The stability of both America’s finances and her people in the early nineteenth century must have been a source of great irritation to the wealthy schemers of Europe’s secret societies, even then in the process of changing their focus from ecclesiastical control to debt manipulation.

   Russia was under the tyranny of the czar, who had steadfastly refused to create a central bank. Western Europe was financially drained following the French Revolution and the Napoleonic Wars. And since no loans meant no profits, European bankers looked to the Americas for new revenue.

   Following the War of 1812, also called the Second War for American Independence, the United States was in extremely enviable circumstances: It had defeated the British empire, and its borders with the less-populated countries of Mexico and Canada were secure.

   As previously noted, President Andrew Jackson had put an end to repeated attempts at creating a central bank, and by 1835 he had even paid off the national debt. The next year, he halted inflation caused by land speculation by ordering that public lands be sold only for gold or silver.

   The lure of America must have been irresistible. However, President James Madison in 1823 had warned off all European intervention and exploitation in the Americas by issuing the Monroe Doctrine. To thwart this policy, a slow and stealthy infiltration process by foreigners was needed, and it may have begun as far back as 1837, the year of Jackson’s retirement. In that year a German-born representative of the Rothschild banking empire arrived in the United States and changed his name from August Schoenberg to August Belmont. According to a sympathetic Rothschild biography, Belmont was actually dispatched to Cuba by Amshel Rothschild and his son but took it upon himself to go to New York instead. Me was even rumored to be an illegitimate Rothschild himself. Whatever the truth, Helmont was in daily correspondence with the Rothschilds and became their acknowledged representative in the U.S.

   With no apparent capital of his own, Belmont soon was buying up government bonds, and within a few short years had created one of the largest banking firms in the nation, August Belmont & Company. Because of his known ties to the family, the firm has always been considered by conspiracy researchers as a Rothschild enterprise.

   At the outbreak of the Mexican War in 1846, it was Belmont who bought the greater portion of U.S. government bonds. Thanks to his aggressive business tactics, the Rothschilds soon had investments in American industry, banks, railroads, federal and state bonds, tobacco, cotton, and, of course, gold. Belmont was instrumental in later financing both North and South during the Rebellion which began in 1861.

   From 1853 to 1857, due in part to substantial donations to the Democratic Party, Belmont represented the United States at the Hague, the seat of government for the Netherlands. He also insinuated himself into American society by marrying the daughter of the famous U.S. Naval Commodore Matthew Perry, hero of the Mexican War and Tokyo Bay. An avid equestrian, Belmont introduced Thoroughbred horse racing to the United States and served as president of the American Jockey Club.

   In 1849 Alphonse Rothschild traveled to New York to determine if the family should replace their agent Belmont with a permanent banking firm. Rothschild was impressed with the obvious opportunities in America and wrote to his brothers that a bank should be established, adding, "Without the slightest doubt, this is the cradle of a new civilization."

   Yet, despite the obvious opportunity, the Rothschilds apparently made the mistake of not making a major investment in the United States—at least not openly.

   "Had they established a bank in New York at this early stage in the nation’s growth, there can be little doubt that the wealth derived from that one source would have dwarfed, within a generation, all that they had amassed so far in Europe," wrote Rothschild biographer Derek Wilson. "It is difficult to understand why James and Lionel [Rothschild] ignored Alphonse’s powerful advocacy."

   It was indeed difficult to understand from a straightforward business viewpoint, but this decision might make eminently good sense when seen from the conspiratorial view of history.

   First there is the long-standing allegation that the Rothschilds, due to both anti-Semitism and suspicion of Europeans by Americans, decided to exercise their power through intermediaries such as Belmont, the Rockefellers, Morgans, and others. And there is now abundant evidence that the bankers of Europe were already conspiring to destroy the economically strong, but politically fragile, American union.

 Author Epperson reported that an authorized biography of the Rothschilds mentioned a London meeting where the "International Banking Syndicate" decided to pit the American North against the South in a "divide and conquer" strategy. Such a plan would provide the solvent U.S. federal government with an enemy that would require massive war expenditures and subsequent debt.

   And in the event of Southern independence,

"each state could withdraw from the confederation, re-establish its sovereign nature and set up its own central bank. The Southern states could then have a series of European-controlled banks, the Bank of Georgia, the Bank of South Carolina, etc., and then any two could have a series of wars, such as in Europe for centuries, in the perpetual game of Balance of Power politics. It would be a successful method of insuring that large profits could be made on the loaning of money to the states involved," Epperson explained.

   Griffin quoted German chancellor Otto von Bismarck as stating,

"The division of the United States into federations of equal force was decided long before the Civil War by the high financial powers of Europe. These bankers were afraid that the United States, if they remained in one block and as one nation, would attain economic and financial independence, which would upset their financial domination over the world. The voice of the Rothschilds prevailed... Therefore they sent their emissaries into the field to exploit the question of slavery and to open an abyss between the two sections of the Union."

   It is historical fact that for some years the Rothschilds had financed major projects in the United States on both sides of the Mason-Dixon Line. Nathan Rothschild, who owned a large Manchester textile plant, bought his cotton from Southern interests and financed the importation of Southern cotton prior to the war. At the same time, wrote Rothschild biographer Wilson,

"He had made loans to various states of the Union, had been, for a time, the official European banker for the U.S. government and was a pledged supporter of the Bank of the United States."

   "Europe’s aristocracies had never been happy about the prodigious success of the Yankee democracy. If the nation now broke into halves, proving that democracy did not contain the stuff of survival, the rulers of Europe would be well pleased," noted historian Bruce Catton.

Lending support to the idea of European manipulation of the American situation, another Rothschild biographer, Niall Ferguson, noted there is a "substantial and unexplained gap" in private Rothschild correspondence between 1854 and 1860 and that nearly all copies of outgoing letters from the London Rothschilds "were destroyed at the orders of successive senior partners."

   If this indeed was the gambit, presidential aspirant Abraham Lincoln saw it clearly. He often tried to explain that his goal was to save the American union, not emancipate the slaves. During his famous debates with Stephen Douglas in 1858, Lincoln made his personal position on race quite clear:

"I will say, then, that I am not, nor ever have been, in favor of bringing about in any way, the social and political equality of the white and black races... I, as much as any other man, am in favor of having the superior position assigned to the white race."

   But equally clear was Lincoln’s determination to preserve the federal union. In late 1862 he proclaimed,

"My paramount object in this struggle is to save the union... If I could save the union without freeing any slaves, I would do it; if I could save it by freeing some and leaving others alone, I would also do that."

   Lincoln understood that the true reason for sectional friction in the United States was not slavery, but economics. The South desired to buy cheaper imported European products, but the powerful Northern manufacturers imposed stiff import tariffs. These tariffs were quickly increased after Southern congressmen left Washington in 1861. The industrial North, filling rapidly with immigrants willing to work for a pittance, had no need for slaves, while the major planters of the agrarian South were totally dependent on human labor. Although Southern leaders had continually demonstrated a willingness to compromise on the slavery issue, they felt they could not suddenly abandon their "peculiar institution."

   Antislavery advocates in both North and South realized that technological advances meant the demise of slavery was only a matter of time. But extremists on both sides, encouraged by agents of the European financiers, continually fanned the fires of discontent.

   The spearhead of this agitation came in the form of yet another secret society: the Knights of the Golden Circle (KGC).

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The secretive Knights organization was the creation of surgeon and author Dr. George W. L. Bickley, who in 1854 founded his first knightly "castle" in Cincinnati, Ohio, drawing heavily from local Freemasons. This society "had close ties with a secret society in France called The Seasons, which itself was a branch of the Illuminati," charged G. Edward Griffin.

