Commentary by Wayne Madsen
After the U.S. revolutionaries defeated the British and the embryonic United States was formed, the nation had two paths before it. It could have followed the path laid out by Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, and Benjamin Franklin and become a truly enlightened democratic republic founded upon strict secularism and revolutionary principles of liberty and justice for all. Or it had the choice of following the cautious and limited democracy, based on a strong central government, as preached by George Washington, John Adams, and Alexander Hamilton.
Unfortunately, for the United States, the country chose the latter option, thus ensuring that the present-day United States of America is a nation controlled by an elite oligarch that does not differ in thought and practice from the arcane monarchy of Great Britain, from which the American revolutionaries fought so hard to break free.
The commander of the Continental Army and the first president of the United States, George Washington, was in lockstep with those conservatives and wealthy elites - symbolized most egregiously by the stranglehold of the cultish and globally-powerful Freemasons - who quickly bled revolutionary principles from the new nation.
Washington began his career as a military surveyor for the British Lieutenant Governor of Virginia Robert Dinwiddie. It was Washington who carried the standard of the British monarch to order the French Marquis Duquesne to pull French troops out of forts established in the Ohio Valley. Washington would cut his teeth as a virtual mercenary for the British crown. His fealty to London would color his approach to his former masters after the American Revolution and his lack of will to order a prompt and total British military evacuation from the city of New York and Charleston, South Carolina.
In 1754, Washington's first battle with the French in what is now Pittsburgh resulted in the defeat of Washington and his expeditionary force. A second battle with the French in the Ohio Valley resulted in Washington's surrender to the French forces. Washington's initial 0 for 2 military record would also result in later disasters during his command of the Continental Army during the revolution.
As far as Washington's empathy with the common man, it is a fact that it never approached the proletarian sympathies of Jefferson, Franklin, Patrick Henry, and Thomas Paine. Washington, at the age of 26 and as an up-and-coming officer in the British colonial army, married Martha [Dandridg]e Custis, the wealthiest widow in the colony of Virginia. Soon, Washington and his wealthier friend and neighbor, Thomas Fairfax, became the top oligarchs in the southern colonies. That experience would color Washington's siding with the John Adams-Alexander Hamilton mercantile-banking clique following the revolution. Washington's perfidy helped to create the present-day banking empire headquartered in lower Manhattan and the City of London. At the same time Washington was fighting for the King of England, Mayer Amschel Rothschild was beginning a coin dealership in Frankfurt. Eventually, Washington and his friends John Adams and Hamilton would ensure that the American city of New York was ripe for business for the expansive House of Rothschild.
In 1765, when the British Parliament levied a stamp tax on all newspapers, pamphlets, almanacs, wills, and business documents - much like what is being heard today from the Obama White House about requiring a fee for running an Internet website - it was Franklin who tried, albeit unsuccessfully, for British Prime Minister Grenville to drop the what was known as the Stamp Act. Washington, a loyal servant of His Majesty's government, was nowhere to be found in the uproar over the tax. It was Patrick Henry, who, before the Virginia House of Burgesses, who, in response to the speaker's comments that Henry's comments about the tax were "treason," said, "If this be treason, make the most of it." Meanwhile, Washington was ensconced with his oligarch friends in Mount Vernon and nearby Alexandria.
Thanks mainly to the opposition of Franklin and Henry, the British parliament repealed the Stamp Act in 1766. Washington was pre-occupied with other matters. During the same year, he shipped one of his "uppity" slaves off to the West Indies in return for a barrel of rum and other Caribbean goods. As a leader of the southern plantocracy, Washington firmly believed in the institution of slavery.
Washington, still a loyal subject of the Crown, was silent as the embers of the American Revolution blew hot in Massachusetts and Rhode Island and among the North Carolina backwoodsmen called "the Regulators" and among a secretive group of secessionists in the Virginia House of Burgesses who used the Committees of Correspondence to keep in contact with fellow travelers in the other colonies.
The Washington estate at Mount Vernon was named by George Washington's brother, British Army Colonel Lawrence Washington for British Admiral Edward Vernon for whom Lawrence served in the British and American colonial attempt to wrest control of the West Indies from Spain. Vernon had, in appreciation for Lawrence's help, arranged a royal grant of the Mount Vernon land to Lawrence. George Washington inherited the estate after Lawrence, who was married to daughter of Colonel Thomas Fairfax, died from tuberculosis in 1752. Washington was part and parcel of the British royal elite in the Virginia colony.
