoln as fighting the “British-backed New York banking system” LaRouche supporter Rochelle Ascher states of Lincoln that he brought banking under control and issued $450 million state created Greenbacks to fund the war.[xlii]
As has been shown above, the assumptions both in regard to Judah P Benjamin and the oft-claimed Rothschild support for the Confederacy, are fallacious. Did the Confederacy then have alternative systems of finance that also sought – like Lincoln – to bypass the international financial system; especially given that the South, unlike the North, was cut off from, rather than subsidised by, the international bankers?
Donations and taxes were insufficient for funding the war effort, as were taxes on imports and exports, considering that trade was greatly reduced. Taxation revenue, tax by a central government being anathema to the concept of states’ rights that formed the basis of the Confederacy, amounted to only 8.2% of the CSA’s revenue.[xliii] Even bond issues were not successful, given the unknown fortunes of war.
The major source of finance was the Government issue of currency. This took the form of the Graybacks. While an examination of the efficacy of government currency issue is not the subject of this essay, what should be noted is that price-inflation was caused in significant part by large-scale counterfeiting of Graybacks from the North, and was also affected greatly according to public confidence or loss of confidence according to the course of the war. Weidenmier states:
In the event of a Confederate defeat, for example, people forecasted higher government spending and money growth in the future and bid up prices immediately. Moreover, mounting Confederate defeats also drove up prices as people were unsure about the fate of the fledging nation. War news, a measure of fiscal confidence, was an important determinant of the Confederate price level and helps to explain the low correlation between the money stock and price level.[xliv]
The extent of the Northern counterfeiting of the Grayback, “posed a serious problem for the Confederacy.”
More money chasing the same number of goods created inflation, reducing the central government’s take from the inflation tax. The Confederacy was unable to curtail counterfeiting because they lacked the resources and equipment to produce high quality money. Counterfeiting was such a widespread problem that people sometimes joked that fake money was of higher quality than government issued currency.[xlv]
Weidenmier states: “It is probably safe to assume that bogus money makers had a large impact on the Confederate price level. The actions of bogus money makers fuelled the Confederate inflation via a large increase in the money stock.”[xlvi]
Therefore the problems encountered by the Confederate economy are not a true reflection of the efficacy of state currency and credit creation, which was successfully utilised on many occasions elsewhere.[xlvii] However, the purpose of this essay is to show that the Confederacy was not only not a lackey of international finance, but that the CSA created its own system of finance to circumvent the plutocrats.
The loans floated in Europe, that of cotton bonds, and “junk bonds” through a Dutch firm, accounted for less than 1% of the war expenditure. The cotton bonds could be redeemed for cotton within the South. As noted above, the Rothschilds were not significantly involved in the cotton trade.
State currency amounted to 60% of the CSA revenue during the war.[xlviii] Wiedenmier states that the money issued by the CSA was interest-free:
…[N]on-interest-bearing money remained the predominant medium of exchange in the Southern Confederacy despite the existence of large quantities of interest-bearing money…. state and Confederate governments forced banks to accept both types of money through de facto legal restrictions.[xlix]
What can be said in summary is that:
- Judah P Benjamin was not a Rothschild agent any more than he was a “Rothschild relative.”
- The presence of a Jew in Government does not in itself offer sufficient proof that the Government is a tool of the Rothschilds or an international conspiracy. Indeed, some 10,000 Jews fought with distinction for the Confederacy.[l]
- The Confederacy failed in its extensive efforts to secure diplomatic recognition from Britain and the rest of Europe at a time when the Rothschilds and Barings were perceived to be “the true lords of Europe.”
- The only notable financial dealing with international finance was the $2.5 million loan secured from Erlanger, the conditions of which Benjamin regarded as usurious.
- The only financial firm that was helpful to the Confederacy was the Liverpool firm of Fraser, Trenholm and Company, directed by a Southerner.
- The Rothschilds specifically did not have any noticeable investments with the Southern states, or interests in cotton.
- Most CSA expenditure was based on non-interest bearing state currency.
As alluded to by Benjamin in his reference to “Puritans” and “Cavaliers” to explain the dichotomy between North and South, the Union represented industrial-capitalism, urbanisation, wage-slavery, money and business ethics. The Confederacy represented one of the final vestiges of European tradition: that of agrarian economy and rural society, and ethics based on honor and chivalry. This was a fight for contending values that is obfuscated by the issue of Slavery which has become the central focus in considering the meaning of the Civil War, just as “The Holocaust” has become the central focus obscuring all other facets of World War II, or the controversy of “Apartheid” that obscured the real forces and aims at work behind the destruction of Afrikaner rule in South Africa.
