Speaker 1: Also media.
Speaker 2: Thomas Jefferson more like Thomas.
Speaker 3: Jerk jerk jerk made sons that.
Speaker 1: Come on, I don't what are we doing?
Speaker 2: What are we doing here? Tried?
Speaker 3: You know, likes Anderson? How about the mass?
Speaker 2: And there you go.
Speaker 3: He apologize, the queen apologize, and I'm getting a very
Speaker 3: dirty look.
Speaker 2: This is this, This is like.
Speaker 3: Hold up, caught a stray over there? I apologize.
Speaker 2: This is like when when two climbers trying to do
Speaker 2: like Killimanjaro, but is a surprise storm apologize like because
Speaker 2: because what we do, I would say, is like the
Speaker 2: emotional equivalent of climbing kill him and Jarro, which I
Speaker 2: assume is one of the hard mountains.
Speaker 3: I don't know much exactly the same.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it seems like it's difficult. You know what else
Speaker 2: is difficult?
Speaker 3: Prop what else is difficult?
Speaker 2: Talking about the life and many moral compromises of Thomas Jefferson.
Speaker 3: And we're gonna do it four hours several.
Speaker 2: More hours to go. Yes, I hope you're feeling nice
Speaker 2: and rested after our first two parts, because we are
Speaker 2: getting into well, I guess we already got into the
Speaker 2: meat of it. We're getting into more of the meat
Speaker 2: of it. It's like like an RB's sandwich. There's a
Speaker 2: lot of meat. Yeah.
Speaker 1: Did you have a nice birthday?
Speaker 2: Prop?
Speaker 3: I did? It was fun. I went fly fishing for
Speaker 3: a little bit. Then I came home and I wrapped
Speaker 3: at the La County Fair. Oh cool. Which they're now
Speaker 3: like they're curating the stage a little better. So it's
Speaker 3: like usually if you're not like War or Steely Dan,
Speaker 3: it's like it's not worth your time, like to perform
Speaker 3: at the fair. Yeah, but now like you're usually you're
Speaker 3: going after like a Journey cover band, But now like
Speaker 3: they're curating the stages better. So this was like a
Speaker 3: hip hop stage next best La And that was dope.
Speaker 1: Man.
Speaker 2: It is something every man has to ask himself at
Speaker 2: some point. Are you more of a Journey cover band
Speaker 2: or are you more of a Steely Dan cover band?
Speaker 3: Man? I think I think I'm a Steely Dan guy.
Speaker 2: I'm Journey. I've known that about myself for a long time.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I'm neither.
Speaker 2: Yeah, Yeah that makes sense, Sophie, I wouldn't.
Speaker 3: I mean, yeah, I.
Speaker 2: Feel like you could do a really good rendition of
Speaker 2: Come sail Away by Sticks.
Speaker 3: I'd do a War, You'd you'd be a fun Telly
Speaker 3: cover band. Okay, okay, I could see you do I
Speaker 3: could see you in a George Clinton band like yeah,
Speaker 3: in the base maybe, and.
Speaker 2: I could see you in the mov PCU like George Clinton.
Speaker 4: I can't do any of these performance I have no talent,
Speaker 4: so I can't do any of these things.
Speaker 2: Being a boss, Jeremy, he was, Okay, you're right, Sorry,
Speaker 2: we should stop. I shouldn't make my twelfth reference to
Speaker 2: that movie.
Speaker 1: Yeah, don't, don't do it.
Speaker 2: So that's the cold open. We'll come back in a
Speaker 2: second with some Thomas Jefferson for you, and we're back prop.
Speaker 2: You would have guessed how many kids Martha Jefferson had
Speaker 2: during the first ten years of her marriage to Thomas.
Speaker 3: How many kids Martha Jefferson? I wish I knew this. Ten?
Speaker 2: No, No, six, six, That's still that's still a lot
Speaker 2: of kids.
Speaker 3: For Test's still a gang of kids, dude. After now,
Speaker 3: I've obviously I've never given birth to a child, but
Speaker 3: I watched it once and if I were a female,
Speaker 3: I would be like, yeah, never get yeah, never akin,
Speaker 3: Am I going to do that?
Speaker 2: Yeah? I don't feel like I would want to, and
Speaker 2: I especially wouldn't want to if I had the kind
Speaker 2: of track record Martha has, cause you want to I
Speaker 2: want you to guess how many of those six kids
Speaker 2: do you think made it to adulthood?
Speaker 3: Oh my god, five, two, two.
Speaker 2: They didn't do great. This is a difficult time to
Speaker 2: have kids. But that's not a good race. Six kids
Speaker 2: two out of six is not good, man. And it's
Speaker 2: some of this is I think Martha. Martha has from
Speaker 2: what we can tell, difficult pregnancies, like and this is
Speaker 2: going to do a lot of permanent damage to her,
Speaker 2: right she.
Speaker 3: Just had Obviously, you know we've we've said this many times.
Speaker 3: You're considering the state of like, let's sit racism aside
Speaker 3: for a second, but considering just the state of medicine,
Speaker 3: there's no other air i'd want to live in.
Speaker 2: Absolutely not.
Speaker 3: Yeah, there's no thank you, But there's some like sorry,
Speaker 3: I'll pass. I'm just yeah, I'm like, okay, uh, you
Speaker 3: got to cut on your arm. We just have to
Speaker 3: chop it off. And there's this, here's some whiskey and
Speaker 3: a stick to bite down on. Nah, I'm good, No,
Speaker 3: I'm good.
Speaker 1: From that narrative, Yeah, I.
Speaker 2: Would give up modern medicine for one thing, and it's
Speaker 2: if they could send me back far enough to see dinosaurs.
Speaker 2: I would give up most things for dinosaurs, Like even
Speaker 2: if they immediately come after me and eat me, Like
Speaker 2: I mean, I feel thirty seconds would be worth it.
Speaker 3: Yeah, your thirty seconds would be worth it because whatever
Speaker 3: ancient mosquito that bites you immediately, right, it's.
Speaker 2: Like yes, super super yellow fever. Yeah, yeah, your malaria
Speaker 2: gets malaria, yeah immediately. Oh yeah, just just ruined. So anyway,
Speaker 2: the Jeffersons, I don't know if I want to say,
Speaker 2: like give him too much shit for this ratio. I
Speaker 2: kind of a get we get so little from Martha
Speaker 2: in part because Thomas destroys a lot of her correspondence
Speaker 2: after she dies. So maybe she was super as much
Speaker 2: into having kids as he is. It's kind of hard
Speaker 2: for me not to look at how he treated the
Speaker 2: people he owned and the fact that Martha was basically
Speaker 2: pushed into having so many kids until her body gave out,
Speaker 2: and like, yeah, kind of drawing a line between those
Speaker 2: two maybe wow, But maybe that's not fair because we
Speaker 2: just don't know anything about what she really felt on
Speaker 2: the matter. Yeah, you know, sure, as a result of
Speaker 2: you know the fact that Martha's in ill health this
Speaker 2: whole time, the whole time that they're married and trying
Speaker 2: to have kids. But Jefferson's engaged in an activity that
Speaker 2: was very common for American slave owners, and in fact
Speaker 2: very common for rich people using like not enslave, but
Speaker 2: like peasants and stuff over in Europe too, which is
Speaker 2: having a wet nurse. Right in their case, the wet
Speaker 2: nurse was Ursula, who's again, you know, one of the
Speaker 2: people that Thomas owns, and she is the wet nurse
Speaker 2: for basically the entirety of the time that Thomas has
Speaker 2: kids and grandkids. Ursula is almost as much of an
Speaker 2: unknown as Martha, or is actually more of an unknown
Speaker 2: even than Martha, because we do get a little bit
Speaker 2: from Martha, but we can assume from the facts that
Speaker 2: she was almost super humanly tough. She nursed for base
Speaker 2: twenty five years straight, both je kids and his grandkids.
Speaker 2: That's a lot sheesh, Yeah, that's that's a lot of nursing.
Speaker 3: That's a lot of milk. Her poor boobs, got it?
Speaker 3: Ya know?
Speaker 1: It hurts to hear that, Yeah, it does.
Speaker 3: You're just in and I still don't understand how you
Speaker 3: can I mean, I don't. I don't know how how
Speaker 3: a person can laxate when it's not their child. I
Speaker 3: know it's a normal thing, but like idea, Yeah, I
Speaker 3: just there's there's parts of science and me me being
Speaker 3: a girl dad with like a wife and two daughters.
Speaker 3: I'm still there are still parts of Therefore, I'm sorry.
Speaker 3: I'm one of those basic men where it's like I
Speaker 3: feel like I'm pretty progressive, but there are certain things
Speaker 3: that I'm just like, aw, that's a mystery. I don't
Speaker 3: know how you do that magic.
Speaker 2: I don't know how like emotionally because it's it's it
Speaker 2: seems like it's such a head fuck, right, yeah, you
Speaker 2: really you can't even like these are the kids of
Speaker 2: the people who own you. You can't nurse a baby
Speaker 2: and not develop a connection to the baby. Like it's
Speaker 2: just it's a baby. You're nursing it. That's like what
Speaker 2: people do.
Speaker 3: An incredibly intimate moment, yeah, of bonding, which is like
Speaker 3: why we the humans do it? You like you bond
Speaker 3: you know?
Speaker 2: Yeah? Yeah, it just feels like almost unavoidable. And Thomas
Speaker 2: has a habit of crediting in his writing Ursula's milk
Speaker 2: with almost supernatural power writing that when one of his
Speaker 2: children was sick, a quote a good breast of her
Speaker 2: milk would heal them almost instantaneously. That's how he writes
Speaker 2: about the quantity a.
Speaker 3: Good breast.
Speaker 2: Of breasts. Yeah, wow, yeah, one a unit of breast.
Speaker 2: I get. Yeah, I don't know, it's weird. Seems like
Speaker 2: a weird way to write it, but I don't actually
Speaker 2: know how else you'd write it. Yeah.
Speaker 3: Is he trying to be poetic?
Speaker 2: I think he usually is. Yeah, in this case it
Speaker 2: comes across off putt it doesn't y y.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 2: And it's one of those things, like, you know, we
Speaker 2: have to keep a couple again, of kind of complex
Speaker 2: things here, which is that this is on Jefferson's part,
Speaker 2: you know, obviously a system based on violence. On Ursula's part,
Speaker 2: this is also like her family, and that might be
Speaker 2: how she, at least from what little we know about her,
Speaker 2: that may very well be kind of how she felt
Speaker 2: about these kids that she's nursing. Yeah, and again kind
Speaker 2: of saying that I'm not saying that like Jefferson was
Speaker 2: a good slave master because that didn't exist, or that like, well,
Speaker 2: this was one of the good places to be in.
Speaker 2: But if you're nursing two generations of babies, you probably
Speaker 2: feel something for those kids, And that seems to be
Speaker 2: the case. And one of the reasons I like Henry
Speaker 2: Winseck's book Master of the Mountain is that he reflects
Speaker 2: on the complex dimensions of this relationship with a line
Speaker 2: that I think is really useful to parsing out what's
Speaker 2: going on here on a moral level. Quote asked to
Speaker 2: reminisce about Jefferson, several summoned up warm memories of their master.
Speaker 2: On the other side of the divide. However, Jefferson left
Speaker 2: no intimate account of the Monticello slaves. In other words,
Speaker 2: members of the Hymmings, Granger Evans families expressed affection for
Speaker 2: Thomas Jefferson. Jefferson relied utterly on these people for the
Speaker 2: health and safety of his family, and, based on the
Speaker 2: writing We left Behind, never gave them a second thought.
Speaker 2: Beyond that, there's no real evidence he thought of them
Speaker 2: as people. Yeah.
Speaker 3: Function, They were able to see him as a person,
Speaker 3: which I think is interesting. Yeah, yeah, complete function. Transaction
Speaker 3: in the way that you would take care of your car,
Speaker 3: right right, the way Cato thought of slaves, Yes, exactly.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 3: Man still hung up on like the mother part of this,
Speaker 3: I'm like, because again, like my organizing premise is that
Speaker 3: people are just the same. As long as the time changes,
Speaker 3: it's still the same. So like, is it vanity for
Speaker 3: you're a woman to be like I'm not gonna nurse
Speaker 3: my own child because I want to keep being a
Speaker 3: part of like the social life. Is this like is
Speaker 3: my baby like a is it like an accessory? You
Speaker 3: know what I'm saying. So like I caught them out
Speaker 3: to impress the other girls, but far be it for
Speaker 3: me to let my figure look weird now, Like, so
Speaker 3: I don't want my boobs to sag? Or is it
Speaker 3: like are you jealous? Is it a sign of status
Speaker 3: that someone else's nursing your child? Like, I just I
Speaker 3: want to know so much more about like what's the
Speaker 3: mindset on that, which, of course is like.
Speaker 4: It's actually like super com it's not super uncommon even
Speaker 4: in today's day and age.
Speaker 3: So no, that's why I was like, it's got to
Speaker 3: be I'm like, it's got to be a thing because
Speaker 3: clearly we still do it now.