   Patterned after Masonic lodges, the Knights had similar passwords, handshakes, "temples," and grand, lesser, and supreme councils. Initiates were sworn to secrecy with a live snake held over their head accompanied by this bloodcurdling oath:

Whoever dares our cause reveal, Shall test the strength of Knightly steel; And when the torture proves too dull, We’ll scrape the brains from out his skull And place a lamp within the shell To light his soul from here to hell.

   The name Knights of the Golden Circle was derived from Bickley’s grandiose plan to create a huge slaveholding circular empire 2,400 miles in circumference with Cuba as the center point. This new nation was to include the southern United States, Mexico, part of Central America, and the West Indies in order to gain a dominance over the world’s supply of tobacco, sugar, rice, and coffee.

   While modern historians either ignore or downplay the significance of the KGC, it is evident from contemporary writings and newspaper coverage that the organization was considered an extremely credible threat at the time. Bickley was certainly a mysterious individual, always claiming to be MI need of money, yet constantly traveling and entertaining dignitaries. The "financial nucleus" of his order was the American Colonization and Steamship Company, organized in Veracruz, Mexico, and capitalized for $5 million. Somebody other than Bickley was paying the bills.

   He also had demonstrable ties to Great Britain, claiming to have been an 1842 graduate of the University of London. Early in the war Bickley was in the Confederate capital of Montgomery, Alabama, identifying himself as a correspondent for the London Times, and after the war he lectured extensively in England.

   Bickley appeared to have shifting allegiances and philosophies. Previously, he had founded a society called the Wayne Circle of the Brotherhood of the Union, which purported to seek constitutional unity. Just before the war started, Bickley wrote an article for his Cincinnati paper Scientific Artisan in which he predicted the end of slavery, stating "this institution is one altogether unenviable, [as] every reasonable man in America will at once admit."

   Despite the ideas put forth in his article, the first step in Bickley’s plans for the Knights of the Golden Circle was to create a separate slaveholding Southern nation, then move southward to Mexico. Like the Nazis much later, the KGC were concerned with purity of blood, as demonstrated by his call for "Anglo-Saxon blood" for the "Texasizing" of the Mexican population.

   By 1860 there were more than fifty thousand Knights, mostly in Texas, awaiting orders to march on Mexico. Headquartered in San Antonio, Bickley gained popularity by pledging to "kill Wall Street" bankers, who he said were scheming against the South. He also said that if Lincoln was elected president, "Washington, not Mexico, would become the target" of the Knights.

   In fact there were two tentative invasions of Mexico in the spring of 1860, but both were repulsed after Bickley failed to provide his men with promised reinforcements and supplies.

   Texas hero and governor Sam Houston reportedly was a member of the Knights at the time but resigned when the Knights turned their attention from the invasion of Mexico to the secessionist movement.

   It was in the cause of Southern secession that Bickley proved more successful, as the KGC came to form the nucleus of the Southern military. According to writer Ollinger Crenshaw,

"The Southern press received the plans of the order with enthusiasm and many newspapers became its exponents... The Vicksburg Sun said tin Knights of the Golden Circle gave the South a military organization capable of defending her rights at home and abroad."

   The KGC was divided into three sections or "degrees"—the "Foreign and Home Guard Militia," the "Foreign and Home Guard Corps" of civilian support, and the "American Legion" which was the political and governing arm. Reportedly, by 1860 membership in the KGC was more than sixty-five thousand and constituted the "brains" of the South. Bickley made their objective clear when he declared, "The fact is, we want a fight, but how to get it is the question."

   Through constant agitation, the Knights stirred up hatreds and fears throughout the North and South.

"After Abraham Lincoln was elected in 1860, this minority of the Southern minority conspired to bring off a last gamble. In 1861, to the extremists’ amazement, disunion triumphed," wrote historian William W. Freehling.

   KGC activity in Northern states involved a plan to create a "Northwest Confederacy" composed of pro-Southerners in several states, including Ohio, Indiana, Minnesota, and Michigan. Illinois alone was reported to have a KGC membership of some twenty thousand. The plan was to seize federal arsenals, then take control of the states and release all Confederate prisoners. One state official, Edmund Wright, tried to opposed the Knights, only to have his wife poisoned and his home burned. In August 1862 sixty KGC members—out of a reported fifteen thousand members in Indiana—were indicted for conspiracy and treason but later released. Federal prosecutors were fearful of creating martyrs and the conspiracy cases were weak.

   The Knights’ actions created havoc with the national government, prompting President Lincoln to lament, "The enemy behind us is more dangerous to the country than the enemy before us."

   The Lincoln administration was compelled to imprison more than thirteen thousand people on charges of "disloyalty," which meant anything from speaking against the government to discouraging military enlistment. "Those who before the war had been called ’the loyal opposition’ found themselves after 1861 commonly referred to as traitors," wrote author Larry Star key.

   Such repression incensed Democrats and anti-Republicans, who charged federal officials with exaggerating the KGC threat in order to suppress criticism of the administration. Membership in the Knights’ organization and its spin-offs, the Order of American Knights and the Sons of Liberty, grew to number in the hundreds of thousands. According to Griffin, the Knights went underground after the war, eventually emerging as the Ku Klux Klan.

   In 1863 Bickley was arrested as a spy in Indiana and held without trial until his release in 1865. A broken man, Bickley died in Baltimore on August 10, 1867.

   With national attention focused on the Southern Rebellion and disunity in the North, far-reaching financial measures were being taken in Washington.

   In mid-1861, with the war just beginning, U.S. Treasury secretary Salmon Chase (the namesake of Chase Manhattan Bank) asked for and received from Congress the first income tax instituted in America. It began as a meager three percent federal tax on all income, but only a year later the tax was raised to five percent on all income over $10,000. "It was a graduated income tax, just as proposed by Karl Marx just 13 years before," noted Epperson, intimating that hidden agendas were being pressed behind the contingencies of war.

   As the war progressed, Lincoln desperately needed more money. Instead of borrowing from the European banks as expected, in 1862 he issued about $450 million in currency printed with green ink called "greenbacks." This paper money was legalized by an act of Congress with nothing to secure it. Endorsing this debt-free, fiat money, Lincoln proclaimed,

"Government, possessing power to create and issue currency... need not and should not borrow capital at interest... The privilege of creating and issuing money is not only the supreme prerogative of the government but it is the government’s greatest creative opportunity."

   It is fascinating to note that the two U.S. presidents who have issued debt-free currency—Lincoln in 1862 and John F. Kennedy in 1963—were assassinated. Lincoln’s assassin, Southern sympathizer John Wilkes Booth, has been established as a member of the Knights of the Golden Circle (along with the famous outlaw Jesse James). Various conspiracy researchers have connected Booth to the previously mentioned Illuminati, the Italian Carbonari, and through Southern secretary of state Judah Benjamin to the House of Rothschild. After the war, Benjamin, often called the "sinister power behind the throne" of Southern president Jefferson Davis, fled to England where he became a successful attorney.

   As in the Kennedy assassination, Lincoln’s death sparked cries of conspiracy which still echo today. The Lincoln assassination conspiracy involved several persons, four of whom were hanged, including Mary Surratt, the first woman executed in this country for a capital offense. It is historic fact that the Lincoln assassination case was a complex plot including smuggling and kidnapping plans that involved Knights of the Golden Circle agents.

"The fact remains that the story of why Abraham Lincoln was murdered can only be completed within the confines of the Confederate cabal in Canada [which included KGC members as well as British agents] ..." noted author Starkey.

The plot also involved some of the highest offices in Washington, including Lincoln’s secretary of war Edwin Stanton. The full story of this plot has yet to reach a wide audience.

