How Saturn Neptune Worked in Abraham Lincoln’s Chart
In the horoscope of Abraham Lincoln, Neptune, in a blend with Saturn energy, was applied to a historical, political situation in a series of events that changed the world, altering it perhaps forever. Nowhere is the power of this synod more clearly illustrated than in the life of Abraham Lincoln.
His application of Neptune/Saturn power was so masterful on so many fronts, that its ripples are still felt in the fabric of history, so much so that the quality of life in our modern world would be very different from what it would have been if this highly developed Neptune/Saturn personality had not been with us to guide America through its most dangerous crisis.
The Promise of America
America in the mid-nineteenth century was an anomaly. It offered more hope for the unfolding of individual expression and creativity than did any other civilization on the planet. Yet it was horribly burdened with the ancient evil of human slavery.
The triple conjunction synod of Uranus, Neptune and Pluto in ancient Greece and Rome brought into being an impulse for freedom in the expression of the creative force. This impulse repeated itself on higher levels in later civilizations.
In 18th century France, this impetus to create the new was quite powerful, but France had a difficult karma, and the French Revolution, ipso facto destroyed much of this impetus.
In Britain for centuries, individual creativity flowered first in the aristocracy, then in the other classes, allowing the innovative and fresh to replace the old, but the traditional class system and its later empire slowed things.
The “new land”, the promised land, was America. Here the impulse to freedom and liberty and sovereignty had a likelihood for true self-expression. The American Revolution confirmed it. A nation was born in which human beings would be free to manifest their true potential, their gifts and talents. This people possessed a Bill of Rights that guaranteed economic freedom, liberty, the right to creative self-expression, called by Jefferson “the pursuit of happiness”, and the right to commune with a Higher Power, which was called freedom of religion.
In much of history, this kind of personal freedom had been a rare, transitory, or nonexistent condition in the institutions of state. At best, only the few–usually the aristocrats–were allowed the opportunity to develop their full gifts. The other classes were servants. This was true in Antiquity but not in Athens and in Rome. Their accomplishments came from all levels of society, and they represented something new.
A civilization in which each citizen is given the right to ply his or her personal creative drive was not fully possible until the codification of laws was realized by people like Washington, Madison, Jefferson, Adams, Franklin, and others.
That is why America is a rather remarkable place to live in today. She is the wealthiest nation on the planet, but her wealth does not spring from oil or gold or other natural resources; and it did not come from the conquest of other nations. Her prosperity came from ideas generated in a society of free minds, ideas that could not otherwise take root and flourish in the material realm.
In a totalitarian civilization, where it is mostly against the law to be unorthodox, such as the ancient Persian Empire of Xerxes I, or in the old Soviet Union, or in present day mullah-dominated Iran, one rarely will find those astonishing breakthroughs found in technology and other sciences. Breakthroughs like Edison’s light bulb or the moving picture machine called the kinetoscope, or lasers or superconductors or computers or a breakthroughs in DNA technology, all of these are impossible in politically repressed civilizations. They can steal this technology, but they can’t create it.
In 19th century America, more human beings, freer and essentially classless, had gathered together in one place than ever before in history. This nation was ready to become–spiritually and materially–the most prosperous and powerful realm on the planet.
One barrier could stop all of this promise. Human slavery. 19th mid-century America was ready to unfold all her potential, but the treatment of human beings as property to be bought and sold, contravening natural law, if it had been allowed to continue, would have destroyed the whole process.
In human affairs, karma is a law which operates every day, every instant. This law says that whatever you send out into the universe returns to you with rigid precision. It is a law that seeks to redress imbalance of any kind: Its law says that for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction. How long until this reaction takes place is extremely difficult to gauge, even with all the knowledge we have today of the motion of the planets in their orbits. When an ancient Hebrew prophet forecast the fall of Nineveh (it fell in 612 B.C.), he offered no timetable.
The Lords of Karma often work with the motions of Saturn and Pluto. While Saturn works within the framework of time, Pluto often doesn’t.
The karma of slavery is such that if A holds B in involuntary servitude, the forces of creation will find a way to balance things (Saturn’s influence), will find a way to reverse the situation (Pluto’s influence).
The French Revolution was no accident; it was a karmic counterbalancing. In France, for long centuries, under feudalism and later under the rule of the king, those few at the top exploited the others. Then fate presented its bill of terror and violence: The aristocracy was murdered; the nation was convulsed; and that Revolution still exerts its effects on French society.
The 1649 revolution in England was less frenzied. A more yielding energy of give and take existed between the classes; but the king still lost his head. Towards the end of their reign, in the 1890’s and early 1900’s, Russia’s elite attempted to counterbalance centuries of unjust rule. In spite of this, it was entirely wiped out. In fact, the whole imperial Caesar/Czar system founded by Ivan the Great was beginning to unravel around the time of the Neptune/Pluto synod, when Nicholas II became emperor in 1894.
Mid-nineteenth century America, the most advanced political experiment in freedom on the planet, the first republic composed of millions of people, was also the largest slave-holding nation. How could America enter the twentieth century holding slaves in chains?
The answer is that she couldn’t. Either slavery had to be abolished, or this dream of a free people would falter and die. The karmic balancing resulted in the American Civil War with its 620,000 deaths. Slavery was expunged, and enough karma was burned to enable America to enter the 20th century.
Returning for a moment to the Neptune Pluto cycle, we note that its conjunction, its dynamic impact point, occurred some thirty years past 1861, completing a five-hundred year cycle begun around 1400 A.D.
