The Civil War

General William Tecumseh Sherman, one of the participants in the Civil War, made this rather cryptic comment in his book Memoirs, "the truth is not always palatable and should not always be told." A similar comment was made by the author of the biography of Senator Zachariah Chandler of Michigan, a Senator during the Civil War:

"The secret history of these days . . . concealing many startling revelations, has yet been sparingly written; it is doubtful if the veil will ever be more than slightly lifted."

Those who have attempted to lift the veil have discovered that there are indeed many hidden truths about this fateful period in American history. One who only hinted at the truth about the real causes of the War was Colonel Edward Mandell House, who wrote his book entitled Philip Dru, Administrator, in 1912. In it, he has one of his characters make this statement:

"Cynical Europe said that the North would have it appear that a war had been fought for human freedom, whereas it was fought for money."

Is it possible that the Civil War was fought for reasons other than those traditionally offered? Is it possible that the real reasons for the war are among the secrets that some wish not to be revealed? Is it possible that slavery and states rights were not the real causes of the War?

CIVIL WAR GENERAL WILLIAM TECUMSEH SHERMAN WROTE IN HIS BOOK MEMOIRS: "THE TRUTH IS NOT ALWAYS PALATABLE, AND SHOULD NOT ALWAYS BE TOLD." HISTORIANS ARE STILL UNCOVERING EVIDENCES OF THE EUROPEAN AND AMERICAN CONSPIRACY THAT SPLIT THE UNITED STATES INTO A NORTH AND A SOUTH SO THAT THEY COULD FINANCE BOTH SIDES IN THE ENSUING CONFLICT.

After the demise of the Second Bank of the United States, the state banks, those chartered by the various states in the Union, operated the banking system of the United States and issued all of the money. Almost exclusively, this money was backed by gold, not by debt and paper money.

However, the financial position of the federal government had been slowly deteriorating:

"At the outbreak of the war the United States Treasury was in greater shambles than Fort Sumter. Southern banks had been quietly withdrawing large amounts of funds on deposit in the North. When Lincoln took office, he found his Treasury almost empty."

The Civil War started in 1837, the year after the charter of the Second Bank had expired, when the Rothschild family sent one of their representatives to the United States. His name was August Belmont, and he arrived during the panic of 1837. He quickly made his presence felt by buying government bonds. His success and prosperity soon led him to the White House, where he became the "financial advisor to the President of the United States."

Another of the pieces of this enormous puzzle fell into place in 1854 when a secret organization known as the Knights of the Golden Circle was formed by George W.L. Bickley, who "declared that he had created the fateful war of 1861 with an organization that had engineered and spread secession."

Another of the leading characters in the story of the Civil War was J.P. Morgan, later to become one of America's most wealthy and influential industrialists and bankers. Mr. Morgan went to Europe in 1856 to study at the University of Gottingen in Germany. It is not inconceivable that one of the people he met while in college was Karl Marx, who was active during this time writing and publicizing his ideas about Communism, since Marx was in and out of Germany on a regular basis.

In any event, it was during this time that the European bankers began plotting the Civil War. According to John Reeves, in an authorized biography entitled The Rothschilds, the Financial Rulers of Nations, a pivotal meeting took place in London, in 1857. It was at this meeting that the International Banking Syndicate decided that (in America) the North was to be pitted against the South under the old principle of 'divide and conquer.' This amazing agreement was corroborated by MacKenzie in his historical research entitled The Nineteenth Century.

The plotters realized that once again the American people would not accept a national bank without a reason for having one, and once again the plotters decided upon a war. Wars are costly, and they force governments into a position where they must borrow money to pay for them, and the decision was made once again to force the United States into a war so that it would have to deal with the issue of how to pay for its costs.

But the plotters had a difficult problem: what nation could they induce to fight against the United States government? The United States was too powerful, and no country, or combinations of countries, could match them in a "balance of power" showdown. Canada to the north and Mexico to the south were not strong enough and couldn't raise an army adequate for the anticipated conflict, so they were discounted. England and France were 3,000 miles away and across a huge ocean that made the supplying of an invading army nearly impossible. And Russia had no central bank so the bankers had no control over that nation.

So the bankers made the decision to divide the United States into two parts, thereby creating an enemy for the government of the United States to war against.

The bankers first had to locate an issue to use in causing the southern states to secede from the United States.

The issue of slavery was ideal.

Next the bankers had to create an organization that could promote secession amongst the southern states so that they would divide themselves away from the federal government.

