The Knights of the Golden Circle’s Secessionist Plot and Plan to Take Over Central & South America – The Duran

Why There are So Many U.S. backed Coups in the Americas

It has come as a strange but ironic twist that many Americans who rejected the Neoconservative forever war Crusader ideology by rallying to the leadership of Donald Trump in 2016 have increasingly found themselves falling into a dangerous trap. I speak of course of the strange acceptance by these Americans of the notion that the US military must invade a variety of “evil” nations in order to impose freedom.

While Ukraine is generally recognized as a failed war which must end, many of these Conservative-leaning Americans have embraced the story that Iran must be set into its place, Israel defended with American might at all costs, China must be confronted militarily (to save the Taiwanese), Mexico must be invaded (to stop fentanyl, drug gangs and immigration flows) and now Venezuela must be ‘saved’ from a big bad communist dictator named President Maduro.

From ‘ending the forever wars’ to now calling for military adventures across the globe while promoting libertarian (see: pro-IMF, Wall Street approved) puppet leaders espousing the name of ‘democracy’, too many American patriots have not figured out how this game is played.

As a consequence of this ignorance, we find ourselves potentially facing a disastrous repeat of the hellish slide into America’s first civil war THAT DIDN’T BEGIN in 1860, but rather in 1800.

Through the British-directed masonic agencies that purged republican lodges, and advanced a violent pro-slavery ideology, the Scottish Rite command structure slowly built up a secessionist movement, including a vast paramilitary society dubbed the Knights of the Golden Circle in 1854.

These Knights (which later formed the backbone of the Knights of the Ku Klux Klan after the Civil War) were committed to not only seceding from the Union, forming a special relationship with England founded upon cheap labor and unlimited free trade, but also invading Latin American nations starting with Cuba, Mexico, all of Central America and much of Venezuela and Columbia forming a new ‘island empire’ akin to England or Japan… but this one centered in Cuba.

In the following essay by Cynthia Chung, the crisis caused by the widespread ignorance of these elementary facts of history will be elucidated.

– Introduction by Matthew Ehret

(This paper is an abridged version of the original essay “America’s ‘Young America’ movement, the Scottish Rite and the Knights of the Golden Circle” from the ongoing series “The French Connection: The Knights of Malta, the Scottish Rite & the Rise of the Mafia Brotherhoods”. You can read the full original version here)

The Scottish Rite were formally organized in the U.S. in 1801, as a group of Tory partisans on the losing side of the American Revolution. As already mentioned, one of the principal men involved from the very beginning was a British general by the name of Augustine Prevost. Prevost had conquered Charleston, South Carolina, and set up a secret police apparatus there which became the Scottish Rite headquarters, after the British Army left.

The Prevost family in Geneva were hereditary members of the ruling Council of 200 (Genoa had a Doge system similar to that of the Republic of Venice), the “Committee of Europe’s Spymasters.” ‘Augustine Prevost and his brother, Colonel James Marcus Prevost, were responsible for the recruitment of the largest force of Crown Loyalists used in the British war effort’ and ‘these Prevosts of Geneva represented the very highest levels of British-Swiss alliance forming the British Secret Intelligence Service.

When Colonel James Prevost died, Aaron Burr married his widow, adopted his children, and took his place in the family and the British Secret Service.

The substantial Tory element in South Carolina would serve Burr and the Prevosts as a fertile recruiting ground for political-conspiratorial activities after the Revolution, under the overall coordination of the supervisor of Loyalist affairs, Secret Intelligence chief Lord Shelburne.’(1)

Anton Chaitkin writes in his Treason in America:

“The History of the Supreme Council, 33^o, Ancient Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry, Northern Masonic Jurisdiction of the United States of America, and Its Antecedents’, by Samuel H. Baynard, Jr., states that Augustine Prevost was Grand Steward of the Lodge of Perfection set up in Albany, New York, in 1768.(16) This lodge was said to have been established by one of the traveling ‘patent’ bearers named Henry Francken. The lodge was ‘abruptly terminated’ as the troubles with the British came to a head in 1774, but not before responsibility for the ‘Ancient’ system was passed on:

In February 1774, Francken appointed Augustine Prevost deputy Inspector General at Kingston, Jamaica, and thereafter, so far as previous writers have recorded, Francken passed out of our picture. The official Rite historian states further that Prevost, in 1776, commissioned a fellow British army officer ‘to establish the Rite of Perfection in Scotland, (this commission) was afterwards to form the basis of its constitution’.”

