The Thirteenth Amendment

by William H. Benson

December 18, 2019

On January 1, 1863, President Abraham Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation, and by it, he declared that “all persons held as slaves” within the rebellious states “are and henceforward shall be free.” Lincoln’s Proclamation freed some 3.1 million slaves within the Confederacy.

Eric Foner, historian and author of a recent book, The Second Founding: How the Civil War and Reconstruction Remade the Constitution, said that Lincoln’s Proclamation was “the largest act of slave emancipation in world history. Never before had so many slaves been declared free.”

Yet, Lincoln’s Proclamation did not include the 800,000 slaves within the five border states—Delaware, Maryland, Kentucky, West Virginia, and Missouri—those states that favored slavery but had refused to join the Southern states’ Confederacy.

Also, Lincoln feared that a future president might issue a proclamation that would undo his, or the courts may declare his unconstitutional.

As a result, some legislators in the Republican-held Congress insisted that now was the time to introduce an amendment to the Constitution that would eradicate and abolish slavery once and for all.

Lincoln came late to the campaign for a thirteenth amendment that would abolish slavery.

Instead, he argued for gradual emancipation, one state at a time, coupled with federal funds granted to slaveowners for the loss of their property, plus colonization, encouraging former slaves to migrate to Africa or Haiti or Central America, an idea that few slaves embraced.

Lincoln understood that to add an amendment to the Constitution was “a complex and cumbersome process.” The last amendment, the twelfth, was added in 1804, sixty years before. Also, the process is spearheaded by Congress and the state governments, with no presidential signature required.

On April 8, 1864, the Senate passed a resolution for a Thirteenth Amendment by a vote of 38 to 6.

Section 1 read, “Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crimes whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.” Thirty-two words to abolish 250 years of “unrequited labor.”

Section 2 read, “Congress shall have the power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation.”

The amendment fails to mention anything about compensation to former slaveowners and nothing about colonization. Instead, this was a legal measure meant to strike at the very heart of slavery.

In June of 1864, the amendment came to a vote in the House, but only 93 Representatives voted for it, not nearly the required two-thirds. It was then that Lincoln began to lobby hard for the amendment.

At one point just days prior to the decisive and close vote on January 31, 1865, Lincoln called two members of the House to the White House, and told them that they must procure two additional votes.

“How?” they asked.

He replied, “I am President of the U.S., clothed with great power. The abolition of slavery by constitutional provision settles the fate, for all coming time, not only of the millions now in bondage, but of unborn millions to come. Those two votes must be procured. I leave it to you to determine how it shall be done, but remember that I am President of the U.S., clothed with immense power.”

The final tally in the House was 119 to 56, two more than the required two-thirds. Wild applause broke out in the House when the votes were counted. Men wept, hugged each other, tossed their hats.

James S. Rollins, of Missouri, decided to vote for it, because Lincoln asked him to, and, as he said, “we can never have an entire peace in this country as long as the institution of slavery remains.”

Steven Spielberg’s 2012 movie, Lincoln, starring Daniel Day Lewis as Lincoln, dramatized this close vote for the Thirteenth Amendment in the House.

On February 1, Lincoln signed his name and wrote the word “Approved,” to the text of the joint resolution that Congress sent him, although his signature was unnecessary. The Thirteenth Amendment is the only ratified amendment that a president ever signed.

As a result, February 1 is celebrated in some communities as Freedom Day.

Then, beginning on February 1, each state took up the issue of ratification. Illinois ratified the amendment first, and in early December of 1865, Georgia voted to ratify it, the last of the necessary 27 states to do so.

On December 18, 1865, Secretary of State William Seward certified that the Thirteenth Amendment is now a part of the Constitution. Eric Foner though commented that, although the day is important in U.S. history, “December 18 has long been forgotten.” But slavery in the United States was gone.

Next time in these pages: the Fourteenth Amendment.

Edward Snowden
by William H. Benson
November 28, 2019

     Last time in these pages, I discussed John Doe, an employee at Mossack Fonseca, who revealed the extent of that Panamanian legal firm’s global enterprise to shelter its clients from paying income taxes.

