Jim Marrs - Rule by Secrecy - The Hidden History that Connects the Trilateral Commission, the Freema

combat against their will and thrown into prison without due process of law. In other words, free men were enslaved so that slaves could be made free. Even if the pretended crusade had been genuine, it was a bad exchange."

By the fall of 1863 T.incoln was becoming increasingly concerned with the foreign military presence in Canada and Mexico. His concern over the French in Mexico led to a hasty attack at Sabine Pass at the mouth of the Sabine River separating Texas from Louisiana. On September 8, 1863, a mere forty-seven Texas militiamen with six: cannons chased off a flotilla of Union ships composed of twenty-two transports carrying five thousand Yankee troops escorted by four gunboats.

With France and Britain coming dangerously close to both recognizing and aiding the South, it was Russia's pro-North Czar Alexander 11 who tipped the balance the other way. After receiving information tbat England and France were plotting war to divide up the Russian Empire, Alexander ordered two Russian fleets to the United States in the fall of 1863. One anchored off the coast of Virginia while the other rested at San Francisco. Both were in perfect position to attack British and French commerce shipping lines. No threats or ultimatums were made public, but it was clear that should war come, the Russian Navy was in a position to wreak havoc. "Without the inhibiting effect of the presence of the Russian fleets, the course of the war could have been significantly different," commented Griffin.

Due chiefly to the presence of these fleets, coupled with the effect of the Emancipation Proclamation on their constituents, Britain and France declined to intervene for the South as planned.

By early 1865 the South had been bled dry, both in men and materials. The Mississippi River was in federal hands and Union general William T. Sherman had cut the Confederacy in two with his infamous "march to the sea" through Georgia. "The [Confederate] nation was able to keep an army in the field at all only because of the matchless endurance and determination of its surviving soldiers," wrote Carton.

"Opposing it was a nation which the war had strengthened instead of weakened—a nation which had had the greater strength to begin with and which had now become one of the strongest powers on the globe.

The war could end only as it did. The Confederacy died because the