Creature From Jekyll Island by G. Edward

notes increased in volume by 214% per year, while the volume of all money, including bank notes and check-book money, rose by over 300% per year. In addition to the Confederate notes, each of the Southern states issued its own fiat money and, by the end of the war, the total of all notes was about a billion dollars. Within the four-year period, prices shot up by 9,100%. After Appomattox, of course, Confederate notes and bonds alike were totally worthless.4

1. Galbraith, p. 90.

2. See chapter ten. The Mandrake Mechanism.

3. See Paul and Lehrman, pp. 80-81; Groseclose, Money and Man, p. 193; Galbraith, pp. 93-94; Rothbard, Mystery, p. 222.

4. See Galbraith, p. 94. Also Paul and Lehrman, p. 81.

GREENBACKS AND OTHER CRIMES 389

As usual, the average citizen did not understand that the newly created money represented a hidden tax which he would soon have to pay in the form of higher prices. Voters in the Northern states certainly would not have tolerated an open and honest tax increase of that magnitude. Even in the South where the cause was

perceived as one of self defense, it is possible that they would not have done so had they known in advance the true dimension of the assessment. But especially in the North, because they did not understand the secret science of money, Americans not only paid the hidden tax but applauded Congress for creating it.

On June 25, 1863, exactly four months after the National Bank Act was signed into law, a confidential communique was sent from the Rothschild investment house in London to an associate banking firm in New York. It contained an amazingly frank and boastful summary:

The few who understand the system [bank loans earning interest and also serving as money] will either be so interested in its profits or so dependent upon its favors that there will be no opposition from that class while, on the other hand, the great body of people, mentally incapable of comprehending,... will bear its burdens without complaint.

LINCOLN'S CONCERN FOR THE FUTURE

Lincoln was privately apprehensive about the Bank Act, but loyalty to his Party and the need to maintain unity in time of war compelled him to withhold his veto. His personal view, however, was unequivocal. In a letter to William Elkins the following year he said:

The money power preys upon the nation in times of peace and conspires against it in times of adversity. It is more despotic than monarchy, m o r e insolent than autocracy, m o r e selfish than bureaucracy. I see in the near future a crisis approaching that unnerves me and causes me to tremble for the safety of my country.

Corporations have been enthroned, an era of corruption will follow, and the money power of the country will endeavor to prolong its reign by working upon the prejudices of the people, until the wealth is aggregated in a few hands, and the republic destroyed.

1 • Quoted by Owen, pp. 99-100.

2- A letter to William F. Elkins, November 21, 1864. Archer H. Shaw, ed., The Lincoln Encyclopedia: The Spoken and Written Words of A. Lincoln (New York: Macmillan Co., 1950), p. 40.

390 THE CREATURE FROM JEKYLL ISLAND

In reviewing Lincoln's role throughout this painful chapter of history, it is impossible not to feel ambivalence. On the one hand, he declared war without Congress, suspended the writ of habeas corpus, and issued the Emancipation Proclamation, not as an administrative executive carrying out the wishes of Congress, but as the Commander-in-Chief of the armed forces. Furthermore, the Proclamation was not issued out of humanitarian motives, as popular history portrays, but as a maneuver to generate popular support for the war. By participating in the issuance of the greenbacks, he violated one of the most clearly written and important sections of the Constitution. And by failing to veto the National Bank Act, he acquiesced in the delivery of the American people back into the hands of the international Cabal, an act which was similar in many ways to the forcible return of captured runaway slaves.

On the positive side, there is no question of Lincoln's patriotism. His concern was in preserving the Union, not the Constitution, and his refusal to let the European powers split America into a cluster of warring nation-states was certainly wise. Lincoln believed that he had to violate part of the Constitution in order to save the whole. But that is dangerous reasoning. It can be used in almost any national crisis as the excuse for the expansion of totalitarian power. There is no reason to believe that the only way to save the Union was to scrap the Constitution. In fact, if the Constitution had been meticulously observed from the very beginning, the Southern minority could never have been legally plundered by the Northern majority and there likely would have been, no movement for secession in the first place. And, even if there had been, a strict reading of the Constitution at that point could have led the way to an honorable and peaceful settlement of differences.

The result would have been, not only the preservation of the Union without war, but Americans would be enjoying far less government intervention in their daily lives today.

WITH MALICE TOWARD NONE

There is one point that is clearly on Lincoln's side. While his political compatriots were howling for economic vengeance against the South, the President stood firmly against it. 'With malice toward none' was more than a slogan with him, and he was willing to risk his political survival on that one issue. The reason he had GREENBACKS AND OTHER CRIMES 391

vetoed the Wade-Davis emancipation bill was because it would have applied a lien against Southern cotton at the end of the war to the benefit of New England textile manufactures. The cotton also would have been taken as security to pay off Southern debt which had been contracted before the war, thus providing the funds to buy back at face value all of the bonds which had been purchased at discount by Rothschild's agent, August Belmont. Such defiance of the financiers and speculators undoubtedly required great courage.

But the issue ran deeper than that. Lincoln had offered a general amnesty to any citizen in the South who would agree to take a loyalty oath to the Union. When ten per cent of the voters had taken such an oath, he proposed that they could then elect Congressmen, Senators, and a state government which would be recognized as part of the Union once again. The Republicans, on the other hand, had incorporated into the Wade-Davis bill the provision that each seceded state was to be treated like a conquered country. Political representation was to be denied until fifty-one per cent, not ten per cent, had taken an oath. Former slaves were given the right to vote—