1715-16: Scotland-born Cadwallader Colden is
in London, amidst the Leibniz-Clarke battle (the debate of Leibnizian
science versus Newtonian dogma). Colden then goes to America, lives in
Philadelphia, marries James Logan's cousin. At the invitation of New York
governor Robert Hunter (ally of governors Spottswood and Keith, the
colonial leaders sponsored by the Swift-Leibniz-Queen Anne faction,[2]
Colden moves to New York and becomes surveyor general of the province.
1724: Colden writes the first document on the need to
improve the route which was to become the Erie Canal. Colden addresses to
Gov. William Burnet, Hunter's chosen successor, "A Memorial
Concerning the Fur-Trade of the Province of New York," stressing the
necessity to develop the river/portage route from the Hudson River along
the Mohawk Valley to Lake Erie. This memorial is published a century later
as an appendix in the 1829 book, Memoir of DeWitt Clinton, by
David Hosack, the physician who attended the Burr-Hamilton duel and cared
for the dying Hamilton.
1727: Colden's "The History of the Five Indian
Nations Depending on the Province of New York" is first published.
Colden studied the problem of achieving peace with the Indians whom the
British and French oligarchs and Jesuits were using against American
continental development.
1731: Colden hires immigrant Charles Clinton as a
surveyor. Over the years Colden advances Clinton's career and brings him
into prominent society.
1747: Abraham Kästner[3]
receives his copy of Colden's 1745 anti-Newtonian work on the physical
nature of the universe, Principles of Action in Matter.
1748: Kästner publishes a German translation of
Colden's work.
1751: Colden's work is published in Paris, by the
networks of Benjamin Franklin.
1752: Colden receives the 1748 German edition of his
book, translated and critiqued by Kästner. Colden writes to Franklin
about having received it and not knowing German, and "I find my name
often in company with those of very great ones Newtone, Leibniz, and
Wolfius and Leibnizs Monades often mentioned a New Doctrine which perhaps
you have seen and is of great repute in Germany." Colden then has Kästner's
commentary translated into English by Reverend John Christopher
Hartwick.
1752: Colden and Franklin collaborate on electricity
and on the attack against Newton. Swiss mathematician Leonhard Euler
attacks Colden, who writes to Franklin that Euler "writes much like a
Pedant—highly conceited of himself."
1753: Franklin and Colden send a reply to Kästner. Kästner's
known response was to organize the Leipzig scientific community to sponsor
a trip to America for his protégé, Mylius, who unfortunately died before
he could reach Franklin and Colden in America.
1754: Franklin is at the Albany Congress, in Colden's
New York province.
1756: James Clinton, son of Colden's
surveyor, enters the colonial militia.
1757-62: Franklin goes to England, spurs and guides
the humanist inventors and developers of the Industrial Revolution.
1760: Colden, James Clinton's family sponsor, becomes
lieutenant governor of New York.
1761: Philip Schuyler, colonial militia
officer, goes to England. He inspects the newly completed Bridgewater
Canal, which Franklin's circle had organized the Duke of Bridgewater
to construct. This canal opens Manchester to industry, and the little
Franklin circle quickly builds other canals, numerous inventions, mining,
and the first steam engine. Schuyler determines that such a canal must be
built in America.
1760s-1770s: Franklin directs the American strategy
for the development of the West. He creates the Illinois company, which
comes under the management of Robert Morris and James Wilson, Illinois
planned to be populated by government-aided settlers with cheap mortgages.
Under the British yoke, Franklin struggles to create Ohio. Lord
Shelburne dissembles to Franklin that although he approves of
Franklin's Ohio scheme, other Brits oppose it, because they will not
permit the establishment of a settled power in the interior of North
America.
1769: Birth of James Clinton's son, DeWitt Clinton.
1775: James Clinton becomes a colonel in the Patriot
militia, a brigadier general the next year.
1775-83: The American Revolution. The Americans take
areas of the West from the British. But the British remain there,
surrounding and menacing the first settlers from British Canada. The West
is cut off from the new U.S.A. to the east, by the mountains.
1776: Jonathan Williams (age 26) joins his
great uncle—Benjamin Franklin—in Paris. Williams sets up his base in
Nantes, as the Continental Congress agent in charge of arms supplies being
shipped from France.
1777: George Clinton, brother of Gen. James Clinton
and son of Colden's surveyor, becomes the first governor of New York State
(governor 1777-95, 1801-04). His nephew DeWitt begins political life as
secretary to Governor Clinton.
Elkanah Watson goes to France bearing messages to Franklin,
then tours and intensively inspects the canals in Holland.
1778: British and Tories direct the Indians in the
horrible, long-remembered massacre at Cherry Valley, N.Y.