The Knights of the Golden Circle was created for that purpose. Abraham Lincoln began to see the drama unfold as he was campaigning for the Presidency in 1860. He saw the war as an attempt to split the Union, not over the issue of slavery, but just for the pure sake of splitting the Union. He wrote:

"I have never had a feeling politically that did not spring from the sentiments embodied in the Declaration of Independence. If it (the Union) cannot be saved without giving up that principle, I was about to say I would rather be assassinated on this spot than surrender it."

So many of his fellow Americans also saw the war as an attempt to split the Union that "it was not uncommon for men to declare that they would resign their officer's commission if the war for the Union was perverted into an attack on slavery."

Curiously, Mr. Lincoln started having thoughts about his own assassination during the 1860 convention.

"He went upstairs and, exhausted by repressed excitement, he lay down on the couch in Mrs. Lincoln's sitting room.

"While lying there he was disturbed to see in the mirror two images of himself which were alike, except that one was not so clear as the other. The double reflection awakened the primitive vein in the superstition always present in him. He rose and lay down again to see if the paler shadow would vanish, but he saw it once more

"The next morning . . . he went home and reclined on the couch to see if there was not something wrong with the mirror itself. He was reassured to find it played the same trick. When he tried to show it to Mrs. Lincoln, however, the second reflection failed to appear.

"Mrs. Lincoln took it as a sign that he was to have two terms in the Presidency, but she feared the paleness of one of the figures signified that he would not live through the second term.

"'I am sure,' he said to his partner once, 'I shall meet with some terrible end.'"

The Knights of the Golden Circle were successful in spreading the message of secession amongst the various Southern states. As each state withdrew from the United States, it left independently of the others. The withdrawing states then formed a Confederation of States, as separate and independent entities. The independence of each state was written into the Southern Constitution: "We, the people of the Confederate States, each state acting for itself, and in its sovereign and independent character."

This action was significant because, should the South win the war, 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 a 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.

President Lincoln saw the problem developing, and was fortunate that the government of Russia was willing to assist his government in the event of a war with England and France. "While still President-elect, he (Lincoln) had been informed by the Russian minister to the United States that his country was willing to aid the Washington government should it be menaced by England and France."

Eleven southern states seceded from the Union to form the Confederacy. But in a rather enigmatic move, the flag adopted by the Confederacy had thirteen stars on it. As mentioned before, the number thirteen has significance to the Freemasons.

The South started the Civil War on April 12, 1861, when they fired upon Fort Sumter, a Northern fort in South Carolina.

One of the members of the Knights of the Golden Circle was the well known bandit Jesse James, and it was Jesse's father, George James, a Captain in the Southern Army, who fired the first shot at the fort.

Abraham Lincoln, now President of the Northern States, once again reported to the American people that the war was a result of conspiratorial forces at work in the South. He told the North that: "combinations too powerful to be suppressed by the ordinary machinery of peacetime government had assumed control of various Southern states."

Lincoln, and later the Russian government, saw that England and France were aligning themselves against the North on the side of the South, and immediately issued orders for a sea blockade of the Southern states to prevent these two nations from using the seas to send supplies to the South.

The Russian minister to the United States also saw this alignment and he advised his government in April, 1861, that: "England will take advantage of the first opportunity to recognize the seceded states and that France will follow her." (It is interesting that two of the Rothschild brothers had banks in England and France.)

The Russian foreign minister instructed his American minister in Washington in July, 1861, "to assure the American nation that it could assume 'the most cordial sympathy on the part of our August Master (the Czar of Russia) during the serious crisis which it is passing through at the present.'"

Lincoln was receiving great pressure from certain of the banking establishment to float interest-bearing loans to pay the costs of the war.

Salmon P. Chase, after whom the Chase Manhattan Bank, owned by the Rockefeller interests, is named, and Lincoln's Secretary of the Treasury during the Civil War, "threatened the (rest of the) bankers that, if they did not accept the bonds he was issuing, he would flood the country with circulating notes, even if it should take a thousand dollars of such currency to buy a breakfast."

So Abraham Lincoln decided not to borrow money from the bankers nor to create interest bearing money by creating a national bank that would loan the government the needed money by printing large quantities of paper money. Lincoln issued the "Greenback" in February, 1862. This money was not only unbacked by gold, but was debt free.

Lincoln was playing a deadly game. He had crossed the international bankers. The war was being fought to force the United States into a position of having to create a national bank, run independently by the European bankers, and Lincoln had turned his back on them by issuing his own Fiat Money.

