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Speaker 1: Media. Hey everyone, Robert Evans here and I wanted to

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Speaker 1: talk about something that is important to me, important to

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Speaker 1: everyone else at cool Zone. We have not really covered

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Speaker 1: it in detail, but on June tenth, twenty twenty four,

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Speaker 1: a man named Leonard Peltier, who is an enrolled member

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Speaker 1: of the Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa of Lakota and

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Speaker 1: Ojibwe Ancestry and is the longest serving political prisoner in

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Speaker 1: the United States, will be appearing before the US Parole

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Speaker 1: Commission for the first time since two thousand and nine.

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Speaker 1: The FBI is vigorously resisting any thought of him being

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Speaker 1: paroled because he allegedly killed two FBI agents and a

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Speaker 1: firefight on June twenty sixth, nineteen seventy five. Said agents

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Speaker 1: had shown up on reservation land to execute a pretextural warrant.

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Speaker 1: The initial firefight occurred during what's called the Reign of

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Speaker 1: Terror on Pine Ridge in the wake of the occupation

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Speaker 1: of Wounded Knee. It was a time of extreme violence

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Speaker 1: by the federal government, who had installed a puppet tribal

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Speaker 1: chair and was arming vigilantes who targeted Indigenous traditionalists. Everything

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Speaker 1: that led up to these events and the subsequent investigation

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Speaker 1: and mister Peltier's extradition, trial, conviction, and sentencings was characterized

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Speaker 1: by gross misconduct on the part of law enforcement, the prosecution,

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Speaker 1: and the courts. Mister Peltier's co defendants were separately tried

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Speaker 1: and acquitted on grounds of self defense. Mister Peltier was

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Speaker 1: railroaded and his cases tainted by discrimination at every level,

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Speaker 1: ranging from the withholding of exculpatory evidence to the torture

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Speaker 1: and coercion of extradition and trial witnesses, and from the

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Speaker 1: refusal of the trial judge to dismiss and a vowedly

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Speaker 1: racist juror, to the apologetic gymnastics of courts affirming his

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Speaker 1: convictions in the wake of meritorious legal challenges and admitted

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Speaker 1: evidence about rageous government misdeeds. Mister Peltier has been in

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Speaker 1: prison for more than forty eight years and is almost

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Speaker 1: eighty years old. He suffers from chronic and potentially lethal

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Speaker 1: conditions for which he receives insufficient and substandard medical care.

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Speaker 1: If you want to take action to hashtag free Leonard Peltier,

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Speaker 1: and I should tell you his name is spelled l

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Speaker 1: EO nar D p E l t I E r.

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Speaker 1: You can call the US Parole Commission at two two

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Speaker 1: three for six seven thousand and sign the petition at

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Speaker 1: n d nco dot cc slash free Leonard Peltier at

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Speaker 1: n d nco dot cc slash free Leonard Peltier all

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Speaker 1: one you Know thing, or follow the n d N

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Speaker 1: Collective on social media for more ways to support him.

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Speaker 1: For more information on Leonard Peltier, you can listen to

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Speaker 1: Margaret's podcast on the Locoda Nation and read In the

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Speaker 1: Spirit of Crazy Horse by Peter Matheeson. Oh, welcome back

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Speaker 1: to Behind the Bastards, the only podcast that you're listening

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Speaker 1: to right now, unless you're you're listening to more than

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Speaker 1: one podcast right now to I think I've done this

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Speaker 1: joke this like this, this bit about the brain hacking

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Speaker 1: people who like I read seventy books a week. Yeah, Jason,

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Speaker 1: do you have any brain hacks? How do you hack

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Speaker 1: your brain? How do you? How are you so such

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Speaker 1: a such a a triple quadruple threat of a musician, writer, author, podcaster.

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Speaker 1: I guess two of those are technically the same thing.

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Speaker 1: But coffee entrepreneur, Yeah, yeah, how are you him?

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Speaker 2: I mean, as a few of them? I think one

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Speaker 2: of the main brain hacks is child labor. So if

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Speaker 2: you just that's a big one.

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Speaker 1: That's a big yeah.

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Speaker 2: You just find a little a little young hungry you

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Speaker 2: know what I'm saying. Kid, don't want to get famous.

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Speaker 1: And you just yeah make it we work too.

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Speaker 2: Yeah, I mean, I'm telling you, man, it's like we.

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Speaker 1: Call that British umpire Maxing. Yeah, yep.

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Speaker 2: One of my one of my mentors, used to say,

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Speaker 2: everybody has the saying twenty four hours, but if you

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Speaker 2: work for me, I get eight of yours. So so like, dude,

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Speaker 2: I got thirty two.

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Speaker 1: Now. So that's there's your free advice for everybody today.

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Speaker 1: Go steal a child. That actually ties in very well

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Speaker 1: to the subject of this episode. Wow, because the guy

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Speaker 1: we're talking about this week is one of the most

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Speaker 1: famously productive human beings in history and and one of

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Speaker 1: the most influential American in the history of our nation.

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Speaker 1: And he did it by stealing a bunch of children.

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Speaker 1: We are talking this week about Thomas Jefferson.

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Speaker 2: Hello, hello, oh man, the man loved him some black women.

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Speaker 1: Oh boy. We'll have a lot to say about all

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Speaker 1: of that. But first cold opens, dozen shut. We're back,

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Speaker 1: and you know, prop I said we at the introduction

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Speaker 1: of this the only way to get those extra eight

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Speaker 1: hours a day is by by stealing them someone younger.

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Speaker 1: But there is one other way, and it's crudely made

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Speaker 1: kretom tea mixed mine with macha and coffee. Today, I

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Speaker 1: was like, are we doing product placement in the first

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Speaker 1: minute of this coffee? Because this is just free the

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Speaker 1: concept of cretum.

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Speaker 2: Be cool if that coffee was owned by me.

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Speaker 1: I it was up until oh recently, I ordered like

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Speaker 1: four or five greats of your of your cold brew.

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Speaker 1: But I finally I need to I need to make

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Speaker 1: another order because I finally made it through. That's been

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Speaker 1: my early afternoon coffee. Just like crack a. Can go

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Speaker 1: go do some squats or sit down and finally write

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Speaker 1: for the day. Yeah, yeah, good stuff.

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Speaker 2: It's like I will still say, I it is magical

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Speaker 2: that these scripts, that these are actually scripts, that you

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Speaker 2: write them. I'm like, do you type? Do you type

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Speaker 2: four thousand words a minute?

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Speaker 1: I can get about four thousand words. That's like a

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Speaker 1: normal night. That's like one one episode usually four to

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Speaker 1: five thousand words, so that's usually.

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Speaker 2: Not a minute, not a minute. Minute though, I was like, no,

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Speaker 2: did you count my joke here? Bro? Like I was like, nah, okay.

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Speaker 1: Once I finish like researching, it's usually about like five

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Speaker 1: hours of writing per script, Yeah, yeah, something like that

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Speaker 1: kind of depends on the script. Some of them take more.

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Speaker 1: Sometimes it's more like eight or ten for the same amount,

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Speaker 1: because like, ye, word count is one thing, but it

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Speaker 1: all depends on like how well you understand, Like if

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Speaker 1: it's one of those things. If I'm like writing about

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Speaker 1: like Thomas Jefferson, thank god, at least the basics of

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Speaker 1: his history. Yeah, we were all raised with his kids,

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Speaker 1: So it's not as much as like if I'm reading

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Speaker 1: about Chow Chesku or whatever and I've got to like you, Ye,

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Speaker 1: let's get into Thomas Jefferson, and specifically I want to.

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Speaker 1: I want to dissuade people who might be worried at

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Speaker 1: the start. This is not even going to be four

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Speaker 1: episodes about Thomas Jefferson his whole life, because there's so

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Speaker 1: much written about this man and surrounding context we have,

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Speaker 1: we're drowning at him. These episodes are purely about Thomas

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Speaker 1: Jefferson and slavery.

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Speaker 2: Right, I'm gonna say this. I've got to say this Yeah.

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Speaker 2: I've gotta say I love the rhythm that the bastards

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Speaker 2: guests have. It seems like like some people get you know,

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Speaker 2: child murder.

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Speaker 1: We have our dead baby guests.

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Speaker 2: Yeah, you have a dead baby. Guess you have your

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Speaker 2: you know, crack doctor. Guess I get horrible acts of

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Speaker 2: racism guests.

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Speaker 1: Ah, yeah, I mean I'll take it. Shit, I'll take it.

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Speaker 2: You're on the Mount Rushmore, Yeah, Rushmore.

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Speaker 1: So is Thomas Jefferson. I think I'm pretty sure he

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Speaker 1: has to be right. Yeah. Now to start with it,

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Speaker 1: to really, like, I think, to ground the story of

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Speaker 1: Thomas Jefferson because it's not really even calling it Thomas

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Speaker 1: Jefferson and slavery is not fully accurate. We're really talking

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Speaker 1: about Jefferson and like the concept of freedom, because Jefferson

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Speaker 1: is going to be seen in his own time as

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Speaker 1: something of like a profit of the concept of human liberty, yes,

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Speaker 1: to an extent that bleeds surprisingly far, both in time

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Speaker 1: and geographically. And to make that point, I want to

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Speaker 1: talk about September second, nineteen forty five, which is when

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Speaker 1: a guy you might have heard of named Ho Chi

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Speaker 1: Minh gave a speech at bod Dean Square in Hanoi, Vietnam.

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Speaker 1: By this point in the Vietnamese struggle for liberation, the

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Speaker 1: hated Japanese occupiers had been forced out in August, but

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Speaker 1: French imperial forces still controlled much of what was then

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Speaker 1: called Indo China. The war between France and the Vietmen

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Speaker 1: would take almost another decade until nineteen fifty four and

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Speaker 1: lead inexorably to an even bloodier conflict between the United

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Speaker 1: States and the Democratic Republic of Vietnam. Given the brutality

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Speaker 1: of that conflict and how it has come down in memory,

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Speaker 1: particularly among their Western left, it may surprise some of

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Speaker 1: you to learn that Ho Chi Minh opened his Boddean

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Speaker 1: Square speech with a quote from the US Declaration of Independence,

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Speaker 1: written by former President Thomas Jefferson. Quote, all men are

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Speaker 1: created equal. They are endowed by their creator with certain

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Speaker 1: inalienable rights. Among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit

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Speaker 1: of happiness. Here's what Ho Chi Minh had to say

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Speaker 1: about that line. This immortal statement was made in the

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Speaker 1: Declaration of Independence of the United States of America in

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Speaker 1: seventeen seventy six. In a broader sense, this means all

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Speaker 1: the peoples on the earth are equal from birth. All

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Speaker 1: the peoples have a right to live and to be

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Speaker 1: happy and free. Now that is a lovely statement. That

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Speaker 1: is not what Thomas Jefferson meant by writing it, which

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Speaker 1: is the at of what we'll be talking about.

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Speaker 2: Yeah, Like I would say Thomas Jefferson when when I

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Speaker 2: was teaching high schoolers the phrase cognitive dissonance came up,

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Speaker 2: and I'm like, if cognitive dissonants were a person, it

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Speaker 2: would be Thomas Jefferson. Because there are things that have

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Speaker 2: came out of his mouth that are that I quote

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Speaker 2: to this day.

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Speaker 1: Like him some of the best things anyone ever wrote.

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Speaker 1: The best is the concept of human liberty.

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Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, sure, even about the institution of slavery. Like

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Speaker 3: if he was like if God is just yeah, right,

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Speaker 3: that's about favorite one. If God is as just as

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Speaker 3: we say he is, then oh shit, is we're gonna

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Speaker 3: be fucked.

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Speaker 1: We'll getto that line in its context and history. I

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Speaker 1: want to talk a little bit more about Ho Chi

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Speaker 1: Men because I don't think this is known enough, which

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Speaker 1: is that prior to the US really get involved in Vietnam,

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Speaker 1: he was a little bit of an America boo, right,

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Speaker 1: Like he kind of stannd the Founding Fathers just a

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Speaker 1: little bit and part of you get in this speech

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Speaker 1: he's got these like very valid complaints about the French occupiers.

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Speaker 1: He doesn't just quote the Declaration of Independence. He quotes

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Speaker 1: the Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen,

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Speaker 1: which is made in seventeen ninety one during the French Revolution,

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Speaker 1: and is like, basically, hey, these are great things. You

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Speaker 1: guys are saying, why aren't you acting that way? Do

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Speaker 1: you should do it? Yeah, there's there's a heartbreaking line

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Speaker 1: in here where he's like, we are convinced that the Allies,

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Speaker 1: which at the Tehran in San Francisco conferences upheld the

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Speaker 1: principle of equality among the nations, cannot fail to recognize

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Speaker 1: the right of the Vietnamese people to independence. Oh boy,

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Speaker 1: they share dead buddy. Yeah. Oh, will apologize for that one.

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Speaker 1: But uh. He was generally Ho Chi Minh generally a

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Speaker 1: guy who like gauged the moment correctly. He was pretty

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Speaker 1: good at that. But he did not in this moment.

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Speaker 2: No no, no, no, no, no no no.

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Speaker 1: So if you care at all about understanding the history

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Speaker 1: of human freedom as an ideological concept and a value system,

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Speaker 1: you do have to study Jefferson, not just because he

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Speaker 1: wrote eloquently on the matter, but because his words influenced

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Speaker 1: revolutionaries in the world over his lifetime and do so today.

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Speaker 1: At the same time, you can't study Jefferson without coming

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Speaker 1: to understand what ho Chi Minh eventually did about the Allies,

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Speaker 1: which is that it's one thing to express nice sentiments

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Speaker 1: about human liberty, and it's another to take any concrete

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Speaker 1: steps to further that end, especially if they might exert

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Speaker 1: a cost from you. So again, we're not doing a

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Speaker 1: political biography on the man, or even an exhaustive look

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Speaker 1: at all of the bad things he did in his life.

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Speaker 1: We are instead, Yeah.

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Speaker 2: He's like he just called cap and yeah and had

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Speaker 2: right to because it's like, bro, and that's to me, Like,

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Speaker 2: I'm glad we're doing this to me, because that's to

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Speaker 2: me what is so fascinating about history, and specifically American history,

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Speaker 2: the history of racism, the history of all of it

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Speaker 2: is like when you drilled obviously I am a recipient

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Speaker 2: of all of this stuff, but like when you drill

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Speaker 2: down into what's going on in the heart and the

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Speaker 2: mind of a person that knows intellectually and even morally

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Speaker 2: and spiritually what they're doing is wrong, yeah, and continues

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Speaker 2: to be a part of it that you know, three

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Speaker 2: hundred years later, we could be like, I don't understand

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Speaker 2: what the hell you're doing. You know, obviously this isn't

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Speaker 2: on the same playing field. But like fast forward to

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Speaker 2: me tomorrow hopping on this plane to sure fly, you

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Speaker 2: don't say like that's knowing full well, yeah, you know

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Speaker 2: what I'm saying.

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Speaker 1: That's particularly a good point because one of the chief,

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Speaker 1: if not the primary, moral issues that we are dealing

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Speaker 1: with right now is like the damage that we're doing

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Speaker 1: to the planets holding capacity for life. Yes, and it's

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Speaker 1: damaged especially all of us in the first world contribute

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Speaker 1: to because like it allows for our lives to be

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Speaker 1: very comfortable in comparison to most human lives. And that's

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Speaker 1: what's happening with Jefferson. Kind of at the end and

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Speaker 1: at the beginning, this is the guy we're gonna trace him.