   Despite pervasive use of the term, the conflict between 1861 and 1865 was never truly a civil war, which is defined as a conflict between factions or sections within a nation. The majority of citizens in each Southern state freely elected to leave the Union. Confederate President Davis, a former United States senator and secretary of war, in his inaugural address on February 18,1861, cited

"the American idea that governments rest on the consent of the governed, and that it is the right of the people to alter or abolish them at will whenever they become destructive of the ends for which they were established. . . . Thus the sovereign states here represented have proceeded to form this Confederacy; and it is by abuse of language that their act has been denominated a revolution."

   "Secession—or rebellion, as the Jacobins preferred to call it—might be treason, but no court had ever said so—or ever would say so—no matter what the opinion the radicals had on the matter," observed historian Shelby Foote.

   But Lincoln and the radical Republicans did proclaim that secession was treason and prepared huge armies and a naval blockade to force the Southern states back into the Union. And while twenty-two million Northerners were locked in strife with nine million Southerners, France and Britain made moves to encircle the conflicted nation.

   With regimental bands playing "Dixie," Britain sent eleven thousand additional troops to Canada, which had become a haven for Confederate agents. France’s Napoleon III installed Austrian Archduke Maximilian as emperor of Mexico, which promptly opened negotiations with the Confederacy and allowed the transportation of supplies into Texas, bypassing the Union blockade. French troops were poised on the Texas border. Both France and England were ready to step in just as soon as flu- North and South had bled each other dry.

   Two eventualities forestalled the complete breakup of the United States: Lincoln’s proclamation freeing slaves in Confederate states and the quiet intervention of Russia.

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On September 22, 1862, just days after the federal army stopped a Confederate advance at the battle of Antietam, Lincoln announced his plans to order the freeing of Southern slaves unless the Southern states returned to the Union. This decree had been held in abeyance for nine months awaiting a Union battlefield victory.

   With no response from the South, Lincoln issued his Emancipation Proclamation on January 1,1863. He proclaimed freedom for all slaves in Rebel-held territory. It was a purely political act, since obviously he had no authority in those areas. But it brought the issue of slavery to the forefront of the conflict. Lincoln later explained this pragmatic gesture by saying,

"Things had gone from bad to worse until I felt that we had reached the end of our rope on the plan of operations we had been pursuing; that we had about played our last card, and must change our tactics or lose the game. I now determined upon the adoption of the emancipation policy."

In other words, it was halfway through this fratricidal war that slavery became a central issue.

   The proclamation was a brilliant strategic maneuver as the citizens of neither Britain nor France would have accepted their nation’s support of slavery—and it strengthened Lincoln’s hand at home.

   When Lincoln instituted the first military draft in 1863, there were riots in several major cities including New York. Between July 13 and 16 more than one thousand people were killed or wounded as army troops restored peace at gunpoint.

"After the passage of many years, it is easy to forget that Lincoln had an insurrection on his hands in the North as well as in the South," commented Griffin dryly.

"To control [this Northern] insurrection, Lincoln ignored the Constitution once again by suspending the right of habeas corpus, which made it possible for the government to imprison its critics without formal charges and without trial. Thus, under the banner of opposing slavery, American citizens in the North, not only were killed on the streets of their own cities, they were put into military combat against their will and thrown into prison without due process of law. In other words, free men were enslaved so that slaves could be made free. Even if the pretended crusade had been genuine, it was a bad exchange."

   By the fall of 1863 Lincoln was becoming increasingly concerned with the foreign military presence in Canada and Mexico. His concern over the French in Mexico led to a hasty attack at Sabine Pass at the mouth of the Sabine River separating Texas from Louisiana. On September 8, 1863, a mere forty-seven Texas militiamen with six cannons chased off a flotilla of Union ships composed of twenty-two transports carrying five thousand Yankee troops escorted by four gunboats.

   With France and Britain coming dangerously close to both recognizing and aiding the South, it was Russia’s pro-North Czar Alexander II who tipped the balance the other way. After receiving information that England and France were plotting war to divide up the Russian Empire, Alexander ordered two Russian fleets to the United States in the fall of 1863. One anchored off the coast of Virginia while the other rested at San Francisco. Both were in perfect position to attack British and French commerce shipping lines. No threats or ultimatums were made public, but it was clear that should war come, the Russian Navy was in a position to wreak havoc. "Without the inhibiting effect of the presence of the Russian fleets, the course of the war could have been significantly different," commented Griffin.

   Due chiefly to the presence of these fleets, coupled with the effect of the Emancipation Proclamation on their constituents, Britain and France declined to intervene for the South as planned.

   By early 1865 the South had been bled dry, both in men and materials. The Mississippi River was in federal hands and Union general William T. Sherman had cut the Confederacy in two with his infamous "march to the sea" through Georgia.

"The [Confederate] nation was able to keep an army in the field at all only because of the matchless endurance and determination of its surviving soldiers," wrote Catton.

"Opposing it was a nation which the war had strengthened instead of weakened—a nation which had had the greater strength to begin with and which had now become one of the strongest powers on the globe. The war could end only as it did. The Confederacy died because the war had finally worn it out."

   The blood cost of the war was horrendous—the 365,000 Yankee deaths combined with 258,000 Confederates totaled more dead than all other U.S. wars combined.

   And the financial cost was staggering. At the end of 1861 government spending was $67 million. By 1865 this number had grown to more than $1 billion. The national debt, which was a mere $2.80 per capita for a population of 33 million in 1861, rose to $75 per person by 1865. It was estimated in 1910 that the total cost of the war, including pensions and the burial of veterans, totaled almost $12 billion, a preposterous sum at that time.

   In the middle of this immense flow of money was Rothschild agent Belmont, financing both sides. He strongly influenced bankers in both England and France to support the Union war effort by the purchase of government bonds. At the same time, he quietly bought up the increasingly worthless bank bonds of the South at great discounts, with the idea that the South would be forced to honor them in full after the war. In 1863 the Chicago Tribune assailed "Belmont, the Rothschilds, and the whole tribe of Jews, who have been buying up Confederate bonds." Much later, this charge was styled a "libel" by those who could not understand the duplicity of Belmont and his employers with their public pro-North sentiments.

   One of the younger Rothschilds visited America at the onset of the war and was as openly pro-Confederate as their agent Belmont was pro-Union. Concerning Lincoln, Salomon Rothschild wrote, "He rejects all forms of compromise and thinks only of repression by force of arms. He has the appearance of a peasant and can only tell barroom stories."

   The Rothschilds played both sides and apparently felt little compassion for the American tragedy. Baron Jacob Rothschild rationalized the carnage by telling U.S. minister to Brussels Henry Sanford, "When your patient is desperately sick, you try desperate measures, even to bloodletting."

   "The boot print of the Rothschild formula is unmistakable across the graves of American soldiers on both sides," concluded Griffin.

   If indeed the War Between the States was a plot by the secret societies to split the United States—as claimed by a Knights of the Golden Circle tract published in 1861—backed by the European Rothschilds, it very nearly succeeded. The harsh Reconstruction policies of the Republican government, which caused the South to suffer under punitive economic policies well into the 1960s, generated enduring hatred and bitterness into the twentieth century as well as the growth of other secret societies in the South, such as the Ku Klux Klan.

   Historian Foote used the term "Jacobins" to describe the secessionists of the era—disrupters of the established social, religious, and political order—who had been operating in America since the late eighteenth century. The Jacobins, a form of "Illuminized" Freemasonry, were the connective tissue that tied the secret societies of the Old World to hidden manipulation in the New World.

   They had crossed the Atlantic after successfully destroying the "Old World Order" in France and were looking for new worlds to conquer. These fugitives were former members and the offspring of members of elder secret societies such as the Bavarian Illuminati, which traced its origins back to the dawn of humankind.