Thus, the origins of the American Scottish Rite would come from a Swiss member of the Council of 200, who was directly working for the British Secret Intelligence Service.

Aaron Burr, (Vice-President 1801-1805 under Jefferson), was closely mentored by the Prevost-Mallet family and was also in the service of the British Secret Intelligence Service. Burr would play a central role in the treasonous faction which orchestrated the secessionist plot in 1807 (which we will hear more about shortly).

‘It should be noted that while establishing these Lodge networks, Major Prevost was in constant contact with his lawyer, uncle, and advisor, Aaron Burr, who came to Philadelphia in 1791 as the US Senator from New York. With these antecedents, the Scottish Rite organization in Charleston, South Carolina – later to be called the Mother Lodge of the World – was officially founded in 1801.’(2)

Caleb Cushing (1800-1879) was, as Anton Chaitkin’s Treason in America incontestably demonstrates, one of the master architects of the American Civil War and the city of Newburyport would hold the “womb of this treasonous clique”, including Cushing’s protégés, Albert Pike (the founder of the American Scottish Rite) and William Lloyd Garrison (famed Abolitionist); as well as Caleb Huse; and George Peabody.(3) George Peabody, American born, was the founder of a gigantic banking firm in England, to which he hired Junius and J.P. Morgan. When Peabody died the firm became the House of Morgan and later moved to the United States.

Chaitkin would insightfully write in his book Treason in America: “Historians have shown a strange lack of curiosity regarding the Cushing, Garrison relationship: William Lloyd Garrison became the leader of the most extreme and provocative elements of Abolitionism, while Caleb Cushing became the main-proslavery spokesman and strategist in the North.”(4)

This might seem a paradoxically contrary thing at first, however, it becomes more transparent when one looks at what was the goal, which was the break-up of the Union. In other words, they were stoking both sides of the same fire.

The first major secession attempt would occur in 1807 led by Burr, with the Workman Memorandum serving as its basis.(5)

Anton Chaitkin writes:(6)

“…in the year 1800, British intelligence officer James Workman submitted a remarkable document to the British Minister of War, Henry Dundas: the British plan for the conquest of the Western Hemisphere…In this treatise will be found the basis for Britain’s appeal to American traitors – white racial superiority and love of the British ‘mother’ culture. 

Workman’s memorandum and his subsequent arrival in New Orleans may be seen as the opening shot of the American Civil War of 1861-1865.

…The memorial…states that 2,500 regular troops, or 4-5,000 colonial irregulars and 1,000 volunteers, would be sufficient to conquer both Florida and Louisiana, the invasion to be backed by one of the British naval convoys in the Caribbean.

Extensive details of appropriate military action in the Americas are discussed (in the Workman Memorandum):(7)

‘The countries proposed to be conquered would not only afford an immediate increase to our maritime trade, but would become the means of supplying, sustaining, and forever preserving to Great Britain all the colonies now in her possession.

It may be said that these projected colonies might in time revolt…At all events, whatever may become of sovereignty and imperial dominion, it should be a proud satisfaction to every Briton to establish and immortalize his name, his language, and his race in every part of the world…

The same interests, language, laws, customs, and manners will ultimately unite together, as against foreigners, Great Britain and all the nations and colonies that have sprung or may proceed from her.

…If the Spanish settlements are taken…the whole continent of America will, in less than a century, become English….

