In my last article in this history series, I attempted to shed some light on President Putin’s reasons for claiming the Bolshevik Revolution did significantly more harm than good to humanity over a century ago.

My primary intention in that location was to demonstrate that revolutionary the events of 1905 and again in 1917 had many characteristics of a foreign-directed regime change which disrupted a true revolutionary process then coming into being.

In this sequel I would like to delve more deeply into the 1867-1905 period of vast revolutionary potential that swept across the globe which the counter-revolution of 1905 and 1917 de-railed.

A Revolutionary Process Blossoms

The late 19th century was shaped, in large measure, by the growing U.S.-Russian alliance which saved the USA from dissolution during its Civil War. Masterful diplomacy at the time resulted in Czar Alexander II deploying the Russian navy to assist Lincoln in his efforts to preserve the Union with a direct message to both England and France that any direct effort to join the confederacy in war against Lincoln would be seen as casus belli by the Russians. This U.S.-Russian alliance again amplified its force in 1867 when Russian statesmen arranged the sale of Alaska to the republic with the aim of extending telegraph lines and rail through the Americas and across the Bering Strait by the end of that century. By 1890, pro-American networks in Russia had finally launched the construction of the Trans Siberian Railway which was to soon carry Baldwin locomotives produced in Philadelphia across a 9289 km expansive rugged terrain.

But despite the setback of murdered leaders Abraham Lincoln, James Garfield and Czar Alexander II, the momentum behind the growth of a multipolar international alliance of nations continued to grow. In 1890, Colorado Gov. William Gilpin’s designs for a cosmopolitan railway stretching across all nations of earth presented a beautiful vision of the world then coming into being.

In Russia, Finance Minister Sergei Witte led a network of nation builders who worked closely with like-minded collaborators in France, Germany, China and the USA (1).

The common denominators among these nationalist movements were: 1) the application of protectionism to develop native manufacturing sectors, 2) the use of national banking/productive credit, 3) large scale infrastructure projects, 4) an emphasis on education/science and 5) railroad construction to accelerate interconnectivity within and between cooperating nations.

In all cases, British Free Trade, speculation and usury were completely rejected in favor of this superior system of political economy.

As historian William Jones has outlined in his voluminous writings on the subject and showcased in this seminal 1995 lecture, It was Witte, who as Finance Minister from 1891-1903, overhauled the Russian economy, banned free trade in favor of Protectionism (2), brought stability to the ruble by ending speculation by pegging the ruble to gold, and lowered interest rates to favor internal development. He additionally imposed strict controls on foreign direct investments ensuring that his ministry (and not ill willed London-based money lenders) stayed in control of Russia’s economic policies.

With a stabilized currency that won the confidence of international investors, Witte also created a new system of national banking with each new rail station along the Trans Siberian line authorized to institute a bank branch in order to facilitate lending to citizens and industry. The great underdeveloped Siberia and Arctic awoke a form of Russian ‘Manifest Destiny’ and Witte aimed to develop its full potential guided by a similar spirit that guided the best of American System patriots in the 19th century and even the Chinese ambitions to “go west” today.

This positive conception of manifest destiny is not at all tied to the exploitation, and imperialism as is commonly taught, but rather the creative overcoming of limits to growth by a spiritual-intellectual and economic extension of the best of civilization driven by a love for scientific and technological progress.

Dimitry Mendeleyev: Scientist and Nation Builder

Witte set up over 100 new commercial and technical schools across Russia with the help of his close collaborator Dimitry Mendeleyev who not only discovered the table of elements that bears his name but also headed the Committee on the Protective Tariff. Throughout his writings and speeches stretching across 40 years of public service, Mendeleyev promoted a new renaissance culture of citizen scientists. He also polemicized against Adam Smith’s free trade which he likened to the absurd belief in a mysterious substance called “phlogiston” which scientists once believed to be the cause of rust.

Attacking the religious devotion to British Free trade permeating the Russian elite, Mendeleyev wrote in his 1891 Tariff Report:

“I consider it my duty, partly in defense of truly contemporary, progressing science, to say openly and loudly that I stand for rational protectionism. Free tradism as a doctrine is very shaky; the free trade form of activity suits only countries that have already consolidated their manufacturing industry; protectionism as an absolute doctrine is the same sort of nonsense as free trade absolutism; and the protectionist mode of activity is perfectly appropriate now for Russia, as it was for England in its time.” (3)

Mendeleyev was part of the Russian delegation that visited the USA during the 1876 Centennial Exposition organized by Lincoln’s economic advisor Henry C. Carey and which showcased the scientific and industrial accomplishments made possible by the young republic in its first 100 years.

Upon his return to Russia, Mendeleyev championed this system serving as executive director of the Southwestern Railway Company and head of the rail department in the Finance Ministry working closely with Finance Minister Ivan A. Vyshnegradsky. He was simultaneously appointed the scientist to head the Bureau of Weights and Standards where he brought in the metric system to Russia and also led the assessment of mineral potential of Russia’s far east which played a vital role in Russia’s development over the coming century.

Mendeleyev attacked those who asserted that humanity could only adapt to the limits that nature put upon us writing: “The philosophy of Jean-Jacques Rouseau… for a ‘back to nature’ existence, is semi childish. Because in a patriarchical society, as well as among higher animals there is a definite limit to growth, but human beings taken as a whole, recognize no such limit”.

Mendeleyev understood that the only way to avoid the destructive effects of Marxist revolutionary chaos was through the uplifting of all citizens through physical, intellectual and spiritual progress. Writing in his Principles of Chemistry, Mendeleyev said: “Chemistry is closely connected with the work of the manufacturer and the artisan. It is a useful part and is a means of promoting the general welfare. In that pure enjoyment experienced on approaching to the ideal, in eagerness to draw aside the veil from the hidden truth and even in that discord which exists between the various workers, we ought to see the surest pledges for further scientific progress.”

Peace Abroad and Progress at Home

The work of Witte and Mendeleyev paid off and by 1900, the Russian rail industry employed 400,000 people directly with millions in secondary and tertiary sectors which went far to pull Russian society out of destitution (7/8th of the population lived on subsistence levels in 1890). Between 1892-1903, Coal production in the Donets Basin tripled, pig iron production tripled and oil, chemical and metallurgical industries blossomed.

Between 1892-1901, 14,814 miles of rail were built (compared to 5466 miles between 1879-1892). Grain imports from Siberia grew from 10,000 tons to 70,000 tons in the same time frame.

Witte worked arduously to ensure treaties of win-win cooperation to break free of British intrigue exemplified by the 1895 Russo-Chinese Bank and Chinese Eastern Railroad both of which involved strong cooperation with Foreign Minister Gabriel Hanotaux’s France. Witte, Hanotaux and their German collaborators loyal to Bismarck’s strategic outlook always focused their efforts on a cooperative entente needed to avoid falling into British traps that could trigger a bloodbath.

Witte had indicated his deep insight into the nature of the Great Game in a 1897 letter to Kaiser Wilhelm- extolling the leader to sign a peace treaty with Russia which would have created a Russian-German-French continental alliance for progress in order to avert a coming storm. In his letter, Witte wrote:

“Imagine, your majesty, the European countries united in one entity, one that does not waste vast sums of money, resources, blood and labor on rivalry among themselves, no longer compelled to maintain armies for war among themselves, no longer forming an armed camp, as is the case now, with each fearing his neighbor. If that were done, Europe would be much richer, much stronger, more civilized, not going downhill under the weight of mutual hatred, rivalry and war… BUT if European countries continue on their present course, they will risk great misfortune.”

Friedrich List’s American System in Russia

This system was directly informed by the works of nationalist economist Friedrich List whose incredibly popular writings guided Russia’s strategic thinking to a much higher degree than anything found in either extremes of Adam Smith or Karl Marx.

Witte himself oversaw the translation of List’s ‘National System of Political Economy’ in 1891 whereby he ensured that List became a guiding light for all economists and administrators under his watch.

Having coined the term “American System of Political Economy” after his five-year tour of the USA from 1825-1830, Friedrich List became a global champion of progress spearheading the creation of the German Zollverein (aka: ‘Customs’ Union) and polemicizing relentlessly against British Free Trade. List’s understanding of economics was exemplified in this quote often cited by Witte:

“The more rapidly the genius of discovery and industrial improvement as well as of social and political progress advances, the more rapidly is the distance between stationary nations and those which are progressively increased, and the greater is the peril of remaining behind.”

These nation-building statesmen knew there were two opposing approaches to resolving the mechanism of “class struggle”: 1) violent revolution of the proletariat or 2) the fostering of scientific and technological progress guided by win-win cooperation and a human centered development around a harmony of interests.

The philosophy animating this outlook was summed up Witte’s statement “with the investment in industry, the powerful stimulus of personal interest calls forth such curiosity and love of learning as to make an illiterate peasant into a railway builder, a bold and progressive organizer of industry and a versatile financier.”

Looking at rail construction as far more than merely “infrastructure”, Witte saw it as a civilizing force saying in 1890: “The railroad is like a leaven, which creates a cultural fermentation among the population. Even if it passed through an absolutely wild people along its way, it would raise them in a short time to the level requisite for its operation.”

When asked what ideological box he fit into, Witte wrote: “I am neither a liberal nor conservative; I am simply a civilized man. I cannot send someone to Siberia simply because he doesn’t think as I do and I cannot take away his civil rights simply because he does not worship God in the same Church as I.”

Years later, Witte described how he overcame insurmountable odds in the early years of his administration saying: “Faced by a serious shortage of locomotives, I invented and applied the traffic system which had long been in practice in the United States and which is now known as the “American system.”

The British Empire which always relied on keeping nations divided, underdeveloped and dependent on the use of maritime shipping was not amused.

The British System Strikes

By controlling the international maritime choke points, the tiny island was able to exert its influence across the globe as a hegemon for over two centuries.

Through the vigorous enforcement of laissez-faire doctrines of free trade, nations were blocked from protecting themselves from the financial warfare launched by the city of London against victim states. This financial warfare took many forms ranging from speculative attacks, usurious money lending, the dumping of cheap goods in order to crush local manufacturing, cash cropping and even drug running.

Anyone wishing to engage in long term planning in the building up of the land-based transport corridors via rail, roads and industry would be easily sabotaged if the British System were dominating their economies.

Despite the fact that the Trans-Siberian railway was completed in 1905, a British-manipulated Japanese-Russian War (from 1904-05) devastated the economy as nearly the entire Russian navy.

Not only did $200 million in loans by financier Jacob Schiff grease the wheels of war, but the Anglo-Japanese Alliance of 1902 guaranteed that the militarily advanced Japanese would find an easy victory over Russia as the treaty guaranteed British military support for Japan if any second party joined to assist Russia. On May 28, 1905, two thirds of the Russian fleet was destroyed at the Battle of Tsushima Strait and all hopes for Siberian-Pacific trade routes came undone.

With this defeat, the planned trajectory for Witte’s hopes for industrialization quickly came undone and the world began its slide into the first of a series of wars and color revolutions that would litter the 20th century.

Witte Returns

Amidst the devastation of the war, a short-lived effort was made by saner advisors of Czar Nicholas II including Grand Duke Nikolai Romanov and the Czar’s mother, to bring Witte back into a position of authority after having been foolishly fired in 1903 (4). These figures understood that Witte was the statesman most qualified to get Russia out of its race into chaos which she found herself locked into.