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Speaker 1: He goes through changes, but kind of ultimately a big

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Speaker 1: part of why he betrays his principles on slavery is

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Speaker 1: because he builds kind of a first world life for

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Speaker 1: himself in the seventeen hundreds, and he's not willing to

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Speaker 1: give up that comfort. Right, There's more to it than that,

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Speaker 1: but that is ultimately what we're building too, because people

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Speaker 1: don't know enough about Monticello. So Thomas Jefferson Tommy Jeffs

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Speaker 1: was born in what biographer Dumas Malone called a simple

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Speaker 1: wooden house in today's Ablemarle County, Virginia. In those days,

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Speaker 1: Virginia was the property of King George the second of

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Speaker 1: Great Britain, ancestor to modern sausage fingered potentate Charles. The

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Speaker 1: calendar was different when Jefferson was a baby, but using

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Speaker 1: modern measures, we'd call his birth date April thirteenth, seventeen

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Speaker 1: four to three. So calling his family home simple probably

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Speaker 1: accurate enough, especially by like our modern you know, judgment,

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Speaker 1: but it loses some context, which is that his father

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Speaker 1: is quite wealthy for his time period and for his era,

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Speaker 1: and he's also kind of like famous. He's local boy

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Speaker 1: who made good. Specifically, he had helped to map and

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Speaker 1: lay out the boundaries of what became Virginia as a

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Speaker 1: young man, and as a result of that, in like

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Speaker 1: the work he did during that time, he comes to

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Speaker 1: own thousands and something like eleven thousand acres. I think

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Speaker 1: it was and a significant number of enslaved human beings.

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Speaker 2: To work that acreage.

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Speaker 1: So his dad, it's important to note, does not inherit

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Speaker 1: like builds what he has right primarily at least, that

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Speaker 1: is not going to be the case with Thomas. Thomas's

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Speaker 1: family home was called Shadwell, but when he was a

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Speaker 1: little boy around age three, his father moved the family

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Speaker 1: from Shadwell to a nicer plantation that he had been

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Speaker 1: hired to manage as the executor of his friend's estate.

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Speaker 2: Yeah, you can't tell me you come from meager beginnings.

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Speaker 2: If your house has a name.

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Speaker 1: If your house has a name, yeah, that's really the

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Speaker 1: easiest quick way to like judge people's so geoeconomically, they

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Speaker 1: call your house. That's not just the apartment complex, like

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Speaker 1: the one what the this window?

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Speaker 2: Yeah yeah. If you come from like you know, Imperial Courts,

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Speaker 2: that's a housing project. So I'm like, okay, that's the

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Speaker 2: name of the projects. But you're telling me your house

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Speaker 2: itself as a name just shaf Well.

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Speaker 1: Yeah, that's that's a rich guy house.

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Speaker 2: I'm sorry.

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Speaker 1: Thomas's first memory is, as a three year old, a

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Speaker 1: fifty mile ride on horseback through the woods to come

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Speaker 1: to this new home, and he's carried He's on like

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Speaker 1: the lap of one of his father's enslaved people. Right.

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Speaker 1: That is his earliest memory is being carried by one

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Speaker 1: of the people his dad owns to a new plantation.

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Speaker 1: His parents would have several more children, three other sisters

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Speaker 1: or three sisters and one brother, and Jefferson spent age

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Speaker 1: three to about nine or ten wandering freely through the

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Speaker 1: semi wilderness around the plantation. He grew up on and

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Speaker 1: reading obsessively from works of classic history. We are talking

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Speaker 1: Roman shit. Yeah, he had an odd relationship with his family.

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Speaker 1: One biographer I have read said that he adored and

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Speaker 1: admired his father Peter, but had it best a strained

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Speaker 1: relationship with his mother, Jane Randolph Jefferson Dumas, who is

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Speaker 1: Jefferson's most detailed early biographer. He writes like the first

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Speaker 1: kind of definitive Jefferson biography simply says there is no

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Speaker 1: positive testimony about her in Jefferson's notes and describes her

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Speaker 1: as a shadowy figure.

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Speaker 2: He got none sad about his mama.

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Speaker 1: He has. He has mom issues. They are mysterious mom issues,

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Speaker 1: but they are mom issues.

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Speaker 2: That's weird. Homie like I don't know she alright, I guess, like, well's.

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Speaker 1: Weird he doesn't say shit about her.

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Speaker 2: Yeah yeah, well, you know in him being a product

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Speaker 2: of his time because all the mom duties was offloaded

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Speaker 2: to slave black women. Yeah, Dot, you know what I'm saying,

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Speaker 2: Like you said, like we're riding in fifty miles, you

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Speaker 2: sitting on the on the on the lap of the

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Speaker 2: help rather than your mom. You know what I'm saying.

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Speaker 2: Of course you're gonna feel feel some type of way

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Speaker 2: about your mamma because you don't do shit.

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Speaker 1: Yes, that is it, And I think that might have Yeah,

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Speaker 1: that's an interesting point. Actually, yeh, I've had I think

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Speaker 1: I've mentioned this on the show friends who like grew

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Speaker 1: up who were rich and had like a nanny, like

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Speaker 1: a full time nanny as a kid, and like express

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Speaker 1: that like, yeah, it was kind of confusing. It's like

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Speaker 1: a three year old I wasn't really sure which one

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Speaker 1: was my mom.

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Speaker 2: Yeah.

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Speaker 1: Now I find this interesting because immediately after saying he

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Speaker 1: could find no positive testimony about Jefferson's mom, he describes

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Speaker 1: her dumas Malone describes her as having physical endurance beyond average,

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Speaker 1: bearing a total of ten children, and raising eight of

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Speaker 1: them to adulthood, which is like, that's hard. That's that's

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Speaker 1: that's a not a bad. Eighty percent survival rate in

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Speaker 1: that time for kids is solid.

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Speaker 2: Kids.

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Speaker 1: You're kind of knocking it out of the park if

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Speaker 1: you're doing eighty on the percent to ten kids.

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Speaker 2: Yeah, it's pretty good.

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Speaker 1: Yeah. Yeah, we are awarding her a behind the Bastard's

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Speaker 1: T shirt that says, only two of my ten children

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Speaker 1: died here it is. Yeah, we love giving that shirt out.

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Speaker 1: I just can that out at show.

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Speaker 2: Yeah, there it is. So I got two. I got

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Speaker 2: two awards under my belt. We got the No Diddle Award.

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Speaker 2: That's right, right, like, hey, you know I'm bad eight

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Speaker 2: hundred ki.

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Speaker 1: I got some bad news on the No Diddling Award here.

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Speaker 1: Thomas Jefferson is not going to win that, bad boy.

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Speaker 2: Oh no, no, absolutely no.

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Speaker 1: But he's still young. Pins not sure. Yeah, oh yeah,

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Speaker 1: maybe if we get a good pen guy. Yeah. So,

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Speaker 1: her husband, Thomas's father Peter, was significantly older than her.

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Speaker 1: This will prove to be a Jefferson tradition, and he

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Speaker 1: died young at age forty nine when she was thirty seven.

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Speaker 1: She lived nineteen more years after this and was a

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Speaker 1: widow longer than she was ever a wife. When Thomas

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Speaker 1: was ten, his father, who was still alive at that point,

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Speaker 1: gave him a loaded gun and told him to march

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Speaker 1: into the forest and find food. The goal here was

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Speaker 1: to increase the boy's self reliance. Thomas failed at first,

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Speaker 1: but eventually found a wild turkey that had accidentally been

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Speaker 1: caught in a pin. He tied the captive animal to

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Speaker 1: a tree, shot it, and brought it home for the

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Speaker 1: family slaves to kill it. I might add that if

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Speaker 1: like you need the slaves to process your game, you're

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Speaker 1: not really living independently. It's kind of a huge part

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Speaker 1: of it. Actually.

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Speaker 2: Yeah, I was like, wait, wait, wait, wait wait, I

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Speaker 2: think the kids just figured out the system found so,

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Speaker 2: which also plays well into who he becomes. It's like, oh,

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Speaker 2: you just got to work the system. Here's a turkey

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Speaker 2: that's already caught, so I'm just gonna shoot it. Yeah,

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Speaker 2: and it has somebody else do to dirty work.

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Speaker 3: Yeah.

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Speaker 1: Yeah. Take it credit for tie it to its tree

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Speaker 1: so I could shoot it, come throttle its neck. At

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Speaker 1: that point, man, you have the turkey. I don't know,

380
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Speaker 1: weird kid. So Thomas's family right about the time of

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Speaker 1: this hunting adventure, probably a little bit afterwards, his family

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Speaker 1: moves back to the Shadowell plantation, but they do not

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Speaker 1: take Thomas with them. He has left behind to live

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Speaker 1: with a teacher, Anglican minister William Douglas. Douglas was not

385
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Speaker 1: and Thomas's later beckoning a very good teacher, but Thomas

386
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Speaker 1: lived with him for five years, alongside several other kids,

387
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Speaker 1: I think five others. So this is like a pretty

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Speaker 1: normal thing at the time, right, Like you have your

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Speaker 1: childhood and then it's time to go to school, and

390
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Speaker 1: you know, there's not like us. We all live out

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Speaker 1: in the country on these you know, manners and stuff.

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Speaker 1: So we're just going to send you to live with

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Speaker 1: the teacher for a while and he'll take care of

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Speaker 1: you too.

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Speaker 2: Far like your school's far. Yeah, yeah, well did you

396
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Speaker 2: just stay there?

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Speaker 1: Basically during his adolescence, he's only ever home for like

398
00:20:30,119 --> 00:20:33,680
Speaker 1: short periods of time and only occasionally. His best friend

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Speaker 1: at school was another boy who also lived there named

400
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Speaker 1: Dabney Carr, who became his best friend. The one story

401
00:20:39,960 --> 00:20:42,479
Speaker 1: that Dumas Malone gives us about their friendship is that

402
00:20:42,600 --> 00:20:45,360
Speaker 1: Danny had a fast horse, but Jefferson had a slow one,

403
00:20:45,680 --> 00:20:48,840
Speaker 1: and everyone gave Jefferson shit for this, and so Thomas

404
00:20:48,880 --> 00:20:53,080
Speaker 1: tricked Dabney into agreeing to have a race on February thirtieth,

405
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Speaker 1: a day that does not exist. Dumas rites. Not until

406
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Speaker 1: the last day of the month that the others discovered

407
00:20:58,200 --> 00:21:01,160
Speaker 1: they had been taken in. You know, he's a little

408
00:21:01,200 --> 00:21:04,320
Speaker 1: smarter than them, although I might add they're not that bright. Yeah, oh,

409
00:21:04,400 --> 00:21:06,440
Speaker 1: that's not a good one. How many days are there

410
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Speaker 1: in February?

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Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, that's like two days more like bro like yeah, yeah, yeah,

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Speaker 2: come on, guys.

413
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Speaker 1: So Peter Jefferson died in seventeen fifty seven, when Thomas

414
00:21:18,160 --> 00:21:21,359
Speaker 1: was around fourteen. Thomas later wrote of his father's sudden

415
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Speaker 1: death when I recollect that at fourteen years of age,

416
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Speaker 1: the whole care and direction of myself was thrown entirely

417
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Speaker 1: on myself, without a relation or friend qualified to advisor

418
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Speaker 1: guide me, and recollect various sorts of bad company with

419
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Speaker 1: which I associated from time to time. I am astonished

420
00:21:36,520 --> 00:21:38,119
Speaker 1: I did not turn off with some of them and

421
00:21:38,119 --> 00:21:41,840
Speaker 1: become as worthless to the society as they were. Now.

422
00:21:42,440 --> 00:21:44,639
Speaker 1: That suggests a lonely boy and one who had a

423
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Speaker 1: pretty low opinion of most of his friends and like companions. Yeah,

424
00:21:49,240 --> 00:21:51,960
Speaker 1: they're all worthless to society, and they nearly dragged me

425
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Speaker 1: down with them. He also doesn't really seem to be

426
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Speaker 1: very close to his family. It's interesting to me that

427
00:21:57,280 --> 00:22:00,600
Speaker 1: his father seems immune to these criticisms, even though by

428
00:22:00,640 --> 00:22:02,840
Speaker 1: all accounts I can find, he must have been the

429
00:22:02,840 --> 00:22:05,359
Speaker 1: one who locked Thomas away for that at that school

430
00:22:05,359 --> 00:22:07,520
Speaker 1: for five years and kept him away from any kind

431
00:22:07,560 --> 00:22:11,480
Speaker 1: of emotional companionship or whatever. Now it's worth noting that

432
00:22:11,520 --> 00:22:15,399
Speaker 1: Thomas's own recollections during this period ignore the fact that

433
00:22:15,440 --> 00:22:18,080
Speaker 1: he did in fact have someone to advise and help him.

434
00:22:18,400 --> 00:22:21,679
Speaker 1: This friend was an enslaved boy, Jupiter, who was, in

435
00:22:21,720 --> 00:22:24,960
Speaker 1: the style of the time, raised alongside Thomas to be

436
00:22:25,119 --> 00:22:28,040
Speaker 1: his companion and servant. This was not an uncommon state

437
00:22:28,040 --> 00:22:30,919
Speaker 1: of affairs for the landed gentry and the colonies. In

438
00:22:30,960 --> 00:22:34,119
Speaker 1: the book Master of the Mountain, Henry Winsick writes he

439
00:22:34,160 --> 00:22:36,560
Speaker 1: had grown up with Jupiter, born at Shadwell the same

440
00:22:36,640 --> 00:22:38,880
Speaker 1: year as he. If they followed the custom of the time,

441
00:22:38,920 --> 00:22:41,200
Speaker 1: the two of them were playmates and companions in fishing

442
00:22:41,200 --> 00:22:44,399
Speaker 1: and hunting. Though Jefferson left no recollection.

443
00:22:43,960 --> 00:22:47,000
Speaker 2: Of this yeah, he was that house what we would

444
00:22:47,040 --> 00:22:48,879
Speaker 2: call a house and okay, got it?

445
00:22:49,040 --> 00:22:51,879
Speaker 1: Yeah yeah, and maybe you know, you have to. I

446
00:22:51,920 --> 00:22:54,880
Speaker 1: do think you have to. Like theoretically I can see

447
00:22:54,920 --> 00:22:57,679
Speaker 1: how because as a kid, Jefferson's not to blame for

448
00:22:57,720 --> 00:23:01,159
Speaker 1: the system either. How as little kids, this could be

449
00:23:01,280 --> 00:23:03,960
Speaker 1: something where like you legitimately see them as a friend.

450
00:23:04,040 --> 00:23:07,439
Speaker 1: But Thomas doesn't seem to have right because he doesn't

451
00:23:07,440 --> 00:23:10,320
Speaker 1: write about this guy, like he ignores him. And like

452
00:23:10,359 --> 00:23:12,160
Speaker 1: when I read that, like you were supposed to hunt

453
00:23:12,160 --> 00:23:14,439
Speaker 1: together and play together, I'm like, well, was he the

454
00:23:14,440 --> 00:23:15,520
Speaker 1: one who found that turkey?