     Whistle blowers, like John Doe, often make front page news, as much a motivating factor as “doing the right thing.” Yet, often they face severe retribution, even time in prison.

     A list of the more prominent whistle blowers of past decades include: Daniel Ellsberg, W. Mark Felt, Frank Snepp, Karen Silkwood, Frank Serpico, Linda Tripp, Mark Holder, Russ Tice, Bradley / Chelsea Manning, and Julian Assange.

     On September 5, 2018, an “Anonymous” White House official published an essay in the “New York Times,” saying, “The dilemma is that many of the senior officials in Trump’s own administration are working diligently from within to frustrate parts of his agenda and his worst inclinations.”

     Just weeks ago, that same “Anonymous” published his / her book entitled “A Warning,” and in it repeated the same charge, and pleaded with American voters “not to renew their contract with Trump.”

     Then, on August 12, 2019, a CIA analyst learned of Donald Trump’s July 25 phone call to Ukraine’s highest official. Once he or she blew the whistle, Congress started down the road of impeachment.

     My vote though for most notorious of all whistleblowers this century goes to Edward Snowden.

     A young man in his late twenties, who worked in Hawaii in 2013, as a high tech / computer wizard / contractor for the National Security Agency, Snowden grew alarmed when he learned details of the NSA’s massive surveillance of American citizens, as well as of citizens of other countries.

     Snowden learned that after 9-11, the NSA had developed systems that could capture and store all phone calls, text messages, and e-mails for almost every human being across the globe. He came to believe that it was wrong for the Federal government to invade an individual’s privacy to that degree.

     Snowden decided he would blow the whistle on the NSA’s “warrantless surveillance of the U.S. population,” plus he decided to submit thousands of electronic documents that he stole from the NSA and gave to three journalists, whom he met in Hong Kong on May 23, 2013.

     If Snowden would have just blown the whistle, and not stolen and leaked the documents, he would have avoided most of the legal troubles he now faces.

     Former U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder later said, that Snowden performed a “public service by triggering a debate over surveillance techniques, but still he must pay a penalty for illegally leaking a trove of classified intelligence documents.”

     On June 21, 2013, Snowden turned thirty. Two days later he flew from Hong Kong to Moscow, but once there Russian officials told him that his U.S. passport was invalid, and that he could not leave. For forty days he lived at Moscow’s airport, but then officials granted Snowden asylum in Russia.

      In September of this year, Snowden published his memoir, “Permanent Record,” and in its pages he says that he and his long-time girlfriend, Lindsay Mills, whom he married in 2017, at a courthouse, have learned to adapt to life in Russia, though cut off from family and friends in the U.S.

     He admits that he would like to return to the U.S., but he knows that Federal government officials would prosecute him, and that he would most likely receive a lengthy prison sentence, Chelsea Manning and Julian Assange’s current fate.

     Snowden’s term of asylum in Russia will terminate in 2020, but he is confident that Russian officials will extend it for an additional three years.

     A debate over Snowden has now come to the forefront.

     Snowden claims that his release of classified documents to journalists, who then made them public six years ago, has “harmed no one and put no one’s lives at risk.” Some might agree, but Deputy Director at the NSA, Richard Ledgett, says Snowden’s statement “is categorically untrue.”

     NSA Director Adm. Michael Rogers says that “Snowden’s surveillance leaks have had a ‘material impact’ on the agency’s ability to prevent or detect a terrorist’s plot.”

     Snowden says in his book, “Permanent Record,” that “whistle blowers” and “leaks” are nautical terms. “Ships spring leaks, and when steam replaced wind for propulsion, operators would blow a steam whistle at sea to signal intentions.” He says that some languages use a word that means “snitch.”

     One other interesting detail. In 2015, Daniel Ellsberg flew to Moscow to meet Edward Snowden.

     The two most well-known whistle blowers over the past fifty years now belong to the Freedom of the Press Foundation, an organization that Ellsberg co-founded. Snowden has served as the non-profit’s president since early 2016, almost four years now.

