Blueprint for the Federal Reserve

Membership by Inheritance Only

© 2005 by Linda Minor

     On the night of November 22, 1910, a group of newspaper reporters stood disconsolately in the railway station at Hoboken, New Jersey. They had just watched a delegation of the nation's leading financiers leave the station on a secret mission. It would be years before they discovered what that mission was, and even then they would not understand that the history of the United States underwent a drastic change after that night in Hoboken. The delegation had left in a sealed railway car, with blinds drawn, for an undisclosed destination.... Aldrich's private car, which had left Hoboken station with its shades drawn, had taken the financiers to Jekyll Island, Georgia.

Club House at Jekyll Island, Georgia

     Some years earlier [1886 to be exact], a very exclusive group of millionaires, led by J.P. Morgan, had purchased the island as a winter retreat. They called themselves the Jekyll Island Hunt Club, and, at first, the island was used only for hunting expeditions, until the millionaires realized that its pleasant climate offered a warm retreat from the rigors of winters in New York, and began to build splendid mansions, which they called "cottages," for their families' winter vacations.... The Jekyll Island Club was chosen as the place to draft the plan for control of the money and credit of the people of the United States, not only because of its isolation, but also because it was the private preserve of the people who were drafting the plan (emphasis added)....

One-sixth of the total wealth of the world was represented by the members of the Jekyll Island Club. Membership was by inheritance only.”

Eustace Mullins, The Secrets of the Federal Reserve:  

The London Connection (1993)

Sen. Nelson Aldrich

The primary plan of Senator Nelson Aldrich and his guests who departed from Hoboken in 1910 was the setting up a government-sponsored central bank owned by private banking interests.  The plan’s success turned upon whether the bank would have a monopoly of the Government’s business.  Thus a second plan—to put in motion the first war of global proportions—would create instant profits for shareholders of existing central banks, which would purchase shares in America’s Federal Reserve Bank.  These banks would make loans to finance the purchase of weapons, to feed impoverished victims of the war, and to reconstruct destroyed cities.

This model for banking consolidation and war profiteering is one that has resurfaced repeatedly in the century since that ominous day in 1910 that led to America’s bloodless banking coup.  War is a dual-edged sword, used by creditors both to collect their unpaid debts and to deprive wayward debtor nations of any hope of independent action.  In this sense the motive behind today’s war in Iraq is thoroughly transparent—a transparency revealing the real beneficiaries of George W. Bush’s insane war in Iraq. All doubt is removed when we peer back in time to those men hiding behind drawn blinds in that plush private railroad car, the destination of which was  Jekyll Island, Georgia. 

 

Who was Nelson W. Aldrich, the owner of that railroad car, and who financed Aldrich’s rise to power?

G. Edward Griffin, The Creature from Jekyll Island

The purpose of this meeting on Jekyll Island was...to come to an agreement on the structure and operation of a banking cartel. The goal of the cartel, as is true with all of them, was to maximize profits by minimizing competition between members, to make it difficult for new competitors to enter the field, and to utilize the police power of government to enforce the cartel agreement. In more specific terms, the purpose and, indeed, the actual outcome of this meeting was to create the blueprint for the Federal Reserve System.

The Rhode Island Elite

Abby Aldrich Rockefeller and Jr.

It was the mission in life of Nelson Wilmarth Aldrich (1841-1915), a life-long resident of Rhode Island, to enact a centralized banking law in the United States—a law that would place control of a monetary system in the hands of a private consortium.  Not born to wealth, Aldrich acquired accoutrements thereof when he rose from the status of retail clerk to ownership of a wholesale establishment in Providence, Rhode Island.  Gaining support from powerful constituents who remained virtually anonymous, he was first elected United States Senator in a special election in 1881 and rose to the chairmanship of the Senate Finance Committee in 1899.  

Senator Aldrich’s daughter, Abby Greene Aldrich (1874-1948) ) in 1901 married John Davison Rockefeller, Jr. (1874-1960), who first met his bride-to-be in 1894 while he was a student at Brown University in Providence—formerly known as the College of Rhode Island.  The college’s name was changed to honor its largest donor, Nicholas Brown, Jr., some of whose family were “unapologetic slave traders,” according to the University’s own website.  Other members of the family had helped to charter the college, along with religious leaders like Ezra Stiles from Yale. [1]

Devout Baptists, the Rockefellers would have been drawn to this Baptist University.  Eliza Davison, who married William Rockefeller in Niles, Cayuga County, New York, inculcated her own religious precepts into her son John Davison Rockefeller. [2] When he chose Laura Spelman Rockefeller as his wife, she converted to the Baptist Church, though some of the Massachusetts Spelmans had been Baptists. [3] 

A History of Religious Tolerance

Rhode Island had, of course, been founded by Roger Williams, who also established the Baptist Church in America. Williams—a dissenter’s dissenter—after having been exiled from Massachusetts, led several other disenchanted malcontents to Providence.  He eventually secured a land grant from Charles II and a patent granting to "Rhode Island and Providence Plantations," certain privileges and providing that no one be molested "for any difference in opinion in matters of religion."

