Speaker 1: Also media.
Speaker 2: Ah boy, it sure is cold in here, because we're
Speaker 2: doing a cold open, prop. How do you feel about
Speaker 2: cold opens?
Speaker 3: Hey? Man, you know I don't like being cold at all,
Speaker 3: but you know, opening is great.
Speaker 4: How many you've done that bit? How many times are
Speaker 4: you gonna do it?
Speaker 3: How many times I've done.
Speaker 2: I don't know that I've done that exact bit.
Speaker 4: Oh you have, because I remember being like fair Fair,
Speaker 4: I remember being.
Speaker 2: With our good friend prop.
Speaker 3: You know, hey, I'll give you a cold opening question. Okay, yeah, okay,
Speaker 3: what's the what's what's the worst thing you love?
Speaker 1: What's the worst thing?
Speaker 2: Man? I love so many bad things.
Speaker 3: I tell you it is right now. It's harsh. Chemical
Speaker 3: cleaning products.
Speaker 2: Oh yeah, yeah, some of that. Yeah, those big those
Speaker 2: big jugs of green ship that Oh my god.
Speaker 3: Yeah yeah, give oh yeah, I need to kind of
Speaker 3: make like nerve gas when I cleaned the bathroom.
Speaker 2: Yeah that's right, that's right. Oh yeah, I love that
Speaker 2: kind of shit.
Speaker 4: Over overpriced skin care products sharp, Oh my god.
Speaker 2: I like driving, which is killing everyone, but I really
Speaker 2: enjoy it. So who's to say if it's bad or not?
Speaker 2: Scientists scientists speaking of scientists, Most scientists will agree that
Speaker 2: the Revolutionary War happened. Why would they disagree with that?
Speaker 2: It definitely did. I was going to do speaking of
Speaker 2: cold opens Valley Forge pretty cold, but also, you know,
Speaker 2: the revolution lasted years, so I assume it was warm
Speaker 2: for periods. Validy Forge is just like, you know, that's
Speaker 2: one of the high points.
Speaker 3: It's one of the moments.
Speaker 2: Yeah. A lot of freezing cold colonial militia, Yeah, keeps
Speaker 2: me west. Yeah. That boat that they had to cross
Speaker 2: and to kill some Hessians. A lot of Hessian killing
Speaker 2: in early American history. Yeah. Anyway, Thomas Jefferson is not
Speaker 2: around for a lot of that. He's involved with the
Speaker 2: revolution obviously, but he's a lover, not a fighter, not
Speaker 2: really a lover even he's a guy who likes to
Speaker 2: write things.
Speaker 3: Not like, oh no, man, he's not really a lover either,
Speaker 3: pretty sigma.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, very much so. He's the John Wick of
Speaker 2: writing essays. Now, as the Revolutionary War starts to pick
Speaker 2: up speed, most of the prominent figures urging rebellion held
Speaker 2: a Continental Congress. Jefferson was not enough of like a
Speaker 2: front burner kind of dude to get elected to that
Speaker 2: in seventeen seventy four, but the next year, he gets
Speaker 2: appointed as an alternate for another guy in the Second
Speaker 2: Continental Congress, and that guy wounds up having to bounce,
Speaker 2: which is how the future president first gets into Congress.
Speaker 2: The fighting against Great Britain had just begun, and Washington
Speaker 2: was chosen for the commander of the American forces, and
Speaker 2: he's you know, Jefferson soon gets elected to be in
Speaker 2: Congress properly, and he serves through the opening years of
Speaker 2: the war, returning home in seventeen seventy six to deal
Speaker 2: with the death of his mother, about whom he writes nothing.
Speaker 2: So he is, you know, from this point on a
Speaker 2: figure in the leadership of the revolution, but not yet
Speaker 2: through he kind of gets in. It's still a lot
Speaker 2: of his dad's like reputation that kind of secures him
Speaker 2: this position. Ellis and American Sphinx describes him as entering
Speaker 2: national affairs by the side door, his main claim to
Speaker 2: fame in these early years. Yeah, that's an interesting way
Speaker 2: to Yeah. The kind of the first thing he does
Speaker 2: that really gets him some attention on his own merits
Speaker 2: is that in seventeen seventy four he kind of almost
Speaker 2: accidentally publishes a pamphlet called a Summary View of the
Speaker 2: rights of British America. This had been written as a
Speaker 2: set of instructions for the Virginia delegation to the First
Speaker 2: Continental Congress, right because he's in He's held office in Virginia,
Speaker 2: Virginia sending people to the First Continental Congress, which he
Speaker 2: is not at, and he writes some instructions for how
Speaker 2: they should what lines they should hold to in this
Speaker 2: kind of debate over what posture delegates should take towards
Speaker 2: Great Britain, and Jefferson urges them to take the most
Speaker 2: radical course in writing, arguing that again Parliament has no
Speaker 2: right to control or tax the colonies. But he doesn't
Speaker 2: actually have the stones to get up in front of
Speaker 2: everybody and argue his point, so he plays sick when
Speaker 2: the debate in Virginia over this goes down, and this
Speaker 2: track that he writes gets published later by his friends
Speaker 2: who like basically are like, well, this is a good
Speaker 2: thing you've written, and we agree with it, so we're
Speaker 2: just going to put this out there, even though you
Speaker 2: decided to play hooky when it was time to stand
Speaker 2: up for it. Lame uh huh, that's TJ. Baby. Now
Speaker 2: there's a lot to criticize about Jefferson. But we see
Speaker 2: in this document the skill with word play that's going
Speaker 2: to become evident to the world when the Declaration of
Speaker 2: Independence gets published. But here's a sample line from this
Speaker 2: first pamphlet. Single acts of tyranny may be ascribed to
Speaker 2: the accidental opinion of the day, But a series of
Speaker 2: oppressions begun at a distinguished period and pursued unalterably through
Speaker 2: every change of ministers too plainly prove a deliberate, systematical
Speaker 2: plan of reducing us to slavery. Now, hmm, that's interesting
Speaker 2: that that's how he is. That's what he says that
Speaker 2: England is trying to do to them, and he part
Speaker 2: of kind of making England into the heel is that
Speaker 2: he decides to make to blame them for the whole
Speaker 2: state of slavery in the colonies. This is where Jefferson's
Speaker 2: going to publish his first kind of statements against slavery
Speaker 2: that are under his own name, arguing that not only
Speaker 2: should the slave trade be stopped, but the new government
Speaker 2: should push for the enfranchisement of the slaves that we have.
Speaker 2: And he's arguing basically that like the king started the
Speaker 2: slave trade, that's yah, yeah, yeah. He like we we
Speaker 2: like it's almost talking about him, like he was like
Speaker 2: a drug dealer who came in. Like, look, we can't
Speaker 2: be blamed for getting hooked on this stuff. Maybe one's
Speaker 2: pushing it, you know.
Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, we were born into this asylum, guys. Yeah,
Speaker 3: and yeah, that's why I was like, dude, it's the
Speaker 3: King Thomas cognitive dissonance. Jefferson.
Speaker 2: Oh yeah, yeah, yeah, he's the best.
Speaker 3: He is the best. Added to be, like, well, that's
Speaker 3: like slavery.
Speaker 2: Wait a minute, he's got a hole between his course
Speaker 2: corpus colossum, right, like his brain has just two rattling
Speaker 2: separate albs.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 2: Jefferson's writing gets shared widely, including by the most prominent
Speaker 2: leaders of the revolution, but he himself is going to
Speaker 2: initially be a marginal figure even after he enters Congress,
Speaker 2: for the simple fact that he sucks at public speaking
Speaker 2: and he has no heart for argument. While he awkwardly,
Speaker 2: almost accidentally stumbles into revolutionary leadership, he devoted most of
Speaker 2: his mental efforts to crafting his inherited home Monticello, into
Speaker 2: a functioning vision of the agrarian ideal that he had
Speaker 2: inherited in somewhat mutated form. From Romans like Cato and
Speaker 2: Master of the Mountain, Henry Winsack writes, in the winter
Speaker 2: of seventeen seventy four, Jefferson started his farm book, the
Speaker 2: Plantation Ledger, he would keep until his death, writing out
Speaker 2: a census of the forty five slaves he received from
Speaker 2: his parents, one hundred and thirty five from the Whales estate,
Speaker 2: and the five he had purchased he owned the future.
