The Puppet Masters: Spies, Traitors and the Real Forces Behind World Events by John Hughes-Wilson

Author:John Hughes-Wilson [Hughes-Wilson, John]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Lume Books
Published: 2014-09-24T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter 11: Quiet Century? The American Civil War

‘If I can deceive my friends then I can be sure of deceiving the enemy…’

– Major General ‘Stonewall’ Jackson, Confederate States Army

Just as Metternich had stamped his mark on the first half of the nineteenth century, so two other men were to make their indelible marks on the last half. In their own way, both Otto von Bismarck and Abraham Lincoln and their use of intelligence has shaped our present-day world. While the one built the Europe of his Prussian dreams, the other sacrificed everything in order to save the Union of the United States of America; and ultimately paid for his obsession with his life.

Trouble had been brewing in North America for a long time. Long after the Civil War was over General William Sherman, one of the Union’s great war time leaders admitted in his memoirs;

‘That the Civil War… was apprehended by the leading statesmen of the half century preceeding its outbreak is a matter of notoriety. General Scott told me in 1850 that this country is on the verge of civil war…’

Even as the war in the Crimea drew to its close, tensions between the divided States that made up the Union had been rising towards an inexorable final clash between North and South. There were two real issues, both closely related. They were States’ rights over property, and the South’s distinct, separate culture. Slavery was the hallmark stamped deeply on both. Abraham Lincoln was merely the human catalyst for a war long in the making.

Elected as an accidental President in 1860, he was a compromise candidate and, like another ‘compromise candidate’ called Adolph Hitler, he shared the scorn of the political establishment and sophisticated metropolitan elite of the capital, who believed that this hick provincial lawyer from the sticks would be a mere cipher, biddable to their will. Like Hitler’s backers they were grievously mistaken. Like Hitler, Abraham Lincoln was also a man of unshakeable resolve. Unlike Hitler, Lincoln believed he was called by some higher moral purpose: unlike Hitler, he won. But if ever there was a living exponent of ‘the triumph of the Will’ it was Abraham Lincoln.

From the moment of his election Lincoln faced the prospect of the dissolution of the very Union of which he had just been made Head of State. Although his votes swept the board in the North, in the seven States of the Deep South he won not a single Electoral College vote. Democratic legitimacy, States’ rights and fears of Federal interference in Southern property and culture all combined to make the Southern states reluctantly opt to secede and then to set up their own Confederation of Southern States. Compromise proved impossible. By spring 1861, the die was cast. Confederate demands to take over Federal garrisons in the south were rebuffed and the Confederate States of American finally opened fire on Fort Sumter in Charleston Harbour. This time the Republic of the ex-colonial states was at war with itself. It was an inevitable outcome of the bid for total independence of 1776.

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