By the 1750’s Newport, because of its religious tolerance, had attracted many of the descendants the twenty-three Sephardic Jews who had arrived in New Amsterdam from Brazil in 1654, and its citizens were primarily engaged in a flourishing “triangular trade,” mirrored after the commerce begun previously in South America. [4]  

Surplus capital came from slave trade in West Indies.

The Dutch West India Company (chartered in 1621), of which a number of Jews in the Netherlands were shareholders,  had been in charge of granting patroonships to settle Dutch colonies in America—what would become New York and New Jersey.  The term “West India trade” was a euphemism emphasizing only one leg of the trading triangle.  Merchants preferred not to refer to themselves as “slave traders,” a term that called greater attention to the African leg of the triangle, where human cargoes were purchased with proceeds from the sale of rum and other products in Africa.  The enslaved Africans were then transported to sugar plantations in the Caribbean, where the ships took on cargoes of raw sugar cane destined for refineries in New York and Newport.  There the cane was turned into either refined sugar or rum.  The typical trade route is shown on the map below.

Triangular trade

Roots in West India Company

The West India trade was one of the first historical bases for American global networking that has survived to the present day. In fact, we can trace the current shareholders of the Bank for International Settlements back to those days when “merchant adventurers roamed the high seas. It should be kept in mind that the Company began its colony in America around 1630 for the sole purpose of making a profit for the investing shareholders. Most of the merchants who settled in the colony of New Netherland were employed as agents or suppliers for the major Dutch trading firms, and they often worked together, dividing up the trade into regions to control most of the profit that was sent back to Holland. As stated by historian Oliver A. Rink:

Unlike New England, the individuals largely responsible for exploiting New Netherland's resources were merchants of the home country. Secure in their Amsterdam countinghouses, the merchants grasped control of the colony's lifeline to Holland and held fast. Profits from their enterprises flowed into coffers in Amsterdam, thus depriving New Netherland of capital and the opportunity to develop a viable, colony-based merchant community.[5]

It is good to keep in mind in this regard what was then occurring in Europe, particularly in England. [6] It was the period following the height of the Protestant Reformation.  Religious and trade wars had devastated the English treasury, and a loan had to be obtained from Amsterdam, where Levant traders had transplanted their bank following the collapse of the Empire of Venice (where they had first founded a bank in the 12^th century).  

During this same time the Dutch and English were engaged in fighting over trade routes, not only in America but the Far East as well.  The New York territory was divided up after the third Anglo-Dutch war by the Treaty of Westminster in 1674.  As a result, New York and New Jersey were ceded to England; however, the loan that sealed the treaty allowing the English to purchase the land came from wealthy bankers in Holland. Since the investors in the West India company were only interested in profit, they cared little who owned the land, as long as the payment of their loan was adequately secured.  To ensure obtaining the payments owed them, many Dutch bankers during this time immigrated to England, just as William of Orange of Holland was placed on the English throne alongside his British Queen. [7]

Merchants in Rhode Island established a private banking network for the trade in slaves, sugar and rum—the most notable of which was called the Four Browns of Providence, who built ships and made pig iron in Rhode Island as well as spermaceti candles from whale oil.  The Brown family also had strong ties to the southern part of the Eastern seaboard where the Browns’ ships unloaded their cargoes of slaves for auction.  Charleston, South Carolina, and Savannah, Georgia—which, incidentally, happened to have the largest population of Jewish immigrants, many of whom were related by blood to the Sephardic families in Rhode Island—were the primary southern ports affiliated with the Rhode Island businessmen.

Corner the Market and Control Supply

What is most fascinating from reading the papers of these merchant families is that they were making agreements among themselves to divide the commerce into territories to eliminate competition at least a century before the Rockefeller family instituted the same practice in railroads and the oil industry.  One account published in 1910, pertaining to the dividing up of the commerce in tobacco, states:

Rhode Island now raised tobacco in large quantities, and it was an important factor in the West Indian trade. Sept. 30, 1766, there appeared to be an over supply. An agreement was made that Nicholas Brown & Co. might ship 75000 lbs., D. Jenckes & Son with E. Hopkins might ship 45,000 lbs., N. Angell and Job Smith 35,000 in three or more vessels consigned to Esek Hopkins. Sales to be made jointly, and any tobacco lost at sea was to be treated pro rata. The matter was to be kept secret and the West Indian price maintained until February 1, following. They hoped to buy all the tobacco in the colony. October 19, it was further agreed between the Browns, Jenckes and Angell, not to give directly or indirectly more than 5s. O.T. at six months for the whole quantity raised. If payment should be anticipated, ten per cent. should be deducted. February 2, 1767, there was too much tobacco on hand for Surinam, for a twelve months’ shipment; Jenckes & Son having 116,000 lbs., N. Brown & Co. 120,000 lbs., Angell and Smith 30,000 lbs. The parties were to ship pro rata for 12 months. If more should be bought ‘than is now grown’ the same rule was to apply (emphasis added). [8]

This model, used a decade prior to the American revolution, would be dusted off and adopted by John D. Rockefeller and his associates when Rhode Island whale oil (spermaceti) was replaced with what would for a time be called “rock oil,” coming as it did from the ground. Through the Rhode Island ancestors and associates of Senator Nelson Aldrich, we can detect this thread of knowledge being passed from one generation to another.  We can also see the pre-civil war trading network still in action a generation after Lincoln’s assassination, when the new Senator from Rhode Island and his daughter’s in-laws, together with banker J. Pierpont Morgan, found isolated refuge from prying eyes in one of the South’s favorite islands for unloading human cargo. 