Speaker 2: The census included the astonishing total of seventy nine children
Speaker 2: under the age of fourteen. About forty percent of Jefferson's
Speaker 2: slaves were children. Jefferson's architectural papers contain an intriguing document,
Speaker 2: probably dating to the mid seventeen seventies, when the Monticello
Speaker 2: household was taking shape. Jefferson sketched out plans for a
Speaker 2: row of substantial, dignified Neo classical houses with stone or
Speaker 2: brick hearths and ample windows for George and his family
Speaker 2: and Betty Hemmings and her family. The enslaved people of
Speaker 2: Monticello were nearly all members of a couple of different
Speaker 2: slave families, including the Hemmingses and the Evanses, from whom
Speaker 2: we get Jupiter. Jupiter is and Evans. They were an
Speaker 2: inheritance from his wife's side of the family, and also
Speaker 2: literally his wife's side of the family, because Martha's dad
Speaker 2: has had as many as six children with the matriarch
Speaker 2: of the family, Betty from American Sphinks quote, it was
Speaker 2: an open secret within the slave community at Monticello that
Speaker 2: the privileged status enjoyed by the Hemmings Face family it
Speaker 2: derived from its mixed blood. Several of Betty's children, perhaps
Speaker 2: as many as six, had most probably been fathered by
Speaker 2: John Wales. In the literal, not just figurative sense of
Speaker 2: the term, they were part of Jefferson's extended family. All
Speaker 2: the slaves he eventually freed were hemmings Is, including Robert
Speaker 2: and James in seventeen ninety four and seventeen ninety six, respectively.
Speaker 2: If what struck the other slaves at Monticello was the
Speaker 2: quasi independent character of the Hemmings clan with its blood
Speaker 2: claim on Jefferson's paternal instincts, what most visitors tended to
Speaker 2: notice was their color. Yeah, and what Ellis means here
Speaker 2: is that the Hemmings family's very light skinned. Some of
Speaker 2: them are described as looking white, a fact that has
Speaker 2: suggested for some time that Thomas Jefferson continued his father
Speaker 2: in law's tradition, and he definitely did. By the way,
Speaker 2: we will be talking about that later because that really
Speaker 2: becomes a factor when he's in France. In factual terms,
Speaker 2: there's no other way to describe this than as rape
Speaker 2: because Betty and Sally Hemings could not say no. That said,
Speaker 2: we don't know how the Hemmings women themselves would have
Speaker 2: talked about what happened to them because they weren't allowed
Speaker 2: to r yeah exactly, yeah, yeah, or at least like
Speaker 2: they didn't. You know, it's a black box to us, right,
Speaker 2: like we just don't have And that's part of kind
Speaker 2: of where I see some of like the evil of this,
Speaker 2: right is in that fact.
Speaker 3: Yeah, and the subsequential view of like like I'm tying
Speaker 3: this all to like the subsequent view of like black
Speaker 3: masculinity and like you know, and how they were played
Speaker 3: in like coon songs and like menstrual shows that like
Speaker 3: we were known for having just this amazing sexual prowess
Speaker 3: that like had to be curved and while at the
Speaker 3: same time being lazy, dumb, and docile, while at the
Speaker 3: same time being incredibly strong and powerful man.
Speaker 2: Yeah, like most historians that I've read, you know, and
Speaker 2: this has started to change, thankfully because of some stuff
Speaker 2: that came out in the late nineties, but you know,
Speaker 2: even up until then, and Ellis's book comes out in
Speaker 2: ninety six, which is like to cut ahead a little bit,
Speaker 2: two years before DNA evidence makes it very clear what
Speaker 2: Jefferson was doing with Sudah. There was, so he writes
Speaker 2: Americans thinks in a period of time where there's actual
Speaker 2: debate over whether or not this happened between historians, And
Speaker 2: as a result, Ellis cuts Jefferson more slack for his
Speaker 2: behavior than I think is reasonable. But he does make
Speaker 2: a point to outlight one of the more fucked up
Speaker 2: dimensions of the situation at Monticello, which I had not
Speaker 2: really thought about as much before I read his book.
Speaker 2: Jefferson had so designed his slave community that his most
Speaker 2: frequent interactions occurred with African Americans who were not treated
Speaker 2: like full fledged slaves, and who did not even look
Speaker 2: like full blooded Africans because in fact they were not
Speaker 2: in terms of daily encounters and routinized interactions. His sense
Speaker 2: of himself as less of a slave master than a
Speaker 2: paternalistic employer and guardian received constant reinforcement.
Speaker 3: Yeah, and stoking the Still there's still an issue of
Speaker 3: fair skin and dark skin black people still an issue,
Speaker 3: you know, Yeah, yeah it is.
Speaker 2: And I I mean Jefferson you can almost see as
Speaker 2: like he's certainly not alone, but certain but one of
Speaker 2: the founders of that, like that conflict. Yeah, and it's
Speaker 2: it exists. His contribution to that exists so that he
Speaker 2: can see himself not as a guy who owns people
Speaker 2: and holds them in brutal bondage, but as like I'm
Speaker 2: like the patriarch of the family, you know. I mean, well,
Speaker 2: everybody's got a job, you know, you'll get it, come
Speaker 2: with come work for Uncle Tom, you know.
Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, you know, I mean it's like.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I'll take care of you. Yeah.
Speaker 3: The word slave is a little crass, you know, It's
Speaker 3: just it's crass. Like we prefer family, right, community.
Speaker 2: We're all a family here at Manticello. Yeah. If you
Speaker 2: think of if you watch that show the Bear, he's
Speaker 2: like the he's like the uncle character who has he's
Speaker 2: always bailing him out, right, Like that's how he wants
Speaker 2: to be seen, you know. Yeah, And again this goes
Speaker 2: back to this, this talent he has for crafting reality
Speaker 2: for himself that differs from what you might say is objective,
Speaker 2: factual reality, but that you know, he is able to
Speaker 2: certainly make real for himself a lot of the time,
Speaker 2: and he's also able to like extend through history. Like
Speaker 2: a lot of people buy this vision that he puts out.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I better like just like the just like the
Speaker 3: Jefferson Bible. It's like, let me just let me just
Speaker 3: remove the shit.
Speaker 2: Out makes this Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly, yeah yeah. Between
Speaker 2: Monticello and Philadelphia, Thomas Jefferson spent the mid seventeen seventies
Speaker 2: flitting between the gritty real world of war and revolution
Speaker 2: and his utopian fantasies. I am convinced he would have
Speaker 2: been a podcaster today because he hated talking in front
Speaker 2: of people, but he loved going on deep dives through
Speaker 2: history books and then writing weird political rants inspired by
Speaker 2: the experiences. In seventeen seventy five, the book he read
Speaker 2: was Diverse Voyages by a guy named Richard hackelyut hackelut hackelute. Yeah, Okay,
Speaker 2: it's the weird name. JK. L Uyt. Written in eighteen
Speaker 2: fifty two, This is a set of three tracts that
Speaker 2: were probably published separately at first going into the history
Speaker 2: of European exploration of the Americas. Hey, everyone, Robert here,
Speaker 2: I completely misspoke. Obviously eighteen fifties as well, after Jomas
Speaker 2: Jefferson's death. Richard Hackelut's Diverse Voyages was written in fifteen
Speaker 2: eighty two, which makes a lot more sense in context.
Speaker 3: Sorry.
Speaker 2: Hackeleute, who's the first professor of modern geography at Oxford,
Speaker 2: was an early ideological advocate of English colonial expansion. He
Speaker 2: was essentially an early propagandist for British imperialism. Despite this,
Speaker 2: Jefferson loved him because his idiosyncratic reading of Hackeliut was
Speaker 2: that the original colonists from England had traveled to the
Speaker 2: Americas without help from the British government. Thus the colonies
Speaker 2: from the beginning represented a clean break with the mother country,
Speaker 2: and the English clean in Parliament, had no right to
Speaker 2: govern them. America was the creation of this almost mythic
Speaker 2: independent group of Saxon explorers, not a colonial project of
Speaker 2: Great Britain.
Speaker 3: Oh okay, yeah, yeah, so it's like well not well, y'all, ay,
Speaker 3: that's right, y'all ain't pay for us to come, and
Speaker 3: we just kind of came, so like you don't get
Speaker 3: to Yeah, nah, yeah, that is that is mythology, bro.
Speaker 2: It is revisionist history, we might say in modern terms. Yeah, right, yes,
Speaker 2: And it's one of those things nobody really buys this
Speaker 2: except for his old mentor mister with right. He's like, yeah,
Speaker 2: you've got it, Tom, but he's kind of like he's
Speaker 2: like a little bit of a crank, right yeah. Now,
Speaker 2: right around the same time to John Adams is kind
Speaker 2: of going to do his own version of like searching
Speaker 2: back through the history to look at like how was
Speaker 2: the how were the colonies, you know, colonized initially, and
Speaker 2: like how how much right does Great Britain have to
Speaker 2: government tax us? And his work is done, I mean,
Speaker 2: you wouldn't call this, by our standards perfect history, but
Speaker 2: it's done with more rigor than Jefferson's's, right, you might
Speaker 2: equivocate Jefferson's work here to almost like sovereign citizen shit, right, Yeah.
Speaker 2: And the main reason it's not seen that way, even
Speaker 2: though it is a historical is that his ultimate contention,
Speaker 2: which is that the colony should be independent, was not
Speaker 2: controversial among the people who win. Right, But it is
Speaker 2: important to see that he is just inventing history here
Speaker 2: for the purpose of political experience.