During the American Revolution, the angular relationship between Pluto and Neptune was the closing trine (Neptune 22° Virgo; Pluto 27° Capricorn, in the 1776 Sibly chart). That closing trine was concerned with making ideas manifest on the material realm. The closing trine of this national chart occurred in astrologic earth signs, implying that its people would produce great wealth.
During the American Civil War, Neptune and Pluto had moved into the Balsamic or closing Crescent phase. This phase of Neptune Pluto. When this cycle is applied to a nation, sometimes it requires that a body of people undergo a cleansing process. For the first two years of the war, Pluto made a partile square to the line of the nodes of the 1776 U.S. chart, stressing the need for the elimination of an ancient karma, which in this case was slavery and the unhealthy aristocracy it was producing.
It is fascinating to speculate about alternative timelines. For example, what would have happened if Athens in the 4th century B.C. had not given in to the temptation of empire? In order to understand the importance of the Civil War, we need to guess at some alternative history, the history that wasn’t.
On Dec. 30th, 1860, the State of South Carolina seceded from the Union; she was followed by all the other Southern states. What would have happened if the Confederate States of America had been allowed to exist as a separate nation?
The Confederacy, what the Southern states called themselves in the American Civil War, though it had a president, a vice-president, a legislative branch and a judicial, was in fact ruled by a planter aristocracy. In its philosophy of governance the Confederacy represented, in my opinion, a direction backwards in the evolution of free republics.
An average-sized plantation, in the 1830’s and 1840’s might work 450 slaves, most of whom tilled cotton fields. This crop was exported to the northern States, or to Great Britain, France, or other nations in Europe.
Cotton was in demand, “cotton was king”, so most planters were prosperous. In the 1850′s, 450 slaves were worth about a half million dollars in gold; but in those days an ounce of gold fetched $20.00 an ounce. In today’s money (2018), those slaves at the auction block would be worth around $12,000,000.00. If one added in the buildings and the land, the average plantation was worth (in today’s 2018 dollars) some $30,000,000.00, or more. Many plantations owned thousands of slaves. All over the South were huge estates, producing tobacco and cotton and other commodities. They were veritable cash cows. By the mid-nineteenth century the art of managing a plantation had reached a high level of efficiency—but their success depended on slavery.
While the 19th Century planter society was blessed with a material success, it really showed no creativity. No one like Emerson or Thoreau or Whitman came from this part of America. The South produced few discoveries or inventions. As a civilization it really had no future. The planters lived in a time warp, hypnotized by their past. These aristocrats numbered twenty to thirty thousand. And they were stale, inward turning. They treasured the past. They strove above all to maintain things the way they were. They resisted change, and in doing so, stilled the evolutionary force of America.
In the mid-nineteenth century, people around America, in New England and in the West, were beginning to ask in one form or another this question: Was America, the cradle of freedom, to be the largest slave-holding country in the world?
The South replied that all it really wanted was to be left alone, to preserve its status quo, to remain an evolutionary cul de sac. And among them a new philosophy of slavery, expressed most eloquent by Senator Calhoun of South Carolina: A precept of this new philosophy was that slavery was good for the slaves. For an increasing number of people, this answer and other sophistries were not enough. The law passed by the Congress, called The Compromise of 1850,was an attempt at mediation between the slave holders and those who wished to wipe out this evil. Then in 1854, Congress in a corrupt back-room deal, repealed the Compromise of 1820. To those hating slavery this repeal made everything worse. It was the beginning of the American Civil War, which would flare up into a hot conflict on April 12, 1861. Repealing the Missouri Compromise of 1820 brought LIncoln back into politics. He had been taking a four period off for study, and retreat and thinking about things.
Sometimes a condition is so evil that compromises don’t really work: the malady itself must be exterminated.
On a wider scale, if the practice of slavery had been allowed to continue, the karmic pattern might have worsened. America possibly could have split into several nations, each a weak state. At their best this might have resembled Australia or Canada. More likely they might have represented those strange dukedoms that exist in Central and South America, with their factional oligarchies, their crippled economies, their festering guerrilla wars, their perennial coups and tyrannies, always vulnerable to the next strong man who rises.
It is hard to guess what the Union or Northern States would have become, if the Confederacy had been allowed to continue, and the dissolution of the Union continued. The South and the North would certainly have been involved in further wars, like Athens against Sparta in the Peloponnesian Wars, or like Europe for a thousand years. The lands west would each have been bloodily contested, and therefore remained undeveloped. Mexico might have reclaimed disputed territory. The Monroe Doctrine, initially designed by Alexander Hamilton, would have been abrogated. Alaska could have remained a Russian possession.
What would have happened if two or three Americas had entered the World War I on different sides? Or later, when Hitler threatened, America might not have been strong enough to come to the aid of the Soviet Union and the British. Human civilization might then have plunged into a maelstrom of darkness.
The outcome of the Civil War was close, very close. What if England or France had broken Lincoln’s naval blockade and supplied the Confederacy with arms and material and food, or if Britain had entered the war with its own armies on the side of the Confederacy? What if President Lincoln had listened to the voices, like General McClellan’s, crying out for peace, even if it meant two or three different versions of the United States and the continuation of slavery? What if General Lee had been made commander of the Southern armies much earlier, and had rushed his army at Washington D.C. and taken it, leading to a new treaty with the British. Today we would be living in a radically different world.
It almost happened.
There were many, many ifs. In 1860, when Lincoln ran for president, America was exploding; it could go in any direction. Talk of war was on everyone’s lips.