   The men who created societies such as the Knights of the Golden Circle, the Thule Gesellschaft, and Cecil Rhodes’s Round Table Groups drew from a long history of these clandestine European organizations.

   However, by the time of the War Between the States, much of the secret society machinations had been forgotten by the American public thanks to the Anti-Masonic Movement of the early nineteenth century.

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Freemasonry, the oldest and most powerful secret society in the history of the world, had planted firm roots in early-day America and even played a significant role in the American Revolution. It played an even greater role in the subsequent French Revolution, which initially was greeted with great joy and approval in the United States. The number of Masonic lodges grew and membership increased. By 1826 it was estimated that Masons in the United States numbered nearly fifty thousand, mostly educated and professional men.

   But in that year, one Mason broke ranks. It became known that a Captain William Morgan of Batavia, New York, was planning to publish ë book revealing the secret symbols, handshakes, oaths, and purposes of the Freemasons. Morgan, ë thirty-year member of the order, wrote, "The bane of our civil institutions is to be found in Masonry, already powerful and daily becoming more so. I owe my country an exposure of its dangers."

   Before the book could be printed, Morgan and his publisher were kidnapped in Batavia. Irate friends and neighbors pursued the kidnappers and managed to rescue the publisher, but Morgan was not so fortunate. He was never seen again.

   Years later, a Mason named Henry L. Valance confided to his doctor as he lay dying that he and two other Masons had dropped Morgan into the Niagara River. Valance said since that night he had suffered from a guilty conscience—"the mark of Cain"—and sought absolution for his sin.

   Yet at the time of the kidnapping, no one could seem to get a straight answer regarding Morgan’s fate. According to the Reverend Charles G. Finney, writing in 1869, the wheels of justice were slowed by brother Masons in the courts and law enforcement, and among witnesses and jurors. Rumors that Morgan had been abducted and murdered by the Masons spread through New York and on into the New England and mid-Atlantic states and a major scandal erupted.

   Due to the public backlash against the secrecy and exclusiveness of Masonry, Finney claimed that about forty-five thousand members left the order and more than two thousand lodges closed.

"Thousands of Masons burned their aprons. In a few years’ time, membership in the New York lodges dropped from 30,000 to 300 as a direct result of the Morgan incident," wrote author William J. Whaley.

   In 1827 Morgan’s book, Illustrations of Masonry by one of the Fraternity Who Has Devoted Thirty Years to the Subject, was published posthumously. For the first time, non-Masons were able to learn of the order’s inner workings.

   The chilling "blood oaths" of punishments for revealing Masonic secrets renewed the widespread belief that Morgan had been murdered by his fellows members. Morgan disclosed that the initiate into the order’s beginning or First Degree of the Blue Lodge pledged to,

"binding myself under no less penalty than to have my throat cut across, my tongue torn out by the roots, and my body buried in the rough sands of the sea at low-water mark, where the tide ebbs and flows twice in 24 hours. ..."

The penalties in higher degrees grew progressively more gruesome.

   In 1829, under public pressure, the New York State Senate investigated Freemasonry and reported that wealthy and powerful Masons were found at every level of government. The Senate also criticized the "silent as the grave" news media, reporting, "This self-proclaimed sentinel of freedom, has felt the force of Masonic influence. ..."

   Opponents of President Andrew Jackson—himself a Freemason—took advantage of the scandal to form the Anti-Masonic Party, the first time a third party was created in the United States. Anti-Masonic candidates were successful in state and local elections but failed to unseat Jackson in 1832. By the late-1830s the Anti-Masonic Party had turned to agitation against slavery and the strictly anti-Jackson members had joined the newly formed Whig Party. Nevertheless, a serious blow had been delivered from which Masonry was not to recover for decades.

   Suspicions and sentiment against Masonry had been growing in the years prior to the abduction of Morgan as many Americans understood how the organization had played a role in the nation’s two earliest, but long forgotten, insurrections.

   Early in 1787 about one thousand Massachusetts farmers, led by Revolutionary War veteran Daniel Shays, attacked the Springfield arsenal to seize arms. Their uprising resulted from anger over increased taxes, the banning of paper money, and laws that only the wealthy could hold state office.

   Irate and overburdened farmers demonstrated in several towns. Samuel Adams, who claimed European "emissaries" were secretly stirring up the people, helped draw up a Massachusetts resolution suspending habeas corpus as well as the famous Riot Act which was read without much effect to the unruly farmers.

   Men who less than ten years earlier had been rebels against English rule were now calling for the death penalty for Shays’s rebels. Only Thomas Jefferson, far from the scene as U.S. ambassador to France, offered sympathy.

"I hold it that a little rebellion now and then is a good thing," he wrote to a friend. "God forbid that we should ever be twenty years without such a rebellion... The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants."

Shays’s small army finally marched on Boston but was turned back, more by a winter storm than by the hastily assembled militia funded by Boston merchants.

   The American union was far from stable, especially in the western areas. In 1791 Secretary of the Treasury Alexander Hamilton—a Mason— had pressed through Congress ë series of tax laws intended to support the newly treated Kink of the United States and force lull repayment of the government bonds held by his friends. It was also an exercise to assert the power of the fledgling federal government. His actions resulted in the Whiskey Rebellion of 1794.

   One group hardest hit by Hamilton’s taxes was the Scotch-Irish farmers of western Pennsylvania, who were particularly incensed at a tax on whiskey. Aside from their imbibing, most farmers converted their grain to whiskey for easy transport to Eastern markets. They saw the whiskey tax as a direct attack on their livelihood and tax collectors were met with weapons. A few were tarred and feathered.

   According to some researchers of this period, the involvement of secret societies influenced by foreigners was demonstrable. For example, the natural disobedience of the angry farmers was heightened by agitation from French ambassador to the U.S. Edmond Genet.

   Expelled from Russia for inciting revolution, Genet had arrived in America in the spring of 1793 and began organizing secret societies called "Democratic Clubs." They were direct replicas of the Illuminati-inspired clubs then advocating revolution in France. John Quincy Adams noted that the Democratic Clubs "are so perfectly affiliated with the Parisian Jacobins that their origin from a common parent cannot possibly be mistaken."

   President George Washington also voiced concern, stating, "I gave it as my opinion... that if these societies were not counteracted... they would shake the government to its foundations."

   In July 1794 Washington donned his old military uniform and reviewed an army of thirteen thousand men led by Robert E. Lee’s father, General Henry "Light-Horse Harry" Lee. The militia army, gathered from neighboring states, moved into Pennsylvania and the few hundred farmers opposing it quickly scattered. Two farmers were convicted of treason but later pardoned by Washington after Jefferson’s Republicans expressed dismay over what they saw as overreaction by the government. The Federalists saw the incident as a victory since it was their first opportunity to establish federal authority by military means within state boundaries.

   But critics saw it as further imposition of elitist authority under a different name.

"Why did Messrs. Hamilton and Washington bother participating in the American Revolution?" wondered author Bramley. "They simply used their influence to create the very same institutions in America that the colonists found so odious under British rule."

With a lull blown revolution underway in I’Yance, under criticism by Jeffersonian Republicans and fearful of Illuminati influence in the nation’s Masonic lodges and Democratic Clubs, Federalists in Congress in 1798 passed the four Alien and Sedition Acts. These unpopular laws, "designed to protect the United States from the extensive French Jacobin conspiracy, paid agents of which were even in high places in the government," empowered the president to expel or imprison foreigners, curtailed immigration, and provided punishment for anyone writing or speaking "with intent to defame" the government.