Witte’s first task as Prime Minister was to solidify a peace treaty with Japan with as few concessions as possible to the defeated Russia. His second major task was to carry out sweeping constitutional reforms needed to avert the emerging revolutionary fervor of millions of Russians then being organized by the likes of Trotsky, Lenin, Parvus and a vast array of London-directed revolutionaries. (5)

Witte commented on his new assignment saying: “when a sewer has to be cleaned, they send Witte. But as soon as work of a cleaner and nicer kind appears, plenty of other candidates spring up”.

Witte accomplished the first task returning to Russia from months of negotiations in the USA as a hero. Upon his return he lost no time authoring the October Manifesto of 1905 which called for sweeping changes of every aspect of Russian governance. Pushing back against those who wished to violently suppress all protest movements, Witte insightfully said:

“The present movement for freedom is not of new birth. Its roots are imbedded in centuries of Russian history. Freedom must become the slogan of the government. No other possibility for the salvation of the state exists. The march of historical progress cannot be halted. The idea of civil liberty will triumph if not through reform then by the path of revolution. The government must be ready to proceed along constitutional lines. The government must sincerely and openly strive for the well-being of the state and not endeavour to protect this or that type of government. There is no alternative. The government must either place itself at the head of the movement which has gripped the country or it must relinquish it to the elementary forces to tear it to pieces.”

This manifesto of October 30, 1905 professed to transform Russia into a constitutional monarchy, expanded civil rights for all citizens, guaranteeing freedom of the press, freedom of association, the right to vote, the right to form trade unions and the creation of the first Duma. Witte also pushed for vast land reform to give peasants the power to own and operate their own land.

However, all of these reforms were rejected by the growing revolutionary organizations which chose to push for regime change.

Witte’s enemies in the court used this instability to arrange his firing in April 1906 and soon an iron fist came cracking down upon the rebellious population (anarchist provocateurs and innocents alike) giving rise to new revengiste grievances that would escalate to a boiling point within the coming decade. To get a sense of the tension of the times, between 1905-1916, hundreds of assassinations and terrorist attacks launched by the terrorist cells like “The Black Hundreds” resulted in tens of thousands of dead, including hundreds of Russian politicians. Witte and his heavy-handed successor Peter Stolypin narrowly surviving several attempts which took place in 1906 (6) (Stolypin eventually being killed in 1911).

The Tragic Fall and Hopeful Renewal of Creativity in Statecraft

Sadly, the flowering of the new system of cooperating nation states under a community of progress and common interest was annihilated by a dense array of assassinations, color revolutions and endless wars.

The Witte-Mendeleyev aborted system was fundamentally anti-Malthusian/anti-closed system and tied to the constant self-improvement of the nation and its people. It was never “left” nor “right” according to any conventional definitions given to us following the Marxist/Communist vs Liberal/Capitalist dichotomy.

This system did not then, nor does it now dichotomize the freedom of the individual citizen from the wellbeing of the whole society. It was and is fundamentally driven by a concept of humanity as a species made in the image of a living Creator capable of conceptualizing and then transcending the relative limits to growth which press upon our potential at all stages of society. This system recognizes that these limits are only caused by limits of knowledge and morality. The tension between these two systems: open vs closed/ multipolar vs unipolar has been at the heart of history including the causes of the Bolshevik color revolution.

While representatives of this better tradition have sadly fallen from sight among nations of the Trans Atlantic rules-based liberal order, a re-appearance of this quality of statecraft has begun to be revived among Eurasian leaders.

One prominent leading figure among this renewal is made evident in the recent remarks by renowned Russian economist and EEC leader, Sergey Glazyev who said in an interview titled  “Ideas Rule the World”:

“For many centuries Russia, fighting for a place under the sun in this world, showed miracles of self-sacrifice, miracles of building new meanings. And when these new meanings penetrate people’s souls, a boom arises in society, an opportunity arises to create new things and be “ahead of the rest of the planet.” This remarkable ability or ability to overcome difficulties is, in my opinion, the first component of that deep ideology that is inherent in the entire Russian people. They are not afraid of difficulties and sometimes even “create difficulties and then heroically overcome them.” But, regardless of whether we ourselves create these difficulties by ourselves or our “partners” help us in this, we must understand that the difficulties have been, are and always will be. The theory of long-term economic development, which I am currently pursuing, shows that as human society develops, limits to growth appear, periods of stagnation and threats to the development of humanity’s very existence appear, which must be overcome. The principle of overcoming these limits, difficulties, threats, fighting for something new, positive, creating new opportunities for the development not only of Russia, but of all humanity : this, I believe, is the key principle of ideology that lies in the depths of the Russian character.”

Glazyev was here making the important point that the specific set of ideas which must govern Russia going into the future storm must have certain universal characteristics.

These characteristics are not limited to Russian experience, but are applicable to all societies and are driven, as Glazyev noted, by the mandate to constantly overcome our limits to growth. This is done specifically by increasing the rates of creative leaps, guided by reason and conscience into ever richer forms of discoveries of those invisible causal laws that organize the universe. As discoveries are made through the fostering of scientific progress, new opportunities to translate those ideas into technological progress must be advanced without any assumed end point in this process.

Just as Lincoln, Witte, Mendeleyev and countless great statesmen of the past understood, it is this principled element of the human condition that sets our species apart from and above all other species in the biosphere. The biosphere’s limits only dominate humanity’s destiny when we permit the law of the jungle, rather than the law of civilization, to shape our world… as all empires demand be so.

The author can be reached at matt.ehret@tutamail.com

Notes

(1) Leaders of this process in France included President Carnot and Foreign Minister Hanotaux, in Germany, it was led by Chancellor Otto von Bismarck and industrialist Emil Rathenau, while President William McKinley and Secretary of State James Blaine championed Lincoln’s system in the USA against the growing rot of an anglophile deep state
(2) With a protective tariff favoring rail development in 1889 followed by a broader protective tariff in 1891
(3) Mendeleyev’s 1891 Tariff Report citation is taken from SCIENTIST-STATESMAN FOUGHT BRITISH “FREE TRADE” IN RUSSIA by Barbara Frazier, EIR, January 1992
(4) The effect of slanders and court gossip that Witte was “a Rothschild shill” led to the Czar’s hasty decision to fire him. This gossip spread through the courts by Sergei Nilus (confessor of the Czar), Interior Minister Cyacheslav Plehve and even Czarina Hesse-Darmstadt herself fueled this hysteria. The material used to drive the slander was fueled by the work of International Okhrana chief Peter Ivanovich Rachkovsky, Russian Okhrana-chief Sergey Zubatov, and Protocols of Zion author Matvei Golovinsky (who worked for Rachkovsky and later became a leading figure of the Bolshevik revolution). This forgery fueled the fires of anti-Jewish paranoia across the minds of the European elite during these dark days. Proof of the Protocols hoax is told in Eric Bronner’s The Tale of a Forgery: Inventing the Protocols: Conspiracy, Anti-Semitism, and the Protocols of Zion, 2019
(5) Many of these forces, who would increasingly rely on terrorist tactics, often found a strange source of support among controllers of the Russian Secret Police known as the Okhrana who tended to work on behalf of the confused and frightened czar as the Jesuit order worked with the often bewildered papacy.
(6) The Black Hundreds was a paramilitary operation interfacing closely with the Okhrana which was find to be tied to two assassination attempts made on Witte in 1906. After a bomb killed 27 people including two of his children, Stolypin stated: “They will kill me, and those will be members of the Okhranka [secret political police]”

– James Fenimore Cooper (The American Democrat 1838)

I think it is evident to most by now that the United States is presently undergoing a crisis that could become a full-blown second civil war.

Some might be wondering, is it really so bad that the U.S. could possibly collapse in the not-so-distant future? After all, isn’t it acting like the worst of empires? Isn’t it wreaking havoc on the world today? Is it not a good thing that it collapse internally and spare the world from further wars?

It is true that the U.S. is presently acting more like a terrible empire than a republic based on liberty and freedom. It may even be the case that the world is spared for a time from further war and tyranny, if the U.S. were to collapse. However, this is unlikely and it most certainly would be only temporary, since the U.S. is not the source of such monstrosities but rather is merely its instrument.

This paper will go not only go through why this is the case and but will also analyze Russia’s historical relationship to the U.S. in context to its recognition of this very fact.

The Great Liberators

In 1861, the Emancipation Edict was passed and successfully carried out by Czar Alexander II that would result in the freeing of over 23 million serfs. This was by no means a simple task and met much resistance, requiring an amazing degree of statesmanship to see it through. In a speech made by Czar Alexander II to the Marshalls of Nobility in 1856 he stated:

“You can yourself understand that the present order of owning souls cannot remain unchanged. It is better to abolish serfdom from above, than to wait for that time when it starts to abolish itself from below. I ask you to think about the best way to carry this out.”

The success of this edict would go down in history as one of the greatest accomplishments for human freedom and Czar Alexander II became known as the ‘Great Liberator’, for which he was beloved around the world.

Shortly after, in 1863, President Lincoln would pass the Emancipation Proclamation which declared “that all persons held as slaves” within the rebellious states “are, and henceforward shall be free.” There is astonishingly a great deal of cynicism surrounding this today. It is thought that because Lincoln did not announce this at the beginning of the war it somehow was never genuine. However, Lincoln was always for the abolishment of slavery and the reason for his delay was due to the country being so at odds with itself that it was willing to break into pieces over the subject, an intent that Lincoln rightfully opposed and had to navigate through.

Former slave and Lincoln ally, Frederick Douglass, though himself frustrated with the delay to equal rights, understood after meeting and discussing his concerns with Lincoln that the preservation of the country came first, stating:

“It was a great thing to achieve American independence when we numbered three millions [slaves], but it was a greater thing to save this country from dismemberment and ruin when it numbered thirty millions. He alone of all our presidents was to have the opportunity to destroy slavery, and to lift into manhood millions of his countrymen hitherto held as chattels and numbered with the beasts of the field.”

For more on the Lincoln-Douglass story refer to my paper.

In addition, there are many speeches Lincoln gave while he was a lawyer, where he most clearly and transparently spoke out against slavery. In a speech at Peoria, Illinois (Oct 16, 1854), 7 years before he would become president, Lincoln stated:

“This declared indifference, but as I must think, covert real zeal for the spread of slavery, I cannot but hate. I hate it because of the monstrous injustice of slavery itself. I hate it because it deprives our republican example of its just influence in the world—enables the enemies of free institutions, with plausibility, to taunt us as hypocrites—causes the real friends of freedom to doubt our sincerity, and especially because it forces so many really good men among ourselves into an open war with the very fundamental principle of civil liberty—criticizing the Declaration of Independence and insisting that there is no right principle of action but self-interest.”

During the civil war lord Robert Cecil (later called the Marquess of Salisbury and three-time Prime Minister of Britain) expressed his viewpoint on the matter in the British Parliament:

“The Northern States of America never can be our sure friends because we are rivals, rivals politically, rivals commercially…With the Southern States, the case is entirely reversed. The population are an agricultural people. They furnish the raw material of our industry, and they consume the products which we manufacture from it. With them, every interest must lead us to cultivate friendly relations, and when the war began they at once recurred to England as their natural ally.” [emphasis added]

By 1840, cotton made up more than half of American exports. More than 75% of slave cotton was exported to Britain. American slave cotton was the centerpiece of the British Empire’s world cheap-labor system.