One man saved America, changed the course of history, preserved the Union, and did so by calling on a power rarely used in statecraft. This was the power of Saturn Neptune.
This man was Abraham Lincoln.
Who Was Lincoln?
He loved cats. He loved trees. He was subject to intense depressions. In his early and late teens he was a woodsman, a timber jack, spending all his daylight hours swinging an ax in the hardy pioneer style, chopping down forests. It was a stern and demanding life-style. His natural mother died of old age in her mid-thirties. His stepmother raised him and was one of the major influences in his life.
When Lincoln was in his twenties, he studied law completely on his own, passed the Illinois bar exam, and became a lawyer. His only proviso in the practice of the law was that he would remain completely honest and truthful in any legal situation. He held to that, and that is where he got the appellation, originally from the judges he appeared under in court, “Honest Abe”. He never cursed, never drank alcohol.
While extremely gentle, physically he was one of the physically strongest men that ever lived. Even in his early fifties, when he was president, he could grasp an ax and hold it, with arm extended straight out at right angles to his body, and he could hold it there for minutes longer than any of the younger men who challenged him.
He was a dead shot with a rifle; he could skin an animal, but hated killing them.
He was a man of laughter, a humorist, a raconteur of extremely funny tales. A book of his humor was published during the Civil War, and it became a best seller.
He was an empath. He could feel the lash if it were laid on another’s back. He felt the suffering of all living beings.
His serious reading was confined to Shakespeare, Burns, and the Bible. Later he would study the Elements of Geometry by Euclid, and he would master all six books. This study taught him to think and reason clearly.
While not a member of any one church, he could quote by heart Isaiah, the Psalms, and the Gospels. His religious beliefs were best summed up by a clergyman who formulated a creed using Lincoln’s own words:
I believe in Him whose will, not ours, should be done.
I believe the people of the United States, in the forms approved by their own consciences, should render the homage due to the Divine Majesty for the wonderful things he has done in the nation’s behalf, and invoke the influence of His Holy Spirit to subdue anger.
I believe in national humiliation, fasting and prayer, in keeping a day holy to the Lord, devoted to the humble discharge of the religious duties proper to such a solemn occasion.
I believe in His eternal truth and justice…
I believe the Will of God prevails; without Him all human reliance is vain; without the assistance of that Divine Being I cannot succeed; with that assistance I cannot fail.
I believe I am a humble instrument in the hands of our Heavenly Father; I desire that all my works and acts may be according to His Will; and that it may be so, I give thanks to Almighty God and seek His Aid.
I believe in praise to Almighty God, the beneficent Creator and Ruler of the universe. [from Carl Sandburg, Abraham Lincoln (New York: Dell Publishing, 1965 ed.) Volume III, p. 630]
And from Jesse Fell, “a scrupulous recorder”:
His religious views were eminently practical and are summed up, as I think, in these two propositions: “the fatherhood of God, and the brotherhood of man”. He fully believed in a superintending and overruling Providence that guides and controls the operations of the world, but maintained that law and order, not their violation or suspension, are the appointed means by which this Providence is exercised.[from Sandburg p. 631]
His face radiated a bit of the Old Testament prophet, crossed with the hayseed. Something of a mystic, he felt that each night’s dreams had a message for him.
Some of his dreams did foretell the future. Before each major battle of the Civil War he had the same dream. He was on a sailing ship gliding swiftly over the water towards an indefinable shore. A few weeks before his assassination he had another dream:
I soon began to dream. There seemed to be a death-like stillness about me. Then I heard subdued sobs, as if a number of people were weeping …I went from room to room; no living person was in sight, but the same mournful sounds of distress met me as I passed along… .What was the meaning of all this? Determined to find the cause of a state of things so mysterious and so shocking, I kept on until I arrived in the East Room, which I entered. There I met with a sickening surprise. Before me was a catafalque, on which rested a corpse wrapped in funeral vestments…. “Who is dead in the White House?”, I demanded of one of the soldiers. “The President”, was his answer; “he was killed by an assassin!”[from Sandburg, pp. 825-826]
He was a forgiving man. In earlier years, when Lincoln was practicing law in Springfield, Illinois, a man named Shields had challenged him to a duel. Somehow, it was worked out with no duel. During the war, Lincoln as president promoted the same man to the rank of Brigadier General.
When Lincoln was running for office, many people, including some who worked and traveled in government circles, felt he was unqualified to serve as president. After his election, he appointed many of those who had been opposed to his candidacy to high office. These included William H. Seward, governor of New York, also a Republican who Lincoln defeated at the Chicago Nominating Convention, and who would end up being Lincoln’s de facto second-in-command; William Stanton, a distinguished lawyer who had sidelined Lincoln in a lawsuit they both had been assigned to by a judge, who became an outstanding Secretary of War; and Salmon Chase, governor of Ohio, who always thought he should be president, even as he was doing an excellent job as Treasury Secretary. Also, Charles Frances Adams, scion of the famous political family, felt that Lincoln was hopelessly unqualified, a country bumpkin, and shared that opinion with many of his contemporaries; as president, Lincoln approved the appointment of Charles Adams as Ambassador to Great Britain, where he successfully applied himself to keeping the British neutral.
All his life Lincoln hated slavery. He felt all men should be free. During the war, when asked to pardon a slave trader pirate, captured and brought to trial in New York, and who was sentenced to death, Lincoln refused. That was a rare refusal.
When Lincoln was a young man, he and a young woman, Ann Rutledge, fell in love. Unfortunately, she was betrothed to marry another man. She could not get out of the engagement, and when she learned that her betrothed was returning to marry her, she contracted an illness and died. She was twenty two years old. This was one of the saddest moments in his life.