455
00:23:15,600 --> 00:23:19,680
Speaker 2: You know? Yeah? Yeah, he was a living robot? Like okay,

456
00:23:19,720 --> 00:23:22,000
Speaker 2: you're a you're a man that's alive. You're a living

457
00:23:22,000 --> 00:23:23,960
Speaker 2: teddy bear. So it's like, yeah, I don't you know,

458
00:23:24,040 --> 00:23:25,960
Speaker 2: how many toys do you write about? How many toys

459
00:23:25,960 --> 00:23:28,000
Speaker 2: did you just kind of leave you forgot when you moved,

460
00:23:28,040 --> 00:23:30,040
Speaker 2: you know what I'm saying, Like, if he's just that,

461
00:23:30,200 --> 00:23:33,040
Speaker 2: it's like, oh, hey, look I got you a black dude,

462
00:23:33,080 --> 00:23:35,439
Speaker 2: you know what I mean. It's like, oh great, thanks Christmas,

463
00:23:35,480 --> 00:23:37,680
Speaker 2: you know, and then by Christmas dinner you forgot about

464
00:23:37,680 --> 00:23:38,560
Speaker 2: your new toy, you know.

465
00:23:38,760 --> 00:23:41,840
Speaker 1: Right, Yeah, And I you know, there's definitely people white

466
00:23:41,840 --> 00:23:45,200
Speaker 1: people from this time who write about the relationships they

467
00:23:45,240 --> 00:23:48,000
Speaker 1: had with these kind of these house slaves that you're

468
00:23:48,040 --> 00:23:51,119
Speaker 1: like raised with as your friend and write about it

469
00:23:51,240 --> 00:23:54,560
Speaker 1: being complicated and it leading them to question the system

470
00:23:54,600 --> 00:23:57,199
Speaker 1: that they live under. Thomas does not do that, at

471
00:23:57,280 --> 00:24:00,680
Speaker 1: least we have no evidence that he does that at all. Yeah,

472
00:24:01,119 --> 00:24:05,720
Speaker 1: So Jefferson grows into a robust young man and he's

473
00:24:05,800 --> 00:24:08,159
Speaker 1: very tall by his late teens. He's always noted as

474
00:24:08,160 --> 00:24:11,920
Speaker 1: having been extremely healthy, although Dumas cites many contemporaries who

475
00:24:11,920 --> 00:24:15,800
Speaker 1: also described him as thin skinned and extremely shy while

476
00:24:15,800 --> 00:24:18,119
Speaker 1: his father sat on the House of Burgesses, which is

477
00:24:18,160 --> 00:24:23,240
Speaker 1: like a Virginia congressional sort of thing. Prior to the

478
00:24:23,280 --> 00:24:26,920
Speaker 1: outbreak of the Revolutionary War. He's a prominent his dad

479
00:24:26,920 --> 00:24:30,000
Speaker 1: had been a prominent local politician and leader. Thomas was

480
00:24:30,040 --> 00:24:33,280
Speaker 1: noted from kind of his late adolescence as being anti social,

481
00:24:33,440 --> 00:24:36,520
Speaker 1: or at the very least not what you'd call an extrovert.

482
00:24:37,119 --> 00:24:40,800
Speaker 1: Dumas interestingly describes him as being indifferent to clothes as

483
00:24:40,800 --> 00:24:42,560
Speaker 1: a young man and basically a little bit of a

484
00:24:42,600 --> 00:24:46,240
Speaker 1: feral youth prior to finishing school and starting college. At Williamsburg.

485
00:24:47,680 --> 00:24:51,000
Speaker 1: Dumas credits him finally getting interested in fashion to the

486
00:24:51,000 --> 00:24:53,879
Speaker 1: fact that he had started to notice the girls. It

487
00:24:53,920 --> 00:24:58,399
Speaker 1: is many such cases. Yeah, that'll do it. Time to

488
00:24:58,440 --> 00:25:01,199
Speaker 1: not be naked outside. I guess ladies don't like that

489
00:25:01,359 --> 00:25:01,760
Speaker 1: so much.

490
00:25:01,960 --> 00:25:04,160
Speaker 2: Turns out I smell like this wild turkey I caught.

491
00:25:04,240 --> 00:25:06,879
Speaker 1: Yeah, but exactly, I gotta take care of that.

492
00:25:07,119 --> 00:25:07,719
Speaker 2: Yeah.

493
00:25:07,760 --> 00:25:11,520
Speaker 1: So in seventeen sixty, freshly Koift, he leaves for college,

494
00:25:11,880 --> 00:25:14,880
Speaker 1: and while he writes little about this period, Winesack notes

495
00:25:14,920 --> 00:25:18,679
Speaker 1: that Jupiter accompanied him on his next adventure. Quote. When

496
00:25:18,760 --> 00:25:21,520
Speaker 1: Jefferson attended the College of William and Mary and Williamsburg,

497
00:25:21,640 --> 00:25:24,720
Speaker 1: Jupiter went with him as his personal servant. Decades later,

498
00:25:24,760 --> 00:25:27,840
Speaker 1: when Jefferson drew up regulations for the University of Virginia,

499
00:25:27,880 --> 00:25:30,080
Speaker 1: he forbade students to have their slaves with him, which

500
00:25:30,119 --> 00:25:33,479
Speaker 1: he thought ruined the character of young white men. Now, okay,

501
00:25:34,080 --> 00:25:38,080
Speaker 1: we simply lack. I don't know if anything happened at

502
00:25:38,080 --> 00:25:40,399
Speaker 1: his own college experience that made him do this, or

503
00:25:40,400 --> 00:25:43,000
Speaker 1: if he's just being like these new kids are lazy,

504
00:25:43,240 --> 00:25:45,399
Speaker 1: like not like me. It was great for me, but

505
00:25:45,440 --> 00:25:45,720
Speaker 1: not that.

506
00:25:45,840 --> 00:25:49,680
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, yeah, I know, I uh this you brought

507
00:25:49,720 --> 00:25:51,679
Speaker 2: up something that I feel like might be lacking in

508
00:25:51,760 --> 00:25:57,560
Speaker 2: my knowledge of like African American history, Like where's like

509
00:25:58,520 --> 00:26:02,239
Speaker 2: the writings of a Jupiter character, Like, oh yeah, a

510
00:26:02,280 --> 00:26:04,879
Speaker 2: person who had to play this well, Like I can't

511
00:26:04,880 --> 00:26:09,399
Speaker 2: think of any book I've read, Like yeah, I was like,

512
00:26:09,440 --> 00:26:11,160
Speaker 2: you know, I actually never thought about that, like because

513
00:26:11,160 --> 00:26:15,960
Speaker 2: I'm imagining this situation from his perspective, you know, obviously,

514
00:26:16,040 --> 00:26:18,080
Speaker 2: Like so I'm like, that's where I could put myself

515
00:26:18,080 --> 00:26:20,159
Speaker 2: in that Parce's shoes. And I'm like, I just I

516
00:26:20,160 --> 00:26:21,960
Speaker 2: don't know of any writings from that perspective.

517
00:26:22,000 --> 00:26:24,600
Speaker 1: You know, you get very few of them. We're all

518
00:26:24,640 --> 00:26:27,560
Speaker 1: going to read some quotes. There's a decent amounts, particularly

519
00:26:27,560 --> 00:26:29,960
Speaker 1: of later in his life of like and this where

520
00:26:30,280 --> 00:26:32,919
Speaker 1: these were interviews that were conducted after he died, often

521
00:26:33,000 --> 00:26:36,280
Speaker 1: but of people that he had owned in some cases

522
00:26:36,359 --> 00:26:38,920
Speaker 1: later freed who talked about him, right, Yeah, didn't talk

523
00:26:38,920 --> 00:26:41,760
Speaker 1: about that time. We do have some of those accounts. Yeah,

524
00:26:41,920 --> 00:26:44,359
Speaker 1: but it's very rare and like you just don't get

525
00:26:44,440 --> 00:26:46,760
Speaker 1: and I don't know if it's like obviously, in a

526
00:26:46,800 --> 00:26:50,119
Speaker 1: lot of cases, slaves were just outright forbidden from learning

527
00:26:50,160 --> 00:26:52,359
Speaker 1: to read or write or even if they did, they

528
00:26:52,359 --> 00:26:55,159
Speaker 1: had to be very careful about who knew. Jefferson was

529
00:26:55,240 --> 00:26:57,840
Speaker 1: less strict about certainly not like a hardliner on that

530
00:26:57,920 --> 00:27:01,320
Speaker 1: particular issue. But we still don't have We have basically

531
00:27:01,320 --> 00:27:04,840
Speaker 1: nothing ye on Jefferson or on Jupiter, very little. And

532
00:27:04,920 --> 00:27:07,920
Speaker 1: I Yah, it's made me kind of think because obviously

533
00:27:08,000 --> 00:27:09,800
Speaker 1: part of why you want to do that is because

534
00:27:09,840 --> 00:27:12,119
Speaker 1: it makes it harder for them to find their freedom.

535
00:27:12,119 --> 00:27:14,280
Speaker 1: It makes it harder for them to forge papers and stuff,

536
00:27:14,280 --> 00:27:16,640
Speaker 1: It makes it harder for them to live if they

537
00:27:16,840 --> 00:27:19,480
Speaker 1: escape from you. I wonder if some of it's it

538
00:27:19,600 --> 00:27:22,160
Speaker 1: makes it harder or impossible for them to like give

539
00:27:22,200 --> 00:27:24,600
Speaker 1: a different account of what their lives were, Like that's

540
00:27:24,640 --> 00:27:25,600
Speaker 1: exactly like.

541
00:27:25,680 --> 00:27:27,439
Speaker 2: Yeh, that's one of the biggest things. It's just like,

542
00:27:27,520 --> 00:27:30,359
Speaker 2: don't nobody want to really tell you because because like

543
00:27:30,400 --> 00:27:33,080
Speaker 2: we did with the Lost cause stuff like you're you're

544
00:27:33,080 --> 00:27:35,080
Speaker 2: trying to convince the world. They're like, no, they like it,

545
00:27:35,119 --> 00:27:38,080
Speaker 2: don't you you know, And of course you can't trust

546
00:27:38,080 --> 00:27:41,120
Speaker 2: nobody's statements under duress, you know what I'm saying. Yeah,

547
00:27:41,160 --> 00:27:43,720
Speaker 2: The only like you know, this is why the writings

548
00:27:43,720 --> 00:27:47,000
Speaker 2: of like a Frederick Douglass, you know, are so important

549
00:27:47,040 --> 00:27:49,399
Speaker 2: to the American story, you know what I'm saying, because

550
00:27:49,400 --> 00:27:53,120
Speaker 2: he was like, oh, look I've been I've been slaved

551
00:27:53,160 --> 00:27:55,600
Speaker 2: and I've been free, and I ain't worried about none

552
00:27:55,640 --> 00:27:57,040
Speaker 2: of what y'all saying, you know what I'm saying. So

553
00:27:57,119 --> 00:28:01,080
Speaker 2: I think you know, yeah, so like when you like

554
00:28:01,119 --> 00:28:04,680
Speaker 2: you said, it's like so when you know, the gentry

555
00:28:04,680 --> 00:28:06,760
Speaker 2: gets to say no, the experience is like this, It's

556
00:28:06,760 --> 00:28:11,719
Speaker 2: like what's Dixie? And then somebody goes, uh, actually it

557
00:28:11,720 --> 00:28:13,280
Speaker 2: ain't like that, fam you.

558
00:28:13,240 --> 00:28:16,439
Speaker 1: Know, yeah, yeah, And I it's interesting because we do

559
00:28:16,600 --> 00:28:19,600
Speaker 1: know Jupiter seems to have occupied a place of extreme

560
00:28:19,680 --> 00:28:21,919
Speaker 1: trust in Jefferson's life. Like later in his life he's

561
00:28:21,960 --> 00:28:25,119
Speaker 1: going to like carry explosives like independently for his master

562
00:28:25,240 --> 00:28:27,840
Speaker 1: and stuff. So like yeah, that's like a you know,

563
00:28:27,920 --> 00:28:29,840
Speaker 1: there's a lot of trust there. Same thing with.

564
00:28:29,880 --> 00:28:32,520
Speaker 2: Like yeah, so that's what's so interesting about it because

565
00:28:32,520 --> 00:28:35,159
Speaker 2: it's like you're a slave, but you're not. You're not

566
00:28:35,480 --> 00:28:37,320
Speaker 2: you know, I mean, we could talk free on this.

567
00:28:37,560 --> 00:28:39,280
Speaker 2: I don't know why I'm censoring myself, but you're not

568
00:28:39,320 --> 00:28:41,200
Speaker 2: a field nigga, you know what I'm saying. No, So

569
00:28:41,280 --> 00:28:44,680
Speaker 2: like a field Nigga's story is going to be very different,

570
00:28:44,840 --> 00:28:47,520
Speaker 2: very much so than a Jupiter is, you know what

571
00:28:47,560 --> 00:28:50,600
Speaker 2: I'm saying. And so it's like I just I just

572
00:28:50,720 --> 00:28:53,040
Speaker 2: I like I know, like I can tell you of

573
00:28:53,120 --> 00:28:55,200
Speaker 2: like readings about what it was like to work in

574
00:28:55,240 --> 00:28:58,320
Speaker 2: the house versus working in the field, but like this particularly,

575
00:28:58,400 --> 00:29:00,360
Speaker 2: I was like, dang, I don't think I know any well.

576
00:29:00,400 --> 00:29:02,560
Speaker 1: And that's you know, when it comes to because we're

577
00:29:02,560 --> 00:29:04,360
Speaker 1: going to read a quote kind of about the amount

578
00:29:04,360 --> 00:29:07,400
Speaker 1: of loyalty a lot of these the the like the

579
00:29:07,680 --> 00:29:09,960
Speaker 1: like the people who lived in his househouse once had

580
00:29:11,360 --> 00:29:13,880
Speaker 1: and it's you know, you have to keep in mind

581
00:29:13,880 --> 00:29:15,560
Speaker 1: when you're trying to figure out, like, well, why would

582
00:29:15,560 --> 00:29:17,640
Speaker 1: they be so well, they were raised with him, right Like.

583
00:29:17,680 --> 00:29:21,040
Speaker 1: We can talk about the objective morality of this system

584
00:29:21,080 --> 00:29:23,680
Speaker 1: and how evil it is, but like to Jupiter growing

585
00:29:23,760 --> 00:29:25,400
Speaker 1: up in this, this is also the dude that you

586
00:29:25,400 --> 00:29:28,200
Speaker 1: were raised with, right like, And we really that's kind

587
00:29:28,200 --> 00:29:30,040
Speaker 1: of in I mean, it's incomprehensible to me, you know,

588
00:29:30,320 --> 00:29:32,080
Speaker 1: of course, but I'm going to I'm going to read

589
00:29:32,120 --> 00:29:35,320
Speaker 1: a passage about that. Dumas Malone writes about Jefferson at

590
00:29:35,360 --> 00:29:36,040
Speaker 1: age twenty.

591
00:29:36,120 --> 00:29:38,760
Speaker 2: Hey, but before you read that passage. Though, before you

592
00:29:38,800 --> 00:29:39,800
Speaker 2: read that passage.

593
00:29:39,440 --> 00:29:40,440
Speaker 1: Should should I do an ad?

594
00:29:40,440 --> 00:29:40,760
Speaker 2: Plug?

595
00:29:40,840 --> 00:29:44,640
Speaker 1: Is it? Type of ads? Speaking of products and services?