When the first Continental Congress met on September 5, 1774 in Philadelphia, Henry declared that "I am no longer a Virginian, I am an American!" New England's Samuel Adams, known as much for his patriotic fervor as his ale-making abilities, was the impetus behind the Congress. From his Mount Vernon estate, Washington's reaction to the news from Philadelphia was that "no thinking man" in North America desired independence from Britain.
At the Second Continental Congress in Philadelphia in 1775, the oligarchs were already putting the brakes on the revolutionary ideas of Henry, Franklin, and other firebrands, including John Hancock. John Adams, who was much more conservative than his second cousin Samuel, supported the wishy-washy Washington to be the commander-in-chief of the Continental Army. Hancock wanted the position of army commander for himself. Many of the delegates in Philadelphia believed Washington to be untested as a commander. The fact that Washington wore his old British Army uniform from two decades earlier apparently dazzled the delegates into believing Washington was the man for the job. It was a fateful error in judgment. Virginia's Charles Lee was appointed the second major general of the Continental Army. In retrospect, Lee would have been a better choice as commander.
After British Army defectors reported to Washington that the British commander in Boston, General William Howe, had engaged in an early form of biological warfare by sending people with smallpox out of Boston to infect other refugees from Boston and the American army, Washington, still believing in the chivalry of the British army, disbelieves the report. After smallpox broke out among the Bostonians fleeing the city, Washington belatedly changed his mind. It would not be the last poor decision made by Washington as commander of American forces.
In 1776, Washington agreed to have American Major General John Sullivan, captured by the British in New York, freed by General Howe to carry a peace agreement to the Continental Congress in Philadelphia. The Congress rejects Howe's offer of clemency and pardons for all rebels who repent their actions before the Crown. Washington abandoned his positions in lower Manhattan and took up a new position in Harlem Heights from where he merely observed the deployment of Howe's forces. Washington's foot-dragging permitted Howe's forces to be supplemented by newly-arrived German Hessian mercenaries.
Eventually, Washington abandons Harlem Heights and Fort Lee, New Jersey after having lost 90 percent of his army. General Charles Lee, in Pennsylvania where he employed the very "un-British" tactic of guerrilla warfare against the redcoats, reluctantly answered Washington's call for help. Lee denounced Washington in a letter in which he stated that Washington was "damnably deficient" and who "has thrown me into a situation where I have my choice of difficulties." Difficulties Lee had - he was captured by the British and held in prison in New York for a year and a half.
It was pure luck that resulted in Washington's defeat of a combined British and Hessian force in Trenton the day after Christmas in 1776. Washington had already seen his Maryland and New Jersey contingent of troops opt not to re-enlist and return home. Luck and the element of surprise gave Washington a badly-needed victory at Trenton, one that helped the American forces see another victory at Princeton and limp along until the French arrived with massive military and naval might.
While Washington still believed in the British methods of warfare, Jefferson had penned the Declaration of Independence, which read "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." Jefferson's attack on the institution of slavery was edited out of the document at the insistence of Washington's plantocracy friends from the southern colonies.
When Congress declined to appoint Brigadier General Benedict Arnold to major general, it was Washington who came to the defense of the soon-to-be traitor to the American cause.
Washington suffered another setback in 1777, when Philadelphia was lost to the British, resulting in the Continental Congress fleeing to York, Pennsylvania. Washington's losses to the British at Germantown and Brandywine had many a member of the Congress wondering about Washington's abilities, especially after his having lost New York earlier. Some members of Congress secretly conspired with some of Washington's senior officers to replace Washington with General Horatio Gates. Meanwhile, Washington led a force of over 10,000 sick and dying troops in Valley Forge, Pennsylvania during a bitterly cold winter.
Gates is eliminated as a potential rival to Washington after he suffers a severe defeat at the Battle of Camden, South Carolina in 1780. Gates is relieved of his command as a result.
Animosity between Washington and freed General Charles Lee at the Battle of Monmouth, New Jersey, results in Washington court-martialing Lee, who is found guilty and suspended from duty for twelve months. On the other hand, Washington dispatched the incompetent General Israel Putnam to raise fresh troops in Connecticut but Putnam has a stroke and retires from the military. Meanwhile, Jefferson successfully pressed the Virginia legislature to prohibit the further importation of slaves into the state.