These countries, together with (our) Indian empire, would place nearly one-third of the inhabitable territory, and one-half of the commercial riches of the earth at (our) disposal.’ ”

It is worth holding in mind that this 1807 secessionist plot, first outlined by Workman in 1800 and attempted by Burr seven years later was not the first but rather the third such attempt. The first having been prepared by Burr in 1800 but which required Burr’s victory over Jefferson to the presidency, at which point the ‘northern secessionists’- largely centered in the Federalist Party would declare the constitution null and void while separating from the slave southern states. Burr would then ensure that the “free” northern states would join British territories in Canada forming a new pro-British confederacy.

When Alexander Hamilton defeated this effort by getting Jefferson elected in 1801, Burr tried to revive the plot once more in 1804 by seeking the governorship of New York- the economic engine of the young nation. Once again, his plan was defeated by a relentless Hamilton who ensured Burr’s loss and the survival of the republic once more.

Burr would succeed in removing Hamilton quite literally from the picture by shooting him dead in a duel in 1804. Hamilton’s eldest son Philip was fatally shot three years before in a duel with George Eacker, who was politically aligned with Burr and a member of the Tammany Society, Aaron Burr’s political machine.

You may be wondering what this secessionist plot of 1807 has to do with the Scottish Rite, well apparently it has everything to do with it and is inextricably tied to British imperial interests…which makes sense considering the very founding of the American Scottish Rite was made by a member of the British Secret Intelligence Service.

However, Burr’s and co. secessionist plot would ultimately fail, resulting in Burr fleeing to England wanted for treason, and thus only further confirming that he had been working for British interests all along…

Chaitkin writes:(8)

“The collapse of the conspiracy seems to have been caused by the habit…of ordinary American citizens to speak out when they suspect that something is being done against the interests of their country. Among these was Joseph Hamilton Daveiss, district attorney for Kentucky, who wrote to President Jefferson on January 10, 1806, outlining the secession plot and asking for the dispatch of investigators.

Eventually General Wilkinson decided to turn against Burr, apparently to save himself. He declared martial law in New Orleans and arrested Burr and several co-conspirators. Judge James Workman – described only as ‘an Englishman of three years residence’ in the Abernethy account – released Burr and his associates and began attacking Wilkinson as a liar.

But Burr was re-arrested, along with Workman and several other eligible characters. One of those taken and sent in chains to Washington was Dr. Justus Erich Bollman, Burr’s go-between for European arms and financing, who had previously been employed by Jacques Necker’s(9) daughter Madame de Stael in smuggling operations within Revolutionary France.

Edward Livingston, who had been installed as Grand Master of the Louisiana Masonic Lodge as soon as he arrived there, was in sufficient command of the affairs of the legal community to have all charges against himself dropped. All the main conspirators managed to get off as well.”

Burr’s treason trial was held in Richmond, Virginia and was presided over by Supreme Court Justice John Marshall. Burr was acquitted. Crucial evidence to Burr’s guiltiness in the secession plot was not included in the trial, including the letter of British Ambassador Anthony Merry which documented the plans for secession and the involvement of Burr amongst others.(10)

On January 3, 1830, as the Nullification-Secession Crisis was being heated up in South Carolina, the Scottish Rite Supreme Council in Charleston issued a warrant to “John A. Quitman (1798-1858), 1^st Sovereign and Grand Illustrious Prince” to open and preside over a Scottish Rite organization in the state of Mississippi.(11)

According to the Dictionary of American Biography: “In 1834 he (Quitman) became identified with the political group known as ‘Nullifiers’ who held the views expressed by the Nullification leaders in South Carolina (the headquarters of the Scottish Rite). He prepared an address in their behalf, which was adopted May 21, 1834, by a convention of ‘Nullifiers’ at Jackson…the sentiments therein set forth were not then popular in Mississippi.”

Chaitkin writes:(12)

“The Knights of the Golden Circle, organized in 1853 under the supervision of the Scottish Rite of Freemasonry, pushed south from Cincinnati, Ohio, into the states on the Gulf of Mexico, recruiting armed men for the conquest of Latin America and the secession of the American South –a replay of Aaron Burr’s 1807 program.