596
00:29:45,120 --> 00:29:55,240
Speaker 1: We weren't, but here's some. We're back. So Dumas Malone

597
00:29:55,320 --> 00:29:58,760
Speaker 1: writes this about our boy tj at age twenty, on

598
00:29:58,800 --> 00:30:01,160
Speaker 1: his way to the county court and to Williamsburg. He

599
00:30:01,200 --> 00:30:03,640
Speaker 1: generally went on horseback or in a one horse chair.

600
00:30:03,760 --> 00:30:06,200
Speaker 1: His servant, Jupiter, who was just his age as a rule,

601
00:30:06,240 --> 00:30:09,280
Speaker 1: went with him or followed close behind, possibly carrying his

602
00:30:09,320 --> 00:30:11,960
Speaker 1: luggage in a cart. The name of this trusted companion

603
00:30:12,000 --> 00:30:13,600
Speaker 1: of the road, who had been going with him since

604
00:30:13,600 --> 00:30:15,760
Speaker 1: his days as a law student, recurs in his account

605
00:30:15,760 --> 00:30:19,320
Speaker 1: books with regularity. Jefferson was always giving money to Jupiter

606
00:30:19,480 --> 00:30:22,120
Speaker 1: to pay a saddler and Staunton, to pay for ferriages

607
00:30:22,160 --> 00:30:25,240
Speaker 1: to Williamsburg and for bread and candles there. He even

608
00:30:25,280 --> 00:30:28,000
Speaker 1: borrowed small coin from Jupiter at times when he himself

609
00:30:28,080 --> 00:30:29,000
Speaker 1: ran out.

610
00:30:30,000 --> 00:30:31,720
Speaker 2: And yeah, man.

611
00:30:31,880 --> 00:30:36,320
Speaker 1: It is you have to again not to not to

612
00:30:36,400 --> 00:30:38,680
Speaker 1: take away from the immorality of this system, but you

613
00:30:38,720 --> 00:30:40,560
Speaker 1: also in order to understand what it was like living

614
00:30:40,600 --> 00:30:42,240
Speaker 1: under them, you have to get that there is a

615
00:30:42,320 --> 00:30:45,960
Speaker 1: kind of intimacy that often develops between these people, right,

616
00:30:46,000 --> 00:30:49,400
Speaker 1: and it's yeah, and just the kind of people you know. Yeah,

617
00:30:49,440 --> 00:30:50,840
Speaker 1: and just the like you said.

618
00:30:50,720 --> 00:30:57,680
Speaker 2: The emotional complication of like okay, what what what we

619
00:30:57,720 --> 00:31:00,719
Speaker 2: would call now like survivor's guilt, where it's like, Okay,

620
00:31:00,800 --> 00:31:03,640
Speaker 2: I know I made it, and I know, like my

621
00:31:03,760 --> 00:31:07,480
Speaker 2: situation is not as bad as everybody else is. I'm

622
00:31:07,520 --> 00:31:10,400
Speaker 2: looking at this person that I could truly as I'm

623
00:31:10,480 --> 00:31:14,480
Speaker 2: on this carriage, nicely dressed and smelling good, seeing somebody

624
00:31:14,520 --> 00:31:17,080
Speaker 2: that could be my brother, cousin or uncle or auntie

625
00:31:17,200 --> 00:31:19,760
Speaker 2: or mom on the side of the row picking cotton,

626
00:31:20,160 --> 00:31:22,520
Speaker 2: knowing full well, and I know what they think of

627
00:31:22,720 --> 00:31:25,440
Speaker 2: as they see me, you know. And then you're like, well,

628
00:31:25,480 --> 00:31:29,080
Speaker 2: you know I and in reality is I would much

629
00:31:29,160 --> 00:31:31,720
Speaker 2: rather be on this cart than over there, you know

630
00:31:31,720 --> 00:31:35,960
Speaker 2: what I'm saying, And like, yeah, just the complicated Yeah.

631
00:31:36,040 --> 00:31:39,640
Speaker 1: Yeah, it is complicated. And it's also like that whole

632
00:31:39,640 --> 00:31:42,040
Speaker 1: thing about like I could be related to this person

633
00:31:42,080 --> 00:31:44,240
Speaker 1: in the field in a lot of cases is not

634
00:31:44,280 --> 00:31:46,560
Speaker 1: the case with Thomas and Jupiter, but it's going to

635
00:31:46,560 --> 00:31:48,240
Speaker 1: be the case with Thomas and a lot of the

636
00:31:48,320 --> 00:31:51,440
Speaker 1: other people that he owns. You are also related by

637
00:31:51,480 --> 00:31:54,560
Speaker 1: blood to these people. Right, that's why Daddy, there's that's

638
00:31:54,640 --> 00:31:57,080
Speaker 1: that's your uncle. That's a cousin by marriage, you know.

639
00:31:57,560 --> 00:32:00,800
Speaker 1: That's also and these the fact that these people, these

640
00:32:01,080 --> 00:32:04,920
Speaker 1: that like these these white families, these like slave owning

641
00:32:05,000 --> 00:32:08,920
Speaker 1: families often raise their kids together with like usually there

642
00:32:08,920 --> 00:32:11,040
Speaker 1: will be a family or a couple of families of

643
00:32:11,080 --> 00:32:14,800
Speaker 1: like privileged enslaved people who live in and around the home.

644
00:32:15,520 --> 00:32:20,320
Speaker 1: That is, it creates these bonds that I think pervert

645
00:32:20,680 --> 00:32:24,320
Speaker 1: but often exist in the image of the concept of

646
00:32:24,320 --> 00:32:26,760
Speaker 1: family bonds. Right, I think this is a perversion of

647
00:32:26,840 --> 00:32:29,920
Speaker 1: family bonds, but it does mimic that, right. And A

648
00:32:29,920 --> 00:32:33,040
Speaker 1: Master of the Mountain Windset goes into more detail on

649
00:32:33,080 --> 00:32:34,840
Speaker 1: this phenomenon. I'm gonna read this quote than we can

650
00:32:34,880 --> 00:32:38,280
Speaker 1: talk about it as after the Civil War. Visited after

651
00:32:38,320 --> 00:32:41,160
Speaker 1: the Civil War, visiting Northerner, astonished at the stories she

652
00:32:41,200 --> 00:32:43,520
Speaker 1: had heard, asked a former slave how he could risk

653
00:32:43,560 --> 00:32:46,000
Speaker 1: his life for the family that enslaved him. The answer

654
00:32:46,080 --> 00:32:47,920
Speaker 1: was that the slaves had not lost a sense of

655
00:32:47,960 --> 00:32:50,880
Speaker 1: common humanity. Often we left our own wives and children

656
00:32:50,960 --> 00:32:52,640
Speaker 1: during the war in order to take care of the

657
00:32:52,640 --> 00:32:55,280
Speaker 1: wives and children of our absent masters. And why did

658
00:32:55,320 --> 00:32:57,960
Speaker 1: we do this because they were helpless and afraid, while

659
00:32:57,960 --> 00:33:00,080
Speaker 1: our families were better able to take care of them

660
00:33:00,600 --> 00:33:03,640
Speaker 1: and had no fear. When they saw their oppressors stricken

661
00:33:03,680 --> 00:33:05,880
Speaker 1: with fear, they did not rise up in vengeance but

662
00:33:05,920 --> 00:33:06,560
Speaker 1: offered help.

663
00:33:08,000 --> 00:33:08,360
Speaker 2: Yeah.

664
00:33:08,400 --> 00:33:11,520
Speaker 1: And that's, you know, e a mess.

665
00:33:11,800 --> 00:33:17,600
Speaker 2: Yeah, it's both both a malady and a testament, you

666
00:33:17,640 --> 00:33:19,720
Speaker 2: know to like you said that, like, well, we didn't

667
00:33:19,720 --> 00:33:22,040
Speaker 2: lose humanity. I know we were being treated like we

668
00:33:22,040 --> 00:33:24,840
Speaker 2: weren't humans, but we know we were. We knew we're humans,

669
00:33:25,440 --> 00:33:29,120
Speaker 2: you know, And like you said, like I still see

670
00:33:29,120 --> 00:33:32,360
Speaker 2: this little boy who's the child of or this little

671
00:33:32,360 --> 00:33:34,880
Speaker 2: girl who's the child of my master. But I'm like you, like, yeah,

672
00:33:34,920 --> 00:33:38,600
Speaker 2: that's that's still a child, you know. And I know

673
00:33:38,720 --> 00:33:42,040
Speaker 2: we're both human, you know, Like maybe you don't, I do.

674
00:33:42,680 --> 00:33:45,200
Speaker 2: And I'm not gonna let you take that from me,

675
00:33:45,760 --> 00:33:47,000
Speaker 2: you know. I think that there was a lot of

676
00:33:47,000 --> 00:33:48,800
Speaker 2: stuff that I was even raised with where it's like

677
00:33:48,880 --> 00:33:52,680
Speaker 2: you can't let you can't let your oppressors strip you

678
00:33:52,720 --> 00:33:55,320
Speaker 2: from your humanity, Like, don't let them take that also,

679
00:33:55,840 --> 00:33:58,120
Speaker 2: And I think that that that's something there. But the

680
00:33:58,200 --> 00:34:01,320
Speaker 2: thought actually crossed my mind as you was talking about

681
00:34:01,440 --> 00:34:08,839
Speaker 2: this weird family bond that like, Okay, it's absolutely obvious

682
00:34:09,320 --> 00:34:16,640
Speaker 2: to everyone in this house, including the master's wife, that

683
00:34:16,640 --> 00:34:20,640
Speaker 2: that little girl, that little light skinned little girl who

684
00:34:20,680 --> 00:34:25,480
Speaker 2: works in my house, looks just like my husband. So like,

685
00:34:26,440 --> 00:34:29,000
Speaker 2: I know that's your child, you know what I'm saying. Yeah,

686
00:34:29,239 --> 00:34:33,520
Speaker 2: And I just wonder if that played a role between

687
00:34:34,480 --> 00:34:39,960
Speaker 2: the relationship of white women and black women where there's

688
00:34:40,000 --> 00:34:43,920
Speaker 2: a level of resentment. That's another thing I never thought about.

689
00:34:44,080 --> 00:34:46,840
Speaker 1: And that's the thing part of the difficulty of getting

690
00:34:46,920 --> 00:34:49,719
Speaker 1: I think. I'm sure that happens. I'm sure that's a

691
00:34:49,760 --> 00:34:52,680
Speaker 1: part of the story that's significant, But they also didn't

692
00:34:52,680 --> 00:34:55,080
Speaker 1: really like let women write a lot like you know,

693
00:34:55,719 --> 00:34:57,960
Speaker 1: it was also not a lot of you don't get

694
00:34:57,960 --> 00:34:59,799
Speaker 1: as nearly at least not as much as we get

695
00:34:59,800 --> 00:35:00,840
Speaker 1: of Yeah.

696
00:35:00,880 --> 00:35:03,360
Speaker 2: I just and I just wonder if like that element

697
00:35:03,520 --> 00:35:06,120
Speaker 2: like plays such a role of like maybe some of

698
00:35:06,160 --> 00:35:09,840
Speaker 2: the vitriol and like besides just run of the middle racism,

699
00:35:10,280 --> 00:35:15,440
Speaker 2: the specific vitriol towards specifically black women, Like I just

700
00:35:15,480 --> 00:35:17,719
Speaker 2: wonder if, like I wonder if that's a thing where

701
00:35:17,719 --> 00:35:20,160
Speaker 2: it's like, well, I mean and that's all in my

702
00:35:20,280 --> 00:35:23,800
Speaker 2: face and rather than rather than like directing the anger

703
00:35:23,840 --> 00:35:27,080
Speaker 2: where it's supposed to be. You'll say it where it's like, well,

704
00:35:27,080 --> 00:35:29,480
Speaker 2: she's properties she didn't have no saying this your husband

705
00:35:29,600 --> 00:35:31,319
Speaker 2: raped her, Like I wan't to understand what you don't

706
00:35:31,400 --> 00:35:32,719
Speaker 2: understand about that, you know.

707
00:35:33,239 --> 00:35:36,760
Speaker 1: But yeah, and also, as we'll talk about later, often

708
00:35:36,800 --> 00:35:39,839
Speaker 1: forced her to be like a nurse maid to your kids, right,

709
00:35:39,880 --> 00:35:42,759
Speaker 1: which I'm sure also especially when you're talking about like

710
00:35:42,760 --> 00:35:45,480
Speaker 1: a woman like like Martha Jefferson is going to be

711
00:35:45,560 --> 00:35:49,680
Speaker 1: his future wife who is sickly, right, and so yeah,

712
00:35:49,719 --> 00:35:53,560
Speaker 1: like that's that's another complication to it. But I think

713
00:35:53,560 --> 00:35:56,560
Speaker 1: we have established these are very complex relationships that we

714
00:35:56,600 --> 00:35:58,600
Speaker 1: are going to be looking into and breaking down. That

715
00:35:58,600 --> 00:36:03,279
Speaker 1: doesn't impact the evil that we attached to them, but

716
00:36:03,320 --> 00:36:05,239
Speaker 1: it is worth understanding if you want to get a

717
00:36:05,239 --> 00:36:06,640
Speaker 1: context for what life was like.

718
00:36:07,320 --> 00:36:07,600
Speaker 2: Now.

719
00:36:07,760 --> 00:36:10,640
Speaker 1: When it comes to where Jefferson lands in the intellectual

720
00:36:10,719 --> 00:36:14,440
Speaker 1: history of slavery, I think it's important that during this

721
00:36:14,600 --> 00:36:18,160
Speaker 1: time he is a voracious reader and he's kind of

722
00:36:18,440 --> 00:36:20,960
Speaker 1: you know the term web we use for like I

723
00:36:20,960 --> 00:36:24,239
Speaker 1: think it came out of initially like like white Americans

724
00:36:24,239 --> 00:36:27,680
Speaker 1: who are obsessed with Japan, right, He's kind of that,

725
00:36:27,760 --> 00:36:29,960
Speaker 1: He's kind of a web for the Roman Republic. Right.

726
00:36:30,000 --> 00:36:33,239
Speaker 1: He is a huge fan. He's in love with his idea,

727
00:36:33,800 --> 00:36:36,400
Speaker 1: this distorted idea of the history and culture of that

728
00:36:36,440 --> 00:36:39,640
Speaker 1: place and time, and he understood it through the scholarship

729
00:36:39,640 --> 00:36:42,480
Speaker 1: of his day as like kind of a golden age

730
00:36:42,480 --> 00:36:44,080
Speaker 1: that was lost in a lot of ways, and this

731
00:36:44,200 --> 00:36:48,240
Speaker 1: influences the attitudes and opinions of these ancient Romans he's reading,

732
00:36:48,560 --> 00:36:52,600
Speaker 1: influences his early feelings on how slavery ought to work right,

733
00:36:52,680 --> 00:36:55,080
Speaker 1: and on the morality of slavery, and in a lot

734
00:36:55,120 --> 00:36:57,640
Speaker 1: of ways his opinions on this are more Roman than American.