Later he married Mary Todd, whose family, like many others of the era, owned slaves. She bore him several children. As Mary Todd Lincoln grew older, she became subject to fits of insanity and paranoia. She was institutionalized several times. Lincoln bore her insanity with infinite gentleness.
In the late 1850′s, Lincoln became a celebrity, what we would call today a “super-star”. With no radio or television, with national newspapers that took weeks to arrive by the horse-post, the popular and famous stars were orators, the ones who could speak to and entertain assembled crowds. Often a sermon or lecture or speech would take several hours, and the throng would remain in place, swayed and moved to tears. Lincoln’s orations would draw people from hundreds of miles around. The next day the text would be published in the major newspapers. This is how people got to know him and came to elect him president.
He was courteous to all, even to black slaves, who looked upon him as a savior, but he also loved minstrel shows.
He mocked class distinctions, always.
He was a law-giver, and judge. As president he set aside a certain number of hours in the week to adjudicate disputes between citizens. He believed, drawing on the ideas embedded in the Constitution, that every president should do this.
The ability to feel what other living creatures were feeling was his greatest gift. This ended up serving him well in the war. It can be seen in an event that happened while he was a young country lawyer in pioneer Illinois.
One Sunday morning, during a rain-soaked April spring, Lincoln, dressed in his best clothes for church, was driving a one-horse buckboard into town. In the distance he could hear the loud and frightened squealing of a pig, which had trapped itself in a quicksand mud; it was slowly sinking to its death, and knew it. Two neighbors passed him traveling in the opposite direction, and they joked with him about the pig’s comical loutish grunting. This was a harsh land, its forests had recently been cleared, and it required of its inhabitants a stern endurance.
Death was a common companion, and that stuck pig was a comic relief.
Lincoln’s buckboard approached the squealing animal. He tried to drive past, and did go on a few yards, when the feeling in his heart made him stop. He tied up the reins to a tree, took off his coat and shirt but not his pants, wadded into the filthy quagmire, and hauled the terrorized creature out from a muddy suffocating death.
Horoscope of Abraham Lincoln
Let us now examine the horoscope of Abraham Lincoln. We have the testimony of the midwife present at his birth, who said he was born around sunrise.’ Thus we do not have an exact verified time. Thus the astro-historian has no authentic ascendant, no clear house cusps. We can say with some certainty that the Sun is in the 1st house, close to the ascendant, and the Moon is in the 12th, and his Saturn/Neptune synod is elevated at the top of the chart. Because we have a verified historical source that says he was born when he was, according to our laws of historical astrology, all those charts that place the Saturn/Neptune on his ascendant are fallacious.
The speculative chart that I have included here may or may not be correct: the Mars, for example, though he died from a gunshot wound in his head, may or may not be in the 8th house. Yet the Pluto Mercury conjunction of this chart rules his 8th House, and it was a conspiracy that led to his death. Yet perhaps a “true chart”, one that is “rectified”, is not so important: Much in his chart remains unaffected by lack of a true birth time.
When the American Civil War began, transiting Pluto, the planet of war, was within two degrees of Lincoln’s line of the nodes, just beyond the conjunction of his south node, implying perhaps a karma from the past connected with war. His awesome physical strength comes from the Mars/Sun. The madness of Mary, his wife, is found in the Mars/Moon square and possibly the Moon’s placement in the 12th House. His gift for writing and humor and oration is to be found in the Uranus/Mercury exact trine. The Neptune/Venus trine is an indicator of the ability, or gift, or burden, of feeling what other living creatures feel. If the Moon is in the 12th house, that is a possible indication of his gift for prophetic dreaming, but that ability also could come from the Moon’s being sextile to Jupiter.
In our historical examination of this chart, the most important element is the elevated Saturn/Neptune synod. This was the tool he used to solve the crisis confronting America. But even if sometime in the future it is proved to be at the bottom of his chart, it would not matter: It is what he used to solve so many problems, re-balance so many energies.
Neptune: This planetary energy rules oneness and forgiveness. It acts as a dissolving force in many areas of life. When placed with Saturn, and when functioning in its highest vibratory rate, Neptune is capable of embodying a law that not often found working in the historical process.
I call this the Law of Non-Resistance. The power of water is invoked: water, being nonresistant will dissolve the hardness of any condition. The phrase from spiritual teaching is to “resist not evil”. Whatever you resist, you become. The application of the Law of Nonresistance can transmute any situation. The constant roll of the ocean will dissolve the hardest rocky coast. The power of water, the Law of Non-Resistance, will dissolve every anger, every rage, every confusion, and transmute those emotional energies into harmony.
Lincoln, as teacher, as savior of the Union, applied this law in the day to day management of the most deadly crisis America has endured. He applied this law to dissolve the ancient evil karma of human slavery.
In handling this crisis, Lincoln was faced with numerous problems. The most difficult was how to prosecute the war.
War is force, straight and direct; it is Mars and Pluto and Eris as opposed to Venus and Neptune, which represent persuasion and diplomacy. Most civilizations do not live too long under the sole rule of Mars and Pluto. (The only military dictatorship in deep antiquity was Assyria. That this civilization drew on Sumerian custom, law and religion—such a wonderful inheritance—helped the Assyrian Empire last for at least a few centuries before it was finally destroyed.)
When a nation has lived in a state of peace for long years and then goes to war, all the rules of society change. A different kind of leader often rises to the position of management, rule and command. If the new leader does not absolutely assume control, then the nation will not be capable of waging war, and may not survive as a political entity.