Speaker 3: Right because Yeah, because he could argue that, like, hey, listen,
Speaker 3: from Britain's perspective, they're saying this, this, and this. He's like,
Speaker 3: from our perspective, he is what we was actually doing.
Speaker 3: So he can make that argument as like, yeah, I'm
Speaker 3: not just making this up from out the thin air,
Speaker 3: which is kind of was, but like he could be like, well, no,
Speaker 3: like that's how they viewed it. Their view is incorrect.
Speaker 3: We knew what we was doing and they had a
Speaker 3: limited perspective. I know what we was doing, you know,
Speaker 3: And you could make that again, and it's because we,
Speaker 3: like you said, we've already they've already accepted the point.
Speaker 3: The point is we supposed to be.
Speaker 2: We got to get out of here. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Speaker 3: Who's homeboy's name? I forget how he's.
Speaker 2: Name Hackle yet, huh Hackle yet?
Speaker 3: Maybe that's him.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 3: Yeah, there was one homeboy that was like and they
Speaker 3: ended up burning his books. God, what is his name?
Speaker 2: Oh you're talking about Thomas Pain.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 2: It was just like, yeah, Pain is dope.
Speaker 3: Yeah, he was like, I'm here for money. I don't understand, Like,
Speaker 3: I don't know about the pirits and ship. I don't
Speaker 3: understand about this independent ship. Y'all doing this, y'all doing
Speaker 3: the Natives wrong. They seem to be nothing like what
Speaker 3: y'all said. I came to make some money.
Speaker 2: I don't know.
Speaker 3: Me and homies came for money. I don't understand what
Speaker 3: the rest of y'all is doing. Yeah, and they burnt
Speaker 3: his books. Boy, it was oh yeah, I mean, I'll
Speaker 3: be telling everybody.
Speaker 2: Jefferson's actually gonna it's weird because like Pain is much
Speaker 2: more of a radical than Jefferson and is, by the way,
Speaker 2: an abolitionist. Yeah, Jefferson's gonna be getting a lot of
Speaker 2: trouble later in his career for going to bat for
Speaker 2: Thomas Payin after on his Pain loses a lot of
Speaker 2: his support because he's, I mean, he's too much of
Speaker 2: a radical. He's like very critical of Christianity, Yeah, in
Speaker 2: ways that are pretty modern actually, yeah, exactly his views.
Speaker 3: Like yeah, man, at some point, at some point we
Speaker 3: got I figure out how to do a deep dive
Speaker 3: on him.
Speaker 2: Because he was just fascinating thing.
Speaker 3: Yeah, Like y'all tripping like I don't understand, like you
Speaker 3: supposed to be the ones you supposed to be to
Speaker 3: God believers, like I don't believe none of that. And
Speaker 3: look how you treat these people that Yeah, weird to me.
Speaker 2: He's like the most reasonable man in the seventeen hundreds,
Speaker 2: yeah right, or at least the most reasonable white guy
Speaker 2: in the seventeen yeh yeah. Yeah. So Jefferson's skill and
Speaker 2: making up bullshit to justify his beliefs after the fact
Speaker 2: would reach its apex with the Declaration of Independence and
Speaker 2: prop we are finally getting to that. That's the money
Speaker 2: shot of any history of Jefferson. But looking at my
Speaker 2: little clock here, because so if he's not around to
Speaker 2: warn us and we are flying like blind here and ads.
Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, we should probably do some mads.
Speaker 2: Now, yeah, take some ads and call me in the
Speaker 2: morning or in like four minutes after you skip ahead
Speaker 2: to the part without ads, we're back. So the whole
Speaker 2: Declaration of Independence project kicks off in seventeen seventy six
Speaker 2: when Jefferson was appointed with four other delegates to write
Speaker 2: a declaration of Independence. And it is a sign of
Speaker 2: how good he is as a writer that the other
Speaker 2: committee members, which include Ben Franklin and John Adams, all
Speaker 2: agree to let him handle the pros. I think Franklin
Speaker 2: says he does it because he can't stand being edited, right, Like,
Speaker 2: I'm not going to write something for somebody else to edit,
Speaker 2: you know, And this is going to go through, Like
Speaker 2: the Congress is going to have to approve this, and
Speaker 2: they're going to make changes. Yeah, John Adams, I think
Speaker 2: is like Jefferson is just such a good writer, will
Speaker 2: let you do it. He spends the rest of his
Speaker 2: life regretting this, by the way, which you would you know.
Speaker 2: In his first draft of the document, Jefferson spent a
Speaker 2: good number of words blaming King George the Third for
Speaker 2: sparking and growing the slave trade, framing it as a
Speaker 2: great evil forced on the colonies by their vile king.
Speaker 2: Now this specific charge is silly, but Jefferson's description of
Speaker 2: the slave trade is not. He describes quote a market
Speaker 2: where men should be bought and sold as a hideous thing,
Speaker 2: in large part due to the brutality involved in transporting them.
Speaker 2: Henry Winsick writes, for many slaves suffered, as Jefferson wrote,
Speaker 2: miserable death in their transportation. Every vessel tossed overboard twenty
Speaker 2: fifty one hundred corpses in its passage across the Sea.
Speaker 2: Jefferson most likely learned of the shrinkage of inventory from
Speaker 2: his father in law, John Wales, and Jefferson describes slavery
Speaker 2: in his initial draft of the declaration as an execrable commerce.
Speaker 2: It's shitty, he says, it's shitty, right, yeah, and that's
Speaker 2: good and accurate. But all of this writing is cut
Speaker 2: from the final draft, as an article for The Miller
Speaker 2: Center explains, after deleting Jefferson's biting attack on King George
Speaker 2: the Third for trafficking slaves and debating other issues of
Speaker 2: substance for three days, Congress approved the unanimous Declaration of
Speaker 2: the Thirteen United States of am America on July fourth.
Speaker 2: The Continental Congress never calls it the Declaration of Independence,
Speaker 2: by the way, it's just a better name. Sometimes that happens. Yeah,
Speaker 2: these guys sucked at titling. Only Thomas would have been
Speaker 2: a good podcaster strong on that one.
Speaker 3: No, that's real, Yeah, that's real because he's actually like
Speaker 3: because yeah, he's one of those dudes who are like, yeah,
Speaker 3: damn on paper, bro, like you yeah, you got it.
Speaker 2: Fam that's right, especially, you know, and at this point
Speaker 2: he still is a guy who could have wound up.
Speaker 2: He's a guy who inherited a lot of enslaved people.
Speaker 2: He is writing now and he's taken at least minimal
Speaker 2: legal steps to trying to end the practice, and he's
Speaker 2: now made some really bold statements about it. He could
Speaker 2: have gone and he could have been like an early abolition.
Speaker 2: He could and a struke and might have pushed a
Speaker 2: lot of the country, Like God only knows, right, given
Speaker 2: the degree of you know.
Speaker 3: We minted it in the first Yeah, we mentioned it
Speaker 3: in the first first episode. I just I like, I
Speaker 3: need to get the quote right. But the one which
Speaker 3: we'll probably get to, the one where he was just
Speaker 3: like essentially like if yeah, yeah, God is there, if
Speaker 3: God is who he says he is, we're about to
Speaker 3: get judged.
Speaker 2: Yeah okay, yeah, no, no, we're we'll be We'll be
Speaker 2: putting that in its context where yeah yeah, ok So.
Speaker 2: The primary reason his condemnations of slavery were cut from
Speaker 2: the final draft was that South Carolina and Georgia refused
Speaker 2: to close their slave markets. Despite the fact that this
Speaker 2: final draft was compromised Jefferson's statement in the Declaration that
Speaker 2: all men were created equal and endowed by the Creator
Speaker 2: with an alienable rights took off like a summer brushfire
Speaker 2: among progressives of his day, and not just in the Americas. Yeah,
Speaker 2: before too long, it would be cited by several states
Speaker 2: who were early to after the war. It's going to
Speaker 2: be cited by like the first states to abolish slavery.
Speaker 2: Is like why, and they're like, well, based on this declaration.
Speaker 3: We said, that's what you said.
Speaker 2: Yeah, this stuff seems like we shouldn't have this. Yeah.
Speaker 3: Frederick Douglas's you know, Fourth of July speech was just like, bro,
Speaker 3: that's this what y'all said.
