by Peter Murphy
The short, depressing history of the litigation is summarised in my postscript. For those interested in the detailed legal issues, the following technical citation may be of assistance. Lunaas v United States 936 F.2d 1277, 1991 U.S. App. Lexis 13116 (Fed. Cir.1991); rehearing denied 1991 U.S. App. Lexis 18175; Certiorari denied 502 U.S, 1072, 112 S. Ct. 967, 117 L. Ed. 132, 1992 U.S. Lexis 683, 60 U.S.L.W. 3520.
I’m not quite sure when the idea came to me of fictionalising the story. It must have been a year or more after the case had ended. Unless the government has the evidence that we were not allowed to pursue, it is very doubtful that the de Haven claim can now be proved or disproved definitively, but with such a persistent family tradition it remains a tantalising enigma. I thought that if I could write the story in a fictitious way, it might at least draw attention to this obscure man, who may well have been an important American hero, as well as hopefully writing an entertaining novel. But it has been by far the hardest writing project I have ever undertaken.
There are two parts to the story, and both offered major challenges. The contemporary part of the story, the litigation, was short and bleak. I didn’t want the quest to end in failure in the novel, so I set out to imagine various ways in which it could have been successful. The characters and the story had to be very different from those in real life. I make clear now that this is a novel. The characters in the contemporary story are products of my imagination, and none of them bears any relationship or resemblance to the people involved in the real life events. Their personal details are entirely invented.
I am glad to make clear that at no time did the government play any dirty tricks on us, or behave in any of the reprehensible ways I attribute to them in the novel. The lawyers who opposed us from the Justice Department and the Bureau of Public Debt were highly competent and unfailingly courteous; and the only criticism I can make of them is a slight failure of sense of humour when we offered to take Rhode Island in settlement of the claim. I would like to reassure the inhabitants of that State that the offer was made in jest, in the hope – misplaced as it turned out – of lightening up the formal communications a bit.
I would like to record also my admiration for Judge James T. Turner, who heard the case in the Claims Court. Although he found against us, Judge Turner was courteous and helpful. He gave us the whole day for oral argument simply because he found the case so interesting, and he was generous with the compliments he paid us for our research and presentation of the case.
The historical story was even more difficult. The evidence surrounding the loans is circumstantial and incomplete, and the real Jacob de Haven has, more than somewhat, faded into the mists of time. I had the work we had done to prepare our legal briefs, which included: extensive research into Hamilton’s Reports on the Public Credit and the contemporary congressional debates; the legislative history of the establishment and development of the Claims Court and its procedures; and the desperate situation of the army at Valley Forge in the winter of 1777–1778. But constructing a plausible view of what might have happened, and how it could be linked to the contemporary story was not easy, and in the end involved a slight detour into the esoteric.
Both stories underwent at least three manifestations over a period of years, until I finally settled on a version that I hope does some justice to both.
To the extent I have succeeded, I am indebted principally to Thelma and Jo Beth for the reasons I have already stated. I acknowledge also my debt to The History of the De Haven Family, by Howard De Haven Ross, Ph.B. First published on May 1, 1894, this short work continued as far as an illustrated fourth edition published in 1929, and was reprinted as recently as 1986. Alice Yocum Hill, a family member who had written a note for the third edition, honoured me with a personally signed copy of the reprint. Ross’s book is informative and, in its own way, quite charming. It offers some interesting details, but is in the end frustrating to the extent that it fails to offer direct evidence of the material issues. In his preface to the first edition, Ross tells us:
I have of late devoted both time and money at library work making a historical search of old records, documents and papers of family, church and state, and have been engaged in collecting and formulating the family evidence and tradition in connection with the De Haven Revolutionary Loan with all material and facts relative thereto.
But if this research yielded any direct evidence about the making or amount of the loans, Ross omitted to include it in his book. While his work provides a lively and interesting account of the family’s genealogy and some insight into family activity in Jacob’s time, and is not short of documentary references, Ross’s claims about the loans consist essentially of speculation and innuendo. In evidentiary terms, the continuous family tradition is far stronger.