Speaker 1: Yeah, a lot of times it's health based.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I think everything that you said, all of the
Speaker 2: different reasons are reasons why people in the past and
Speaker 2: probably the sumach sent today have had nurse maids, especially
Speaker 2: when you're talking about like we are talking about enslaved
Speaker 2: people being used as nurse maids here, but like in Czarist,
Speaker 2: you have people who are not slaves, they're not really
Speaker 2: fully free, and they're used as nursemates by like the
Speaker 2: wealthy families, the czar and stuff. And sometimes it is
Speaker 2: it like, well, I don't want to be doing that,
Speaker 2: you know, I don't want to take this onto my body.
Speaker 2: I don't have time but a lot. I think with
Speaker 2: Jefferson in particular, and with with Martha Jefferson, it's that
Speaker 2: she's just not well, she's not yeah, and they're they
Speaker 2: think that this will help make the children more because
Speaker 2: the kids are also not healthy.
Speaker 3: Oh yeah, because they keep dying and they keep they
Speaker 3: keep things. Okay, yeah, obviously, like the health stuff is
Speaker 3: like I mean, every woman can't like to it like that.
Speaker 3: It is what it is, you know what I'm saying.
Speaker 3: So I totally understand that. Please guys, don't come at
Speaker 3: me like I know like you, I'm a dad. I
Speaker 3: know that, like everybody can't make milk, But it just
Speaker 3: seemed like this was a strange, like yeah, the grankiest cuz,
Speaker 3: like you know what I'm saying, Like you tell me
Speaker 3: nobody in this family, you know. So that's why I
Speaker 3: was like, what's going on?
Speaker 2: You know? I wonder too if someone what's going on
Speaker 2: with like ursula is Obviously, when you're a slave, you
Speaker 2: are being constantly taken advantage of by all of the
Speaker 2: people who own you, right, But these babies, even though
Speaker 2: like they're their parents, obviously are taking advantage of you. Yeah,
Speaker 2: the babies, they're babies, right, Like they need milk, you know.
Speaker 2: And so to a degree, maybe I understand like why
Speaker 2: that would be that would make the whatever you have
Speaker 2: connection you have to them like stand out more because
Speaker 2: like it is this thing that needs you that is blameless.
Speaker 2: I don't know, I don't know, can't get it. You know.
Speaker 2: There's probably a million different ways people felt when they
Speaker 2: were in this situation, and we'll never know because they
Speaker 2: were denied the ability to like express themselves anyway. So
Speaker 2: that's a bummer. And the eighteen nineties, du mas Malone
Speaker 2: writes a six volume history of Thomas Jefferson. This is
Speaker 2: generally considered to be like the first definitive biography of Jefferson.
Speaker 2: It still gets cited quite a lot to the present
Speaker 2: day because obviously the eighteen nineties you're probably not talking
Speaker 2: to a lot of people who knew Thomas directly, but
Speaker 2: a lot of people who's like parents knew Thomas you
Speaker 2: can still talk to, right, So you do have a
Speaker 2: lot closer access to a lot of those sources. And
Speaker 2: obviously Dumas's book there's a lot of scholarly value to it.
Speaker 2: But Dumas Malone also very much wants to pretend slavery
Speaker 2: is not happening, right, or not that it's not happening,
Speaker 2: but that it wasn't Jefferson was not a bad example
Speaker 2: of a slave owner. Right. Part of how he does
Speaker 2: this is he really emphasizes all of the things Jefferson
Speaker 2: would say about how ugly slavery was, like this quote.
Speaker 2: No one could find in his words any ground whatsoever
Speaker 2: for the opinion that slavery in eighteenth century Virginia was
Speaker 2: or would ever become a beneficent institution. He regarded it
Speaker 2: as fundamentally cruel and was in no possible doubt that
Speaker 2: it undermined the morals and destroyed the industry of the
Speaker 2: masters while degrading the victims. So we see, even decades
Speaker 2: after the Civil War, you've got this respected historian parroting
Speaker 2: Jefferson's line. And we talked about this in the early episodes.
Speaker 2: Jefferson would always be like, Yeah, slavery's bad because of
Speaker 2: all of the bad things it does to white people.
Speaker 2: It makes the masters lazy, and it makes them like
Speaker 2: worse people.
Speaker 4: Right.
Speaker 2: I find it interesting that Malone is carrying that forward
Speaker 2: kind of and not really he doesn't do what a
Speaker 2: historian should, which is examine what wine Seck is going
Speaker 2: to do more than a century later, which is actually examined, well,
Speaker 2: how did Jefferson actually behave in his life? Did he
Speaker 2: act like a man who felt like it was unethical
Speaker 2: to yet these people he owned do all of the
Speaker 2: work for him, and he doesn't, you know. Yeah. Malone
Speaker 2: goes on to quote another line from Notes on the
Speaker 2: State of Virginia, which he describes as perhaps the most
Speaker 2: erudent summary of the evil of slavery, and can the
Speaker 2: liberties of a nation be thought secure when we have
Speaker 2: removed their only firm basis a conviction in the minds
Speaker 2: of the people that this liberties are of that these
Speaker 2: liberties are of the gift of God, that they are
Speaker 2: not to be violated but with his wrath. Indeed, I
Speaker 2: tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just,
Speaker 2: that his justice cannot sleep forever. That considering numbers nature
Speaker 2: and natural means only a revolution of the wheel of
Speaker 2: fortune and exchange of the situation is among possible events.
Speaker 2: That it may become probable by a supernatural interference. The
Speaker 2: Almighty has no attribute which can take a side with
Speaker 2: us in such a contest.
Speaker 3: That that's the quote, that's the one who that's the one? Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 3: at least that I've been refercent where I'm just like, bro, yeah,
Speaker 3: if if God is just, he's not on our side. Yeah,
Speaker 3: Like what like how you let that come about your mouth? Like, well,
Speaker 3: I mean it's true, you know what I mean.
Speaker 2: It's true, and it's it is good writing, like just yes,
Speaker 2: structurally obviously as a piece of like craft, it's it's good,
Speaker 2: except for I think you can't you can't view it
Speaker 2: as craft in a vacuum. You have to look at
Speaker 2: in part what he actually meant by this, And I
Speaker 2: don't think it's often enough stated that what he's talking
Speaker 2: about here is his belief that a race war is
Speaker 2: inevitable if black and white people live too, true, right, Yeah,
Speaker 2: Like that is what he's expressing, and that is something.
Speaker 3: He believes, and and they and a genuine fear at
Speaker 3: the time. Yeah, you know, it's like we can't like
Speaker 3: at this point, you can't let them because they're just
Speaker 3: gonna there's more of them, and they're going to destroy
Speaker 3: us because we've been treating them terribly. Yeah, obviously this
Speaker 3: is such a sensitive topic, especially with like being like
Speaker 3: all eyes on Rafa, you know, and just a sentiment
Speaker 3: that I would venture to say is might actually be
Speaker 3: a motivating factor for how you know, obviously I'm not
Speaker 3: at the table, but how like some of the people
Speaker 3: in the government of Israel might be thinking too in that, Like,
Speaker 3: you know, every we've covered it so many times, a
Speaker 3: hood put politics, like every piece of research, every piece
Speaker 3: of research is like, when you have state sanctioned violence
Speaker 3: like this, you inevitably radicalize and create insurgencies. What you're
Speaker 3: doing will do this. And and if you are trying
Speaker 3: to eradicate every possible threat to your safety, it's genocide.
Speaker 3: That's your only option. You gotta kill everybody, you know,
Speaker 3: what I'm saying because someone's you can't you know what
Speaker 3: I mean. So it's like, so I wonder if they're like, well, shit,
Speaker 3: we can't stop now, like we went this far. Like
Speaker 3: if they do, they're gonna wipe us out because we're wrong,
Speaker 3: you know. So I just I wonder if that thinking
Speaker 3: is like a part of it, a part of their
Speaker 3: calculation right now, Well, I mean, what are we gonna do?
Speaker 2: You know, I certainly, I'm sure, I certainly don't think
Speaker 2: when we're talking about like net and Yahoo right that
Speaker 2: I don't know that I think he's capable of thinking
Speaker 2: that he's wrong on a moral level. And also, you know,
Speaker 2: a lot of this comes down to like beliefs about
Speaker 2: religion and God, which totally further kind of derange some
Speaker 2: of that. Yeah, Jefferson expresses accurately why slavery is evil
Speaker 2: and expresses a fear that that evil will rebound upon
Speaker 2: white people in America. Yeah, and then he doesn't do
Speaker 2: anything to even make a better situation for the people
Speaker 2: he owns, right, And that is contrary to how he
Speaker 2: is depicted. Even in Ellis's book American Sphinx, they had
Speaker 2: this long passage where he's like there was no such
Speaker 2: thing as good slavery, Like it was bad and it
Speaker 2: was hypocritical of Jefferson, But among people who owned people
Speaker 2: in the Americas, he treated the people he owned better
Speaker 2: than most. And the case that win Seck makes is
Speaker 2: that like he really didn't. And this is going to
Speaker 2: bring me prop to a thing that I did not
Speaker 2: know about, which is Thomas Jefferson, slavery and smallpox. Yes, yes, okay,
Speaker 2: so you're are you yeah yeah yeah, yeah, yeah yeah,
Speaker 2: give it to. At the time of the Revolutionary War,
Speaker 2: there existed a fairly effective inoculation against smallpox. Now by
Speaker 2: modern standards, it was brutal and dangerous, like by the
Speaker 2: by the standards of a modern vaccine. This is basically
Speaker 2: cutting someone's skin and sticking like the scab from like
Speaker 2: what's called like either from cowpox or another like smallpox
Speaker 2: or whatever, like under their skin, and it kind of
Speaker 2: where it works basically the way that a vaccine works.
Speaker 2: Obviously it is one or two percent of people die
Speaker 2: that you need.
Speaker 3: Yeah, it's an analog. It's an analog vaccine, you know.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, it's it's an anally. That's a good, A
Speaker 2: good way to look at it. And it's it's pretty
Speaker 2: unpleasant to receive, but it's also a one or so
Speaker 2: percent chance of dying from this is wildly better than
Speaker 2: your odds of just raw dogging smallpox. Right, Like, smallpox
Speaker 2: is one of the worst things that human being never
Speaker 2: in count vicious. So because if you are a slave owner,
Speaker 2: the human beings you own are probably, if not most,
Speaker 2: then at least a very significant chunk of your wealth,
Speaker 2: a lot of slave owners chose to vaccinate the people
Speaker 2: that they own right against smallpox, or inoculate, I think
Speaker 2: is the more accurate term to use, and not because like,
Speaker 2: you know, we're great people, but because like, this is
Speaker 2: a sensible way to protect assets.
Speaker 3: You know.
Speaker 2: Yes, one of the slave owners who chose to vaccinate
Speaker 2: the people he owned was George Washington. Now I don't
Speaker 2: say that to like be like, look at all wonderful
Speaker 2: George Washington hanging out vaccines. I say that to contrast
Speaker 2: Thomas Jefferson, who refused to take the same preventative action
Speaker 2: for the people that he owned, even though he could have,
Speaker 2: and he was not. This is not because you, I think,
Speaker 2: could be not for like being a slaver, but you
Speaker 2: could be forgiven for not like vaccinating your kids in
Speaker 2: this era if you didn't have access to information about
Speaker 2: how much better it really was, and it's information is
Speaker 2: harder to come by than good information. On Thomas Jefferson
Speaker 2: as president is at one of me. I think the
Speaker 2: first president who's like a vocal advocate for smallpox inoculations, right,
Speaker 2: he is like really really insistent upon this. He himself
Speaker 2: was inoculated at age twenty three, so he knew that
Speaker 2: this worked, which suggests that he did not fail to
Speaker 2: vaccinate his slaves out of ignorance. We don't know why
Speaker 2: he didn't either. I think it comes down to either
Speaker 2: just like laziness, like he just didn't get around to it,
Speaker 2: or he was too cheap to do it right, And
Speaker 2: I don't really know what which it was. Right, there's
Speaker 2: a darker possibility, which is that he may have done
Speaker 2: it because he thought it would make the people he
Speaker 2: owned less likely to flee, right, because if they run away,
Speaker 2: they're more likely to encounter smallpox. And maybe if they
Speaker 2: know that they don't have any sort of defense against it,
Speaker 2: it'll make them And that's relevant because of what happens
Speaker 2: during the Revolutionary War. So as is always the case,
Speaker 2: whenever anyone went anywhere back then, in large numbers. British
Speaker 2: soldiers who like came to North America to fight in
Speaker 2: the Revolutionary War brought smallpox with them and spread it
Speaker 2: like wildfire everywhere they went. There is evidence that they
Speaker 2: had done so purposefully in the French and Indian Wars
Speaker 2: as part of like is essentially part of smallpox blankets, right, Yeah,
Speaker 2: significant evidence there. So during the Revolutionary War, Virginia's royal
Speaker 2: governor promised freedom to slaves who would leave their masters
Speaker 2: and fight for the king, and the British army provided
Speaker 2: shelter to run away families of slaves. Jefferson would later
Speaker 2: claim that thirty thousand slaves tried to take the British
Speaker 2: up on this offer, and twenty seven thousand of them
Speaker 2: died of smallpox. Now that's a hideous number. Prop Do
Speaker 2: you want to guess where Thomas Jefferson came up with
Speaker 2: that number?
