A great grandmother's letters shine new light upon the Lincoln conspiracy

This old daguerreotype photo is of my grandmother on my father's side, Mary Rosella Lacey, or Mom Mom, who died before I was born. She is wearing a dress she made herself. Her father, John Lacey, was an Irish bootmaker who made boots for President Lincoln, among other people. She is notable for raising five Flaherty children who all turned out well, and that is what defines her life for me.

One day I learned that although my ancestors, O'Flaherty, O'Malley, O'Higgins, Murphy, and Lynch, all had Irish names, I was not one hundred percent Irish, like I thought. The O'Flaherty's had in large part kept to themselves overlooking the pre-historic sea port now called Galway, from the Connemara Mountains of northwest Ireland, an area they claim to have never surrendered to anyone. But inevitably, after the year 1200, our tower castles and our blood became intrertwined with the Norman family de Burgh, now known as Burke. During the Dark Ages it is rather unabashedly written, as though it were not blarney, that some of them, who were scribes, were forced to remove further from Connemara into the monasteries of northern Scotland, where they almost single handedly kept alive the written word, by reproducing the only remaining copies of Brehon Law, the Bible and other texts.

Once in America, it took the marriage of my grandfather, to unite my O'Flaherty group with another descendant of a Norman and Irish family, William F. Lacey, and his wife, the daughter of an Irish, Scottish, and English merchant named William Wilson. My grandmother Mom Mom's mother, who they called Nana, was a Wilson.

Nana was a nice, well educated young lady, from an established family. Her great grandfather once owned farmland on what is now called Capitol Hill, and her great-great grandfather from England had served on the Revolutionary War staff of General Washington. But according to her letters, that pedigree did not necessarily make Nana think her side of the family was better than the generations who had lost the land before them. The negative thing however, was that the once prosperous Wilsons were beset by the severe economic problems of the time. There were also a few footnotes to her side of the family history that no one ever spoke about.

Nana's best friend had once started telling everyone what she knew, and they had locked her away for life in the Government Hospital for the Insane. No one wanted to dwell for long on the fighting amongst themselves and the suffering that had created the differences between them. Neither did the family speak about the subject when my father's aunt Katy used to bring it up, for she was regarded as the conspiracy theorist of his generation. Nevertheless, Katy preserved some of the papers that my great grandmother, Mary Rosella Wilson, or Nana, left behind, and those writings in my collection, as well as letters that have been saved by the James R. Dobbyn family, and Frances Flaherty Knox, mention the negative forces and those responsible for the financial pressure that caused our family differences. And no family fight has ever drawn as much attention. Let's be frank about it, and call it what it was. I'm talking about the Civil War.

It was a war fought over the interpretation of the sovereign rights of individual states; a Civil War for state's rights; the individual rights of sovereign states to protect, and defend if necessary, their laws, their enterprises, and their citizens from external powers such as the federal government and their masters at international banks.

This is not to say that the abolition of slavery was not a main factor, or to in any way denigrate the Civil Rights struggle of American slaves. But speaking from the perspective of one whose own ancestors were sold into slavery by the English, I can tell you without racial prejudice that slavery was on its way out when the Civil War started, and President Lincoln hastened abolition not only because it was the right thing to do, but because it favored the North.   

Nana wrote that detractors used our ugly family fight, this Civil War of ours, to foment hatred and prophesize the failure of our new form of government. They mistook the reasons why we were fighting amongst each other, and they questioned what we were fighting about. They dramatized the incendiary racial, moral and financial aspects surrounding the issue of slavery. They ridiculed our chances for survival as a nation. They said we were dreaming.

Some people thought we were simply fighting about the abolition of slavery, others insisted it was a rebellion against taxation. They just could not conceive how the sons of the original thirteen colonies could fight each other for a principle that detractors of democracy never knew. They could not comprehend any cause that would make brother take sides against brother, or fathers and sons occupy different positions on the field of battle. They never learned that family fights are not fought to destroy the other side, but instead to compel the other side to be loyal and true.

Nana said slavery would have been abolished without the need of a Civil War, and the timing of the Emancipation Proclamation had been a strategic thing. She said our family fight really started as a conflict forced upon the States, who sought to defend their independence, and the sovereign constitutional rights of their states, from the tyranny of financially motivated federal interests. She said the sovereign states of the South were forced to fight, to prevent the federal bureaucracy of the North, from overriding states laws, and heavy handedly deciding which sectors would prosper or die. She said that both sides were fighting over the interpretation of a document that they both had assisted in writing; a document called the Constitution.

Abraham Lincoln saw into the future. Before he was elected, he visualized himself helping to guide the ship of state though a practically unavoidable Civil War, and into the calmer waters of a unified nation. He recognized the peril in a legislature controlled by financial interests, and so he favored government control of the currency. He also recognized that the abolition of slavery was close at hand. For those things, and because the North was the seat of federal power, he was vilified as the symbol of tyranny.

Assassins lay in wait for him on his inaugural route. An alarming number of conspirators, from both the North and the South, both men and women, planned his demise. Many individuals and several teams of agents were on call to kill him if and when the opportunity presented. Within the District of Columbia, a city of spies, and foreign financial interests, there may have been more people against President Lincoln than for him.

The Lincoln White House was surrounded by the encampment of a full Union company. A special cavalry unit accompanied the president and his carraige when he traveled outside. Throughout this hideous internal conflict, units from both sides engaged in biological warfare, smuggling food, clothing and other provisions contaminated with viruses such as influenza, yellow fever and small pox amongst the military and civilian populations. The Lincoln's own young son may have been one of the victims. But that kind of information was secret.

Nana referred to President Lincoln's failed efforts to avoid the war and preserve the Union by compensating slave owners, as high-minded. But even though some in her family admitted he had struggled to do the right thing, they were still against him for financial reasons. When it was ordered that all houses on the avenue had to display black in honor of the slain president, they refused. And when a young captain and his squad returned on horseback to give Nana the choice of either displaying something black, or being taken to jail, she defiantly hung an umbrella on the door knob.

The Civil War was clearly fought to make rich men richer. But It appears that people were all mixed up at the time, much like today, when they debate about Health Care, or Taxes, while remaining aloof about the main problem with our country, and the world at the moment, Banking Policy. Financiers in Europe wanted to destabilize our new country in order to profit from both sides of the conflict. Foreign powers such as the English, and the French at our borders in Mexico and Canada, awaited the opportunity to take back what they believed should be their land. Our own legislators, their financial ties, and our enemies too, were strangling the South with tariffs and embargos to keep European goods competitive, even to the extent of interfering with contracts for commodities such as cotton from the South to the North.

Some school books still inexplicably teach that Lincoln's killer, John Wilkes Booth, was just an egotistical actor, or a white supremacist who wanted to go down in history. That may be true. But people like great grandmother NaNa, on the Wilson side of the family, have told a different, more compelling story; a story about the creation of the Secret Service only hours before Lincoln’s murder; a story about Agent John Parker who left his post so that Booth would have access to the president; and a story about Confederate agents who received money from the Zouaves, through Canada, to finance two separate teams involved in the coup.

Now, the blue of the North and the gray of the South have blended imperceptibly into the khaki of a United States army. Both sides of my extended family, once caught up in our family war, lie together.  Democrats, and Republicans, Thomas O'Flaherty, and his aquaintance Mary Surratt, Union, and Confederate agents, those aligned with President Lincoln's Greenback Agenda, and their adversaries, the agents of international bankers... all together now, on the same side, in their family plot, Section 12, at venerable Mount Olivet Cemetery.