I must also add a word of thanks to my old and dear friend Professor Sherman L. Cohn. Sherman and I worked together for many years in connection with the American Inns of Court. We met first at the Supreme Court in 1983, when Chief Justice Warren Burger appointed us both to a committee charged with designing and putting in place a structure for the organisation, and we served together on its board for many years thereafter, becoming close friends in the process. Sherman, who before his retirement completed more than half a century on the faculty at Georgetown University Law School, is a veritable mine of information about Washington DC, everything from the city’s buildings and infrastructure to its myriad political complexities. Over the years, he has illumined me about almost every aspect of the Capital, and this is not the first of my books to owe a good deal to the insights he has passed on to me.
Lastly, I must mention Alexander Hamilton. I knew very little about Hamilton when I first started work on the de Haven case, but as I read more about him, and studied his writings on the public debt, a clear impression emerged. He was that rare breed, a true statesman. He was a clear-sighted man put in charge of a very murky economic situation. His first concern was to right the ship, to keep the currency afloat and the economy ticking over, while keeping an eye on America’s future credit-worthiness. This makes his attitude to the war loan debt all the more remarkable. He insisted that it must be paid in full. This was, of course, partly for pragmatic reasons to do with reassuring creditors abroad. But it ran much deeper than that. For Hamilton, the war loan debt was a debt for which the faith of the United States had been repeatedly pledged. It was the price of liberty. It was not to be evaded, reneged on, or diminished.
I have, for dramatic effect, conflated various of Hamilton’s writings and statements about the question of whether speculators, who had bought up loan certificates at huge discounts from the indigent after the war, should recover the whole amount due under those certificates. My extract from the congressional debate on February 9, 1790 is similarly a combination of the actual record of the debate, statements made by Hamilton on other occasions, and my own imagination. I make no apology for this. I have every confidence that I have faithfully represented Hamilton’s views about the case of the speculators, which he stubbornly maintained in the face of understandably intense congressional opposition. His position on that issue was crystal clear, and it became the basis for our argument based on Article Six of the Constitution.
Hamilton was a statesman for whom, where there was a conflict, considerations of principle, considerations of honour, must prevail over considerations of pragmatism and expediency. You don’t hear that said about many contemporary politicians. But with every judicial remedy exhausted, the de Haven family’s hopes may now rest on the chance that one such will one day step forward – not to pay the whole amount, which is beyond the ability of any modern government to pay – but to make some meaningful gesture, however modest, that will enable everyone to agree that the price of liberty has, at last, been fully paid.
As ever, I am grateful to Ion Mills and Claire Watts at No Exit Press, for their continued faith in my writing; to my indefatigable agent, Guy Rose; and to my wif
e Chris, who has lived the story and the writing of this book with me, for all her unfailing love and support.
ALSO BY PETER MURPHY
The American Novels
Removal
Test of Resolve
The Ben Schroeder Series
A Higher Duty
A Matter for the Jury
And is there Honey still for Tea?
The Heirs of Owain Glyndwr
Calling down the Storm
One Law for the Rest of Us
Verbal
The Walden Series
Walden of Bermondsey
Judge Walden: Back in Session
Judge Walden: Call the Next Case
About the author
Peter Murphy graduated from Cambridge University and spent a career in the law, as an advocate, teacher, and judge. He has worked both in England and the United States, and served for several years as counsel at the Yugoslavian War Crimes Tribunal in The Hague. He has written nine novels: two political thrillers about the US presidency, Removal and Test of Resolve; seven historical/legal thrillers featuring Ben Schroeder, A Higher Duty, A Matter for the Jury, And Is There Honey Still for Tea?, The Heirs of Owain Glyndwr, Calling Down the Storm, One Law for the Rest of Us and Verbal. He is also the author of three Judge Walden of Bermondsey collections of short stories. He lives in Cambridgeshire.
oldcastlebooks.co.uk/petermurphy
Copyright
First published in 2021
by Oldcastle Books Ltd,
Harpenden, UK
oldcastlebooks.co.uk
@oldcastlebooks
© Peter Murphy, 2021
The right of Peter Murphy to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
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A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events or locales is entirely coincidental.
ISBN
978-0-85730-417-9 (Paperback)
978-0-85730-418-6 (Ebook)
Ebook by Avocet Typeset, Bideford, Devon, EX392BP