Sulfur,
Lead
and
Poppies
Abolition
And
the
Real
Motive
for
the
Civil
War
“I
used no original material. It’s all been gone over before.”
-Shelby
Foote in interview with Brian Lamb for Book TV on CSPAN
shortly before Foote’s death
All
rights reserved. This book or any portion thereof
may
not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever
without
the express written permission of the publisher
except
for the use of brief quotations in a book review.
Printed
in the United States of America
First
Printing, 2015
ISBN-13:
978-1507859339
ISBN-10:
1507859333
Table of Contents
Introduction
This book began as a quest to understand
the origins of my own family’s westward migration from their family farm in
Walton County, Georgia. My quest only began in earnest after the
December 10, 2000 death of our 23-year-old son, William Patrick Carr. I had spent four years studying the facts of
his death. I had sent about a hundred emails to
Presbyterian ministers the week of December 3rd, 2004 outlining the
circumstances of Patrick’s death and to my horror Gary Webb, author of Dark Alliance supposedly committed
suicide in California five days later on the anniversary of Patrick’s death and
the anniversary of Webb’s resignation from the San Jose Mercury News that had
first printed Dark Alliance and then
essentially retracted it. Webb had
relied on the Houston Post investigative reporter, Peter Brewton, another son
of a Presbyterian minister in Texas. The full findings of my fourteen year
investigation into Patrick Carr’s death are in the 2015 book One Nation Under Oz.
Patrick had died in the days immediately
before the 2000 U.S. Presidential election when former Texas Lieutenant Governor
Ben Barnes was sitting on the embarrassing Texas National Guard memos of George
W. Bush that had been typed by Marion Carr Knox whose son was also named
Patrick Carr. Marion Carr Knox had been
the Texas National Guard commander’s typist at Ellington Field, Houston. Our Patrick Carr’s burned out Bronco and body
were found near Ellington Field, an inexplicable location, and he had been on a
private yacht that night with his uncle, the fishing buddy of William E. King,
the partner with James R. Bath, George W. Bush’s Air National Guard roommate.
Gary Webb’s book Dark Alliance had laid bare a cancer on the U.S. body politic
that had direct implications to Patrick’s murder in Houston. It wasn’t until after seeing the 2014 film Kill The Messenger that I realized that
Webb had supposedly killed himself (two bullets to the head and as impossible a
suicide scenario as our son’s death) on the anniversary of Webb’s 1997 resignation
from the San Jose Mercury News. Webb did not understand what Herman
Melville knew instinctively…you can call America’s addiction the relentless and
mindless pursuit of a great white whale, but not what it really is and who is
really behind it.
Ellington Field, Houston had been home to
General Claire Chennault head of the American Volunteer Group or AVG that
provided Chaing Kai-shek air support against the Japanese during World War
II. The Texas Air National Guard had
been headed by David “Tex” Hill, Chennault’s ‘Flying Ace” the son of the First
Presbyterian Church of San Antonio, Texas, pastor Rev. Pierre B. Hill and that
church had been founded by Rev. John McCullough who founded Galveston Texas’
First Presbyterian Church after McCullough had fled the pistol of the murderous
John Joel Glanton, protagonist in Cormac McCarthy’s novel Blood Meridian. William Patrick Carr had grown up at First
Presbyterian Church, Galveston, but Patrick’s church in Corpus Christi, Texas
put him at the center of even greater danger which is fully covered in One Nation Under Oz.
Gary Webb’s Dark Alliance was not a new discovery. It began long before the Iran-Contra fiasco of
the 1980’s, but Webb was like one more cancer doctor telling his patient that
he has cancer for which he, the doctor-messenger, was killed. If the journalists and pastors won’t tell the
truth who will? As a Presbyterian
minister who had difficulty understanding
just why 600,000 Americans had to die in a Civil War that could have
been solved with the stroke of a pen it appeared that far above the pronounced
motive of the abolition of slavery, some other motivation was operative. Webb’s discovery that CIA agents were
supplying drugs to Los Angeles and the nation and reintroducing chains of
slavery long after Appomattox was an important insight for Americans, but who
would believe it? People didn’t want to
believe that the tobacco industry and big government profited from well-taxed
carcinogens, but that’s the truth of the matter.
Behind the relentless pursuit of profits
was what would eventually be described by Smedley Butler, Dwight Eisenhower,
Theodore “Ted” Westhusing and Pat Tillman, and can simply be put “the
mercenary motive.”
Adam Goodman, Director of the Cornelius Vander
Starr Center for the American Experience in Chestertown, Maryland, described how one of
his freshman students, a Marine on the G.I. bill, wanted to do a term paper on
the wrangling in the mind of Civil War soldier Major William H. Emory whose mother
was the great granddaughter of Benjamin Franklin. The issue was which side to fight on in the
U.S. Civil War. The persistent Marine
rummaging through the attic of the Emory homestead which had been in the family
for over three hundred years, found a bundle of Emory’s letters and commenced
his work. Goodman, who had also written
about the place of Benjamin Brown French in the curious lack of photographs from
November 6, 1860, the day that Abraham Lincoln was elected President, sits over the Center
named for the founder of AIG Insurance and principal in the Pacific Mail and
Steamship Company, C.V. Starr, whose company insured
the passage of U.S. ships in the “China Trade”.
How and why Goodman had access to the attic of the Emory home is a story
in itself, but in both William H. Emory and C.V. Starr
we are given dynamic clues to this “mercenary motive.” Starr would become a founding member of the
OSS, the Office of Strategic Services, the forerunner of the CIA.
