CUSHING'S CONGRESSIONAL MEDAL OF HONOR

Alonzo Hersford Cushing, William Barker Cushing and Howard Bass Cushing:  Gettysburg, Pickett’s Charge and the Making of  a Medal Winner

By Lowell P. Wigglesworth, CPW News Service

     The 2014 Congressional Medal of Honor winner Alonzo Hersford Cushing has a famous last name.  Betsey Maria Cushing was born in 1908, married John Hay “Jock” Whitney, U.S. Ambassador to Britain.   She died in 1998.  She was the daughter of Dr. Harvey Williams Cushing, of Cleveland, Ohio and a professor at Harvard, Johns Hopkins and Yale.  Her older sister married Jacob Astor and her younger sister married the Standard Oil heir, Stanley Mortimer, Jr. and CBS television founder , William S. Paley.  By  an earlier marriage Betsey Maria Cushing Roosevelt Whitney was the daughter-in-law of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt.
     Jock Whitney invested nearly a million dollars in  movie maker Selznick International Inc. at a time when a million dollars was a huge investment and served as Selznick’s Chairman of the Board.   Jock Whitney  also gave $50,000 for the option on Margaret Mitchell's novel  Gone With the Wind, and then funded more  of the production of the movie that premiered in Atlanta, Georgia, starting point of General William Tecumseh Sherman’s “March to the Sea.”  When a cigarette touched off a flaming synthetic dress worn by a fan one movie enthusiast said "damn, the Yankees are still burning Atlanta!"  No mention was made in the movie nor in Mitchell's book of  the real motive for the American Civil War....a battle over the rail route to the Pacific Ocean and the Middle Eastern opium fields beyond.
     The Cushing name in the U.S. and Boston is best represented by Caleb Cushing, the U.S. “China Trader” who negotiated  for the U.S. the Wanghia Treaty that essentially replaced Britain as China’s key trading partner under the agreement that the U.S. would not do as the British had done….enslave the poor Chinese with opium from Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan, Turkey, India and Pakistan.     The Boxer Rebellion had shown Chinese contempt for the enslaving trade arrangement that was also termed “Opium Wars”.   These wars, as American’s would soon discover, were shown during World War II to have been continued under the American umbrella only to be rejected by the Chinese Cultural Revolution that expelled Western influences until the Nixon era with renewed relations from groundwork laid by U.S. Ambassador to China, George Herbert Walker Bush, himself linked by family ties to the New England China Traders and the Yale/CIA intelligence community.
     Caleb Cushing hosted Confederate President Jefferson Davis in Boston prior to the Civil War who spoke at Boston’s Faneuil Hall prior to Frederick Douglass’ historic appearance there.   Douglass plugged abolition and Davis was selling slavery, a subject that was not to Cushing's disliking as evidenced by his profitable opium sales.  Chains are chains.  There is no getting around the fact that Caleb Cushing was a brilliant businessman whose propensity for self-analysis was overridden by desire for profits.  Opium, a product that can be grown in much of the United States as a crop would it not mess up the well-control U.S. drug policy,  was an essential medicine for surgeries as Union artilleryman  and pharmaceutical salesman, Eli Lilly, would learn during the Civil War.   Amputations go much more smoothly where morphine is available and where the racket of munitions sales can be sweetened with the promise of painlessness the war racket moves to whole new level.

     Historians like Frank Vandiver and Douglas Brinkley, have not addressed this relationship between Jefferson Davis and Caleb Cushing.   The fact that the American Civil War was in large part a drug deal gone bad, but is not covered at all in high school civics classes is inexcusable.    Any citizen old enough to fight for his or her country should be told the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth and not just from the alternative media and marginalized historians.  This is especially true when both historians like Vandiver, Brinkley and others have the letters of Jefferson Davis and Caleb Cushing at their disposal and have for years.  One such letter is especially informative.  If there is a “smoking gun” on America’s motivation for the Civil War it is the letter from Jefferson Davis to Franklin Pierce the enthusiastic supporter of slaver William Walker, the "Grey-eyed man of destiny" dated January 20, 1861 (Jefferson Davis, “The Papers of Jefferson Davis,” The PJD Project of Rice University, retrieved from https://jeffersondavis.rice.edu/Content.aspx?id=86 on 7/5/14).  Davis' letter to Pierce reads:

“When Lincoln comes in he will have but to continue in the path of his predecessor to inaugurate a civil war and, leave a soi disant democratic administration responsible for the fact. Genl. Cushing was here last week and when we parted it seemed like taking a last leave of a brother."