Jekyll Island's exclusivity

Jekyll Island, Georgia

Jekyll Island, a small island east of Brunswick, Georgia, was purchased by an entity called the “Jekyll Island Hunt Club” in 1886, with final closing of the transaction in February 1888.  The following year—1889—J.P. Morgan hosted a group of railroad men, representing the interests of many of the members of the hunt club, at his residence at 219 Madison Avenue in New York City.  The purpose of that meeting, following the model used in Rhode Island in 1766, was to “make a strict compact which would efface competition among certain railroads, and unite those interests in an agreement by which the people of the United States could be bled even more effectively than before,” as Gustavus Myers so eloquently relates in his classic work. [9]   Myers goes on to say:  “But the magnates realized that the old indiscriminate system of competition was rapidly becoming archaic, and that the time was ripe for a more systematic organization of industry.”

The millionaire industrialists purchased the island from the last purchaser’s descendants—who were being represented by John Eugene du Bignon and the husband of his sister Josephine, Newton S. Finney.  The last recorded deed had named Captain Christophe Poulain du Bignon as the purchaser in 1800.  Captain Poulain du Bignon, born in Saint Malo, Brittany, had first arrived in Georgia in 1791—the year Toussaint L'Ouverture led the slave insurrection in St. Domingo (now Haiti), having spent his military career in the French East India Company.  Joined by four French royalists, three of whom came from St. Domingo, he had bought both Jekyll and Sapeloe Islands in partnership but later acquired sole ownership of Jekyll as a home for his family, whom he brought to America when the French Revolution reached its peak. 

Captain Christophe died in 1814, and between that date and 1888 the island was owned and managed by his heirs.  According to one historian of the island:

During slavery days, the slave ships were wont to land their cargoes on the islands along the coast where the negroes were hidden until they could be disposed of.  On the lawn in front of Faith Chapel on Jekyll is a large iron pot which bears the following inscription:

“Mess kettle from slave yacht Wanderer, Captain Corry, used for feeding the slaves landed on Jekyl Island November 28, 1858.  Yacht owned by Charles A .L. Lamar of Savannah, Ga.” [10]

Importing slaves had been outlawed in Georgia more than fifty years prior to secession, but still the trade persisted, aided greatly by shipping families in the northern and New England who had long made their living in the trade.  For example, the T.H. Perkins family with all its branches, had also fled St. Domingo in 1791, only a few years before beginning to replenish their wealth in the opium trade. [11]  The same can be said of another French emigre, Stephen Girard, who became Philadelphia’s wealthiest banker after years in the West India trade.  Slaves and opium were the steppingstones to his fortune, though he never admitted that fact.

It is, therefore, only fitting that America’s central bank was born on Jekyll Island.  The industrialists who joined the Jekyll Island Hunt Club in 1886 and later years were no different from the island’s previous dwellers who had profited from illicit commerce and secret cargoes.  After all, business is business.  And business secrets are much easier to keep when membership in the club is by inheritance only.

---

 Endnotes:

[1] According to an article visible in 2005 at Brown’swebsite, but since removed: “More than sixty signatories are registered on the charter, including the Reverends [James] Manning and [Ezra] Stiles, John and Nicholas Brown of the Providence merchant family, and several former or future governors of the colony.... It is often suggested that the University was established by and named for John Brown, who centuries later attained modest notoriety for his involvement in and support of the African slave trade. However, Rhode Island College was renamed Brown University some forty years after its founding and a year after John’s death, and the renaming honored John Brown’s nephew, Nicholas Brown Jr., a 1786 alumnus of the College.  In September of 1804, Nicholas Brown Jr. contributed five thousand dollars ($5,000) toward the endowment of a professorship at the College. In recognition of his gift, the Corporation voted that henceforth the College would be known as Brown University.”

[2] They moved from here after burying one child in 1847, according to gravestones in the Niles cemetery.

[3] The Spelmans’ first American ancestor took root in Granville, Massachusetts after arriving from Danbury, Essex County, England.  Many remained in that state, though one branch of the family had helped found the town of Granville, Ohio as early as 1805, while another had settled in Providence, Rhode Island in 1738, working in the shipping of grain and other commodities.   

[4] Encyclopedia Judaica. An entertaining source of information about these elite families is Stephen Birmingham, The Grandees:  The Story of America’s Sephardic Elite (New York:  Dell, 1971).  An online source of Jewish History with many photographs is also available.  The following passages are from Marc Lee Raphael, Jews and Judaism in the United States, a Documentary History (New York: Behrman House, Inc., Pub, 1983), pp. 14:

"Jews also took an active part in the Dutch colonial slave trade; indeed, the bylaws of the Recife and Mauricia congregations (1648) included an imposta (Jewish tax) of five soldos for each Negro slave a Brazilian Jew purchased from the West Indies Company. Slave auctions were postponed if they fell on a Jewish holiday. In Curacao in the seventeenth century, as well as in the British colonies of Barbados and Jamaica in the eighteenth century, Jewish merchants played a major role in the slave trade. In fact, in all the American colonies, whether French (Martinique), British, or Dutch, Jewish merchants frequently dominated.