The military chief of this ‘Cuban Junta’ was John Anthony Quitman, a New Yorker who had moved to Mississippi and was now (1853) the tactical leader of the Southern secessionist movement. Quitman had been arrested by President Zachary Taylor and indicted for masterminding an identical plan against Cuba in 1850. With Taylor having immediately, conveniently died, the indictment was dropped and Quitman’s operation was back in business in New York City.”

Chaitkin continues:(13)

“…Quitman imported into Mississippi the project of the European oligarchs to destroy the American republic, which had been recently tried out in South Carolina…John A. Quitman was an avid participant – a brigadier-general of volunteers – in the Mexican War, becoming close friend of Caleb Cushing of Massachusetts. 

At the close of the war, he presented a plan to President Polk for the permanent subjugation and annexation of Mexico.

The Freemasons’ monthly magazine of Boston printed the following notice on February 1, 1848:

‘At a special session of the Supreme Council…for the Southern Jurisdiction…our illustrious Brother, John A. Quitman…Major General in the Army of the United States, was elected to fill a vacancy in the (Southern) Supreme Council, and was duly and formally inaugurated a Sovereign Grand Inspector General of the 33d. All Consistories, Councils, Chapters and Lodges under (the Southern) jurisdictions are hereby ordered to obey and respect him accordingly.’ Quitman was by this time the recognized leader of the secessionist movement in Mississippi, the most important such grouping outside of South Carolina.

…In October 1849, Quitman’s Mississippi secessionists convened a strategy session in Natchez with representatives from throughout the South, and a call was issued to all Southern states to send delegates to a convention on June 3 of the following year.(14)

In January 1850, Quitman took office as Governor of Mississippi. In that office, as leader of the extremists in the South, Quitman was openly proposing the breakup of the Union, and the new president, Zachary Taylor, was presented with a deepening national crisis.

At the same time, Quitman was engaged in another of Young America’s adventures: he was arranging and financing the invasion of Cuba by mercenary troops. With the ostensible purpose of taking Cuba out from under ‘oppressive’ Spanish rule, and saving the South from the threat that Spain might abolish slavery in that neighbouring island, a ‘Cuban Junta’ of revolutionaries in New York had hired Spanish renegade Narciso Lopez as a general for the invasion, and Quitman for broker and sponsor. It is useful to note that Virginia’s Robert E. Lee and Mississippi’s Jefferson Davis were both offered the leadership of the invasion, and both refused the offer.

…President Zachary Taylor (1784-1850)…sent his own agents into California and New Mexico and arranged for those territories to request that Congress admit them to the Union as free states. While Texas leaders were claiming part of New Mexico, and there were threats of invasion across the desert from Texas into New Mexico, Taylor pledged that he would uphold the law and the Constitution at all costs.

Taylor now acted against the primary anti-Union conspirator. In June, 1850, a federal grand jury in New Orleans indicted Mississippi Governor John A. Quitman for financing the invasion of Cuba, in violation of laws protecting the neutrality and peace of the United States.

On July 3, John Quitman sent a telegram to Washington, D.C., saying that he would personally be leading an anti-federal; army of several thousand troops from Texas into New Mexico. Allan Nevins, in Ordeal of the Union, paraphrases President Taylor describing a meeting he had that day…

‘I told them…that if it becomes necessary I will take command of the army myself to enforce the laws. And I said that if you men are taken in rebellion against the Union, I will hang you…’(15)

The next day, July 4, 1850, Taylor had on his desk a half-finished message declaring that he would never permit Texas to seize any part of New Mexico’s area. The President appeared that afternoon at an Independence Day celebration, at which the audience was exhorted to rally to the Union.

That evening the President ‘fell ill,’ vomiting up a mass of blackish material. He died on July 9^th. Death was officially attributed to his having consumed too-cold milk and too many cherries. This, according to the official reports, had caused ‘cholera morbus,’ then fever.”

This was the second American President (the first being William Henry Harrison who would die after only one month into his presidential term) to die from “stomach distress.”