John Doe and Mossack Fonseca

by William H. Benson

November 14, 2019

     Three weeks ago, I happened to watch an interesting movie, “The Laundromat,” starring Meryl Streep. The movie, I discovered, is not about washing and drying clothes, but rather it is about washing ill-gotten profits into clean money, and hiding assets in offshore companies to evade taxes.

     Based on actual events, the movie showcases two villains: Jüregen Mossack and Ramón Fonseca, founders of a Panamanian legal firm, Mossack Fonseca, with branches in thirty-five countries, that specialized in setting up offshore companies for wealthy individuals, politicians, and elected officials.

     Robert Palmer of Global Witness compared the baffling process of hiding assets in offshore companies to a Russian doll. “One company is hidden inside another, which is hidden in another, and so on, until it becomes impossible for a government to identify the actual person, and demand that he or she pay the taxes owed.”

     For example, a sports star can put his name’s rights into a series of offshore company to avoid taxes.

     The Panama Papers first came to light months after a Mossack Fonseca employee, code-named John Doe, sent an email in late 2015, to two reporters at a German newspaper, “Süddeutsche Zietung,” and asked, “Interested in data? I’m happy to share.”

     John Doe had somehow managed to copy every email, text document, image, and file, since 1977, from Mossack Fonseca’s clients, a total of 11.5 million documents, the largest cache of leaked documents ever in human history.

    John Doe sent this treasure trove to the two German reporters, who then decided to pass it on to a Washington D.C.-based organization, the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists.

     Gerard Ryle, an official at the ICIJ, spoke on Ted Talk in June 2016, and explained that his organization’s first decision was to share the information with other journalists, something investigative reporters are loathe to do.

     The ICIJ invited 367 journalists from nearly 100 media organizations in 25 language groups across the globe to participate in the massive research. They allowed “native eyes to look at native names.” For example, Nigerians would look at the documents that pertained to Nigeria.

     The ICIJ also asked all journalists to sit on their stories for months, also something that investigative reporters are loathe to do, but then they agreed to release their stories on the same day, April 3, 2016.

     The ICIJ built a virtual newsroom, housed it in a safe and secure site, and then made the documents searchable and readable for the journalists, who went to work conducting research in courthouses, quizzing people, and building their accounts of tax evasion.

     Then, on April 3, 2016, at 8:00 p.m., German time, in dozens of newspapers across the globe, the ICIJ’s reporters published their stories simultaneously. As a result, “The Panama Papers exposed the rich and powerful as people who can hide vast amounts of their assets in offshore accounts.”

     Gerard Ryle of ICIJ explained that “Iceland’s prime minister owned an interest in a secret offshore company, named Wintris, Inc., that in turn had ownership in Iceland’s banks, the very issue of corruption that Iceland’s voters had elected him to fight and stamp out.”

     Once that story broke, Iceland’s prime minister resigned, the first of numerous resignations, and every month since then, stories of bringing people to justice because of the Panama Papers have appeared in newspapers.

     As of this date, governments have clawed back a total of $1.2 billion in taxes owed but not paid.

     In December of 2018, prosecutors  in the United States announced criminal charges against four men: “Ramses Owens and Dirk Brauer, former senior employees of Mossack Fonseca; Richard Gaffey, a Boston-based accountant; and Harald Joachim Vonder Goltz, a former U. S. taxpayer. All were charged with tax evasion, wire fraud, and money laundering.” Trial is set for January 2020.

     John Doe, as far as I know, remains unknown, but his devastating leak sunk Mossack Fonseca. The legal firm closed its doors in 2017. Reporters have quizzed him about his motivation, and he says,

     “ I decided to expose Mossack Fonseca because I thought its founders, employees, and clients should answer for their roles in these crimes, only some of which have come to light thus far. It will take years, possible decades, for the full extent of the firm’s sordid acts to become know.”

     Because John Doe blew a whistle and leaked his company’s once-private client files to the public, he lost his job, but prosecutors have brought dozens, if not hundreds, of people to justice for evading taxes and laundering dirty money. The world needs more whistle-blowers, like John Doe.