1779: Gen. James Clinton, ordered by Washington to
take command at Lake Otsego, to punish the Cherry Valley massacre
perpetrators, famously dams the lake at its outflow into the Susquehanna
River, raising the lake level, and when ready, bursts the dam so that his
heavily laden supply boats get swept down the river to reach General
Sullivan.
1780: Alexander Hamilton marries Elizabeth,
daughter of Philip Schuyler.
1783-89: At Revolution's end, George Washington
works in New York plotting the route for a canal to Lake Erie, and in the
middle Atlantic for routes to the Ohio River. Organizing for these canals
by Washington and Hamilton leads to the assembling of the Constitutional
Convention in Philadelphia.
Elkanah Watson, back from Europe, meets with Washington to discuss the
development of a New York canal to Lake Erie.
1785: William Cooper of New Jersey visits
Lake Otsego. Originally a skilled worker, Cooper is an avid reader of
Jonathan Swift, of history, and of London political literature, in the
library set up in Burlington, N.J. by Philadelphia-based Quakers, an
apparent spin-off from the Logan-Franklin library.
1786: William Cooper acquires 40,000 acres at the
lake, including the site of Cooperstown, on the interior frontier
contested with Britain. Alexander Hamilton is Cooper's political sponsor
and lawyer, and Cooper's partners include Robert Morris, Tench Coxe, and
Benjamin Rush. Cooper rapidly populates his area with settlers getting
cheap mortgages, allowing them to pay just about anything to get their
land.
1790: One-year-old James Fenimore Cooper arrives at
the settlement of his father William.
The Cooper land adjoins the 24,000-acre patent owned by John
Christopher Hartwick, who translated Kästner's version of Colden's
Leibnizian physics. Hartwick turns over to William Cooper the entire
management of his land. Hartwick dies in 1796. Hartwick's Cooper-managed
estate sets up an Indian School which becomes Hartwick Seminary and then
Hartwick College. In 1990, the papers of William Cooper were donated to
the Hartwick College Archives as the bequest of Paul Fenimore Cooper, Jr.,
great-great-great grandson of William Cooper. Around 1983, a member of the
Cooper family took me to lunch at the Yale Club and into the Century Club,
where a portrait of Aaron Burr was hanging over the fireplace, and we
discussed the 1809 assassination of William Cooper by Burr's
people.
Aaron Burr was the attorney for the Prevost family,[4]
the Martinist-allied British intelligence figures who contested in the
court system against William Cooper and his family for ownership of this
strategic landholding on the frontier in New York.
In 1940, the New York State Historical Association held a
150th-anniversary commemoration of James Fenimore Cooper coming to
Cooperstown. In the pageant, participants performed the roles of John
Christopher Hartwick, Gen. James Clinton, and Lieutenant Prevost of
Switzerland (nephew of two British commanders in the Revolution and the
War of 1812).
1792: Philip Schuyler, assisted by Elkanah Watson,
creates the Western Inland Lock Navigation Company to build the Erie
Canal. Schuyler begins construction, but needs the government to take
over to get the job done.
1794: DeWitt Clinton, a member of the New York State
Board of Regents, addressing the Legislature, says: "Great
Improvements must take place which far surpass the momentum of power that
a single nation can produce, but will with facility proceed from their
united strength. The hand of art will change the face of the universe.
Mountains, deserts, and oceans will feel its mighty force. It will not be
debated whether hills shall be prostrated; but whether the Alps and the
Andes shall be leveled; nor whether sterile fields shall be fertilized,
but whether the deserts of Africa shall feel the power of cultivation; nor
whether rivers shall be joined, but whether the Caspian shall see the
Mediterranean, and the waves of the Pacific lave the Atlantic."
1800: Aaron Burr, having organized the
anti-Federalist vote in New York State for the Jefferson Presidential
ticket, is encouraged by Albert Gallatin to try to get the Presidency
himself, with backing of anti-Union Northern Federalists. DeWitt
Clinton and Hamilton block this; Hamilton convinces enough
Federalists to back Thomas Jefferson and elect him through Congress
action.
1802: The U.S. Military Academy (USMA) is
established at West Point. The Academy was in some respect Hamilton's
project. He had prepared the legislation for its creation for Congress,
proposed the general curriculum, and inspected the West Point fort as the
intended site for the Academy. Congress passes legislation to set up the
USMA only after Jefferson became President.
Jonathan Williams is founding superintendent. Joseph
Gardner Swift is the first graduating cadet.