Speaker 3: Where you come up with the number.
Speaker 2: He made it up. He just made it out.
Speaker 3: I was like, there's no as he was as you
Speaker 3: were talking, I was like, how would you get that data?
Speaker 2: Like just lie?
Speaker 3: I was like a census where they taken Like, there's
Speaker 3: no census on this. Bro. Yeah, I was totally thinking.
Speaker 3: I was like, unless I'm wrong, that's funny.
Speaker 2: No.
Speaker 3: It was also I also wonder if there's this if
Speaker 3: if you know, the whole eugenics, the eugenics of it
Speaker 3: all plays plays a role in just believing Africans are stronger,
Speaker 3: and just you know what I'm saying, it's like, well
Speaker 3: it doesn't affect them.
Speaker 2: The way, maybe they won't. Yeah, yeah, I think that that.
Speaker 2: That's probably a number of things that feed into it.
Speaker 2: But this is like like when I was a kid
Speaker 2: and Wikipedia was new, I would just edit Wikipedia articles
Speaker 2: to win arguments with my friends, and I think that's
Speaker 2: kind of what Thomas Jefferson is.
Speaker 1: Bro.
Speaker 3: No, listen, I'm looking at it. It was like thirty thousand.
Speaker 2: Yeah, like word. Trying to figure out where this number
Speaker 2: came from, historian Cassandra Pybus went through the original sources
Speaker 2: and found that Jefferson had written that thirty of his
Speaker 2: own enslaved workers fled during the revolution and twenty seven
Speaker 2: of them died of smallpox. Right, Thus, he just did
Speaker 2: ten thousand, That's literally what he did. Yeah, as far
Speaker 2: as he can tell, he was like, yeah, probably about
Speaker 2: one hundred times that many people or whatever.
Speaker 3: Why not.
Speaker 2: Very I mean, it's just such a like slap dash.
Speaker 2: He gets such a reputation as being like the most
Speaker 2: the greatest political genius in American history, and like he
Speaker 2: certainly wasn't that he had his areas of intelligence, but
Speaker 2: like that's just such lazy work.
Speaker 3: Nah, bro, you're a regular dude, like all of us
Speaker 3: do that like nine years last night, you know you didn't.
Speaker 2: Yeah. Yeah. So the actual evidence based estimate is that
Speaker 2: about five thousand enslaved people in Virginia and Maryland fled
Speaker 2: to the British lines, and a huge number of these
Speaker 2: people did die of smallpox, but the blame for that
Speaker 2: should go to owners like Jefferson, who had neglected to
Speaker 2: inoculate them. The British army. This is weird because this
Speaker 2: episode they're kind of some of the good guys. Normally
Speaker 2: I would not call them a particularly ethical force, but
Speaker 2: they attempted to mitigate this right and save these enslaved people.
Speaker 2: They inoculated runaway slaves as soon as they arrived in camp,
Speaker 2: but the disease was just spreading too quickly. They did
Speaker 2: not have enough doctors to actually do this right. Yeah,
Speaker 2: like they did try from what I From what I've read,
Speaker 2: it seems like they tried pretty hard to avoid to
Speaker 2: save as many people as possible. It was just kind
Speaker 2: of beyond their capability, right, which is fair given like
Speaker 2: the realities of above smallpox and the realities of smallpox. Sure.
Speaker 2: In his farm book, Jefferson holdly recorded the losses, writing quote,
Speaker 2: joined the enemy and died next to the names of
Speaker 2: two girls, Flora and Quomina, who were eight and six
Speaker 2: years old. God again, he writes that as if like
Speaker 2: it's like a free adult who has made the decision
Speaker 2: to become a traitor. Right, this is talking about even
Speaker 2: joined the enemy.
Speaker 3: Hoping none of us look at the age.
Speaker 2: Yeah, these kids together are fourteen years old. Like, come on, man,
Speaker 2: I'm gonna lay out the story of these two girls,
Speaker 2: but I want you to keep that very cold description
Speaker 2: about the deaths of two children in mind and compare
Speaker 2: that to this passage from Dumas Malone's biography Jefferson and
Speaker 2: his Time, written in eighteen ninety two. Quote, At Monticello,
Speaker 2: domestic servants were abundant, and a number of the favorites
Speaker 2: came into his possession through her ursula. The fat woman
Speaker 2: who nursed Patsy and later children, and her husband, King
Speaker 2: George had been acquired for Missus Jefferson. Well. The noted
Speaker 2: Hemming's family, who were mostly bright Mulattoes, came through the
Speaker 2: Wales estate. Jefferson was kind to his servants to the
Speaker 2: point of indulgence, and within the framework of an institution
Speaker 2: he disliked. He saw that they were well provided for.
Speaker 2: Seems like well provided for would include an inoculation from
Speaker 2: small parties.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I was like a little bellies is fool, that's
Speaker 3: what you're saying.
Speaker 2: Yeah, And he closes with the lion. His people were
Speaker 2: devoted to him and they made his home life comfortable
Speaker 2: and jolly. I don't know, man, the six and eight
Speaker 2: year old but died didn't seem jolly. Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 3: Demoted to you, bro like this words, doing a lot
Speaker 3: of work, buddy, Yeah, become a devoted Okay.
Speaker 2: Flora and Quomina fled with their ten year old brother
Speaker 2: Jimmy and their mother sal. Earlier, we talked about Jefferson's
Speaker 2: household slaves like Ursula and George, who expressed affection and
Speaker 2: acted with loyalty towards Jefferson. These were members of the
Speaker 2: families that Jefferson kept close. Some of them were literally
Speaker 2: his cousins and brothers and sisters in law, but Sally
Speaker 2: and her family lived further down the mountain doing menial work.
Speaker 2: Jefferson records Sal as a quote laborer in the ground.
Speaker 2: Now to speak about the British Empire again, you know,
Speaker 2: prop and we've talked about this on the show. When
Speaker 2: the British Empire would take a place right, like India, right,
Speaker 2: they would find a group of people to be like
Speaker 2: the term used is like warrior people right there. This
Speaker 2: is the tribe or the community or whatever that we
Speaker 2: recruit soldiers from to help us police the and they
Speaker 2: get extra privileges. And part of obviously the most obvious
Speaker 2: way that this helps a colonizing entity is that it
Speaker 2: gives you soldiers, right. But the other way it helps
Speaker 2: is that it creates division within the community you're ruling,
Speaker 2: and people will be angry at the warrior race, right,
Speaker 2: you know, as opposed to being as angry it focused
Speaker 2: on you. Jefferson does that at Monticello right between He
Speaker 2: deliberately kind of sets up conflict between these laborers in
Speaker 2: the ground and the people who are working in the house.
Speaker 2: So the people who are allowed to like learn a
Speaker 2: trade and become something like a blacksmith, right where you're
Speaker 2: able to make some money for yourself and you have
Speaker 2: a degree of independence. That conflict is a part of
Speaker 2: what he is kind of he's very deliberately stoking because
Speaker 2: it makes it easier for him to control people, right.
Speaker 3: And persist to this day. Yeah, yeah, yeah among the
Speaker 3: black community for sure. Yeah, we've gotten a lot wiser,
Speaker 3: but it definitely persists to this day.
Speaker 2: And it you know, there was possibly violence as a
Speaker 2: result of this. One of the kind of I don't
Speaker 2: want to get too much into it because it just
Speaker 2: the the actual evidence on this is unclear, but Ursula
Speaker 2: and a number of the people he owned who were
Speaker 2: like close to the Jefferson family, who like in the house,
Speaker 2: died all at the same time. This is a lot
Speaker 2: later in life, is after I think after his presidency. Yeah,
Speaker 2: and there were there were kind of suspicion at the
Speaker 2: time that they might have been poisoned, and it's possible
Speaker 2: that it was like kind of as a result of
Speaker 2: a conflict between the different sort of communities of people
Speaker 2: at Monticello. Yeah. I don't think we'll ever really know.
Speaker 2: But that sort of thing happens elsewhere, right, Like we
Speaker 2: have like it's not impossible that like he kind of
Speaker 2: incited something that led to a lot of people, including
Speaker 2: like the woman who nursed his children getting murdered. Yeah,
Speaker 2: you know, unclear as to what actually went down. Some
Speaker 2: of this is like it's just so long ago and
Speaker 2: so little of this was documented. We'll never know. And
Speaker 2: they didn't have the ability to like do blood tests
Speaker 2: and stuff for poison, you know, yeah, it being the
Speaker 2: seventeen hundreds or eighteen hundreds, yeah, and all that stuff.
Speaker 2: So Flora and Quomina died of smallpox in the British
Speaker 2: Army camp. Jimmy and sal returned to Monticello, I think,
Speaker 2: frightened by how much smallpox there was in the British camp,
Speaker 2: and then they died at Monticello. Shortly thereafter. Another family
Speaker 2: of laborers in the ground, Hannibal and his wife Pat
Speaker 2: fled with their six small children, all of whom of smallpox.
Speaker 2: And I again, I'm not used to writing about the
Speaker 2: British Army as like good guys here. Yeah, but that
Speaker 2: is kind of what we're building to. But you know,
Speaker 2: who are good guys?
Speaker 3: No, I don't, please tell me who is.
Speaker 2: The products services. Oh we'll be back in a minute, folks. Okay,
Speaker 2: we're back. So I want to talk about the British
Speaker 2: Army here prop because I didn't know this history. It
Speaker 2: kind of makes me surprised at the humanity shown by
Speaker 2: the literal British Army that the Americans do not show here.
Speaker 3: Yeah, the place that colonized eighty percent of the world,
Speaker 3: right there to show some humanity Okay.
Speaker 2: Yeah, a surprising amount here, because when the Revolutionary War ended,
Speaker 2: the victorious Americans wanted the slaves that had fled and
Speaker 2: were currently living with the British army back, right. That
Speaker 2: was a demand that was made British diplomats. Obviously, British
Speaker 2: diplomats didn't give a shit about these people, so they're like, yeah, sure,
Speaker 2: you can have them back. That seems like an easy
Speaker 2: thing we can give you as we sure, Yeah, who cares.
Speaker 3: If we want to be different? Yeah, right when I
Speaker 3: get it.
Speaker 2: Yeah, But the British generals, the field commanders were like, no, no, no,
Speaker 2: we promised these people freedom as a matter of our
Speaker 2: personal honor. You don't get to give them back. Wow,
Speaker 2: we made them a promise, and I think this is
Speaker 2: the largest act of emancipation prior to the Civil War
Speaker 2: because these British commanders ignore their diplomats and take eight
Speaker 2: to ten thousand black Americans away by boat and they
Speaker 2: are freed.
Speaker 3: Wild.
Speaker 2: You have to be pretty evil for the British Army
Speaker 2: and the seventeen hundreds to be the good guys. Yeah, anyway,
Speaker 2: I don't know, kudos to those British commanders.
Speaker 3: Oh yeah, that's even an interesting thing to where they're
Speaker 3: like they're honor code. They're like, dude, we gave our word. Yeah,
Speaker 3: like we made a promise. Yeah, we made a promise.
Speaker 3: And it's like whether however they feel about probably, you know,
Speaker 3: the humanity of it all and seeing like these people
Speaker 3: is like one thing, but then it's like the other
Speaker 3: thing of like, well we're no, we're like, we're members
Speaker 3: of the Royal Army. We have a certain amount of
Speaker 3: dignity and honor in our word means something, so like
Speaker 3: we gave them our word and also fuck y'all.
Speaker 2: Yeah, so fuck y'all. That probably wasn't none of it.
Speaker 3: Yeah yeah, yeah, like man, fuck you like no, you know, yeah.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah. In seventeen eighty two, Martha Jefferson died. We
Speaker 2: don't know what killed her. It seems to be one
Speaker 2: of those deals where you know she's not healthy, she
Speaker 2: has a lot of difficult pregnancies. Her body just kind
Speaker 2: of gives out on her thing man. Yeah, Yeah, it
Speaker 2: seems like she had kind of a rough life. Jefferson again,
Speaker 2: I think he destroys the correspondence that he and Martha
Speaker 2: had had earlier in their relationship. There's a you get
Speaker 2: the feeling he wanted to obscure a lot of this
Speaker 2: as much as possible of Martha's personality and who she
Speaker 2: was from the eyes of history. I don't know why.
Speaker 2: I guess it's possible and maybe even probably likely that
Speaker 2: it was just he was devastated by this and he
Speaker 2: couldn't bear having them around. It may just literally be
Speaker 2: a human moment for him where he just like couldn't
Speaker 2: he couldn't take having those those letters exist. I don't
Speaker 2: know his friends at the time, do right that he
Speaker 2: was unusually devastated by which I mean people like Edmund
Speaker 2: Randolph wrote stuff like this in a letter to James Manison.
Speaker 2: I never thought him to rank domestic happiness in the
Speaker 2: first class of the chief. Good, But I scarcely supposed
Speaker 2: that his grief would be so violent as to justify
Speaker 2: the circulating report of his swooning away whenever he sees
Speaker 2: his children. So that's like the claim that he makes
Speaker 2: is that, like Jefferson's like can't even be around his
Speaker 2: kids without passing out. He's so so stricken by grief.