Obituary for Harold Bloom

by William H. Benson

October 31, 2019

     Harold Bloom passed away on Monday, October 14, at the age of eighty-nine, leaving behind his wife Jeanne, and his two sons, David and Daniel.

     Bloom also leaves behind thousands of awe-inspired students, for Bloom taught at Yale University, in its English department, for sixty plus years, ever since the year that he received his doctorate in English there, in 1955. He taught his last class on Thursday, October 10. 

     One colleague observed, “There’s always a pack of people sitting around him to see if any bread or fishes are going to be handed out.” Another said, “Beautiful, brilliant students surrounded him. He was a vortex of power and intellectual charisma.”

     He also leaves behind a number of impressed readers who bought his forty odd books, but few could understand the heavy ideas contained therein. His books though brought him fame as the country’s leading literary critic, and substantial wealth.

     Harold’s parents, William and Paula, migrated to America after World War I. The Holocaust consumed the unfortunate relatives who remained behind in Odessa, Russia.

     Harold was the youngest of five children, three older sisters and an older brother. When five years old, one of Harold’s older sisters took him to the East Bronx library, and there he discovered Hart Crane, W. H. Auden, and T. S. Eliot. Bloom’s ability to memorize lines of poetry amazed his family.

     Soon, he discovered the classics, Homer and Plutarch and Ovid, as well as the English Romantic poets. He idolized Chaucer, Cervantes, Emerson, Freud, and Shakespeare for the rest of his life, and memorized sizable portions of their works, that he would recite to his awe-struck students.

     Harold and Jeanne lived in “the same rambling nineteenth-century brown-shingled house in New Haven, Connecticut,” for sixty plus years, a house that was “loaded with thousands of books.”

     Bloom displayed an intriguing writing style, bombastic, arrogant, filled with exaggerations, but most wise and perceptive. An observer said, “It is impossible to read deeply in Bloom without him flooring you with feeling.” Indeed!

     Certain works of literature captivated him. He said, “Walt Whitman overwhelms me, possesses me, as only a few others—Dante, Shakespeare, Milton—consistently flooding my entire being.”

     He did not write fiction. Instead, he wrote about the fiction that others had written.

     He wrote, “A literary work is not a social document to be read for its political or historical content, but is to be enjoyed above all for the aesthetic pleasure it brings. Not to worship the great books, but to prize the astonishing mystery of creative genius.”

     His books’ titles explained what he intended to explore within. For example, Genius: A Mosaic of One Hundred Exemplary Creative Minds; Where Wisdom Shall Be Found; How to Read and Why; and The Western Canon: The Books and School of the Ages.

     Bloom’s most profound book he published in 1992, and entitled it, The American Religion: The Emergence of the Post-Christian Nation. In it, he announced that for now he was a religious critic, and that he would apply rules of literary criticism to each of several Protestant Christian denominations.

     Bloom wrote, “A nation obsessed with religion rather desperately needs a religious criticism.” He then dared to critique, each in turn, the Pentecostals, the Southern Baptists, the Mormons, and others.

     He said, “I write both to blame and to praise the American Religion,” and “Religious criticism needs to enter that area, which lies between theology and spiritual experience.”

     Bloom agreed that the world needs literary critics to keep alive the works of writers from the distant past, and then to pass their thoughts and their words on to other eager young students.

     Of all Bloom’s bold statements, one that I find most intriguing is, “Like Shakespeare, Chekhov cannot be called either a believer or a skeptic; they are too large for such a categorization.”    

     Yet, Bloom enjoyed quoting others. For example, centuries ago, Rabbi Tarphon would say, “It is not necessary for you to complete the work, but neither are you free to desist from it.”

     And from Chaucer’s “The Knight’s Tale,” Bloom quoted, “It is a good thing for a man to bear himself with equanimity, for one is constantly keeping appointments one never made.”

     One writer who mentioned Bloom’s passing said, “For Bloom, the worst part about death was surely that he could not take a book with him.”