In his memoirs, Joseph Swift writes that in October 1802, he and his
mentor, Col. Jonathan Williams, traveled together to Albany and met
Hamilton, then titled a U.S. General:
General Hamilton ... invited me to dine with him at his
father-in-law's—General Philip Schuyler's. After dinner, among the
subjects of conversation was the canal and improved navigation of the
Mohawk.... It was graphically described by General Schuyler.... He
regretted that the locks were too small, and the Mohawk unmanageable. He
spoke of the object of the tour of Washington in 1789 to be, among other
enquiries, to learn what improvements could be made to connect the Hudson
and the lakes....
The following day General Hamilton, Colonel Williams and General
Schuyler discussed the subject of the Military Academy, the colonel giving
his ideas and purposes to encourage an enlargement of the present plan;
General Hamilton approved....
Colonel Williams and myself examined the old octagonal Dutch church,
that stood at the junction of Market and State Streets, and the old hall
where, in 1754, a congress had been held, which had been described to him
by his friend and relative, Dr. Franklin....
On the 12th [of November 1802] a meeting was assembled in the
"long room" of the Academy, consisting of Lieutenant-Colonel
Williams, Major Wadsworth, Professors Barron and Mansfield, Lieutenants
Wilson, Macomb, Swift and Levy, and Cadet Armistead, for the purpose of
forming a Military Philosophical Society, to promote military
science and history. This society soon embraced as members nearly every
distinguished gentleman in the navy and Union, and several in Europe. Its
funds were invested in New York city stock [i.e., city bonds].
The Military Philosophical Society included DeWitt Clinton and John
Quincy Adams. In the Society's minutes as of 1807, Joseph Gardner Swift is
listed as the corresponding secretary.
1802-03: Pamphlet War between the Aaron Burr
organization and the DeWitt Clinton organization. (Clinton is in the U.S.
Senate; he then becomes mayor of New York City. Burr is Vice President.)
DeWitt Clinton shoots Burr's aide John Swartwout, in a duel at
Weehawken, N.J.. Clinton's arranged duel with Burr ally Sen. Jonathan
Dayton of (N.J.) is called off.
Martin Van Buren begins his political career in the law office
of Burr's aide William P. Van Ness, the main author (pseudonym
"Aristedes") of the Burr group's pamphlets attacking DeWitt
Clinton. (Peter Irving, Washington Irving's brother, writes pro-Burr
articles in this pamphlet war! Thus Washington Irving is in the middle of
this affray from the very beginning.)
The DeWitt Clinton organization replaces the Burr organization as
leaders of New York State politics in the Jefferson party.
1803-06: James Fenimore Cooper is at Yale. His science
teacher is Benjamin Silliman.
1804: President Jefferson chooses New York Gov. George
Clinton (DeWitt's uncle) to be Vice President for Jefferson's second term,
replacing Burr. Burr seeks the vacated New York governorship, and
conspires with Federalist secessionist New Englanders. Hamilton goes
against his own party, exposing Burr as a would-be Napoleon.
Burr shoots Hamilton in duel at Weehawken, N.J. John Swartwout, earlier
wounded in a Weehawken duel by DeWitt Clinton, is Burr's second. William
P. Van Ness, Martin Van Buren's mentor and boss, awakens Burr for the
duel.
1804-06: Aaron Burr, in league with British Amb.
Anthony Merry, Sen. Jonathan Dayton (Clinton duel challenger), John
Randolph of Roanoke, Va. (first cousin of chairman Tucker of the East
India Company), and Andrew Jackson, aims at conquest of Louisiana and
Mexico for a new, British-backed empire.
1806-11: James Fenimore Cooper is in the U.S.
Navy, rises to lieutenant; warships take him to England and Spain.
1807: Robert Fulton, a member of the Military
Philosophical Society, demonstrates the operation of a steamboat on the
Hudson River. (Beyond the scope of the present chronology are Fulton's
life and projects in tandem with Franklin, Hamilton, et al., the origin of
heat power/steam power from Leibniz and Franklin, the crucial early role
of steamboats in the West, and in Ambassador J.Q. Adams' proposal for
Fulton steamboats to Czar Alexander I.)
1807: Jefferson puts Burr on trial for treason. At the
trial in Richmond, Va., Andrew Jackson, called as witness, harangues in
the street against Jefferson. John Randolph is the grand jury foreman,
conspiring with Burr and, like Jackson, haranguing against Jefferson.
Observers at the Burr trial, young lawyer/patriot Winfield Scott,
and Washington Irving meet, and they become lifelong friends.
Scott enters the Virginia militia and without authorization captures
British sailors who have been raiding the Virginia coast.
1807-08: James Kirke Paulding and Washington
Irving collaborate to write satires, including "Salmagundi."
Paulding, Irving, and a few friends form a literary/intelligence set.
Paulding later writes The Lay of the Scottish Fiddle, a famous
satire on Sir Walter Scott.