When it was apparent that the Third Reich was going to dominate Europe, and that all other measures did not work, Winston Churchill naturally stepped into the office of Prime Minister. No one challenged him. As Machiavelli described this kind of situation in one of his philosophical musings on republics:
In times of difficulty men of merit are sought after, but in easy times it is not men of merit, but such as have riches and powerful relations that are most in favor. It ever has been and ever will be the case, that men of rare and extraordinary merit are neglected by republics in times of peace and tranquility; for jealous of the reputation which such men have acquired by their virtues, there are always in such times many other citizens, who want to be, not only their equals, but their superiors….
..it is the common fault of republics in tranquil times to make small account of men of merit. And it is a twofold cause of indignation for such men to see themselves deprived of the rank to which they are entitled, and to be associated with, and often even subordinated to unworthy men, who are their inferiors in capacity. This defect in republics has often caused great evils… [from Niccolo Machiavelli, The Prince and the Discourses, trans. Luigi Ricci (New York: Modern Library, 1940) pps. 462-463]
In April, 1861, the War Between the States began. President Lincoln, in office for little more than a month, was faced with difficult military problems. Most of the good generals, including many combat officers with experience in the Mexican War, who knew how to win battles and capture armies, like Robert E. Lee, Stonewall Jackson, Joe Johnston and others chose–often for family reasons–to fight on the Southern side.
In the North, nearly every corps commander or general was a peacetime officer. Throughout history, peacetime armies have been staffed with office politicians, bureaucrats adept at backbiting and politicking. Peacetime armies consist of a slow, stifling bureaucracy, petty officialdom and midget tyranny.
In peacetime, these office politicians, often falling under the rulership of Virgo and Mercury, take the place of battlefield commanders, who fall under the rulership of Aries and Scorpio and Mars and Pluto and Eris. This is what happened to U.S. Grant, who took to the consolation of alcohol frustrated over the petty tyrannies of his peacetime commanding officer, and resigned his commission.
If a nation goes to war, and things are working right in its army, the office politicians step aside and allow the hard-fighting officers to take charge. It happened within the American military establishment at the beginning of the First and Second World Wars. It did not happen in Vietnam, which is one reason it became such a mess. [from Edward Luttwak, The Pentagon & the Art of War (New York: Simon ;and Schuster, 1984) p. 23
At the outbreak of World War II, Eisenhower held the permanent rank of Lieutenant Colonel, and was an obscure officer on Marshall’s staff in the pentagon. George Patton was just as obscure an officer, and Douglas MacArthur was not even in the army. Today no one remembers the names of those who headed the military in 1939, 1940 and 1941.
When Lincoln as Commander-in-Chief inherited the army, it was almost completely staffed with office politicians. When the war began, they stayed in power, and the Union armies suffered a string of constant defeats. All this time, Lincoln with his brilliant mind for study was studying everything he could find out about war. He was giving himself a thorough grounding about how it is fought, how armies function, why the great generals succeeded where many others failed. Very early on he decided on a strategy to win the war, and it was the strategy later used to win. But then he had to find the right generals to carry out this strategy, and initially he couldn’t find any good generals.
George McClellan was an office politician general. He was a graduate at age 21 of the U.S. Military Academy; he was an engineer; he designed a horse saddle that made him famous, called the McClellan saddle. He became the president of a railroad. An organization man, a social climber, he got along well with his superiors, and knew well how to impress people in power. People said he was “going places.”
When the South first threatened Washington, D.C. with its better-led armies, there was a panic in the city, and General McCllelan was recalled from where he was stationed in the west. He arrived in Washington, immediately took command of the chaotic situation, stabilized the army that was there, and began to build up an new army that could defend the capitol. He organized and built it well, and soon it was large enough to defend the city.
Lincoln then appointed him General of the Army of the Potomac.
McClellan used his engineering skills to build formidable defenses wherever he took his army. As a politician, he was a tough bureaucratic infighter. He cultivated popularity with his soldiers. In 1862, he was considering running for president against Lincoln, which he did in 1864.
In many ways General George McClellan was a brilliant, capable man. As a general, he really had only one problem: He couldn’t fight. He was simply wonderful at everything else, and if there just hadn’t been that little war going on, he would have been recorded in history as a great general. He even had a nickname: Little Napoleon.
But he wouldn’t fight; he wouldn’t attack the opposing army. Much of his generalship was spent writing letters or sending telegrams to Lincoln. Sometimes McClellan put the blame on the size of Lee’s army. Sometimes there were not enough supplies. Lincoln absorbed it all, didn’t fight back, didn’t accuse McClellan of being afraid of attacking General Lee. He just quietly applied the Law of Non-Resistance.
When McClellan finally, but ponderously moved to attack the Confederacy, it was Lee who solved Lincoln’s problem. Lee sent a brigade of cavalry, commanded by General Stonewall Jackson, to describe a complete circle around McClellan’s army, completely cutting it off for a while. McClellan’s telegrams and other communications to Washington D.C., when they were able to get through, were frantic. General Lee had mentally paralyzed his opposing general. He had known McClellan at West Point and later, and Lee was a fine judge of character. That was the end of McClellan: He was forced to resign.
Lincoln had to work through many generals in the early years of the war, but he was unfailingly patient and kind with all of them. If they were insecure and attacked him out of their own fears, he allowed that process to happen, and “resisted not”.