Speaker 2: This This line seems pretty clear. Yeah, that said but
Speaker 2: you know this is again that generations of abolitionists will
Speaker 2: take a lot out of that line. Jefferson himself is
Speaker 2: never really an abolitionist, right, far from it. In fact,
Speaker 2: this is a bit puzzling given where he sits in
Speaker 2: seventeen seventy six, because he kind of it feels like
Speaker 2: he might have right, there's a moment here where it
Speaker 2: feels like he could have tipped that way. Historian David
Speaker 2: Breon Davis notes, quote he was one of the first
Speaker 2: statesmen in any part of the world to advocate concrete
Speaker 2: measures for restricting and eradicating Negro slavery, which is not,
Speaker 2: you know, nothing, but in the seventeen eighties it kind
Speaker 2: of becomes nothing because he sings a very different tune
Speaker 2: during the last years of the seventeen seventies. Then he's
Speaker 2: going to serve in the Virginia House of Delegates, where
Speaker 2: he championed progressive measures like freedom of religion and a
Speaker 2: radical free public education system for all white male Virginians.
Speaker 2: He also crusaded against legally mandated primogenitor which saw landed
Speaker 2: estates passed on exclusively to eldest son. Jefferson had good
Speaker 2: reasons for all this. He saw inherited wealth is dangerous
Speaker 2: despite benefiting from it himself, and he opposed state religion,
Speaker 2: both because it violated individual liberty and as the Miller
Speaker 2: Center notes, he also feared that religion would hinder the
Speaker 2: development of a national elite, a moral and ethical group
Speaker 2: of aristocrats who would lead the nation. And this is
Speaker 2: because again Jefferson is this as ellis as a sphinx.
Speaker 2: This gives us kind of an unegalitarian explanation for some
Speaker 2: of the things he said that seem egalitarian, even some
Speaker 2: of the policies he pursued that were good, which is
Speaker 2: that he's not a guy who believes everyone is and
Speaker 2: should be equal. He believes everyone should have an equal shot.
Speaker 2: All the white men, they should have anything shot it
Speaker 2: becoming a part of the aristocracy, and that aristocracy is
Speaker 2: going to be based on their natural levels of intelligence
Speaker 2: and ability.
Speaker 4: Right.
Speaker 2: But we need an aristocracy, right, it just needs to
Speaker 2: be a natural.
Speaker 3: One, right, Yeah, it's not just built on the fact
Speaker 3: that your daddy came from this place.
Speaker 4: Yea.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, that that is kind of what he says
Speaker 2: he's arguing for, right, and Heaver views artificial methods of
Speaker 2: curtailing membership in this elite as bad. He also sees
Speaker 2: himself as a natural member of the aristocracy.
Speaker 3: Yeah except for me, though, Like, and I should be.
Speaker 2: You know, I didn't errate everything, but like I'm clearly
Speaker 2: so capable, right.
Speaker 3: Yeah, Yeah, Yeah, I'm different.
Speaker 2: I'm different. I'm built a little different than these these
Speaker 2: other first sons who got rich, Yeah because of their daddies.
Speaker 2: I'm built a little different.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 2: In seventeen seventy nine, Jefferson was somewhat to his own frustration,
Speaker 2: elected governor of Virginia. This is a bad time to
Speaker 2: be the governor of Virginia because it doesn't look great
Speaker 2: in seventeen seventy nine, right, like, Virginia's economy is in
Speaker 2: the shitter. The British are doing pretty well in the field.
Speaker 2: There's a counter revolution by Tories, which of these like
Speaker 2: loyalist assholes. And Jefferson not a great warrior. He's not
Speaker 2: like a warrior poet type guy. There's like one campaign
Speaker 2: that he like supports in southern Virginia and it's a
Speaker 2: disaster because he's he's not really good at that stuff. Now,
Speaker 2: when he first goes to I think Williamsburg and then
Speaker 2: he goes to Richmond as governor, he's like the last
Speaker 2: governor to live in the Williamsburg mansion. Jefferson brings his
Speaker 2: some of his slaves with him, right, members of the
Speaker 2: Hemmings and Granger families mostly, and it's from them that
Speaker 2: we get a lot of the memories of Jefferson during
Speaker 2: this chaotic time. In January seventeen eighty one, Benedict Arnold
Speaker 2: lands in Virginia with a whole buttload of Brits Virginia's
Speaker 2: militia were mostly engaged in conflict with Native Americans, and
Speaker 2: Jefferson showed no aptitude for gathering these s gathered forces
Speaker 2: together and welding them into a functional army, which, to
Speaker 2: be fair, is hard, but he doesn't do it. So
Speaker 2: what he does do is send his family away and
Speaker 2: he cloisters himself in the attic of the governor's mansion
Speaker 2: with a spyglass. When the British finally came, it took
Speaker 2: only a few cannonballs to send every white man in
Speaker 2: town fleeing for the hills. Jefferson included several of his
Speaker 2: house slaves, acted like to kind of protect the family wealth.
Speaker 2: When he leaves them behind. One of them. We get
Speaker 2: this story from Isaac, who's five at the time, and
Speaker 2: he describes the British invasion as an awful sight. It
Speaker 2: seemed like the day of judgment was come, which is
Speaker 2: not all that different from how my family members who
Speaker 2: were there speak of the British invasion in the nineteen sixties,
Speaker 2: you know, talking about the Beatles was a Beatles Beatles bit.
Speaker 2: Jefferson has fled the scene, and he has left behind
Speaker 2: like this enslaved family, including this little boy, Isaac, who's
Speaker 2: from whom we get most of this story, and Isaac's father, George,
Speaker 2: I believe this is George Granger went through the house
Speaker 2: collecting valuables, primarily the family's silver, which he hid under
Speaker 2: There's like a bed in the kitchen with like a
Speaker 2: hide a bed under it, and he like hides it
Speaker 2: underneath that. So when the British arrive, he lies and
Speaker 2: he's like, my master's you know, fled and he took
Speaker 2: all the silver with him. I don't know what's going on.
Speaker 2: And these British soldiers they rampaged through the mansion, but
Speaker 2: they don't find the silver. George then flees, leaving his
Speaker 2: family behind, to find Jefferson's family at monte Cello and
Speaker 2: help them. Right, So he he leaves his family to
Speaker 2: go find and help Jefferson and his family get out
Speaker 2: of Monticello. And while George is away, his wife and
Speaker 2: son are taken captive by British forces. What now again?
Speaker 2: This is like it's no, like this is it's it's
Speaker 2: such a confusing thing because George has he's an opportunity
Speaker 2: one a decent number of enslaved people take to find
Speaker 2: his freedom, right, to get himself and his family out
Speaker 2: of there, either with the British or just by using
Speaker 2: the chaos to get out.
Speaker 3: Wow, Okay, he doesn't.
Speaker 2: Not only does he not do that, but he like
Speaker 2: leaves his family kind of trusting that the British will,
Speaker 2: you know, not fuck with them too much, and they
Speaker 2: wind up getting captured. And it's we're gonna talk about
Speaker 2: all this because this is like, this is not He's
Speaker 2: not the only person that is going to happen to
Speaker 2: This is a major part of the history for enslaved
Speaker 2: people during this period is like what happens, you know,
Speaker 2: when they try to decide to flee, what happens if
Speaker 2: they go over to the British. We're gonna talk about
Speaker 2: all of that, but first it's time for some ads.
Speaker 3: I'm back, I see.
Speaker 2: Yeah, Sophie's our second ad break.
Speaker 4: So wow, that's so nice.
Speaker 1: I lost power for however long I was gone for.
Speaker 3: Yeah, Well, for the audio people, it'll be nothing, but
Speaker 3: for the other.
Speaker 4: People, don't miss my, my, my, my wonderful remarks.
Speaker 2: Speaking of losing power, Thomas Jefferson has lost power because
Speaker 2: he just had to flee from the Governor's mansion because
Speaker 2: the British Benedict Arnold came rolling around there. So yeah.
Speaker 2: The next couple of months of Jefferson's life are chaotic,
Speaker 2: with British forces rating every Jefferson property they could find,
Speaker 2: and Thomas keeping himself and his family just barely out
Speaker 2: of their grasp. This was obviously hard on them, both
Speaker 2: physically as well as mentally. Their new worn daughter Lucy
Speaker 2: died in April, and the whole constantly on the road
Speaker 2: thing did not help with that. Jefferson and his men
Speaker 2: retook the capitol after the British left, but when they returned,
Speaker 2: when the British come back, he has to flee again,
Speaker 2: and he makes it. He flees back to Monticello. He
Speaker 2: wounds up like leave, fleeing Monticello minutes ahead of this
Speaker 2: group of British dragoons, which is like a kind of
Speaker 2: mounted soldier. And here again one of the people that
Speaker 2: he owned acted to protect his absent owner from the
Speaker 2: book master of the Mountain quote. When the raiders swarmed
Speaker 2: into the house at Monticello, it quickly became a parent
Speaker 2: that once again Jefferson had eluded them. But they knew
Speaker 2: he could not be very far off. So one of
Speaker 2: the dragoons jammed a pistol into Martin Hemmings's chest and
Speaker 2: said he would shoot if Hemmings did not tell them
Speaker 2: where the governor had gone. Fire away. Then Hemmings replied
Speaker 2: and refused to say anything else. Martin Hemmings was not
Speaker 2: one of the half siblings of Missus Jefferson. His mother
Speaker 2: had borne him before she began her relationship with John Wales.
