Speaker 1: Media. Hey everyone, Robert Evans here and I wanted to
Speaker 1: talk about something that is important to me, important to
Speaker 1: everyone else at cool Zone. We have not really covered
Speaker 1: it in detail, but on June tenth, twenty twenty four,
Speaker 1: a man named Leonard Peltier, who is an enrolled member
Speaker 1: of the Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa of Lakota and
Speaker 1: Ojibwe Ancestry and is the longest serving political prisoner in
Speaker 1: the United States, will be appearing before the US Parole
Speaker 1: Commission for the first time since two thousand and nine.
Speaker 1: The FBI is vigorously resisting any thought of him being
Speaker 1: paroled because he allegedly killed two FBI agents and a
Speaker 1: firefight on June twenty sixth, nineteen seventy five. Said agents
Speaker 1: had shown up on reservation land to execute a pretextural warrant.
Speaker 1: The initial firefight occurred during what's called the Reign of
Speaker 1: Terror on Pine Ridge in the wake of the occupation
Speaker 1: of Wounded Knee. It was a time of extreme violence
Speaker 1: by the federal government, who had installed a puppet tribal
Speaker 1: chair and was arming vigilantes who targeted Indigenous traditionalists. Everything
Speaker 1: that led up to these events and the subsequent investigation
Speaker 1: and mister Peltier's extradition, trial, conviction, and sentencings was characterized
Speaker 1: by gross misconduct on the part of law enforcement, the prosecution,
Speaker 1: and the courts. Mister Peltier's co defendants were separately tried
Speaker 1: and acquitted on grounds of self defense. Mister Peltier was
Speaker 1: railroaded and his cases tainted by discrimination at every level,
Speaker 1: ranging from the withholding of exculpatory evidence to the torture
Speaker 1: and coercion of extradition and trial witnesses, and from the
Speaker 1: refusal of the trial judge to dismiss and a vowedly
Speaker 1: racist juror, to the apologetic gymnastics of courts affirming his
Speaker 1: convictions in the wake of meritorious legal challenges and admitted
Speaker 1: evidence about rageous government misdeeds. Mister Peltier has been in
Speaker 1: prison for more than forty eight years and is almost
Speaker 1: eighty years old. He suffers from chronic and potentially lethal
Speaker 1: conditions for which he receives insufficient and substandard medical care.
Speaker 1: If you want to take action to hashtag free Leonard Peltier,
Speaker 1: and I should tell you his name is spelled l
Speaker 1: EO nar D p E l t I E r.
Speaker 1: You can call the US Parole Commission at two two
Speaker 1: three for six seven thousand and sign the petition at
Speaker 1: n d nco dot cc slash free Leonard Peltier at
Speaker 1: n d nco dot cc slash free Leonard Peltier all
Speaker 1: one you Know thing, or follow the n d N
Speaker 1: Collective on social media for more ways to support him.
Speaker 1: For more information on Leonard Peltier, you can listen to
Speaker 1: Margaret's podcast on the Locoda Nation and read In the
Speaker 1: Spirit of Crazy Horse by Peter Matheeson. Oh, welcome back
Speaker 1: to Behind the Bastards, the only podcast that you're listening
Speaker 1: to right now, unless you're you're listening to more than
Speaker 1: one podcast right now to I think I've done this
Speaker 1: joke this like this, this bit about the brain hacking
Speaker 1: people who like I read seventy books a week. Yeah, Jason,
Speaker 1: do you have any brain hacks? How do you hack
Speaker 1: your brain? How do you? How are you so such
Speaker 1: a such a a triple quadruple threat of a musician, writer, author, podcaster.
Speaker 1: I guess two of those are technically the same thing.
Speaker 1: But coffee entrepreneur, Yeah, yeah, how are you him?
Speaker 2: I mean, as a few of them? I think one
Speaker 2: of the main brain hacks is child labor. So if
Speaker 2: you just that's a big one.
Speaker 1: That's a big yeah.
Speaker 2: You just find a little a little young hungry you
Speaker 2: know what I'm saying. Kid, don't want to get famous.
Speaker 1: And you just yeah make it we work too.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I mean, I'm telling you, man, it's like we.
Speaker 1: Call that British umpire Maxing. Yeah, yep.
Speaker 2: One of my one of my mentors, used to say,
Speaker 2: everybody has the saying twenty four hours, but if you
Speaker 2: work for me, I get eight of yours. So so like, dude,
Speaker 2: I got thirty two.
Speaker 1: Now. So that's there's your free advice for everybody today.
Speaker 1: Go steal a child. That actually ties in very well
Speaker 1: to the subject of this episode. Wow, because the guy
Speaker 1: we're talking about this week is one of the most
Speaker 1: famously productive human beings in history and and one of
Speaker 1: the most influential American in the history of our nation.
Speaker 1: And he did it by stealing a bunch of children.
Speaker 1: We are talking this week about Thomas Jefferson.
Speaker 2: Hello, hello, oh man, the man loved him some black women.