The Civil War
When unjust conditions stay frozen too long, war is often the result. War is a clash of will on a mass level. At the start of the American Civil War, neither the Union nor the Confederacy quite knew what it was getting into. The illusion was that “our army will defeat the other side, and return home in three months.” Few dreamed that it would be a four-year slugfest.
Numerous causes of war exist: blood lust and the desire for conquest, a need for the collective mind to compensate for ancient evils. Sometimes it is simply the desire for power and greed; at other times war derives from a spiritual fervor.
Alexander the Great, out of the need to be the perfect, ideal warrior, led an invincible army through North Africa, Southern Europe, Asia Minor and much of Asia. Caesar warred from the desire to conquer his own lusts, and perhaps the desire to be emperor. Napoleon had to fight too many wars, and that ultimately destroyed him, even though he was a good general and knew how fight wars. Louis XIV loved war philosophically, used it as a tool in foreign policy, and constructed one of the most powerful military dictatorships since Imperial Rome. It took several decades for Louis’ opponents to match his military strength.
Mars is war; Mars is anger. In times of war, especially civil war, a palpable rage and fury is in the air, people feed on it, and it turns all the laws and agreements people normally live by completely upside down. Courtesy, decency and the quiet rule of principle are suspended in favor of rape, pillage and murder.
Adolph Hitler had a warlike Mars: It was conjunct Venus and square Saturn. He was quite at home with war and its madness. And he had Pluto in the 8th House. In the First World War, history tells us that he loved the life at the front, where he spent four years as a messenger in the trenches.
Winston Churchill, who had a Sun septile Mars, also was fascinated by war. As a young Lieutenant, he was under fire in several different theaters of war. As historian, he wrote many books about it.
John Kennedy, who had Jupiter and Mercury and Mars conjunct his 8th house cusp, was a combat officer in the Second World War. During his term as president, Kennedy faced down the Soviet Union in a frightening confrontation called the Cuban Missile Crisis (October 1962). That 8th house conjunction dominates his whole chart—It squares his Uranus, quintiles his Neptune, and trines his Moon. Like many Scorpio/Mars types, his anger remained perfectly controlled throughout this crisis, often hidden behind a smile, a lesson Premier Khrushchev learned only too late.
Strong Mars, Pluto and Scorpio patterns are common to the charts of historical personages involved in wars.
Yet when we examine Lincoln’s chart, especially his Mars and Pluto configurations, we find that they are 138° apart, indicating that Mars/Pluto was not a major theme in his life. He rarely used this energy to prosecute the war.
Lincoln’s Cabinet and the Application of Saturn/Neptune
Abraham Lincoln possessed one of the strangest cabinets, or council of advisers, that any president ever assembled. Until the time they joined his administration, many of them had been his political opponents.
Salmon P. Chase fiercely desired the presidency, and he furiously fought Lincoln in the primaries. Lincoln appointed him Secretary of the Treasury.
William H. Seward, a prominent politician of his day, also felt that he would make a better president than Lincoln, and opposed Lincoln in many ways during the maneuvering for the nomination. He still lost. He was chosen by Lincoln to be Secretary of State, and was a good one. He also worked with Lincoln every day, and was his de facto second in command.
Edwin Stanton, like Lincoln, was a lawyer. The two men had earlier had a nasty confrontation. In the early 1850′s, Lincoln had been retained by a railroad as an attorney in a lawsuit that Stanton was also working on. Edwin Stanton was a highly paid and sophisticated railroad lawyer. He looked upon Lincoln as a country bumpkin, and by not sharing the caseload work with him, edged him out of the case. Between attorneys, an act of this kind was and is considered the deadliest of insults.
In his search for a competent War Secretary, Lincoln asked Stanton to fill this position. Stanton was an outstanding Secretary of War. Like many skilled administrators in high-level, high-stress jobs, he was always exploding in rages, venting his anger at people, sometimes including the president. Lincoln never returned Stanton’s anger. Not once in the story of the Civil War is an episode recorded of an explosive rage from Lincoln. At his president’s funeral, Stanton stood and cried.
Lincoln’s response to the fury of his lieutenants was gentleness and compassion. He never raged at his wife, at his children, at the servants in the White House. Nor did he berate his inept generals.
In Abraham Lincoln we see demonstrated the application of Saturn/Neptune force at its highest level.
Civil war is a time of fierce madness. It was brutal and savage when Caesar crossed the Rubicon; it was ferocious when the French consumed themselves in their Revolution, when the Russians put their own to death in the millions and millions. It remains so today as an eternal law: Collective anger destroys all the bonds of civilization; it sets brother against brother, father against son, friend against friend.
Often amidst this general derangement a Martian personality rises to power and assists the civilization in creating a new order. During the Uranus/Neptune synod that occurred in the mid-seventeenth century, when a conflict arose between the king and the parliament in England, Oliver Cromwell ascended to power. The cutting tool he employed to wield power was his natal Mars opposition Saturn. When Napoleon was chosen by the fates to impose order on the killing madness of the French Revolution, his power came from a Mars configured in a grand trine with Uranus, Neptune and Pluto.
And Lincoln? Did he use Mars? Possibly some. He was physically strong. His Mars trine Sun gave him the stamina to work a full day, plus long hours into the night. But in the application of the power of the president his chosen implement was his Saturn/Neptune synod. This man was always putting out fires. He employed all the power of his office to neutralize anger, fear, and the desire for vengeance. For the entire period he was in office he was “cooling things out”. Every kind of wrath, hurt pride, touchiness, rage, vengefulness that came his way was dampened down, discouraged, laughed at, and somehow restrained. He was a man with an open heart (Venus trine Neptune). And he applied this loving energy in his own unique, loving fashion (Venus trine Saturn).