Speaker 2: Kin ship tied to the Jeffersons was not as direct
Speaker 2: as that of his younger siblings fathered by Wales. As
Speaker 2: the Jefferson grandchildren recounted the story, Hemming stood his ground fiercely,
Speaker 2: answering gaze for a glance, and not receding a hair's
Speaker 2: breadth from the muzzle of the cocked pistol. Unbeknownst to
Speaker 2: the British, another servant named Caesar lay in silence beneath
Speaker 2: their feet under the floor of the portico with silver.
Speaker 2: He and Martin had just finished hiding when the raiding
Speaker 2: party rushed in.
Speaker 3: Wow.
Speaker 2: Now, yeah, that's like palsy.
Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, it's impossible to get into their heads. Like
Speaker 3: it's impossible, you know, and especially with a modern brain,
Speaker 3: like it's just it's impossible. But you can say you're
Speaker 3: just another slave master anyway, So like, oh, yes, you're
Speaker 3: not my you're not my rescue, you know what I'm saying.
Speaker 3: And and then you're like and even if you were,
Speaker 3: it's like, well fuck you for like storm in my house,
Speaker 3: like you know what I'm saying, Like I still live here,
Speaker 3: Like I mean, fuck this place. But it's but I
Speaker 3: still live here, and you ain't finna, just like I
Speaker 3: don't know you, like you don't get to do this,
Speaker 3: you know what I'm saying. It's like, you know, like
Speaker 3: if we gonna tear this place down, we gonna take
Speaker 3: this place down, you won't get to tear the place down.
Speaker 3: You know.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I do wonder because obviously you don't get you
Speaker 2: don't get this guy's writing. I'm like what he does
Speaker 2: in Georgia's I do wonder because the British do offer freedom.
Speaker 2: But it's again we're not talking like they're not putting
Speaker 2: this out over the Internet or whatever. Everybody's not looking
Speaker 2: at this like how much how how much of that information? Yeah,
Speaker 2: and also, as we're going to talk about, their offers
Speaker 2: of freedom are extremely dangerous because just the biological realities
Speaker 2: of the time like fleeing and being held in the
Speaker 2: British camp even if they're promising you your freedom is
Speaker 2: not safe.
Speaker 3: Yeah, and it's like, well, where you're gonna take me.
Speaker 3: You're gonna take me back to Britain, like right, so
Speaker 3: I gotta get back on that boat.
Speaker 2: Nah yeah yeah, Like how much are these people being
Speaker 2: told and by whom? And what are they being told by?
Speaker 2: Guys like Jefferson?
Speaker 3: Right, and you're all the same, but yeah, yeah, that's
Speaker 3: how you're all the same.
Speaker 2: Like, oh yeah, I'm at least gotta like shore up
Speaker 2: my situation with this guy who I know, who's not
Speaker 2: an unquantity to me, I know, no fucking dragoons, right, and.
Speaker 3: Like still like my mom and daddy, my sister, you know,
Speaker 3: my brothers, my cousin, Like these are people I know.
Speaker 3: So if anything, it's like I'm protecting the people I know,
Speaker 3: Like yeah, it's like.
Speaker 2: Yeah, the their comfort because we're in the house is
Speaker 2: very tied to the success of this guy. So if
Speaker 2: I defend him and his wealth, that's kind of taking
Speaker 2: care of my people too. Yeah, you know, these are
Speaker 2: complicated things happening here. Yeah, this whole episode of like
Speaker 2: fleeing repeatedly from the Capitol, just barely ahead of British forces.
Speaker 2: Is a black mark on Thomas's warktime career. He gets
Speaker 2: attacked for this a lot. Yeah, he's pilloried for failing
Speaker 2: to defend his state because he's the guy in charge
Speaker 2: and he just keeps running away. You're the bro, and
Speaker 2: it doesn't matter if it's like you didn't have a
Speaker 2: lot of options. You know what else was like, he
Speaker 2: doesn't find a better option. He doesn't build a militia
Speaker 2: into something that can fight these guys, and like you could.
Speaker 2: You can argue whether or not it's reasonable enough to
Speaker 2: go after him for that, but people do, right, man.
Speaker 3: Yeah, slaying that Turkey didn't do much for you, did it?
Speaker 2: No? No, he didn't learn how to deal with noon. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 2: they're a little harder.
Speaker 4: So.
Speaker 2: In June of seventeen eighty one, Jefferson resigns as governor,
Speaker 2: and the man who replaced him proved to be better
Speaker 2: at the stuff he'd been bad at, raising a functional
Speaker 2: militia to assist Washington's army. While the war entered its
Speaker 2: end phase, Jefferson hit out in a place called Poplar
Speaker 2: Forest and did what he was good at. He wrote.
Speaker 2: The work he did on the run would later make
Speaker 2: up his only published book, Notes on the State of Virginia.
Speaker 2: And if you are a poly size student, you just
Speaker 2: shuddered a little bit. Yes, you have read this son
Speaker 2: of a bitch in college.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 2: The book was started as a response to questions sent
Speaker 2: by the French legation in Philadelphia for like all of
Speaker 2: the different states. They reach out to represents in each
Speaker 2: of the colonies and are like, hey, here's twenty three
Speaker 2: questions about like geography and law, and like what's the
Speaker 2: culture like here? Right? And Jefferson he answers all of that,
Speaker 2: but a lot of what he's doing is he's trying
Speaker 2: to defend his new country to the French because he
Speaker 2: has this feeling that French intellectuals see Americans is a
Speaker 2: bunch of dumb yokels, right, Like they're backing us, they're
Speaker 2: backing our play in a big way, but they don't
Speaker 2: think much of us as an actual people, right. And
Speaker 2: Jefferson is kind of trying to defend the what becomes
Speaker 2: the American right as a person. There's this strain of
Speaker 2: thought among naturalists in Europe that the plants and people
Speaker 2: in the New World are inferior somehow to the plants
Speaker 2: and people in the old world. Right. A lot of
Speaker 2: this comes out as racism against Native Americans, Right, But
Speaker 2: there's this widespread belief that even white people become less
Speaker 2: intelligent when they migrate to the New World. One French
Speaker 2: thinker Abbe ray Now cited this as proof of the
Speaker 2: fact that quote or cited as proof of this fact
Speaker 2: that quote, America has not yet produced one good poet.
Speaker 2: Of course, they're being made dumb by the land. They
Speaker 2: don't even have poets over there.
Speaker 3: Your music don't even slap bro like, yeah, yeah, that's hilarious.
Speaker 2: And it's Jefferson. His argument against this is funny because
Speaker 2: he's like, man, it took how long did it take
Speaker 2: the fucking Greeks to make a poet?
Speaker 3: Right?
Speaker 2: Yeah, like they had a long time.
Speaker 3: We're new yeah, first of all brands.
Speaker 2: Yeah yeah, He's like England was around a while before
Speaker 2: you guys got a Shakespeare. You gotta give us some dime,
Speaker 2: you know, anyway, more or less right about that. It
Speaker 2: takes a minute, I guess. So after so wait year,
Speaker 2: what years? This is like seventeen eighty one, Like.
Speaker 3: We've been a country for five years yeah, yeah, barely right,
Speaker 3: not even really, because we're fighting this war. You know
Speaker 3: they've done yet.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, what do you expect?
Speaker 1: They just haven't published yet. Maybe they're so working on their.
Speaker 2: Crad Have you read all of them? I don't know.
Speaker 2: It's trying to get paper.
Speaker 4: Great roast.
Speaker 2: He's right when he rebuts this kind of stuff, he's right,
Speaker 2: but he has a harder time rebutting the other valid
Speaker 2: allegation that the French make of American savagery, which is, well,
Speaker 2: you guys have slaves, right.
Speaker 4: Well, you.
Speaker 3: Definitely ass backwards with this one, guys.
Speaker 2: Yeah yeah. And to discuss how he tries to kind
Speaker 2: of answer this, Henry Weinsack writes, having accused King George
Speaker 2: of attempting to enslave them, American leaders laid themselves open
Speaker 2: to the charge of hypocrisy by their failure to enslavery
Speaker 2: in their own country. Samuel Johnson jibed, how is it
Speaker 2: that we hear the loudest yelps for liberty among the
Speaker 2: drivers of negroes. Slavery had been outlawed in England's homeland,
Speaker 2: not in its home, though not in its colonies. In
Speaker 2: the landmark seventeen seventy two Somerset decision by an activist
Speaker 2: judge who concluded that enslavement was such an egregious denial
Speaker 2: of rights that slavery had to be specifically authorized by law,
Speaker 2: and Parliament had never done so. When there were calls
Speaker 2: for Parliament to pass enable legislation for black slavery, the
Speaker 2: proposal was derided in a widely circulated joke which was
Speaker 2: eventually published in the Virginia Gazette. If Negroes are to
Speaker 2: be slaves on account of color, the next step will
Speaker 2: be to enslave every Mulatto in the Kingdom, then all
Speaker 2: the Portuguese, next to French, then the brown complexioned English,
Speaker 2: and so on, until there'll be only one free man left,
Speaker 2: which will be the man of palest complexion in the
Speaker 2: free three kingdoms.