The Knights of the Golden Circle, was a secret society founded in 1854 by George W.L. Bickley, with the objective to create a new country known as the Golden Circle where slavery would be legal. As Chaitkin earlier stated, the Knights of the Golden Circle were under the supervision of the Scottish Rite and their military chief was John Anthony Quitman. The Golden Circle was to include the territories of the Southern United States, Mexico, Cuba, Haiti, the Dominican Republic and most of the islands of the Caribbean, Central America, and the northern parts of South America.

The Knights of the Golden Circle was a paramilitary organization, similar though much more extensive to Joseph Smith’s (the founder of Mormonism and Mormon Masonic Lodges) paramilitary operations which occurred in the state of Missouri, the most notable known as the Missouri Mormon War of 1838 ).

The name of the Knights of the Golden Circle was derived from the circle with a 1200-mile radius from Cuba, cutting through North and South America. This vision of the Knights of the Golden Circle would continue to play a prominent role up to the day of the Kennedy administration (and beyond) and plays a direct role in the Kennedy assassination (more on this later in this series). Very significantly, Havana, Cuba is at the centre of the Knights of the Golden Circle’s proposal for a new country.

Chaitkin writes:(16)

“By the time the Civil War started, the Knights of the Golden Circle claimed at least 65,000 armed and drilled recruits in the deep South – and in the area of the nation’s capital (this made the successful inauguration of President Abraham Lincoln a tricky business). The order gradually stepped up its molding of Southern ‘public opinion’ toward the necessity of secession from the Union. At the point secession was being resolved upon, it was of great value to the leaders of the insurrection to have an armed secret organization numbering in the thousands, to enforce ‘unanimous’ public support for their actions.

… While the Knights of the Golden Circle, the military preorganization of the Confederacy, was being organized under the control of the Scottish Rite’s Northern chief, the Swiss J.J.J. Gourgas, and his lieutenant Killan Henry Van Rensselaer, the Southern Jurisdiction of the Rite was organizing the political leadership for the secession itself. The man in charge of this project was Albert Pike of Newburyport, Massachusetts.

Pike had been a life-long friend and a decades-long protege of his townsman Caleb Cushing. On March 20, 1853, two weeks after Cushing rose to power as the attorney general of the United States, the Rite’s Southern Secretary General Albert Gallatin Mackey conferred the Rite’s exalted degrees upon Albert Pike at a ceremony in Charleston, South Carolina.(17)

… In 1859, Albert Pike was called upon to become the grand commander of the Southern Scottish Rite…The gap Pike was to fill came from the sudden death, in 1858, of Mississippi secessionist and Scottish Rite leader John A. Quitman. Over the next two years – until the records suddenly stop a week before Fort Sumter – Pike set up a Scottish Rite Supreme Council extending for the first time over the entire South.” 

The Scottish Rite would come to rule over American Freemasonry during the nineteenth century and Albert Pike is recognised as the source of this success.

Thus, the Scottish Rite would not only play a central role in the attempt to break-up the American Union, in direct service to British Secret Intelligence, but it would also play a central role in the vehemently backed racist policy concerning black slaves, a system that they wished to see solidified in the southern United States all the way down to the northern tip of South America under the Knights of the Golden Circle vision.

After the civil war, the Ku Klux Klan was started up in Tennessee to stop newly freed blacks from voting. It should also be noted that the KKK costume bares an uncanny resemblance to that of the Knights of the Holy Sepulchre.

The Order of the Knights of the Holy Sepulchre was formed in 1099 with the primary mission to “support the Christian presence in the Holy Land” and was acting alongside the Knights Templars and the Knights Hospitaller.Matt Ehret’s InsightsSir Henry Kissinger: Midwife to New Babylon

Anton Chaitkin writes in “America’s ‘Young America’ movement: slaveholders and the B’nai B’rith”:

“With their occult-satanic rituals and costumes, the KKK burned and tortured blacks and pro-USA whites. The Klan’s national headquarters was in Memphis, where KKK leaders Albert Pike and Nathan B. Forrest lived and attended lodge together.

…The US Navy won an 1862 Mississippi River battle, and the US Army took Memphis, Tennessee. Isaac Wise’s Memphis B’nai B’rith agent, the British born Abrham E. Frankland, was arrested, and admitted being a Confederate spymaster. Julius Ochs sent him supplies in jail the same day, and Frankland was released on a $20,000 bond.