Speaker 2: So that may that may honestly explain enough of like
Speaker 2: why he Obvio destroyed their letters and stuff. He just
Speaker 2: he may have just been really shabow. Yeah, yeah, he's
Speaker 2: still a person, right, It's sad. In seventeen eighty five,
Speaker 2: our boy TJ was sent to France to act as
Speaker 2: basically ambassador. They use a different term back then than ambassador,
Speaker 2: but he was an ambassador, right, his actually attache. Yeah,
Speaker 2: something like that.
Speaker 3: It's a fun word.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I like it. I like the word act.
Speaker 3: I want.
Speaker 2: I hope to be an attache at some point someday. Yeah,
Speaker 2: I'll do it in France, you know, fuck it, I
Speaker 2: think I could represent this country. His actual day job
Speaker 2: was negotiating various treaties, but he spent most of his
Speaker 2: time bullshitting with French intellectuals and radicals and watching the
Speaker 2: precursors to the French Revolution wind their way into being right.
Speaker 2: So he is. He is a famous and highly sought
Speaker 2: after dinner guest, and like the father of liberty is
Speaker 2: how a lot of people see him when I talk
Speaker 2: to him, Except he's also he owns a bunch of people, right,
Speaker 2: Like the same year he moves to France to do
Speaker 2: the job, he sells thirty one slaves to appease his creditors,
Speaker 2: right to deal with the interest on the debts that
Speaker 2: he has. Oh wow, Yeah, the end of the war
Speaker 2: had come with a resumption of interest payments and the
Speaker 2: expectation that indebted planters like Thomas Jefferson would make good
Speaker 2: on their obligations because most of them, including Thomas and Thomas,
Speaker 2: most of these Virginia planters who owe money owe it
Speaker 2: to British people, right to like banks and other creditors
Speaker 2: over there. He is, you know, infuriated by the fact
Speaker 2: that as part of negotiating it into the war, his
Speaker 2: debts have come due again, because he's come to understand
Speaker 2: by the time he's in Paris that a mixture of
Speaker 2: his own debts and his father in law's debts and
Speaker 2: the brutal realities of the interest rates both had agreed
Speaker 2: to meant that he couldn't really escape the situation he
Speaker 2: was in right, like he was never going to be
Speaker 2: It's like, you know, a lot of people have student
Speaker 2: loan situations right like this, right where it doesn't matter.
Speaker 2: I will never be.
Speaker 3: Able to chain this.
Speaker 2: Yeah. Yeah, this is like one of the most important
Speaker 2: things for understanding him as a thinker, because he is
Speaker 2: number one, He's he's hugely against the idea of inherited debt.
Speaker 2: This is like a major part of like what he's
Speaker 2: going to advocate for in politics. And just this, the
Speaker 2: mix of shame and desperation is like a major factor
Speaker 2: in shaping the man that he is because he always
Speaker 2: has this this kind of like it's like a fucking wolf,
Speaker 2: like always chasing him right gnawing at his back. And
Speaker 2: this is part of what's going to shape his attitude
Speaker 2: towards slavery and Jefferson's feelings here come from a series
Speaker 2: of complex things. He is a believer that the American
Speaker 2: struggle for independence, our revolution was the start of an
Speaker 2: inevitable wave of liberty that was destined to sweep the globe.
Speaker 2: If you read about how the guys like you know,
Speaker 2: Marks in eighteen forty eight and the people after him
Speaker 2: talk about the inevitable socialist world revolution that's coming. Thomas
Speaker 2: talks a lot like that. You know, he's not a socialist,
Speaker 2: but he's talking about like liberty as he conceives it,
Speaker 2: and he sees that, like well, it's going to come,
Speaker 2: probably in France next, but it's destined to sweep the
Speaker 2: world and the only things standing in the way of
Speaker 2: liberty are the British, who are an inherently counter revolutionary force.
Speaker 2: And he has this belief that, like, well, because the
Speaker 2: British are inherently opposed to human freedom, they're doomed. The
Speaker 2: empire is inevitably on its way to collapse. It's past
Speaker 2: its height, it's falling apart. Now, that was not accurate,
Speaker 2: right at all. No, the British Empire doesn't reach its
Speaker 2: height for more than a century after this point, right,
Speaker 2: Like it does quite well for a while. Yeah, And
Speaker 2: it's also like you, no one would call the British
Speaker 2: Empire a force for human liberty, but they did ban
Speaker 2: slavery decades before the United.
Speaker 5: States, much earlier, day, earlier, much earlier, and I would
Speaker 5: call that a meaningful ass if you're thinking about like
Speaker 5: liberty is a global cause, that's a mean thing.
Speaker 2: It's more meaning. Jefferson does after this point.
Speaker 3: Yeah, that's pretty big, man, like that that's that's a
Speaker 3: that's a that's that's a. Yeah, that's a that's in
Speaker 3: the W line. Man, I gotta tell you, bro, that's
Speaker 3: in the W line. Yeah.
Speaker 2: You can and should point out that the British still
Speaker 2: made use of situations that were not all that different
Speaker 2: from slavery, and even still did profit from slavery in
Speaker 2: some ways and the periphery of the empire. But like
Speaker 2: they still this is still a major step that they
Speaker 2: take well before the US does.
Speaker 3: Yeah, they were doing prison reform earlier too. Yeah, looking
Speaker 3: at like how to make our prison a little better?
Speaker 3: Like at least can we them at least it.
Speaker 2: Yeah, Jefferson is kind of racist against the British, so
Speaker 2: he can only see them as like this inherent counter
Speaker 2: revolutionary force with realities like well, actually the things that
Speaker 2: pe like British people within the British Empire are major
Speaker 2: parts of this swing towards greater human liberty and respect
Speaker 2: for like the autonomy of man. They play it, their role,
Speaker 2: they also play their role in trying to quash it.
Speaker 2: You know, it's accomplishing.
Speaker 3: Everybody else, Yeah, just like everybody else. I wonder, like,
Speaker 3: I think it's an interesting moment in time too that like,
Speaker 3: actually I never thought about it to you said it
Speaker 3: that like, by luck of the draw, you get to
Speaker 3: be born in an era where there are sweeping international
Speaker 3: changes or revolutions that are happening, like when you if
Speaker 3: you just happen to be in one of those moments
Speaker 3: like an industrial revolution, like a you know, or like
Speaker 3: you said, like this idea of like, you know this
Speaker 3: for for us, it would be like at least for
Speaker 3: a black person, it would be like being around in
Speaker 3: the sixties and being like, this is international the world
Speaker 3: is changing, you know type moment. And I never thought
Speaker 3: about this time after the revolution and this concept of
Speaker 3: being like yo, like it's democracy thing y'all, like trying
Speaker 3: to tell you, homie, like this this whole this is different,
Speaker 3: fam like you know, we don't King's homeboy, like it
Speaker 3: was about to go crazy right now, like what it
Speaker 3: you know again, barring what my personal experience would have
Speaker 3: been at that time that moment in history, man, I
Speaker 3: never thought of it as like, wow, it's kind of
Speaker 3: like a moment, you know.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, a lot of people do. And there's like
Speaker 2: good reason too, right, I mean, like the Haitian Revolution
Speaker 2: also totally all that was happening, not that right, like yeah, yeah, yeah,
Speaker 2: and we know how that ends. But at the time
Speaker 2: it could have it would have looked to someone who
Speaker 2: was like less not racist, you know, in the way
Speaker 2: Jefferson was, you might have been like, look, really it
Speaker 2: is like this wave is it's coming more seriously, this
Speaker 2: is just the start of it, you know, exactly, at
Speaker 2: least for a while. So you can see how someone
Speaker 2: might have believed that as a representative of the new
Speaker 2: nation of the United States and a slave owner, Jefferson
Speaker 2: found himself regularly needing to defend his people and himself
Speaker 2: while he was in France to all these kind of
Speaker 2: like philosophers of liberty. These guys, a lot of whom
Speaker 2: are going to become like politicians who are going to
Speaker 2: have elected leaders in the Republic that's coming. A lot
Speaker 2: of these guys see him as an advocate of the
Speaker 2: cause of liberty, and they're confused because they're like, yeah,
Speaker 2: we love what everything you say, and it's amazing that
Speaker 2: you guys won your war. How do you own people?
Speaker 2: How can you be this guy and own people? My boy?
Speaker 2: But yeah, like.
Speaker 3: Bars everything you say, yeah, bars, yeah, like yeah, help me, yeah,
Speaker 3: help me figure this out.
Speaker 2: And for a time, Jefferson is kind of able to
Speaker 2: He kind of is able to bamboozle a lot of
Speaker 2: these people by pure eloquence. He had first written out
Speaker 2: an abolition plan, and that pamphlet his friends had published, right,
Speaker 2: the kind of first thing that starts his political career,
Speaker 2: proposing first that the slave trade be ended, and then
Speaker 2: that the enfranchisement of the enslaved people already here carried
Speaker 2: out gradually. Right, And part of this does happen. We
Speaker 2: do ban the Atlantic slave trade, right.
Speaker 3: Yeah, that's first. He can bring no new ones.
Speaker 2: Yeah yeah, but we never there's never like that gradual.
Speaker 2: There's never a graduate emancipation of the enslaved people here, right,
Speaker 2: because he's kind of proposing basically, we like, I don't know,
Speaker 2: draw lots or whatever and over you know, twenty years
Speaker 2: or whatever, everyone gets freed. You know, that's kind of
Speaker 2: the idea. You're let believe reading this.
Speaker 3: Yeah, you ramp down. It's like it's like the switch
Speaker 3: to electric cars where it's like, yeah, you can't just
Speaker 3: like you know, put every mechanic out of business. Today
Speaker 3: it's like, yeah, we gotta you gotta like slow it down,
Speaker 3: and you know, yeah, yeah is what he's saying.
Speaker 2: Yeah, that's what he's saying. And obviously, like that's bad, right,
Speaker 2: the idea that like you would you would feel the
Speaker 2: need to not, you know, fuck over the slavers. But
Speaker 2: it would have been if we'd done that, it would
Speaker 2: have been better than what we did, which was nothing
Speaker 2: until we had a war, right until we fought. Yes.
Speaker 2: In Notes on the State of Virginia, as part of
Speaker 2: this European charm offensive, Jefferson had laid out a more
Speaker 2: detail plan for emancipation. So he writes this first plan
Speaker 2: out kind of before he gets into Congress, and then
Speaker 2: during the Revolutionary War, as he's trying to really make
Speaker 2: sure that like these these French thinkers that he admires
Speaker 2: so much and who are backing our war effort, stay
Speaker 2: on his side, he lays out a different emancipation plan,
Speaker 2: and it's a much colder one than the last one.
Speaker 2: Under this plan, enslaved adults would stay that way forever,
Speaker 2: their children would not and in fact, those children would
Speaker 2: be taken away from their parents and put into some
Speaker 2: sort of public training program that amounted to a crash
Speaker 2: course in being a free person, and then, at age
Speaker 2: twenty one or eighteen for women, they would be given guns, tools,
Speaker 2: a small amount of livestock, and be sent somewhere else, right,
Speaker 2: And the idea is, we can't have them living among
Speaker 2: us killers, but they can have a colony, you know,
Speaker 2: and that'll.
Speaker 3: Give you a gun and leave you here crazy. Yeah,
Speaker 3: Like okay, say, look, man, that's just not smart.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it's kind of I think like this thinking is
Speaker 2: sort of what leads to liberia. Like Jefferson is kind
Speaker 2: of the I don't know if he's the very first,
Speaker 2: but he's one of the first, certainly the first guy.
Speaker 2: The level of prominence he's at, who's kind of laying
Speaker 2: out that sort of a yeah right yeah, and it's
Speaker 2: god the level of evil in like, well, of course,
Speaker 2: we can't free people who are already slaves, but we
Speaker 2: will take their children away from them and have an
Speaker 2: orphan colony.
Speaker 3: Bro. Like, like, just say it again out loud, bro, Like,
Speaker 3: just say it out loud to yourself again, Like word,
Speaker 3: that's yeah for real?
Speaker 2: Fam like, Yeah, I want you to sit alone at
Speaker 2: the mirror and just look into your own eyes as
Speaker 2: you say, I want to abduct the children of slaves
Speaker 2: to make an allied colony.
Speaker 3: Yeah. Yeah, and that's and that's going to make them
Speaker 3: be appreciative what you did for them, that's yeah. And
Speaker 3: he's like, oh, absolutely, now we're sending him back to Africa.
Speaker 2: No, they're gonna be fissed. Yeah, his attitude was more
Speaker 2: like Kansas. I don't think he's saying Africa. Yeah. I
Speaker 2: think he wanted you because he's colonizer right right, And
Speaker 2: that's you know, in these Jefferson episodes, that is very
Speaker 2: much part of like the bad things that he did,
Speaker 2: his attitudes towards colonization and the Native Americans. This is
Speaker 2: there's so much to say just about slavery. I didn't
Speaker 2: really feel like I could, like I kind of wanted
Speaker 2: to focus these episodes on that. I'm not leaving that
Speaker 2: out because it's not important. It's just no, there's a
Speaker 2: lot to say about Jefferson, you know.