The autumn of 1862 would mark the first critical phase of the Civil War. Lincoln sent an urgent letter to the Russian Foreign Minister Gorchakov, informing him that France was ready to intervene militarily and was awaiting England. The salvation of the Union thus rested solely on Russia’s decision to act.

The Foreign Minister Gorchakov wrote in response to Lincoln’s plea:

“You know that the government of United States has few friends among the Powers. England rejoices over what is happening to you; she longs and prays for your overthrow. France is less actively hostile; her interests would be less affected by the result; but she is not unwilling to see it. She is not your friend. Your situation is getting worse and worse. The chances of preserving the Union are growing more desperate. Can nothing be done to stop this dreadful war? The hope of reunion is growing less and less, and I wish to impress upon your government that the separation, which I fear must come, will be considered by Russia as one of the greatest misfortunes. Russia alone, has stood by you from the first, and will continue to stand by you. We are very, very anxious that some means should be adopted–that any course should be pursued–which will prevent the division which now seems inevitable. One separation will be followed by another; you will break into fragments.”

Russia’s proclaimed support in its letters to Lincoln would be put to the test during the summer of 1863. By then, the South’s invasion of the North had failed at Gettysburg and the violent anti-war New York draft riots also failed and Britain, as a result, was thinking of a direct military intervention with the backing of France. What would follow marks one of the greatest displays of support for another country’s sovereignty to ever occur in modern history.

The Russian Navy arrived on both the east and west coastlines of the United States late September and early October 1863.

The timing was highly coordinated due to intelligence reports of when Britain and France were intending their military action. The Russian navy would stay along the US coastline in support of the Union for 7 months! They never intervened in the American civil war but rather remained in its waters at the behest of Lincoln in the case of a foreign power’s interference.

If Russia had not done this, Britain and France would most certainly have intervened on behalf of the Confederate states as they made clear they would, and the United States would have most certainly broken in two at that point. It was Russia’s direct naval support that allowed the United States to remain whole.

Czar Alexander II, who held sole power to declare war for Russia, stated in an interview to the American banker Wharton Barker on Aug. 17, 1879 (Published in The Independent March 24, 1904):

“In the Autumn of 1862, the governments of France and Great Britain proposed to Russia, in a formal but not in an official way, the joint recognition by European powers of the independence of the Confederate States of America. My immediate answer was: `I will not cooperate in such action; and I will not acquiesce. On the contrary, I shall accept the recognition of the independence of the Confederate States by France and Great Britain as a casus belli for Russia. And in order that the governments of France and Great Britain may understand that this is no idle threat; I will send a Pacific fleet to San Francisco and an Atlantic fleet to New York.

…All this I did because of love for my own dear Russia, rather than for love of the American Republic. I acted thus because I understood that Russia would have a more serious task to perform if the American Republic, with advanced industrial development were broken up and Great Britain should be left in control of most branches of modern industrial development.” [emphasis added]

What was Czar Alexander II referring to exactly when mentioning the advanced industrial development of the American Republic? Well, in short he was referring to the Hamiltonian system of economics. Notably, Alexander Hamilton’s 1791 Report on the Usefulness of the Manufactories in Relation to Trade and Agriculture which was published in St. Petersburg in 1807, sponsored by Russian Minister of Finance D.A. Guryev.

It was Hamilton who pioneered a new system of political economy coming out of the war of Independence which saw America bankrupt, undeveloped, and agrarian. Hamilton solved this problem by federalizing the state debts and converting it into productive credit, channelled by national banks into large scale internal improvements with a focus on the growth of manufacturing. Anyone wishing to learn more about this should read Anton Chaitkin’s recent publication Who We Are: America’s Fight for Universal Progress.

In the introduction to the translated Hamilton pamphlet, Russian educator V. Malinovsky wrote:

“The similarity of American United Provinces with Russia appears both in the expanse of the land, climate and natural conditions, in the size of population disproportionate to the space, and in the general youthfulness of various generally useful institutions; therefore all the rules, remarks and means proposed here are suitable for our country.”

This “American system” was what Tsar Alexander II recognised as the only economic system to have successfully challenged the system of empire, which he recognized as the root of all slavery. The ineffective and ultimately costly labour of slaves was no match for competing against a machine tool industry to which Frederick Douglass attested. The construction of rail that was made possible through the development of this machine tool industry is what freed countries from Britain’s maritime supremacy.

The “American System”

In 1842, Czar Nicholas I hired American engineer George Washington Whistler to oversee the building of the Saint Petersburg-Moscow Railway, Russia’s first large-scale railroad. In the 1860s, Henry C. Carey’s economics would be promoted in St. Petersburg’s university education, organised by US Ambassador to Russia Cassius Clay. Carey was a leading economic advisor to Lincoln and leading Hamiltonian of his age.

Sergei Witte, who worked as Russian Minister of Finance from 1889-1891 and later became Prime Minister in 1905, would publish in 1889 the incredibly influential paper titled “National Savings and Friedrich List” which resulted in a new customs law for Russia in 1891 and resulted in an exponential growth increase in Russia’s economy. Friedrich List publicly attributed his influence in economics to Alexander Hamilton.

Lincoln’s Pacific Railroad superintendent, General Grenville Dodge, advised Russia on its Trans-Siberia railroad, built with Pennsylvania steel and locomotives from 1890-1905.

In his 1890 budget report, Sergei Witte- echoing the Belt and Road Initiative unfolding today, wrote:

“The railroad is like a leaven, which creates a cultural fermentation among the population. Even if it passed through an absolutely wild people along its way, it would raise them in a short time to the level requisite for its operation.”

Sergei Witte was explicit of his following of the American model of political economy when he described his re-organization of the Russian railways saying:

“Faced by a serious shortage of locomotives, I invented and applied the traffic system which had long been in practice in the United States and which is now known as the “American system.”

By 1906, Czar Nicholas II of Russia supported the plan for the American-Russian Bering Strait tunnel, officially approving a team of American engineers to conduct a feasibility study.

Russia would complete the trans-Siberian railway in 1905 under the leadership of “American System” follower Count Sergei Witte. On its maiden voyage the Trans-Siberian rail saw Philadelphia-made train cars run across the Russian heartland, and it is no accident that all of the key players involved in the Alaska purchase were also involved in the Russian continental rail program on both sides of the ocean.

Bismarck’s Zollverein

In 1876 Henry C. Carey organized the centennial exhibition where 10 million people from 37 countries came to Philadelphia to see the achievements of the United States in its advancements in machine tool industry, which propelled their economy to the first in the world.

Only three years later, Otto von Bismarck broke Germany’s free trade system implementing an American style tariff policy for his nation. The kinship between Germany and the United States became so strong at this time that Otto von Bismarck’s speech in the parliament (1879) was quoted by McKinley on the floor in US Congress:

“A success of the United States in material development is the most illustrious of modern time. The American nation has not only successfully born and suppressed the most gigantic and expensive war of all history, but immediately afterward disbanded its army, found employment for all its soldiers and marines, paid off most of its debt, given labour and homes to all the unemployed in Europe as fast as they could arrive within its territory and still by a system of taxation so indirect as not to be perceived, much less felt… Because it is my deliberate judgement that the prosperity of America is mainly due to its protective laws, I urge that Germany has now reached that point, where it is necessary to imitate the tariff system of the United States.”

Otto von Bismarck was heavily organising for the building of the Berlin to Baghdad railway, which after much resistance and delay would only be completed in 1940. If this has been accomplished during Otto von Bismarck’s life, the Middle East could have avoided the Sykes Picot carving up.

In 1869, Japanese modernizers working directly with the Lincoln-Carey strategists ran the Meiji Restoration which industrialized Japan.

In the 1880s and 90s, Lincoln-Carey Philadelphia industrialists were contracted for huge infrastructure and nation-building projects in China. Hawaiian Christian missionary Frank Damon, having participated in the Carey group’s strategies at a very high level, helped instigate, shape, and build the Sun Yat-sen organization that gave birth to modern China.

Sun Yat-sen referred to his admiration of Lincoln’s USA as the basis for a new multipolar system saying:

“The world has been greatly benefited by the development of America as an industrial and a commercial Nation. So a developed China with her four hundred millions of population, will be another New World in the economic sense. The nations which will take part in this development will reap immense advantages. Furthermore, international cooperation of this kind cannot but help to strengthen the Brotherhood of Man.”

How Did We End Up Where We Are Today?

With such a glorious outlay of cooperation and common interests across the globe united against an economic system of empire, it begs the obvious question “What went wrong? How did we end up where we are today?”

To give one a quick glimpse into the reason why, let us look at some of the major assassinations and soft-coups from the late 19^th century and early 20^th century of American system proponents (refer to the image below).

Henry C. Carey stated it best when he described the situation as such, in his “Harmony of Interests” (1851):

“Two systems are before the world; the one looks to increasing the proportion of persons and of capital engaged in trade and transportation, and therefore to diminishing the proportion engaged in producing commodities with which to trade, with necessarily diminished return to the labor of all; while the other looks to increasing the proportion engaged in the work of production, and diminishing that engaged in trade and transportation, with increased return to all, giving to the laborer good wages, and to the owner of capital good profits… One looks to pauperism, ignorance, depopulation, and barbarism; the other in increasing wealth, comfort, intelligence, combination of action, and civilization. One looks towards universal war; the other towards universal peace. One is the English system; the other we may be proud to call the American system, for it is the only one ever devised the tendency of which was that of elevating while equalizing the condition of man throughout the world.”

We have yet to conclude the victor between these two opposing systems, the fight is not over and we would be foolish to give up at the finishing line. What we do today will decide the course of things in the future, and whether we live under a true recognition of freedom and prosperity, or whether we are ruled-over and our liberties treated as “privilege,” that can be given or taken based on the judgement of a ruling class, remains to be seen.

Thus, let us hearken to the words of Lincoln, who in a debate with the slave power’s champion Stephen Douglas, said:

“That is the issue that will continue in this country when these poor tongues of Judge Douglas and myself shall be silent. It is the eternal struggle between these two principles – right and wrong – throughout the world. They are the two principles that have stood face to face from the beginning of time, and will ever continue to struggle. The one is the common right of humanity and the other the divine right of kings.”

A beloved and twice-elected nationalist president was assassinated and replaced by a passionate supporter of the British Empire and America was on its disastrous path to empire in Asia and war in Europe.

The strategic context of the murder of William McKinley is seldom discussed. The extraordinary and deeply disturbing parallels between his murder and the sadistic slaughter 20 years before of Russia’s heroic Tsar Alexander II, friend of Abraham Lincoln and liberator of 24 million slaves has, to my knowledge, never before been explored or even suggested by anyone. Yet the same dark mastermind and imperial interests can be clearly identified behind both assassinations.

McKinley ended a 20-year-long economic depression that started in 1873, the longest in American history. He was pulled reluctantly into war with Spain and into annexing the Philippines but was strongly opposed to any further moves towards empire.