…Memphis B’nai B’rith leader Abraham Frankland was an intimate friend of Albert Pike. Frankland had been in the Pike-Benjamin spy apparatus, and wrote a blistering attack on the US attempt to reconstruct the South under equal rights. Frankland now stayed on to aid Pike in his postwar task.”

Chaitkin continues in “America’s ‘Young America’ movement: slaveholders and the B’nai B’rith”:

“In his ‘Morals and Dogma,’ KKK boss Albert Pike celebrates the collaboration between these two Memphis masonic chiefs, Pike and Frankland, at the height of the bloodiest assassination wave in US history.

…upon the triumph of their KKK, Albert Pike appointed Abraham Frankland the head of the Scottish Rite of Freemasonry for the state of Tennessee, and an emeritus member of the Supreme Council. Simultaneously, Isaac Wise appointed Abraham Frankland the president of the B’nai B’rith district for Tennessee, Mississippi, Alabama, and Arkansas.

At the beginning of this century, Isaac Wise’s grandson Adolph Ochs, the owner of the New York Times, wrote a series of editorials attacking black voting rights in those southern states. This vicious editorial campaign helped swing the North behind the new anti-black Jim Crow laws which were then being written, which finally reversed rights gained by Union blood during the civil war. The Ochs-Sulzberger family, a great power in the B’nai B’rith, has remained in control of the New York Times ever since.”

The order of Memphis and of Misraim, which was later notoriously followed by members such as Aleister Crowley, originated in 1881 by combining two ‘Egyptian’ Rites, those of Memphis and Misraim. Guiseppi Garibaldi, military leader of the Risorgimento, who had also been Grand Master of the Grand Orient of Italy, would also become the first Grandmaster of this united rite of Memphis and Misraim.

The Memphis rite was founded in 1815 by freemasons who had joined the Napoleonic battle campaigns in Egypt and learned there of ancient Egyptian initiation rites. And the Bonaparte family’s influence would not end there, later co-founding America’s secret police, the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI).

It should also be known that much of the FBI is implicated in the Scottish Rite. For instance, there are certain Washington lodges which have a disproportionately high number of FBI agents in them such as the Alexandria Lodge.

(In Part IX of this series, the significance of Maxmilian I, and Austrian archduke who attempted to establish a Mexican Empire under the Hapsburg Empire as part of the Knights of the Golden Circle Operation will be discussed.)

Cynthia Chung is the President of the Rising Tide Foundation and author of the book “The Empire on Which the Black Sun Never Set,” consider supporting her work by making a donation and subscribing to her substack page Through A Glass Darkly.

Footnotes:

(1) Anton Chaitkin. Treason in America (1984). Pg 153

(2) Anton Chaitkin. Treason in America (1984). pg. 153-154.

(3) Ibid, pg. 136.

(4) Ibid

(5) Ibid, pg. 59

(6) Ibid, pg. 59-64

(7) James A. Workman. A Memorial…for the Conquest…of Spanish America, New York Public Library Rare Book Room.

(8) Anton Chaitkin. Treason in America (1984). pg. 77

(9) Jacques Necker, a Geneva born, Protestant, slavishly pro-British banker, had been installed through the efforts of Shelburne’s leading ally in France, Philippe Duke of Orleans, as finance minister.

(10) Anton Chaitkin. Treason in America (1984). Pg. 78

(11) The original warrant is photographically reproduced in Harris, Ray Baker, Southern Supreme Council, pg. 202

(12) Anton Chaitkin. Treason in America (1984). pg. 348

(13) Ibid, pg. 208-209

(14) Thelma Jennings, The Nashville Convention: Southern Movement for Unity, 1848-1851, Memphis State University Press, 1980 pg. 6.

(15) Allan Nevins, Ordeal of the Union, Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York 1947, pg. 331.

(16) Anton Chaitkin. Treason in America (1984). Pg. 225-234

(17) Harris, Southern Supreme Council, pg. 244