Speaker 3: Yeah, he's he's a multi dimensional character that, like you know,
Speaker 3: obviously when you at least from from my perspective, once
Speaker 3: you add it all together. I'm like you, I mean,
Speaker 3: you're still a ship bag.
Speaker 2: Yeah, you know what I'm.
Speaker 3: Saying, Like, at the end of the day, you are.
Speaker 3: But it's but it's a complex shit bag, you know
Speaker 3: that that Like yeah, and.
Speaker 2: He had he was in power for or he was
Speaker 2: in you know, a political an active political figure for
Speaker 2: more than forty years. So there's just you.
Speaker 3: Can't to say, yeah, you can't shake your fist at that,
Speaker 3: Like that's that's some real Where did I get that
Speaker 3: phrase shake your fist that?
Speaker 2: Yeah, you can't prize myself, you can't do all the
Speaker 2: shaking of your fist that's necessary in four episodes right
Speaker 2: where we're really just there's even stuff, there's a lot
Speaker 2: plenty about Jefferson and slavery that we're leaving out. I
Speaker 2: just didn't know how to fit at all. Besides like
Speaker 2: his fourty five keys. Yeah, So Jefferson when he's talking
Speaker 2: about you know, he has a lot of these like
Speaker 2: salon meetings, these like long dinners with these different French intellectuals,
Speaker 2: and his chief argument as to why it's just not
Speaker 2: possible to do a general emancipation yet is that if
Speaker 2: they did one, a race war would inevitably follow and
Speaker 2: his credit and one letter to a friend, he placed
Speaker 2: the blame on deep rooted prejudices by white people, which is,
Speaker 2: you know, sounds sympathetic, but then he also blames ten
Speaker 2: thousand recollections by the Blacks of the injuries they have sustained.
Speaker 2: And then beyond that he adds the real distinctions which
Speaker 2: nature has made, which is race science. Right now, he
Speaker 2: was talking about, yeah.
Speaker 3: You're two for three, bro, Yeah, yeah.
Speaker 2: Yeah, those first two points, well those are things. Yeah,
Speaker 2: like people are going to be very angry about what's
Speaker 2: been done to them, and you do have to account
Speaker 2: for that somehow. And then he gets then he gets
Speaker 2: into the race science. And this all worked on a
Speaker 2: lot of his admirers though, right, like a surprising number
Speaker 2: of people kind of bought that, like, well, he doesn't
Speaker 2: really like this, but this is a really thorny problem,
Speaker 2: and like maybe he's right, you know, we have to
Speaker 2: avoid a race war. Like you've got these kind of
Speaker 2: intellectuals who know slavery is wrong, and they also don't
Speaker 2: they haven't been in a lot of cases to the
Speaker 2: United States. They don't have great context for like how
Speaker 2: brutal the system really is, or how much Jefferson is
Speaker 2: full of shit?
Speaker 3: Right, Yeah, It's like you got your little brother in
Speaker 3: a headlock, and you're like, if I let you go,
Speaker 3: do you promise not to punch me? Swear swear swear
Speaker 3: on mo sweared on our mother that you will not
Speaker 3: punch me. I can't let you go unless you swear.
Speaker 3: Are you gonna punch It's like, man, yeah, what are
Speaker 3: we talking about here?
Speaker 2: Yeah? That is Jefferson like gets himself trapped very much
Speaker 2: in that that mode of thinking, dude, but he's good
Speaker 2: enough about talking about it in a way that it
Speaker 2: makes it seem less fucked up than it actually is.
Speaker 2: That said, by the time Jefferson's been in Paris a
Speaker 2: few years, some of these admirers of his have started
Speaker 2: to notice that it shure didn't seem like any kind
Speaker 2: of gradual emancipation program was in place, right. They were like, Okay,
Speaker 2: we agreed with you, maybe this has to be done gradually,
Speaker 2: but like, it doesn't actually seem like you guys are
Speaker 2: doing anything over there. Yeah, what's up with that?
Speaker 3: Yeah? I hate that. I hate the like the what
Speaker 3: I was going to guy? Yeah, that's the guy. I
Speaker 3: got a lot of plans like, well, my plan is
Speaker 3: to do this, but we got to make sure this,
Speaker 3: and then I forgot about that, and then probably tomorrow
Speaker 3: we'll go get it. Oh you was the I was
Speaker 3: going to guy, You're not finna do it.
Speaker 2: I'm definitely gonna write this screenplay one day. It seems
Speaker 2: like you talk about it a lot, but you're not
Speaker 2: doing anything.
Speaker 3: A man maybe should write, maybe you should start.
Speaker 2: Yeah. Yeah, Jefferson is writing, but he is not doing
Speaker 2: any emancipating. And one of the people who notices that
Speaker 2: is French editor and future revolutionary politician Jean Nicholas de
Speaker 2: mune who.
Speaker 3: You should talk about after this ad break.
Speaker 2: Oh yeah, shoot, yes, speaking of John Nicholas d'munet, these
Speaker 2: ads would he'd love, would you? Yeah? Yeah? Yeah. D
Speaker 2: Mooney yourself towards spending money, you can that one. Yeah,
Speaker 2: we figured it out basically. Ah, we're back. So his
Speaker 2: friend Demuinae is like, hey, it doesn't look like you're
Speaker 2: doing any of the stuff you'd said you were going
Speaker 2: to do, and Jefferson responds He sends a letter back
Speaker 2: writing that emancipation has only been delayed because quote persons
Speaker 2: of virtue and firmness thought the timing wasn't right. Quote.
Speaker 2: They saw that the moment of doing it with success
Speaker 2: was not yet arrived, and that an unsuccessful effort, as
Speaker 2: too often happens, would only rivets still closer the chains
Speaker 2: of bondage and retard the moment of deliberty to the
Speaker 2: suppressed description of men. No, these really smart guys. You
Speaker 2: don't know them, but they're like, they're super smart.
Speaker 3: They actually funny.
Speaker 2: If we like fuck this up, it'll be even worse
Speaker 2: for the people we own. So we really just got
Speaker 2: to kind of wait, you know, we gotta do it right.
Speaker 2: We want to do it right.
Speaker 3: Yeah, We're gonna do it. We want to do it right.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 3: I still believe there needs to be in all of
Speaker 3: our halls of justice and dialogue and stuff like that,
Speaker 3: the command FAM button. Yeah, like just to come on, fam,
Speaker 3: Like there needs to be that needs to be a
Speaker 3: button where it's like you can have these high and lofty,
Speaker 3: you know, precedent setting you know, swooping, uh, you know,
Speaker 3: air tight logical discussions that are probably again incredibly articulate
Speaker 3: and air type. But I'm gonna hit the command fan button.
Speaker 3: Come on fan, yeah, bright, yeah, and everybody in the
Speaker 3: room knows what that means. You know what that means.
Speaker 3: Come on, f Yeah, you tell me smarter people.
Speaker 4: Come on, fam, have you to have the come on
Speaker 4: fan button and get the fuck out Claus in all situations?
Speaker 3: Yes, and to get the fuck out Claus get the Yeah.
Speaker 3: Those are the two things we are.
Speaker 2: Adding pressing the pressing the common fam button and mashes
Speaker 2: the mountain Henry Winsick Rights. Jefferson admitted mentioning that the
Speaker 2: Virginia legislature had liberalized the slave laws so as to
Speaker 2: enable individual owners to free people at will. For Demione
Speaker 2: would have then asked why persons of virtue and firmness
Speaker 2: had not yet freed their slaves, particularly why Jefferson had
Speaker 2: not freed his. Jefferson also did not mention that in
Speaker 2: revising the slave code, he had suggested a law compelling
Speaker 2: a white woman who bore a mixed race child to
Speaker 2: leave Virginia or be placed out of the protection of
Speaker 2: the laws.
Speaker 3: Damn.
Speaker 2: So yeah, yeah, that's pretty that's pretty bad. Yeah.
Speaker 3: So they already do it, jo like y'all, Yeah, y'all did,
Speaker 3: we don't already y'all can do it, but ain't nobody
Speaker 3: doing it? Mister virtue of people.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, and it's what we're going to talk more
Speaker 2: about his attitudes towards you know, what was then called missagenation,
Speaker 2: because they're really incoherent, right, like they he is not
Speaker 2: at all consistent about this, but that is a particularly
Speaker 2: hideous moment, right.
Speaker 3: Like yeah, the missigenation. Yeah, the misigenation stuff is the
Speaker 3: stuff that like swoops around like black community so much,
Speaker 3: specifically about Thomas Jefferson. Why we're like, you're shitbag, bro, Like.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, he wanted to because what he's saying there
Speaker 2: is like if a white woman has a mixed race child,
Speaker 2: they're not protected by the law, so like members of
Speaker 2: their family can murder them and not get in trouble, right,
Speaker 2: Like that is what he's suggesting, Like it's it really
Speaker 2: is ugly. So the ideological incoherence behind between some of
Speaker 2: the words and most of the actions of this prophet
Speaker 2: of liberty are really well described in Ellis's book American Sphinx,
Speaker 2: which is kind of written to explain this part of
Speaker 2: Jefferson that like, wow, it really seems like he says
Speaker 2: a bunch of shit that he does not do right
Speaker 2: or that. Yeah. Yeah, And in that book, LS lays
Speaker 2: out another example of how Jefferson jinked away from confronting
Speaker 2: this issue in his correspondence with his French friends. You
Speaker 2: know that nobody wishes more ardently to see an abolition
Speaker 2: not only of the trade, but of the condition of slavery,
Speaker 2: he wrote to a French friend in seventeen eighty eight.
Speaker 2: But I am here as a public servant, and those
Speaker 2: whom I serve have not yet been able to give
Speaker 2: their voice against this practice. It is decent for me
Speaker 2: to avoid too public a demonstration. If my wishes to
Speaker 2: see it abolished without serving the cause here, it might
Speaker 2: render me less able to serve it beyond the water,
Speaker 2: he began to develop the argument. It became the centerpiece
Speaker 2: of his public position on slavery throughout his mature years
Speaker 2: and until the end of his life, that the problem
Speaker 2: should be passed along to the next generation of an
Speaker 2: American statesman, and he really becomes the father of our
Speaker 2: country in that moment, Like, well, really, what I got
Speaker 2: to do is just push this on a generation.
Speaker 3: Sounds like it sounds like it sounds like a tomorrow problem. Yeah,
Speaker 3: got it.
Speaker 2: Wow.
Speaker 3: When I was a kid at our church, one of
Speaker 3: our pastors Pastor Renee, he's just alg black woman. She
Speaker 3: used to say, a lot of taki taki, not a
Speaker 3: lot of dewey dewey. You know, you guys got a
Speaker 3: lot of It's a lot of talkie talkie, you know,
Speaker 3: Like I need to see a little more dewey dewey,
Speaker 3: you know. So like every time I'd hear like this,
Speaker 3: that's what I think of, Like, all right, pastor a right,
Speaker 3: Pastor Renette, You're right, I need we need some more
Speaker 3: dewey dewey. Yeah.
Speaker 2: So the question I'm left with here is was he
Speaker 2: just a psychopath?
Speaker 3: Right?
Speaker 2: Like? Is he just one of the like a lot
Speaker 2: of American politicians or politicians in general, who's calculating whatever
Speaker 2: will he can say to further his interests, but he
Speaker 2: just does not care about the reality of like what
Speaker 2: he's doing. Or is it like you know, people use
Speaker 2: that term for Steve Jobs, the reality distortion field, which
Speaker 2: he eventually used on himself when he used to treat
Speaker 2: his cancer. Is it that is he like, is he
Speaker 2: really convinced himself that this is a well, I can't
Speaker 2: be you know, most of the other people in American politics,
Speaker 2: all these other politicians that I need to do these
Speaker 2: other great things that I want to do. They can't
Speaker 2: be anti slavery because of the realities of the you know,
Speaker 2: the state that they're in, you know, the terrible time
Speaker 2: that we're in. And I don't want to make them.
Speaker 2: I don't want to embarrass them because then I won't
Speaker 2: be able to do the other important things that I
Speaker 2: need to do. Right, has he convinced himself of that?
Speaker 2: Is it just the lie that he knows will work?
Speaker 2: And I don't know. I contend that part of what's
Speaker 2: going on here is what I like to call speech
Speaker 2: and debate syndrome. Right, This is a tendency I've noticed
Speaker 2: in public figures who came out of competitive speech and debate,
Speaker 2: guys like Ben Shapiro, and it convinced themselves. Competitive debate
Speaker 2: is a game with rules that you can, you know,
Speaker 2: take advantage of based on what you can convince a
Speaker 2: judge is true with wordplay and it's not or sorry.
Speaker 2: They convince themselves that, like, because that's what debate is. Yeah,
Speaker 2: they guys like Ben Shapiro convince themselves it's actually a
Speaker 2: search for truth. Right that, Like, being able to win
Speaker 2: a debate means that you're right even if you're just
Speaker 2: like lying and saying whatever dumb shit comes into your
Speaker 2: head to try and make an argument in that moment. Yeah,
Speaker 2: and that means my arguments better. Yeah, exactly, It's like, no,
Speaker 2: it means that, like, this is a game that you
Speaker 2: score points in and you have found a way to
Speaker 2: maximize your point And you can maximize your points by
Speaker 2: just making shit up or exaggerating, lying about what's in sources.