The international bankers also out-manuevered Lincoln, at least to a degree, when on August 5, 1861, they induced Congress, mostly at the urging of Secretary of the Treasury Chase, to pass an income tax. They imposed "a three-percent federal income tax. This was superseded almost at once by an act of March, 1862, signed in July, while maintaining a three-percent tax on income below $10,000, increased the rate to five percent above that level."

It was a graduated income tax, just as proposed by Karl Marx just thirteen years before.

PRESIDENT ABRAHAM LINCOLN WROTE THAT A 'MONEY POWER' WAS AT WORK IN THE CIVIL WAR AND THAT IT ASSISTED IN THE PASSAGE OF THE NATIONAL BANKING ACT OF 1863. THIS BILL CREATED A NATIONAL BANK WITH THE ABILITY TO CREATE MONEY AND LOAN IT, AT INTEREST, TO THE UNITED STATES GOVERNMENT. IT WAS THIS SAME 'POWER' THAT WAS INVOLVED IN HIS ASSASSINATION IN 1865.

England and France now moved to increase the pressure on Lincoln's government. On November 8, 1861, England "dispatched 8,000 troops to Canada as tangible proof that she meant business" in supporting the South. France marched troops into Mexico after landing them on the coast and imposing their choice of rulers, the emperor Maximillian, as the head of Mexico. Lincoln could see that he was being flanked by the European governments.

In 1938, Jerry Voorhis, a Congressman from California, wrote a pamphlet entitled Dollars and Sense, in which he shared a little bit of history with the American people about the events of the Civil War:

"In July 1862, an agent of the London bankers sent the following letter to leading financiers and bankers in the United States soon after Lincoln's first issue of greenbacks: 'The great debt that capitalists will see to it is made out of the war must be used to control the volume of money. To accomplish this the bonds must be used as a banking basis.'

"We are not waiting for the Secretary of the Treasury (Salmon P. Chase) to make this recommendation to Congress. It will not do to allow the greenback, as it is called, to circulate as money any length of time, for we cannot control them. But we can control the bonds and through them the bank issues." In order to curtail the flow of the military equipment the largely rural South needed to wage the war, Lincoln, on April 19, 1861, imposed the naval blockade previously mentioned. The Confederacy needed "to go abroad and replace privateers with powerful warships which (they were) to buy or have built to order. The first of these vessels, the Sumter, was commissioned in the spring of 1861, and was followed in 1862 by the Florida and the Alabama."

The South was purchasing these ships from England and France to break the blockade, and Secretary of State William Seward saw the importance of keeping these two nations out of the war. He "warned the British government: 'If any European power provokes war, we shall not shrink from it.' Similarly Seward advised Mercier that French recognition of the Confederacy would result in war with the United States."

Lincoln continued to see the danger from the European bankers and the two European countries of France and England. He saw the main issue of the war as being the preservation of the union. He repeated his statement that preserving the Union was his main task: "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."

But even though Lincoln was not conducting the war over the issue of slavery, he issued the Emancipation Proclamation freeing the slaves on September 22, 1862, claiming the right to do so as the Commander-in-Chief of the Army and Navy. There was no act of Congress, just the solitary act of the President of the United States. But his act had the force of law, and the American people accepted it as such.

In addition to the external threat from England and France, Lincoln also had an internal threat to contend with: the central bank. On February 25, 1863, Congress passed the National Banking Act. This act created a federally chartered national bank that had the power to issue U.S. Bank Notes, money created to be loaned to the government supported not by gold but by debt. The money was loaned to the government at interest, and became Legal Tender. This bill was supported and urged by the Secretary of the Treasury, Salmon P. Chase.

Lincoln, after the passage of this act, once again warned the American people. 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, more insolent than autocracy, more 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 is destroyed."

A few months after the passage of the act, the Rothschild bank in England wrote a letter to a New York firm of bankers:

"The few who understand the system (interest-bearing money) will either be so interested in its profits, or so dependent on 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 the tremendous advantages that capital derives from the system, will bear its burdens without complaint, and perhaps without even suspecting the system is inimical to their interests."

