by Peter Murphy
4
She didn’t sound crazy. I decided provisionally to treat her as a serious client who had come for help with a case one might reasonably pursue. Whether that would be the final verdict was another matter, but I would give her the benefit of the doubt for now. I smiled.
‘Well, sure. Perhaps they would offer us a small state to go away. How about Rhode Island?’
She laughed. ‘Sure, why not?’
‘All right, Sam. But let’s get serious, shall we? Tell me why the government owes you 672 billion dollars.’
She nodded. ‘Not me, Kiah, my family.’
‘OK. Your family.’
‘How’s your history?’ she asked. ‘Do you remember the story of the War of Independence?’
‘I took some history classes in college,’ I replied. ‘I guess I remember the basic outline, but –’
‘Does the name Valley Forge, Pennsylvania, ring a bell?’
‘Sure. Wasn’t that where George Washington took the army during the winter, that cold winter when they almost froze to death?’
‘You got it. It was the winter of 1777–1778. They’d just got their asses kicked by the Brits in two battles. They were almost out of food, clothing, weapons – all the basic supplies. They didn’t have much money, and very few people thought they had much chance of winning, so they didn’t exactly have a great credit rating. The Brits had the real money. They could buy whatever supplies they needed. And if that wasn’t enough, as you say, it was a very cold winter. Washington’s army was freezing to death, in addition to starving to death. But somehow, by the spring they had turned things around. When they left Valley Forge they were fully supplied. They started winning, and before long they had the Brits on the run.’
I remembered that much. ‘OK.’
‘Money and supplies had started to arrive, just in time, round about February. I’m sure it came from lots of different places. They were desperate, and they were taking help from anyone who would give it. The French kept promising to help, and they did eventually, but by that time the army was already back on its feet. The question is: who bailed them out during the winter? According to our family tradition, an ancestor of mine called Jacob van Eyck was one of their biggest benefactors. They say he contributed gold and supplies to the tune of 450,000 dollars.’
I raised my eyebrows. Suddenly I was catching just a faint glimmer of where this story was going.
‘450,000 in today’s money?’
‘No, 450,000 dollars value at the time, in 1778.’
I sat back in my chair.
‘But Sam, that was a fortune. If that’s true, Jacob must have been –’
‘As rich as Croesus, yes. He was. He was a merchant and a landowner, and if not the richest, he was one of the richest men in Pennsylvania. As a matter of fact, he owned the land around Valley Forge, on the west bank of the Schuylkill, right next to Washington’s encampment.’
‘But how did he make that kind of money?’
She smiled. ‘Good question. There are lots of family stories about that. The polite version is that he made his money by importing wine and other goodies from Europe. But that’s what they all said at the time, wasn’t it, if they didn’t want to talk about… well, you know…?’
‘You’re talking about the slave trade?’
‘I have no evidence of anything like that. But it wouldn’t surprise me. It was the easiest way to make that kind of serious money then, wasn’t it? And Jacob had definitely made some serious money.’
‘But he must have been something of an idealist as well,’ I pointed out, ‘to give so much.’
She smiled again. ‘Yes. I’m sure he was. But independence wasn’t just an ideal to men like Jacob. It had its commercial side. Don’t forget the Boston Tea Party, Kiah. For all the talk of liberty, independence also had a lot to do with not paying taxes to the King.’
‘True,’ I agreed.
‘There’s another thing, too. Jacob and George Washington were close friends and they were both high-ranking Freemasons. I’m not sure how much that had to do with it. It wasn’t a simple picture. Maybe none of that mattered very much. Jacob may have just figured that if Washington lost to the Brits he was screwed as well, so he might as well take his chances with Washington.’
She shrugged.
‘Anyway, that’s the family tradition. But his contribution wasn’t a gift, Kiah. It was a loan. The Continental Congress had authorised loans to be raised for the war effort, so anyone making a loan expected to be repaid after the war.’
‘And you’re assuming that Jacob went through the proper channels?’
‘I can’t see him putting up so much money without intending to get back as much of it as he could. Can you? He was a businessman above all, and he must have known that lending so much could wipe him out – as indeed it did.’
I thought for a moment or two. ‘I’ve never heard about these loans before. How did they work? How did you get your money back?’
‘The Congress set up loan offices, which issued certificates to anyone who made a loan. The loans were repayable after the war with interest at six per cent compound per year.’
‘Six per cent compound? But that’s…’
‘That was the deal. After the war, you would present your loan certificate to the loan office, and they would pay you in cash.’
I shook my head. Suddenly, $672 billion was beginning to make a bit more sense. Compound interest at six per cent over 250 years wasn’t the kind of thing you could even estimate in your head, let alone calculate. An internet compound interest calculator would work it out in a second or two, and I must admit I felt my fingers twitching to reach for my keyboard. But Sam had been there before me, and I kept my curiosity in check. Even if she wasn’t exactly right, it would obviously be a lot of money – a whole lot of money.