Speaker 2: Like I've done all of those things to win speech
Speaker 2: debate competitions.
Speaker 3: Yeah, totally.
Speaker 2: Yeah, constructing an argument that sounds good is what matters.
Speaker 2: And if what your writing sounds good enough, people won't
Speaker 2: pay attention to like the incoherencies inside it. Like as
Speaker 2: long as you can get you can razzle, dazzle your
Speaker 2: opponent away from not noticing them, then you can win,
Speaker 2: even if there are huge inconsistencies and the thing that
Speaker 2: you're arguing. And I wonder if Jefferson is kind of
Speaker 2: doing that to himself right in order to kind of
Speaker 2: avoid getting judged by these people that he admires and
Speaker 2: that he wants to think well of him, He's coming
Speaker 2: up with all these kind of like bullshit ways to
Speaker 2: obfuscate the reality, which is that he just doesn't really
Speaker 2: want to free his slaves, right, yeah, like he likes
Speaker 2: stoning people.
Speaker 3: And it just but it feels icky. It's almost like, well,
Speaker 3: I don't want to sound like them fools, like yeah,
Speaker 3: at least at least I'm like acknowledging and turning myself
Speaker 3: into a pretzel rather than just sounding like this guy
Speaker 3: like your you sound like a knuckle dragging you know
Speaker 3: what I'm saying, Like I'm a I'm a distinguished civilized
Speaker 3: man like and I wonder if there's that just the
Speaker 3: pride of like even though I agree with y'all, yeah,
Speaker 3: I can't accept that I agree.
Speaker 2: With y'all yeah yeah, because I know this is evil
Speaker 2: and I don't want to be judged by people who
Speaker 2: are better now or folks in the future. So I
Speaker 2: have to find a way to thread the needle while
Speaker 2: still getting the thing I want. Yes, So Jefferson writes
Speaker 2: this banger kind of as an example of this sort
Speaker 2: of sophistry. He writes this in a letter to Demine
Speaker 2: about the injustice of slavery. When the measure of their
Speaker 2: tears shall be full when they're grown, she'll have involved
Speaker 2: heaven itself in darkness. Doubtless a God of justice will
Speaker 2: awaken to their the stress, and by diffusing light and
Speaker 2: liberality among their oppressors, were at length by his exterminating
Speaker 2: thunder manifest his attention to the things of this world
Speaker 2: and that they are not left to the guidance of
Speaker 2: a blind fatality. Like eventually, God's going to realize how
Speaker 2: fucked up this is. You'll take care of it.
Speaker 3: Right, It's going to end because this is wrong. So
Speaker 3: if I don't do it, I know it's going to okay, Right,
Speaker 3: God man twisted yourself in.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 1: In Americans, unseasoned season Yeah no, salt no salt no, no.
Speaker 2: He would he Yeah. In American Sphinx, Ellis excla season, Yeah,
Speaker 2: boiled chickens. Just just boil your boil your the dough
Speaker 2: in a hot dog water. Yeah, yes, call it the
Speaker 2: Jefferson Yes so in Americans, Ellis explains a lot of
Speaker 2: the kind of the hypocrisy here by saying that Jefferson's
Speaker 2: chief goal in any face to face interaction was to
Speaker 2: avoid awkwardness and confrontation. Right quote. Jefferson always regarded candor
Speaker 2: and courtesy as incompatible, and when forced to choose, he
Speaker 2: invariably picked courtesy, thereby avoiding unpleasant confrontations. Letter writing was
Speaker 2: a perfect instrument for this diplomatic skill, in part because
Speaker 2: of Jefferson's mastery of the written word, and in part
Speaker 2: because different audiences could be independently targeted. Yeah, and so
Speaker 2: he's it's also like, well, part of what he's doing
Speaker 2: here isn't even necessarily that he wants to be thought of. Well,
Speaker 2: he just doesn't like to argue with people, and so
Speaker 2: he's going to say whatever he thinks will get them
Speaker 2: to stop giving him shit without confronting them.
Speaker 3: Right, that's crazy modern.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, he does, right, he is. He is the
Speaker 2: first twenty first century man.
Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, he's crazy.
Speaker 2: He's an asshole out of time. So in this passage,
Speaker 2: Ellis is kind of talking about the fact that while
Speaker 2: he's living it up in Paris, Jefferson publishes all of
Speaker 2: these letters back in the United States, like warning young
Speaker 2: Americans not to go to Paris because it's like decadent
Speaker 2: and depraved and it'll it'll ruin your morals as a person. Right,
Speaker 2: He's like living it up and being like, oh, yeah,
Speaker 2: you don't want to go to Paris, guys, you know,
Speaker 2: just just just stay in the field in Virginia.
Speaker 3: It's fine, and I enjoy his French women.
Speaker 1: Yeah, he's trying not to get caught up.
Speaker 3: Get caught bro, you know what I'm saying, trying to share.
Speaker 1: Either he'sent xoxo to our life.
Speaker 2: Yeah, well, I think it's also you know, he's a
Speaker 2: as a fairly modern, open minded guy. He's perfectly capable
Speaker 2: of enjoying you know, the scene in Paris totally, but
Speaker 2: he knows that that's not popular with like American conservatives,
Speaker 2: so he has to write letters home about like, oh, yeah,
Speaker 2: there's such decadent even like really gross people. We don't
Speaker 2: need to be going over to.
Speaker 3: You, like, yeah, really be telling you what we're doing
Speaker 3: out here. You know what I'm saying, he thought about
Speaker 3: for it.
Speaker 1: He's every politician ever.
Speaker 2: No guys politician ever. You got to avoid the drugs
Speaker 2: over there. Like I was sniff testing a bunch of
Speaker 2: their cocaine the other day to make sure it's safe
Speaker 2: for other people, and I'm just not sure. I'm gonna
Speaker 2: need to check on more, right, you know, That's really
Speaker 2: the only thing for me to do.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I wanted to go into these brothels to make
Speaker 3: sure these women are being well taken care of. Yeah,
Speaker 3: that they're healthy. And I just went in for that.
Speaker 3: I just wanted to test.
Speaker 2: Yeah, And after nine or ten hours, I realized there
Speaker 2: was no fire. Exit. Come on, come on, guys.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 2: In one dinner with a bunch of abolitionists in France,
Speaker 2: he was asked yet again, why hasn't there been any
Speaker 2: move for general emancipation and you're supposedly liberty loving country.
Speaker 2: Jefferson just bullshitted, saying that some slave owners had tried
Speaker 2: to free their slaves out of the goodness of their hearts,
Speaker 2: and they'd even given them land and like tools, and
Speaker 2: it had failed because these poor black people weren't ready
Speaker 2: for the realities of freedom, and they were so scared
Speaker 2: they asked to be taken back as slaves. Now, hmmm,
Speaker 2: that's obviously a lie. Like he's literally just like, I'm
Speaker 2: just gonna lie so that these people I can win
Speaker 2: this argument, right, that's what he's doing. One of the
Speaker 2: guys he's at dinner with as an American who was
Speaker 2: working as a spy for the British. He may have
Speaker 2: also been a double agent working for the Americans. It's
Speaker 2: kind of unclear but this guy writes Jefferson a letter
Speaker 2: after this dinner, and it's basically like citation, please, like
Speaker 2: you brought this story up? Where can I read more
Speaker 2: about this?
Speaker 3: That's bullshit?
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, this seems interesting. Is there any evidence that
Speaker 2: it happened? And Jefferson replied, oh yeah, dude, you know
Speaker 2: it was some Quakers who did it, who like freed
Speaker 2: those guys and then had to take him back. And
Speaker 2: I don't actually know their names. Uh, but he he
Speaker 2: offers up, let me get back to you. He does
Speaker 2: offer up more details in this letter, some of which
Speaker 2: contradict what he'd said during the dinner quote. I remember
Speaker 2: that the landlord was obliged to plant their crops for them,
Speaker 2: to direct all their operations during every season and according
Speaker 2: to the weather. But what is more afflicting, he was
Speaker 2: obliged to watch them daily and almost constantly, to make
Speaker 2: them work, and even to whip them. These slaves chose
Speaker 2: to steal from their neighbors rather than work. They became
Speaker 2: public nuisances and in most cases were reduced to slavery. Again,
Speaker 2: and that's very different. I also don't think that's true.
Speaker 2: But like saying, well, they committed crimes and were re enslaved.
Speaker 2: Is different from them saying begging taken back, right.
Speaker 3: They wanted to come back. RH few things in that story.
Speaker 3: One is I'm obviously you can't say this of everyone,
Speaker 3: but Quakers famously abolitionists, famously anti slavery.
Speaker 2: Yes, so the.
Speaker 3: Idea so like you're starting a story with the people
Speaker 3: that already disagree with the institution in the first place
Speaker 3: and helped out in the underground railroad data ones. Okay,
Speaker 3: got it. So that's first number one. And then even
Speaker 3: if you sit in even if that's true, you're sitting
Speaker 3: across the table and you're like, you set them free
Speaker 3: in a country where everybody else where they're gonna go tools.
Speaker 3: Of course they're terrified. What the fuck are you talking about?
Speaker 3: The first other free white person they see is gonna
Speaker 3: kill them or try to enslave them. Yeah, of course
Speaker 3: that's what happened. What do you mean they couldn't handle it?
Speaker 2: Like yeah, yeah, well, and that's so here's I wanted
Speaker 2: to like, there's actually a real story behind us, and
Speaker 2: it is completely different from the story that Jefferson tells,
Speaker 2: which is that Okay, a bunch of around this time,
Speaker 2: like in the late seventeen hundreds, a bunch of Quakers
Speaker 2: had freed their slaves. Because there's kind of this almost
Speaker 2: it's almost like a meme that overtakes Quaker culture, which
Speaker 2: is this very specific argument that the conclusion of it
Speaker 2: is that God has made everybody the same. Right, It's
Speaker 2: like a scriptural argument, but the conclusion people start making
Speaker 2: and they are like people traveling different Quaker communities like
Speaker 2: arguing this is God made everybody the same, which means
Speaker 2: there are no natural differences between the races. Everybody's just people.
Speaker 2: We shouldn't own people, right, Yeah, Now, manu mission. When
Speaker 2: this starts happening, manumission is illegal in Virginia. This is
Speaker 2: the mid seventeen seventies. You're not a l to free
Speaker 2: your slaves in Virginia. So Quakers spent years fighting in
Speaker 2: court to make that legal, which culminates in Virginia legalizing manumission.
Speaker 2: This is a big deal. During the years that Jefferson
Speaker 2: was in state politics, he has to have known the
Speaker 2: reality of the situation, right, which is not that these
Speaker 2: people all had to go back into slavery. That is
Speaker 2: not what happens. Like a lot of people just got
Speaker 2: freed because Quakers were pretty chill. Yeah, Now Jefferson knows
Speaker 2: he's lying. And part of how you know he knows
Speaker 2: he's lying is that in that letter back to that
Speaker 2: dude where he's like bullshitting about this, he's like, you know,
Speaker 2: I'm probably I don't remember everything perfectly, so so don't
Speaker 2: make it. Make no use of this imperfect information. If
Speaker 2: you plan to write an article. I don't want you
Speaker 2: citing me in an article.
Speaker 3: Don't quote me, bro, Yeah.
Speaker 2: Don't unless he says. If you want to quote me
Speaker 2: in face to face conversations, you can do that.
Speaker 3: Right.
Speaker 2: If you want to just lie at as somebody, that's fine,
Speaker 2: that's what I did, right, don't quote me. That might
Speaker 2: get embarrassing when people realize I'm a liar.
Speaker 4: He said, I said, he said, I said, But I said,
Speaker 4: but like, don't tell anybody.
Speaker 2: But don't tell anybody unless it's face then it's cool.
Speaker 3: So funny. Hey, look, I might be remembered, like I'm
Speaker 3: telling you this happened. Wait, I might be remembered this,
Speaker 3: but look, but but for real, though, don't quote me
Speaker 3: on it. Yeah, so hilarious.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it's choice.
Speaker 3: Hey, So it's like, hey, so you don't know shit
Speaker 3: then right, Yeah, so you're folks, so you don't know.
Speaker 3: So what's the point of the story if you can't
Speaker 3: tell me?
Speaker 2: Okay, great stuff, So speaking of I don't know basic reality. Uh.
Speaker 2: The famed liberty liberty advocate spent a large part of
Speaker 2: his years in Paris trying to get out of his
Speaker 2: debts to his creditors by arguing that he deserved compensation
Speaker 2: for the slaves who had died of smallpox. In general
Speaker 2: Cornwallis's camp, Oh word, basically, I shouldn't have to pay
Speaker 2: you people as much because I didn't want you killed.
Speaker 3: Yeah, they wouldn't have died if you ain't give him smallpox. Yeah. Wow.
Speaker 2: So his debts. The reason why he's trying to do
Speaker 2: this is his debts, and a lot of those debts
Speaker 2: come from that bad deal that he inherited from his
Speaker 2: father in law. Are crushing at this point. In July
Speaker 2: of seventeen eighty seven, he wrote to his property manager
Speaker 2: in Monticello that he couldn't sell any more land because
Speaker 2: it was quote the only sure provision for his children.