Lincoln was betting on the blockade he had imposed around the South as a means of keeping England and France out of the war. The blockade was effectively doing this, at least on the surface, but others were using it as a means of making enormous profits. Private individuals were "running" the blockade by equipping several ships with essential provisions for the South, and then hoping that a percentage of these ships would make it through the blockade, so that the blockade runner could charge exorbitant prices for the goods in Southern cities. One of these individuals was Thomas W. House, reportedly a Rothschild agent, who amassed a fortune during the Civil War. House was the father of Colonel Edward Mandell House, the key to the election of President Woodrow Wilson and the passage of the Federal Reserve bill in 1913.

Lincoln realized that the North needed an ally to keep the European countries out of the war directly, as both nations were building ships capable of running the blockade, and the entry of England and France directly into the war could spell the end of the North. He looked to other European countries for assistance and found none willing to provide the support for his government. There was one country, however, that had no central bank and therefore no internal force preventing its support of the United States government.

That country was Russia.

Russia had a large navy and had already pledged its support to Lincoln prior to the beginning of the war. It could now involve itself and keep England and France out of the war because these two nations feared a war with the Russian government

Lincoln needed something that he could use as a means of encouraging the Russian people to send their navy to the defense of the United States government. Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation to free the slaves as a gesture to the Russian people who had their Czar free the serfs with a similar proclamation in 1861. Lincoln anticipated that this one act would encourage the Russian people to support their government when it lent support to Lincoln's government

The Czar of Russia, Alexander II, issued orders to his imperial navy to sail for the American ports of New York City and San Francisco as a sign of support for Lincoln and his government. It also served as a dramatic means of indicating to France and England they would have to contend with the Russian government as well should they enter the war on the side of the South. These ships began arriving in the United States in September, 1863.

It was commonly understood why these ships were entering the American waters. "The average Northerner (understood) . . . that the Russian Czar was taking this means of warning England and France that if they made war in support of the South, he would help the North."

In October, 1863, the city of Baltimore issued a proclamation inviting the:

"officers of the Russian ships of war now in or shortly to arrive at that Port (New York) to visit the city of Baltimore. . .and to accept of its hospitalities, as a testimonial of the high respect of the authorities and citizens of Baltimore for the Sovereign and people of Russia, who, when other powers and people strongly bound to us by ties of interest or common descent (England and France?) have lent material and support to the Rebels of the South, have honorably abstained from all attempts to assist the rebellion, and have given our government reliable assurances of their sympathy and good will."

The Czar issued orders to his Admirals that they were to be ready to fight any power and to take their orders only from Abraham Lincoln. And in the event of war, the Russian Navy was ordered to "attack the enemy's commercial shipping and their colonies, so as to cause them the greatest possible damage."

In addition to all of these problems, Lincoln faced one more: the machinations of an internal conspiracy. Lincoln had anticipated such a conspiracy in 1837 when he stated:

"At what point then is the approach of danger to be expected? I answer, if it ever reaches us it must spring up amongst us; it cannot come from abroad. If destruction be our lot, we must ourselves be its author and finisher. As a nation of free men, we must live through all time, or die by suicide."

So Lincoln feared that the ultimate death of his nation would be caused by her own sons, his fellow Americans.

Early in 1863, Lincoln wrote a letter to Major General Joseph Hooker, in which he said: "I have placed you at the head of the Army of the Potomac. I have heard, in such a way as to believe it, of your recently saying that both the army and the government needed a dictator."

Apparently what Lincoln had heard about General Hooker was true, as Hooker had "once been feared as the potential leader of a Radical coup d'etat."

The Radicals referred to in Lincoln's letter to General Hooker were a group of Republicans, amongst others, who saw that the North would ultimately win the war with the South, and they wanted Lincoln to make the South pay for its rebellion after the victory. Lincoln favored the softer approach of allowing the Southern states to return to the Union after the war ended, without reprisals against them or their fighting men. The Radicals were frequently called the "Jacobins" after the group that fomented the French Revolution of 1789. As mentioned earlier, they were an offshoot of the Illuminati.

But Lincoln's biggest battle was yet to be fought: the battle for his life. The visions of Lincoln's earlier years about not serving two complete terms, and his fears about internal conspiracies, were about to come true.

On April 14, 1865, the conspiracy that Lincoln both feared and had knowledge of assassinated him. Eight people were tried for the crime, and four were later hung. In addition to the conspiracy's successful attempt on Lincoln's life, the plan was to also assassinate Andrew Johnson, Lincoln's Vice President, and Secretary of State Seward. Both of these other attempts failed, but if they had been successful, there is little doubt who would have been the one to reap all of the benefits: Secretary of War Edwin Stanton.