"This was no less true on the North American mainland, where during the eighteenth century Jews participated in the 'triangular trade' that brought slaves from Africa to the West Indies and there exchanged them for molasses, which in turn was taken to New England and converted into rum for sale in Africa. Isaac Da Costa of Charleston in the 1750's, David Franks of Philadelphia in the 1760's, and Aaron Lopez of Newport in the late 1760's and early 1770's dominated Jewish slave trading on the American continent."

[Author, Rabbi Marc Lee Raphael, is the Nathan and Sophia Gumenick Professor of Judaic Studies, Professor of Religion, and Chair, Department of Religion, The College of William and Mary, and a Visiting Fellow of Wolfson College, Oxford University. He has been the editor of the quarterly journal, American Jewish History, for 20 years, and a visiting professor at Brown University, the University of Pittsburgh, HUC-JIR, UCLA, and Case Western Reserve University.]

[5] Oliver A. Rink, Hollandon the Hudson: An Economic and Social History of Dutch New York, Ithaca, NY: Cornell, 1986), pp. 212-213.  Other references cited at the website called A Brief Outline of Dutch History and the Province of New Netherland include: Dennis J. Maika, Commerce and Community: Manhattan Merchants in the Seventeenth Century, Ph.D. Dissertation, New York University, 1995; John Franklin Jameson, Narratives of New Netherland, 1609-1664  (New York: Scribner, 1909).

[6] A timeline of the history of banking by a writer affiliated with far-right conspiracy historian Willis Carto describes the period as follows: “Catholic king of England James II (Stuart) was overthrown through a well-organized invasion financed by the moneyed Jews of Amsterdam and led by the Prieure de Sion and the Orange Order. The king was exiled to France and in February of 1689 William of Orange, the prince of Nassau, was put upon the English throne by means of a coup d'etat, which became known as the Glorious Revolution....England at that time was in poor condition after more than 50 years of war with France and the Netherlands, and the new king, William III (of Orange), asked several powerful bankers for help. They provided the English state with a loan of 1.25 million pounds but only delivered 750,000 pounds. The terms of the loan were as follows: the names of the lenders were not to be revealed, and these were guaranteed the right to found the Bank of England, whose directors were ensured to establish a gold reserve so as to be able to issue loans to a value of 10 pounds for each pound deposited gold in the bank vault. They also were allowed to consolidate the national debt and secure payment for annuity and interest through direct taxation of the people (emphasis added.” [By Juri Lina, The Barnes Review, September/October 2004, p. 9]

[7] Almost a century after certain of the bankers and their descendants had left Amsterdam, it was discovered that a large portion of the deposits of the Bank of Amsterdam had disappeared around 1740, having been loaned by the bank to the East India Company, the Provinces of Holland and the City of Amsterdam itself—resulting in the Bank’s failure in 1790, according to  Stephen Colwell, The Ways and Means of Payment (New York:  Augustus M. Kelley, 1965), p. 180.  See also Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations concerning how the Bank of Amsterdam operated; of course Smith’s book was first published in 1776, a few years before the bank’s failure.  By the time Adam Smith was writing, the Bank of England had been controlling British colonial enterprises for almost 80 years.  After the American revolution, the bankers would send their sons to America to ensure debts were collected from the former colonies, just as the fathers had been sent out from Holland to represent previous creditors.

[8] William B. Weeden, Early Rhode Island: A Social History of the People (New York: The Grafton Press, 1910). Relating to the slave trade, Weeden states:  “Providence [in Rhode Island] dealt somewhat in slaves, though it did not equal Newport or even Bristol in the traffic....The commerce with the West Indies took out the produce of Rhode Island and such surplus merchandise as the exchanges with our own coast afforded. Candles and rum were constant staples. The Islands made rum, but the cheaper distillation of New England was wanted to send to Africa.....” 

[9] Gustavus Myers, History of the Great American Fortunes (copyright 1909, First Modern Library edition, 1936).  " A momentous gathering it was that assembled in Morgan's mansion on January 8, 1889. Who were they we note there? Apparently private citizens; in reality monarchs of the land: Jay Gould with his son George, held by the leading strings; Stickney, of the Northwest Territory; Roberts, of the Pennsylvania Railroad; sleek Depew, echoing the Vanderbilts; Sloan, of the Delaware, Lackawanna, & Western Railroad, and a half dozen more magnates or their accredited mouthpieces. The honorable legislatures could gravely discuss the advisability of this or that legislation; the noisy ‘Congress of the United States’ could solemnly meet and after wearing out mouths in rodomontade, profess to make laws; the high and mighty Courts could blink austerely and pompously hand down their decisions. But in that room in Morgan's house sat many of the actual rulers of the United States; the men who had the power in the final say of ordering what should be done."