‘And let me guess. The family tradition is that Jacob was never repaid?’
‘Not one cent, principal or interest. The government probably didn’t have the money – literally: they didn’t have enough gold to repay that kind of debt. The country was pretty much bankrupt after the war; the currency was next to worthless, and they couldn’t just go out and borrow. They paid people who had loaned smaller amounts, but with the amount Jacob was owed, it would probably have been impossible. Unfortunately for Jacob, it ruined him. He died in poverty.’
‘I take it you don’t have Jacob’s loan certificate tucked away in your briefcase?’ I asked. ‘If you did, I’m guessing somebody would have done something about this before now.’
She hesitated.
‘No one seems to know where the loan certificate is. I guess we will have to find it.’
‘Assuming there ever was one,’ I said, ‘and assuming it is still in existence.’
‘Actually,’ she said, ‘I don’t think we’re looking for just one certificate. There must have been any number of deliveries to the army over a period of time, to the quartermaster or whoever, either of money or supplies of different kinds, mustn’t there? It stands to reason. And if so, there would have been invoices for each delivery. There wouldn’t have been one single certificate for a grand total. There would have been a whole file of loan certificates. Don’t you think?’
‘What I think,’ I replied, ‘is that I’m swimming in the dark. I don’t know anything like enough about loan certificates, or about Jacob, or about what happened at Valley Forge. I would need to know a lot more than I do before I can give you any real advice about this.’
‘But you will take the case, Kiah, won’t you?’
It was said almost pleadingly. That was another thing you soon learned as a young lawyer with your own office. Clients don’t always give as much thought as they should to why they want a particular lawyer, and whether the lawyer they want is the best person to handle a case. Lawyers aren’t much help in that situation. No lawye
r wants to turn away work. But sometimes the red flags are just too obvious to ignore, and there were red flags all over this one. I was a lawyer in solo practice with no back-up. I had no staff except for Arlene, and no money to fund lengthy, complex litigation; and I was being asked to make the government cough up a sum that would do more economic damage to the Treasury than the War of Independence. The government was not going to allow that to happen without instructing the Department of Justice to put up a certain amount of resistance, and the Department of Justice was not short of either funds or staff.
‘I do have quite a few documents with me,’ Sam was saying. ‘It’s stuff my branch of the family has collected over the years. My father was very interested in the loans. He would go to family reunions and collect whatever people would give him; press clippings, historical articles, and so on, and it does give you quite a good account of things. There were even a few times when the family tried to do something about it, by approaching their congressmen, and so on. Nothing ever came of it. But no one has ever sued the government. My father believed that was the only option left to us. Now, he’s gone, and I…’
She stopped, but she didn’t have to say any more. I understood the call of a dead parent all too well. So that’s why she was here. It was for her father. My heart went out to her. She wasn’t crazy: optimistic, perhaps; unrealistic, perhaps; but not crazy. But that didn’t mean I could just jump into this with her. In fact, if she hadn’t told me about her father, I would probably have said no right there and then. But she had told me about her father. She had no way of knowing, but she had pressed exactly the right button. I couldn’t just turn her away —not like that, not so summarily. I needed time: time to reflect on the story she had told me, and time to reflect on my options. I was thinking that the best option might be to choose a law firm to refer her to – perhaps the firm of Don Quixote and Associates, whose knight-errant partners had the resources and the inclination to tilt at windmills, because that did seem to be the best description of what Sam was asking me to do. In any case, given time, I could reflect on the best way to help her.
‘Would it be possible for you to leave those documents with me for a day or so?’ I asked. ‘I really don’t feel I can advise you properly without knowing much more than I know now. They will be quite safe. Would that be OK?’
‘Sure,’ she replied. ‘I’ll just leave the briefcase with you.’
‘Here’s my card,’ I said. ‘Call me tomorrow afternoon. I’m not saying I’ll have a final answer for you then, but I’ll do my best.’
‘Thank you,’ she said.
She stood and made her way to the door. As she was leaving, a thought came to me. I called her back.
‘Sam, what did you mean when you said it wasn’t only about the money, and you could settle for less?’
She turned and looked me directly in the eye.
‘Kiah, if our family tradition is true, Jacob van Eyck played a large part in making sure that the War of Independence didn’t end in failure. He is an American hero who has never been recognised. The government will erect a statue to Jacob van Eyck in Philadelphia, and the President of the United States will unveil it.’
5
After she had gone, I wheeled the briefcase to my conference table and started to take out the documents she had brought. There were a lot of them. It was just as well the briefcase was on wheels; she couldn’t have carried it very far. The documents were neatly organised in folders of various colours secured with rubber bands. She had written titles in matching coloured inks on the front covers. I arranged the folders into a number of piles, grabbed a pen and a yellow pad, and pulled myself up a chair. They were on my table now, and much as I tried to resist the feeling, it felt as though I had taken possession of them.