On September 6, 1901 McKinley was shot and mortally injured while visiting the World’s Fair in Buffalo in New York State. He died eight days later. His assassin was a Polish-American former steel worker called Leon Czolgosz who had been taken up by leading figures in the Anarcho-Syndicalist movement led with great prominence and charisma by former Russian Prince Peter Kropotkin from his secure, protected haven in Britain.

It was just over 20 years since Tsar Alexander II, the liberators of the serfs and joint architect with Otto von Bismarck of the Russian-German alliance that ended the 30 years of unparalleled invasions and destructions of great nations around the world by Britain and France, was assassinated on March 13, 1881 by Ignacy Hryniewiecki, also known as Ignaty Grinevitsky, another Polish anarchist recruited by the tiny secret anarchist cell of that grandly called itself the Narodnaya Volya, the People’s Will.

Czolgosz, one of life’s losers had come only recently to revolutionary anarchism, which advocated the murder of national leaders as “the propaganda of the deed,” only three years before in 1898. He had been taken up by the deeply rooted anarchist cell in Buffalo. Czolgosz was personally counseled and taught in the movements ideals and methods by Emma Goldman, who remains a beloved romantic figure of the American Left to this day,

Goldman (1869-1940) was a Lithuanian Jewish anarchist who came to the United States and is revered by the American Left and feminists as Red Emma for championing free speech, labor protests, women’s rights and birth control. In reality, she played no discernible role in achieving any of them. She also openly advocated bomb throwing by anarchists and unsuccessfully attempted to murder industrialist Henry Clay Frick, the right hand man of Andrew Carnegie in his Pittsburgh steelmaking empire.

Czolgosz met Goldman for the first time during one of her lectures in Cleveland, Ohio in May 1901. By then, Goldman had already met Kropotkin often including during his most recent American tour the previous month. Czolgosz openly admitted that Goldman had been his inspiration in the anarchist movement and after listening to her, he was ready to do anything he could to advance the cause.

After Goldman gave her lecture in Cleveland, Czolgosz approached the speakers’ platform and asked for reading recommendations. On the afternoon of July 12, 1901, he visited her at the home of Abraham Isaak, publisher of the newspaper Free Society in Chicago and introduced himself as Fred Nieman, (which means “nobody” a clear sign he was already thinking in conspiratorial terms.) Goldman later admitted to introducing him to her anarchist friends who were at the train station.

After the assassination, Goldman refused to condemn Czolgosz. Highly suspicious police and federal officials questioned Goldman, already a national figure. She complained they had given her “the third degree” and later writers have uncritically taken her at her word. But this was certainly just her lifelong pattern of wild, melodramatic exaggerations and outright lies.

She praised Czolgosz as a “supersensitive being,” an unlikely poetic description from someone who claimed to have only casually met him for a few minutes. It was language more likely to have been used by a lover inspiring a man to some “heroic, great deed” and it is quite likely they had had intimate relations.

Far from igniting a passionate mass anarchist movement across America, the murder of President McKinley did the opposite and discredited anarchism forever in the United States after 25 years of popularity tirelessly fanned by Kropotkin. Socialism, which angrily rejected the anarchists’ love of violence and assassination, superseded it and Eugene Debs won a million votes when he ran as head of the Socialist Party for president in 1912 against Woodrow Wilson, and Theodore Roosevelt.

Goldman was deported from the United States in 1919 after serving several short jail terms for minor offenses. She visited Russia but disapproved of the Soviet Union (she disapproved of everything she did not run or imagine) and eventually died in Canada in 1940.

Thirty years after her death, Goldman enjoyed a bizarre revival among American feminists which continues to this day. Adulation continues to pour down on her.

L. Doctorow’s pretentious, reverently praised and execrably bad 1975 novel “Ragtime” makes her the central, prophetic inspiring figure of the Ragtime era, a fantasy more unreal than Tolkien. The novel later became an embarrassingly awful though also acclaimed Broadway musical.

In real life, Goldman was an intimate friend and colleague for at least 30 years of the man who called himself Mephistopheles, after Goethe’s poetic version of Satan, Russian Prince Peter Kropotkin, who led the international anarchist movement for more than 40 years following the death of Mikhail Bakunin in 1876.

Goldman worshipped Kropotkin. She wrote of him: “We saw in him the father of modern anarchism, its revolutionary spokesman and brilliant exponent of its relation to science, philosophy, and progressive thought.”

So close were Kropotkin and Goldman that she visited him in Moscow in 1920 a year before his death and later attended his funeral. She always referred to him as “Peter.” It is likely they had been lovers. Her role in the McKinley assassination exactly parallels that of Sophia Perovskaya, the infamous, hate-crazed director of Hryniewiecki’s grenade murder attack on Tsar Alexander.

The most striking parallel with the murder of the Liberator Tsar was Kropotkin’s remarkable proximity to both crimes. As I have previously noted in these columns, Kropotkin is documented as having known Perovskaya in the notorious Nikolai Tchaikovsky Circle of Russian anarchists as early as 1872, nine years before the assassination. And he was later close to Goldman for the rest of the his long life (He lived to the age of 79.)

Czolgosz was apparently recruited in Cleveland by the anarchists and Goldman was his inspiration to do whatever he could for the movement.

Buffalo is not a large city and is relatively remote. It is 637 kilometers (about 400 miles) by road from New York City. Yet Kropotkin took the time to visit it and its anarchist cells for leisurely trips twice in close succession in 1897 and 1901. He spoke English fluently. His visit in late April 1901 at the end of a popular and very high-profile U.S. tour was only five months before the shooting of President McKinley in September. He had established warm personal ties with Buffalo’s anarchist leader Johann Most on his previous visit there three years before as documented in the study “Kropotkin in America” by Paul Avrich.

Avrich notes, “Kropotkin exerted an increasing influence on American anarchists, not to speak of socialists, Single Taxers and other reformers. During the 1880’s and 1890’s, his articles appeared in all the leading anarchist journals.”

It was much easier for violent anarchist cells in America to operate in small towns or obscure industrial cities where the police were far smaller, less well equipped, far less sophisticated and not attuned to the threat of revolutionary violence than in major metropolises like New York City, Los Angeles or Chicago.

All this Kropotkin knew well. In Buffalo, since his 1897 visit, his key contact was Most, a German expatriate who even in those circles was regarded as a wild and violent “firebrand,” according to Avrich. The World’s Fair had already been arranged to be held in Buffalo – a surprisingly remote and small location for such an event – and President McKinley was certain to visit it.

In other words, when poor, doomed President McKinley took his fatal train to obscure little Buffalo he was going to a stronghold of the most violent anarchist leader on the North American continent who had recently been in close personal contact with the movement’s international leader.

Kropotkin did not operate secretly or fearfully in the United States. He had enormous protection and influence. He was an honored guest in 1897 at meetings of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and gave a speech to the National Geographical Society in Washington, DC.

In 1901, Kropotkin stayed at the prestigious and luxurious Colonial Club in Cambridge Massachusetts. He was invited to the United States by the Lowell Institute. He also gave a guest lecture at Harvard. Goldman organized his busy and successful speaking schedule on the East Coast.

Like Tsar Alexander, McKinley was no evil tyrant but a successful reformer who had decisively improved terrible living conditions for scores of millions of people. He restored the U.S. economy by reviving the “national system ” of previous presidents such as Abraham Lincoln and James Garfield (both also assassinated). He especially increased industrial tariffs to keep British and German industries from undermining the U.S. industrial base with floods of subsidized and artificially supported “dumped” exports.

McKinley also settled a miners’ strike giving the oppressed workers decent rights and significant improvements in pay and conditions, the first such successful development in U.S. history. He was at the same time a trusted partner to Wall Street in maintaining business confidence and favorable investment conditions.

All this changed when McKinley’s vice president, the youngest in U.S. history, Theodore Roosevelt, succeeded to the presidency when McKinley succumbed to his wounds on September 14, 1901 after eight days of agony.

Roosevelt was named to the vice presidency supposedly to remove him from a position of real power as governor of New York State as the Wall Street moguls did not like or trust him. He filled the slot vacated by previous Vice President Garret Hobart, the highly capable former governor of Ohio, who died at the age of only 55 in 1899 after developing heart problems over that summer. Hobart’s death has been suggested but never seriously investigated as a possible poisoning. Had he lived, Roosevelt could never have been seriously considered as McKinley’s running mate in 1900.

Roosevelt devoted his next eight years in the presidency and the rest of his life to integrating the United States and the British Empire into a seamless web of racial imperialist oppression that dominated Latin America, sub-Saharan Africa and Asia and that destroyed the cultural history and heritage of the Native North American nations. But that is another story.

All this change was made possible by Czolgosz’s convenient two shots into President McKinley’s abdomen: Goldman lived in comfort and acclaim in different countries, always protected by the British Empire until her death in Canada in 1940 at the age of 71.

The International Anarchist Congress of London, from July 14 to July 20, 1881 was highly unusual in many ways, though it has almost totally been forgotten by history,  save as a curiosity.

It was the last such gathering to be held for more than a quarter of a century until the International Anarchist Congress of Amsterdam in August 1907. During that time, there were four other unsuccessful attempts to call international congresses, in Geneva in 1882, in Paris in 1889, in Chicago in 1890 and once again in Paris in 1900.

Those interested in the procedural minutiae of the congress can easily enough find obscure academic articles discussing theoretical intellectual positions held and debated at the Congress.

But as far as I have been able to find, no historians have given any serious study to the possibility that the Congress may have been used to coordinate or plan any program of “Propaganda of the Deed” – the assassination of important political leaders across Europe and the Americas, which was central to the achievement of the anarcho-syndicalist movement’s goals.

Nor is there any discussion anywhere – save in terms of abstruse and apparently harmless political theory – of the role that former Prince Peter Kropotkin, the most consistently high-profile and charismatic leader of the anarchist movement played in the convention.

Most striking of all, there appears never to have been any serious investigation conducted as to why the British government permitted its capital London, to be the host of the conference that on the surface stood for the destruction of everything that the British Empire, its traditions and institutions held dear.

The decision to permit the 1881 congress to gather in London was particularly striking – and from the Russian government’s point of view outrageous – because it opened only four months almost to the day after Tsar Alexander II, the Great Liberator who freed 24 million serfs from slavery and supported Abraham Lincoln and the Union through the U.S. Civil War, was assassinated by a specially designed shrapnel grenade thrown by Ignacy Hryniewiecki on Sunday, March 13, 1881.

That hideous crime was planned and committed by the Narodnaya Volya, “The People’s Will” itself a strange, tiny, conspiratorial group shrouded in mystery and unanswered questions to this day.

The name of the group suggests – as it was meant to – a mass popular movement, But the Narodnaya Volya was no such thing. The best estimates of Russian and Western historians alike put it at no more than 200 members. Almost none of these were from peasant backgrounds. They were almost all from favored, prosperous, professional middle class families and in some cases even from aristocratic backgrounds.

Interestingly, the followers of the late Osama Bin Laden in the first generation of al-Qaeda that carried out the destruction of the World Trade Towers in New York City on September 11, 2001 exhibit an almost identical set of profiles, as former Saudi intelligence chief Prince Turki bin Feisal bin Abdelaziz ibn Saud has pointed out.