     Abolitionist Frederick Douglass had worked in the ship building business laying the hulls of the China Clippers, the fast sailing ships used by the Russell's, Cushing and other New England China Trading families, with most of the ships built in Alexander Brown’s home port of Baltimore, Maryland.     It was in Baltimore that the Fugitive Slave Laws that fueled the fires for Civil War found the focal point in James Hamlet, a slave  who worked at Brown’s Merchant Shot Tower, a munitions manufacturing facility in Baltimore where he made lead musket balls and bullets.  Meanwhile, up the East Coast and across Boston’s Beacon Hill from John Perkins Cushing and Caleb Cushing’s homes, George Luther Stearns, would seek to corner the lead market and become one of Abolitionist John Brown’s “Secret Six” backers in the racket of war.
     While the Cushing boys from Wisconsin are frequently reported as having no ties to New England China Traders, Ohioan, Dr. Harvey Williams Cushing’s place at Johns Hopkins, Harvard and Yale says otherwise.    Ohio was a key recruiting state for Civil War officers and buried in the Spring Grove Cemetery of Cincinnati is not only the founder of Yale’s Skull & Bones, Alphonso Taft, but forty Union Generals, the greatest assembly of U.S. Army generals outside of Arlington National which was not a consideration for Union Generals after the Civil War victory in as much as it was built on the estate of vanquished Confederate General Robert E. Lee.   When four Vietnam War protestors were gunned down by the Ohio State National Guard at Kent State most people did not know just how close those student were to the  center of an American power elite with historic ties to Indo-China that far outdated the rise of Communism and Ho Chi Minh.
     The American Civil War was a war to control the route across the continent to the Pacific. Slavery was secondary as any African American having lived the experience of delayed civil rights and the targeting of their communities for "drug dumping" can tell.  The South controlled the gateway to the flat Southwest rail route and its East Coast Transcontinental terminus was from Atlanta to Savannah, the course of William Tecumseh Sherman’s “March to the Sea”.  Sherman’s financial advisor prior to the Civil War was future Confederate General Braxton Bragg for whom Fort Bragg just north of San Francisco was named and where Sherman had worked with George C. Bragg in the years before the Civil War to secure the railroads of the San Francisco Bay Area for what would become the Transcontinental Route that followed Russell’s Pony Express Route across the prairies of the MidWest and Rocky Mountains.   If there is any doubt that Sherman was motivated by destroying the Southern Transcontinental rail route to the Chinese opium, one needs only look at his treatment of freed slaves abandoned from his protection at Ebenezer Creek and to his sacking of the city of Vicksburg the railway head across the Mississippi  with the flat continent stretched beyond.  
     With Jefferson Davis’ relationship to Caleb Cushing  well established and with Thomas Bragg, Braxton’s brother sitting at Davis’ right hand as the Attorney General of the Confederacy, there is little doubt that Caleb had hedged his bets on controlling the rail route to the British East India Company’s money pot that had been filled by Baghdad and Bombay opium trader David Sassoon, whose Middle Eastern opium was picked up in Bombay and shipped as a trading commodity for silk and spices to China.
     With the invention of Alfred Nobel’s dynamite the Southern route was put on ice through Reconstruction as the San Francisco route eclipsed a Pacific rail terminus in San Diego or Baja, the target of filibusterer William Walker who also eyed Honduras for a canal across Central America. Walker would have welcomed a load of weapons like that supplied to the Cubans by the Virginius had Walker not been executed in Honduras.   Walker, opposed in his canal venture by Cornelius Vanderbilt,  Teddy Roosevelt would champion a canal across Panama.   Future Panamanian drug dealer and strong man, Manuel Noriega, would have been fully aware of this history and was conveniently removed from his office and essentially gagged with the help of the 1986 Goldwater-Nichols Act by George Herbert Walker Bush whose close associated deny any family relationship to William Walker, though Hondurans are working on a DNA analysis of William Walker's body similar to that linking Sally Hemmings to Thomas Jefferson.
      When Jock Whitney funded Gone With The Wind based on Margaret Mitchell’s best selling novel of the same name, no mention was made of the real motive for the American Civil War.   One Cushing brother would die at Gettysburg, another as the “Custer of Arizona” and the youngest would become known as “Lincoln’s Commando” or the “The First Navy Seal”.     While Alonzo’s Medal of Honor would be awarded in October 2014, “Lincoln’s Commando” would marry Katherine Louise Forbes of Boston having received help from his mother in securing a U.S. Naval Academy appointment through family contacts.   When the ship Virginus was held by Spanish General  Juan Burriel  in Cuba with executions of Britons of the Virginius' crew William B. Cushing came to the rescue.    A ship bearing arms for Cuban rebels in a type of early Castro invasion force or Bay of Pigs depending on ones’ point of view, William B. Cushing, without apparent orders from his commanders, steamed in to Santiago Bay and demanded Burriel’s immediate stop to the killings under threat of naval bombardment of the city. 
     With these facts rarely reported in U.S. civics classes, it becomes clearer as to just how and why a forgotten soldier who did not receive his Medal of Honor within the Congressionally mandated three years of their death might do so later.    Two-time Congressional Medal of Honor winner, Smedley Darlington Butler, was painfully aware that much more goes into the fighting of America’s wars than meets the eye and that while “how we go to war” is often told and retold, “why we go to war” is not.     His book told that story well….”Why?”…..because War is A Racket.