Posted on 06/29/2005 7:48:18 AM PDT by Valin
News item: The Chicago City Council initiated efforts to cancel contracts with the Wachovia Savings Bank after the bank apologized for its ties with the slave trade. An investigation, required by the bank’s participation in a public housing project, revealed that of the more than a hundred banks North Carolina-based Wachovia has acquired, one of them once put hundreds of African-American slaves to work on railroads and another accepted slaves as collateral for loans that defaulted in the early 1800s. Members of the City Council are also discussing seeking reparations from the bank.
An Address to the Chicago City Council
Members of the City Council, I stand before you today to offer you my congratulations for your diligent efforts in ferreting out the past support of slavery by the Wachovia Corporation, the Aetna Insurance Company, and other financial institutions. It is a grim irony that, even today, such corporate entities should still be reaping the benefits from what is without doubt the sorriest chapter of our nation’s history. Not only do your efforts help in setting the historical record straight. They also offer the possibility – through the concept of joint-and-several liability and many other doctrines developed by our nation’s great trial lawyers – that these institutions will at long last be made to pay monetary damages for their past acts.
I would like to direct your attention, however, to an institution with far greater financial resources whose historical role in abetting slavery and resisting its abolition is manifestly clear, yet which, even today, continues to reap benefits from this nefarious record. I speak, of course, of the Democratic Party.
The Democratic Party was, throughout the 19th century, the party of the South and, ipso facto, the Party of Slavery. In the years preceding the outbreak of the Civil War, you will recall, the Democratic Party, north and south, supported slavery. Although there was considerable opposition to slavery in the North, it did not coalesce until the founding of the great Republican Party in the 1850s. In the famous Lincoln-Douglas Debates – which took place right here in your state, Lincoln, the Republican, was the opponent of slavery, while Douglas, the Democrat, supported it under the principle that the majority of people in the slave states were in favor of it.
In 1860, the South voted for Douglas, the Democrat, while the North voted Republican. When Lincoln won, the South, rather than abiding by the results of the election, attempted to secede, plunging the nation into our greatest fratricide, the Civil War.
After the War, the South regrouped around the Democratic Party, which became known as the party of “Rum, Romanism and Rebellion,” the “Rebellion” being the South’s effort to secede. When Republicans tried to organize state governments in the South that included African-Americans, the Democrats called them “carpetbaggers” and “scalawags” and attempted to drive them out. The situation remained in flux until the disputed election of Rutherford Hayes, in which Hayes was awarded the Presidency, despite losing the popular vote. In exchange, he agreed to withdraw federal troops and allow Southern Democrats to return to the political system.
Hayes had hopes that Republican inroads would hold, but Southern Democrats quickly demolished that effort, barring African-Americans from voting and establishing Jim Crow laws. This bloc of former Confederate States – now called the “Solid South” – then became the backbone of the Democratic Party for the next 120 years.
This exploitation of vestigial pro-slavery sentiment led to bizarre outcomes. During the 1930s, for example, a group of East Coast intellectuals, masquerading under something called the “Roosevelt Coalition,” were able to impose neo-socialist economic policies on the entire country by winning the support of labor unions while holding the Solid South through the tacit approval of racial segregation.
This exploitation of historical pro-slavery sentiment did not end until the Great Election of 1994, when the South finally abandoned its historical allegiance to the Democrats and followed its conservative instincts into the Republican Party. As Newt Gingrich, a northern conservative who led the transformation, commented at the time, “The Civil War is finally over.”
By losing its Southern support and finally resigning itself to being a minority party, you might want to argue that the Democrats have finally paid their debt. As you yourselves have illustrated, however, such debts should not be forgotten.
On your behalf, then, I will be filing a class action in Federal Court next week demanding $1,475,456,879,463,647,343,346,980,345.12 on behalf of all those Americans who have been defrauded by the Democratic Party throughout American history. Since the Democrats won’t be able to pay the damages, I will also be naming their principle source of funding, the Trial Lawyers of America, as co-defendant. Under the principle of joint-and-several liability and never-ending recrimination, I am confident they can be brought to the bar to bear their responsibility.
It is imperative that so unjust a historical debt should be left unpaid. The record must be set straight. I thank you for your time and hope you will be joining me in this effort.
William Tucker is a weekly columnist for TAE Online.
We should all go out immediately, empty our bank accounts of all assets, and walk up in the street to the nearest black person, or person of any colour, for that matter, and hand everything over. Just give it to them.