Cornelius Vander Starr was born at Fort
Bragg, named for Braxton Bragg whose brother
was the Attorney General for the Confederacy and worked closely with Jefferson
Davis’ Indian Agent and founder of
Scottish Rite Masonry in the U.S., Albert Pike, the future chief legal advisor for the Ku Klux
Klan. So close was Confederate President
Jefferson Davis to the Emory family that Goodman tells us that
William’s brother lived with the Davis family for a time. Fort Bragg is not Fort Bragg, North Carolina,
but Fort Bragg, California just north of San Francisco. C.V. Starr’s
father had been an engineer for the railroad at Fort Bragg.
Major William H. Emory had been the
map maker who laid out the South’s rail route to San Diego before, thanks to a
Civil War and the invention of Alfred Nobel’s Dynamite, the site shifted to
San Francisco where right up to the beginning of the Civil
War William Tecumseh Sherman was working with George Bragg to deliver the San
Francisco Bay Area railroads into the hands of Leland Stanford, but not before Sherman rode East to destroy the
Atlantic terminus of the South’s proposed railroad to the Pacific and the China
Trade products beyond….especially those of the opium poppy.
As for the lack of photos from the
momentous day of Lincoln’s election November 6, 1860? It remains something of a mystery. Two years earlier in 1858 America’s most
celebrated photographer, Matthew Brady, had opened a studio in Washington D.C. and over the
course of the Civil War made a living selling photos of soldiers who wanted to
be remembered after they surely died on some bloody battlefield. There were lines of soldiers at his gallery.
Brady’s mentor was Yale graduate, Samuel Fenley Breese “F.B.” Morse,
whose fortunes were tied to the telegraph that ran along the first
Transcontinental Railroad. Morse’s
cousin died in Texas and his name was James Walker Fannin the hero of the
Goliad Massacre. Brady’s other mentor
was William Page the Andover and Amherst theologian and
photographer who spent time with America’s New England power elites in
Florence, Italy studying art and the mercantile methods of the
Medici. Other close friends of Matthew
Brady were poet James Russell Lowe and sculptor
William Wetmore Story. William Story’s father was the Supreme Court
Justice rendering the decision on the Amistad
case that like the first Fugitive Slave Law test case of
James Hamlet from Baltimore, further enflamed consent for war. William’s
father, Justice Joseph Story of
Massachusetts, had succeeded Supreme Court Justice William Cushing, another New England name like Lowe, Russell, Lodge
and Cabot whose fortunes were tied up with the speedier transport of goods, all
kinds of goods, from the Middle East….from what is today Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iran, Iraq,
Turkey, India… the Golden Crescent….with ready-made markets in China
and the rest of the world.
All
proceeds from this book will support the William Patrick Carr Foundation. The 2015 Foundation will provide college
scholarships for investigative journalism students at Texas Tech University
where Peter Brewton, author of The Mafia,
CIA and George Bush and award winning journalist for the Houston Post teaches
journalism and to Northern Kentucky University, Gary Webb’s alma mater.
AVAILABLE AT AMAZON.COM
UPDATE:
On April 2, 2015 nearly fifteen years after Patrick Carr's death, while looking for Easter decorations, Patrick's father opened a box containing the waiter's apron Patrick had worn at his job in Austin before he moved to Houston. In its only pocket was a brochure for Les Bon Temps Charter Service which used the 60' Hatteras, formerly "Miss Heather" and previously owned by the father-in-law of Thomas Hajecate, son-in-law of Halliburton executive, William Breland. The boat had been renamed "The Sea Note" by the new owners. Hajecate had been previously indicted in "Operation Lone Star". In the same pocket was the business card of Darryl Sneary the partner of Rebecca Rather of Austin's Rather Sweet Bakery. On the back of the card in Patrick's handwriting were the names and phone numbers of several of the parties listed on the incorporation records for 616 Ranch, Inc., including the daughter of the long-standing clerk of the Texas House of Representatives. According to USA Today (December 8, 2006) Dan and Rebecca Rather are cousins.....
AVAILABLE AT AMAZON.COM
UPDATE:
On April 2, 2015 nearly fifteen years after Patrick Carr's death, while looking for Easter decorations, Patrick's father opened a box containing the waiter's apron Patrick had worn at his job in Austin before he moved to Houston. In its only pocket was a brochure for Les Bon Temps Charter Service which used the 60' Hatteras, formerly "Miss Heather" and previously owned by the father-in-law of Thomas Hajecate, son-in-law of Halliburton executive, William Breland. The boat had been renamed "The Sea Note" by the new owners. Hajecate had been previously indicted in "Operation Lone Star". In the same pocket was the business card of Darryl Sneary the partner of Rebecca Rather of Austin's Rather Sweet Bakery. On the back of the card in Patrick's handwriting were the names and phone numbers of several of the parties listed on the incorporation records for 616 Ranch, Inc., including the daughter of the long-standing clerk of the Texas House of Representatives. According to USA Today (December 8, 2006) Dan and Rebecca Rather are cousins.....
Rather Sweet Bakery & Café
Fredericksburg, Texas
This quaint café in an old German town surrounded by gorgeous Texas Hill Country attracts cyclists and climbers as well as tourists. They flock to the area, about 80 miles west of Austin, for antique shops and Rebecca Rather's Big Hair Lemon Tart. "Now that says Texas," Malgieri declares. (Rather, by the way, is a cousin of TV newsman Dan Rather.) 830-990-0498.
Elsewhere Dan Rather is referred to as Rebecca Rather's uncle.
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