The Narodnaya Volya was only founded in 1879. But it was totally crushed by 1884. Yet in the first two years of its existence, it operated with apparent impunity carrying out no less than eight attempts on the life of Tsar Alexander. No other tsar in Russian history including Alexander’s son and grandson after him was ever hunted so mercilessly and relentlessly by assassins.

The Narodnaya Volya never lacked for any of the financing it needed for its murderous schemes. The Russian internal security services, who proved extremely efficient and energetic in smashing the group after it carried out its bloody deed, seemed utterly helpless and inept against it until that point. This may in large part have been because the group was so tiny and so novel in its operational techniques.

Who led the Narodnaya Volya? Its documented leaders were Andrey Zhelyabov and Sofya  Perovskaya. Perovskaya came from an aristocratic background but showed little capability beyond her own murderously intense fanaticism and strange obsession with murdering the tsar. Other members of the group when arrested openly commented on her merciless hatred for the ruler who had liberated the serfs.

But Perovskaya from 1872 was personally very closely associated with the then handsome, dashing and charismatic anarchist leader Prince Peter Kropotkin. It is likely they were lovers.

The carefully (British) constructed image of Kropotkin that endures to this day is a tubby, kindly, smiling old, bearded Father Christmas. In his youth, however, he was darkly satanically handsome and was obsessed with Goethe’s devil figure Mephistopheles in  “Faust.”

For Perovskaya, Kropotkin would have been the dashing, aristocratic brilliant love of her life. For Kropotkin, the rather plain Perovskaya would have been a means to an end: The hunting and murder of the tsar.

Kropotkin came from one of the most aristocratic eminent families in Russia. He claimed descent from the House of Rurik, the original ruling family of Russia. He had actually been a personal page of Tsar Alexander II in his early years in power. He had been brutally bullied (or so he later claimed) when entering the Imperial corps of pages. For ever after, he maintained an intense personal hatred of the tsar, intensified by the years he spent as a prisoner for his subversive activities in the Peter and Paul Fortress in St. Petersburg starting in 1872. His escape was engineered by friends in 1876.

Kropotkin’s relationship with Perovskaya starting in 1872 in the Tchaikovsky (not the great musical composer) Circle is the key documented fact that links Kropotkin directly to the murder of the great tsar he so intensely personally hated. The group’s leader Nikolai Tchaikovsky, like Kropotkin found protection in Britain for most of his later life.

Kropotkin was a noted scientist in his day who contested Darwin and argued a version of evolution based on natural cooperation rather than natural selection. In fact it was superficial and crackpot but interestingly has recently been revived, along with his scientific reputation in British academic circles.

During the remainder of his own long life (he died in 1921 at the age of 79), Kropotkin was allowed to live in complete peace and security in Britain. Not coincidentally, Britain was the only major country in Europe not to suffer from the mysterious outbreak of assassinations that swept the continent and even the United States in the last quarter of the 19th century.

As Matthew Ehret has noted, the anarchist assassinations seemed to disproportionately target major leaders who rejected free trade and a global economic order dictated by British financial interests from the City of London. Its victims included U.S. presidents James Garfield (1881) and William McKinley (1901), French President Sadi Carnot (1894), Spanish Prime Minister Antonio Canovas (1897) and King Umberto I of Italy (1900).

In addition, in 1878 alone, anarchists attempted to kill Emperor Wilhelm I of Germany twice as well as the Kings of Spain and Italy. Kropotkin hailed all these efforts at “the Propaganda of the Deed.” Not coincidentally, all of these leaders, especially the old Kaiser, Bismarck’s patron and protector stood like Tsar Alexander II squarely opposed to British efforts at global financial domination.

Yet despite all these outrages – or more likely because of them – Kropotkin, the guiding figure of anarcho-syndicalism and the great champion of the murder of national leaders continued to enjoy a charmed life protected by the British Empire.

To this day, British historians and other writers have unanimously continued to swallow the approved line that Kropotkin was a kindly, brilliant, pacifist saint – belonging to the company of Mohandas Gandhi and Dr. Martin Luther King rather than that of Sergei Nechayev and Dostoyevsky’s “Devils.”

The hyper-energetic, much loved and woefully idiotic American popular historian Barbara Tuchman spread this Disneyworld fairy tale image of Kropotkin in her enormously popular and influential history of the pre-World War I world “The Proud Tower” in 1966. Typically, she won the Pulitzer Prize twice for writing other histories that got their central facts and theses wrong.

A serious study of the role of Kropotkin and his “Anarchist International” in the assassinations of the late 19th century is well over 100 years overdue.

But even in that age of carefully selected and discriminating terror, the hunting and murder of the great liberator Tsar Alexander stands out for its relentless nature and obsessive cruelty.

That age of assassinations and the Anarchists Congress that the British so incongruously hosted in July 1881 is not just a matter of abstract curiosity about a long forgotten and irrelevant past. It offers disquieting parallels to the use of targeted assassinations and the methodical destabilization of great nations in the name of free trade, democracy and human rights that continues at a feverish pace in our own time.

As the great American novelist William Faulkner rightly wrote in “Requiem for a Nun,” “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.”

Half a century earlier, thousands of Imperial Russian Navy sailors and their officers flooded the cities of San Francisco and New York. But the circumstances were very different. They were there to defend the United States from foreign invasion – not to threaten it and they brilliantly succeeded in their tasks.

The incredible story is well told in “Friends in Peace and War: The Russian Navy’s Landmark Visit to Civil War San Francisco” by C. Douglas Kroll published in 2007.

As Kroll documents, the U.S. Navy’s tiny Pacific Squadron was weak at the time and Confederate commerce raiders indulgently encouraged by Britain roamed the Atlantic: The message the Russian forces sent was unmistakable: Any British or French naval attack on New York or San Francisco, the two great centers of U.S. commerce and financial power on the East and the new West Coast, would be an attack on Russia too.

The streets of San Francisco and New York teemed with Russian officers and sailors in their bright uniforms in 1863 and they were social successes too. Innumerable parades, dance balls and dinners were organized, many by the visiting Russians themselves.

The two squadrons were dispatched by Tsar Alexander II, all his life a great and true friend of the United States, to protect the Atlantic and Pacific coastlines of North America if the two other most powerful nations in the world – the British and French Empires – chose to intervene in the Civil War on the side of the Confederacy, as they openly moved towards doing during the high-tide of their war during 1862.

The British Empire’s efforts to dismantle the United States during the Civil War have been documented in these columns in the articles of Matthew Ehret.

The British government was dominated in the1860s by the great champion of democracy, open borders and Free Trade William Ewart Gladstone, whose father had made the family fortune by being the biggest slave trader in the world. Gladstone at the height of his power and influence as Britain’s Chancellor of the Exchequer or finance minister openly pressed for recognition of the slave-owning Confederacy,

The same policy was pushed by the sinister and brilliant Robert Gascoigne-Cecil, later to rule as foreign secretary and prime minister as Lord Salisbury after Gladstone from 1886 most of the time to 1902. He dominated British foreign policymaking for 40 years and to the day he died he openly expressed regret that the Empire had not seized its opportunity during the Civil War to destroy the United States.

It was Tsar Alexander’s intervention which prevented that. He could see with the burning and plundering of Beijing in 1860 that St, Petersburg could well be next. Across Eurasia, he made common cause with Otto Von Bismarck, new Chancellor of Prussia, to unite Germany and drive back British and French influence from the heart of Europe.

Then Alexander developed an extraordinary friendship with U.S. President Abraham Lincoln. Ignored for almost one and a half centuries. “The Tsar and the President: Alexander II and Abraham Lincoln, Liberator and Emancipator” by Marilyn Pfeifer Swezey (University of Wisconsin Press, 2009) documented this astonishing friendship, conducted by letter between the two great liberators of East and West, who both fell, martyred by foul assassins.

Protecting the Union in its drive to abolish slavery against the British Empire was central both to the great tsar’s moral passion and his strategic vision to defend his country.

Alexander II’s grand strategy is never taught in the schools and universities of the Western World to this day but it was a brilliant success.

By 1870, Russian protection and support had ensured the survival and reunification of the United States in North America and the unification of Germany in Europe.

The alliance of the British and French Empires which had inflicted havoc around the world from Russia and Austria-Hungary to India, China, Mexico and the United States for 20 years was smashed when Napoleon III was toppled in France after Prussian forces captured him in the 1870 war.

Alexander put Britain on the global strategic defensive for the first time since its defeat in the American War of Independence 90 tears earlier. By 1870, the United States and Germany had already outstripped Britain in railroad construction and steel production. Both of them practiced protectionist tariff policies to protect the jobs and well-being, profit and industrial capabilities of their own peoples – a model that was also being adopted by Japan. Between the United States to the west and Germany to the east, Britain was boxed in and could no longer pose a direct threat to Russia.

Until the Russian Revolution, and the arrogant insanity of Woodrow Wilson (diagnosed as chronically insane by none other than Sigmund Freud himself, who wrote a book about it), the United States and Imperial Russia remained good friends.

Tsar Alexander sold Alaska to the United States. Lincoln’s surviving secretary of state William Seward negotiated the deal. Alexander even invited Lincoln and his First Lady Mary Todd Lincoln as his honored guests to St. Petersburg after he stepped down from the presidency and Lincoln accepted the offer.

In the event, Lincoln’s true heir, General Ulysses S. Grant took up the offer and was warmly entertained as the emperor’s guest in August 1878 just three years before his own assassination in 1881. (Grant, the most astute of observers, quietly noted that the great tsar seemed nervous and worn down after so many attempts on his life by the revolutionaries.)

This crucial true story of the real strategic context of the U.S. Civil War is never taught in any U.S. schools and universities. All U.S. politicians, policymakers and pundits (P3) are totally ignorant of it. Once again, total, pathetic ignorance of the most profound lessons of their own history has fatally blinded modern Americans.

The mob which Shakespeare mocked as a mindless instrument of tyrants in his play Julius Caesar, has again been deployed in America where George Soros’ funding has turned this social-justice beast against the very republic itself (ironically under the banner of Freedom from Tyranny” of course).

Instead of hearing calls to save America, break up the Wall Street banks or return America back to its anti-colonial heritage, today we hear only calls for tearing down monuments, and to undo the Constitution as a fraud wrapped in a lie built upon hypocrisy and white privilege with no redeeming value anywhere to be found.

I’d like to take this brief moment to do something a tad unpopular by honoring the positive traditions of the too-often forgotten America whose Father of Founding Fathers Benjamin Franklin, shaped not merely a revolution of 13 independent-minded colonies against the British Empire, but rather a global movement stretching from France, Russia, Poland, Ireland, Prussia, India and Africa!

Without this international array of republican-minded patriots across cultures, religions and continents, then the revolution of 1776 that established on this earth for the first time a system of government founded upon the Consent of the Governed and for the protection of inalienable rights would never have succeeded.

America’s Revolution as an International Affair

As I laid out in my last paper “Why Canada Failed the Ben Franklin Challenge of 1776”, Franklin’s sad return to the Continental Congress in New York from Quebec in May, 1776 was one of the few defeats suffered by the statesman. Franklin’s decades of work to bring the French Colony of Quebec into the independence movement was sabotaged by 1) the slavish illiteracy rampant among the peasants of the feudal system inherited from France, and 2) the rampant corruption of the Catholic clergy elite which signed a devil’s pact with the British Empire to keep the peasants locked into the empire. These factors would play into the collapse of the French Revolution in 1789 as we will see shortly.