1809: William Cooper is assassinated in Albany while
his son J.F. Cooper is in the Navy.
1809-12: Henry Clay (migrant to Kentucky
under lifelong sponsorship of Society of the Cincinnati, who as a
grouping, are the direct founders of Kentucky) and John C. Calhoun
of South Carolina, jointly organize the "War Hawks" for
defensive war against Britain. (Calhoun is known to most people today only
as the "Southern rights" fanatic he later became, after being
ground down by the British-run enemy oligarchy.) With the 1814 publication
of Mathew Carey's Olive Branch, the nationalist movement (which
Clay and Calhoun lead together) successfully promotes Hamilton's program
within the Jefferson party!—protective tariff, Second Bank of the United
States, and internal improvements—i.e., government-financed
infrastructure projects.
1812-15: U.S. war against Britain, known today as the
War of 1812, known then as the Second War of Independence. Monroe becomes
war leader, Secretary of War, and simultaneously Secretary of State.
During the war, Washington Irving is aide and military
secretary to New York Gov. Daniel Tompkins.
1812-13: British intelligence leader Jeremy Bentham's
agent Aaron Burr quietly returns to the United States just before
war breaks out. He collaborates with Martin Van Buren on political
strategy.
1810s: The sons of Augustine Prevost, Jr. press their
suit against the Cooper family, seeking to ruin them and disrupt their
position in central New York State.
1815: DeWitt Clinton resigns as Mayor of New York
City. On Dec. 30, there is a meeting of Clinton and the city fathers to
organize support for the state to take over construction of the Erie
Canal from Schuyler's private enterprise. Co-organizer of the meeting
is Cadwallader David Colden, the president of the anti-slavery
Manumission Society and the grandson of the Leibniz/Franklin man,
Cadwallader Colden.
Washington Irving sails for England. He befriends Sir Walter Scott and
the cream of British high society.
1816: The Bank of the United States is restored, and a
protective tariff passed under Treasury Secretary Alexander Dallas,
co-leader with Mathew Carey of Pennsylvania's Jefferson Party.
Monroe is elected President. Appoints Calhoun Secretary of War, John Q.
Adams Secretary of State. North and South are united behind nationalism
and Jeffersonian anti-British politics. Political parties essentially go
out of existence.
1815-23: Martin Van Buren creates the Albany
Regency, a New York State organization, succeeding the moribund Burr
organization, for the purpose of fighting the Monroe Administration, and
explicitly to revive the party division and bitter rancor in the country.
Van Buren's group in New York City is called the Bucktails. He organizes
them to fight against the development of the Erie Canal.
1815-18: Joseph G. Swift is Superintendent
of the U.S. Military Academy at West Point. He had served with Winfield
Scott in the War of 1812. Calhoun, Scott, Swift, and, in France, young
Sylvanus Thayer, Lafayette, and Alexander von Humboldt, all collaborate on
upgrading the Military Academy at West Point.
1817-19: General Swift organizes creation of
the West Point Foundry, as a private enterprise across the river
from the Academy. The main owner is Gouverneur Kemble, brother-in-law of James
Kirke Paulding.
The salon of Washington Irving's group, with General Swift, establishes
the informal but rigorous continuation of the Military Philosophical
Society: A dinner is held every Saturday night at the Kemble home at the
Foundry, where officer-teachers and cadets meet with strategists and
distinguished foreign guests, from about 1819 until after the 1861-65
Civil War. Joel Poinsett of South Carolina is a member of the
inner circle of the group.
The West Point Foundry, on government contracts, makes about one-third
of all U.S. artillery up through the Civil War, including the famous
rifled Parrott guns (Robert Parrott is superintendent of the West Point
Foundry, 1837-67). The Foundry factory produced steam engines, and
America's first iron ship (the cutter Spencer). The engine for
the first American locomotive, the Best Friend, is cast at the
Foundry, as are the locomotives DeWitt Clinton and West Point,
metal fittings for the Erie Canal locks, and cast-iron piping for the New
York City water system. The Foundry employs at its height over 1,000
workers, and can produce 10,000 tons of cast iron per year.
1817: DeWitt Clinton, elected governor, wins
overwhelming popular backing for the state to build the Erie Canal. Albany
Regency boss Martin Van Buren, acknowledging enormous public pressure,
changes course to back the canal in the state Senate, while his New York
City Bucktails still oppose it.
1817: James Fenimore Cooper joins the state militia,
becomes military aide-de-camp to Governor Clinton. Now living in
Westchester County, Cooper stays close to his father's friend, old John
Jay, co-author with Hamilton and Madison of The Federalist
papers. Jay tells Cooper the story of the American secret agent during the
Revolution, in Westchester County, which Cooper later makes into his book The
Spy.
