by E.M. Burlingame

This is an unpopular opinion I am reluctantly coming to more and more—namely, that Hamilton and Lincoln were working for the City of London and were, in fact, bad guys, traitors to the Republic even:

Look at the actions and the structures they left standing. The official stories emphasize necessity, patriotism, and later success. The ledger of what they actually did, and what those acts produced, is different.

Hamilton’s program was not abstract theory. He funded the Revolutionary and Confederation debts at (or near) par, assumed the state debts, and created a class of public creditors whose fortunes were now tied to the federal government’s solvency and expansion. Speculators who had bought the paper cheap from original holders—often soldiers and farmers—were made whole. He then chartered the First Bank of the United States on the Bank of England model: privately directed, government-linked, issuer of notes, fiscal agent. He invoked implied powers to get it done. He pushed tariffs and a Report on Manufactures that treated industrial development as a national project requiring federal direction.

The immediate results were creditworthiness and liquid securities markets. Foreign capital, much of it from London and Amsterdam, flowed in. New York began its rise as a financial center. The longer results were a permanent funded national debt treated as an instrument of state power, a banking system that concentrated influence among a relatively small group of urban financiers, and a federal government with the fiscal machinery to act like a European great power. Jefferson’s agrarian, state-centered republic lost the economic contest. The “national blessing” of funded debt became the template. Later central banking, from the Second Bank through the National Banking System to the Fed, sits on that foundation.

Lincoln’s actions completed the shift. He used war to prevent secession and then used the war’s emergency to enact the National Banking Acts. National banks were required to hold U.S. bonds as the basis for their note issue. A prohibitive tax was placed on state-bank notes. The old decentralized state-banking system was subordinated or crushed. Greenbacks introduced government-issued fiat. Protective tariffs were raised and kept high. Massive federal land grants went to railroads. An income tax and internal-revenue machinery appeared. The Southern planter class—the last major competing power base of landed wealth and state-sovereignty claims—was broken by invasion, emancipation without compensation, and Reconstruction.

What followed was not restoration of the pre-1861 compact. It was a more centralized fiscal-military state, a national currency and debt market, and financial power increasingly routed through New York. The National Banking System created a reserve hierarchy that funneled funds toward Wall Street. Panics continued (1873, 1893, 1907), but the architecture now favored national banks and federal debt. The political economy that emerged was industrial, protectionist, and credit-based. The Jeffersonian/Jacksonian alternative—limited federal power, state banking, low tariffs, agrarian weight—did not recover. By the Gilded Age the United States was operating as a Hamiltonian commercial republic. The later Federal Reserve was an evolution, not a rupture.

The City of London connection is structural, not a spy novel. The techniques Hamilton copied—funded debt, a privileged bank of issue, a market in government securities—were British. Early American credit depended on European (heavily British and Dutch) buyers. After 1865 British capital financed much of the railroad and industrial expansion that the new national system enabled. The United States adopted the playbook, scaled it, on behalf of the City of London. That is how financial systems actually own and control all: by imitation of working machinery and by capital flows, not by secret commissions.

Both men died before the full settlement was visible. Hamilton was killed in 1804 while Jeffersonians still held the presidency and the system remained contested. Lincoln was killed in 1865 as Reconstruction and the Gilded Age industrial-financial order were only beginning. Martyrdom made it easier to treat the new structures as sacred rather than as the product of specific policy choices that transferred power from states and landed interests to the federal government and its allied financiers and industrialists. Reputation campaigns built on the story of a martyred man were proliferated by British-backed publishers and press, both direct to the public and through control of schoolhouse curriculums.

The Revolution’s political independence was real. The financial and federal order that replaced the old republic of relatively sovereign states was Hamiltonian, then Lincolnian. That is what the actions produced. And now our masters seek to not restore to us what our Founding Fathers gave us, but to refinance this imperial system embedded by two dead men and many others since.

And this: Stop looking at what the official histories say and start looking at what actually happened. The two are rarely the same. Our enslavement is in what happened, not in what has been written about it. PsyOps did not begin in this century or the last. They began long ago.