How the Rockefellers Got Control of Skull and Bones in 1930

Percy at Yale, 1900, marries Stillman 1901

Probably because of his family's intimate contacts in governmental circles, Charles Stillman was in a position as soon as the treaty ending the Mexican War was signed, to purchase the military's boats previously used to navigate the Rio Grande River. But Stillman had set up a town directly across the river from Matamoros, which he named Brownsville (For Fort Brown), and found it more profitable to operate a ferry across the river. He thus attempted to sell his boats to other men who had been engaged in furnishing supplies to the military during the war by steamboat. Two of these were Mifflin Kenedy and Richard King, who also became huge landowners in the former disputed area between the Rio Grande and Nueces Rivers. They were partners until 1865, when Charles Stillman returned to New York City to make way for the establishment of the First National City Bank of New York from profiteering profits derived from two wars.

Click image to enlarge.

The Connecticut Roots of Stillman Family

When we review the Stillman family ancestry, we find that it, intriguingly intersects with that of the families we have previously researched who were intimately involved with the Russell Trust and Skull and Bones in the early days of Connecticut's history. From various genealogical studies, the following information has been collected about the common ancestor, most of which is derived from Life of Mr. George Stileman/Stillman:

Founder of the largest North American Stillman branch, Mr. George Stillman was born in England in 1654 as George Stileman -- the first of three sons of George Stileman (1621- ). A bronze plaque dated 1670 hangs in the Church of St. Mary the Virgin in Steeple Ashton, Wiltshire County, England to memorialize him.

In 1677 George Stileman married Jane Pickering -- the daughter of Sir Gilbert Pickering, Baronet of Nova Scotia 1st, a strict Puritan and Oliver Cromwell's Lord Chamberlain to the Protector (a combination of supreme court judge and attorney general). As was the custom of the time, George Stileman took Jane Pickering's last name, rather than the reverse, so that Jane Pickering could retain her societal status and inheritance. Thus George Stileman became George Stileman Pickering.

Jane Pickering gave birth to their first son, George Stileman Pickering, Jr., in August 1679. Through Lady Elizabeth Montagu Pickering, the wife of Sir Gilbert Pickering, a royal lineage has been thoroughly documented by John R. Sprague III. All direct descendants of Mr. George Stillman may rightfully claim this lineage as theirs for whatever purposes such claim may serve.

In those times, there was a tremendous amount of turmoil everywhere, with the monarchy in constant struggle to wrest control from the Parliament, and with religious groups fighting openly to gain control as well. Sir Gilbert Pickering died in 1668 leaving his eldest son Sir John Pickering in charge of the Pickering family. The throne of the King of England was once again claimed by the Roman Catholics through the Stuart family when Charles II died and his brother James II became King of Great Britain in 1685.

Duke of Monmouth executed

George Stileman Pickering and Jane Pickering were apprehended and charged with treason during the Duke of Monmouth's rebellion of 1685, a generation after the death of Oliver Cromwell, but were able through wealth and influence to leave England and immediately set sail for the American Colonies from London late that same year with all that they could carry with them.

George Stileman Pickering Jr., Samuel Stileman Pickering, and a daughter, Jane Stileman Pickering, were left behind to be sent for when their new home in the New England colonies had been established. Tragedy struck during the trip when Jane Pickering died at sea of complications resulting from premature childbirth. George Stileman Pickering settled in Hadley, Massachusetts, dropped the Pickering name, and resumed the use of his surname of Stileman.

George was joined later by his eldest son George Stileman Pickering, Jr. George Stileman Pickering, Jr. -- unhappy with following his father's new trade- - returned to England, and completed studies and qualifiications to practice as a medical doctor. In 1689 George Stileman changed to the surname spelling of Stillman. Doctor George Stileman Pickering, Jr. returned to the colonies permanently around 1700 and also dropped his last name of Pickering and assumed the surname spelling of Stillman, the same as his father.

A man of education, George Stillman's mercantile business grew to make him wealthy in Hadley, and he served as a Selectman, a member of the Board of Governors. He married Rebecca Smith, daughter of Lt. Philip Smith in 1686. George Stillman moved everything to Wethersfield, Connecticut, where Lt. Smith and his father had removed, abandoning the property which was then being besieged by the Narragansett tribes. It was Nathaniel Foote, Philip's wife's father, who was credited with founding this new community four miles south of Hartford.

In 1699 George and Rebecca Smith Stillman had a daughter named Anna who would marry Deacon Hezakiah May; their daughter, Elizabeth May, wife of Daniel Newcomb, had a daughter, Lydia, who married Timothy Bush; thus began the Stillman relationship to the George Bush Family lineage.