One month after this failed effort, a four-man committee led by Franklin drafted the Declaration of Independence on July 2^nd and made public on July 4^th proclaiming:

“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. — That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, — That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.”

Although a slave owning degenerate named Thomas Jefferson is sadly given sole credit for this document (fueling the argument of those proclaiming America to be a nation built on hypocrisy), the fact is that the great abolitionist Ben Franklin guided the writing of this document from start to finish. Over 40 corrections to Jefferson’s drafts were made by the old statesman including the erasure of Jefferson’s desired wording of “property” derived from his love of John Locke for the higher Leibnizian idea of “happiness” preferred by Franklin.

Franklin had already fought to unite the colonies for over twenty years beginning with his 1754 Plan of Union at the outset of the French-Indian War adopted by the Albany Congress, but rejected by the individual colonies who were always kept divided amongst themselves. Franklin’s “Join or Die” cartoon had its origins not in 1776, but actually during the battle of 1754 and it was an open secret that the British Elite of the 18^th century collaborated closely with French oligarchical families to keep the troublesome colonialists subjugated, and underdeveloped as part of the “balance of power” game of empire.

After Franklin’s July 4, 1776 success, he knew that America’s fate hinged upon his ability to engage the international network of statesmen, and scientists whom he had organized over the course of 40 years and especially since his 1752 discovery of electricity made him an international sensation earning him the title “Prometheus of America” and immortalized in the painting by Benjamin West.

This post-1776 phase of his plan took him to France where he was made America’s ambassador in Paris. It was here, that Franklin arranged the French-American Treaty of Alliance of 1778 that turned the tide of the revolution towards the American cause which had zero chance of success before this moment.

Franklin had already organized his allies in Prussia where Friedrich the Great voiced open support for the cause and the great military strategist Wilhelm von Steuben became the Inspector General of the Continental Army providing military drills and modern military techniques to the undisciplined “citizen soldiers” of the USA. The republican Polish military engineer and colonel Tadeusz Kosciuszko served as Brigadier-General in the Continental Army and the young Marquis Lafayette who arrived illegally in America along with other French troops before the 1778 alliance treaty, made invaluable contributions to the cause. Over twenty generals of the Continental Congress were Irishmen, and many led the later efforts to create an Irish revolution in 1798-99.

In his ambassadorial station in France, Franklin met many members of the European intelligentsia- including key Russian figures. Among them included a young woman named Ekaterina Dashkova– the younger sister of Catherine the Great and president of the Russian Academy of Sciences who became friends with the elder scientist and was soon inducted into Franklin’s Philosophical Society (becoming the society’s first woman and first Russian). In turn, Dashkova made Franklin the first American member of the Russian Academy of Sciences in 1781. It was through these connections that Franklin played a leading role in organizing the League of Armed Neutrality under the helm of Catherine the Great which ensured that vital supplies and arms would make their way from Europe to America without being blocked by British ships. Within the first 12 months, this League grew to include the Netherlands, Denmark, Sweden, Austria, and Prussia. To this day, Russia’s league created the foundations of Maritime law.

This early alliance sewed the seeds of a larger tradition of U.S.-Russia friendship which saved both nations at existential moments and is outlined brilliantly by American University President Edward Lozansky’s recent July 4^th article.

Franklin’s French networks had deep connections into India as well, which made themselves felt in the French-Indian alliance of 1780 that saw pro-American Muslim leader Hydar Ali lead thousands of Indian soldiers on a march across Western Ghats where they attacked the strategic British Base of Fort St. George near the Port town of Madras. Ali was supported by French troops on land and sea under the command of Admiral Suffren. Hydar Ali had already defeated the British in 1760 and represented a powerful independence force in India that kept British oligarchs up at night (It would still be many years before Britain would gain control of this “Crown Jewel” of the empire). During this conflict, Hydar Ali’s forces innovated rockets which decimated British troops, and forced Britain to re-direct over 20% of their naval fleet from fighting in the Americas- this was a vital boon to the French and American forces a world away. Hydar Ali’s son Tipu Sultan even wrote a message to the Continental Congress in 1781 saying: “every blow that is struck in the cause of American liberty throughout the world, in France, India, and elsewhere and so long as a single insolent savage tyrant remains the struggle shall continue.”

America’s flagship of the Continental fleet was named the Hydar Ali in his honor.

In Morocco, the French were able to arrange an important dialogue between Emperor Sidi Mohammed and American officials which saved American shipping from the ravages of Barbary pirates who ruled the coasts of Africa and the Straits of Gibraltar. During the opening of the war, the British made sure to inform these Barbary pirates of American shipping and used these forces against American ships bound for Europe. Sidi Mohammed agreed to supply protection for America’s ships and guaranteed them safe harbor from the Tunisian and Algerian pirates. Soon the Continental Congress had passed an act which called for Franklin to lead a team of negotiators to work out a deal with Morocco and other North African countries.

Although international political chaos and the constant treachery and intrigue within America during its early years resulted in very little progress on this front, it is noteworthy that Morocco was the first nation in the world to recognize America’s independence on December 20, 1777.

Even though Franklin didn’t appear to have any direct contact with the Chinese during this period (who were busy fending off the British Empire’s lusting dogs of the East India Company who were preparing a new phase of Asiatic expansion), Chinese thought did figure prominently in the thinking of Ben Franklin and Thomas Paine. Franklin had published many writings on Confucius from 1737-1757, which shaped many points of wisdom in the Poor Richards Almanac. Writing to a friend in 1747, Franklin stated “Confucius was my example. I followed Confucius”. As Professor David Wang points out, many of his insights into civil administration and law derived from his studies of China.

While there are many more chapters to this international story, the lesson I wanted readers to come away with is that America was both more than you thought it was and also less than it was meant to be.

According to the intentions of such renaissance men as Franklin, the American cause was never meant to be a “local issue” defined by 13 rebelling colonies, but rather a new age of reason for all mankind.

Kindred spirits across Europe watched in horror as the first European nation to attempt revolution led by Lafayette and other leaders of Franklin’s network (who made the American cause a success) was overthrown by a Jacobin “color revolution”. The noble origins of the June 20, 1789 Tennis Court Oath which kick started the French Revolution were soon lost as a bloodbath (directed by British assets from the Foreign Office) channelled the rage of France’s peasant population against ALL of the elite, corrupt and noble alike, proclaiming “the revolution has no need of scientists”. The sound of the guillotine lopping off the heads of the great revolutionary astronomer/mayor of Paris Jean-Sylvain Bailey and chemist Antoine Lavoisier still resonates as a shame of France. Lafayette only saved his head long enough to end up in an Austrian dungeon for 5 years as punishment for fighting to overthrow hereditary systems and was immortalized in Beethoven’s only opera Fidelio in 1805.

The pro-humanist forces of Europe slowly came undone during the Napoleonic wars which culminated in the 1815 Congress of Vienna and Holy Alliance which re-established “peace” by banning dangerous books, teaching, and art that might awaken revolutionary feelings in the minds and hearts of Europeans. These Orwellian laws were outlined in the Carlsbad decrees of 1819 and ruined more than a few lives of great statesmen and teachers. This story was told in my paper “Kissinger’s Adoration of the 1815 Congress of Vienna”.

During this time, the British Empire came out again as a force of evil preparing a new phase of its global conquest with a crushing of the Hydar Ali spirit in India and a new age of opium wars against China.

In spite of this growing darkness, great poets who dreamed of that better age of reason produced some of the greatest and under-appreciated poetry with Percy Shelley and John Keats leading that movement in Britain, Robbie Burns in Scotland and such figures as Schubert, Heine, Schumann and Beethoven representing this spark in Vienna and Germany. Palmerston-Mazzini’s “Young Europe” anarchist mobs were periodically deployed to disrupt constructive nationalist tendencies throughout this period- laying the groundwork for “color revolutions” of the 20-21^st centuries.

Beethoven’s 1824 Ninth Symphony setting Schiller’s great poem an “Ode to Joy” to music was a celebration of that dreamed-of age of brotherhood and creative reason which Franklin devoted his life to accomplishing and which today’s multipolar alliance has again awoken as a potential alternative to an age of darkness, war and collapse facing humanity in the 21st century.

The author delivered a lecture on July 1, 2020 on this topic and can be reached at matt.ehret@tutamail.com

Even though President Lincoln and Czar Alexander II were both known as great reformers and emancipators for their common commitment to free slaves and serfs, both leaders were assassinated before their grand visions could come to fruition.

In this article, I would like to present another chapter of this forgotten history: The creation of modern Canada in as a confederation designed explicitly to prevent the inevitable construction of a Russian-American rail connection through the Bering Strait in the wake of the Civil War.

The Strategic Value of the Bering Strait Tunnel in History

For those who are not aware, the Bering Strait Rail tunnel project is a 150 year idea which was formulated by allies of Lincoln and Alexander II after America’s Civil War. The original grand design was driven by a plan to connect telegraph lines between continents, followed soon thereafter by a connection of the Trans-Siberian Railway and America’s Trans Continental Railways through British Columbia, Alaska and into Eurasia, as laid out spectacularly by former Colorado Governor William Gilpin in his 1890 book the Cosmopolitan Railway.

Echoing today’s Belt and Road Initiative which is quickly growing to become a world land bridge, Gilpin described what this new paradigm of human civilization was destined to look like:

“The weapons of mutual slaughter are hurled away; the sanguinary passions find a check, a majority of the human family is found to accept the essential teachings of Christianity IN PRACTICE… Room is discovered for industrial virtue and industrial power. The civilized masses of the world meet; they are mutually enlightened, and fraternize to reconstitute human relations in harmony with nature and with God. The world ceases to be a military camp, incubated only by the military principles of arbitrary force and abject submission. A new and grand order in human affairs inaugurates itself out of these immense concurrent discoveries and events” [Cosmopolitan Railway p. 213]

The idea of the Bering Strait tunnel was supported by Czar Nicholas II who, in 1906 hired a team of American engineers to conduct feasibility studies on the initiative which then had an estimated cost of $350 million.

Sadly a couple of World Wars and disastrous revolution kept this project from blossoming as it was intended.

This idea was revived again by FDR’s great Vice President Henry Wallace who discussed the project at length with Russia’s Foreign Minister Molotov in 1942. In this meeting Wallace declared that “It would mean much to the peace of the future if there could be some tangible link of this sort between the pioneer spirit of our own West and the frontier spirit of the Russian East.”

Again, the Cold War derailed this project and it was only in 2007 that the Russian Government revived it once again with Putin even offering to pay 2/3rd of the $65 billion estimated cost to construct the 100 km tunnel across the Bering Strait. This project was offered to the west more loudly in 2011 and in May 2014, China unofficially gave their backing to the initiative. Sadly, unipolar technocrats and neocons controlling NATO foreign policy had not the eyes to see what benefits such projects offered those who joined in its construction, and instead continued onto their zero-sum game plan for full spectrum dominance.

With the 2018 unveiling of the Polar Silk Road extending the east-west development corridors into the Arctic, which have merged increasingly with Russia’s Eurasian Economic Union and Putin’s Northern Vision, the Bering Strait connection has again been given new life. If nations of the west find the courage to let go of the Titanic before the hellish chaos of the oncoming financial meltdown erupts, then the projects animating the new multi polar paradigm will undoubtedly look a lot like the World Land bridge concept illustrated by the Schiller Institute below.

