Joe Bob's America: The zombie lawsuit

NEW YORK, March 29 (UPI) -- Lemme get this straight. Corporations formed from other corporations that died centuries ago are supposed to pay money to people with ancestors who also died centuries ago but who were slaves. That's a WHOLE lotta dead people to be dragging into court. They oughta call this zombie litigation.

In case you missed it, three people claiming to be descendants of slaves filed a lawsuit this week against three big corporations -- promising as many as a hundred more lawsuits to follow -- and they want money for being ... uh ... it's not clear exactly why they want money, but they want LOTS of it. One figure they're using is $1.4 TRILLION.

I don't know about you, but I'm gonna go to Salt Lake City and break out all the old genealogical charts. Given the fact that almost everybody who came to America got shafted in one way or another, this idea could be a gold mine. Even a lot of the WHITE people were indentured servants.

But what's interesting about the "slave reparations" case is that the headlines were NOT "Wackos Invade Brooklyn Courthouse" or "My Great-Great-Great-Granddaddy Wants His Cash." The reporting was so respectful that Newsday even splashed it across the front page, and there was not a single newspaper that said anything remotely satirical, as though it's the most natural thing in the world to be filing lawsuits for damages related to LEGAL activities that happened 300 years ago.

The No. 1 boogeyman they came up with is John Brown, founder of Providence Bank, who owned slave ships in the 18th century. Why is he important? Because his original bank is one of the predecessor corporations that ended up as FleetBoston Financial, one of the largest banking chains in the country. Other defendants include Aetna, which wrote insurance policies for slaveholders, and CSX, the railroad, whose predecessors way back in merger-and-acquisition history apparently used slave labor to lay the tracks.

I have just a FEW questions here.

Numero Uno: Is there no such thing as a statute of limitations anymore?

Oh, of course not. I forgot. This is America. Indian land claims. I'm waiting for the first descendant of a Cro-Magnon Man to file suit against the Indians for taking HIS land.

Numero Two-o: How do you prove which slave was abused by which company?

In the 16th and early 17th centuries, the few slaves brought to the continental United States were bought from the Caribbean, not Africa, sometimes from a third or fourth generation that had been born in the islands. What if the slave's life got BETTER when he was removed from Barbados or Jamaica? Do you get $5 credit for that?

Numero Three-o: Shouldn't these cases be filed in London and Lisbon and Madrid and Amsterdam?

After all, that's where the slave ships came from. At the very least, shouldn't you file in Charleston, S.C., where you had slave expeditions as late as 1807, when they were finally abolished by federal law?

If you wanna go after somebody, go after the Duke of York. He's presumably running the same royal house administered by James, Duke of York, who founded the Royal African Company in 1672. But there are lots of OTHER slave-trade Londoners who have ancestors you could sue. Lord Shaftesbury, of Habeas Corpus Act fame, had a spread in Carolina. So did Lord Craven, Sir George Carteret, Sir John Colleton -- you can still find all those surnames in the London phone book. Or just go after ALL the descendants of investors in African House, which included 15 lord mayors of London, 25 sheriffs of London, and the philosopher John Locke. (Maybe he has a few royalties still coming in).

Or maybe the ancestors of these offended parties were brought here by the French through New Orleans. (They don't say in their complaint exactly what their lineage is). A guy named Antoine Crozat had the slave-trade monopoly in Louisiana (back when it was a MUCH bigger Louisiana) beginning in 1708, so you could go to Paris and find THOSE companies, or you could go down the line to where he sold out to John Law, a Scot who formed Nouvelle Compagnie des Indes, the largest corporation in the world, but that would probably require putting liens on a few castles in the Highlands.

Or hell, why not just trace the family tree of Henry the Navigator himself. He STARTED IT. I'm sure the Lisbon courts would make you feel right at home.

Numero four-o: Does it matter to a court at all that all these companies, when they insured slavers or financed slavers or made a few loans to indigo plantations, were engaging in a LEGAL business?

OK, it's rhetorical.

Numero five-o: Why New York?

If you wanna compare slavery records, New York has the cleanest hands of just about any of the original 13 colonies. The Dutch West India Company brought a few slaves to work there before 1664, but most of them were granted their freedom. In the real heavy period of slave ships, New York was hardly even in the ballgame. Between 1715 and 1745 there were only 14 voyages out of New York, but if you're writing down names, it was the Schuylers, the Van Hornes, the Livingstons and the Walters. I would check the Union Club membership roster.

Most New Yorkers, in fact, bought their slaves illegally from Madagascar pirates, including Frederick Philipse, who bought Yonkers plantation and built the Yonkers manor hall. So why not just claim ALL of the city of Yonkers? After all, he didn't even pay TAX on his slave purchases.

Numero six-o: What about the white-skinned slaves? Do they count?

Muslims were frequently turned into slaves in Spain and Portugal, and some of them ended up here in the 16th and 17th century. Fair-skinned Indians were also taken into captivity and placed in the same fields alongside the blacks. Indians from the Caribbean were sometimes sold into slavery as well.

Here's the census of 1704 for Carolina: 1,800 African male slaves, 1,100 African female slaves, 1,200 African children, 500 Indian male slaves, 600 Indian female slaves, 300 Indian children, 4,500 Europeans. If you do the math, it looks like the Indians should get a third of any class-action money. Otherwise the suit might be perceived as ... uh ... racist?

Numero seven-o: What about Newport?

Newport, R.I. -- not Providence -- was the real center of slave commerce in the colonies. The reason is they had poor soil but excellent harbors, so they became traders and a sort of slave clearinghouse. Newport probably sent more ships to West Africa than any other city, and if you're looking for the guy responsible, you could start with Henry Collins, the "Lorenzo de Medici of Newport," who was able to set up the rum industry so that ships had cargo in both directions. Samuel and William Vernon were even bigger than Collins, though, and they're the ones who sold most of the slaves to the southern planters. While you're filing, you could stroll past the Newport mansions and decide which one you want.

But if you're going to file a big symbolic lawsuit, why do you leave Newport out of it entirely? It makes it look like you just chose whichever companies have large assets TODAY, without any regard for history, while CLAIMING that you're doing this for the sake of history.

Numero eight-o: Is there anybody brave enough to say that the United States is the LEAST guilty party of any western nation when it comes to the slave trade?

Even Denmark and Italy -- to take two examples that get NO publicity on this issue -- did more slave trading than the United States. There were several delegates to the first Continental Congress, Jefferson among them, who tried to free the slaves, abolish the institution, and repatriate any first-generation slaves who wanted to return to their country of origin. By 1787 it was illegal to import slaves in all but three states -- Georgia and the Carolinas. South Carolina prohibited it in 1788, North Carolina in 1794 and Georgia in 1798. South Carolina reopened the trade from 1803 to 1807, but after that slave importation was illegal. So it took the United States 24 years to end a practice that began in 1440. Then it took one more generation to free the slaves who were already in the country.

Slavery had existed since the beginning of time, but the one country that INHERITED it was able to get rid of it in two generations.

When the lawsuit was filed, a New York city councilman named Charles Barron said, "Somebody has to pay."

What's funny about that is that it's the same thing the slaveholders said during those two generations. It's only about money, they were saying. Apparently it's still only about money. Somebody has to pay, and they don't much care who it is.

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(Joe Bob Briggs writes a number of columns for UPI and may be contacted at [email protected] or through his Web site at joebobbriggs.com. Snail mail: P.O. Box 2002, Dallas, Texas, 75221).