735
00:36:57,800 --> 00:37:00,680
Speaker 1: In his youth, he's going to age into an acceptance

736
00:37:00,800 --> 00:37:04,319
Speaker 1: of what we now call scientific racism as an older man,

737
00:37:04,800 --> 00:37:08,240
Speaker 1: but that's not entirely where he starts with things. At college,

738
00:37:08,239 --> 00:37:11,840
Speaker 1: Thomas gains a reputation for being, in biographer Joseph Ellis's

739
00:37:11,880 --> 00:37:15,600
Speaker 1: World Words, an obsessive student. Ellis writes in the book

740
00:37:15,640 --> 00:37:19,080
Speaker 1: American Sphinx that Thomas would spend sometimes fifteen hours with

741
00:37:19,120 --> 00:37:22,080
Speaker 1: his books, three hours practicing his violin, and the remaining

742
00:37:22,120 --> 00:37:25,520
Speaker 1: six hours eating and sleeping. He was an extremely serious

743
00:37:25,600 --> 00:37:26,160
Speaker 1: young man.

744
00:37:26,719 --> 00:37:27,000
Speaker 2: Wow.

745
00:37:27,080 --> 00:37:29,360
Speaker 1: Jefferson would later write about the two years that he

746
00:37:29,440 --> 00:37:32,360
Speaker 1: spent at college as the happiest years of his life.

747
00:37:32,640 --> 00:37:34,960
Speaker 1: He was active in sports, and he built a sizable

748
00:37:35,000 --> 00:37:38,520
Speaker 1: friend group, which included Dabney Carr. His mentor was a

749
00:37:38,560 --> 00:37:41,960
Speaker 1: math professor William Small, who was a prominent deist and

750
00:37:42,000 --> 00:37:44,759
Speaker 1: whose views on religion shaped Jefferson's own. This is a

751
00:37:44,760 --> 00:37:47,000
Speaker 1: big part of how he comes to see himself as

752
00:37:47,040 --> 00:37:50,400
Speaker 1: a dist He has this kind of this guy, William Small,

753
00:37:50,440 --> 00:37:53,960
Speaker 1: this professor, as kind of a mentor. He graduates, he's

754
00:37:53,960 --> 00:37:55,480
Speaker 1: gonna have a couple because he doesn't have like a

755
00:37:55,560 --> 00:37:59,439
Speaker 1: dad anymore. Right. He graduates in seventeen sixty two because

756
00:37:59,480 --> 00:38:01,719
Speaker 1: life moved to a lot faster in those days, or

757
00:38:01,719 --> 00:38:04,680
Speaker 1: at least school did. And he took an apprenticeship in

758
00:38:04,760 --> 00:38:08,600
Speaker 1: the law with a guy named George With its spelled withy,

759
00:38:08,800 --> 00:38:12,320
Speaker 1: but it's pronounced with apparently. So this lasted five years,

760
00:38:12,360 --> 00:38:15,400
Speaker 1: and it acquainted Jefferson with the nuts and bolts of

761
00:38:15,440 --> 00:38:17,440
Speaker 1: the kind of law that he was practicing, which was

762
00:38:17,480 --> 00:38:21,320
Speaker 1: mainly land title law. He was representing planters in cases

763
00:38:21,360 --> 00:38:24,560
Speaker 1: involving land claims. For the most part. With was also

764
00:38:24,640 --> 00:38:27,760
Speaker 1: an intellectual inspiration for Thomas, who called him my second

765
00:38:27,840 --> 00:38:32,080
Speaker 1: father and described him as the American Cato. Now, this

766
00:38:32,120 --> 00:38:34,760
Speaker 1: is going to get us into our detailed talk about

767
00:38:34,760 --> 00:38:37,279
Speaker 1: one of the Romans that Thomas reads a lot, and

768
00:38:37,320 --> 00:38:41,440
Speaker 1: that is Cato the Elder. There's a Cato the Younger too.

769
00:38:41,560 --> 00:38:44,160
Speaker 1: Both Catos are related and both were known to be

770
00:38:44,239 --> 00:38:47,200
Speaker 1: kind of these moral paragons of a very specific set

771
00:38:47,200 --> 00:38:49,520
Speaker 1: of austere agricultural values.

772
00:38:49,640 --> 00:38:49,839
Speaker 2: Right.

773
00:38:50,200 --> 00:38:52,319
Speaker 1: They are these kind of guys who still are with

774
00:38:52,400 --> 00:38:55,080
Speaker 1: us today. Right, you know, this kind of like conservative,

775
00:38:55,600 --> 00:38:59,160
Speaker 1: obsessive sort of love of the concept of being a farmer,

776
00:38:59,280 --> 00:39:03,319
Speaker 1: often attached many real knowledge of what being a farmer requires.

777
00:39:03,480 --> 00:39:03,640
Speaker 2: Right.

778
00:39:04,520 --> 00:39:07,480
Speaker 1: Kato the Catos, but particularly Cato the Elder is like

779
00:39:07,800 --> 00:39:10,400
Speaker 1: he's he is ground zero for that. He is like

780
00:39:10,480 --> 00:39:13,200
Speaker 1: the first guy in Western literature to be like, ah,

781
00:39:13,400 --> 00:39:14,759
Speaker 1: we all need to be farmers.

782
00:39:15,160 --> 00:39:18,959
Speaker 2: Yeah, that particular, I think it's important to like drill

783
00:39:19,080 --> 00:39:23,479
Speaker 2: down that type of personality. Like and and while it's

784
00:39:23,520 --> 00:39:27,040
Speaker 2: it's actually very telling that he goes to Kato, because

785
00:39:27,920 --> 00:39:32,040
Speaker 2: it's like if somebody were to say they were a

786
00:39:32,160 --> 00:39:35,400
Speaker 2: karate master or a jiu jitsu master and you're like, oh, word,

787
00:39:35,760 --> 00:39:37,640
Speaker 2: like how many tournaments have you been in? And they're

788
00:39:37,640 --> 00:39:40,359
Speaker 2: like No, I just studied it and I know all

789
00:39:40,400 --> 00:39:42,240
Speaker 2: the things. So it's like, oh, you you're a master

790
00:39:42,360 --> 00:39:45,000
Speaker 2: because you read it, not to dread.

791
00:39:44,840 --> 00:39:48,920
Speaker 1: A lot of guy karate karate for you.

792
00:39:49,120 --> 00:39:51,560
Speaker 2: Yeah, So it's like, no, I can teach karate in

793
00:39:51,640 --> 00:39:55,319
Speaker 2: a classroom, not an adult jo in a classroom, that

794
00:39:55,480 --> 00:39:56,600
Speaker 2: dude Kato.

795
00:39:57,000 --> 00:39:59,759
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, exactly. And there's this this reality, this thing

796
00:39:59,760 --> 00:40:02,399
Speaker 1: that's really starting to happen in a major way while

797
00:40:02,440 --> 00:40:07,160
Speaker 1: Cato the Elder is alive. That's like, basically the backbone

798
00:40:07,200 --> 00:40:10,560
Speaker 1: of the Roman military had always been these small, independent farmers, right.

799
00:40:10,600 --> 00:40:13,760
Speaker 1: These guys are freemen. They're soldiers when they're not farming

800
00:40:13,840 --> 00:40:18,040
Speaker 1: if the state needs them. And this is like, you know,

801
00:40:18,360 --> 00:40:20,640
Speaker 1: Rome is going to constantly deal with the problem of that.

802
00:40:20,719 --> 00:40:23,480
Speaker 1: Like once they start to get big, you start having

803
00:40:23,680 --> 00:40:26,160
Speaker 1: all these rich people buying up all of this land

804
00:40:26,239 --> 00:40:28,960
Speaker 1: that smaller farmers had and working it with slaves, and

805
00:40:29,040 --> 00:40:33,600
Speaker 1: this kind of destroys the social backbone that had supported

806
00:40:33,600 --> 00:40:37,200
Speaker 1: the military. A lot of Roman politics is going to

807
00:40:37,239 --> 00:40:39,720
Speaker 1: like revolve around this change that happens.

808
00:40:39,800 --> 00:40:40,000
Speaker 3: Right.

809
00:40:40,480 --> 00:40:42,880
Speaker 1: It's more complicated than we're going to get into today,

810
00:40:42,880 --> 00:40:44,560
Speaker 1: but what's important for you to know is that if

811
00:40:44,560 --> 00:40:48,000
Speaker 1: he were alive today, Cato the Elder would have a TikTok, right,

812
00:40:48,680 --> 00:40:50,600
Speaker 1: and it would be the kind of TikTok where he's like,

813
00:40:50,840 --> 00:40:53,920
Speaker 1: he's like giving these angry rants over ai generated images

814
00:40:53,960 --> 00:40:57,080
Speaker 1: of farmhouses and wives with too many fingers, handling handing

815
00:40:57,160 --> 00:41:00,279
Speaker 1: plates of indistinct food to broods of Norman rock well

816
00:41:00,280 --> 00:41:02,359
Speaker 1: looking kids. Yeah, and he would go on all these lives.

817
00:41:02,360 --> 00:41:04,719
Speaker 1: It'd be a split screen with somebody playing the lies

818
00:41:04,840 --> 00:41:08,520
Speaker 1: on the other side. Yeah, yeah, yeah. He would be

819
00:41:08,520 --> 00:41:11,400
Speaker 1: going these long rants about returning to tradition. He'd be

820
00:41:11,440 --> 00:41:13,640
Speaker 1: really angry about women in video games. I have that

821
00:41:13,680 --> 00:41:15,160
Speaker 1: my suspicions, Oh for sure.

822
00:41:15,360 --> 00:41:16,520
Speaker 2: Oh wow. Yeah.

823
00:41:16,560 --> 00:41:19,040
Speaker 1: In his own day, Cato wrote a lot about his

824
00:41:19,120 --> 00:41:22,920
Speaker 1: idealized concept of the free citizen farmer, a tough and

825
00:41:23,040 --> 00:41:26,319
Speaker 1: morally upright creature who formed the backbone of Roman military might.

826
00:41:26,600 --> 00:41:29,520
Speaker 1: Of course, this citizen farmer was also a slave master,

827
00:41:29,640 --> 00:41:33,360
Speaker 1: and Cato had very specific ideas on how slaves should

828
00:41:33,360 --> 00:41:36,520
Speaker 1: be kept. From Plutarch's Life of Cato the Elder quote,

829
00:41:36,719 --> 00:41:39,040
Speaker 1: a slave of his was expected to either be busy

830
00:41:39,080 --> 00:41:41,080
Speaker 1: about the house or to be asleep, and he was

831
00:41:41,200 --> 00:41:44,160
Speaker 1: very partial to the sleepy ones. He thought these gentler

832
00:41:44,160 --> 00:41:46,000
Speaker 1: than the wakeful ones, and those who had enjoyed the

833
00:41:46,000 --> 00:41:48,200
Speaker 1: gift of sleep were better for any kind of service

834
00:41:48,200 --> 00:41:50,239
Speaker 1: than those who lacked it. In the belief that his

835
00:41:50,280 --> 00:41:53,280
Speaker 1: slaves were led into most mischief by their sexual passions,

836
00:41:53,360 --> 00:41:56,040
Speaker 1: he stipulated that males should consort with the females at

837
00:41:56,040 --> 00:41:58,760
Speaker 1: a fixed price, but should never approach any other woman.

838
00:41:59,320 --> 00:42:01,680
Speaker 1: So he makes his slaves pay him to have sex.

839
00:42:02,160 --> 00:42:05,080
Speaker 2: Wow, there's something to be said about I don't want

840
00:42:05,080 --> 00:42:06,799
Speaker 2: to go down too big of a tangent, but just

841
00:42:06,840 --> 00:42:09,919
Speaker 2: like what the Romans meant when they said slaves being

842
00:42:11,000 --> 00:42:15,440
Speaker 2: rather different than what we meant. Yeah, but also the

843
00:42:15,480 --> 00:42:18,080
Speaker 2: way that they viewed sexuality. It's so interesting that they

844
00:42:18,160 --> 00:42:21,879
Speaker 2: that you brought that up, because sex was, at least

845
00:42:21,880 --> 00:42:26,839
Speaker 2: in the ancient Romans, was much less about pleasure than

846
00:42:26,880 --> 00:42:29,160
Speaker 2: it was about dominance, you know what I mean, And

847
00:42:29,520 --> 00:42:32,080
Speaker 2: and social status and order, you know what I'm saying,

848
00:42:32,160 --> 00:42:35,720
Speaker 2: Like it's a way to display power.

849
00:42:36,160 --> 00:42:39,320
Speaker 1: So certainly when you're talking about like your the people

850
00:42:39,320 --> 00:42:40,600
Speaker 1: that you own, yes.

851
00:42:40,520 --> 00:42:44,080
Speaker 2: Yes, So then to say that, like because if for

852
00:42:44,760 --> 00:42:47,600
Speaker 2: your slave to be able to have choice in who

853
00:42:47,640 --> 00:42:50,520
Speaker 2: they sleep with, is to say that you're letting your

854
00:42:50,560 --> 00:42:53,360
Speaker 2: slave exert power or some sort of authority, and it's like,

855
00:42:53,400 --> 00:42:55,160
Speaker 2: I can't let you do that, Like that's not in

856
00:42:55,239 --> 00:42:55,920
Speaker 2: our worldview.

857
00:42:56,000 --> 00:42:58,480
Speaker 1: Yeah, and Cato seems to be saying that, like, if

858
00:42:58,520 --> 00:43:00,839
Speaker 1: you do that, that little bit of that little bit

859
00:43:00,840 --> 00:43:03,720
Speaker 1: of agency you give them will like lead them spark

860
00:43:03,880 --> 00:43:06,600
Speaker 1: likely could be the foundation of rebellion. Yes, right, yes,

861
00:43:06,960 --> 00:43:10,640
Speaker 1: and yeah, his attitude basically is that, like, slaves are

862
00:43:10,680 --> 00:43:14,320
Speaker 1: living tools, right, so they should be either working or unconscious,

863
00:43:14,360 --> 00:43:17,320
Speaker 1: having exhausted themselves at the end of every single day.

864
00:43:18,080 --> 00:43:21,560
Speaker 1: Because people don't like living this way, and because Cato,

865
00:43:21,920 --> 00:43:25,160
Speaker 1: despite talking about like austerity and how it's great to

866
00:43:25,200 --> 00:43:28,040
Speaker 1: not be to lose yourself to these modern comforts, Kato

867
00:43:28,200 --> 00:43:30,640
Speaker 1: is a guy who seeks a life of comfort provided

868
00:43:30,680 --> 00:43:33,160
Speaker 1: by human bondage, the people who work for him without

869
00:43:33,200 --> 00:43:36,160
Speaker 1: being paid, right, And he understood that in order to

870
00:43:36,200 --> 00:43:38,680
Speaker 1: maintain that life, he has to keep his slaves divided

871
00:43:38,719 --> 00:43:42,280
Speaker 1: and befuddled beneath him. Quote and this is from Plutarch.