1818: Ethan Allen Brown is elected Ohio
governor, on a platform of canal building to link up with New York's Erie
Canal, then under construction. Brown started out in public life as an
assistant to Alexander Hamilton, in Hamilton's law office in New
York, 1797-1802.
1819-20: Washington Irving's The Sketch Book
comes out, including the short story "Rip Van Winkle"—the
modern world awakens from British colonial backwardness.
1820: James Fenimore Cooper is Secretary of the
Clinton Republicans for Westchester County, organizes the county for
Clinton's re-election as governor, versus the Van Buren "Bucktails,"
which Cooper says includes many anti-national Federalists.
1820: General Swift, in Philadelphia, negotiates for
the development of Pennsylvania's anthracite coal, and outlines the
creation of canals that must carry the coal into New Jersey and New York.
Swift writes that the first anthracite coal that was burned in New York
City, was burned in his own office.
At precisely this point in his memoirs, General Swift also discusses
his work as the president of the Handel and Haydn Society (he was a later
founder of the New York Philharmonic Orchestra.)
We take note of the cultural contrast between America's military
nation-builders and the present current of Utopians and assorted losers.
1820 to late 1820s: Mathew Carey and Nicholas Biddle,
in league with the Society of the Cincinnati circle, organize the first
large-scale American coal mining: to begin with, anthracite, then
bituminous. Coal production goves rapidly from virtually nothing, only
local driblets, to globally significant millions of tons. See below.
1820-22: James Fenimore Cooper moves to New York City,
reviews books for Col. Charles K. Gardner's magazine, The
Literary and Scientific Repository. Cooper had served with Gardner in
the military, and Gardner had served with Winfield Scott in the War of
1812. Gardner's magazine is promoted by General Swift and Cadwallader D.
Colden, grandson of Franklin's collaborator, and mayor of New York
(1819-20). Cooper writes The Spy, published December 1821.
1823: President Monroe appoints Nicholas Biddle
president of Bank of the United States. The Biddle family and the Carey
family become Fenimore Cooper's main confidants in Philadelphia. Cooper's The
Pioneers (1823) is modeled on his father William Cooper (later, the
circles of Teddy Roosevelt considered Cooper's historical treatment false,
and too sympathetic to the Indians). In New York City, Cooper creates the Bread
and Cheese club, meeting in the back room of Charles Wiley's
bookstore.
1823: On May 28, the first issue of New York's The
Patriot daily newspaper appears. Gen. Winfield Scott and Gen.
Joseph Gardner Swift, assisted by James Fenimore Cooper,
formulate the paper's viewpoint and coverage, along with writer Henry
Wheaton of the Irving circle. Finances and overall organization are
arranged by President Monroe's son-in-law, Samuel Gouverneur.
Col. Charles K. Gardner, Cooper's magazine publisher, is the editor of The
Patriot [see box].
Under the condition of global menace from the British-Hapsburg Concert
of Vienna, the main purpose of the newspaper is to combat Martin Van
Buren's "Albany Regency" and its new political axis with the
wildest Southern anti-national, anti-industrial forces, arranged through
London's John Randolph of Roanoke and his Richmond friends. The patriots
must hold the Union together, industrialize, develop the West, create a
new North American physical/political geography, and thus overcome the
European-supported plantation slavery political universe, with a new
American universe.
This is the next to the last year of Monroe's Administration, and the
control of the Presidency is at issue.
For the 1824 election, Van Buren backs free-trader William
Crawford of Georgia, who was then Treasury Secretary. Van Buren picks old Albert
Gallatin for Crawford's Vice Presidential running mate—this has
special significance when Crawford has a stroke, since he would likely die
in office if elected.
The Patriot's candidate is John C. Calhoun, Monroe's Secretary
of War. Calhoun has called for using the revenues from the Bank of the
United States to fund a national system of roads and canals. Calhoun
writes to Samuel Gouverneur and Generals Scott and Swift, that they have
to launch The Patriot to break Van Buren and the Richmond junta,
who combine to spread states-rights "radicalism" in the South
and West.
The Patriot boldly defends American System economics and the
government's Constitutional powers, against the Regency attacks, hitting
directly at Mordecai Noah, editor-stooge for Van Buren.
The Prospectus of The Patriot newspaper says:
... In the present crisis of European affairs, it is important to
sustain the attitude of defence, heretofore indicated by the measures of
Government; it is important to adopt such a course of policy, as will tend
to encourage the domestic manufactures of our country; to sustain our
shipping interests, by a proper provision of naval forces; to provide for
a system of internal improvements, by which our internal trade may be
extended, and our reliance upon ourselves increased; and finally—to
harmonize the Agricultural, Manufacturing and Commercial interest; showing
that the whole may be advanced by a system of well concerted measures. In
supporting these, we shall advocate the Republican cause, without
reference to geographical divisions; and we shall reprobate any attempt to
introduce the odious and impolitic distinction of slave and non-slave
holding states.