[10] Margaret Davis Cate, Our Todays and Yesterdays: A Story of Brunswick and the Coastal Islands, Revised Edition (Brunswick, Georgia:  Glover Bros., Inc., 1930), p. 48.  A part owner of the Wanderer was Colonel Charles A.L. Lamar from the Georgia branch of the French Huguenot family from which the second President of the Republic of Texas, Mirabeau Buonaparte Lamar, also stemmed.  

[11] A colorful description of the insurrection originally printed in the Pennsylvania Gazette may be read at this website.

Money May Not Smell, But....

The Odor of Blood Does Reek

Bloody Bleeding Kansas

William E. Connelley included a chapter titled "Lane's Army of the North," in his book,  A Standard History of Kansas and Kansans--referring to Col. James H. Lane, who had gone to Washington, D.C. in March to present the Topeka Constitution to Congress, and attempt to have Kansas admitted as a State. He later went to Chicago, where he told those who heard him:

"I have been sent by the people of Kansas to plead their cause before the people of the North. Most persons have a very erroneous idea of the people of Kansas. They think they are mostly from Massachusetts. They are really more than nine- tenths from the Northwestern States. There are more men from Ohio, Illinois and Indiana, than from all New England and New York combined."

 Speaking further of President Franklin Pierce, Col. Lane, quoted by Connelly, declared:

"Of Franklin Pierce I have a right to talk as I please, having made more than one hundred speeches advocating his election, and having also, as one of the electors of Indiana, cast the electoral vote of that State for him. Frank was, in part, the creature of my own hands; and a pretty job they made of it. The one pre-eminent wish of mine now is that Frank may be hurled from the White House; and that the nine memorials, sent him from the outraged citizens of Kansas detailing their wrongs, may be dragged out of his iron box."

Connelley tells us that organizations were formed all over the North to help Kansas in the struggle with the slave power. 

On the 10th of July, there was a meeting at Buffalo, New York, to consolidate all these local bodies into a National organization, to be directed by one head. Governor Reeder presided at this meeting. It was determined to open a road through Iowa and Nebraska to enable emigrants to come to Kansas without being obliged to pass through Missouri....Lane had advocated the route through Iowa even before it was known that the Missouri River would be blockaded by the Missourians, saying that Free-State emigrants to Kansas ought not to be compelled to pass through hostile territory where they were insulted, maltreated and sometimes mobbed. The route through Iowa was recommended by this meeting. The National Kansas Committee was organized, composed of the following members:

• George R. Russell, Boston; 
• W. H. Russell, New Haven; 
• Thaddeus Hyatt, New York, 
• N. B. Craige, Pittsburgh; 
• John W. Wright, Logansport; 
• Abraham Lincoln, Springfield, 
• E. B. Ward, Detroit; 
• J. H. Tweedy, Milwaukee; 
• W. H. Hoppin, Providence; 
• W. H. Stanley, Cleveland; 
• F. A. Hunt, St. Louis; 
• S. W. Eldridge, Lawrence; 
• G. W. Dole, J. D. Webster, H. B. Hurd, J. Y. Scammon, and I. N. Arnold, Chicago.

Eli Thayer's Emigrant Aid Company

In a book Eli Thayer wrote years after the event, A History of the Kansas Crusade,
edited by Edward Everett Hale, he stated that the convention was not so much about opposing slavery as opposing the stranglehold the Puritan fathers like Winthrop and Lawrence had for so long held over New England. They had "readily joined the disaffected Democrats of New York in the Buffalo Convention" after Zachary Taylor was nominated in 1848 after the war with Mexico and annexation of Texas. This combined party, however, according to Thayer, grew smaller every year until in 1853 they lost a battle with the repeal of the Missouri Compromise and formed the Free Soil party. Thayer blamed the southerners for the ensuing bloody battle that eventually occurred in Kansas, while President Pierce always laid the responsibility for the bloodbath on the New Englanders who formed the Emigrant Aid Company.

Thayer chose a man born in Old Lyme, Connecticut, James Denison Colt, to assist him. Colt's genealogy takes us back to the family of Samuel Colt, inventor of the improved revolver for which he received a British patent, and profited greatly from the wars against Mexico and native Americans:

Colt received a boost in sales during the Texas Revolution and the Mexican American War. His weapons contributed to the U.S. Army's success, and to the resulting westward expansion of American territory. A Texas Ranger, Captain Samuel Walker, wrote Colt a testimonial that read, in part:"Your pistols...[are] the most perfect weapon in the World... to keep the various warlike tribes of Indians and marauding Mexicans in subjection."

Construction of the Colt Armory in Hartford, Connecticut began in 1853, after renting space there since 1848.

Machine Tools and Interchangeable Parts

British scientists had long been interested in American factory outputs for interchangeable moveable parts. In the book, English and American tool builders, author, Joseph Wickham Roe, tells the history of the rivalry between British and American inventors and dates the rise of the interchangeable parts inventions with Eli Whitney in New Haven and Simeon North in Middletown, Connecticut, the same town from which Skull and Bones founder, William H. Russell, had hailed. 