In 1779, after Britain's Iroquois allies in New York offer the revolutionaries a separate peace deal, Washington's commander responds to the offer by destroying all Iroquois villages in western New York. Washington would set into motion a policy by many of his successors that would see the wholesale slaughter and forced exile of millions of Native Americans from the Atlantic to the Pacific.
On October 19, 1781, after Lord Cornwallis surrenders to Washington at Yorktown, Virginia after the French come to the aid of the revolutionaries, Washington curiously permits British troops to remain in New York until November 1783 and in Savannah until July 1782 and Charleston until December 1782. New York was a fateful decision. One of Washington's staff officers, Alexander Hamilton, resigned his commission and moved back to New York to publish essays advocating a strong central government. Hamilton's policies would eventually include advocacy for the establishment of a U.S. central bank, akin to what is now the secretive Federal Reserve Bank system.
Some slaves opted to flee with the British ships at Yorktown into freedom. However, Washington issued an order that these slaves were to be returned to their owners. Meanwhile, Jefferson was writing about the total emancipation of slaves, further widening his gulf with Washington and his pro-business post-revolutionary conservative allies.
In 1782, Washington's old rival Charles Lee died of pneumonia in Philadelphia at age 51. To his dying breath, Lee called Washington a "puffed up charlatan." Later, many other new citizens of the new American republic would agree with Lee.
During the war, Washington's chief army logistician, Joseph Simon of Lancaster, Pennsylvania, a Jew, ran up huge debts, although he did not personally profit from any of the business deals. Those war debts would begin the steady slide of the United States into a state of permanent financial servitude to European banking houses, already being influenced by the Rothschilds, and provide a impetus to Hamilton to create major banking structures in New York City. While the British still occupied New York City, the Bank of North America was established in 1781 by Congress. Hamilton favored the creation of a national bank and was behind the creation of the Bank of New York during the British occupation of the city. In 1791, the bank became the First Bank of the United States and, along with the Bank of New York, were issued the first shares of stock by the new New York Stock Exchange in 1792. Hamilton succeeded in transforming New York City into a financial center - one that worked closely with its counterparts in London and the Rothschilds' emerging empire in Frankfurt and other continental European cities.
Although Washington retired from the Army after the Treaty of Paris with Britain was signed, his hard nailed approach to rebellion influenced how the government of Massachusetts dealt with Shay's Rebellion in 1787. The Massachusetts governor sent a militia to deal with farmers in western Massachusetts who seized a federal arsenal in Springfield. The militia opened fire on the rebel farmers, killing four and wounding 20. In a letter to his friend James Madison, Jefferson shows his commitment to the revolutionary principals, later to be expounded upon further in the French and Russian revolutions: "I hold it that a little rebellion now and then is a good thing, and as necessary in the political world as storms in the physical. Unsuccessful rebellions, indeed, generally establish the rights of the people, which have produced them. An observation of this truth should render honest republican governors so mild in their punishment of rebellions as not to discourage them too much. It is a medicine necessary for the sound health of the government." For John Adams and his Boston oligarchs and Washington and his Virginia landed gentry friends, one revolution would be quite enough. The new United States now had before it two paths: oligarchic control or ingrained revolutionary principles of government. To its everlasting shame, it would choose the former.
Washington would retire temporarily to Mount Vernon where he would consort with his Freemason friends as well as a secretive group of war veteran officers known as the Society of the Cincinnati. The group of veterans elected Washington as their first president-general. The second president-general was central bank and strong federal government proponent Hamilton. The third head of the group was Charles Pinckney who would run for president against Jefferson's friend Madison. The split between the secretive oligarchs and the democratic revolutionaries was set in cement. Franklin, Jefferson, and Elbridge Gerry all criticized the hereditary membership society as an embryonic American nobility class, although Franklin later joined the group. It was the society that chose the Teutonic and militaristic bald eagle as America's national symbol. Franklin preferred the turkey.
In a letter to his daughter, Franklin wrote of the eagle symbol: "He is a Bird of bad moral Character. He does not get his Living honestly. You may have seen him perched on some dead Tree near the River, where, too lazy to fish for himself, he watches the Labour of the Fishing Hawk; and when that diligent Bird has at length taken a Fish, and is bearing it to his Nest for the Support of his Mate and young Ones, the Bald Eagle pursues him and takes it from him . . . For the Truth the Turkey is in Comparison a much more respectable Bird, and withal a true original Native of America . . . He is besides, though a little vain & silly, a Bird of Courage, and would not hesitate to attack a Grenadier of the British Guards who should presume to invade his Farm Yard with a red Coat on."