Besides political subjects ... our press will be devoted to a
discriminating defence of American Literature: As in Politics and in the
Arts, we would achieve our independence of other countries also in
Literature....
On the front page of The Patriot's first issue, a long article
entitled "Washington Irving" boasts of Irving's talent,
disparaging Walter Scott and Lord Byron. Also on the front page, and
continuing for many weeks, is an ad for Charles Wiley's bookstore,
offering The Spy and The Pioneers, and Washington
Irving's works, and Catholic books for sale (DeWitt Clinton was known as
the champion of Irish immigrants).
We note here that The Patriot's leader, Winfield Scott, acts
with his friends Irving and Cooper as both a maker and a writer of
history, and acts from the historical perspective of a fight across the
centuries for mankind against the oligarchy, identical to our perspective
in publishing the present report.
In the preface to his Memoirs, published in 1864, General
Scott lamented the paucity of autobiographies by those who had actually
themselves shaped history. He says that those who knew of the secret
councils of rulers, and how the leadership thought, have not generally
written about these things, though there have been good writers
writing history.
Then Scott speaks of Jonathan Swift—whom most people would
think of only as a literary figure—as follows:
"This friend and counselor of [Henry] St. John and [Robert]
Harley, brought them to power (and, according to Dr. Johnson, dictated
public opinion to England) mainly by a pamphlet—The Conduct of the
Allies—that broke down the Godolphin ministry.... The masterly
narrative—The Last Four Years of Queen Anne, seems to complete
Swift's claim to a place in the small category of makers and writers of
history."
The Patriot carries dispatches from Mexico, Colombia, and
Peru, on the desperate political and military fight against Spain and the
Concert of Vienna.
The Patriot spearheads a short-lived New York State People's
Party, electing its candidates (Wheaton, Gouverneur, et al.), and
breaking Van Buren's hold on the state legislature—which body selects
the state's Presidential electors.
1823: President Monroe enunciates the Monroe Doctrine,
which J.Q. Adams had worked out in response to the menaces of Russia's
ambassador to the United States, Baron Van Tuyll Van Serooskerken,
and against the imperial pretensions of the British.
DeWitt Clinton, advised by General Swift, asks New Jersey leaders to
proceed with their canal project, which is headed by Cadwallader D. Colden.
Clinton says we must get the Pennsylvania coal into circulation, to
industrialize, and we must become nationally independent, and with state
projects we avoid subjection to the narrow consideration of foreign and
domestic capitalists.
As of 1823, the strategic question is hanging fire: Will the Erie Canal
and related canals be completed, altering the natural geography of North
America so as to permit the Western settlers to ship and travel to the
East without having to go through British territory? Or will the enemy
overturn the whole breakout by putting in a rotten successor to President
Monroe?
1824: Lafayette tours New York, greeted by
Cooper's Bread and Cheese club, and by DeWitt Clinton, and is taken to
West Point by General Swift. Cooper writes a beautiful account of the
celebration honoring Lafayette. Lafayette's translator, Friedrich List,
settles in Pennsylvania in association with Nicholas Biddle and Mathew
Carey. This is the Pennsylvania grouping which starts, virtually
overnight, the U.S. production of anthracite coal, which leads to the
production of bituminous coal. In response to the Erie Canal project, they
pass through the Pennsylvania legislature a huge canal-building program,
the chief use of which is to put the coal onto the market to industrialize
the country.
The Presidential election hinges on New York as the key battleground
state. A dramatic turning point is the action by the Van Burenites—April
12, 1824—kicking old DeWitt Clinton out of his chairmanship of the Canal
Commission, before the Erie Canal is finished, and when Clinton holds no
other office. The patriots, led by General Swift and his allies, jump on
this with mass protests, producing an emotional public reaction. DeWitt
Clinton is swept back into the governorship. The head of The Patriot-promoted
People's Party, War of 1812 Gen. James Tallmadge, Jr., is elected
lieutenant governor and serves 1824-26 under Governor Clinton. William
Paulding, friend of Washington Irving and brother of West Point
Foundry's James K. Paulding, backs The Patriot and is mayor of
New York City (1824-26).
Throughout and behind these events, the combined actions of the circle
of Lafayette and Hamilton may be seen.
Congress passes the 1824 General Survey Act, allowing the
President to assign Army engineers to work in non-Federal enterprises.
Congress passes a seriously protective tariff, especially for iron.