.
Then we should all go to the nearest bridge or tall building and jump off of it, en masse. It's the only solution.
I love it! Great article.
OK...you first.
what about two generations of racial discrimination aganst lower and middle-class white americans?
DAMMM that's good..!
Not me.
I freed my slaves and apologized as soon as I was told keeping them was wrong.
So9
Thanks for posting this.
What about the blacks who owned slaves? Should they pay reparations? And what about the blacks who sold their brothers and sisters into slavery? Should they pay even more?
Wachovia was so stupid to issue an apology - they knew where this was all heading.
Definition: Joint and several liability
Where two or more people enter into an obligation such as a guarantee together, joint and several liability means that the lender or creditor can recover the whole indebtedness from any one of them. They are then left to sort out their respective contributions between themselves.
From American Tort Reform Association
Whether joint and several liability provisions should be abolished and replaced with proportionate liability.
Problem:
The common law rule of joint and several liability, sometimes called the "deep pocket" rule, makes each and every defendant in a tort lawsuit liable for the entire amount of the plaintiff's damages regardless of the defendants' relative degrees of fault or responsibility.
Background:
The effect of joint and several liability is to convert lawsuits into searches for financially viable defendants. This causes defendants to settle out of court for fear of being found fully liable for substantial judgments.
On the other hand, proportionate liability is the concept that a party is only responsible for the damages caused by his own negligence.
A Wisconsin case illustrates the rule's unfairness. An uninsured driver of a car with faulty brakes struck and killed a six year old boy at a school crossing, despite a stop sign and a crossing guard. Plaintiff argued that the accident might have been avoided if the crossing guard, instead of signalling the car to stop, had attempted to get the child out of the car's path. The city, as the crossing guard's employer, was found to be simply one percent at fault. Yet because it was the only solvent party, the city had to pay 100%, the full amount of damages. (Zimmer v. City of Milwaukee)
Rationale:
The application of the doctrine of joint and several liability poses a particularly serious problem for professionals whose clients have become bankrupt or are otherwise "judgment proof." For example, many lawsuits that involve professionals are brought by shareholders or creditors of a bankrupt client. The professional is often a co-defendant with the bankrupt party and its directors and officers, who have relatively few assets. The professional, who may also be a victim of the plaintiff's actions, is typically found to have at most a minimal degree of fault. Nevertheless, the solvent professional often has to pay all, or a large part, of the damages awarded. This is the essence of the "deep pocket" rule.
Joint and several liability is not just a problem when other defendants are bankrupt. If one of the defendants settles with the plaintiff, and subsequent trial allocates damages to that defendant in excess of the settlement amount, the remaining defendants may be liable for the difference.
Recommended Action:
The solution is to enact state laws establishing that each defendant in a claim is "severally" liable. Each defendant should only be required to pay its proportionate share of the plaintiff's loss.
Many states have modified joint and several liability. For example, in NewYork, a party who is less than 50% at fault will not be subject to joint and several liability. California retained joint and several liability for economic damage only, requiring that damages for pain and suffering be paid according to fault.
***What follows at this site: Is each state's status on reform. Illinois has NO listing.
Of course, a full telling of Black History would not be complete without a telling of the origin of slavery in the Virginia colony:
Virginia, Guide to The Old Dominion, WPA Writers' Program, Oxford University Press, NY, 1940, p. 378
"In 1650 there were only 300 negroes in Virginia, about one percent of the population. They weren't slaves any more than the approximately 4,000 white indentured servants working out their loans for passage money to Virginia, and who were granted 50 acres each when freed from their indentures, so they could raise their own tobacco.
Slavery was established in 1654 when Anthony Johnson, Northampton County, convinced the court that he was entitled to the lifetime services of John Casor, a negro. This was the first judicial approval of life servitude, except as punishment for a crime.
But who was Anthony Johnson, winner of this epoch-making decision? Anthony Johnson was a negro himself, one of the original 20 brought to Jamestown (1619) and 'sold' to the colonists. By 1623 he had earned his freedom and by 1651, was prosperous enough to import five 'servants' of his own, for which he received a grant of 250 acres as 'headrights.'
