The (Yankee/Marxist) Secret Police

by Al Benson Jr.

The New York Tribune reported, on September 6, 1861, that: "Eight hundred names are now entered on the books of the secret police in New York City, of persons suspected of treason, and many arrests will be made."

"Secret Police" in New York City in 1861? It almost sounds like the trailer for an old movie about how the KGB operated/operates in Moscow. Truly, there is nothing new under the sun. That which has been will be. But it almost seems as if the Lincoln administration was giving us kind of a sneak preview of what was to come. Of course, present day "historians" would not quite see it that way. At least they wouldn't admit to it.

Even modern, politically correct (cultural Marxist) "historians" although they agree with and try to whitewash the great socialist emancipator, are forced to concede that his administration was quite ruthless. Those in Lincoln's cabinet  were willing to go along with Lincoln's Jacobin mindset, and after his death, they were more than willing to exceed it.

Mark Neely Jr., in his book The Fate of Liberty--Abraham Lincoln and Civil Liberties wrote of Secretary of State William Seward in the same vein. When a political prisoner from Kentucky was arrested, a friend of his came to Washington to plead for his release. Neely wrote: "...the Secretary of State readily admitted that no charges were on file against the prisoner. When asked whether he intended to keep citizens imprisoned against whom no charges had been made, Seward apparently answered: 'I don't care a d--n whether they are guilty or innocent. I saved Maryland by similar arrests, and so I mean to hold Kentucky'." In other words, to "preserve" the Union you destroy all of its supposed constitutional guarantees of protection against intrusive government.  It almost reminds one of a mad doctor trying to kill his patient in order to save his life. "The operation was a smashing success--the patient died!"

The willingness to kill something in order to "save" it is quite consistent with the Yankee/Marxist mindset.  Even their own records bear this out. Neely stated that: "Just after the Civil War  The American Annual Cyclopedia and Register of Important Events of the Year 1865 stated that the total number of military arrests in the North had been thirty-eight thousand." Neely's book even had s small section on torture employed by the North, (pages 109-112). So for you who think that the American government's torturing of prisoners is a new thing with the advent of Iraq and all the rest, think again. American torture of prisoners is not new. It is at least as old as the War of Northern Aggression.

If readers haven't figured out by now what all this has to do with today, then there is little that I can explain to them. We have experienced runaway big government intrusion into our lives for almost as long as most of us have been alive. We have a "voluntary" income tax that would have made Lincoln drool with anticipation. Since we were all born after 1860, none of us has ever had the opportunity to live under the system that was envisioned for us by great men like Patrick Henry. Indeed, those in his own day, thanks to the ratification of the Constitution, never had a chance to live under it. We do, however, live under increasing degrees of state socialism--euphemistically labeled as "democracy."

Did the Lincoln administration during the War, and Thaddeus Stevens and his radical abolitionist cohorts after the War, like Robespierre and other French revolutionaries, labor to "reconstruct" American society in such a way as to conform it to some form of socialism? You get three guesses--and the first two don't count!