In fact, after the successful assassination of Lincoln, Stanton "became in that moment the functioning government of the United States, when he assumed control of the dty of Washington D.C. in an attempt to capture Lincoln's killer."

The man who killed Lincoln, John Wilkes Booth, had several links with societies of the day, one of which was the Carbonari of Italy, an Illuminati-like secret organization active in Italian intrigue.

One of the many evidences of Stanton's complicity in the assassination attempts is the fact that he failed to block off the road that Booth took as he left Washington D.C. after the assassination, even though Stanton had ordered military blockades on all of the other roads.

It is now believed that Stanton also arranged for another man, similar in build and appearance to Booth, to be captured and then murdered by troops under the command of Stanton. It is further believed that Stanton certified that the murdered man was Booth, thereby allowing Booth to escape.

But perhaps the most incriminating evidence that Stanton was involved in the assassination of Lincoln lies in the missing pages of the diary kept by Mr. Booth. Stanton testified before Congressional investigating committees "that the pages were missing when the diary was given to him in April of 1865. The missing pages contain the names of some seventy high government officials and prominent businessmen who were involved in a conspiracy to eliminate Lincoln. The purported eighteen missing pages were recently discovered in the attic of Stanton's descendants."

And Booth was even linked to those involved with the conspiracy in the South: "A coded message was found in the trunk of Booth, the key to which was discovered in Judah P. Benjamin's possession. Benjamin . . . was the Civil War campaign strategist of the House of Rothschild." (Mr. Benjamin held many key positions in the Confederacy during the Civil War.)

So it appears that Lincoln was the subject of a major conspiracy to assassinate him, a conspiracy so important that even the European bankers were involved. Lincoln had to be eliminated because he dared to oppose the attempt to force a central bank onto the American people, and as an example to those who would later oppose such machinations in high places.

(Note: One of the early books on the subject of this conspiracy was published just months after the assassination of President Lincoln. It was entitled The Assassination and History of the Conspiracy, and it clearly identified the Knights of the Golden Circle as the fountainhead of the assassination plot. The back cover of the book carried an advertisement for another book that offered the reader "an inside view of the modus of the infamous organization, its connection with the rebellion and the Copperhead movement at the North." The second book was written by Edmund Wright, who claimed to be a member of the Knights.)

After the attempt on his life failed, and after Lincoln's death, Vice-President Johnson became the President of the United States. He continued Lincoln's policy of amnesty to the defeated South after the war was over. He issued an Amnesty Proclamation on May 29, 1865, welcoming the South back into the Union with only a few requirements:

1. The South must repudiate the debt of the war;
2. Repeal all secession ordinances and laws; and
3. Abolish slavery forever.

The first requirement did not endear President Johnson to those who wished the South to redeem its contractual obligations to those who loaned it the money it needed to fight the war. One of these debtors was the Rothschild family, who had heavily funded the South's efforts in the war.

Johnson also had to face another problem.

The Czar of Russia, for his part in saving the United States government during the war by sending his fleet to American waters, and apparently because of an agreement he made with Lincoln, asked to be paid for the use of his fleet. Johnson had no constitutional authority to give American dollars to the head of a foreign government. And the cost of the fleet was rather high: $7.2 million.

So Johnson had Secretary of State William Seward arrange for the purchase of Alaska from the Russians in April, 1867.

This act has unfairly been called "Seward's folly" by those historians unfamiliar with the actual reasons for Alaska's purchase, and to this day, Secretary of State Seward has been criticized for the purchase of what was then a piece of worthless land. But Seward was only purchasing the land as a method by which he could pay the Czar of Russia for the use of his fleet, an action that probably saved this nation from a more serious war with England and France.

But the real problem Johnson was to have during his tenure as President of the United States was still to occur.

He asked for the resignation of Secretary of War Edwin Stanton, and Stanton refused.

The Radical Republicans, also called the Jacobins, in the Senate started impeachment proceedings against President Johnson. These efforts failed by the slim margin of only one vote, and Johnson continued in office. In an interesting quirk of fate, the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court at the time was Salmon P. Chase, and it was his task to preside over the impeachment trial of President Johnson. Chase had resigned as Secretary of the Treasury to become the Chief Justice. It was almost as if the conspiracy had anticipated the impeachment proceedings and had wanted a man they felt they could trust in that key position.

Senator Benjamin F. Wade, President Pro-Tempore of the Senate, and next in line of succession to the Chief Executive's position, had been so confident that Johnson would be found guilty of the charges against him and removed from office that he had already informally named his new cabinet. Ironically, Stanton was to become the Secretary of the Treasury.