John C. Calhoun drops out of the Presidential race. Calhoun later
changes sides under blackmail, and phony South Carolina slave-revolt
hysteria, and succumbs to the combination of those who join with Martin
Van Buren's scheming with the Venetian/British party of slave-owners.
1825: The Erie Canal is completed, the triumph of Gov.
DeWitt Clinton. Alexander Dallas Bache graduates from West Point.
Bache is Benjamin Franklin's great-grandson, named for his maternal
grandfather Alexander Dallas, Mathew Carey's Pennsylvania political
partner who, as Treasury Secretary, restored the Bank of the United States
(see above, 1816).
John Quincy Adams becomes President, the vote in Congress swung by New
York's Stephen Van Rensselaer. Adams activates the Army to design the
first U.S. railroads. The Army Engineers' Board of Internal
Improvements is tasked with choosing appropriate projects, beginning
with the city- and state-funded Baltimore & Ohio Railroad. Gen. Joseph
G. Swift is the mentor and co-worker for most of the railroad-building
engineers. Swift's brother-in-law and protégé, George Washington
Whistler, engineers many of the first lines.
President Adams puts through Federal money for the creation of Midwest
canals. Under state leadership, with Bank of the United States
funding, these canals connect the Erie Canal, Lake Erie, and Lake Michigan
with the Ohio River, Indiana, Illinois, and the Mississippi River. DeWitt
Clinton's aide Cadwallader D. Colden is New York's emissary to the Midwest
states to organize the canal system. The Erie Canal makes New York City a
giant.
Abraham Lincoln runs for the Illinois legislature (1831) on
this strategic infrastructure program. Based on the success of the Erie
and Midwest canals, Lincoln and his immediate circle create the city of Chicago.
The iron industry, coal-mining, canals, and railroads take off, to
begin America's industrialization.
1827: Martin Van Buren travels to South Carolina, with
fast horses and carriage provided by Russian Amb. Baron Van Tuyll (the
Baron's descendant, in the 1930s, would organize the Military Christian
Fellowship, uniting Brits and Nazis, and would aid Joseph Rettinger in the
1950s "Bilderberger" schemes).
Van Buren conspires with John Randolph of Roanoke (who reportedly vows
never to wear clothing made in the U.S.A.) and with the anti-U.S.
extremists in Charleston, to create a new "Democratic Party."
Van Buren becomes the main national organizer for the Presidential
candidacy of Andrew Jackson, whom Van Buren had not supported in 1824.
Late 1820s: President John Q. Adams' ambassador to
Spain is Alexander Everett, who was his private secretary when Adams was
ambassador to Russia. Everett goes to see Washington Irving in Paris, and
recruits him to come to Spain, under the sponsorship of the Adams
government. At issue is Spain's role in the Americas, the heritage of
America versus the heritage of the Inquisition, and the role of Russia
with respect to all of this.
Adams' man Everett officially asks Irving to work on biographical
material relating to Christopher Columbus. At this time, the Adams
Administration is seeking Russian help to keep Spain from doing mischief
in Ibero-America.
Irving moves to Spain with an official connection to the U.S. Embassy.
He becomes partner with Russia's Prince Dolgorouki (of that pro-republican
Russian family) who is attached to the Russian Embassy in Spain. Irving
and Dolgorouki live and work together in the old Muslim palace, the
Alhambra, in Granada. Irving writes pioneering works on Islam, and the
Muslim greatness in Spain, and a biography of Columbus—a celebration in
response to British/Hapsburg anti-American fulminations.
1828: Andrew Jackson, presented as a pro-nationalist,
is elected President.
Late 1820s-early 1830s: James Fenimore Cooper is in
Europe, the close collaborator of Lafayette.
1831-32: At Lafayette's request, Cooper writes a
50-page pamphlet ("Letter to General Lafayette," Paris, December
1831) and a newspaper series defending the U.S. Constitutional government.
For this, Cooper comes under attack in Whig Party U.S.
newspapers. Cooper counterattacks.
1831: Cooper's The Bravo is published,
showing that a banking oligarchy could mask its power behind the front of
a "republic."
1832: Henry C. Carey, son of Mathew Carey,
and later the principal strategist for nationalist politics everywhere,
arranges the publishing of Cooper's The Heidenmauer. Cooper shows
the oligarchical interest that pushes Luther's Reformation, while at the
same time he spotlights the duplicity of the Benedictines, who manipulate
superstitious public opinion.
1833: Cooper's The Headsman is published; it
is set in Switzerland, based on the figure of the executioner, the type so
beloved of Catholic fundamentalist and freemason Joseph de Maestre
(1753-1821).