Speaker 2: But he also couldn't sell more of his slaves quote,
Speaker 2: as there remains any prospect of paying my debts with
Speaker 2: their labor. Right, and this is we did the top
Speaker 2: Roberty Lee episodes earlier this year. That's the same logic
Speaker 2: as Lee. I'd love to free these people, but I
Speaker 2: need them to make me money because I'm in debt, right,
Speaker 2: sucking casts. Yeah yeah. And it's what's fucked up is that,
Speaker 2: like Lee at least doesn't try to justify it other
Speaker 2: than like, well, I need the money, you know, fuck it. Yeah,
Speaker 2: I'm just a racist, you know, I really care. Jefferson
Speaker 2: the Profit of Liberty has to like twist this by
Speaker 2: claiming that what he's doing is somehow the best thing
Speaker 2: for his slaves.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 2: Quote in this, I am governed solely by views to
Speaker 2: their happiness, which will render it worth their while to
Speaker 2: use extraordinary exertions for some time to enable me to
Speaker 2: put them ultimately on an easier footing, which I will
Speaker 2: do the moment they have paid the debts due from
Speaker 2: the estate, two thirds of which have been contracted by
Speaker 2: purchasing them. Right. Well, the money came because we bought
Speaker 2: these people, so like they kind of owe it, right.
Speaker 3: Yeah, we do. They do have a cost, Yeah, there's
Speaker 3: a cost tied to this, and just you know, I
Speaker 3: hate it. Yeah, the world we live in, it's our
Speaker 3: modern world.
Speaker 2: But right, yeah, so even what's interesting, Yeah, because he
Speaker 2: has this view that like, these people owe me for
Speaker 2: the debt of their you know, bringing them over here,
Speaker 2: and even the small children who like we're born here
Speaker 2: owed me a debt. They are born owing me money. Right,
Speaker 2: that is how he views this. You know, this guy
Speaker 2: who makes a big part of his career trying to
Speaker 2: like fighting against what he sees is the evils of
Speaker 2: inherited debt, sees no moral quandary, and of fixing debt
Speaker 2: to the children who are born into his ownership. And
Speaker 2: in fact, a major story of Jefferson's Paris years is
Speaker 2: that he comes to see slavery as the answer to
Speaker 2: not just his but the whole nation's financial woes. Virginia
Speaker 2: planters owed millions to bankers in Great Britain, and the
Speaker 2: new nation also found itself hobbled by debt to the
Speaker 2: country it had just beaten at war. Farming, Jefferson had
Speaker 2: come to see, was a form of gambling because he's
Speaker 2: a bad farmer. Right, It's like it's not reliable enough
Speaker 2: for making money. Slavery, though, is a safe investment. It's
Speaker 2: basically a treasury bond. Right. He writes at length to
Speaker 2: his friends like gleefully basically that he's calculated a rate
Speaker 2: of return, right, Yeah, and that I get because of
Speaker 2: like my slaves are continuing to have kids. The value
Speaker 2: of the people I own increases by about four percent
Speaker 2: every year, and it's really stable. It's like the most
Speaker 2: stable investment he that exists at the time. Right. And
Speaker 2: this is particularly beneficial because Jefferson is going to use
Speaker 2: these people as collateral with a Dutch bank to rebuild Monticello. Right,
Speaker 2: That's how he funds making the house we're going to
Speaker 2: talk about next episode. Is like using these people as
Speaker 2: collateral and alone. He is a pioneer in financializing slavery, right,
Speaker 2: taking it beyond just well, we need to grow food,
Speaker 2: and we don't want to do it ourselves, so we
Speaker 2: own people and use them for it too. I am
Speaker 2: treating these people I own as an investment viasu as
Speaker 2: it's a bond, you know, it's a treasury bond or something,
Speaker 2: right like. That's how he's or money market account or
Speaker 2: some shit, right like that. That's one of his big innovations. Now,
Speaker 2: it's during this time in France seventeen eighty five to
Speaker 2: eighty nine, that Jefferson also starts what historians often refer
Speaker 2: to as his relationship with Sally Hemmings. I am going
Speaker 2: to start by laying out the absolute verified facts of
Speaker 2: the situation as we know them. In seventeen eighty seven,
Speaker 2: midway through his ambassadorship, Sally travels to Europe alongside Jeffery's
Speaker 2: daughter Mary. We do not know what Jefferson and Sally
Speaker 2: did during this period or what point they started doing it, right,
Speaker 2: Sally never writes anything about that, but during her two
Speaker 2: and a half years in Paris, we know she negotiates
Speaker 2: with Jefferson what Monticello describes as extraordinary privileges for herself
Speaker 2: and freedom for her future children. Right like they have
Speaker 2: a negotiation, Jefferson did free Sally's kids, and as Monticello
Speaker 2: dot Org admits, Jefferson did not grant freedom to any
Speaker 2: other enslaved family unit.
Speaker 3: Sally's the legend that right, we know about, Yeah.
Speaker 2: And that is the legend. Part of this actually is
Speaker 2: one of the more satisfying, but one of like the
Speaker 2: it's very interesting. This legend exists that like well, Jefferson
Speaker 2: had a bunch of children with Sally Hemmings. That is
Speaker 2: a legend in the black community for decades. Historians are like,
Speaker 2: probably not, probably not, guys, we did the math. There's
Speaker 2: really just you know, it's just unlikely. It's just unlikely.
Speaker 2: And yeah, the historians are very much wrong.
Speaker 3: Yeah, he absolutely did. We know us.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, we'll get to that. So this is rape,
Speaker 2: and it's not just rape because he owns her right
Speaker 2: when she moves to Paris. Sally is fourteen years old
Speaker 2: and Thomas is forty four. Yes, hey everybody. As a note,
Speaker 2: members of the Hemmings family have claimed that they think
Speaker 2: the relationships started when Sally was sixteen. You know, we'll
Speaker 2: never know for sure either way. You know, you're talking
Speaker 2: either fourteen and forty four or sixteen and forty six.
Speaker 2: I don't really think one is less gross than the other.
Speaker 2: So there you go. Like, even if this had been
Speaker 2: two free people, this was this would not be consensual. Yeah,
Speaker 2: and I think that that the age gap gets left out.
Speaker 2: That was not emphasized to me at least. Yeah, No,
Speaker 2: was the cap again, fourteen and forty four. That's disgusting,
Speaker 2: that it's really bad. Yeah, is three times her age.
Speaker 4: That is that is disgusting. It is I would like
Speaker 4: for one second second, Yeah, I would like to pause
Speaker 4: for a second. Fourteen she was a child. Forty four
Speaker 4: he was disgusting, and forty four in that day and age,
Speaker 4: he is old. He looks like shit is lizard skinny?
Speaker 2: I think it does? You know, that's again we don't
Speaker 2: get nearly enough of like Sally or what she thought
Speaker 2: that what you hear about, like her making this negotiation
Speaker 2: for the freedom of her kids, Like what it suggests
Speaker 2: is somebody who is incredibly intelligent and savvy and doing
Speaker 2: the thing that is going to be best for her kids,
Speaker 2: like that is in a hideous situation. But like I
Speaker 2: wish we knew more of her, because what we know
Speaker 2: suggests a pretty impressive person.
Speaker 3: Yeah, she was my entry point to Thomas Jefferson, which
Speaker 3: is so funny. It's not the other way around, Like, yeah,
Speaker 3: my entry point was so yeah.
Speaker 2: And it probably should be because this is kind of
Speaker 2: what says the most about.
Speaker 4: But still, you did not know she was fourteen?
Speaker 2: I didn't, really I did. I did. I learned as
Speaker 2: a young No, yeah he said he.
Speaker 3: Did, Yes, Yeah, I knew she was a child.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I feel like they of course they do skip
Speaker 1: that part.
Speaker 4: Of course it is because they were like he was
Speaker 4: Thomas Jefferson, he was so handsome.
Speaker 1: He was such a good man.
Speaker 4: No, he's a disgusting creep like the rest of us.
Speaker 2: Yeah he's Yeah. I had My teacher really jumped around
Speaker 2: it and was like, well he probably did, you know,
Speaker 2: have a relationship. That was always the term that was
Speaker 2: used with Sally Hemmings and like, but really did leave
Speaker 2: out the whole She was fourteen and he was forty four.
Speaker 3: This was one of those like the fond moments with
Speaker 3: my dad, like you're coming on from school, you're working
Speaker 3: on this, and you know, my dad like, man him,
Speaker 3: teachers don't know what they talking about, Like just like
Speaker 3: that those moments like that's not what happened. Let me
Speaker 3: tell you, you know what I'm saying, Like, don't listen,
Speaker 3: they don't know what they talking about. And then he
Speaker 3: would sit down and be like, let me tell you
Speaker 3: the real son, you know, and then and then would
Speaker 3: break the shit down and then be like, you know,
Speaker 3: you say what you got to say to him, but
Speaker 3: here's what happened. So thisd she I have specific memories
Speaker 3: about this one. He was like no, I know you
Speaker 3: got to pass your little test, but no, let me
Speaker 3: say you got that.
Speaker 2: Man.
Speaker 1: You know what was that movie that like all of
Speaker 1: us had to watch?
Speaker 3: Oh God, which one?
Speaker 2: No, there was one that like framed it as a romance. Yeah, right,
Speaker 2: like yeah, like like fifteen years ago something like that.
Speaker 2: I forget when there was that one.
Speaker 4: And then but then there's like a not not specific
Speaker 4: to h it was like the Declaration of Independence movie
Speaker 4: that all of us had.
Speaker 1: We watched it in in high school.
Speaker 3: It's a school one. Yeah, we watched.
Speaker 1: In high school.
Speaker 4: And I was like, they try and they try to
Speaker 4: make Tamash Everson seem like, oh, he's just he's so hot,
Speaker 4: he's so handsome, and it's like, oh.
Speaker 2: No, guys pedophiles. Yeah. And there's another thing that's actually
Speaker 2: really fucked up about this that I didn't know, which
Speaker 2: is that so Sally's mother was Betty Hemmings. Betty Hemmings
Speaker 2: was the consort of Martha Jefferson's father, Thomas's father in law.
Speaker 2: Sally is John Wales's daughter, which makes her Martha Jefferson's
Speaker 2: half sister. So he is sleeping with the child's sister
Speaker 2: of his dead wife while working in Paris as a
Speaker 2: diplomat representing the United Nazza.
Speaker 3: You just taught me something.
Speaker 4: So technically not not incest, but really gross.
Speaker 1: Is that what you're saying?
Speaker 2: I mean it, it's I don't know. I don't know
Speaker 2: how you want to parse that out.
Speaker 1: To be honest, I really don't want to parse it out.
Speaker 4: I just want to say, Thomas Jefferson, you you bro,
Speaker 4: You're disgusting on every level.
Speaker 3: Even Roberty Elee didn't do that. Yeah, no, bro, Like,
Speaker 3: come on, man.
Speaker 2: So we're jumping around a bit. But but rumors about
Speaker 2: you know, all of this that like Thomas was had
Speaker 2: a relationship with with with Sally first broke as a
Speaker 2: public matter in September of eighteen oh two, when a
Speaker 2: political journalist named James Calendar not quite spelled like the
Speaker 2: word Calendar wrote an article alleging Jefferson had for years
Speaker 2: quote kept as his concubine, one of his own slaves.
Speaker 2: Her name is Sally, and actually I find it interesting
Speaker 2: because by describing her as both one of his slaves
Speaker 2: and as a concubine, he's more accurate than the historians
Speaker 2: who talk about it as a relationship. Yes, right, because
Speaker 2: a concubine doesn't have the freedom to not be a yeah, yeah,
Speaker 2: And I actually kind of think that that's not a
Speaker 2: bad way, especially given the way in which people would
Speaker 2: have actually talked about this at the time.
Speaker 3: That's exactly they think that, Yeah, you're right, that is
Speaker 3: the most accurate way to say it, like, because that's
Speaker 3: what it is.
Speaker 2: Yeah. Yeah, it's like, yeah, it's like what the con
Speaker 2: did or whatever, you know. So, Calendar further went on
Speaker 2: to claim that Jefferson had had several children by her
Speaker 2: in a write up on Monticello dot org. Quote. Although
Speaker 2: there were rumors of a sexual relationship between Jefferson and
Speaker 2: an enslaved woman before eighteen oh two, Calendar's article spread
Speaker 2: the story widely. It was taken up by Jefferson's Federalist opponents,
Speaker 2: and it was published in many newspapers during the remainder
Speaker 2: of Jefferson's presidency. Jefferson's policy was to offer no public
Speaker 2: response to personal attacks, and he apparently made no explicit
Speaker 2: public or private comment on this question, although a private
Speaker 2: letter of eighteen oh five has been interpreted by some
Speaker 2: individuals as a denial of the story. Sally Hemmings left
Speaker 2: no known accounts Jefferson's daughter, Martha Jefferson Randolph, privately denied
Speaker 2: the published reports. Two of her children, Ellen Randolph Coolidge
Speaker 2: and Thomas Jefferson Randolph, maintained many years later that such
Speaker 2: a liaison was not possible on both moral and practical grounds.