Chief Justice Chase's role in these events would be recognized years later by John Thompson, founder of the Chase National Bank (later to be called the Chase Manhattan Bank, after its merger with the Manhattan Bank owned by the Warburgs,) who named his bank after him. In addition, other honors came to the Chief Justice. His picture now is found on the $10,000 bill printed by the U.S. Treasury. This bill is the highest existing denomination currency in the United States.

After the Civil War ended, President Johnson "had no doubt there was a conspiracy afoot among the Radicals (the Jacobins) to incite another revolution."

It was the intent of the Jacobins to stir up the newly freed slaves and then use this dissatisfaction as the reason for starting another Civil War. And in fact there was a large riot in Memphis, Tennessee, in April, 1866, where a group of whites attacked negroes and forty-six of the Negroes were killed. Later, in July, 1866, there was a riot in New Orleans where a group of marching negroes were fired upon and many of them were killed.

The Radicals blamed Johnson for these killings, but some knew that the rioting was the work of others. Gideon Wells, the Secretary of the Navy, was one and he wrote in his diary:

"There is little doubt that the New Orleans riots had their origin with the Radical members of Congress in Washington. It is part of a deliberate conspiracy and was to be the commencement of a series of bloody affrays through the States lately in the rebellion (the South.) There is a determination to involve the country in civil war, if necessary, to secure negro suffrage in the States and Radical ascendancy in the general government."

Even President Johnson was aware of the attempts to incite another Civil War as he once told Orville Browning that "he had no doubt that there was a conspiracy afoot among the Radicals to incite another revolution, and especially to arm and exasperate the negroes."

"The President himself was coming to believe that Stevens and Sumner (the leaders of the Radicals, also known as the Jacobins) and their followers intended to take the government into their own hands.

"It was an 'unmistakable design,' he once told Welles. They would declare Tennessee out of the Union and so get rid of him, and then set up a Directory based on the French Revolution's model."

One of the groups acting to incite the riots was the Knights of the Golden Circle, whose war-time members included John Wilkes Booth and Jefferson Davis, the head of the Confederacy. Another member, Jesse James, was secretly hoarding large quantities of gold stolen from banks and mining companies in an attempt to buy a second Civil War. It has been estimated that Jesse and the other members of the Knights had buried over $7 billion in gold all over the western states.

Jesse James, a 33rd degree Mason, lived to be 107 years old. He claimed that his secret to his long life was that he changed his name frequently after first locating a cowboy with approximately his same physical characteristics. He then would kill or have him killed by shooting him in the face. He would then plant some items known to be his on the body, such as jewelry or clothing. His next step would be to have a known relative or a close friend identify the body as being that of Jesse James. Since there were no other means of identifying the body such as pictures or fingerprints, the public assumed that the relative or friend knew what they were saying when they identified the body. Grateful townspeople were happy to think that the notorious bank-robber, or any or his dangerous aliases, was dead, so they tended to believe that the identification was correct. Jesse claimed that it was by this method that he assumed the identities or aliases of some seventy-three individuals. In fact, he claimed that one of his aliases he used in later years was that of William A. Clark, the copper king and later a U.S. Senator from the Las Vegas area of Nevada. It is after Senator Clark that Clark County, Nevada is named.

Another group that was formed in 1867 to spread terror amongst the Negroes was a group known as the Ku Klux Klan, named after the Greek word Kuklos, which meant "band" or "circle."

Someone suggested that the name should be changed to Ku Klux, and this is the name that has existed to this very day. This organization was "brother to those secret organizations made up of other victims of despotism: the Confrereries of medieval France, the Carbonari of Italy, the Vehmgerict of Germany, (and) the Nihilists of Russia."

It was the Nihilists who were credited with the assassination of the Czar of Russia, Alexander II, in 1881. This was the same Czar who sent the fleet to America during the Civil War. So he, like Lincoln, had to pay the price for outwitting the international bankers who had caused the Civil War. The connection between the Ku Klux Klan and the Knights of the Golden Circle has now become known. One author has written that "the Ku Klux Klan was the military arm of the Knights of the Golden Circle."

The final important act of the Civil War came in 1875, when Congress passed the Specie Redemption Act, declaring it the policy of the government to redeem President Lincoln's "greenbacks" at par in gold on January 1, 1879.

Lincoln had outwitted the international bankers.

The United States still did not have a central bank.

It was time for the conspiracy to change the strategy.