Simeon North's oldest son, Reuben, inherited his father's armaments business in Middletown, and the youngest son, Dr. Simeon North (1802-1884)  graduated Yale, class of 1825 (eight years ahead of William H. Russell) and became the fifth president of Hamilton College in New York. Dr. North's wife, the former Frances Harriet Hubbard, was a sister of Mrs. William H. Russell--wives being daughters of Dr. Thomas Hubbard, professor of surgery at Yale and president of the Connecticut State Medical Society, 1822-27. Mary E. Hubbard Russell would assist her husband in operating the Collegiate School in New Haven, which became one of the favored prep schools for young men who would later be tapped for Skull and Bones.

Click image to enlarge.


 
Mary Bellis, has written:

Both Eli Whitney and Simeon North helped to establish the United States Arsenals at Springfield, Massachusetts, and at Harper's Ferry, Virginia, in which their methods were adopted. Both the Whitney and North plants survived their founders. Just before the Mexican War the Whitney plant began to use steel for gun barrels, and Jefferson Davis, Colonel of the Mississippi Rifles, declared that the new guns were "the best rifles which had ever been issued to any regiment in the world." Later, when Davis became Secretary of War, he issued to the regular army the same weapon.

Whitney's factory and its assets, including any patents he may have owned, were sold by his descendants in 1888, to the Winchester Repeating Arms Company of New Haven. During the interim, the Sharps rifle company was moved to Hartford, and several of the Colt company's top managers, Billings and Fairfield, helped to supervise that company as well as their own. What we learn from this history of the machine tools is that whatever domestic use could be made for the machinery--whether for cotton gins, sewing machines, lathes, or even cotton mills or men's suspenders made of India rubber and fabric cartridge belts used in machine guns and ammunition belts, manufactured by the Russell family's factories in Middletown--the machine tools could always be converted to make weapons when it became more patriotic or profitable to do so. The researcher ,who provided the information about Russell Manufacturing for his website, stated:

From information provided by the Russell Library, Middletown, CT, the Russell Manufacturing Company, established in Middletown by Samuel Russell in 1834, had a history of producing military equipment dating at least back to the Spanish-American War when they produced cartridge belts for use with the M1892 Krag rifle and possibly cartridge belts for various state militia units equipped with M1873 trapdoor Springfield rifles. When WWI started the Russell Company was producing about 300 M1910 "BELT, Cartridge, Dismounted, Model of 1910" per week. The M1910 had 10 "eagle" snap and later lift-the-dot flap pockets each holding two 5 round stripper clips of M1906 .30 caliber ammunition. This belt was very similar to the M1923 cartridge belt used in WWII and Korea and served the army until it was phased out in 1957 with the advent of the M14 rifle which used a detachable 20 round box magazine. As the country was preparing to celebrate the first post-WWI "Decoration Day", now known as Memorial Day honoring the U.S. WWI war dead, the Middletown Press, on May 29, 1919, ran a feature story highlighting the local manufacturers contributions to the war effort.  The cut below lists items that Russell Manufacturing produced for the WWI war effort.

Founder of Russell Manufacturing Company in 1834

Samuel Russell, son of Capt. John Russell

Excerpt from History of Middlesex county, Connecticut, 

with biographical sketches of its prominent men 

by J.B. Beers

Samuel Russell, eldest son of Capt. John and Abigail Russell, was born at Middletown, Conn., August 25th 1789. His father having deceased when he was but twelve years of age, he was placed under guardianship, and after receiving an ordinary education was placed in the store of Messrs. Whittlesey & Alsop, Washington street, Middletown, and afterward with Mr. Samuel Wetmore, where he remained until he arrived at majority; he then went to New York city, and entered the house of Messrs. Hall, Hull & Co., foreign shipping merchants, and was sent by them as supercargo to Spain; after which he was invited to enter the house of B. & T.C. Hoppin & Co., Providence, R. I., who were engaged in the Calcutta and China trade, where he remained until he became a partner of Messrs. E. Carrington & Co., Cyrus Butler, and B. & T.C. Hoppin. 

On the 26th of December 1818, articles of co-partnership were signed for the transaction of business in China for a term of five years, which at the expiration of that time eventuated in the establishment of the house of Russell & Co., at Canton — one of the most celebrated firms in China, doing business under the same name up to the present time; having numbered among its partners such men as Phillip Amidon, Augustine Heard, William Henry Low, John C. Green, John Murray Forbes, Joseph Coolidge, A. A. Low, W. C. Hunter, Edward King, Robert Bennett Forbes, Warren Delano jr., and Russell Sturgis.

Mr. Russell's life in China is thus briefly described by one who knew him intimately and enjoyed his lifelong friendship:

While he lived no friend of his would venture to mention his name in print. While In China, he lived for about twenty-five years almost an hermit, hardly known outside of his factory except by the chosen few who enjoyed his intimacy, and by his good friend, Hoqua, but studying commerce in its broadest sense, as well as its minutest details. Returning home with well earned wealth he lived hospitably In the midst of his family, and a small circle of inmates. Scorning words and pretensions from the very bottom of his heart, he was the truest and staunchest of friends; bating notoriety, he could always be absolutely counted upon for every good work which did not involve publicity."

The house of which he was a member had a world-wide reputation, and the name of Samuel Russell was potent wherever commerce reached. It is said of him, personally, that his word was as good as his bond.