The Trent Affair
A good example of his gentle, calming touch can be described in what is known historically as The Trent Affair.
In America in late 1861, the War was not going so well for the Union. The Northern States and its people were infused with a general malaise of defeat. General Beauregard, commanding a smaller but better-led army, by getting the untested army to run away in a total rout, had defeated the Union at a site ten miles from Washington called Bull Run (July 21, 1861). General Freemont was making a mess of things out in the west. As a young man serving as an officer in Oregon and California he had been a hero; now he was much older, an alcoholic, and making bad mistakes. The naval blockade wasn’t really working. No major battles had been won, and the South had not collapsed, as the Northern press had promised it would, and as everyone had believed. The president was involved in his dreary search to find a general who could fight and win, someone who was a match for Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson and A.S. Johnston.
The fires of collective rage and frustration burned high in the Union, and they came to a head in November of 1861, oddly on the high seas. A mail ship of British registry, the Trent, set sail from the British West Indies, its destination Plymouth, England. It was approached by an American warship, a frigate called the San Jacinto, skippered by one of the most self-willed, independent-minded officers in the U.S. Navy, a Captain Charles Wilkes. After the San Jacinto hailed the Trent and sent a cannon shot across its bows, this neutral ship–not a war ship–hauled in its sails, came to a stop in the water, and was boarded by U.S. Marines. Two high Confederate officials, James Mason of Virginia and John Slidell of Louisiana, were removed from the Trent and taken into custody by Captain Wilkes.
Captain Wilkes arrived in Boston with his prisoners. When he stated what he had done, the city “gave him a great banquet, bombarding him with oratory.” When the news of Slidell’s and Mason’s arrest was published in the papers, people all through the Union were delirious with joy, and everywhere the incident was treated as a “victory”. Gideon Wells, Secretary of the Navy, sent the captain a letter of commendation. Wilkes became a national hero.
While Northerners everywhere were congratulating themselves, possibly because it was the first “win” of what was becoming a nasty long-lasting war, and while Lincoln’s cabinet, including Secretary Seward, also supported the action, one person in government was completely quiet about this affair, the president. For weeks after the boarding of the Trent, he issued no public statement about it.
Lincoln realized immediately that this action taken by a headstrong Navy skipper was essentially an act of high-seas piracy. Hadn’t a like action caused the war with Britain some fifty years earlier? Yet in the general war-madness people were saying it would be a good thing to go to war with Britain.
In London, the authorities were outraged. A Federal sloop-of-war had no right in international law to board a neutral ship and remove any of its passengers. The Prime Minister and his cabinet discussed war. Charles Francis Adams, the Union ambassador on station in London at the time, felt that war with Britain was inevitable. He worked at calming the troubles.
The British Empire in the 1860′s was the mightiest sea power in the world. If it had entered the war on the side of the Confederacy, the naval blockade surrounding the South would have most certainly been dissolved. The Southern generals would have received all the guns and material they required for a successful invasion of the North. British armies might have invaded New York and Boston, might have torched Washington as they had done in 1814. Britain would have reinforced the South with armies.
Regardless of the outcome, Lincoln would not have unconditionally defeated the South. The outcome might have been two or three Americas. The world would have traveled down a different timeline.
The British almost went to war.
What did Lincoln do? First, he said nothing at all about the incident. In this manner did he pour oil on troubled waters. Then he began telling stories, and he was a master storyteller.
His stories were humorous in a non-attacking sort of way, and contained within them was a moral, a truth, that tended to discourage the frenzy. Cabinet members, generals, congressmen, all the high officials around him were subjected to his funny tales. Yet these anecdotes moved them in the direction he wanted to go.
And it was subtle: People rarely understood what he was doing.
His Secretary of State, William Seward, was bellicose to friends and associates saying that perhaps it wouldn’t be so bad to go to war with Britain. Lincoln asked him to write a position paper that took an opposite view of what he was saying publicly. Just as an exercise of course. But it had the effect of collapsing Seward’s anger.
On Christmas morning, when the cabinet was discussing The Trent Affair, Lincoln read them the observations of British philosopher John Bright:
Nations drift into wars—as we drifted into the late war with Russia—often through the want of a resolute hand somewhat early in the quarrel. So, now, a courageous stroke, not of arms, but of moral action, may save you and us … It is common here to say that your government cannot resist the mob violence by which it is surrounded. I do not believe this, and I know that our government is often driven along by the force of the genteel and aristocratic mob, which it mainly represents.
I know nothing but what is in the papers, but I conclude this government is ready for war if an excuse can be found. I need not tell you that at a certain point the moderate opinion of a country is borne down by the passion which arises and which takes the name of patriotism, and that the good men here who abhor war may have no influence if a blow is once struck. [from Sandburg, p. 366]
Eventually, everyone cooled down. Lincoln’s cabinet members and many others in positions of power began to understand the futility of a war with the British. Secretary Seward sent a communication to Adams in London saying that the Confederate officials “will be cheerfully liberated”, [from Sandburg, p. 366] and that reparations would be made. In a few weeks a British man-of-war sailed into Boston Harbor, picked up the Confederate officials, and the fire was out.
Was there anyone but Lincoln who could have quenched these fires?
Throughout the Trent Affair–from the first reports of the capture of the Confederate officials to their release to the British–history describes a Union that is possessed of an enormous collective rage. This kind of rage, in governmental affairs, is extremely dangerous, and can be fatally destructive to a civilization.