At the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia in 1787, there is so much distrust of the oligarchic strong central government proponents that some small states, including Delaware, threaten to go their separate ways. Madison, sensitive to their grievances, hammers out protections for the small states. He would also protect the people against the designs of Washington - who turned down a kingship - and John Adams by beginning work on the Amendments to the Constitution, which would provide for protections from an overbearing central government.
Jefferson also pens in 1787, "The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants. It is its natural manure." This was America at its highest regard for revolutionary ideas and ideals. It would not last in America but in 1788, the success of the American Revolution was already being felt in the streets of Paris. The seeds of the French Revolution had been sown in the taverns, meeting halls, and battleground of America.
The inauguration of Washington as the first President of the United States in 1789 in New York set the stage for the imperial presidency. Although he turned down the offer of king, Washington did not shake hands with well-wishing visitors. Washington merely bowed. Artwork has, throughout the history of the country, portrayed Washington as an effeminate deity-like figure. Washington took the oath of office on a bible from the St. John's Lodge No. 1. The bible use predated the First Amendment to the Constitution spelling out the separation of church and state and became a custom used until the present day.
The Masonic Lodge in Alexandria, Virginia possesses a true-to-life portrait of Washington. He has a scar on his left cheek, an ugly black mole just underneath his right ear, and pockmarks on his nose as a result of smallpox when he was younger. Couple those blemishes with his wooden dentures, and Washington is far from the powdered wig-adorned dandy on the U.S. dollar bill.
However, Washington's appearance pales in comparison to his thoughts about the role of government. No sooner is Washington inaugurated then Madison rises in Congress to introduce the Amendments to the Constitution as a check against the designs of Washington, Hamilton, and the Cincinnati Society crowd.
In 1790, Washington laid the groundwork of America's military-industrial complex when he told Congress in New York "To be prepared for war is one of the most effectual means of preserving peace." Congress also approved Hamilton's choice for the new capital on the banks of the Potomac near Georgetown, Maryland. The city would be designed by Washington's fellow Mason, the Frenchman Pierre-Charles L'Enfant. To this day, Washington, DC evokes the architecture of the Roman Empire and ancient Egypt.
Washington (l.) and Jefferson (r.) at the laying of the cornerstone for the U.S. Capitol Building in 1793. While Washington was an ardent Mason as evidenced by his apron, Jefferson was not a Mason and was a critic of secret societies. However, the painting above shows Jefferson wearing a Masonic apron as well, one of the first examples in American history of a neo-con [Federalist] disinformation campaign.
One of Hamilton's first acts as Treasury Secretary was to create the first public debt by having the federal government assume the unpaid debts of the states. Speculators in New York began buying up depreciated debt securities with the promise of accrued interest from Hamilton. Madison and Secretary of State Jefferson opposed Hamilton having his full way because the southern states had already paid their war debts and there was a compromise that saw the moved to near Georgetown in exchange for the Treasury's assumption of the debt of the states.
In 1791, Jefferson and Madison, with the help of Virginia's George Mason, succeeded in enacting the Bill of Rights as amendments to the U.S. Constitution. The main reason was to place a check on Washington, Hamilton, John Adams and the other neo-Tories.
Meanwhile, Hamilton began issuing U.S. bonds playing 6 percent interest in order to avert an economic depression.
In 1793, Washington betrayed America's revolutionary foundations by deciding not to support revolutionary France in its war against Britain. Treasury Secretary Hamilton was urging the United States to enter the war on the side of its old enemy, the British and Secretary of State Jefferson urged the United States to come to the aid of France. Apparently, the anti-Masonic zeal of the French revolutionaries who had beheaded their king and queen was too much revolution for the doddering Washington.
A majority of the American people favored the United States coming to the military aid of France. But Washington rejected their wishes, instead, sending Supreme Court Chief Justice John Jay to London to persuade the British to evacuate from their forts in the Northwest Territory in return for American "neutrality" in the British-French war. Washington had already embraced "Manifest Destiny" for an imperialistic and expansive United States.