In 1837, he returned to Middletown, where he had made previous arrangements for the erection of the elegant mansion on the corner of Washington and High streets. This was done under the supervision of Hon. Samuel D. Hubbard. He did not sit down, on his return, simply to enjoy his wealth, but entered heartily into public and private enterprises. He founded the Russell Manufacturing Company, and was its first president. He was president of the Middlesex County Bank nearly ten years, and was a large stockholder. During the panic of 1857, he advanced $75,000 of his private fortune to sustain the bank through the crisis. He was constantly assisting private individuals who were in financial trouble, and while he frequently lost large sums in this manner, it never occasioned him any regret. His motto was "Duties are ours; events are God's.''

He was a man of broad and liberal views, and gave freely to the support of all religious denominations. He gave liberally toward the building of the Roman Catholic church, and induced the quarry companies of Portland to contribute the stone. He assisted nearly all the other churches by large contributions. He made judicious investments of his money, which yielded large returns, but it is said of him that he gave away, and lost by assisting others, a sum fully equal to all he made in China.

In his business he was very methodical and painstaking; in his private life was frugal and economical, avoiding all display or ostentation, but very hospitable. His friends always found a hearty welcome under his roof. In his private charities no one but himself and the recipients ever knew the extent of his gifts.

Mr. Russell was twice married; first, on the 6th of October 1815, to Mary Cotton Osborne, in New York city, daughter of David and Mary Cotton Osborne, of Stratford, Connecticut, an orphan (both parents having died in the West Indies), by whom he had two sons: George Osborne, and John Augustus Russell. During Mr. Russell's first absence, in China, his young wife died suddenly at the early age of twenty-three, leaving his two little children in charge of his sister, Frances. After having completed the five years' engagement with the Providence house, Mr. Russell returned from Canton for a brief stay, during which time he married Frances A., the sister of his first wife, and again returned to the East. George and John, his sons, did not inherit strong constitutions, and although sent to Europe for travel and treatment, and living much in the West Indies, neither of them attained far beyond the age of early manhood. George Osborne, the eldest, married Amelia C., daughter of Thomas Mather, and left two sons: Samuel and George Osborne. John A. married Helena E. Webster, of Cuba, and left one son, Frank W., who died while a youth.

Mr. Russell had one son by his second wife, Samuel Wadsworth Russell, who married Clara A. Casey, daughter of Dr. William Casey, of Middletown, by whom he had three children: William Wadsworth, Mary Alice, and Cornelia Augusta. This third son of Mr. Russell was much younger than his half brothers, and survived his father some years, but died at the early age of 31.

Samuel Russell, son of George Osborne, and grandson of Samuel Russell, the East India merchant, lost his father when but three years of age, and was brought up by his grandfather. He represents the family in Middletown, and is in possession of the fine old residence, built by his grandfather, and maintains with pride the characteristics of the old mansion.

He married for his first wife, Lucy McDonough, second daughter of Hon. Henry G. Hubbard, and granddaughter of Commodore McDonough, by whom he has three children: Samuel, Thomas McDonough, and Lucy Hubbard. He married, for his second wife, Sarah Chaplin Clark, daughter of John Clark jr., and Caroline Madison Pickering, of Cambridge, Massachusetts, by whom he had one daughter, Helen Pickering. Mr. Russell has been, for some years, the vice-president and a director of the Russell Manufacturing Company, and also holds several directorships elsewhere.

Edward Augustus Russell was born in Middletown, Connecticut, on the i6th day of June 1797. He was the second son of John Russell and Abigal Warner, his wife, and was born in the old family homestead, which had been owned and occupied by four generations before him, among whom were the Rev. Noadiah Russell, and the Rev. William Russell, who were consecutively together pastors of the North Congregational Church in this city for seventy-three years — or from 1688 to 1761.

At an early age he was apprenticed to Mr. Samuel Wetmore, merchant, with whom he remained as long as Mr. W. continued in business in Middletown, Mr, Russell then went to Providence, R. I., as clerk to Edward Carrington & Co., in the East India trade.

On the 12th of September 1820, he married Miss Elizabeth Brown Hall, daughter of William Clark Hall, a native of Boston, but more recently of Middletown, and moved to Petersburg, Va., where he was engaged in business for about two years, when he returned North to enter the office of Mr. George Douglas in New York. He had not been there long, however, when offers of strong inducement caused him to sever his connections with Mr. Douglas and to seek a home from which he then supposed he might not return for many years. In the spring of 1825, he sailed from New York for China, to take part in the house of Russell & Co., in Canton, which had been formed the year before by his elder brother, Samuel, in partnership with Mr. Philip Amidon, of New York. He was, however, within two years from the time of his arrival there, stricken down with that dread scourge of the East — liver complaint — and after a long and protracted illness was obliged to return to his native country.

Again entering the office, in New York, of Mr. Douglas — this time as partner — he continued for some years, and until this connection was severed by his being called to the presidency of the Royal Insurance Company in that city, which position he held until he retired from active business, and returned to Middletown in 1838.

During the remainder of his life, he was interested in the affairs of his native town, and held many trusts outside as well as at home. He was mayor of the city from May 1857 to January 1861, was representative to the Legislature, delegate to National Convention, president of the Charles River Railroad, as well as director in other roads, and was also interested in the development of the manufacture of silk in the State of Massachusetts.

