Philip Morin Freneau (January 2, 1752 – December 18, 1832) was an American poet, nationalist, polemicist, sea captain and early American newspaper editor.. He co-founded the National Gazette with James Madison and Thomas Jefferson – and was a strong proponent of Jefferson’s policies.
One of his best-known poems, “On Sir Toby“, became a well-known anti-slavery poem. During the Revolutionary War he served as a crew member on a privateer and was captured spending six weeks on a British prison ship which almost killed him. His subsequent writing The British Prison Ship and many more patriotic and anti-British writings earned him the title “Poet of the American Revolution.”
Freneau’s editorial Rules for Changing a Republic into a Monarchy; July 1792 (Annals of America, Volume 3; page 499) had prophetic application to America today.
He speaks to us from the grave:
“In drawing all bills, resolutions, and laws, keep constantly in view that the limitations of the Constitution are ultimately to be explained away. Precedents and phrases may be shuffled in without being adverted to by candid or weak people.
Let the press be busy propagating the doctrines of monarchy and aristocracy. It will be useful to confound a mobbish democracy with a representative republic, that by exhibiting all the turbulent examples and enormities of the former, odium may be thrown upon the character of the latter.
But the grand nostrum will be a public debt. Stretch it and swell it to the utmost [the electorate] will bear. Allow as many claims as decency will permit. Assume all debts of your neighbors [bailouts; “too big to fail“] – get as much debt as you can rake and scrape together, and when you have got all you can “advertise” for more, and have the debt as big as possible.
The next step will be to get it into as few hands as possible. Modify the debt, complicate it, divide it, subdivide it, subtract it, postpone it, let there be one-third of two-thirds. Let there be 3 percents, and 4 percents, and 6 percents – and present 6 percents and future 6 percents. Let the whole debt be such a mystery that only a few can understand it to clinch their advantage over the many.
The members of the Legislature are to have a deep stake in the game. A sufficient number can alternately legislate and speculate, and speculate and legislate, and buy and sell, and sell and buy, until a due portion of their constituents property has passed into their hands to give them an interest against their constituents, and to ensure their positions are permanent.
All this must be carried out under cover of the closest secrecy. Should it be discovered by the People, the whole plan may blow up.*
Their money will give them influence, even among those who have been tricked out it. A great debt will require great taxes, many tax gatherers and other officers; and those officers will be auxiliaries of their power.
Heavy taxes may produce discontents; these may threaten resistance, and in proportion to this danger will be the pretense for a standing army against it. A standing army will increase the moral force of the government by means of its appointments [West Point officer corps], and give it physical force by means of the sword, thus doubly forwarding the main object.
The management of a great debt will require establishing a National Bank. In fashioning the bank, keep in mind it is to be made particularly instrumental in enriching and aggrandizing the elect few.
It will be so difficult to explain to the People that the gain of the few is at the cost of the many, that the contrary may be boldly and safely pretended.
The members of the Bank at the same time will be members of the government; members of the government will be members of the Bank. The two institutions will be soldered together and each made the stronger. Money will be put under the direction of Money.
To crown the whole thing, the Bank will have a proper interest in swelling and perpetuating the public debt and public taxes, with all its’ blessing of both because its power and profits will be extended in exact proportion.
“Divide and govern’ [Political ‘factions’] is a maxim consecrated by the experience of ages and should be as familiar in its use to every politician as the knife in his pocket. Applied to a national Bank let there first be a northern and southern section, then an eastern and western section [the geographically dispersed Federal Reserve].”
- On January 2, 1889, a circular marked “Private and Confidential” was issued by the three banking houses of Drexel, Morgan & Company, Brown Brothers &Company, and Kidder, Peabody & Co. The most painstaking care was exercised that this document should not find its way into the press or otherwise become public.
Why this fear?
Thanks to a stenographer’s report of those proceedings which we were able to obtain, the work of that meeting was clear.
The name of the organization was to be the “Interstate Commerce Railway Commission “; its purpose the cessation of competition among its members (the wealthiest men in America). Its corollary goal was that – united- no competitor or government could oppose it – regardless of the popular upswell demanding (and getting) laws passed in almost every State prohibiting such “combinations.”
Every man in that meeting knew he was participating in a conspiracy to violate Fair Trade laws – yet none feared retribution having bought control of both legislative and judicial bodies in the States and the federal government.
In 1895, the United States government was held up by this syndicate bankers headed by Morgan and forced to give over a virtual gift of many millions of dollars for the privilege of having a nominal and transient claim on a supply of gold which those same bankers had drained from the United States Treasury only a short time previously.” – Proceedings of Conference Between Presidents of Railroad Lines West of Chicago and St. Louis, and Representatives of Banking Houses held at No. 219 Madison Ave. New York,(Morgan’s residence); January 8, and 10, 1889; Myers, History, p. 572
See:
“The Great Deformation: The Corruption of Capitalism in America” by David A. Stockman, 2013; 712 pgs.
“The Creature from Jekyll Island: Another Look at the Federal Reserve” by G. Edward Griffin, 5th Ed.; January 1, 2010
“The Obsolescence of Federalism” by Harold J. Laski, 1939
“The American Plutocracy: America’s 60 Families” by Ferdinand Lundberg, 1937
“History of the Great American Fortunes” by Gustavus Myers, 1936 (especially page 572)
“Money Changers in the Temple” by Charles E. Coughlin, 1936
“The Treason of the Senate” by David Graham Phillips, 1906; page 98
“Frenzied Finance” by Thomas William Lawson, 1905
“The Shame of Our Cities” by Lincoln Steffens, 1904
“The History of Standard Oil Company” by Ida M. Tarbell, 1904
“Driven From Sea to Sea – or, A Campin’ “by C.C. Post; 1883, p. 354