Anthony Johnson ought to be in a 'Book of Firsts.' As the most ambitious of the first 20, he could have been the first negro to set foot on Virginia soil. He was Virginia's first free negro and first to establish a negro community, first negro landowner, first negro slave owner and as the first, white or black, to secure slave status for a servant, he was actually the founder of slavery in Virginia. A remarkable man." http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/secret/famous/johnson.html
I found the reference, out of Michael A. Hoffman II's "They Were White and They Were Slaves: The Untold History of the Enslavement of Whites in Early America" : Joseph Cinque was himself a slave trader, selling his fellow blacks into this horror after he himself was set free by a US court.
Amistad producer Debbie Allen calls this destabilizing fact a "rumor." She'd better. If the thinking public, black and white, discover that "noble" Cinque later sold his own people in the very manner he condemned, then there will be a second mutiny, this time against Spielberg and his shameless hoaxing.
Here is Samuel Eliot Morrison, one of the most distinguished of American historians, writing in his "Oxford History of the American People,"
(New York: Oxford Univeristy Press, 1965), p. 520:
"The most famous case involving slavery, until eclipsed by Dred Scott's, was that of the Amistad in 1839. She was a Spanish slave ship carrying 53 newly imported Negroes who were being moved from Havana to another Cuban port. Under the leadership of an upstanding Negro named Cinqué, they mutinied and killed captain and crew. Then, ignorant of navigation, they had to rely on a white man whom they had spared to sail the ship.
"He stealthily steered north, the Amistad was picked up off Long Island by a United States warship, taken into New Haven, and with her cargo placed in charge of the federal marshal. Then what a legal hassle! Spain demanded that the slaves be given up to be tried for piracy, and President Van Buren attempted to do so but did not quite dare.
"Lewis Tappan and Roger Sherman Baldwin, a Connecticut abolitionist, undertook to free them by legal process, and the case was appealed to the Supreme Court. John Quincy Adams, persuaded to act as their attorney, argued that the Negroes be freed, on the ground that the slave trade was illegal both by American and Spanish law, and that mankind had a natural right to freedom.
"The court with a majority of Southerners, was so impressed by the old statesman's eloquence that it ordered Cinqué and the other Negroes set free, and they were returned to Africa. The ironic epilogue is that Cinqué, once home, set himself up as a slave trader."
(End quotation from historian Samuel Eliot Morrison)
BLACK SLAVEOWNERS
http://americancivilwar.com/authors/black_slaveowners.htm
Child slavery today in West Africa?
http://gbgm-umc.org/nwo/99ja/child.html
Slavery throughout historyhttp://www.freetheslaves.net/slavery_today/slavery.html
"To pursue the concept of racial entitlement--even for the most admirable and benign of purposes--is to reinforce and preserve for future mischief the way of thinking that produced race slavery, race privilege and race hatred. In the eyes of government, we are just one race here. It is American."
--Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia
"The democracy will cease to exist when you take it away from those who are willing to work and give it to those who would not."
Thomas Jefferson
Perhaps the group that had the strongest vested interest in seeing the South victorious were the black slaveowners. In 1830 approximately 1,556 black slaveowners in the deep South owned 7,188 slaves. About 25% of all free blacks owned slaves. A few of these were men who purchased their family members to protect or free them, but most were people who saw slavery as the best way to economic wealth and independence for themselves. The American dream in the antebellum South was just as powerful for free blacks as whites and it included the use of slaves for self-improvement. They bought and sold slaves for profit and exploited their labor just like their white counterparts.
Richard Rollins
After their capture one group of white Virginia slave owners and Afro-Virginians were asked if they would take the oath of allegiance to the United States in exchange for their freedom. One free negro indignantly replied: "I can't take no such oaf as dat. I'm a secesh nigger." A slave from this same group, upon learning that his master had refused, proudly exclaimed, "I can't take no oath dat Massa won't take." A second slave agreed: "I ain't going out here on no dishonorable terms." On another occasion a captured Virginia planter took the oath, but slave remained faithful to the Confederacy and refused. This slave returned to Virginia by a flag of truce boat and expressed disgust at his owner's disloyalty: "Massa had no principles." Confederate prisoners of war paid tribute to the loyalty, ingenuity, and diligence of "kind-hearted" blacks who attended to their needs and considered them fellow Southerners.
Ervin L. Jordan, Jr.
A History of the South
Fourth Edition, Alfred A. Knopf 1947, 1953, 1963, 1972
by Francis Butler Simkins and Charles Pierce Roland
P. 125-126
BEGIN QUOTE: Abolitionist assertions that the bondsmen were frequently inadequately clothed, underfed, and driven to death are economically unreasonable. Masters wished to preserve the health and life of their slaves because a sick Negro was a liability and a dead Negro was worth nothing. A rough plenty prevailed on the average plantation. “The best preventive of theft is plenty of pork,” was the advice of a Virginian.