   Many thought these laws were a thinly disguised attempt to consolidate unwarranted federal power, and resolutions were passed in the Kentucky and Virginia legislatures essentially negating the acts. These states declared that since the federal government was the result of a compact between the states, if the federal government assumed powers not specifically granted by the Constitution, the states had the right to declare such powers unconstitutional. This was the beginning of the constitutional argument that supported secession in the mid-nineteenth century.

   The religious nature of early Northeastern America, founded in great part by the Pilgrims and Puritans, proved resistant to the anarchistic ideas imported by Illuminized Freemasonry—but such was not the case in France.

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If one desires to point to a major world event proven to have been inspired by secret society machinations, one need look no further than the French Revolution, which devastated that nation between 1787 and 1799. Revolutionary leaders, in seeking to overthrow the decadent monarchy of King Louis XVI, launched the first national revolution of modern times.

   Although popularly believed to have begun due to a public uprising over lack of food and government representation, the record is quite clear that the revolution was instigated by cells of French Masonry and the German Illuminati.

   The New Encyclopaedia Britannica tells us that in France,

"there arose a political system and a philosophical outlook that no longer took Christianity nor granted, (hat in fact explicitly opposed it... The brotherhood by such groups as the freemasons, members of secret fraternal societies, and the Illuminati, a rationalist secret society, provided a rival to the Catholic sense of community."

Secret society researcher and author Nesta H. Webster was even more pointed, writing in 1924,

"[The Masonic book A Ritual and Illustrations of Freemasonry] contains the following passage, ’The Masons . . . originated the Revolution with the infamous Duke of Orleans at their head.’"

Author Bramley wrote,

"During the first French Revolution, a key rebel leader was the Duke of Orleans, who was grand master of French Masonry before his resignation at the height of the Revolution. Marquis de Lafayette, the man who had been initiated into the Masonic fraternity by George Washington, also played an important role in the French revolutionary cause. The Jacobin Club, which was the radical nucleus of the French revolutionary movement, was founded by prominent Freemasons."

   It was the Duke of Orleans, grand master of the Grand Orient Lodge of Freemasons, who reportedly bought all the grain in 1789 and either sold it abroad or hid it away, thus creating near starvation among the commoners. Galart de Montjoie, a contemporary, blamed the Revolution almost solely on the Duke of Orleans, adding that he "was moved by that invisible hand which seems to have created all the events of our revolution in order to lead us towards a goal that we do not see at present. ..."

   Drawing on an impressive number of contemporary writings, Webster added,

"If, then, it is said that the [French] Revolution was prepared in the lodges of Freemasons—and many French Masons have boasted of the fact—let it always be added that it was Illuminized Freemasonry that made the Revolution, and that the Masons who acclaim it are Illuminized Masons, inheritors of the same tradition introduced into the lodges of France in 1787 by the disciples of Weishaupt, ’patriarch of the Jacobins.’" (emphasis in the original)

   Giuseppe Balsamo, a student of the Jewish Cabala, a Freemason, and a Rosicrucian, became known as Louis XIV’s court magician Cagliostro. He wrote how the German Illuminati had infiltrated the French Freemason lodges for years and added,

"By March 1789, the 266 lodges controlled by the Grand Orient were all ’illuminized’ without knowing it, for the Freemasons in general, were not told the name of the sect that brought them these mysteries, and only ë very small number were really initiated into the secret."

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Pro-revolutionary members of France’s National Constituent Assembly had formed a group which became known as Society of the Friends of the Constitution. After the assembly moved to Paris, this group met there in a hall leased from the Jacobins’ convent of Catholic Dominican friars. These revolutionaries, sworn to protect the revolution from the aristocrats, soon were known as the Jacobin Club. Since that time, all revolutionaries have been called Jacobins.

   At least that is the official story of the Jacobins. As usual, the Jacobins are tied to earlier secret societies, in this case a movement to restore a kingship in Britain.

   In 1688 England’s unpopular and pro-Catholic Stuart king, James II, was deposed by his Dutch son-in-law, the Protestant William of Orange. James—whose name in Latin was Jacobus, hence the name Jacobites— fled to France. There he continued to be supported by Freemasons in Scotland and Wales who sought to restore him to the English throne. They were accused by French Freemasons of converting Masonic rituals and titles into political support for this restoration.

   According to some versions of Masonic history, James was ensconced in the Chateau of Saint-Germain by his friend, French king Louis XIV, where, with the help of Catholic Jesuits, he established a system of Masonry that became the basis of Masonic traditions such as the "Scottish Rite."

   "The theory that connects the royal house of the Stuarts with Freemasonry ... as a political engine to be wielded for the restoration of an exiled family to a throne ... is so repugnant to all ... that one would hardly believe that such a theory was ever seriously entertained, were it not for many too conclusive proofs of the fact," was the convoluted admission of this political involvement by Masonic author Albert Mackey writing in the nineteenth century.

   After a series of failed rebellions, the Jacobites in Scotland were finally crushed at the battle of Culloden Moor near Inverness in 1746. Their leader, Charles Edward Stuart, "Bonnie Prince Charlie, the young pretender," escaped to France, taking with him Jacobites imbued with Francmasonic ideals. A year later in Arras, France, Charles chartered a Masonic Sovereign Primordial Chapter of Rose Croix known as "Scottish Jacobite."

   "The organization of this chapter was intended only as the beginning of a plan to enlist other Masons ... to create a chapter in whatever town they might think proper, which they actually did... among them one at Paris in 1780, which in 1801 was united to the Grand Orient [Lodge] of France," explained Mackey.

   "The Jacobite character of the Paris lodge is not a matter of dispute," wrote Webster. But she argued that "the founders of the Grand Lodge in Paris did not derive from the Grand Lodge in London, from which they held no warrant, but... took their Freemasonry with them to France before the Grand Lodge of London was instituted; they were therefore in no way bound by its regulations."

This may be where English and Continental Freemasonry began to diverge.

   According to Mackey, the attempt to connect Masonic traditions with the Stuart claims to the English throne was the first time politics had been introduced into the "speculative philosophy" of freemasonry. It certainly was not the last.

   French Masons too were heavily involved in the political events of that day. Webster noted, "All the revolutionaries of the Constituent Assembly were initiated into the third degree" of Illuminized Masonry, including revolutionary leaders such as the Duke of Orleans, Valance, Lafayette, Mirabeau, Garat, Rabaud, Marat, Robespierre, Danton, and Desmoulins.

   Honore-Gabriel Riquetti, Comte de Mirabeau, a leading revolutionary, indeed espoused ideals which were identical to those of Adam Weishaupt, founder of Bavarian Illuminized Masonry. In personal papers, Mirabeau called for the overthrow of all order, all laws, and all power to "leave the people in anarchy." He said the public must be promised "power to the people" and lower taxes but never given real power "for the people as legislators are very dangerous [as] they only establish laws which coincide with their passions." He said the clergy should be destroyed by "ridiculing religion."

   Mirabeau ended his tirade by proclaiming, "What matter the means as long as one arrives at the end?"—the same end-justifies-the-means philosophy preached from Weishaupt to Lenin to Hitler.

   As is common in world events, the issues that sparked revolution originally centered on finances. France had spent a considerable amount of money supporting the American Revolution. In February 1787 French noblemen were summoned to an assembly by the controller general of finances, who proposed increasing taxes on the wealthy to reduce the national debt. Needless to say, the wealthy noblemen rejected this idea and instead called for a meeting of Estates-General, France’s parliament composed of the three Estates of the nobles, the clergy, and the commoners. It had not met in nearly two hundred years.

   Agitation for the Estates-General to consider political reforms continued through 1788, with disturbances in major French cities, including Paris. During this period, representatives of the three Estates were elected.