Arctic development remains one of the best strategic points of alliance and cooperation needed to re-organize the collapsing world economic order around firm principles of multipolar cooperation and value and as such is not too different from the dynamic shaping the world when Lincoln took office in 1860.

The 19th century Clash of Two Systems

Lincoln’s economic advisor and leader of the international export of the American System of Political economy, Henry C. Carey, described this clash between two systems in his 1851 Harmony of Interests:

“Two systems are before the world; the one looks to increasing the proportion of persons and of capital engaged in trade and transportation, and therefore to diminishing the proportion engaged in producing commodities with which to trade, with necessarily diminished return to the labor of all; while the other looks to increasing the proportion engaged in the work of production, and diminishing that engaged in trade and transportation, with increased return to all, giving to the laborer good wages, and to the owner of capital good profits… One looks to pauperism, ignorance, depopulation, and barbarism; the other in increasing wealth, comfort, intelligence, combination of action, and civilization. One looks towards universal war; the other towards universal peace. One is the English system; the other we may be proud to call the American system, for it is the only one ever devised the tendency of which was that of elevating while equalizing the condition of man throughout the world.”

Carey, just like the British Empire’s Lord Palmerston, clearly recognized that America had not completed “the mission of 1776” since not one but TWO Americas existed within Washington: One positive America representing the anti-slavery/anti-colonial principles of the 1789 constitution vs. another hypocritical slave power that never believed that “all men were created equal”. Just as two antithetical impulses existed within America, so too did two opposing views of “Manifest Destiny” co-evolve since 1776: One hellish version driven by the ‘principle’ of spreading slavery and suppressing the weak while the other more noble impulse was represented by the spirits of Lincoln, Carey and Gilpin illustrated above.

This fatal contradiction within the republic was exploited fervently by Anglo-American intelligence for 80 years before the inevitable civil war finally broke out in 1861.

President Lincoln defined the terms of this contradiction and immanent war in an 1858 debate with the Slave Power’s champion Stephen Douglas saying:

“That is the issue that will continue in this country when these poor tongues of Judge Douglas and myself shall be silent. It is the eternal struggle between these two principles – right and wrong – throughout the world. They are the two principles that have stood face to face from the beginning of time, and will ever continue to struggle. The one is the common right of humanity and the other the divine right of kings.”

This quote is important as it addresses the fact that Lincoln recognized correctly the inextricable connection between the institution of slavery (even when it masqueraded under a republican veneer) and monarchical principles of colonialism which saw mankind’s right to rule defined not by morality, or merit but rather by “principles” of hereditary right.

The Stage is Set for a Forgotten Battle

By now most informed people are aware of Russia’s 1863 intervention into the Civil War as a turning point that blocked British and French imperialist forces from entering the war militarily on the side of the Southern rebels. What is not so well established is how Russian and American grand strategy to connect the continents by rail did not occur as it was intended after the sale of Alaska.

There are several convergent factors at play during the 1865-1867 period which presented a major challenge to the weakening British Empire strategists:

The need to confederate British territories in North America as possession of the Empire instead of allowing them to either become independent nations or annexing to Lincoln’s republic.

If this first task could be done by ousting pro-Lincoln forces in Canadian political power and killing Lincoln, then the next task involved transferring the vast private territories owned by the Hudson Bay Company separating eastern colonies from the lone western outpost of British Columbia on the Pacific. The majority of Canada during this pre-1867 period was private Hudson Bay land as it had been since it was chartered in 1670 by Prince Rupert.

If this transfer of Hudson Bay possessions into federal hands could be affected, then it would still be necessary to somehow persuade the fiercely independent British Columbian subjects to join Confederation. This was not a simple task as the vast majority were in favor of annexing to the USA due to the economic despair of their colony caused by the collapse of the Gold rush bubbles in 1858 and total isolation from the other British American colonies.

The Anti-Union Confederacy That Succeeded

On July 1, 1867, the British North America Act was enacted consolidating Britain’s “other” anti-American confederacy operation under a new constitution dedicating the new federation’s existence to be conducive “to the Welfare of the Provinces and promote the interests of the British Empire”.

It should be kept in mind that the project to confederate actually began during the Civil War in the form of a week-long booze-soaked orgy of the Charlottetown convention of 1864 which hammered out the resolutions later put into law in 1867.

Some have wondered why just days before the July 1, 1867 enactment, would-be confederate President Jefferson Davis gave a speech to cheering crowds in Lennoxville Quebec stating: “I hope that you will hold fast to [your] British principles and that you may ever strive to cultivate close and affectionate connections with the mother country”.

This pro-British gushing from a confederate traitor in Quebec shouldn’t be surprising at all if we take into account the fact that Montreal and Toronto served as Southern confederacy bases of operations used with the full support of the British Empire to run terrorist operations, raids, espionage and financing of the war against Lincoln’s forces from the North (while Canada “officially” maintained an air of neutrality). Even Lincoln’s assassin, John Wilkes Boothe was discovered to have been deployed from Montreal to kill Lincoln, with union officers discovering a $500 cheque amidst his possessions signed directly by none other than Ontario Bank President Henry Starnes (who would later become Mayor of Montreal).

As Barry Sheehy pointed out in Montreal: City of Secrets, during the Civil War, “the largest Confederate Secret Service base outside Richmond was located in Montreal” under the direct control of confederate Secretary of State Judah Benjamin- himself an asset of British Intelligence.

Much like the exiled Russian and Hong Kong oligarchs and traitors of the modern day, Jefferson Davis, Judah Benjamin and many other confederate rebels lived out their days in comfort in both Canada and Britain (Benjamin becoming an English Barrister in London from 1865 until his death in 1884).

The Sale of Alaska and the Rush for British Columbia

On March 30, 1867, the British Empire was caught off guard with the news that Russia’s Alaskan possessions had been sold to America for $7.2 million in a secretive diplomatic maneuver which Secretary of State William Seward described as the most important deal of his life.

The sale had suddenly made the isolated colony of British Columbia very hot real estate. During this 1867 purchase, Lincoln’s Trans Continental Railway, begun in 1863 at the height of the Civil War was a mere two years from completion, linking the Pacific to Atlantic for the first time in history and thus destroying the British monopoly over maritime shipping routes.

With students of Lincoln’s program to be found among the intelligentsia of Russia, led by Count Sergei Witte and Dimitri Mendeleyev, the American modeled (and largely American-built) Trans-Siberian Railway’s construction was not far away, and the linking of rail across the two continents was discussed as a real possibility by republican visionaries the world over.

The chances that British Columbia would join confederation were minute at this time as the broken colony had no ties of commerce to Britain or the east coast confederacy 3500 km away. In fact, on July 2, 1867 the first of several petitions was sent to Queen Victoria requesting that either the colony’s debt burdens and economic woes be alleviated by the Mother country or that the queen grant them permission to annex to the USA!

At this time, American consul to Victoria Allen Francis, wrote a letter to the president stating:

“Even the colonists claiming most loyalty to the queen, are now urging with great unanimity annexation to the United States as their only salvation- as the only means of retrieving the colonies from their present embarrassment and decline.”

BC’s Colonialist Newspaper described the situation in the following terms:

“Since no change would be for the worse, they (British Columbians) would welcome annexation to the United States to continuing in a state of poverty and wretchedness. In writing this we know we speak the mind of 9 out of every 10 men in the colony… the sentiment is heard at every gathering street corner- at social gatherings, in business circles- in all places”

On July 18, 1868 the Hudson Bay territories (aka: Rupert’s Land) were sold to Ottawa under an operation led by Sir Georges Etienne Cartier who stated “in this country we must have a distinct form of government in which the monarchical spirit will be found.”

Cartier’s monarchical spirit was reflected in Canada’s leading fathers of confederation such as Sir John A. Macdonald who famously stated “a Britisher I was born and a Britisher I will die” and who looked to the vast wilderness west of Toronto saying in 1867: “I would be quite willing, personally to leave the whole country a wilderness for the next half century, but I fear if Englishmen do not go there the Yankees will.”

On May 22, 1867, Father of Confederation Sir Alexander Galt stated British policy for western expansion (to block the connection between Russia and the USA) saying: “If the United States desire to outflank us on the west, we must accept the situation and lay our hand on British Columbia and the Pacific Ocean. This country cannot be surrounded by the Unites States- We are gone if we allow it… ‘From the Atlantic to the Pacific’ must be the cry in British America as much as it has ever been in the United States”

The last serious effort by British Columbians to join America was made with the Annexation petition of 1869 listing BC’s desperate grievances with the empire and appealing to President Grant:

“The only remedy for the evils which beset us, we believe to be in a close union with the adjoining States and Territories, we are already bound to them by a unity of object and interest; nearly all our commercial relations are with them; They furnish the Chief Markets we have for the products of our mines, lands and waters; They supply the Colony with most of the necessities of life; They furnish us the only means of communication with the outer world… For these reasons we earnestly desire the ACQUISITION of this Colony by the United States.”

The Alabama Claims

The last great hope for extending Lincoln’s rail through BC into Alaska at this time arose amidst the 1869-1871 Alabama Claims affair which saw the world’s first international trial in Geneva address the matter of Britain’s military support for the confederacy during the Civil War (reflecting the irony of America’s recent covert support for Syrian rebels). Britain’s air of neutrality was betrayed by her construction of Confederate war ships that unleashed havoc on Lincoln’s Navy. The court ruled in favor of America and soon Britain came close to loosing it’s Canadian possessions as payment for their sin (Senator Charles Sumner and Secretary Seward both advocated this course), although weaker figures in America ended up agreeing to a measly $15 million settlement in 1872 while all wrongs were forgotten.

With these failures to capture the pregnant moment, the effort to assimilate BC into London’s northern confederacy was accelerated.

Ottawa negotiations began on June 7, 1870 and within weeks nearly all resolutions and clauses were agreed upon. The two biggest impediments to B.C.’s entry into the Confederacy were dealt with by the payment of all of the colony’s debts by Ottawa and the promise made by Sir Macdonald to construct a rail line linking the new province with Montreal and Quebec “within ten years”. This promised rail line was necessary in order to sabotage the intention of the American Manifest Destiny policy.

The Empire Strikes Back

With these arrangements agreed upon (paralleling similar arrangements in the former Red River Settlement in today’s Manitoba), British Columbia was admitted into Confederation as the 6th Canadian Province. Within the coming decades, as Canada was opened up to form a British-controlled Northern Confederacy blockade against the civilizing progress of the sovereign nation state intention of the United States, Saskatchewan and Alberta were formed as provinces where there had formerly been only Hudson’s Bay land. The lack of progress on Canada’s rail by 1878 had resulted in renewed disenchantment on the part of British Columbians who demanded once more for annexation into the USA resulting in Sir John A. Macdonald’s “National Policy of 1878-1885” which forced the construction of Canada’s own trans continental rail (with the inaugural train cars arriving in BC’s Port Moody from Montreal on the 4th of July, 1885).

By the time of the 1876 Centennial Exhibition in Philadelphia, the American System of Political Economy had resulted in the greatest explosion of wealth in the United States and became a model for the whole civilized world seeking to break free of British colonial hegemony.