Slaves probably fared as well in the enjoyment of the necessities of life as did most of the free laborers of the country. One of the most respected of all Northern critics of slavery, Frederick Law Olmsted, wrote that the Southern bondsmen lived in quarters quite as adequate as those of most mill or mine workers elsewhere, and that the slaves were perhaps the best fed “proletarian class” in the world. He also testified that they worked less than did free laborers.
Incomplete statistics reveal that the slaves averaged somewhat higher sickness and death rates per thousand than did Southern whites as a whole. But the slaves were from all indications as healthy and long-lived as white common laborers in the United States before the Civil War. It was general knowledge at the time in Louisiana that the slaves were better off in these respects than were the thousands of Irish immigrant laborers engaged in clearing land and digging drainage canals on the sugar plantations.
The planters were reluctant to commit their expensive chattels to this dangerous work, but preferred to hire free laborers, whose loss by death, sickness, or injury cost nothing. A careful study of the figures on a group of 875 plantation slaves whose records are preserved indicates their average life expectancy at the time of birth to have been longer than that of the general population of such cities as New York, Boston, and Philadelphia during the same period. An authority on urban slavery concludes that the medical care, health, and welfare of slaves in Southern cities were superior to the care, health, and welfare of the free Negroes; and the outstanding work on the life of Negroes in the North at this time shows that they fared no better in such matters than did free blacks in the land of slavery. END QUOTE
Booker T. Washington. It’s worthwhile quoting.
“There is (a) class of colored people who make a business of keeping the troubles, the wrongs, and the hardships of the Negro race before the public. Having learned that they are able to make a living out of their troubles, they have grown into the settled habit of advertising their (the black people’s) wrongs – partly because they want sympathy and partly because it pays. Some of these people do not want the Negro to lose his grievances, because they do not want to lose their jobs . . .”
Booker goes on to say: “There is a certain class of race problem-solvers who don’t want the patient to get well, because as long as the disease holds out, they have not only an easy means of making a living, but also an easy medium through which to make themselves prominent before the public."
Read about Child Sex Slaves!!
Tennessee in June 1861 became the first in the South to legislate the use of free black soldiers. The governor was authorized to enroll those between the ages of fifteen and fifty, to be paid $18 a month and the same rations and clothing as white soldiers; the black men appeared in two black regiments in Memphis by September.
Black Confederates and Afro-Yankees in Civil War Virginia, Ervin L. Jordan, Jr., (Charlottesville, VA: University Press of Virginia, 1995) pp. 218-219
The last thing the UN is trying to do is reduce slavery throughout the world!
There are more slaves today than were seized from Africa in four centuries of the trans-Atlantic slave trade. The modern commerce in humans rivals illegal drug trafficking in its global reach and in the destruction of lives.
As a descendant of a Union Army soldier, I think I'm entitled to some reparations too. Pay up, Demoncrats!
Another question:
Do the descendents of European, Asian and native American slaves get some of this money or is it only for the descendents of black slaves.
That too would be pure racism.
Mr. Soros and that heir to the Heinz Ketchup fortune, John Heinz Kerry, should not be given a free pass, nor should the Kennedy's .
As far as I know, there is no one living today in the US who held slaves here. We are not responsible for what our forefathers(or foremothers) did. We owe no one an apology as we didn't do anything wrong. My ancestors may have had slaves, if they did they will, and probably already have, answer to God for it.( I refuse to leave out the o on God, anyone wants to be offended feel free to do so). I owe no one anything in regards to slavery, it is no longer legal here.
How 'bout this for an idea: Every white person whose ancestors fought for the Union should be given reward money for fighting to free the blacks. Reparations should be made to them by the blacks for any loss of life to relatives long dead, loss of limbs etc. We could set up a schedule that would determine the amount of damage sustained by all civil war veterans and proceed from there.
The people who bitch and moan about the Civil war today act as if there was only one side fighting the war and that side were white Southerners, the other side is never mentioned, I guess this is the only war in history that only had one army fighting against itself and inflicting horrendous casualties on both sides.
Gee, like red much?
I have an ancestor who died for the North in the Civil War. I am going to sue the democrat party for $10million. They were responsible for hundreds of thousands of deaths.
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