Speaker 3: Just your your boiled chicken. That's all is left. The
Speaker 3: boiled chickens gotta do right. This is absurd, Guys like
Speaker 3: this just doesn't make sense.
Speaker 2: It is interesting because this is before scientific racism is
Speaker 2: starting to be a thing at this time, and it's
Speaker 2: you don't get enough of like that. Of just like
Speaker 2: some regular guys writing as a columnist in a newspaper
Speaker 2: being like, you guys, see how ridiculous this is, right, Yeah,
Speaker 2: Like just.
Speaker 3: Like I can't tell her, like I don't know not
Speaker 3: none about it. You book learning. I'm just saying, yeah, yeah.
Speaker 2: How far are we taking this? Because it seems like
Speaker 2: you can make a case for basically everybody essentially.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 2: So, speaking of scientific racism, this is the heel turn
Speaker 2: moment really for Jefferson because while he's writing notes on
Speaker 2: the state of Virginia, which he does we'll talk about
Speaker 2: in the next episode, he does include a plan to
Speaker 2: end slavery in that, but he also starts his first
Speaker 2: kind of dipping into like scientific racism, right, And this
Speaker 2: is a big pivot from the all men are created
Speaker 2: equal guy, right, and so that the hoops he has
Speaker 2: to jump through to do this are worth laying out.
Speaker 2: He starts by admitting that slavery is a horror, right,
Speaker 2: but he cites is one of its evils, and you're
Speaker 2: kind of you kind of take from this. He sees
Speaker 2: this as the worst evil is what it does to
Speaker 2: young white men, right, because it makes them lazy, right right?
Speaker 3: Okay, yeah, not that it their conscience, no, no, not
Speaker 3: that it distorts their understanding of morality. And how the earth. Yeah,
Speaker 3: it makes them lazy.
Speaker 2: It does a little bit. But he's because he does say, like,
Speaker 2: the man must be a pro who can retain his
Speaker 2: manners and morals undepraved by such circumstances. And he's talking
Speaker 2: about like growing up with like a slave that's raised
Speaker 2: next to you. That's like you're you know, raised to
Speaker 2: be your servant, right, that that's going to like how
Speaker 2: can you not have your morals work worked? But then
Speaker 2: he does go right into like it makes white men
Speaker 2: lazy and it forces them to be tyrants, right, they
Speaker 2: have to be tyrants when they're raised this way. Yeah,
Speaker 2: it's just this focus on what it does to white
Speaker 2: people that's so like off putting.
Speaker 3: Yes, Like it's kind of burying the lead here, buddy, Like, yeah, words,
Speaker 3: that's what you john from this, Okay. Yeah.
Speaker 2: It's interesting to me that this argument does put him
Speaker 2: at odds with some pro slavery advocates of his day,
Speaker 2: because there are people arguing in like newspapers and whatnot
Speaker 2: at the day that like, part of why slavery has
Speaker 2: to remain in the in the new country is that
Speaker 2: working is too hard for white men. We can't do it.
Speaker 2: We can't do it. Yeah. Yeah. Win Sex cites a
Speaker 2: series of letters to a Virginia paper during this period
Speaker 2: in which one man argues, general utility is the basis
Speaker 2: of all law and justice, and on this principle, the
Speaker 2: right of slavery is founded. Well, it's really useful for me, right, Well,
Speaker 2: how about people super convenient?
Speaker 3: I hear everything you're saying, bro, I hear everything you're saying.
Speaker 3: But like counterpoint is really it really it's really good
Speaker 3: for me though.
Speaker 2: Yeah. Have you tried to work eight hours? It's like,
Speaker 2: really it sucks. Have you, man?
Speaker 3: Have you actually tried to harvest? Come back? Oh? Like
Speaker 3: it really hard work.
Speaker 2: It's hot doing things, man sucks. Yeah. There's another letter
Speaker 2: that Winstt quotes. That's to a newspaper in Pennsylvania, where
Speaker 2: a Southerner argues that abolitionious to a quote totally blind
Speaker 2: to our ease and interest. The certain consequence would be
Speaker 2: that we must work ourselves. Come on, yeah, man.
Speaker 3: Like, yeah, yo, that is that is my patron saying
Speaker 3: Ricky Bobby when he was like when cale not ju
Speaker 3: was like, how about how about how about I you
Speaker 3: let me win? Sometimes he goes, Okay, yeah, I hear you.
Speaker 3: But if if you win, then that means that I
Speaker 3: don't win.
Speaker 2: I gotta lose.
Speaker 3: Yeah, but like and you know, you know how I
Speaker 3: roll in first and last, like I can't. But if
Speaker 3: you're first and I'm not first, so we can't do that?
Speaker 2: Is I like reading stuff like that just because it's like, okay,
Speaker 2: so that is as like blatantly selfish and evil as
Speaker 2: the reality was. Right, that's a guy. There's no dressing
Speaker 2: that up. He's like, yeah, but i'd have to work
Speaker 2: if we didn't have work.
Speaker 3: Bro, Like, do you want to work? Like there? Yes,
Speaker 3: It's like a point that's made often in both of
Speaker 3: our shows is that history is history is us. These
Speaker 3: are just regular. There's nothing uniquely evil or there's no
Speaker 3: unique malady about. They are just there us we are,
Speaker 3: Like that is the most regular, regular answer that yeah,
Speaker 3: that anyone would give today to where you're like, well, well,
Speaker 3: I don't want to pick the fruit, you know what
Speaker 3: I mean? Well, like I don't know, you know what
Speaker 3: I'm saying, Like I want to go to the store
Speaker 3: and buy it, like you pick the fruit.
Speaker 4: You know.
Speaker 2: That's so that's such an awful thing. Like what they're
Speaker 2: saying is so awful, and it's so much uglier than
Speaker 2: than Jefferson's flowery pros. But they're also they're honest, and
Speaker 2: he is full of shit, and this is really this
Speaker 2: is the full of shit stuff that comes out because
Speaker 2: since he's not going to make that well I don't
Speaker 2: want to work, you know, argument, he's going to like
Speaker 2: have to dress it up, and he has these it's
Speaker 2: it's this notes on the state of Virginia is weird
Speaker 2: because he has these moments of like where he'll land
Speaker 2: kind of in between racism and some kind of actual wisdom.
Speaker 2: Like he takes on the common argument by white people
Speaker 2: that that black people, if they're freed, they're they're inclined
Speaker 2: to criminal behavior, right, And he actually makes a good
Speaker 2: argument here, which is like that disposition to theft with
Speaker 2: which they have been branded must be ascribed to their
Speaker 2: situation and not to any pravity of the moral sense.
Speaker 2: The man in whose favor no laws of property exist
Speaker 2: probably feels himself less bound to respect those made in
Speaker 2: favor of others. Come old, Well, if the law says
Speaker 2: your property, why are you going to give a shit
Speaker 2: about the law?
Speaker 3: Yes, like yeah, again, just this like dizzying, like yes, yes, right, yes,
Speaker 3: you're right.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah. Now this descends very quickly though, into what, again,
Speaker 2: is kind of proto scientific racism. Jefferson doesn't. He does
Speaker 2: argue that he believes He states his belief that black
Speaker 2: people are inferior, but he also he hymns, He's like, well,
Speaker 2: I'm a scientist, and right, we don't have conclusive data yet.
Speaker 2: I'm just saying this might be what's happening, right, But
Speaker 2: he does state his belief that black people and white
Speaker 2: people are fundamentally different, with differences that are quote fixed
Speaker 2: in nature. Now, what he actually means by this is
Speaker 2: pretty shallow. His like, his his scientific justification is like,
Speaker 2: well they look different, yeh, look at it, like yeah,
Speaker 2: and he's like, white people have flowing hair and more
Speaker 2: elegant symmetry of form. And then he gets into the
Speaker 2: real racist shit where he's like, black people inherently prefer
Speaker 2: to have sex with white people, and he makes a
Speaker 2: comparison to how orangutans prefer to have sex with human beings,
Speaker 2: which is not true about orangutans either. No, one very
Speaker 2: racist in so many ways.
Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, you're yeah, you're beating the dog and you're
Speaker 3: like he likes it. See you look the dog likes it.
Speaker 2: Yeah, okay, yeah it's bad. And that orangutan phrase is
Speaker 2: like the one you'll encounter most often when you read
Speaker 2: the sections of Jefferson's racism, and it deserves to be read.