By his marriage he had seven children, three of whom, with one grandson, now occupy the old homestead. He died in Middletown, April 4th 1874, on the same spot where he was born, and which has now been owned and occupied by seven generations of the same family.

How They Keep the Secrets

What can be learned from studying the list below which sets out the dates of beginning and ending service (we assume, since the columns are undefined) of the entire list of trustees of Yale since 1701? There's no way to know the answer unless we do the work. See research below on these names. Many sources to assist are now available through Google Books, including:

• Biographical Sketches and Annals of Yale College by Franklin Bowditch Dexter, 1745, where the index begins at page 767, but the easiest way to search is to use the online search engine.
• The organization of American culture, 1700-1900: private institutions ... By Peter Dobkin Hall, is not a free e-book, but nevertheless quite interesting and available in libraries: Publisher: New York : New York University Press, 1984.

Original Bonesman's Family Helped Found Yale

In Search of Yale's Roots

The story of Yale, as told by Edwin Oviatt, in The beginnings of Yale (1701-1726), published in 1916, began in England where John Davenport, John Cotton, Thomas Mather and Theophilus Eaton lived in fear of their lives if they continued to practice the religious faith they shared. The four men would meet up once again in "the new world" in 1637 at Massachusetts Bay Colony, to which Davenport had fled into the arms of his old friends. There Harvard College would be founded, which remained the only upper level educational institution until the establishment of Yale in 1701.

It is the purpose of this post to determine who were the men most responsible in those early days for creating the university now known as Yale. Eventually, we will also connect those original founders to the secret society known as Skull and Bones.


Rev. John Davenport soon became dissatisfied in the Puritan colony in Massachusetts and desired to dominate his own group, which he set up the following year at New Haven on land acquired from some friendly Indians. 

Following the Forbes Money Trail

Rosemary Forbes Kerry

We now return to the family of Rosemary Forbes, wife of Fred Kerry's son, Richard, John Forbes Kerry's father. John Kerry would go to Yale and be inducted into Skull and Bones in the class of 1966. He became a Democratic presidential candidate in 2004, running against another member of Skull and Bones, George Walker Bush, class of 1968.

Small world!

The Forbes Family Tree

Richard Kerry's Father-in-Law

Clarence Hatry of Austin Friars' Trust

After his stint at AIC, James Grant Forbes (Rosemary's father) was, according to Alistair Tayler’s description of him in his book--The House of Forbes, published in Aberdeen in 1937--a director of Austin Friars Trust. This so-called trust was merely a ponzi scheme, built by Londoner Clarence Hatry with fraudulent assets, and set up in 1927 which led to the stock collapse in 1929, triggering the great depression in the United States. [10]  The public outcry in the aftermath of this scandal led to creation of the Bank for International Settlements--further centralization of the global banking industry.  

Forbes was also a director of Blair & Co., Ltd., a large investment banking company—often associated with the Boston investment bank of Lee, Higginson & Co.—which played a central role in financing the Dawes Plan for the reconstruction of Europe after World War I. [11] This relationship with Blair & Co. would place him in contact with the central players who devised the means of creating and financing a global one-world government.

The Untitled Aristocracy

 © 2004 by Linda Minor

There is, however, in New England, an aristocracy, if you choose to call it so, which has a far greater character of permanence. It has grown to be a caste, not in any odious sense, but, by the repetition of the same influences, generation after generation, it has acquired a distinct organization and physiognomy....A scholar is almost always the son of scholars or scholarly persons. He comes of the Brahmin caste of New England. This is the harmless, inoffensive, untitled aristocracy to which I have referred, and which I am sure you will at once acknowledge.

--Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr., Elsie Venner (1859) [1]

The Call to Arms

John Forbes Kerry accepted the Presidential nomination at a speech at the Democratic Convention in the summer of 2004 amid rousing oratory praising him as a patriotic veteran who volunteered to serve his country in the war in Vietnam. The details of what inspired his decision, however, were not revealed. Identifying the forces that motivated Kerry to enlist in the Navy in 1966 reveals much more about him than the fact that he served on combat duty in the war. Let's go back to 1966 to find out.

Kerry was recruited by William Putnam Bundy (Yale, Skull and Bones 1939), John F. Kennedy's assistant secretary of state for Far Eastern affairs, who made a speech at Yale University in 1966. Three years after Kerry's "hero," President Kennedy, had been violently murdered while beginning his plan to withdraw all American forces from Indochina, Bundy arrived at Yale to support the war Kennedy had vowed to end. Immediately after JFK's assassination, Lyndon Johnson had reversed Kennedy's National Security Memorandum 263 and kept Bundy on in the same position as before.

Following the Yale speech, where he was "greeted as a legacy of the slain president," Bundy paid a visit to his own nephew, Harvey Bundy III, a resident of Jonathan Edwards College at Yale, who shared a large suite complete with fireplace with roommates including John Kerry. Bundy remained there "into the wee hours of the morning." [2] Bundy's advice to the young men was to be trained as officers for the war in Vietnam—to serve where their country needed men of their calibre and breeding.  He meant, of course, men from that class of “untitled aristocracy,” who were bred to lead the masses and control events.