There were several large blue files containing newspaper cuttings and magazine articles. Some of them went back a long way. I didn’t go through them all, but there were several from the 1950s, and one or two were even older. The headlines suggested that, from time to time, family members had raised the question of the loan with their congressmen in different parts of the country. I didn’t try to read through everything, so what I am about to say might be a bit unfair. But while the politicians had made a few general comments about what a wonderful thing patriotism is, and what a good guy Jacob must have been, I couldn’t see anything to suggest that any of them had done anything tangible to help the family. Disappointing, but not too hard to understand, I thought. The repayment amount would have been a bit smaller back then, but it would still have been an eye-watering number, and any representative who suggested on the record that the government should repay it would have every reason to fear that it would come back to haunt him if he ever ran for higher office, or even if he stood for re-election. It occurred to me that if I took the case, I might have a similar problem with some judges.
There were numerous slim grey files containing photographs, many of them apparently taken during family reunions. They were of no immediate interest. I would have to go over them with Sam to find out who these people were, and whether we needed to deal with them. Like any group of people, no doubt the van Eyck family had its movers and shakers, some who acted as if they were more important than others, and some who actually were more influential than others. It would be important to know who was who, and what they were likely to think of Sam’s plan to sue the government.
Then there were various red and green files entitled ‘Research’. One of the green files also had the letters ‘LDS’ on the cover. I smiled. Good for Sam. I knew exactly what I was going to find before I even opened it. Kate Banahan, my wills and trusts professor at Georgetown Law, had clued the whole class in to this. There was, she insisted, no finer way to trace the ancestry of anyone in America, as you sometimes have to in a contested will case. Of course, today you can go to your computer and find any number of online sites for tracing your ancestry, but the LDS Church was in the business long before there was any such concept as online.
They go back to the days when records were made using quill pens and ink, and it might take you days, or weeks, to travel to where a record was kept. They started the Family History Library in 1894, and over the years they built up a huge collection of genealogical records from all over the world – registers of births, marriages, and deaths culled from churches and offices and the pages of family bibles and anywhere else they could be found —with the aim of enabling anyone interested in doing so to put together their own family tree. They have their own religious reasons for doing this, of course, which I’m sure make perfect sense to them, but the good news for the rest of us is that they have been open to sharing this vast treasure trove of information with anyone who needs or wants it. Originally, the only way of doing research was to go to the LDS library in Salt Lake City yourself and track down the documents you needed using the traditional card index system. But gradually the library began to travel via local family history centres, and increased its use of microfilm and microfiche, and now, of course, you can go online. The LDS collection remains the biggest and the best.
Sam had started with the first thing I would need to be sure of: that she herself was in fact a descendant of Jacob van Eyck. That wouldn’t have taken her long – it doesn’t take the LDS site long to go back 200 years – and she had printed out all the paperwork. There was no doubt about it. He was her ancestor. And then she had moved on. She had wanted to find out what else the site could tell her about her family. She had printed out a thick stack of records. But I didn’t try to look through them in detail because I was distracted by a handwritten note she had paper-clipped on top of them. The note was short and stark. I didn’t know whether she understood the significance of what she had discovered, but with my legal training it hit me full in the face.
Jacob van Eyck died intestate and without any surviving spouse or children. His three children died in infancy and, therefore, predeceased him. His wife and his
parents also predeceased him. But he was survived by his seven brothers, all of whom had children.
She had circled the number seven twice, which suggested that, even without legal training, she thought this might be important. She was right, I was sure of it. I was assuming that the law in Pennsylvania when Jacob died in 1812 would be the same as it is in Virginia today. That may sound like a big assumption, but the law of Pennsylvania and the law of Virginia both grew from the roots of the English law, and the law of succession moves slowly. It doesn’t get a lot of public attention. No political careers are made by promoting reform of the law of wills or intestacy. So the law of succession evolves mainly by way of judicial interpretation and meanders through time, like a tranquil river feeling its way gently through a flat, peaceful landscape. Unlike some other areas of the law, the law of succession can remain essentially unchanged for centuries.
I would have to call in to the Georgetown Law Library to verify it, but I had no real doubt about what I would find. Jacob had left no will. In the absence of a surviving spouse or child, each of Jacob’s seven (circled twice) brothers would have been entitled to inherit from him in equal shares under the law of intestate succession. As would, in succession, his brothers’ children, and those children’s children, and so on for more than two hundred years. All their descendants alive today would be potential plaintiffs in the action Sam wanted to bring against the government, and there would have to be thousands of them. This would have to be a class action, and if we ever called a meeting of the class we would have to rent somewhere like Yankee Stadium.
I suppose all that should have been obvious to me as soon as she explained the case to me. She couldn’t be the only surviving descendant of Jacob van Eyck. But somehow, my mind had not wandered to the question of how many living members the family tree might have. If all of them were equally entitled to a share of anything we recovered, they would all be entitled to a say in how the case was conducted, and on what terms, if any, it could be settled. I had just unfurled another huge red flag. How long I remained in my reverie before Arlene interrupted me, I’m not sure.