   The three Estates met at Versailles on May 5, 1789, and were immediately divided over how voting should be tabulated. Popular votes would favor the majority, primarily the commoners, while a vote by the Estates would favor the nobles and clergy.

   Third Estate commoners, gaining support from some of the priests, won out, and King Louis XVI grudgingly called for a National Constituent Assembly to devise a new French constitution while secretly gathering troops to suppress the gathering.

   Word of these troop movements spread, and in the ensuing Great Fear of July 1789, a crowd in Paris stormed the king’s chief prison, the Bastille, where they released only seven prisoners—most were mentally ill—but acquired much-needed guns and powder.

   Contrary to popular history, this attack was not the spontaneous action of a downtrodden mob. "That brigands from the South were deliberately enticed to Paris in 1789, employed and paid by the revolutionary leaders, is a fact confirmed by authorities too numerous to quote at length. ... In other words, the importation of the contingent of hired brigands conclusively refutes the theory that the Revolution was an irrepressible rising of the people," wrote Webster.

   Meanwhile mounted couriers dispatched by the secret societies rode from town to town warning the fearful peasants that conspirators against the nation were hiding in the aristocrats’ castles and manors. They were told the king had ordered them attacked. Chaos and violence were soon widespread and hailed as a revolution.

   "We see in the French Revolution the first time where grievances were systematically created in order to exploit them," wrote author Still.

   Such exploitation began with the Freemasons as early as 1772 when the Grand Orient Lodge was firmly established in France, counting 104 lodges. This number grew to 2,000 lodges by the time of the Revolution, with 447 lodge members participating in the 605-member Estates-General. According to several researchers, the Grand Orient Lodges were the core of the Illuminati penetration of Freemasonry.

   This penetration began in the early years of the eighteenth century when the Jacobites and Templar remnants fought for control of the French lodges of Freemasonry. Author Webster believed that "Scots Masonry" was merely a veil for Templarism and that the Grand Lodge of France was "invaded by intriguers" (meaning the Jacobites).

   French Masonry soon split into two factions—the Grand Lodge of France with its Templar tradition infused with Illuminism, and the expelled Grand Lodge Lacorne, which in 1772 became the Grand Orient Lodge with the future Duke of Orleans at its head.

   "The Grand Orient then invited the [Grand Lodge of France] to revoke the decree of expulsion and unite with it, and this offer being accepted, the revolutionary party inevitably carried all before it, and the Due de Chartes [soon to be Duke of Orleans] was declared Grand Master of all the councils, chapters and Scotch lodges of France. In 1782 the ’Council of Emperors’ and the ’Knights of the East’ combined to form the ’Grand Chapitre General de France,’ which in 1786 joined up with the Grand Orient. The victory of the revolutionary party was then complete," explained Webster.

   Alarmed over the spreading havoc, the national assembly in 1789 hastily introduced a Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen, proclaiming liberty, equality, the inviolability of property, and the right to resist oppression—all basic longtime tenants of Masonry.

   When the king refused to approve the declaration, a Parisian mob marched to Versailles and took him to Paris, where the assembly continued to hammer out new laws and policies. One was to nationalize property of the Roman Catholic church to pay off the national debt. This action drove a wedge between the commoners and their supporters within the clergy, increasing hostility on both sides. The assembly then attempted to create a constitutional monarchy similar to England’s, but the weak and fearful Louis tried to flee the country in June 1791. He was captured at Varennes and returned to Paris under guard.

   Meanwhile, buoyed by the situation in France, Masonic-based revolutionary clubs sprang up in other countries, including England, Ireland, the German states, Austria, Belgium, Italy, and Switzerland. Tensions between outside nations and France rose until 1792 when France declared war on Austria and Prussia.

   Confronted with both a war and a revolution, France degenerated into the Reign of Terror, during which time King Louis XVI, Marie Antoinette, and many thousands, chiefly aristocrats, were executed.

   In a move similar to Hitler’s action 150 years later, the Jacobins closed down all Masonic lodges in 1791, ironically fearful that Freemasonry’s organizing power might be turned against them.

   "Behind the Convention, behind the clubs, behind the Revolutionary Tribunal, there existed . . . that most secret convention which directed everything ... an occult and terrible power of which the other Convention became the slave and which was composed of the prime initiates of Illuminism," noted Webster.

   Author Epperson, after an exhaustive study of the subject, agreed. He wrote, "The invisible hand that guided the entire French Revolution was the Illuminati, only 13 years in existence, yet powerful enough to cause a revolution in one of the major countries of the world."

   Wars, riots, and coups continued in France until a young General Napoleon Bonaparte finally seized complete control in 1799. Although he carried on his own brand of terror in Europe for years, Napoleon proclaimed an end to the revolution. France was in a shambles. Hundreds of thousands had died of starvation, war, violence, and the guillotine. The power of both the monarchy and the monolithic church had been largely destroyed.

   "So in the ’great shipwreck of civilization,’ as a contemporary has described it, the projects of the Cabalists, the Gnostics, and the secret societies which for nearly eighteen centuries had sapped the foundations of Christianity found their fulfillment," commented Webster.

   The confidence to initiate a major revolt such as the French Revolution may have been gained in the new lands of America. While the American Revolution was not the sole creation of secret societies as in France, there was nevertheless a definite undercurrent of secret society connections based on both religious and philosophical differences.

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In the early seventeenth century, two distinct groups of Englishmen made their way to the new land of America: "Illuminized" Freemasons who louiulc’d llu- ill lalfil Jamestown colony, and the religions Pilgrims who fared better at Plymouth. It is instructive to briefly consider both.

   Jamestown was named after England’s King James I, who commissioned the first "authorized" version of the Bible. It became the first permanent English settlement in America after its founding by Captain John Smith in 1607. The colony was strictly a business venture of the Virginia Company of London, a firm formed in 1606 by secret society members including Sir Francis Bacon, who might rightfully be viewed as the founder of modern America.

   The well-educated son of the lord keeper of Britain’s Great Seal, Bacon became a lawyer and member of Parliament. Despite a quarrel with Queen Elizabeth, he was knighted in 1603.

   Sir Francis Bacon served as England’s grand chancellor under King James I and was described by author Marie Bauer Hall as "the founder of [English] Freemasonry ... the guiding light of the Rosicrucian Order, the members of which kept the torch of true universal knowledge, the Secret Doctrine of the ages, alive during the dark night of the Middle Ages."

British author Icke said Bacon was "a Grand Commander of the Brotherhood Order called the Rosecrusians, and very much involved in the underground operations of the Knights Templar traditions."

   Bacon indeed was a fascinating figure, largely ignored in history except for his scientific work.

   Despite his attacks on scholastic orthodoxy, Bacon gained renown as a scientist and philosopher. Twenty years after Bacon’s death in 1626, his "Invisible College" of followers formed a society of learned men, which in 1660 became the Royal Society of London for the Promotion of Natural Knowledge. According to Masonic historian Albert Mackey, many members of the original society were also members of the Company of Masons.

   "This was the reason of their holding their [Society] meetings at Mason’s Hall, in Masons’ Alley, Basinghall Street," wrote Mackey. "They all entered the Company and assumed the name of Free and Accepted Masons . . . [which] gave birth to that denomination of Freemasons which afterward became so famous."

   "In Stuart England, the early Freemasons of Charles I and Charles II were men of philosophy, astronomy, physics, architecture, chemistry and generally advanced learning. Many were members of the country’s most important scientific academy, the Royal Society, which had been styled the Invisible College after it was forced underground during the Cromwellinn Protectorate. . . . Early members included Robert Boyle, Isaac Newton, Robert Hooke, Christopher Wren and Samuel Pepys," wrote author Laurence Gardner.