Associate Supreme Court Justice John Rutledge felt so betrayed by the Jay Treaty with Britain he denounced it publicly. In retaliation, Washington's neo-Tories in Congress failed to confirm Rutledge for the post of Chief Justice.
In 1794, when farmers in western Pennsylvania objected to a Hamilton-inspired tax on their whisky, they rose in rebellion. Washington and Hamilton decided to raise a militia and send it to Pennsylvania to put down the rebellion as an example of how far the federal government would go in stamping out insurrection, memories of Shay's Rebellion in Massachusetts still fresh in their minds, Washington, Hamilton, and General Henry "Lighthorse Harry" Lee personally led federal militia troops into battle against the rebels in Pennsylvania. Ironically, Lee's son, Robert, would lead the Confederate Army against the federal forces in the Civil War.
True to his devotion to slavery, one of Washington's last acts of president was to demand to return of a young female fugitive slave from New Hampshire to Alexandria, Virginia. The New Hampshire authorities refused the request from the slave-minded Washington.
In 1797, President John Adams and his neo-Tories, worried about the success of the French Revolution, push for the U.S. to side with the British against the French. As later seen with "papists," "anarchists," "communists," and "terrorists," the United States is gripped by fear of pro-French revolutionary "Jacobists." Adams orders the U.S. Navy into action against the French Navy. France feels betrayed by the United States. Adams forces through Congress the Aliens Act, which permit the deportation of any alien deemed dangerous - particularly anti-British republicans from France and Ireland. Jefferson rejects the acts and drafts the Kentucky Resolutions that declare Adams's acts "null and void" in Kentucky. Virginia also nullifies Adams's acts. Over two hundred years later, the spirit of independence in the United States was lost when there was not even a hint that a state might declare the USA-PATRIOT act "null and void" within its jurisdiction.
Newspaper publisher and editor Benjamin Franklin Bache, the grandson of Benjamin Franklin, was a fervent Jeffersonian who criticized Washington, Adams, and their Federalist Party in his Philadelphia Auroranewspaper. Bache even wrote that Washington had secretly collaborated with the British during the Revolutionary War. Bache was arrested and jailed just before the enactment of Adams's unconstitutional Alien and Sedition Acts and charged with seditious libel against the government. Bache thundered that his First Amendment rights had been violated by Adams and his regime. Bache died from yellow fever in 1798 at age 29 before his case was to come to trial.
In 1799, Washington died at Mount Vernon. The U.S. government immediately began the process of deifying the first president of the United States. Nonsensical tales of Washington chopping down a cherry tree and throwing a silver dollar across the Potomac became folklore believed by children in schools across the country.
As we celebrate a contrived federal holiday called "President's Day," which was originally cobbled together from two February birthday holidays honoring Washington and Abraham Lincoln and then expanded to honor all U.S. presidents, we should all remember the real Washington: the man who reluctantly agreed to fight the British, the man whose poor military decisions almost resulted in a British victory, whose conservative and Tory beliefs ensured that slavery would continue for several more decades in the United States, and whose penchant for aristocracy and oligarchy resulted in the Bill of Rights being passed as a check on the designs of Washington and his neo-Tories.
Washington may have been the first president of the United States but he was one of the worst individuals to have occupied that office. Careful consideration should be made on whether it is time to have some name changes in this country. The nation foolishly followed the aristocratic and secret society ways of Washington and his cohorts rather than the true revolutionary path laid out by Jefferson, Madison, Henry, Mason, and Thomas Paine. I propose renaming Washington, DC, Jefferson with full rights, as a state, as Jefferson, the author of the Declaration of Independence, would have demanded. The state of Washington should become the state of Madison, in honor of the author of the Bill of Rights. Mount Washington in New England should become Mount Henry, named after Patrick Henry. The George Washington Bridge should become Thomas Paine Bridge. Northern Virginia's George Washington Parkway should become the Ben Franklin Bache Parkway, most notably because it passes by the CIA headquarters, which could use a wake up call on the history and beliefs of Bache when, in the future, they consider again knocking off or torturing an unfriendly journalist.
To enact a new American Revolution, we must scrap what was rotten with the first one. And that can begin by relegating Washington, John Adams, Hamilton, and their neo-Tory Federalist lackeys to their proper dungeons in American history.
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Note: In the interest of full disclosure, the author's maternal ancestor was Washington's chief logistician, Joseph Simon.