Speaker 2: But in his book, win Seck brings up another point
Speaker 2: about this passage that I had not considered. Jefferson probably
Speaker 2: summoned up the fantastical image of an ape mating with
Speaker 2: an African woman to deflect attention from the actual reality
Speaker 2: of Virginia society, the pervasive rape of black women like
Speaker 2: white men. Yes, and I hadn't thought about that, but.
Speaker 3: Yeah, that's exactly what it is to be like. But
Speaker 3: they like it, and I'm like, no, they don't. They
Speaker 3: are property, yeah, like you like we like, which is obvious,
Speaker 3: like like shit that none of us have to explain,
Speaker 3: which is like they don't have agency. What are you
Speaker 3: talking about? And and you are raping them and for
Speaker 3: their own safety and the safety of their children. They
Speaker 3: don't pretend like they like it. Yeah, you know, but
Speaker 3: of course they don't like what the what are you
Speaker 3: talking about? What are you talking about? Yeah?
Speaker 2: I think one of the things I think about when
Speaker 2: I read Jefferson's writing here, because he very much frames
Speaker 2: this is I'm trying to look at this like a scientist, yeah,
Speaker 2: trying to analyze these different relations between the raceists scientifically.
Speaker 2: I think a little bit. You've heard that story about
Speaker 2: that guy who studied like wolves and wrote this about
Speaker 2: like alpha wolf behavior, and yeah, yeah, he gave us
Speaker 2: this idea of the alpha male and then realizes later like, oh,
Speaker 2: I was just looking at wolves in prison captivity, and
Speaker 2: they act differently in prison than they do in the time.
Speaker 2: They don't actually do this in the wild, right. He
Speaker 2: is Jefferson is analyzing people that he owns and that
Speaker 2: other people around him own and their behavior, and he's
Speaker 2: he's attributing all of their behavior to like natural distinctions
Speaker 2: and always ignoring like, well but they're enslaved well always,
Speaker 2: not always, but.
Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, yeah factual And yeah, this is like this
Speaker 3: is really this is the big heel turn moment.
Speaker 2: This is when he commits. This is when it becomes
Speaker 2: kind of impossible ideologically for him to ever wind up
Speaker 2: on the side of abolition, right because he is fundamentally
Speaker 2: defending slavery, and when he defends slavery, he does so
Speaker 2: by being racist. Right. One of his complaints is that
Speaker 2: people with black skin are better at hiding their emotions.
Speaker 2: Now that's not true. But what's happening here is number one,
Speaker 2: he doesn't pay attention to them, right, because he owns them, no,
Speaker 2: you know, and so he doesn't understand them as much
Speaker 2: as he understands white people. Right. And the other thing
Speaker 2: is that, yeah, if you are enslaved, you probably get
Speaker 2: good at hiding certain feelings because they're dangerous.
Speaker 3: Right, absolutely, like the idea that which is completely normal
Speaker 3: of yeah, self preservation and making decisions that are going
Speaker 3: to uh yeah again, like because we are in fact
Speaker 3: humans that are going to try our best to protect
Speaker 3: our children. And if that means I got to do
Speaker 3: a little shucking job to make sure that you feel placated,
Speaker 3: is going to stop the overseer from coming over here?
Speaker 2: Yeah? Yeah, And yeah, it's one of those this kind
Speaker 2: of belief again that he does not analyze in any way, right. Yeah,
Speaker 2: it culminates in a very fortunate set of conclusions for him,
Speaker 2: which is he decides, like, well, it just seems like
Speaker 2: black people don't feel as much as white people, right.
Speaker 2: We know they don't need as much sleep because we
Speaker 2: don't let them sleep as often. We know they're less
Speaker 2: sensitive to the heat and the cold. Yeah, you just
Speaker 2: don't listen when they can complain they feel like they can.
Speaker 3: Yeah, and especially with you saying well, like like them
Speaker 3: saying well, we I mean you kidding me. We couldn't
Speaker 3: handle this, like yeah, and they're handling it, so I
Speaker 3: guess you know. Yeah, we wouldn't stand for this. We
Speaker 3: would look, we would not stand for this. And apparently
Speaker 3: they're standing for soeah.
Speaker 2: So it must be cool. Yeah, he starts. He's one
Speaker 2: of the first people to make the argument that they
Speaker 2: don't feel pain in the same way, which exists, I
Speaker 2: mean less consciously. But like that's still a problem in
Speaker 2: medicine today. He writes. Their griefs are transient. In other words,
Speaker 2: they feel sad when they lose family members, but not
Speaker 2: for a long time. They forget things quickly. Right now.
Speaker 2: He also he has to acknowledge equality in a few areas. Right,
Speaker 2: he says that they have an equal equivalent memory to
Speaker 2: white people. Right, because he he employes black laborers doing
Speaker 2: complicated tasks. Right, he can't not see that, right, there
Speaker 2: can't be any use as workers. Yeah, number one, Right, yeah, yeah,
Speaker 2: but he also has to argue, but that means they
Speaker 2: don't have any they don't they lack reason, and they
Speaker 2: can't imagine things. They really can't want anything better. And
Speaker 2: part of his argument for this is I've never met
Speaker 2: a black person who could understand Euclid's writing. It's like,
Speaker 2: do you let him read Euclid? But do you teach
Speaker 2: him like math? You know, like have you tried?
Speaker 3: Yeah about that?
Speaker 2: Yeah? How about that?
Speaker 4: Is it?
Speaker 2: And also like, is it are there little white people
Speaker 2: who haven't heard about Euclid?
Speaker 4: Right?
Speaker 2: The most of the country that's not can't read and
Speaker 2: that certainly doesn't know a fucket Euclid? Yeah?
Speaker 3: Is it?
Speaker 2: Maybe a matter of access to education? Maybe you understand
Speaker 2: is valuable?
Speaker 4: You know?
Speaker 3: Yeah, oh my god.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 2: Anyway, Yeah, he's pretty bad. There is one moment here
Speaker 2: where he's like, it's possible I'm wrong about this because
Speaker 2: maybe enslaved people feel they have to lock up their
Speaker 2: faculties and talents to endure. So he has the ability
Speaker 2: to realize what's going on here. He even hints at it,
Speaker 2: though he just can't accept it.
Speaker 3: Those frustrating moments when you're just in somebody, when he
Speaker 3: just peeks up and says, yeah, I mean I could
Speaker 3: be tripping because I mean, clearly we're beating him to death,
Speaker 3: and yeah, yeah.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it could be wrong about this very obvious thing. Yeah.
Speaker 2: So nevertheless, he concluded that these differences weren't the result
Speaker 2: of the fact that slavery gave few chances for creativity
Speaker 2: or intellectual achievement. He decides nature had produced the distinction,
Speaker 2: and he gives himself out again. He's like, that's just
Speaker 2: what I think. I you know, now, maybe there will
Speaker 2: be some more evidence later, but yeah, I consider that
Speaker 2: kind of like, I don't know, a little cowardly.
Speaker 3: Actually, it's very cowardly because of like, yeah, it's the
Speaker 3: implications of the like freud of it all, like the
Speaker 3: subconscious continuingly to peek out, like you know you're wrong,
Speaker 3: Like you know you're wrong. You know what I'm saying
Speaker 3: somewhere in there, Like you know you wrong, but you
Speaker 3: also know you not trying to change your way of life,
Speaker 3: you know, And like you said, the fullest shitty like
Speaker 3: is on full display here.
Speaker 2: You know, you're you're too good a writer to not
Speaker 2: bring this up because you just inherently make good arguments.
Speaker 2: But like you have to clamp it down. You can
Speaker 2: almost feel him shoving that back down inside of himself
Speaker 2: in order to make this work. And we'll talk a
Speaker 2: lot more about this kind of and even a bit
Speaker 2: more about Notes on the State of Virginia. But at
Speaker 2: the end of this episode, let's just bring it to
Speaker 2: the end of the Revolutionary War, which the US wins
Speaker 2: at Yorktown while Jefferson is still scribbling away. In seventeen
Speaker 2: eighty three, a peace was negotiated and the US gained
Speaker 2: its independence. Notes on the State of Virginia was published
Speaker 2: in seventeen eighty five and then republished several times, and
Speaker 2: it formed a meaningful part of the backlash or counterswing
Speaker 2: to a wave of abolitionist sentiment that gripped the new
Speaker 2: country around the time of its independence. Right because of
Speaker 2: the declaration, there's actually starts to be this argument. There's
Speaker 2: even some will argue Virginia might have been on its
Speaker 2: way to abolishing slavery. Right weeks before Jefferson turned in
Speaker 2: his draft, a member of the Virginia State Legislature submitted
Speaker 2: a draft constitution that would have ended hereditary slavery in
Speaker 2: the state. It argued that men were born equally free
Speaker 2: and independent, and that no compact could deprive them of
Speaker 2: their rights. The legislature, though, added a line that men
Speaker 2: only gained these rights when they enter into a state
Speaker 2: of society, and slaves were defined as not part of society.