The American War of Secession was a “clash of civilizations.” North and South represented divergences that were bound to conflict, as the Southerner was an anachronism in the new industrial-capitalist world, just as the Afrikaner is an anachronism is the world of globalization. Slavery was used as the pretext for a moral crusade to destroy the Southerner and his unique civilization; Apartheid was used for the same reasons against the Boer. The antagonists were similar in both situations, and the victors were in both instances were the plutocrats.
A number of historians have remarked upon what they have called the “anti-bourgeois” spirit of the South. The “ruling class” or what we might call the “culture-bearing stratum” possessed an ethos that was an “aristocratic, antibourgeois spirit with values and mores emphasizing family and status, a strong code of honor, and aspirations to luxury, ease, and accomplishment [that] set it apart from the mainstream of capitalist development.”[li] Eugene Genovese has stated that the divide between the North and South was so wide culturally that a “final struggle [was] so probable that we may safely call it inevitable.”[lii]
Such was the consciousness of the Southerners in regard to their civilization as a bastion of honor and tradition that they were acutely aware of the differences they confronted to the North:
Travelling through the South in 1861, London Times correspondent William Howard Russell found this “conflict of civilizations” to be a pervasive theme. “The tone in which [Southerners] alluded to the whole of the Northern people indicated the clear conviction that trade, commerce, the pursuit of gain, manufacture, and the base mechanical arts, had so degraded the whole race” that Southerners wished to eschew all association with them. Russell continued: “There is a degree of something like ferocity in the Southern mind [especially] toward New England which exceeds belief.” A South Carolinian told Russell: “We are an agricultural people, pursuing our own system, and working out our own destiny, breeding up women and men with some other purpose than to make them vulgar, fanatical, cheating Yankees.” Former US Senator Louis Wigfall of Texas said to Russell:
We are a peculiar people, sir! … We are an agricultural people…. We have no cities – we don’t want them…. We want no manufactures: we desire no trading, no mechanical or manufacturing classes…. As long as we have our rice, our sugar, our tobacco, and our cotton, we can command wealth to purchase all we want…. But with the Yankees we will never trade – never. Not one pound of cotton shall ever go from the South to their accursed cities.[liii]
In 1861 Charles Colcock Jones Jr[liv] stated of this deep cultural dichotomy:
In this country have arisen two races[lv]which, although claiming a common parentage, have been so entirely separated by climate, by morals, by religion, and by estimates so totally opposite to all that constitutes honor, truth, and manliness, that they cannot longer exist under the same government.[lvi]
In the South then it might be found that the repository for a genuine “American culture” was developing that was one of the few and final European cultural upsurges against the cycle of Western decadence and death about which Oswald Spengler warned. From the above statements can be discerned a cultural vitality that was in revolt against the spirit of decay manifested by the North with its City and Money values.[lix] It is such a sentiment that caused the present-day Southern scholar Dr Clyde Wilson to state of the Confederate flag at a time of the offensive to ban the flag from public display:
But why it really gets so much attention (and will continue to do so) is this: it is the most potent symbol in the world today of brave resistance to authoritarian government. That is why it was unfurled by the Eastern Europeans a few years ago when they were liberated. That is why it is hated by every New World Order flunky in the universe. That is why it is now banned from the public space of the world, though it appeared with honor as an American symbol until very recently.[lx]
[i] Francis Parker Yockey, Imperium (California: Noontide Press, 1962), 460-461.
[ii] Dr Henry Makow, “Why the Bankers love the Left,” December 30, 2007. http://www.rense.com/general79/amake.htm
[iii] Maj. Gen. Count Cherep-Spiridovitch, The Secret World Government (New York: the Anti-Bolshevist Publishing Association, 1926), 180.
[iv] The “Hazard Circular” is said to have been a document issued in 1862 among bankers and their political dupes in regard to the situation in America. That it has been referenced by reliable researchers such as Gertrude Coogan (Money Creators, Chicago, 1935, 212) makes it no more reliable on that account, but is yet another example of how a myth can take on a life of its own. If however any reader can provide the exact date and page number of the Times in which the Hazard Circular is said to have been published, it would be a valuable document.
[v] “The Brains of the Confederacy,” Jewish-American History Foundation, http://www.jewish-history.com/civilwar/judahpb.html
[vi] August Belmont was Rothschild emissary for the Northern states.
[vii] The Modern History Project, Chapter 2.1 “The Bank of the US.” http://www.modernhistoryproject.org/mhp/ArticleDisplay.php?Article=FinalWarn02-1
The claim that Slidell arranged the Erlanger loan is incorrect and will be dealt with below.
[viii] William Guy Carr, Pawns in the Game (California: Angriff Press, n.d.) 53.
[ix] Robert Douthat Meade and William C Davis, Judah P Benjamin: Confederate Statesman (Louisiana State University Press, 2001), 17.
[x] Ibid., 18.