Speaker 2: They also stated that Jefferson's nephews, Peter and Samuel Carr,
Speaker 2: were the fathers of the light skinned Monticello slaves, some
Speaker 2: thought to be Jefferson's children because they resembled him. Because yeah, now, yeah,
Speaker 2: that's both like lying that your nephew that you're like,
Speaker 2: I guess if they're his nephews, they're like your cousins, right,
Speaker 2: did it? Like it to protect your dad? Is gross?
Speaker 2: As I said, it took historians a long time to
Speaker 2: acknowledge that any of this was true, and so for
Speaker 2: decades there was no proof of this besides the compelling
Speaker 2: fact that Sally had a lot of kids who looked
Speaker 2: like Thomas Jefferson. Dumas Malone basically leaves this out of
Speaker 2: his work, and for decades historians mostly concluded it was bullshit,
Speaker 2: and the story thus spread kind of mimetically right through communities.
Speaker 2: Face to face, Both of abolitionists and of Black Americans.
Speaker 2: Monticello dot Org notes that a major source for the
Speaker 2: claim was two of Jefferson's children. Over the years, however,
Speaker 2: belief in a. Thomas Jefferson Sally Hemming's relationship was perpetuated
Speaker 2: in private. Two of her children, Madison and Eston, indicated
Speaker 2: that Jefferson was their father, and this belief has been
Speaker 2: perpetuated in the oral histories of generations of their descendants
Speaker 2: as an important family truth. Now the story resolves here
Speaker 2: in a way that I find satisfying, and the best
Speaker 2: way to lay that out is I'm going to quote
Speaker 2: first a passage from the original edition of American Sphinx,
Speaker 2: published in nineteen ninety six. Since Ellis was largely analyzing
Speaker 2: the work of generations of biographers and historians before then,
Speaker 2: he speaks with the voice of most of his profession
Speaker 2: when he concludes, unless the trustees of the Thomas Jefferson
Speaker 2: Memorial Foundation decide to exhumin the remains and do DNA
Speaker 2: testing on Jefferson as well as some of his alleged progeny,
Speaker 2: it leaves the matter and mystery about which advocates on
Speaker 2: either SAE I can freely speculate and surely will. Within
Speaker 2: the scholarly world, especially within the community of Jefferson specialists,
Speaker 2: there seems to be a clear consensus that the story
Speaker 2: is almost certainly not true. Within the much murkier world
Speaker 2: of popular opinion, especially within the black community, the story
Speaker 2: appears to have achieved the status of a self evident truth.
Speaker 2: So that's what Ellis writes in nineteen ninety six. Yes, basically, like, well,
Speaker 2: people tell this as a story, and they seem to
Speaker 2: believe it, but there's really no right. Two years after
Speaker 2: Ellis publishes his book, in nineteen ninety eight, doctor Eugene
Speaker 2: Foster carried out a series of DNA tests. And I
Speaker 2: am not well qualified to discuss the specifics of how
Speaker 2: you do a DNA test, but the result is that
Speaker 2: they found a genetic link between Jefferson and Himmings descendants.
Speaker 2: Someone with the Jefferson male y chromosome fathered Eston Hemmings,
Speaker 2: Sally's last child, born in eighteen oh eight. About twenty
Speaker 2: five adult Jefferson's existed at the time, and some of
Speaker 2: them did visit Monticello, But the study author's note the
Speaker 2: simplest and most probable conclusion was that Jefferson was the father.
Speaker 2: For years, Jefferson's descendants had tried to defend their sainted
Speaker 2: ancestors name by alleging his nephews had fathered the children instead.
Speaker 2: But his nephews would have passed DNA to the Hemmings
Speaker 2: from John Carr, their grandfather, and that DNA was missing.
Speaker 2: This rather forcefully set the historic community into an abrupt
Speaker 2: about face. And this is so Elis. I just read
Speaker 2: you what Ellis wrote ninety six where he's like, well,
Speaker 2: historians don't agree. Here's what he writes in an update
Speaker 2: to that after this DNA test in the original edition,
Speaker 2: I went on to speculate that the likelihood of a
Speaker 2: Jefferson Hemmings liaison was remote, offering several plausible readings of
Speaker 2: the indirect evidence to support by conjecture. No matter how
Speaker 2: plausible my interpretation, it turns out to have been dead wrong. Yes,
Speaker 2: so that's good at least, right.
Speaker 3: Yeah. Yeah, and you look, look, look pretends to be surprised.
Speaker 3: You know what I'm saying, Like that was like, oh word, okay,
Speaker 3: welcome to the party. Yeah, thank you for telling us,
Speaker 3: well we knew.
Speaker 2: Yes, yes, yeah, And I do find it very the
Speaker 2: crow that he has to eat there except generations of like, yeah,
Speaker 2: like oral tradition were right and we the historians were not.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 2: Jefferson remained ambassador to France until November of seventeen eighty nine,
Speaker 2: several months after the outbreak of the revolution. He was
Speaker 2: an ardent defender and apologist of the revolution upon his return,
Speaker 2: which is like controversial because a lot of people are
Speaker 2: getting killed by the guillotine, right, There's a lot of
Speaker 2: ugly shit happening. And Jefferson's attitude, which is actually I
Speaker 2: tend to agree with, is like, yeah, there's a lot
Speaker 2: of bad stuff happening, but like you're kind of ignoring
Speaker 2: all the bad stuff that the old regime had to
Speaker 2: do to stay in power, too, like, you know, totally
Speaker 2: like on balance, I think this is probably going to
Speaker 2: make the world a better place, right, And you know
Speaker 2: that's one of those things I don't, you know, entirely
Speaker 2: disagree with this. In an American sphinx Ellis calls it
Speaker 2: revolutionary realism and even compares Jefferson to a as a
Speaker 2: thinker to Lenon and Mao, But not without good reason. Again,
Speaker 2: Ho Chi Min's got to quote this guy, you know, wow, Yeah,
Speaker 2: because he does have this almost religious belief in like
Speaker 2: the revolution that is coming for human liberty. He just
Speaker 2: leaves out certain humans. Yeah, Jefferson's colleagues, like John Adams,
Speaker 2: thought he was insane when he argued that the spirit
Speaker 2: of seventy six and the Spirit of seventy nine had
Speaker 2: set the ball of liberty in motion to roll around
Speaker 2: the globe. The sheer amount of deception in Jefferson's public
Speaker 2: statements and arguments makes it impossible to know how much
Speaker 2: Jefferson believed in any of what he was saying. Here,
Speaker 2: Ellis seems to argue that when it came to the
Speaker 2: grand design, his concept of the broad sweep of the future,
Speaker 2: the role of the English as a doomed counter revolutionary anchor,
Speaker 2: and the US as a force for freedom, he truly
Speaker 2: believed what he said. But there's no way to argue
Speaker 2: he didn't like about his intentions for his own slaves,
Speaker 2: most of whom he'd never freed, and about his overall
Speaker 2: belief in the morality of slavery. If he truly believed
Speaker 2: it was evil, as he often said, he used it
Speaker 2: for financial gain and in Keiley, his own comfort, and
Speaker 2: went out of his way to lie about that Charles
Speaker 2: Francis Adams, the son of John Quincy Adams and a
Speaker 2: diplomat himself, wrote of Jefferson he did not always speak
Speaker 2: exactly as he felt, either towards his friends or his enemies.
Speaker 2: As a consequence, he has left hanging over a part
Speaker 2: of public life, a vapor of duplicity, the presence of
Speaker 2: which is generally felt more than it is seen. And
Speaker 2: I kind of like that that description of like this,
Speaker 2: like he's kind of part of our original sin as
Speaker 2: a nation, not just his owning people, but like the
Speaker 2: way in which he made lying central, like this obfuscation
Speaker 2: of reality, Like he's one of these first people doing that,
Speaker 2: you know.
Speaker 3: And yeah, like you said, the distortion field of that
Speaker 3: Steve Jobs did. It was like the gift he gave
Speaker 3: to the country, you know, of like yeah, and being
Speaker 3: so much more sinister in the fact that, like according
Speaker 3: to your writings, like you know you're doing.
Speaker 2: That, yeah, you know, yeah, yeah, And that's like, you know,
Speaker 2: we talk about how like basically everyone can find to
Speaker 2: Thomas Jefferson to like agree with them in modern stuff.
Speaker 2: But yes, what I never see him compared to is like,
Speaker 2: you know, people like Trump and even you know, people
Speaker 2: like every president, like the the degree to which presidents
Speaker 2: lie and obpus skate and basically the delete reality in
Speaker 2: order to make it more convenient, which we sort of
Speaker 2: that sort of gets laid out as like, well, that's
Speaker 2: just part of politics, part of modernity, it's part of
Speaker 2: like our problem, you know, the war on truth as
Speaker 2: a result of you know, social media and all this stuff.
Speaker 2: But like, no, it goes back very far. Jefferson is
Speaker 2: helping to start that.
Speaker 3: Yeah, that's why they should have been a common fam button. Yeah,
Speaker 3: old time.
Speaker 2: I agree. Come on, yeah, come on man. Yeah, so
Speaker 2: prop that's part three.
Speaker 3: Yeah, okay, how we feel like.
Speaker 2: That's We're gonna talk about Monticello next time.
Speaker 3: Okay, cool, and then we'll be done finally. Man, I'm
Speaker 3: feeling a little faint. Yeah. I feel like I'm glad
Speaker 3: that like millions of people will now catch up to
Speaker 3: how we feel about Thomas Jefferson. Sure caught up. Yeah,
Speaker 3: I'm glad you caught up, because like, don't stop quoting
Speaker 3: this man. I mean some of the quotes by themselves
Speaker 3: are like yeah, it's a bar.
Speaker 2: Yeah, like you're not a hero.
Speaker 3: You're not a hero.
Speaker 1: No, you're disgusting.
Speaker 3: You're disgusting, pretty gross. He is?
Speaker 2: He is, Yeah, he is, he is. And like, I
Speaker 2: don't know, I part of why we did this now,
Speaker 2: I've been meaning to do something like this for a while.
Speaker 2: Is I read that book, Henry wind Seck's Master of
Speaker 2: the Mountain, and it's just so oh fucking good. It's
Speaker 2: such a damning indictment of Jefferson in such a such
Speaker 2: a well laid out one that it was kind of
Speaker 2: like felt the need to read a lot more.
Speaker 3: Yeah, it would do I mean obviously, like I'm pissing
Speaker 3: in the wind here, but it would do our education
Speaker 3: system such a favor if we would remove the mythos
Speaker 3: of the founding fathers and understood them like this. And
Speaker 3: if you understand them like this, you understand modern politics better.
Speaker 3: You can articulate views better, we can understand laws better
Speaker 3: like you. We would our democracy would be so much
Speaker 3: more healthy if you at least were honest about the
Speaker 3: complexities of who these people were. Like if you was
Speaker 3: a ship back us the ship bag, you know what
Speaker 3: I'm saying, Like it is what it is, you just
Speaker 3: use a ship bag. It did an amazing thing, you
Speaker 3: know what I'm saying like, and that's and to me,
Speaker 3: I'm like, I feel like as a kid, it's like
Speaker 3: I would have felt much better about the future if
Speaker 3: it's like, dude, sometimes trash people do amazing things, and
Speaker 3: then sometimes, you know, amazing people can do trash stuff,
Speaker 3: you know what I'm saying, Like, like, just give me
Speaker 3: that mythos much better than like all these dudes are
Speaker 3: like these dudes are saints, you know.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, yeah, I think there's almost like a a
Speaker 2: degree to which it's It's like if you were to say, like, hey,
Speaker 2: you know this like writer you really liked was actually
Speaker 2: like a real messy, real piece of shita, people would
Speaker 2: be like, well, yeah, especially if it's a TV writer, Right,
Speaker 2: We're all we're all used to accepting that.
Speaker 3: Yeah, we know.
Speaker 2: Yeah, that's what Jefferson was mostly famous for. He was
Speaker 2: really good at writing and also a piece of shit,
Speaker 2: you know, like shouldn't be too hard anyway. PROP any
Speaker 2: pluggables to plug.
Speaker 3: I do man prop hip hop dot Com on the YouTube's,
Speaker 3: on the websites, on the socials, prop hip hop politics
Speaker 3: with PROP is we're chugging along, We're getting better, We're
Speaker 3: putting out.
Speaker 2: Videos better, faster, stronger.
Speaker 3: There it is. We're out here daft punkin.
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Speaker 3: And yeah, man, and keep supporting the pod man, you.
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Speaker 2: uh yeah we have. By the way, folks, we're helping
Speaker 2: out the Portland Diaper Bank so that low income mothers
Speaker 2: can have free diapers. So go to go fund me
Speaker 2: Portland Diaper Bank Behind the Bastards. Just type all that in,
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Speaker 2: donate money. Diapers that'll help are freakishly expensive, crazy expensive,
Speaker 2: and you always need them. Yeah, a lot, a lot
Speaker 2: of things in our world are morally complicated. But making
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Speaker 2: don't have to worry about diapers.
Speaker 3: Pretty easy, man. Yeah, that's a pretty easy one, you know.
Speaker 2: Just help them buy diapers. So, folks, that's the episode.
Speaker 2: We'll be back in a couple of days.
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