He noted of the men of the Royal Society that "like the early Templars, they were endowed with very special knowledge."

   For nearly three decades, according to authors Michael Baigent and Richard Prince,

"’Rosicrucianism,’ Freemasonry and the Royal Society were not just to overlap, but virtually to be indistinguishable from one another."

According to some Masonic writers, the only meaningful difference between the Freemasons and the Royal Society was that the latter conducted open meetings.

   England’s first recorded Masonic initiation was for Sir Robert Moray in 1641. Moray also was one of the founders of the Royal Society and said to be its "soul" and "guiding spirit." He also was said to be a chemist and a patron of the Rosicrucians, yet another example of that sect’s penetration of Freemasonry.

   Bacon for many years has even been identified by some as the true author of the writings of William Shakespeare, an allegation not as ludicrous as it sounds. There is ample evidence to support it, and believers included Mark Twain, Walt Whitman, Henry James, Sigmund Freud, and Ralph Waldo Emerson.

   It was alleged that William Shakespeare was merely an illiterate stable hand and actor whose name was used to mask the radical political writings of a secret Elizabethan society which included Bacon, Sir Walter Raleigh, and Edmund Spenser. It was even rumored that Bacon was actually the illegitimate child of Queen Elizabeth.

   Adding to the suspicions concerning Shakespeare’s true identity was the fact that no biography of the Bard was written for more than one hundred years after his death in 1616. In addition, not one remnant of an original Shakespeare script has ever been found—not even correspondence with producers, patrons, or fellow actors—and there is really no proof of his official biography as an actor and playwright other than that a certain Shakespeare did exist. In his last will, this Shakespeare made no mention of his literary works, left his wife merely his "2nd-best bed and furniture," and signed the document "William Shackspeare."

   Another valid argument against Shakespeare’s authorship was that the dramas and comedies evinced a knowledge of history, politics, geography, and court etiquette unlikely in ë commoner. In Love’s labour’s Lost there supposedly was found an anagram in Latin which translated, "These plays, the offspring of F. Bacon, are preserved for the world." Acknowledged as a "master of English prose," the courtly Bacon would certainly seem the prime candidate as author of the Shakespeare material.

   Bacon’s Masonic beliefs were advanced in two books—De Sapientia Veterum (The Wisdom of the Ancients) and New Atlantis. In the latter, according to occult researcher Andre Nataf, "Bacon is here describing a Utopia which underlies many secret societies, including modern Freemasonry."

   Masonic writer Manly P. Hall said the reason New Atlantis was not published until after Bacon’s death was that,

"it told too much... [revealing] the entire pattern of the secret societies which had been working for thousands of years to achieve the ideal commonwealth in the political world."

   This "ideal commonwealth" proved to be America, hailed as a land of boundless opportunity and the site of the Masonic "Great Plan" to build a "New Atlantis."

"Time will reveal that the continent now known as America was actually discovered, and, to a considerable degree, explored more than a thousand years before the beginning of the Christian era," wrote Hall.

"The true story was in the keeping of the Mystery Schools, and passed from them to the Secret Societies of the medieval world. The Esoteric orders of Europe, Asia, and the Near East were in at least irregular communication with the priesthoods of the more advanced Amerindian nations.

"Plans for the development of the Western Hemisphere were formulated in Alexandria, Mecca, Delhi, and Lhasa [Tibet] long before most European statesmen were aware of the great Utopian program."

   Following this ancient secret society plan, Sir Walter Raleigh and other members of the "Baconian Circle" made an ill-fated expedition to America, landing on Roanoke Island, North Carolina, in 1584. Raleigh, who was executed by King James I in 1618 for treason, was accused by the Catholic Jesuits of operating a "School of Atheism" because of his Freemason connections and philosophy.

   With the failure of Raleigh’s colony, interest about America waned in England until the posthumous publication of Bacon’s New Atlantis.

   Many of the subsequent Jamestown colonists led by Captain John Smith were Rosicrucian Freemasons and, some have said, relatives of Bacon. They certainly were for the most part aristocratic Englishmen who relied on their Utopian ideals rather than hard work for success. The colony suffered severe hardships and would have disappeared but for the aid of friendly Indians and the arrival in 1610 of Thomas West, Lord De La Warr, and reinforcements.

   Meanwhile two groups of religious dissenters were colonizing America further north.

   In 1534 King Henry VIII broke with Catholicism and formed the Church of England. Those who sought to purify the new church of any taint of Catholicism were called Puritans and a splinter group who wanted nothing whatsoever to do with the church were known as Separatists. Collectively these dissenters became known as Pilgrims when they journeyed to America.

   The Pilgrims set up colonies in Plymouth, Massachusetts, and elsewhere in New England. Plymouth leader William Bradford quickly decided that the communal style of living advocated by the London merchants who financed the colony was not working well.

   "Everyone was fed from common stores," wrote Still. "The lack of incentive was threatening to turn Plymouth into a another Jamestown. ... So Bradford instituted an incentive system. He assigned a plot of land to be worked by each family. From then on, the little community was never again in need of food....

   "The first two colonies in America were excellent examples of two rival systems," Still continued, "one based on the concept of individually-held property driven by incentive, the other based on the communal theories of Plato and Francis Bacon."

   As America grew, so did English Freemasonry. A Freemason center was founded in London on June 24, 1717, when four lodges united to form the Grand Lodge of England, also called the Mother Grand Lodge of the World.

"Encouraged by the Mother Grand Lodge in London, the Freemasonic lodges in the colonies of America began to plot and agitate against British rule," wrote author Icke.

   One of the earliest revolts was led by Nathaniel Bacon, a descendant of Sir Francis, according to journalist Still. Bacon in 1676 organized a militia supposedly to fight Indians, but instead he took control of Jamestown, thus starting the first revolution in America. His rebellion disintegrated with his sudden death at age twenty-nine.

   According to several sources, American Masons included George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, Ethan Allen, Henry Kimx, I’anick Henry, John Hancock, Paul Revere, and John Marshall. Benjamin Franklin became grand master of the Philadelphia Lodge in 1734.

   Colonel LaVon P. Linn, a Masonic chronicler, wrote that of the estimated 14,000 officers in the Continental Army, 2,018 of them were Freemasons representing 218 Lodges, many of them "field lodges" that moved with the army from camp to camp. British Freemasons recruited members from among the American troops they trained prior to the revolution, thus "most of the military personnel involved, commanders and men on both sides, were either practicing Freemasons themselves or were steeped in the values and attitudes of Freemasonry," noted authors Baigent and Leigh.

   According to one theory, it was Washington, who became a Mason at age twenty, who helped initiate revolution in the British colonies. In 1754 Washington led a military foray into the Ohio Valley, where his troops fired upon French soldiers. These Frenchmen later said they were ambassadors under diplomatic immunity, a claim dismissed by Washington. French retaliatory action forced Washington’s force to surrender at Fort Necessity, Pennsylvania. The incident turned long-standing frontier tensions into the French and Indian War, which spread to Europe as the Seven Years War. This war drained Britain’s finances, forcing Parliament to saddle the American colonies with higher taxes, a key issue of the revolution.

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According to A New Encyclopedia of Freemasonry, "In the tense times before the American Revolution the secrecy of the Masonic Lodges offered the colonial patriots the opportunity to meet and plan their strategy. The Boston Tea Party was entirely Masonic, carried out by members of St. John’s Lodge during an adjourned meeting." Others have identified the lodge as Saint Andrew’s, but the point is made.

