Sugar, opium and cotton

In 1823, Captain Warren Delano, 24, sailed to Canton, China, in search of adventure. Seven years later, Delano was a senior partner at Russell & Company, America’s biggest opium trader, and his descendents would rise straight to the top of North America’s oligarchy. Of course, the lion’s share of the opium trade belonged to the world’s most powerful corporation at that time, the Honorable East India Company (HEIC), chartered by Queen Elizabeth in 1600, the same year Freemasonry appeared as a major force. And yes, those two are linked throughout history, one visible and the other completely invisible.

William Huntington Russell was cousin to the heir of the great Russell opium fortune and educated at Yale University. In fact, he was valedictorian of 1833. While at Yale, Russell spent a summer in Germany, where he was inducted into a Masonic-style society known as “The Order.” When he returned to New Haven, he discovered Phi Beta Kappa was going public, so he launched the secret Skull & Bones society based off the The Order he’d discovered in Germany.

There’s some strong connections between the slave and opium trade because both were considered sleazy and not discussed in polite society, and both reaped profits rivaling King Sugar, and both involved shipping fleets. Soon, thanks to the invention of the cotton gin, King Cotton could sit at the dais alongside the monarchs of opium and sugar. But it’s important to realize cotton and sugar were initially dependent on the African slave trade, so while Southerners were saving money with free labor over the long-term, first they had to buy slaves and three million were transported from Africa to North America, so figure a billion dollars over the course of a few decades, and realize those numbers require multiplication of a factor of 25 to reach commensurate value in our money today, so we are talking potentially $25 billion. The average price of a slave during the Civil War peaked at $800, and considered a good investment since they were expected to produce at least $130,000 in labor over a lifetime. There were 4 million slaves when the war began representing a value of $3.2 billion, or $80 billion today.

Maybe now you realize why eight of the twelve colleges at Yale are named after slave holders, while none named for abolitionists, a sure indication Yale was the Northern college of choice, not just for the Boston Brahmin slave traders, but for the Southern oligarchy as well, and The Tomb a place where both interests might converge.

It’s become standard practice for corporations to mount secret grass-roots movements against themselves. You might think it strange, but it’s actually standard corporate counter-intelligence procedure, not rocket science, and something that’s been going on for centuries, if not longer. So don’t be surprised if the same corporations that profiteered off slavery put up money to fund the abolitionist movement. In 1808, the African slave trade was abruptly officially stopped, thus ending the gravy train on that profit stream, although a black market illegal slave trade flourished for another 50 years, it was subject to confiscation and forfeiture by the British Navy.

In England everyone was paid off. You got money for loss of your slaves and you were compensated for any business losses. And only slaves under the age of 3 were freed immediately, others had to work as indentured servants until they’d paid back their value in labor. The pay-out amounted to the equivalent of over 16 billion pounds in today’s money, or around $26 billion.

Jay Gladstone got $134 million and his son served as Prime Minister four times. If you check the House of Lords, you’ll find a number of family fortunes associated with these payouts, and heirs have been living comfortably off interest ever since, a list that includes the appropriately-named Hoggs as well as the Camerons.

So why didn’t Abraham Lincoln strike the same deal, and avert Civil War by offering to compensate the South in much the same way? Maybe he would have after the war was over, we just don’t know, because Lincoln was assassinated before any final decisions were made on Reconstruction.

We know Lincoln vetoed the plan proposed and championed by Thaddeus Stevens: confiscation of all property owned by the 70,000 richest Southern families, so it could be parceled out to freed blacks and Northerners like himself who’d lost property during the war. I imagine Stevens may have already had his winter-estate plantation selected amongst all the choice options available.

It’s interesting the abolitionist movement came out of Massachusetts. The chief propaganda organ was titled, The Liberator, run by William Loyd Garrison, who was closely associated with the British abolitionist movement. Frederick Douglass became his star contributor and most of the subscriptions were sold to blacks. When Douglass launched his own paper, The North Star, Garrison cruelly cut off all contact. As soon as the war ended, Garrison folded his paper and the abolitionist society it had created, saying their mission was accomplished. In truth, any mission involving justice and equality for Southern blacks was just getting started and it took another hundred years to really start lifting them out of the depths of exploitation, and, in fact, in some places that battle lingers, especially inner-city ghettos where blacks have a much better chance of going to prison than of going to college.

During the Civil War, William Russell served as correspondent for London Times. He was the primary funder and supporter of John Brown, the terrorist who sparked the rush to violence. Prior to that, he’d created an officer’s training school in anticipation of the war.

During the war, the center of gravity on American finance shifted from Philadelphia to Wall Street where it resides today. The railroad, steel and oil robber barons soon eclipsed the old money shipping interests.