1829-1830s: President Andrew Jackson appoints Martin
Van Buren as Secretary of State. Van Buren gets the insane John Randolph
of Roanoke in as U.S. Ambassador to Russia. Van Buren resigns from the
Cabinet in a successful scheme to finally destroy the nationalist
connections of John C. Calhoun, then the Vice President. Calhoun becomes
the spokesman for Nullification, anti-tariff agitation, and Southern
states-rights. Van Buren consolidates the regime's attacks against
internal improvements, and destruction of the Bank of the United States.
The Bank of England withdraws credit from the U.S.A.
1837: For a eulogy of the recently deceased Mathew
Carey, Edgar Allan Poe writes in the Southern Literary Messenger
a review of Carey's Autobiography; Poe calls Carey a truly great
man.
1837: Van Buren becomes U.S. President. The economy
crashes, mass poverty and chaos follow. Western states are bankrupted,
canal- and railroad-building are blamed! Laws and new state Constitutions
are put in place, banning state sponsorship of internal improvements.
And yet, shaping the Presidency is not a simple matter.
Consider these strange facts concerning the Van Buren Administration.
James K. Paulding is Van Buren's Secretary of the Navy, and is
one of Van Buren's closest personal counselors. Joel Poinsett is
Van Buren's Secretary of War, continuing the pro-Union role
Poinsett played in leadership in South Carolina under President Jackson
and Army chief Winfield Scott, in the Nullification crisis.
Paulding and Poinsett team up to organize and send out the bold Charles
Wilkes naval exploring expedition (1838-41), to discover the South
Magnetic Pole, a project based on the program of Carl F. Gauss
and to map the Pacific and Antarctic. (This is the same spirited Wilkes
who would later capture the Confederate commissioners on the British
steamer Trent, in the early days of the Civil War.)
"Jackson Democrat" Alexander Dallas Bache is sent to Germany
by Nicholas Biddle (who himself had voted for Jackson); Bache meets with
Humboldt and Gauss and forms with Gauss the Magnetischeverein or
World Magnetic Union, whose geodesy and global-magnetic experimentation
Bache had spread through the United States.
"Jackson Democrat" Friedrich List is already in Europe as a
U.S. diplomat organizing for the American System.
1838-39: "Jackson Democrat" James Fenimore
Cooper is in Philadelphia, researching for his History of the Navy of
the United States of America. Thurlow Weed and other Whig Party
scoundrels attack Cooper in their newspapers, and Cooper thrashes them all
in successful legal actions. Yet Cooper is the most potent opponent of
Jackson's degenerate racism and of the Van Buren anti-national agentry
acting through Jackson. Cooper later organizes the Presidential candidacy
of Gen. Winfield Scott, who becomes the Whig Party's 1852 nominee.
1842: Gen. Joseph G. Swift and his brother-in-law
George Washington Whistler plan the building of Russia's first railroad,
by former Army engineer Whistler.
From General Swift's Memoirs:
May 7, 1842: Whistler and myself to Washington, ... meeting Major
Bautatz of the Russian service, and General Tallmadge [of the old New York
"People's Party"], who gave Whistler some points in the
character of the Emperor Nicholas, in reference to his industry and desire
to improve public works, that may be useful to Whistler.
On 8th met the Russian ambassador, Mr. Bodisco, and arranged for Mr.
Whistler's service at Twelve thousand dollars a year. Had with Mr. Bodisco
an interesting conversation on the difficulties of a Russian campaign
across the Indus and the sands to India, and of its inutility, while
England had the supremacy of naval power.
Whistler builds the Moscow-to-St. Petersburg railroad, and
fortifications, and is much beloved in Russia, where he dies in this
service.
1850s-1860s: Abraham Lincoln personally organizes the
building of the railroad grid in Illinois, complementing the canal system.
Then as President, he builds the Transcontinental Railroad, thus opening
up the West as the heirs of Leibniz had planned. And Lincoln joins hands
with the heirs of Leibniz in Russia, to preserve the Union, and break the
United States finally out of colonial backwardness.
[1] Anton Chaitkin,
"Leibniz, Gauss Shaped America's Science Successes," EIR,
Feb. 9, 1996.
[2] H. Graham Lowry, How
the Nation Was Won: America's Untold Story, 1630-1754 (Washington,
D.C.: Executive Intelligence Review, 2004 reprint of 1988 edition).
[3] David Shavin,
"Leibniz to Franklin on 'Happiness,' " Fidelio, Spring
2003.
[4] On the allied
Prevost and Mallet families, British intelligence and enemy agents inside
the United States such as Burr and Gallatin, see Anton Chaitkin, Treason
in America, From Aaron Burr to Averell Harriman (Washington, D.C.,
Executive Intelligence Review, 1998).