George Stillman carried on a large trade business with the West Indies and England until his death in 1728. During his life he set one son, John Stillman, up in business, provided son Benjamin Stillman with a Yale education (Class of 1725), and made various bequests to his other children--Nathaniel Stillman, several daughters, and his son, Dr. George Stillman Jr.

Deacon Benjamin Stillman practiced law in Middleton, Connecticut, the same town where his sister Lydia Stillman lived with her husband, Rev. Daniel Russell.

But it was Nathaniel Stillman (1719 – 1811) whose branch leads to Charles Stillman. We will return to him subsequently.

Lt. Philip Smith

 

Before a year passed after his arrival, George Stillman had married a young woman in Hadley, Massachusetts, Rebecca Smith, whose father, Lieutenant Philip Smith, was "murder'd with an hideous witchcraft," in 1684, according to Cotton Mather's writings. Smith's own father-in-law, Nathaniel Foote, in 1634 had led many of Hadley's citizens out of the Bay Colony to a new town he set up in Connecticut called Wethersfield. Lieutenant Samuel Smith (the "fellmonger") went with the Foote group, but then returned to Hadley with his son Philip about 25 years later and served in the colonial legislature.

Philip Smith went back to Wethersfield with Rev. William Russell, Jr. in 1659 and married Foote's youngest daughter, Rebecca, then about 24. He took her with him to Hadley where he helped to run the Hopkins School, . Twenty-five years later he died at the age of 50--allegedly murdered by Mary Reeve Webster, Wife of William Webster, who lived near Hadley. Prior to Smith's death, Webster had already been accused of witchcraft and sent to Boston for trial, in which it was alleged:

...that she, not having the fear of God before her eyes, and being instigated by the devil, hath entered into covenant and had familiarity with him in the shape of a warraneage, (fisher or wild black cat of the woods) and had his imps sucking her, and teats or marks found on her, as in and by several testimonies may appear, contrary to the peace of our sovereign lord, the king, his crown and dignity, the laws of God and of this jurisdiction

Hideous Witchcraft

Once Smith was dead, the good citizens of Hadley, strung up Mary Webster, hanging her, though she survived the night. She was then buried in a pile of snow but again survived that ordeal.

Two years later after her father's death, Rebecca Smith became George Stillman's second wife. After their children were born in Hadley, Massachusetts, the Stillmans migrated to Wethersfield in Connecticut. There their daughter, Lydia Stillman, married into the Russell family--becoming the wife of Rev. Daniel Russell, son of Nodiah Russell of New Haven and Mary Hamlin Russell from Middletown, Connecticut.

See Russell genealogy

Yale Founder Nodiah Russell 

Daniel Russell's father had been one of the twelve founders of Yale as well as one of the trustees of the college, and his brother, William Russell (Yale 1709), who was pastor of the church in Middletown, CT was married to Mary Pierpont, from whose Huguenot family the notable banker, J. Pierpont Morgan, was also descended. 

Mary Pierpont's sister was the wife of famed preacher Jonathan Edwards, who was an integral part of the "great awakening":

Edwards argued that Lockean “sense impressions” of most importance were those which saw and felt God, since they affected human growth. Confronting his congregation, he pitted two images – images of “Sinners in the hands of an angry God” against those of “the divine and supernatural light”. The result of such sermons during the 1730s brought society in the Connecticut Valley to remarkable conversion and interior reflection. This revivalist sentiment spread throughout New England in different degrees throughout the decade, with another resurgence or zeal occurring in 1742-1743.

Thus it was that the Stillman family was so closely tied to the man who would become known as the co-founded of Skull and Bones at Yale:

GENERAL WILLIAM HUNTINGTON RUSSELL- (Page 410)
Rev. William Russell married Mary, oldest daughter of Rev. James Pierpont (Harvard, 1681), also one of the ten founders of Yale College, and one of the original trustees of Yale College thirteen years (1701 to 1714), and during a period of thirty years until his death (1685-1714), pastor of the First Congregational Church in New Haven. Another daughter, Sarah Pierpont, married Rev. Jonathan Edwards, D.D. (Yale, 1720), the distinguished theologian and president of Princeton College, and ancestor of three presidents of Yale (Timothy Dwight, president 1795-1817; Theodore D. Woolsey, president 1846-1871; Timothy Dwight, president 1886-1899), and whose granddaughter married Eli Whitney, inventor of the cotton-gin. These Pierponts were descended from Sir Hugh de Pierrepont, of Picardy, in France, A. D. 980, whose grandson. Sir Robert de Pierrepont, went from France to England as commander in the army of William the Conqueror in 1066, and was ennobled for distinguished conduct at the battle of Hastings (1066), and from him descended the dukes and earls of Kingston. (Genealogical Abstract of the Family of Pierrepont, Yale College Library; also Hollister's History of Connecticut, "Vol. I, 458-459, 510.) [Author: Norris Galpin Osborn Title: Men of mark in Connecticut; ideals of American life told in biographies and autobiographies of eminent living Americans (Volume 8)]

William and Mary Pierpont Russell had two sons:

• one, named for his father Nodiah and also a clergyman, would become the grandfather of William Huntington Russell, founder of Skull and Bones at Yale.
• Samuel, was father of Captain John Russell and grandfather of a second Samuel Russell, the founder of Russell & Company, in 1824 in Boston.  