872
00:43:42,840 --> 00:43:44,640
Speaker 1: At the outset, when he was still poor and in

873
00:43:44,680 --> 00:43:47,040
Speaker 1: military service, he found no fault at all with what

874
00:43:47,160 --> 00:43:49,440
Speaker 1: was served up to him, declaring that it was shameful

875
00:43:49,480 --> 00:43:51,439
Speaker 1: for a man to quarrel with the domestic over food

876
00:43:51,480 --> 00:43:54,279
Speaker 1: and drink. But afterwards, when his circumstances were improved and

877
00:43:54,320 --> 00:43:56,600
Speaker 1: he used to entertain his friends and colleagues at table,

878
00:43:56,880 --> 00:43:59,080
Speaker 1: no sooner was dinner over than he would flog those

879
00:43:59,080 --> 00:44:01,040
Speaker 1: slaves who had been remiss at all and preparing or

880
00:44:01,080 --> 00:44:03,640
Speaker 1: serving it. He was always contriving that his slave should

881
00:44:03,680 --> 00:44:06,839
Speaker 1: have feuds and dissensions among themselves. Harmony among them made

882
00:44:06,880 --> 00:44:10,600
Speaker 1: him suspicious and fearful. So he's like beating his slaves

883
00:44:10,600 --> 00:44:13,120
Speaker 1: after dinner, not even if they didn't do anything, just

884
00:44:13,120 --> 00:44:16,040
Speaker 1: so that, like what, they'll get angry at someone else, right,

885
00:44:16,120 --> 00:44:18,319
Speaker 1: at one of the other people. You know. Yeah, this

886
00:44:18,480 --> 00:44:21,399
Speaker 1: is one of the guys that Thomas Jefferson is reading obsessively.

887
00:44:21,560 --> 00:44:25,040
Speaker 1: You know the fact that he compares his mentor to

888
00:44:25,520 --> 00:44:30,239
Speaker 1: moderate the American Kato is meaningful rites a lot, yes, yeah,

889
00:44:30,280 --> 00:44:32,759
Speaker 1: and yeah, Kto is. He's a conservative, right, and he's

890
00:44:32,760 --> 00:44:35,080
Speaker 1: someone who believes in the maintenance of his own comfort

891
00:44:35,160 --> 00:44:38,279
Speaker 1: through this suffering and subjugation of others, but also someone

892
00:44:38,280 --> 00:44:41,800
Speaker 1: who fetishizes this idea of independence and hard work despite

893
00:44:41,840 --> 00:44:44,520
Speaker 1: getting a lot of their station through inheritance. One of

894
00:44:44,560 --> 00:44:47,640
Speaker 1: Kato's noteworthy sentiments was that a good Roman should seek

895
00:44:47,680 --> 00:44:50,600
Speaker 1: to earn more than he inherited, and Jefferson would always

896
00:44:50,600 --> 00:44:53,520
Speaker 1: obsess over this image of himself as a great businessman,

897
00:44:53,640 --> 00:44:55,680
Speaker 1: even though he never is able to really do that.

898
00:44:56,560 --> 00:45:00,600
Speaker 1: While practicing law, Jefferson entered into adult society found himself

899
00:45:00,640 --> 00:45:03,759
Speaker 1: walking in some of the most respected circles in Virginia.

900
00:45:03,920 --> 00:45:06,080
Speaker 1: He gained easy access to this scene due to his

901
00:45:06,120 --> 00:45:10,000
Speaker 1: father's wealth and reputation, and Jefferson constantly spent more than

902
00:45:10,000 --> 00:45:13,200
Speaker 1: he could afford to spend, burning away his inheritance trying

903
00:45:13,200 --> 00:45:16,440
Speaker 1: to impress his wealthy society friends. It was during this

904
00:45:16,520 --> 00:45:18,360
Speaker 1: portion of his life that he fell in love for

905
00:45:18,400 --> 00:45:21,360
Speaker 1: the first time to a young woman named Rebecca Burwell.

906
00:45:21,840 --> 00:45:24,080
Speaker 1: Her parents had died when she was young, but left

907
00:45:24,120 --> 00:45:27,240
Speaker 1: her a fabulous fortune. Her uncle, who has made her guardian,

908
00:45:27,360 --> 00:45:29,360
Speaker 1: was the governor of New York. When he fell in

909
00:45:29,400 --> 00:45:32,360
Speaker 1: love with her, Thomas he was twenty and she was sixteen.

910
00:45:32,719 --> 00:45:35,520
Speaker 1: And so, unlike Robert E. Lee, our boy, TJ's going

911
00:45:35,600 --> 00:45:38,520
Speaker 1: to fail early to the coveted behind the bastards didn't

912
00:45:38,560 --> 00:45:39,400
Speaker 1: flirt with children.

913
00:45:39,440 --> 00:45:41,880
Speaker 2: Award made to his twenties.

914
00:45:41,960 --> 00:45:44,640
Speaker 1: Yeah, you're almost you're almost in line with that one

915
00:45:44,719 --> 00:45:48,319
Speaker 1: Texas Romeo and Juliet law Right twenty and sixteen. So

916
00:45:48,360 --> 00:45:51,640
Speaker 1: he's not as bad as some people, allowing for the fact, well,

917
00:45:51,719 --> 00:45:53,480
Speaker 1: yet he's going to be actually much worse than most

918
00:45:53,480 --> 00:45:57,759
Speaker 1: people not too long from now, yes, but allowing for

919
00:45:57,800 --> 00:45:59,960
Speaker 1: the fact that this was more common back than wellolk

920
00:46:00,280 --> 00:46:02,600
Speaker 1: on that a little bit later. I also do want

921
00:46:02,600 --> 00:46:05,440
Speaker 1: to acknowledge something most people already know, which is that

922
00:46:05,760 --> 00:46:07,799
Speaker 1: guys who flirt with women who are a lot younger

923
00:46:07,800 --> 00:46:10,440
Speaker 1: than ye them often have issues with control and self

924
00:46:10,480 --> 00:46:13,160
Speaker 1: confidence that make them want to be with someone who

925
00:46:13,239 --> 00:46:16,640
Speaker 1: is less able to exercise agency. And we can infer

926
00:46:16,680 --> 00:46:18,800
Speaker 1: that this may have been part of what's happening with Jefferson,

927
00:46:18,840 --> 00:46:20,800
Speaker 1: from the fact that he is too shy to flirt

928
00:46:20,840 --> 00:46:23,839
Speaker 1: with her directly, and so like, after meeting her and

929
00:46:23,880 --> 00:46:26,840
Speaker 1: falling in love, he flees to Shadwell for nine months

930
00:46:27,160 --> 00:46:29,240
Speaker 1: and then he like he spends the whole time basically

931
00:46:29,280 --> 00:46:31,440
Speaker 1: like getting his courage together, and then when he comes

932
00:46:31,480 --> 00:46:35,000
Speaker 1: back to Williamsburg he does so he tries to reconnect

933
00:46:35,000 --> 00:46:38,360
Speaker 1: with her in this horribly awkward way, being like, hey, sorry,

934
00:46:38,360 --> 00:46:41,279
Speaker 1: I was gone for nine months. I absolutely intend to

935
00:46:41,320 --> 00:46:43,960
Speaker 1: ask for your hand in marriage, probably in the future,

936
00:46:44,200 --> 00:46:46,279
Speaker 1: probably in the near future, but I gotta go to

937
00:46:46,320 --> 00:46:49,440
Speaker 1: England first, Is that cool with you? And Rebecca seems

938
00:46:49,480 --> 00:46:50,680
Speaker 1: to have been like, I don't know what to fucking

939
00:46:50,760 --> 00:46:53,319
Speaker 1: do with this, And so another dude gives her an

940
00:46:53,360 --> 00:46:58,280
Speaker 1: actual marriage proposal and she marries that guy. Dumas writes

941
00:46:58,400 --> 00:47:00,920
Speaker 1: he explained this inactivity to us on the ground that

942
00:47:00,920 --> 00:47:03,840
Speaker 1: he had been abominably lazy. But the probability is that

943
00:47:03,880 --> 00:47:05,919
Speaker 1: he was now deeper in the law than in love,

944
00:47:06,080 --> 00:47:08,719
Speaker 1: by which Dumas means he was just obsessed with his job.

945
00:47:08,920 --> 00:47:15,600
Speaker 1: Yeah right, speaking of workahol, Do you know what cleans

946
00:47:15,719 --> 00:47:19,880
Speaker 1: my palate is the products and services that support this podcast?

947
00:47:22,040 --> 00:47:22,720
Speaker 1: Is that accurate?

948
00:47:22,800 --> 00:47:23,040
Speaker 2: Clean?

949
00:47:23,120 --> 00:47:33,960
Speaker 1: Jo Buck too cleans? Whatever you'll do if we sell that? Yeah,

950
00:47:34,000 --> 00:47:38,879
Speaker 1: and we're back. So. The most noteworthy consequence of these

951
00:47:38,960 --> 00:47:41,640
Speaker 1: early years in law and high society was that it

952
00:47:41,719 --> 00:47:44,319
Speaker 1: started bringing Jefferson into contact with some of the men

953
00:47:44,360 --> 00:47:47,840
Speaker 1: who had become influential voices of the revolution. This was

954
00:47:47,960 --> 00:47:50,880
Speaker 1: seventeen sixty five and he was training to be a

955
00:47:50,960 --> 00:47:53,840
Speaker 1: lawyer still when he first listened to Patrick Henry extempt

956
00:47:53,920 --> 00:47:58,280
Speaker 1: against British tax policy. In this case the Stamp Act. Henry,

957
00:47:58,440 --> 00:48:00,360
Speaker 1: you're all familiar with Henry. They give me bride er

958
00:48:00,400 --> 00:48:02,799
Speaker 1: ging me death guy. Right, he's a fiery orator. That's

959
00:48:02,880 --> 00:48:05,000
Speaker 1: kind of what he's still known for. Yeah, and he

960
00:48:05,080 --> 00:48:08,960
Speaker 1: is he is a very like he's a hardliner for independence, right.

961
00:48:09,040 --> 00:48:09,239
Speaker 2: Yeah.

962
00:48:09,239 --> 00:48:11,480
Speaker 1: And Jefferson, he's a hardliner because he doesn't believe that

963
00:48:11,520 --> 00:48:14,719
Speaker 1: Parliament has any right to tax the colonies. And Jefferson

964
00:48:14,760 --> 00:48:17,719
Speaker 1: agrees with this very strict stance right that there's no

965
00:48:17,760 --> 00:48:20,400
Speaker 1: reason Parliament should be able to tax American landowners and

966
00:48:20,480 --> 00:48:24,800
Speaker 1: farmers for any purpose in American Sphinx Ellis describes Jefferson

967
00:48:24,840 --> 00:48:27,640
Speaker 1: as turning into kind of a fundamentalist on this point.

968
00:48:28,040 --> 00:48:30,279
Speaker 1: From his earliest days in the House, he opposed all

969
00:48:30,360 --> 00:48:34,280
Speaker 1: forms of parliamentary taxation and supported non importation resolutions against

970
00:48:34,320 --> 00:48:38,880
Speaker 1: British trade regulations. Now, while Jefferson felt strongly about this,

971
00:48:39,040 --> 00:48:41,720
Speaker 1: his participation in the debates of the day was mostly

972
00:48:41,800 --> 00:48:45,320
Speaker 1: limited to watching and listening. He was still very shy

973
00:48:45,400 --> 00:48:48,600
Speaker 1: and not confident in his voice or perhaps his mind.

974
00:48:49,120 --> 00:48:53,240
Speaker 1: Ellis continues, he seemed to most of his political contemporaries

975
00:48:53,280 --> 00:48:55,839
Speaker 1: a hovering and ever silent presence, like one of those

976
00:48:55,880 --> 00:48:58,520
Speaker 1: foreigners at a dinner party who nod privately as they

977
00:48:58,560 --> 00:49:01,160
Speaker 1: move from group to group, but never reveal whether or

978
00:49:01,239 --> 00:49:03,359
Speaker 1: not they can speak the language. He had a deep

979
00:49:03,440 --> 00:49:07,120
Speaker 1: seated aversion to the inherent contentions and routinized hurly burly

980
00:49:07,200 --> 00:49:09,800
Speaker 1: of a political career, and was forever telling his friends

981
00:49:09,840 --> 00:49:11,959
Speaker 1: that life on the public stage was not for him.

982
00:49:12,440 --> 00:49:15,080
Speaker 1: Just as his political career was getting started, he seemed

983
00:49:15,080 --> 00:49:16,200
Speaker 1: poised for retirement.

984
00:49:16,680 --> 00:49:23,319
Speaker 2: Wow, I do know. Just dudes that like are just

985
00:49:23,560 --> 00:49:26,640
Speaker 2: introverted in quiet and just whenever things are happening right now,

986
00:49:26,719 --> 00:49:30,280
Speaker 2: like they actually have a trillion amazing things to say,

987
00:49:30,480 --> 00:49:32,759
Speaker 2: they're just yeah, I just don't feel like I need

988
00:49:32,760 --> 00:49:36,080
Speaker 2: to jump into this. And I actually in some ways

989
00:49:36,280 --> 00:49:40,759
Speaker 2: admire that because I am very much the like, like

990
00:49:41,640 --> 00:49:44,480
Speaker 2: there's lava in my mouth, I have to talk like so.

991
00:49:44,600 --> 00:49:45,640
Speaker 1: Like yeah, for to.

992
00:49:48,400 --> 00:49:53,080
Speaker 2: Loquacious, we'd say surprise, surprise, surprise. Yeah.

993
00:49:53,160 --> 00:49:55,880
Speaker 1: Jefferson is very much one of those, like discretion is

994
00:49:55,920 --> 00:49:59,000
Speaker 1: the better part of being a smart guy. Yeah, but

995
00:49:59,040 --> 00:50:01,480
Speaker 1: he's also he's going to kind of it's gonna cost

996
00:50:01,520 --> 00:50:04,840
Speaker 1: some problems for him too. But he gets chosen to

997
00:50:04,880 --> 00:50:07,760
Speaker 1: represent his district in the House of Burgesses in seventeen

998
00:50:07,880 --> 00:50:10,560
Speaker 1: sixty eight after it had been dissolved by the Royal

999
00:50:10,600 --> 00:50:14,040
Speaker 1: Governor after a dispute around taxation. We're not going to

1000
00:50:14,120 --> 00:50:15,960
Speaker 1: labor on this much because I think this kind of

1001
00:50:15,960 --> 00:50:18,200
Speaker 1: stuff gets covered in school a lot, and it's not

1002
00:50:18,360 --> 00:50:21,560
Speaker 1: super relevant to the bastardrey in Jefferson's life. But the

1003
00:50:21,600 --> 00:50:24,000
Speaker 1: basic issue here is that Parliament wanted Americans to pay

1004
00:50:24,040 --> 00:50:27,640
Speaker 1: taxes like everybody else, and Americans felt this was unfair

1005
00:50:27,719 --> 00:50:30,880
Speaker 1: as they weren't really represented in Parliament. The French and

1006
00:50:30,920 --> 00:50:34,080
Speaker 1: Indian Wars, which had concluded a little bit earlier, were

1007
00:50:34,120 --> 00:50:36,520
Speaker 1: a major inciting incident here because they had driven up

1008
00:50:36,560 --> 00:50:38,680
Speaker 1: debt for the Crown, which inspired a lot of the

1009
00:50:38,680 --> 00:50:41,440
Speaker 1: taxes and duties on American goods that Jefferson and his

1010
00:50:41,520 --> 00:50:44,040
Speaker 1: cohorts are going to rail against. And it was during

1011
00:50:44,040 --> 00:50:46,319
Speaker 1: his time in the House of Burgesses that Jefferson first

1012
00:50:46,320 --> 00:50:49,520
Speaker 1: comes into contact with George Washington, who led an effort

1013
00:50:49,560 --> 00:50:52,560
Speaker 1: to have Virginia join the Association for the Non Importation

1014
00:50:52,680 --> 00:50:57,480
Speaker 1: of British Manufacturers. This was an effort of intracolonial solidarity

1015
00:50:57,520 --> 00:51:01,360
Speaker 1: to protest British taxes on goods and support domestic manufacturing.