On a personal level, in a high official, rage can be catastrophic. Adolph Hitler experienced one of the deepest rages in his life two months before the German Army was secretly scheduled to invade the Soviet Union. His wrath caused him to hurl his legions against its source, a small Balkan nation, Yugoslavia, which had resisted his will and dared him to invade and conquer it.
Military thinkers, including some of Hitler’s own generals, have theorized that if the Soviet Union had been invaded some forty-five days earlier, Moscow would have fallen, Stalingrad would have been taken, Leningrad destroyed, and the Soviet oil fields and granaries would have been captured, and that Germany would have mounted a successful invasion against the Soviet Union.
As William Shirer, a journalist who turned himself into a historian, describes it:
The coup in Belgrade [Yugoslavia] threw Adolph Hitler into one of the wildest rages of his entire life. He took it as a personal affront and in his fury made sudden decisions which would prove utterly disastrous to the fortunes of the Third Reich…
He hurriedly summoned his military chieftains to the Chancellery in Berlin on March 27…
This postponement of the attack on Russia in order that the Nazi warlord might vent his personal spite against a small Balkan country which had dared to defy him was probably the most catastrophic single decision in Hitler’s career…
By making it that March afternoon in the Chancellery in Berlin during a moment of convulsive rage he tossed away his last golden opportunity to win the war… [from William Shirer, The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich.(New York: Library of America, 1984 ed.) pp 53-54]
It is quite possible that Hitler’s rages destroyed the Third Reich.
Lincoln never had rages. He knew all about anger, had mastered it in his early twenties. And he knew all about the power of water to dissolve every hard thing.
Our next vignette takes us into April of 1865. By then, Lincoln had found his generals, U.S.Grant to lead the army, and Grant’s lieutenants, Sherman and Sheridan. They were winning everywhere.
Richmond was captured. General Lee, having been opposed and pushed backward by General Grant for the last year and a half, was retreating westward. Ninety-five miles into that retreat, Lee was confronted by Sheridan’s dragoons. Sheridan was shortly joined, following a thirty-mile forced march, by Generals Ord and Griffin. Behind them, Grant’s main army was pulling up. There was nowhere that General Lee could run.
This place was called Appomattox.
Grant and Lee met there in a small courthouse, and talked about the Mexican War, and weapons, and the spring planting, and surrender. Later that day, at 4:30 P.M on April 9, 1865, Grant wired this message to Stanton:
General Lee surrendered the Army of Northern Virginia this afternoon on terms proposed by myself.
[from Ulysses S Grant, Memoirs and Letters (New York: Library of America, 1984) p. 741]
Washington celebrated for days, and so did the rest of the North. The abolitionist radical Senators planned their revenge on the South. Yet Lincoln, everywhere he went—and everywhere he went the crowds were delirious in their cheering and adulation—led these crowds in singing the Confederate song, “Dixie”. His message was that “they are not our enemies now.”
The Law of Non-Resistance, which says “resist not evil”, “agree with thine adversary”, is extremely powerful.
In order to use it one must have a developed spiritual awareness.
Lincoln knew what was right (Neptune); he had the iron will to apply his spiritual insight (Saturn elevated). His use of Saturn/Neptune saved America.
Less than a week after the surrender, he was dead from assassin’s bullet. Eight months after that the Thirteenth Amendment abolishing slavery was ratified by the States and became law.
I have included a few of the images of Lincoln, taken from magazines and newspapers. Pictures and images often represent what is going on in the collective mind of a people.
The first is the Raccoon Picture, drawn by a British cartoonist for Punch Magazine in 1862. It was a visual representation of what happened in the Trent Affair. It depicts Lincoln with the body of a raccoon clutching the branch of a tree. On the ground a man aims a rifle at him. The image indicates Lincoln’s willingness to humorously take on the blame for a situation he did not create, but one that he had to “cool out” (a marvelous American phrase). Lincoln performed that kind of service all through the war, and if he had to look a little ridiculous, it didn’t bother him at all.
The second picture comes to us from a hostile British cartoonist, Matthew Morgan, in 1863. Lincoln is in a completely filled theater; he is hanging from a hoop placed in the ceiling. While not a very pleasant picture, it is a perfect drawing of his Neptunian purpose in the Civil War. From the tarot, it is an image of The Hanged Man, a Neptunian theme.
The third picture (above) has the president dressed in a fool’s costume standing on the stage with puppets, who represent his cabinet.” The title of this cartoon is “a pleasant comedy of death”.
In the symbolism of tarot, the fool, the trickster, the jester describes the person who walks foolishly over the cliff. .. and keeps on walking. In that era, the greatest crisis of American history, when the people voted for Lincoln as president, they must have known on an unconscious level that there was no one else who could “keep on walking”.
I close this section with two descriptions of Lincoln by Walt Whitman:
March 4, [1865]: I saw him on his return … after the performance was over. He was in his plain two-horse barouche, and look’d very much worn and tired; the lines, indeed, of vast responsibilities, intricate questions, and demands of life and death, cut deeper than ever upon his brown face; yet all the old goodness, tenderness, sadness, and canny shrewdness, underneath the furrows …. By his side sat his little boy of ten years…”
and in 1863
[he had] a face like a Hoosier Michelangelo, so awfully ugly it becomes beautiful, with its strange mouth, its deep cut, criss-cross lines, and doughnut complexion… [from Richard Luthin, The Real Abraham Lincoln (New York: Prentiss Hall, 1960) pp. 592, 386]