Speaker 2: Still that's pretty fucked up. Yeah, Like these people are
Speaker 2: literally what your entire society rests on.
Speaker 3: But damn yeah, it makes it that much more like
Speaker 3: human and like heinous to where it was like, bro,
Speaker 3: it was people right there. It was like right there,
Speaker 3: like y'all knew. It just was like, we'll cut that
Speaker 3: part out.
Speaker 2: Like yeah, and it's it's still this is not even
Speaker 2: probably a few years after the constitution, yeah, Virginia is
Speaker 2: changed or a few years after this happens, the constitution
Speaker 2: in Virginia is changed to include black people as citizens
Speaker 2: if they've been freed. Right, And if you were observing
Speaker 2: all of this, like these debates and these pushbacks and whatnot,
Speaker 2: in trying to predict the future, you might have guessed
Speaker 2: in the mid seventeen eighties, well maybe Virginia is headed
Speaker 2: to abolition. Winsett kind of argues that it was, and
Speaker 2: that it's Jefferson who plays a major role in wrenching
Speaker 2: it away from that course quote. At this critical moment,
Speaker 2: Jefferson broke from the dominant progressive thinking of his time
Speaker 2: to construct an image of the black person as the other,
Speaker 2: a being with no place in American society. Putting a
Speaker 2: scholarly sheene on the rationalizations of slaveholders, Jefferson made himself
Speaker 2: the theorist and spokesperson for the reactionaries. Jefferson was not
Speaker 2: as torn as he has taken to be, writes the
Speaker 2: historian Michael Zuckerman. He was not as confined by his
Speaker 2: culture as his apologists have often claimed in regard to race,
Speaker 2: as in regard to so much else. He was a leader,
Speaker 2: and that's part two.
Speaker 3: I love that.
Speaker 4: Maybe leaders are a bad idea.
Speaker 2: Yeah, maybe leaders are a bad idea.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 2: Maybe race leaders are a bad idea.
Speaker 3: Yeah maybe. Yeah. May be like I'm smart, I read stuff. Yeah,
Speaker 3: it might be a little more to it, you know
Speaker 3: what I'm saying.
Speaker 2: Yeah, he's such a little kind of a little shit.
Speaker 2: He's a bitch ass he's Yeah.
Speaker 3: I mean at the end of the day, at the
Speaker 3: end of the day.
Speaker 2: Yeah, at the end of the.
Speaker 3: Day, at the end of the day, It's like I
Speaker 3: could cover it all you have like like flower it up, man,
Speaker 3: like twist your brain into a pretzel say that you
Speaker 3: like while I'm doing it. But I'm not like those dudes.
Speaker 3: And it's like, bro, like I mean, I like I
Speaker 3: think of so many modern things I think of, like
Speaker 3: this may feel very TMZ of it, but like I
Speaker 3: think of like P Diddy and his apology and was
Speaker 3: just like you know, I was it really in a
Speaker 3: dark place.
Speaker 4: Man.
Speaker 3: You know, I've gone to therapy, and bro, like, don't
Speaker 3: I won't hear about your therapy, you know what I'm saying. Yeah,
Speaker 3: And I'm like and the like, okay, like it, there
Speaker 3: was a lot of lightly dim places that you was
Speaker 3: in before you got to the dark one that we saw. Brother,
Speaker 3: like you don't you don't wake up and get to
Speaker 3: that homeboy you ever said what I'm saying, that's not
Speaker 3: that's not that's not a light switch, big dog like
Speaker 3: you was building this homie, you know, and then I
Speaker 3: think the like you know, like why like like it's
Speaker 3: like if I could if I could grab America by
Speaker 3: the cheek and be like the face cheeks okay and
Speaker 3: be like.
Speaker 1: Uh, I'm glad you're clarified.
Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, yeah, Like why you ain't join the I
Speaker 3: C C. Big dog, Like why you don't want to?
Speaker 3: Why you want to say like, tell me, tell me
Speaker 3: why you don't want to call call this a genocide?
Speaker 3: Tell me why you don't want to tell me why
Speaker 3: you don't want to accuse anybody for crimes of crimes
Speaker 3: agains humanity?
Speaker 2: What's the same Why Jefferson does everything he does here
Speaker 2: is exactly well, because it would mean making your life
Speaker 2: a little less comfortable, yes, right, And it would mean
Speaker 2: sacrifices the things you value that.
Speaker 3: Maybe people will peak at you and be like exactly, so,
Speaker 3: like why why why won't America do this?
Speaker 4: Well?
Speaker 3: Because I don't want you all to look at our
Speaker 3: centuries of crimes of humanity? So I don't want to.
Speaker 2: You know what I'm saying that some acess to like
Speaker 2: we really use their airspace a lot, Like there's a
Speaker 2: number of things for the reasons why it comes down
Speaker 2: to yeah, yeah, like I don't want to. It'll be
Speaker 2: hard for me.
Speaker 4: It comes down to your lyric prop. It comes down
Speaker 4: to I don't hate America just a man, she keeps
Speaker 4: her problem, she doesn't.
Speaker 2: And she don't just like dude, be who Jefferson is, like,
Speaker 2: he's he has to because he's this big I am
Speaker 2: the profit of freedom guy. Internationally, he has to write
Speaker 2: to these dudes in France, we're going to be the
Speaker 2: people a lot of the people who are involved in
Speaker 2: the French Revolution, and who are these like and and
Speaker 2: he has to explain how am I still the profit
Speaker 2: of freedom while owning people. That's the big part of
Speaker 2: what's happening here. And the answer is that, like, well,
Speaker 2: they're not really the same kind and there's a lot
Speaker 2: of problems, Like I agree slavery is bad, but we
Speaker 2: really have to look at this very carefully because of
Speaker 2: all of these biological differences, right, Which is all he's
Speaker 2: doing is he's scientificizing the ship that every slave owner
Speaker 2: would say, which is like, yeah, but I don't want
Speaker 2: to work it is he you know, yeah, he's a farmer,
Speaker 2: but he's not a farmer. Yeah, you know exactly, really.
Speaker 4: Every butt guy, he's the I don't hate women, but
Speaker 4: he's that guy.
Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, yeah, Well it's kind of like but look, look, look, look,
Speaker 3: if you let me finish, if you let me finish, yeah,
Speaker 3: I would tell you. It's like all right, bros.
Speaker 4: He's every guy I don't want to talk to a
Speaker 4: bar right, Yeah, like yeah, yeah, those are the guys
Speaker 4: you have to like they got all these big words,
Speaker 4: but you just it's almost like, you know, like a
Speaker 4: toddler out of control, Like I have to you have
Speaker 4: to just keep them in focus and be like, hey man,
Speaker 4: here's here's the cornerstone question.
Speaker 3: How can you be the profit of freedom while keeping
Speaker 3: someone enslaved? Yeah, like no, no, no, no, that's all we
Speaker 3: talk about. That's like you can give me aught. How
Speaker 3: are you the profit of freedom? Yeah, exactly.
Speaker 2: And he's gonna have to We're gonna talk about his
Speaker 2: time in France because he's the basically the ambassador. Yeah,
Speaker 2: that's the whole time there is. He's like having that
Speaker 2: argument with me. Yeah yeah, we'll get to that. But
Speaker 2: first prop what's your pluggables? Where are they?
Speaker 3: Oof?
Speaker 2: When are they?
Speaker 4: Man?
Speaker 3: When are they they are whenever you want?
Speaker 4: On?
Speaker 3: Do you believe the Internet's dead?
Speaker 2: I think large chunks of it are, right, Like you know,
Speaker 2: that's that's kind of something like a third of old
Speaker 2: Wikipedia links or whatnot or dead, Like, yeah, it turns
Speaker 2: out it's not a very good place to store things.
Speaker 3: No, But on this, you know, on the on whatever's
Speaker 3: left of the internet. You can go to prop hip
Speaker 3: hop dot com. Uh, and that'll get get you to
Speaker 3: all the other places the politics will prop man, you
Speaker 3: know where. I feel like this has been probably one
Speaker 3: of my best seasons, if I do say so myself. Yeah, yeah, yeah,
Speaker 3: we kind of kind of hit a stride.
Speaker 1: He's coming to dude, super good things.
Speaker 3: Come in hit a stride. Man. I'm really excited about this.
Speaker 3: So yeah, the politics prop with the cool Zone crew,
Speaker 3: you know, yep.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 4: And for us at cool Zone Media and all the things,
Speaker 4: and for you Robert anything.
Speaker 2: No, no, nothing like that Poland diaper bank. Behind the
Speaker 2: Bastards go fundme. We're doing a go fundme diapers for
Speaker 2: people who can't afford them. Always a good thing, always
Speaker 2: a good things. Good to help people have diapers who
Speaker 2: can't afford.
Speaker 4: To buy them otherwise Bye bye.
Speaker 1: Behind the Bastards is a production of cool Zone Media.
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