Slavery

So, my devoted Cake Eater readers, here's your (not so) Random Question(s) of the Day: How relevant is it to your lives and moral sensibilities that any business you conduct be with corporations who had nothing to do with the slave trade?  

The reason I ask is because it would appear the Financial Times believes that you would believe it's a very important consideration.  One that is on par with what is considered ethical behavior today, i.e. practicing fair trade, keeping things clean evironmentally speaking, sweatshop free labor, etc.

On Saturday, the FT published a series of articles detailing a new discovery, ripped straight from the moldy British National Archives, regarding a few well-known abolitionists of the day, who, it would seem, profited from slavery. 

These so-called abolitionists founded and ran companies which are still in existence today.  Would such a discovery cause you to quit doing business with them?  To wish you never had done business with them?  That this is the moral and ethical thing to do: to punish a company because of something their founders did over two hundred years ago? 

I don't know.  Like I wrote up yonder, the FT seemingly thinks that these discoveries could be detrimental to their business.  But, once you get to the heart of the matter, the sails, which had been set to billow, lose their wind and deflate completely, in my opinion.  Let's see what you think.  The two companies in question are NM Rothschild (yes, that banking family) and Freshfields, a law firm.

Stashed in the National Archives in London’s leafy suburb of Kew are hundreds of boxes of documents marked T71. Each of the sepia-coloured sheets inside them holds handwritten details of estates and slaves, including how much each “negro” was worth, creating the most extensive known paper trail of slave owners in the UK’s former colonies.

For 170 years, the papers remained unexamined, allowing companies, families and institutions that knowingly profited from slavery to conceal their links to the trade and keeping those who were unaware of them in ignorance.

That changed when Nick Draper quit his banking job at JPMorgan and began a doctorate at University College London. Among the boxes he sifted through was T71/1222, which contained a claim for £3,000 in compensation made by Nathan Mayer Rothschild and his brother Baron James de Rothschild, scions of the banking dynasty.

The documents describe an agreement between the two brothers that £3,000 owed to Lord James O’Bryen by the purchaser of his estate in Antigua should be secured to NM Rothschild himself by a mortgage over 88 slaves on the estate. The slaves served as collateral in case the debtor defaulted.

After that buyer went bankrupt, NM Rothschild used the compensation scheme set up by the government after the abolition of slavery to secure the £3,000. The money was eventually awarded to the NM Rothschild estate after his death.

The episode appears neither in the Rothschild family’s extensive archives nor in Niall Ferguson’s two-volume history of the family. In fact, NM Rothschild’s main known connection with slavery until today was his role in putting an end to it.

The banking magnate organised a loan to the government of £15m, out of a total of £20m it spent in the 1830s on bailing out the slave owners after abolition. At the time, this huge sum represented almost half the government’s annual expenditure – by which measure it dwarfs today’s efforts to shore up the country’s financial institutions.

{...}The database will also list one of the UK’s most famous lawyers, James William Freshfield, founder of Freshfields – an inclusion that will come at a sensitive time for the City group, one of the top four “Magic Circle” UK law firms, after the recent expansion of its Washington practice.

Among founders of law firms whose successor companies remain extant, Freshfield is the name that appears most frequently in the slave compensation records.

In total, Mr Freshfield and his sons were awarded compensation on 10 claims for four clients, the parliamentary list detailing the awards shows.

The underlying documents show that the claims were made as trustees and “owners-in-fee”.

Trustees had the power and responsibility to ensure the trusts – in these cases estates with slaves – continued to benefit their clients and earned fees from the arrangement.

{...}That did not preclude him from working on behalf of multiple slave-owning clients, including Smith Payne & Smith – one of the banks that ultimately formed NatWest, the Royal Bank of Scotland subsidiary bought in 2000 – and administering agreements, such as marriage settlements and mortgages, the claims show. Uniquely among lawyers in the records, Freshfield’s partners also entered claims for money on behalf of the law firm under the compensation scheme for slave owners as they sought to recoup unpaid legal fees.

The documents describe how James William Freshfield and his two sons, under the firm Freshfield and Sons, counterclaimed for three groups of slaves in St Christopher [now known as St Kitt’s]. They based the claim on unpaid legal fees regarding the earlier sale of the Belle Tete estate and its slaves.

The claim was eventually withdrawn. However, the counter-claim’s detailed description of Mr Freshfield’s authority as the holder of deeds over an estate and its slaves and his attempt to collect unpaid legal fees using the government compensation system sheds new light on his role during the slave era.{...}

 

 

How is this relevant today?  Back to the article we go...

{...}In the US, where today’s Rothschild bank is also active, JPMorgan, the investment bank, apologised in 2005 for its role as a mortgagee of slaves in Louisiana. The bank subsequently created a $5m scholarship for black students in the state.

Slave descendants have launched lawsuits against US banks and insurance groups, while cities such as Chicago and Los Angeles require companies wanting to do business with them to disclose any historical links with slavery.{...}

So, to recap: the Rothschilds loaned money to a plantation owner in Antigua, who put up his slaves as collateral.  It's thought they made this loan as a social favor to a prominent person, not because they thought he was a good financial bet.  The plantation owner goes bankrupt, and the Rothschilds use a government-funded scheme to recoup their original loan.  This government-funded scheme was, in fact, funded by their bank, because Rothschilds loaned the money to the government to bail out the slave owners when abolition was passed. 

Freshfield, on the other hand, seems to have gotten his hands a little dirtier, actually working on behalf of slave owners, organizing their trusts, and applying for compensation from the same post-abolition fund when their clients couldn't pay their legal bills. 

Forgive me for adding a little nuance to the canvas, but this is hardly earth-shattering news. 

Both the Rothschilds and Freshfield were active abolitionists, and the record shows they were.  Yet no matter how morally reprehensible they found slavery to be, they still had to do business in a world where slavery was legal. After all, the slave trade was made illegal long before the act of owning slaves was. This is an important distinction.  The slave trade was abolished in 1807.  But it was legal to own slaves until 1833.  This in no way, shape or form colors them as hypocrites.  They were simply engaged in commerce in the time in which they lived, a time, I repeat, when slavery was legal.  They could hardly completely avoid any and all business associated with slavery.  Rothschilds, again, provided the funds which helped the British Government bail-out slave owners who were affected when slavery was abolished in the 1830's.    

Should these two firms have to pay out now, and possibly suffer lost business, because they did marginal business at best with slave owners?  

I don't think so. 

The sins of the fathers shouldn't be visited upon the sons.  It's simply not fair to hold people responsible for sins they did not commit---even when it's highly specious to call them 'sins' in their first place.  Furthermore, it's not moral for descendants of slaves to claim fresh financial liability from these two companies because of what their acestors went through hundreds of years ago.  Even if they could prove some sort of connection, it would be a marginal one at best.  How is that fair?  How is that moral?  It's just another example of thinking money will make right. In this case, we're talking about a corporation potentially having to pay out to descendants of slaves.  Riddle me this, joker: How is that different from slavery itself?  Equating a monetary sum to someone's life is, by definition, slavery.  That it's posthumous doesn't make it any better.   

There comes a time when you have to let sleeping dogs lie.  And this should be one of those times.