Ian Urbina’s “The Outlaw Ocean”

by William H. Benson

October 17, 2019

     A month ago, I read a new book, fascinating and eye-opening, entitled, The Outlaw Ocean: Journeys Across the Last Untamed Frontier.

     It’s author, Ian Urbina, first explains in his “Introduction,” that he quit writing his dissertation in history at the University of Chicago in 2003, to take a job as a journalist at the New York Times.

     There, at the Times he said, he “learned how to be a reporter.” Often, his supervisors cautioned him, “Tell stories, don’t write articles.”

     In 2014, he pitched an idea for a series of articles to his editor then, Rebecca Corbett, about the rampant lawlessness that exists on the high seas. She “nudged him toward a focus more on the people than on the fish, delving more into human rights and labor concerns,” than on environmental issues.

     Urbina’s first article appeared in the Times in July of 2015, and “another dozen or so pieces” followed. In January of 2017, he departed the Times to expand his articles into a book.

     Each of his fifteen chapters stands alone. He said, “I organized the chapters as a series of essays, confident that readers would connect the dots.”

     In the “Introduction,” he reveals the numbers of workers required to meet the world’s growing appetite for ocean fish, and also to move freight. “Over 56 million people globally work at sea on fishing boats, and another 1.6 million work on freighters, tankers, and other types of merchant vessels.”

     Yet, once those workers sail away from the shore, they leave the security of land’s rules and laws. “For all its breathtaking beauty, the ocean is also a dystopian place, home to dark inhumanities. The rule of law, so solid on land, is fluid at sea, if it’s to be found at all.”

     He says, “There is no shortage of laws governing the seas. The real problem is lax enforcement.” As a result, “one of every five fish that ends up on a dinner plate is caught illegally.”

     In Chapter 1, Urbina describes how a single ship, the Bob Barker, that belonged to “Sea Shepard,” an organization founded to halt illegal fishing, pursued a single Nigerian fishing vessel, the Thunder, “across more than 11,550 nautical miles, three oceans, and two seas,” for 110 days in early 2015, until the Thunder‘s captain scuttled the ship and caused it to sink.

     What was the crew’s crime? Poaching tooth-fish in the cold waters south of Chile. A marketing expert renamed the fish, once caught, “Chilean Sea Bass,” and people loved to eat it.    

     In Chapter 5, Urbina tells of Rebecca Gomperts, a Dutch doctor, who “sails the world in a sloop,” offering safe abortions near countries where laws make them illegal. She will position her ship more than twelve miles offshore, safe in international waters. 

     Gomperts’s sloop flies Austria’s flag, where abortions are legal, but the women who seek her help live in Guatemala, Ireland, Poland, and Morocco, places where lawmakers have criminalized abortions.

Urbina writes, “Few people are as adept at capitalizing on such loopholes in maritime law as Rebecca.”

     In Chapter 6, Urbina describes the methods that Thailand’s fishing captains resort to in order to entice sufficient numbers of laborers to work on their vessels. They offer loans to Cambodian men to pay for their transport to Thailand, by promising them “work in construction in Thailand.”

     But the captains fail to tell the Cambodians that they will work at sea, that the job lasts for months at a time, and that they will not ever earn enough to pay off their loan. Soon, the Cambodians realize they are stuck in bondage, imprisoned at sea, and “trapped in a cycle of debt slavery.”

     Urbina writes, “Slavery is a harsh reality, but this sort of bondage is a global blindspot, because governments, companies, and consumers either do not know it occurs, or, when they do, prefer to look the other way.”

     Urbina describes the brutality on board a Thai fishing vessel. “Crew members are routinely threatened and beaten, or even executed.” The fishing captains “lock workers behind chained doors for weeks or months, with little freshwater or food, or work them eighteen hours a day hauling in fish.”

Thomas Hobbes, the English philosopher, wrote in his poem, Leviathan, that life outside of society would become “solitary, poor, nasty, and brutish.” On a ship, far from shore, “our darkest impulses emerge,” despite “our most noble intentions, to establish a fair and just rule of law. Neither has any chance against the power of the outlaw ocean.”