[xi] Robert Douthat Meade and William C Davis, op.cit., 285.
[xii] Robert N Rosen, The Jewish Confederates (South Carolina: University of South Carolina Press, 2000), 59.
[xiii] Ibid., 13.
[xiv] August Belmont was born August Shoenberg in Rhenish Prussia. He joined the Rothschild bank at Frankfurt am Main at the age of 14, and opened an office in Wall Street , New York in 1837. “August Belmont,” Britannica Online Encyclopaedia, http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/60004/August-Belmont
[xv] Robert Douthat Meade and William C Davis, op.cit., 270.
[xvi] See: Werner Sombart, The Jews and Modern Capitalism (New Brunswick: Transaction Books, 1982). Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (London, Boston: Unwin Hyman, 1930). http://xroads.virginia.edu/~HYPER/WEBER/toc.html
[xvii] Albert N Rosen, op.cit., 294.
[xix] Maj. Gen. Count Cherep-Spiridovich, op.cit., 171-172.
[xx] Robert Douthat Meade and William C Davis, op.cit., 296.
[xxi] Robert N Rosen, op.cit., 79.
[xxv] Oxford University Lecturer in American History.
[xxvi] Jay Sexton, Debtor Finance: Finance and American Foreign Relations in the Civil War Era 1837-1873 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005).
[xxvii] Ibid., 1.
[xxviii] Ibid., 12.
[xxxi] Ibid., 13.
[xxxiii] Carroll Quigley, Tragedy and Hope: A History of the World in Our Time (New York: MacMillan Co., 1966), 52.
[xxxiv] Ibid., p. 51.
[xxxv] Spurious interpretations of Quigley et al have also led, for example, to another conspiracy theory that states that the real wire-pullers are the British Establishment, including the British Monarchy. Among the primary theorists for this are those of the LaRouche movement for example. For a refutation of this see: K R Bolton, “Don’t Blame the Brits: Is there an ‘Anglophile’ Conspiracy Seeking World Domination?,” Foreign Policy Journal, August 8, 2010, http://www.foreignpolicyjournal.com/2010/08/08/dont-blame-the-brits/
Sexton himself also alludes to this “Anglophile conspiracy” interpretation even among some mainstream scholars, stating: “Finally, it should be explicitly stated that in no way does this work advance the argument that the United States, through its debts to British capitalists, was in some way incorporated into an ‘informal’ British empire.” Sexton, op.cit., 18
[xxxvi] Jay Sexton, op.cit., 142.
[xxxvii] Ibid., 144.
[xl] Ibid., 151. Sexton’s references to Rothschild disdain for slavery as: N M Rothschild and Sons to [August] Belmont, 7 May, 9 July 1861, Rothschild Archive, London.
[xli] Ibid., 151; footnote 44.
[xlii] Rochelle Ascher, “The Lessons of Abraham Lincoln,” American Almanac, 1992, http://american_almanac.tripod.com/ascher1.htm
[xliii] Marc Weidenmier, Money and Finance in the Confederate State of America, E H Net, http://eh.net/encyclopedia/article/weidenmier.finance.confederacy.us
[xlvii] For example, the First New Zealand Labour Government in 1935 funded its iconic State Housing project with 1% state credit, thereby with this one measure reducing 75% of the unemployment in the midst of the World Depression.
[l] Just as Jews fought with distinction for Germany during World War I, and for the most part German-Jews during the Weimer period were not only anti-Marxist but anti-Zionist, German patriots. See: K R Bolton, Nazism? An Answer to the Smear-Mongers (Paraparaumu, New Zealand: Spectrum Press, 2005), 10-12. Of course a comeback could be that the 10,000 Jewish Confederates fought as agents of the international Jewish conspiracy; however, I am only concerned with reality.
[li] Charles Grier Sellers, “The Travail of Slavery,” Sellers (ed.), The Southerner as American (Chapel Hill: Univ. of North Carolina Press, 1960) 40.
[lii] Eugene D Genovese, The World the Slaveholders Made (New York: Pantheon, 1969), 33.
[liii] William Howard Russell, My Diary North and South, ed. Fletcher Pratt (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1954), 99.
[liv] Southern scholar and mayor of Savannah, Georgia.
[lv] Northern and Southern.
[lvi] Robert Manson Myers, ed., Children of Pride: A True Story of Georgia and the Civil War (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1972), 648.
[lvii] Northern preacher and social reformer.
[lviii] John L. Thomas, ed., Slavery Attacked: The Abolitionist Crusade (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1965), 149.
[lix] Oswald Spengler, The Decline of The West (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1971).
[lx] Clyde Wilson, “The Universal Symbol of the Spirit of Liberty,” LewRockwell.com September 14, 2000, http://www.lewrockwell.com/orig/wilson1.html