We learn from Families of Ancient Wethersfield, Connecticut, Volume II, compiled by Henry R. Stiles and published by Grafton Press in 1904, about the Stillmans who went to Texas and Mexico during the Mexican and civil wars, and that leads us back into previously reported facts about Citigroup's Roots in Texas, as well as to the Skull and Bones cult that was founded in Connecticut in 1832. The Stiles book (inset right) was published shortly after James J. Stillman began marrying his children off into the William Rockefeller family, and thus melding the Standard Oil fortunes into Yale's endowment institutions. 

Yale had already managed to gobble up a large portion of the wealth of another of Standard Oil's original investors, Oliver Payne (Yale ), when the William Collins Whitney family split in two--one son William Payne Whitney casting his fortune with Yale and his Standard Oil heir uncle; the other, Harry Payne Whitney, siding with their father. Harry married into the Vanderbilt family, went to Harvard, and cast his fortune on the side of the Morgan banking conglomerate for which his father had long helped with its pump-and-dump schemes. William Payne Whitney dropped his first name, married the daughter of Secretary of State John Hay, and became the father of John Hay "Jock" Whitney, the man who eventually took over the Freeport Sulphur company created by earlier progenitors of the company founded by the Swensons of Texas.

The two or three decades after the Stillmans merged with the Rockefellers was the most crucial period in American history. It witnessed the shift of control of America's wealth from the Morgan elites to the Rockefeller upstarts, with Stillman betting his children's lives on the side of oil. William F. Engdahl has expressed the evidence garnered by previous researchers like Anthony Sutton and Eustace Mullins, when he writes in Gods of Money: Wall Street and the Death of the American Century:

In 1930 as most banks were struggling to survive, Rockefeller's Chase National Bank was thriving... Chase Bank's most significant acquisition during the first months of the financial crisis in 1930 was the Equitable Trust Company of New York, the largest stockholder of which was John D. Rockefeller Jr. This made the Chase Bank the largest bank in America and indeed the world.
As a result of their dominant position following the decline of the House of Morgan during the depression, the Rockefeller group, in addition to controlling Chase Bank and First City Bank of New York, controlled the largest US oil companies.

... The Rockefeller group also consolidated a commanding control over the major chemical and defense-related industries.

See one of the books by Anthony C. Sutton, Wall Street and the Bolshevik Revolution, which summed up each group's investments prior to the 1929 crash.

Before World War I, the financial and business structure of the United States was dominated by two conglomerates: Standard Oil, or the Rockefeller enterprise, and the Morgan complex of industries — finance and transportation companies. Rockefeller and Morgan trust alliances dominated not only Wall Street but, through interlocking directorships, almost the entire economic fabric of the United States.
Rockefeller interests monopolized the petroleum and allied industries, and controlled the copper trust, the smelters trust, and the gigantic tobacco trust, in addition to having influence in some Morgan properties such as the U.S. Steel Corporation as well as in hundreds of smaller industrial trusts, public service operations, railroads, and banking institutions. National City Bank was the largest of the banks influenced by Standard Oil-Rockefeller, but financial control extended to the United States Trust Company and Hanover National Bank as well as to major life insurance companies — Equitable Life and Mutual of New York. 

The great Morgan enterprises were in steel, shipping, and the electrical industry; they included General Electric, the rubber trust, and railroads. Like Rockefeller, Morgan controlled financial corporations — the National Bank of Commerce and the Chase National Bank, New York Life Insurance, and the Guaranty Trust Company. The names J.P. Morgan and Guaranty Trust Company occur repeatedly throughout this book. In the early part of the twentieth century the Guaranty Trust Company was dominated by the Harriman interests. When the elder Harriman (Edward Henry) died in 1909, Morgan and associates bought into Guaranty Trust as well as into Mutual Life and New York Life. In 1919 Morgan also bought control of Equitable Life,and the Guaranty Trust Company absorbed an additional six lesser trust companies. Therefore, at the end of World War I the Guaranty Trust and Bankers Trust were, respectively, the first and second largest trust companies in the United States, both dominated by Morgan interests. [emphasis added]

One last reminder before closing this post:
If you want to know who is in control, always follow the money!