1016
00:51:01,920 --> 00:51:04,799
Speaker 1: Jefferson hated the idea that the Americas would have to

1017
00:51:04,840 --> 00:51:08,319
Speaker 1: import basic necessities from elsewhere in the Empire instead of

1018
00:51:08,360 --> 00:51:10,799
Speaker 1: having their own manufacturing base for those products, which is

1019
00:51:10,800 --> 00:51:12,640
Speaker 1: going to be strangled by the taxes and duties that

1020
00:51:12,680 --> 00:51:16,000
Speaker 1: Parliament was pushing through. Like a lot of problematic dudes,

1021
00:51:16,040 --> 00:51:19,000
Speaker 1: Jefferson is going to grow increasingly obsessed with these ideas

1022
00:51:19,000 --> 00:51:22,279
Speaker 1: of autarchy, right of radical self reliance on both an

1023
00:51:22,280 --> 00:51:24,759
Speaker 1: individual and a national level, and he kind is going

1024
00:51:24,800 --> 00:51:27,040
Speaker 1: to come to believe that the basis of the society

1025
00:51:27,040 --> 00:51:30,200
Speaker 1: he wants to build should be these independent Yalemen farmers

1026
00:51:30,360 --> 00:51:33,000
Speaker 1: who produce all the necessities of life on their own

1027
00:51:33,440 --> 00:51:36,120
Speaker 1: independent properties, or at least most of them. Yeah, and

1028
00:51:36,239 --> 00:51:39,160
Speaker 1: kind of the nation that these people build in common

1029
00:51:39,200 --> 00:51:41,840
Speaker 1: together will itself be independent. Right, It's not going to

1030
00:51:41,920 --> 00:51:46,239
Speaker 1: need anything from elsewhere. Now, this kind of life, the

1031
00:51:46,280 --> 00:51:49,520
Speaker 1: reality of it, Like as with Cato's fantasies, it's only

1032
00:51:49,520 --> 00:51:51,240
Speaker 1: really possible with large numbers of insides.

1033
00:51:51,440 --> 00:51:54,960
Speaker 2: It requires slaves. Yeah, yeah, to that point from what

1034
00:51:55,040 --> 00:51:59,920
Speaker 2: I understand, Like, yeah, his picture were of America was

1035
00:52:00,120 --> 00:52:03,480
Speaker 2: not big city, you know, and that that that that

1036
00:52:03,560 --> 00:52:07,680
Speaker 2: actually became quite a point of contention because of like

1037
00:52:07,880 --> 00:52:12,520
Speaker 2: just the very his very just his imagination of what

1038
00:52:12,600 --> 00:52:16,680
Speaker 2: this world could be is not modern. It's not so

1039
00:52:16,800 --> 00:52:20,520
Speaker 2: that played such a role in his view of slavery

1040
00:52:20,520 --> 00:52:22,680
Speaker 2: and a view of this and like yeah, so like

1041
00:52:22,719 --> 00:52:26,600
Speaker 2: that that in turn, if you took another like Founder,

1042
00:52:26,600 --> 00:52:28,480
Speaker 2: that was like, nah, dude, we could be modern, Like

1043
00:52:28,600 --> 00:52:30,440
Speaker 2: let's we can be the future, you know.

1044
00:52:30,520 --> 00:52:33,279
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, like you know, And there were a lot

1045
00:52:33,320 --> 00:52:37,319
Speaker 1: of these, a lot of those guys. Jefferson his his

1046
00:52:37,600 --> 00:52:40,839
Speaker 1: vision of kind of his ideal society. For as much

1047
00:52:40,840 --> 00:52:43,720
Speaker 1: as he talks about democracy and his interested in progress

1048
00:52:43,719 --> 00:52:45,520
Speaker 1: as he is, and he's going to label himself an

1049
00:52:45,520 --> 00:52:48,840
Speaker 1: ally with the progressives of his time. Yeah, what he

1050
00:52:49,000 --> 00:52:51,799
Speaker 1: talks about really seems like feudile to me in a

1051
00:52:51,800 --> 00:52:55,680
Speaker 1: lot of ways. These like little feudal independent states run

1052
00:52:55,719 --> 00:52:57,839
Speaker 1: on slavery, right, you know, which is kind of their

1053
00:52:57,960 --> 00:53:02,000
Speaker 1: version of serfdom. It's made clear kind of how some

1054
00:53:02,040 --> 00:53:06,600
Speaker 1: of his beliefs are moving along. In seventeen sixty eight,

1055
00:53:06,640 --> 00:53:09,080
Speaker 1: which is the same year he joins the House of Burgesses,

1056
00:53:09,880 --> 00:53:12,200
Speaker 1: and that's the year he decides to build a house

1057
00:53:12,280 --> 00:53:15,560
Speaker 1: for himself on top of a mountain Monticello, on a

1058
00:53:15,600 --> 00:53:19,680
Speaker 1: parcel of land inherited from his father. Building Monticello is

1059
00:53:19,680 --> 00:53:21,440
Speaker 1: going to be the work of a lifetime and in

1060
00:53:21,520 --> 00:53:26,000
Speaker 1: some ways the most insidiously evil direct action of Jefferson's life,

1061
00:53:26,400 --> 00:53:29,280
Speaker 1: but at this stage his plans were unsettled. In seventeen

1062
00:53:29,360 --> 00:53:32,719
Speaker 1: seventy two, he married Martha Whale Skelton, who had been

1063
00:53:32,760 --> 00:53:34,839
Speaker 1: widowed young and thus had a huge amount of wealth

1064
00:53:34,840 --> 00:53:37,920
Speaker 1: and property to offer him. The family slaves who were

1065
00:53:37,960 --> 00:53:41,240
Speaker 1: later interviewed about this marriage describe it as a love match,

1066
00:53:41,280 --> 00:53:44,040
Speaker 1: though not something done for property, which is interesting and

1067
00:53:44,080 --> 00:53:46,000
Speaker 1: probably suggests that that's what it was.

1068
00:53:46,160 --> 00:53:46,359
Speaker 2: Right.

1069
00:53:46,640 --> 00:53:48,440
Speaker 1: They wrote about this as different from a lot of

1070
00:53:48,440 --> 00:53:52,719
Speaker 1: the other arranged marriages that they saw among the white

1071
00:53:52,719 --> 00:53:55,560
Speaker 1: people who were kind of at the top of their society.

1072
00:53:56,040 --> 00:53:59,080
Speaker 1: We don't really know much about the relationship because Jefferson

1073
00:53:59,160 --> 00:54:01,840
Speaker 1: later destroys most of his correspondence with Martha.

1074
00:54:02,320 --> 00:54:02,560
Speaker 2: Great.

1075
00:54:03,000 --> 00:54:04,799
Speaker 1: Yeah, I don't know what's going on. There may have

1076
00:54:04,840 --> 00:54:06,319
Speaker 1: just been a thing he did out of grief, because

1077
00:54:06,320 --> 00:54:09,160
Speaker 1: she's not going to live a long life, and neither

1078
00:54:09,280 --> 00:54:12,200
Speaker 1: is her father John. He is less of a mystery, though,

1079
00:54:12,320 --> 00:54:15,840
Speaker 1: because he was a slave trader. Henry Winsick writes quote

1080
00:54:16,200 --> 00:54:19,800
Speaker 1: when Jefferson courted the beautiful Martha Wales. He spent evenings

1081
00:54:19,840 --> 00:54:22,840
Speaker 1: by the fire with her father, Old John, who undoubtedly

1082
00:54:22,880 --> 00:54:25,840
Speaker 1: talked business with the young suitor, discoursing on slaves and

1083
00:54:25,880 --> 00:54:28,080
Speaker 1: the peaks and valleys in the market for them. The

1084
00:54:28,120 --> 00:54:30,560
Speaker 1: incoming tide of slaves washed up against the steps of

1085
00:54:30,600 --> 00:54:33,720
Speaker 1: the county courthouses every late summer and fall. The lawyers

1086
00:54:33,719 --> 00:54:36,480
Speaker 1: and magistrates had the routine of land transactions and debt

1087
00:54:36,520 --> 00:54:40,400
Speaker 1: collections interrupted when overseers herded gangs of newly delivered African

1088
00:54:40,480 --> 00:54:44,239
Speaker 1: children under the courthouses through the magistrates to scrutinize, their

1089
00:54:44,280 --> 00:54:47,960
Speaker 1: task being to assign each child in age. When children

1090
00:54:48,000 --> 00:54:51,080
Speaker 1: reached sixteen, they became taxable, So the planters had an

1091
00:54:51,120 --> 00:54:52,600
Speaker 1: interest in low estimates.

1092
00:54:53,239 --> 00:54:53,640
Speaker 2: Wow.

1093
00:54:54,120 --> 00:54:56,239
Speaker 1: Yeah, the idea that like you don't even really have

1094
00:54:56,360 --> 00:54:59,239
Speaker 1: your age. Yeah, that's something that like these guys are

1095
00:54:59,280 --> 00:55:01,160
Speaker 1: kind of hash out independent of you.

1096
00:55:01,719 --> 00:55:02,560
Speaker 2: Yeah.

1097
00:55:02,640 --> 00:55:05,800
Speaker 1: Now, from what he would write later, we can infer

1098
00:55:05,840 --> 00:55:08,960
Speaker 1: that Jefferson was horrified by aspects of what Wales told him,

1099
00:55:09,000 --> 00:55:14,000
Speaker 1: particularly about the passage like from Africa the Americans. Yeah,

1100
00:55:14,400 --> 00:55:16,520
Speaker 1: and so much so that he eventually is going to

1101
00:55:16,560 --> 00:55:19,880
Speaker 1: take action. Not long after this point, soon after joining

1102
00:55:19,880 --> 00:55:21,880
Speaker 1: the House of Burgesses. Sometime at the end of the

1103
00:55:21,880 --> 00:55:24,759
Speaker 1: seventeen sixties or the start of the seventeen seventies, he

1104
00:55:24,840 --> 00:55:30,280
Speaker 1: submitted an emancipation bill anonymously through a cousin. Jefferson himself

1105
00:55:30,320 --> 00:55:33,520
Speaker 1: hated face to face conflict and the vicious reaction to

1106
00:55:33,560 --> 00:55:36,480
Speaker 1: the bill. His cousin was accused of hating his country

1107
00:55:36,719 --> 00:55:39,200
Speaker 1: reinforce his fear of speaking out on the issue. But

1108
00:55:39,239 --> 00:55:41,759
Speaker 1: he does at this point, he does try something. Yeah,

1109
00:55:41,800 --> 00:55:43,240
Speaker 1: it's nothing, I think.

1110
00:55:43,080 --> 00:55:46,040
Speaker 2: Yeah, And and to know that, like what gets outlawed

1111
00:55:46,080 --> 00:55:50,719
Speaker 2: first is the importation of new slaves, you know, which

1112
00:55:50,760 --> 00:55:57,080
Speaker 2: I still which I think indirectly is connected to Jefferson

1113
00:55:57,120 --> 00:55:59,720
Speaker 2: being like, yes, some about this is crazy.

1114
00:55:59,719 --> 00:56:02,640
Speaker 1: And it's connected to Jefferson's this belief he's going to

1115
00:56:02,680 --> 00:56:05,399
Speaker 1: express for a while about how slavery should be brought

1116
00:56:05,400 --> 00:56:08,319
Speaker 1: to an end. He's going to consistently advocate for that.

1117
00:56:08,360 --> 00:56:09,800
Speaker 1: But yeah, we're getting ahead of ourselves.

1118
00:56:09,840 --> 00:56:10,120
Speaker 2: Ye, yeah.

1119
00:56:10,160 --> 00:56:15,000
Speaker 1: Yeah. In seventeen seventy three, Jefferson's best friend, Dabney Carr died.

1120
00:56:15,400 --> 00:56:18,120
Speaker 1: He had married Thomas's sister, Martha, and his loss was

1121
00:56:18,160 --> 00:56:21,640
Speaker 1: an understandable blow to Thomas. What's Harder to understand is

1122
00:56:21,640 --> 00:56:24,200
Speaker 1: how he responds to Dabney's death, As described in an

1123
00:56:24,239 --> 00:56:27,760
Speaker 1: article by the National Park Service, while slaves were preparing

1124
00:56:27,800 --> 00:56:30,960
Speaker 1: Carr's grave, Jefferson sat nearby taking notes on the time

1125
00:56:31,000 --> 00:56:33,480
Speaker 1: required to turn the soil. Two men spent three and

1126
00:56:33,480 --> 00:56:36,640
Speaker 1: a half hours at this job. Thus, Jefferson calculated one

1127
00:56:36,680 --> 00:56:39,240
Speaker 1: man would take seven hours and could therefore be expected

1128
00:56:39,280 --> 00:56:42,960
Speaker 1: to turn an acre of ground in four working days. Now,

1129
00:56:43,640 --> 00:56:46,280
Speaker 1: that's a weird response to losing your best friend.

1130
00:56:46,800 --> 00:56:47,040
Speaker 2: Ji.

1131
00:56:47,080 --> 00:56:50,640
Speaker 1: Like I normally I say there's no wrong way to grieve,

1132
00:56:50,800 --> 00:56:54,200
Speaker 1: But carefully studying the number of slave man hours needed

1133
00:56:54,239 --> 00:56:56,239
Speaker 1: to bury your friend while you watch them dig his

1134
00:56:56,320 --> 00:56:58,160
Speaker 1: grave is the wrong way to gree.

1135
00:56:58,040 --> 00:57:00,480
Speaker 2: Can you imagine a bad way? You imagine sitting next

1136
00:57:00,480 --> 00:57:02,799
Speaker 2: to somebody grieving, putting your arm around him. They just

1137
00:57:02,800 --> 00:57:05,640
Speaker 2: real quiet, and you're like bro mans On as you know,

1138
00:57:05,640 --> 00:57:07,880
Speaker 2: you could talk to me about anything. Man, I love you, homie, Like,

1139
00:57:08,000 --> 00:57:10,800
Speaker 2: I what do you have? What's what's how you feeling

1140
00:57:10,840 --> 00:57:11,200
Speaker 2: right now?

1141
00:57:11,200 --> 00:57:11,359
Speaker 3: Man?

1142
00:57:11,400 --> 00:57:13,239
Speaker 2: What's what's what's feel in your mind?

1143
00:57:13,280 --> 00:57:15,360
Speaker 1: I feel like you could turn an acre of soil

1144
00:57:15,400 --> 00:57:16,200
Speaker 1: in about four days.

1145
00:57:17,880 --> 00:57:22,560
Speaker 2: I'm sorry, Yeah, wait, that's what you were saying about

1146
00:57:22,640 --> 00:57:25,720
Speaker 2: right now, okay, such a weird Now I'd be like,

1147
00:57:25,920 --> 00:57:29,760
Speaker 2: oh yeah, all right man, Yeah, what do you say

1148
00:57:29,760 --> 00:57:34,080
Speaker 2: to that? Like all right, all right, all right, Thomas, okay,

1149
00:57:34,480 --> 00:57:36,160
Speaker 2: well let me know if you need anything, bro, Like.