   Of the fifty-six signers of the Declaration of Independence, only one was known not to be a Freemason, asserted Masonic writer Manly P. Hall, who in The Secret Teachings of All Ages also told of a most mysterious incident at the time of the signing of this historic document. As the debate over their future reached a crescendo and many hesitated to sign the declaration realizing they would be putting their life on the line, suddenly a tall stranger with a pale face spoke out. No one knew who he was or where he came from, but the force of his oration was transfixing. His stirring words ended with the cry, "God has given America to be free!"

Amid cheers filled with emotion, every man rushed forward to sign the declaration except the stranger. "He had disappeared," wrote Hall, "nor was he ever seen again or his identity established." Hall said this episode paralleled similar incidents in world history, when strange unknown men suddenly appeared just in time for the creation of some new nation. "Are they coincidences," he asked, "or do they demonstrate that the divine wisdom of the Ancient Mysteries is still present in the world, serving mankind as it did of old?"

   Recall that England in 1764 had outlawed the creation of colonial scrip. This forced the colonists to sell bonds of indebtedness to the Bank of England and use its banknotes. "The colonies would gladly have borne the little tax on tea and other matters had not it been that England took away from the colonies their money, which created unemployment and dissatisfaction," wrote Benjamin Franklin.

   Author Epperson commented,

"Franklin acknowledged that the cause of the Revolution was the resistance of the colonies to the idea of borrowed money, resulting in debt and inflation as well as interest payments, and not ’taxation without representation’ as is commonly believed."

Again, this is an issue that we of modern-day America are not supposed to consider, much less understand.

   "When speaking of deficit spending," explained author Griffin, "... the colonists discovered, every government building, public work, and cannon of war is paid out of current labor and current wealth. These things must be built today with today’s labor, and the man who performs that labor must also be paid today. It is true that interest payments fall partly to future generations, but the initial cost is paid by those in the present. It is paid by loss of value in the monetary unit and loss of purchasing power for one’s wages." (emphasis in original)

   Faced with the staggering costs of the American Revolution, the colonists found that the unrestricted printing of money offered no lasting solution. In an attempt to avoid interest on borrowed money, the new states began printing their own paper fiat money eventually called "Continentals." The total money supply grew from $12 million in 1775 to $425 million by the end of 1779. liy that year the one-dollar Continental note was worth less than ë penny, hence the* old slogan "not worth a Continental.".

   Working to agitate these financial problems into open revolution were the secret societies. Freemasons were drawn to Samuel Adams’s Committees of Correspondence and the Sons of Liberty, which organized boycotts of British goods. Purposeful violent acts, such as the Boston Tea Party, were instigated by the inner-core members of the Freemason lodges, although sometimes even peaceful demonstrations got out of hand.

   In the summer of 1765, wealthy Boston merchants, including many Masons, formed a group opposed to England’s Stamp Act called the Loyal Nine. This group organized a procession of more than two thousand demonstrators who marched on the home of the local stampmaster and burned his effigy. After the initial instigators left, the aroused crowd began destroying property. Armed citizen patrols were organized and the very merchants who formed the Loyal Nine denounced the violence of the crowd.

   Thomas Paine clearly advocated Masonic ideals, as when he attacked the divine right of kings in his book Common Sense. Referring to the Norman invasion of England by William the Conqueror in 1066, Paine wrote,

"A French bastard landing with an armed Banditti and establishing himself king of England against the consent of the natives, is in plain terms a very paltry rascally original. It certainly hath no divinity in it."

   Author A. Ralph Epperson concluded that Masons controlled the American Revolution, while William Bramley noted,

"There was clearly something deeper driving the revolutionary cause: the rebels were out to establish a whole new social order ... A ’Who’s Who’ of the American Revolution is almost a ’Who’s Who’ of American colonial Freemasonry."

   Most of the patriots never realized this hidden manipulation.

"Few of these men, if any, knew of the ’plan’ of which only the leaders of Masonry were aware," noted Still. "Most believed they were simply involved in the cause of gaining independence from a tyrant. Masonry was to most of them, as it is to most of the membership today, merely a fraternal organization promoting social skills and providing fellowship to its members."

   Further proof of Freemasonic influence in the American Revolution can be found in an examination of the U.S. dollar bill—with Mason George Washington on the front and Masonic symbols on the reverse. One finds a pyramid with a missing capstone but topped by an "eye," both significant a long standing Masonic symbols. There are also the Latin phrases Annuit Coeptis (He hath prospered our beginning) and Novus Ordo Seclorum (New Worldly Order).

   Charles Thompson, designer of the Great Seal of the United States, was a Freemason and a member of Benjamin Franklin’s American Philosophical Society, an American counterpart to Britain’s "Invisible College." According to author Laurence Gardner,

"The imagery of the Seal is directly related to alchemical tradition, inherited from the allegory of the ancient Egyptian Therapeutate [medicine]. The eagle, the olive branch, the arrows and the pentagrams are all occult symbols of opposites: good and evil, male and female, war and peace, darkness and light. On the reverse—as repeated on the dollar bill—is the truncated pyramid, indicating the loss of the Old Wisdom, severed and forced underground by the Church establishment. But above this are the rays of ever-hopeful light, incorporating the ’all-seeing eye,’ used as a symbol during the French Revolution."

   Author Bramly noted that the official seal of the United States bears the words E Pluribus Unum (One out of many) originally depicted a Phoenix bird rising from ashes, a Masonic symbol traced to ancient Egypt. But so many people mistook the long-necked Phoenix for a turkey that the Bald Eagle was substituted in 1841.

   With these undeniably Masonic symbols prominently displayed on money and considering the wealth of information available to the scholar, Washington was clearly correct in his 1782 quote acknowledging the role of Illuminized Freemason doctrine in the early United States.

   Many conspiracy writers view one particular secret society—the Illuminati—as an early stage manager of world affairs from behind the scenes, a group powerful and dedicated enough to infiltrate and control even the Freemasons. To understand the mysterious and elusive Illuminati or Illuminated (enlightened) Ones, one must first turn to Germany in the eighteenth century.

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Although Illuminati concepts can be traced back through history to the earliest sects claiming esoteric knowledge, the order was first publicly identified in 1776. On May I of that year—a clay long honored by Communists who sonic believe formal their philosophy kissed on the Illuminati doctrine—the Bavarian Illuminati was formed by Adam Weishaupt, a professor of Canon Law at Ingolstadt University of Bavaria, Germany.

   One of his cofounders reportedly was William of Hesse, the employer of Mayer Rothschild. It is certainly true that the Rothschilds and German royalty were connected through Freemasonry: Rothschild biographer Niall Ferguson wrote that Mayer’s son Salomon was a member of the same Masonic lodge as Mayer’s bookkeeper Seligmann Geisenheimer.

   Studying to be a Jesuit priest, Weishaupt was undoubtedly angered over the 1773 banning of the order by Pope Clement XIV. While this act eventually led Weishaupt to break with the church, he remained fascinated with Jesuit theology. He also was greatly influenced by a merchant known only as Kolmer, termed by author Webster "the most mysterious of all the mystery men."

   Kolmer, suspected by some researchers to be the same man called Alto-tas who was admired and mentioned by the French court magician and revolutionary Cagliostro, learned the esoteric knowledge of Egypt and Persia while living in the Near East for many years. Kolmer preached a secret doctrine based on an ancient form of Gnosticism called Manichaeanism or Mandaeanism that had used the word "Illuminated" prior to the third century.

   Kolmer reportedly met Cagliostro on the Island of Malta, the old Knights Templar stronghold, while on his way to France and Germany in the early 1770s. Cagliostro, the future French revolutionary, then became involved in Masonic activities with the famed Venician lover Giovanni Giacomo Casanova, as well as the mysterious Count of Saint-Germain.

   In