Converts to the American System were made by all lovers of progress from around the world who came to the Convention. Germany under Chancellor Otto von Bismarck vigorously applied American System practices of high protective tariffs and vast internal improvements under his Zollverein. Czars Alexander II and III and their close circle of Russian advisors applied the American model for the vast modernization of Russia vectored around the Trans-Siberian Rail. Even Japan under the Meiji Restoration applied the American model to escape feudalism and enter the modern age.

Sadly, an age of London-financed revolutions, assassinations and wars mis-shaped the 1880s, 1890s, and 20th century, preventing this system of win-win cooperation from evolving as it was destined.

Today the world is again pulled by two opposing systems represented by Lincoln’s international allies on the one hand and British Intelligence on the other… although today’s champions of the multi polar world of cooperation have names like Xi Jinping and Putin. These Eurasian statesmen have ushered in a new system of credit, diplomacy, security, economic and science policy governed by the best principles displayed by the American System of the 19th century and occasionally revived albeit only briefly under such 20th century leaders like Franklin Roosevelt and John F. Kennedy.

Whether the western nations have the moral fitness to recover their lost traditions and join in this new paradigm or not yet remains to be seen…

The author delivered a lecture on this topic which can be viewed here:

It has always been an utmost necessity to exercise caution when reading the historical accounts of great periods that threatened to change the course of the world. As is widely recognised though not reflected upon enough, ‘history is written by the victors’, and if this be indeed the truth, than we must be aware of what lens we are looking through.

It is a sad reality that most Americans have forgotten that the Russians were their brothers during the American Civil War, a union that was not only based from a geopolitical stratagem but much more importantly was based on a common view of humankind; that slavery’s degradation could no longer be tolerated and that industrial growth was an absolute precondition to free man. Historians today largely dismiss this as a fairy tale, they spew their vitriolic commentaries, and try to destroy the memories of great people from the past that truly did believe and fight for something noble. These historians would erase our heroes or otherwise would have us believe that they were nothing but small, bitter men that cared nothing for the world. For if we have no memory of such heroes, we have no memory of the fight that was left unfinished…

Since these revisionist historians would have this, let us not be led by such false guides into the dark forest of history, but rather let us focus on the actions and the words of the very men who shaped the world stage as proof of their mettle.

The Roots of Russian-US Relations

Princess Vorontsova-Dashkova (1743-1810) was one of the most important political and scientific leaders within Russia, and would become the head of the Russian Academy of Sciences, one of the most influential intelligence institutions in Russia. Benjamin Franklin met Princess Dashkova in Paris 1781 during her European tour and the two quickly recognised that they were on the same page in world outlook, comrades in the Enlightenment so to speak. In 1789, Benjamin Franklin would be recruited as the first American member of the Russian Academy of Sciences and Princess Dashkova would become the first female member of Franklin’s American Philosophical Society all in the same year. Although some might have us believe that this was just a gesture of show for the public eye, anyone who comprehends the significance of both these institutions and their roles in American and Russian intelligence circles would recognise this as a close pairing.

Dialogue between the two countries would continue and in 1809, John Quincy Adams became the first American Ambassador to Russia and began a close diplomatic relationship to Czar Alexander I. In less than two years from Adams’ arrival in St. Petersburg, Czar Alexander I announced on Dec. 31, 1810 a ukase lifting all restrictions on exports and imports to Russia by sea, while at the same time imposing a heavy tariff on goods arriving overland, most of which came from France. This action by Alexander I would mark a clear break from Napoleon’s Continental System and was a great triumph for the US since most cargo carried to Russia by ship came in American vessels, whether the cargo was American or English. Napoleon would conclude from this decision that Russia stood in the way of his conquering of Europe and declared war on Russia 18 months later, to which as is well known, Russia was victorious.

In 1861, Cassius Clay became possibly the greatest US Ambassador to Russia (1861-1862 and 1863-1869), stead-fasting relations, Clay was instrumental in convincing Czar Alexander II to support the Union amidst the American Civil War and aided in setting up massive industrial improvements within Russia (more on this a little later). It is worth noting that Clay would also become very good friends with the Dashkova family, as he frequently cited in his Memoirs.

United under a common cause

In 1861, the Emancipation Edict was passed and successfully carried out by Czar Alexander II that would result in the freeing of over 23 million serfs. This was by no means a simple task for which there was much resistance met, and required an amazing degree of statesmanship to see it through. In a speech made by Czar Alexander II to the Marshalls of Nobility in 1856 he stated:

“You can yourself understand that the present order of owning souls cannot remain unchanged. It is better to abolish serfdom from above, than to wait for that time when it starts to abolish itself from below. I ask you to think about the best way to carry this out.”

The success of this edict would go down in history as one of the greatest accomplishments for human freedom and Czar Alexander II became known as the ‘Great Liberator’, for which he was beloved around the world.

Shortly after, in 1863, President Lincoln would pass the Emancipation Proclamation which declared “that all persons held as slaves” within the rebellious states “are, and henceforward shall be free.” There is astonishingly a great deal of cynicism surrounding this today. It is thought that because Lincoln did not announce this at the beginning of the war it somehow was never genuine. The preservation of the country was to be the utmost priority. Lincoln was willing to see out the end of slavery over a longer period of time if it could mean the avoidance of a civil war, when it became clear that this was not possible and all-out war was inevitable, he declared that slavery would be abolished in the Confederate held states upon the Union’s victory. Those who doubt where Lincoln stood on the subject of slavery should review his career as a lawyer prior to becoming President where he clearly denounced slavery throughout his entire life.

United under a common threat

However, nothing would attest to the solidarity between Russia and the United States further than the confirmed assurance from Russia that it would actively interfere if Britain and France were to take military action against the Union and for the side of the Confederacy. Autumn of 1862 would mark the first critical phase of the war. Lincoln sent an urgent letter to the Russian Foreign Minister Gorchakov, informing him that France was ready to intervene militarily and was awaiting England, the salvation of the Union thus rested solely on Russia’s decision to act. The Foreign Minister Gorchakov wrote in response to Lincoln’s plea:

“You know that the government of United States has few friends among the Powers. England rejoices over what is happening to you; she longs and prays for your overthrow. France is less actively hostile; her interests would be less affected by the result; but she is not unwilling to see it. She is not your friend. Your situation is getting worse and worse. The chances of preserving the Union are growing more desperate. Cannothing be done to stop this dreadful war? The hope of reunion is growing less and less, and I wish to impress upon your government that the separation, which I fear must come, will be considered by Russia as one of the greatest misfortunes. Russia alone, has stood by you from the first, and will continue to stand by you. We are very, very anxious that some means should be adopted–that any course should be pursued–which will prevent the division which now seems inevitable. One separation will be followed by another; you will break into fragments.”

President Lincoln was given the go ahead to publicise Russia’s support for the Union and this was sufficient to cause Britain and France to step back. The second critical phase would occur during the summer of 1863. By then, the South’s invasion of the North had failed at Gettysburg and the violent anti-war New York draft riots also failed. Britain was once again thinking of a direct military intervention. What would follow marks one of the greatest displays of support for another country’s sovereignty to ever occur in modern history.

The Russian Navy arrived on both the east and west coastlines of the United States late September and early October 1863.

The timing was highly coordinated due to intelligence reports of when Britain and France were intending their military action. The Russian navy would stay along the US coastline in support of the Union for 7 months! They never intervened in the American civil war but rather remained in its waters at the behest of Lincoln in the case of a foreign power’s interference.

Czar Alexander II, who held sole power to declare war for Russia stated in an interview to the American banker Wharton Barker on Aug. 17, 1879 (Published in The Independent March 24, 1904):

“In the Autumn of 1862, the governments of France and Great Britain proposed to Russia, in a formal but not in an official way, the joint recognition by European powers of the independence of the Confederate States of America. My immediate answer was: `I will not cooperate in such action; and I will not acquiesce. On the contrary, I shall accept the recognition of the independence of the Confederate States by France and Great Britain as a casus belli for Russia. And in order that the governments of France and Great Britain may understand that this is no idle threat; I will send a Pacific fleet to San Francisco and an Atlantic fleet to New York.

…All this I did because of love for my own dear Russia, rather than for love of the American Republic. I acted thus because I understood that Russia would have a more serious task to perform if the American Republic, with advanced industrial development were broken up and Great Britain should be left in control of most branches of modern industrial development.”

It was therefore very much due to Russia’s dedicated display of solidarity with Lincoln’s Union that Britain and France did not intervene and the country was able to piece itself together. Lincoln referred to the Russian support in his Thanksgiving Proclamation as “God’s bounties of so extraordinary a nature that they cannot fail to penetrate the heart.”

The Fight for Advanced Industrial Development

What was Czar Alexander II referring to exactly when mentioning the advanced industrial development of the American Republic? Well, in short he was referring to the Hamiltonian system of economics. Notably, Alexander Hamilton’s 1791 Report on the Usefulness of the Manufactories in Relation to Trade and Agriculture  which was published in St. Petersburg in 1807, sponsored by Russian Minister of Finance D.A. Guryev. In the introduction to the pamphlet, Russian educator V. Malinovsky wrote:

“The similarity of American United Provinces with Russia appears both in the expanse of the land, climate and natural conditions, in the size of population disproportionate to the space, and in the general youthfulness of various generally useful institutions; therefore all the rules, remarks and means proposed here are suitable for our country.”

In 1842, Czar Nicholas I hired American George Washington Whistler to oversee the building of the Saint Petersburg-Moscow Railway, Russia’s first large-scale railroad. In the 1860s, Henry C. Carey’s economics would be promoted in St. Petersburg’s university education, organised by US Ambassador to Russia Cassius Clay. Carey was a leading economic advisor to Lincoln and leading Hamiltonian of his age.

Sergei Witte, who worked as Russian Minister of Finance from 1889-1891 and later became Prime Minister in 1905, would publish in 1889 the incredibly influential paper titled “National Savings and Friedrich List” which resulted in a new customs law for Russia in 1891 and resulted in an exponential growth increase in Russia’s economy. Friedrich List publicly attributed his influence in economics to Alexander Hamilton.

In his 1890 budget report, Sergei Witte – echoing the Belt and Road Initiative unfolding today, wrote:

“The railroad is like a leaven, which creates a cultural fermentation among the population. Even if it passed through an absolutely wild people along its way, it would raise them in a short time to the level requisite for its operation.”

Witte was explicit of his following of the American model of political economy when he described his re-organization of the Russian railways saying: “Faced by a serious shortage of locomotives, I invented and applied the traffic system which had long -been in practice in the United States and which is now known as the “American system.” [Memoirs p.19]

Where do we find ourselves today?

Both President Lincoln and Czar Alexander II recognised that the sovereignty of the individual and of a nation were intertwined and that Russia and the United States had become united in this cause. That for an individual to be truly free, there needed to be a system that could ensure access to a basic standard of living and education, for which industry was imperative. Lincoln would be assassinated on April 14, 1865 and Alexander II on March 13, 1881. Their deaths, as is often the case with great leaders, left a void that seemed too large to ever refill.

Today President Putin is advocating this very same policy alongside China in the Belt and Road Initiative, a policy with the clear intention to uplift the standard of living across the world with advanced industrial development.

It is time the United States joins this initiative and remembers its forgotten brother.