1150
00:57:36,360 --> 00:57:38,920
Speaker 1: You're welcome for burying your friends, how about that?

1151
00:57:39,080 --> 00:57:40,920
Speaker 2: Yeah?

1152
00:57:40,960 --> 00:57:43,680
Speaker 1: So that same year, the same year that Dabney dies,

1153
00:57:43,800 --> 00:57:46,600
Speaker 1: his father in law is also going to die, and

1154
00:57:46,680 --> 00:57:50,160
Speaker 1: you know, fuck him. Uh, he leaves Martha Jefferson, eleven

1155
00:57:50,200 --> 00:57:53,120
Speaker 1: thousand acres of land, thirty five slaves, and what biographers

1156
00:57:53,160 --> 00:57:57,560
Speaker 1: generally describe as innumerable debts. The exact reason for those

1157
00:57:57,560 --> 00:57:59,959
Speaker 1: debts is important to understand. If we're going to grab

1158
00:58:00,200 --> 00:58:02,400
Speaker 1: fully how the man with the post abolition.

1159
00:58:02,080 --> 00:58:04,040
Speaker 2: It just says innumerable.

1160
00:58:03,480 --> 00:58:05,280
Speaker 1: Debts, innumerable debts.

1161
00:58:05,320 --> 00:58:06,280
Speaker 2: That's hilarious.

1162
00:58:06,080 --> 00:58:09,800
Speaker 1: This man is under fucking water, and it's we're going

1163
00:58:09,880 --> 00:58:12,440
Speaker 1: to talk about why he's underwater, right, because.

1164
00:58:12,200 --> 00:58:16,680
Speaker 2: We're vague but also not vegue. Yeah, it's strangely accurate.

1165
00:58:16,880 --> 00:58:19,360
Speaker 2: I was like, all right, all right, copy that, sir,

1166
00:58:19,720 --> 00:58:23,560
Speaker 2: Yeah you're yeah, what is he what's being communicated? Yeah,

1167
00:58:23,080 --> 00:58:26,360
Speaker 2: what's what is said is vague, but what being communicated

1168
00:58:26,520 --> 00:58:27,479
Speaker 2: is spot on. Yeah.

1169
00:58:27,840 --> 00:58:31,640
Speaker 1: Yeah, and his again this guy Wales, John Wales, I

1170
00:58:31,680 --> 00:58:34,040
Speaker 1: think has been a wholesale of human beings. And he

1171
00:58:34,120 --> 00:58:36,880
Speaker 1: had shortly before dying, set up a big deal in

1172
00:58:36,960 --> 00:58:40,400
Speaker 1: seventeen seventy two for a consignment of enslaved people coming

1173
00:58:40,440 --> 00:58:43,479
Speaker 1: in on a boat called the Prince of Wales. Only

1174
00:58:43,520 --> 00:58:47,080
Speaker 1: two hundred and eighty of the four hundred people aboard survived,

1175
00:58:47,120 --> 00:58:48,960
Speaker 1: which was a high rate of loss. I mean, it

1176
00:58:49,000 --> 00:58:50,760
Speaker 1: was never a low rate of loss, right, but this

1177
00:58:50,880 --> 00:58:54,120
Speaker 1: was it was bad. Scene is bad, and this shrank

1178
00:58:54,160 --> 00:58:57,520
Speaker 1: their potential profits. But then they sold two hundred and

1179
00:58:57,520 --> 00:58:59,800
Speaker 1: sixty six of these people, and they did so on

1180
00:59:00,080 --> 00:59:03,480
Speaker 1: credit to quote unquote wealthy planters who claim to be

1181
00:59:03,560 --> 00:59:06,040
Speaker 1: good for it. And the planters were buying on credit

1182
00:59:06,120 --> 00:59:08,760
Speaker 1: because they needed these guys to harvest their tobacco and

1183
00:59:08,760 --> 00:59:10,560
Speaker 1: then they were going to sell the tobacco and then

1184
00:59:10,560 --> 00:59:13,160
Speaker 1: they were going to pay back Whales. But then the

1185
00:59:13,160 --> 00:59:16,880
Speaker 1: tobacco market crashed that year and the planters had no cash,

1186
00:59:16,960 --> 00:59:19,680
Speaker 1: and thus Wales and his business partner had to make

1187
00:59:19,760 --> 00:59:22,440
Speaker 1: good on the payment to the original slavers in London.

1188
00:59:22,840 --> 00:59:26,840
Speaker 1: Thomas Jefferson inherited this debt in seventeen seventy three, and

1189
00:59:26,880 --> 00:59:29,040
Speaker 1: he is it's going to take He's not really getting

1190
00:59:29,040 --> 00:59:30,920
Speaker 1: out of this, right, Like this is going to be hanging.

1191
00:59:30,960 --> 00:59:34,560
Speaker 1: It's like a student loan. It's like an evil student loan.

1192
00:59:34,920 --> 00:59:37,320
Speaker 1: Student loans are a different kind of very different Yeah.

1193
00:59:37,400 --> 00:59:40,680
Speaker 2: Yeah, study loon only for slaves.

1194
00:59:41,280 --> 00:59:43,560
Speaker 1: Yes, yeah, it's like a student right, and like with

1195
00:59:43,640 --> 00:59:46,680
Speaker 1: a similarly ruinous rate of interest. Right, So he's not

1196
00:59:46,720 --> 00:59:48,720
Speaker 1: going to be able to really pay any of these

1197
00:59:49,080 --> 00:59:52,680
Speaker 1: or the debts that he has accrued off. Situations like

1198
00:59:52,760 --> 00:59:56,680
Speaker 1: this are not uncommon for the wealthy Virginia planting class, right,

1199
00:59:56,880 --> 01:00:00,000
Speaker 1: these guys are wealthy in quotation marks. To explain this,

1200
01:00:00,320 --> 01:00:03,000
Speaker 1: we have to talk about what Jefferson and his peers

1201
01:00:03,080 --> 01:00:07,560
Speaker 1: considered wealth, right, because they're not talking about like cash, right.

1202
01:00:08,800 --> 01:00:10,920
Speaker 1: They are talking about primarily land.

1203
01:00:11,040 --> 01:00:11,200
Speaker 2: Right.

1204
01:00:11,280 --> 01:00:13,960
Speaker 1: Wealth is land to a lot of these guys, and

1205
01:00:14,000 --> 01:00:15,920
Speaker 1: the fact that all of them are hideously in debt,

1206
01:00:15,960 --> 01:00:19,840
Speaker 1: mostly to British lenders, is inconvenient and a problem, But

1207
01:00:19,880 --> 01:00:23,640
Speaker 1: it doesn't change their impression of themselves right as wealthy men.

1208
01:00:23,840 --> 01:00:26,040
Speaker 1: But it does cause all these problems because that land

1209
01:00:26,120 --> 01:00:29,280
Speaker 1: can be taken away, right, and debt is inherited in

1210
01:00:29,360 --> 01:00:31,160
Speaker 1: this period, and so debt is going to be a

1211
01:00:31,200 --> 01:00:34,520
Speaker 1: central issue for Jefferson. Over the course of his decades

1212
01:00:34,520 --> 01:00:37,480
Speaker 1: in public life. He would often advocate for the elimination

1213
01:00:37,560 --> 01:00:41,680
Speaker 1: of American debts held by English bankers during post war negotiations, and,

1214
01:00:41,720 --> 01:00:44,200
Speaker 1: like Robert E. Lee a generation later, he came to

1215
01:00:44,240 --> 01:00:47,040
Speaker 1: see the human beings that he had inherited as a

1216
01:00:47,120 --> 01:00:49,640
Speaker 1: path out of the debt trap that his relatives and

1217
01:00:49,720 --> 01:00:53,800
Speaker 1: his own spending had locked him into. In seventeen seventy

1218
01:00:53,840 --> 01:00:56,400
Speaker 1: four and seventeen seventy five, the conflict of a British

1219
01:00:56,480 --> 01:00:59,400
Speaker 1: taxation and rule of the colonies reached a fever pitch

1220
01:00:59,480 --> 01:01:03,120
Speaker 1: and boiled over into armed resistance. Jefferson became a major

1221
01:01:03,160 --> 01:01:06,440
Speaker 1: figure in Virginia and increasingly well known throughout the colonies

1222
01:01:06,640 --> 01:01:09,439
Speaker 1: for his full throated, or at least full pinned because

1223
01:01:09,440 --> 01:01:12,120
Speaker 1: he's not really a talking guy at this point, defense

1224
01:01:12,160 --> 01:01:14,680
Speaker 1: of the Boston Tea Party. Now he writes a lot

1225
01:01:14,680 --> 01:01:18,120
Speaker 1: about the tea Party, not historically accurate shit, but what

1226
01:01:18,200 --> 01:01:21,600
Speaker 1: he writes sets the popular conception of this moment to

1227
01:01:21,640 --> 01:01:24,080
Speaker 1: an extent that it still exists today. You can draw

1228
01:01:24,080 --> 01:01:26,440
Speaker 1: a line from what Jefferson writes about these people to

1229
01:01:26,560 --> 01:01:28,920
Speaker 1: like the tea Party that we had in the early odds, right,

1230
01:01:29,120 --> 01:01:31,640
Speaker 1: And I'm going to quote from American Sphinx here. In

1231
01:01:31,720 --> 01:01:35,520
Speaker 1: Jefferson's account, a dedicated group of loyal Bostonians risked arrest

1232
01:01:35,560 --> 01:01:39,440
Speaker 1: and persecution to destroy a cargo of the contraband Samuel Adams,

1233
01:01:39,440 --> 01:01:41,680
Speaker 1: a major figure in the Continental Congress and the chief

1234
01:01:41,760 --> 01:01:44,560
Speaker 1: organizer of the Tea Party, must have chuckled in satisfaction,

1235
01:01:44,720 --> 01:01:47,040
Speaker 1: knowing as he did that the loyal Bostonians were really

1236
01:01:47,080 --> 01:01:49,800
Speaker 1: a group of hooligans and vandals who would disguised themselves

1237
01:01:49,840 --> 01:01:52,400
Speaker 1: as Indians in order to avoid being identified, and who

1238
01:01:52,400 --> 01:01:55,240
Speaker 1: had enjoyed the tacit support of the Boston merchants, many

1239
01:01:55,240 --> 01:01:58,040
Speaker 1: of whom had made their fortunes in smuggling. Sam Adams

1240
01:01:58,040 --> 01:02:00,480
Speaker 1: realized that the Tea Party was an orchestrat act of

1241
01:02:00,480 --> 01:02:05,320
Speaker 1: revolutionary theater. Jefferson described it as a spontaneous act of patriotism,

1242
01:02:05,360 --> 01:02:08,120
Speaker 1: conducted according to the etiquette of well a tea party.

1243
01:02:08,480 --> 01:02:12,920
Speaker 1: But then again, perhaps Jefferson's version was itself a propagandistic manipulation,

1244
01:02:13,400 --> 01:02:17,840
Speaker 1: just as self consciously orchestrated as the Tea Party itself. Now,

1245
01:02:18,400 --> 01:02:20,800
Speaker 1: the whole point of that book by Ellis American sphinx.

1246
01:02:20,840 --> 01:02:23,920
Speaker 1: The reason he calls it American sphinx is that Jefferson

1247
01:02:23,960 --> 01:02:28,160
Speaker 1: has really hard to pin down about this and other stuff, right,

1248
01:02:28,200 --> 01:02:30,320
Speaker 1: you can you can make a case if you're arguing

1249
01:02:30,320 --> 01:02:33,400
Speaker 1: about like modern politics, he would be on both sides

1250
01:02:33,440 --> 01:02:36,200
Speaker 1: of most issues of his day or of like today,

1251
01:02:36,320 --> 01:02:40,360
Speaker 1: right like, because he's he's very inconsistent and he's really

1252
01:02:40,480 --> 01:02:42,920
Speaker 1: had He's fine with lying to protect his own image.

1253
01:02:42,920 --> 01:02:45,560
Speaker 1: He does it all the time. But he's also really

1254
01:02:45,600 --> 01:02:48,120
Speaker 1: good at writing. He's a great writer, and so like

1255
01:02:48,320 --> 01:02:50,320
Speaker 1: the stuff he writ. Ellis describes his writing on the

1256
01:02:50,320 --> 01:02:52,280
Speaker 1: Tea Party as being like a fairy tale, right and

1257
01:02:52,320 --> 01:02:55,920
Speaker 1: obviously the fact that that distortion gets passed down to

1258
01:02:55,960 --> 01:02:58,880
Speaker 1: such an extent is a credit to his ability to

1259
01:02:59,040 --> 01:03:02,320
Speaker 1: craft reality, which is very much what he is doing. Right.

1260
01:03:02,400 --> 01:03:06,200
Speaker 1: He's building Ellis describes as like a fantasy world for

1261
01:03:06,320 --> 01:03:09,439
Speaker 1: himself that is robust enough to occasionally admit the rest

1262
01:03:09,480 --> 01:03:10,160
Speaker 1: of the country.

1263
01:03:11,920 --> 01:03:13,200
Speaker 2: And that's a good way.

1264
01:03:13,280 --> 01:03:18,360
Speaker 1: Yeah, that's a good way to say him. Yes, yeah, wow, yeah.

1265
01:03:18,520 --> 01:03:20,360
Speaker 1: And we're going to talk about that and a lot

1266
01:03:20,440 --> 01:03:23,800
Speaker 1: more in part two. But prop yo, it's the end

1267
01:03:23,840 --> 01:03:27,240
Speaker 1: of part one. I hope you all had a good time. Prop,

1268
01:03:27,360 --> 01:03:28,880
Speaker 1: You got any pluggables to play?

1269
01:03:28,960 --> 01:03:32,920
Speaker 2: And Politics will Prop. We do a hood politics vyballs

1270
01:03:33,360 --> 01:03:36,000
Speaker 2: which don't have a don't have no cuss words in it,

1271
01:03:36,520 --> 01:03:38,360
Speaker 2: and it's a little shorter so he could play to

1272
01:03:38,400 --> 01:03:41,240
Speaker 2: the kiddos. But yeah bull Politics will Prop. Go to

1273
01:03:41,240 --> 01:03:43,520
Speaker 2: prop hip hop dot com. You could find the pod

1274
01:03:43,720 --> 01:03:48,560
Speaker 2: on all of the things and uh yeah man, and

1275
01:03:48,560 --> 01:03:50,520
Speaker 2: I'm gonna continue to rock with y'all. Man, oh, I

1276
01:03:50,560 --> 01:03:52,520
Speaker 2: wrote a book of poetry book Terror.

1277
01:03:52,600 --> 01:03:57,720
Speaker 1: You sure did? Yeah and yeah man excellent. Well, everybody,

1278
01:03:57,880 --> 01:04:00,360
Speaker 1: that's it for part one. Come back tomorrow where we'll

1279
01:04:00,400 --> 01:04:10,280
Speaker 1: talk about more. Thomas Jefferson Bye. Behind the Bastards is

1280
01:04:10,280 --> 01:04:12,000
Speaker 1: a production of cool Zone Media.

1281
01:04:12,360 --> 01:04:14,160
Speaker 2: For more from cool Zone Media, visit

1282
01:04:14,160 --> 01:04:17,880
Speaker 1: Our website Coolzonemedia dot com, or check us out on

1283
01:04:17,920 --> 01:04:21,960
Speaker 1: the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.