Speaker 1: Oh boy. We'll have a lot to say about all
Speaker 1: of that. But first cold opens, dozen shut. We're back,
Speaker 1: and you know, prop I said we at the introduction
Speaker 1: of this the only way to get those extra eight
Speaker 1: hours a day is by by stealing them someone younger.
Speaker 1: But there is one other way, and it's crudely made
Speaker 1: kretom tea mixed mine with macha and coffee. Today, I
Speaker 1: was like, are we doing product placement in the first
Speaker 1: minute of this coffee? Because this is just free the
Speaker 1: concept of cretum.
Speaker 2: Be cool if that coffee was owned by me.
Speaker 1: I it was up until oh recently, I ordered like
Speaker 1: four or five greats of your of your cold brew.
Speaker 1: But I finally I need to I need to make
Speaker 1: another order because I finally made it through. That's been
Speaker 1: my early afternoon coffee. Just like crack a. Can go
Speaker 1: go do some squats or sit down and finally write
Speaker 1: for the day. Yeah, yeah, good stuff.
Speaker 2: It's like I will still say, I it is magical
Speaker 2: that these scripts, that these are actually scripts, that you
Speaker 2: write them. I'm like, do you type? Do you type
Speaker 2: four thousand words a minute?
Speaker 1: I can get about four thousand words. That's like a
Speaker 1: normal night. That's like one one episode usually four to
Speaker 1: five thousand words, so that's usually.
Speaker 2: Not a minute, not a minute. Minute though, I was like, no,
Speaker 2: did you count my joke here? Bro? Like I was like, nah, okay.
Speaker 1: Once I finish like researching, it's usually about like five
Speaker 1: hours of writing per script, Yeah, yeah, something like that
Speaker 1: kind of depends on the script. Some of them take more.
Speaker 1: Sometimes it's more like eight or ten for the same amount,
Speaker 1: because like, ye, word count is one thing, but it
Speaker 1: all depends on like how well you understand, Like if
Speaker 1: it's one of those things. If I'm like writing about
Speaker 1: like Thomas Jefferson, thank god, at least the basics of
Speaker 1: his history. Yeah, we were all raised with his kids,
Speaker 1: So it's not as much as like if I'm reading
Speaker 1: about Chow Chesku or whatever and I've got to like you, Ye,
Speaker 1: let's get into Thomas Jefferson, and specifically I want to.
Speaker 1: I want to dissuade people who might be worried at
Speaker 1: the start. This is not even going to be four
Speaker 1: episodes about Thomas Jefferson his whole life, because there's so
Speaker 1: much written about this man and surrounding context we have,
Speaker 1: we're drowning at him. These episodes are purely about Thomas
Speaker 1: Jefferson and slavery.
Speaker 2: Right, I'm gonna say this. I've got to say this Yeah.
Speaker 2: I've gotta say I love the rhythm that the bastards
Speaker 2: guests have. It seems like like some people get you know,
Speaker 2: child murder.
Speaker 1: We have our dead baby guests.
Speaker 2: Yeah, you have a dead baby. Guess you have your
Speaker 2: you know, crack doctor. Guess I get horrible acts of
Speaker 2: racism guests.
Speaker 1: Ah, yeah, I mean I'll take it. Shit, I'll take it.
Speaker 2: You're on the Mount Rushmore, Yeah, Rushmore.
Speaker 1: So is Thomas Jefferson. I think I'm pretty sure he
Speaker 1: has to be right. Yeah. Now to start with it,
Speaker 1: to really, like, I think, to ground the story of
Speaker 1: Thomas Jefferson because it's not really even calling it Thomas
Speaker 1: Jefferson and slavery is not fully accurate. We're really talking
Speaker 1: about Jefferson and like the concept of freedom, because Jefferson
Speaker 1: is going to be seen in his own time as
Speaker 1: something of like a profit of the concept of human liberty, yes,
Speaker 1: to an extent that bleeds surprisingly far, both in time
Speaker 1: and geographically. And to make that point, I want to
Speaker 1: talk about September second, nineteen forty five, which is when
Speaker 1: a guy you might have heard of named Ho Chi
Speaker 1: Minh gave a speech at bod Dean Square in Hanoi, Vietnam.
Speaker 1: By this point in the Vietnamese struggle for liberation, the
Speaker 1: hated Japanese occupiers had been forced out in August, but
Speaker 1: French imperial forces still controlled much of what was then
Speaker 1: called Indo China. The war between France and the Vietmen
Speaker 1: would take almost another decade until nineteen fifty four and
Speaker 1: lead inexorably to an even bloodier conflict between the United
Speaker 1: States and the Democratic Republic of Vietnam. Given the brutality
Speaker 1: of that conflict and how it has come down in memory,
Speaker 1: particularly among their Western left, it may surprise some of
Speaker 1: you to learn that Ho Chi Minh opened his Boddean
Speaker 1: Square speech with a quote from the US Declaration of Independence,
Speaker 1: written by former President Thomas Jefferson. Quote, all men are
Speaker 1: created equal. They are endowed by their creator with certain
Speaker 1: inalienable rights. Among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit
Speaker 1: of happiness. Here's what Ho Chi Minh had to say
Speaker 1: about that line. This immortal statement was made in the
Speaker 1: Declaration of Independence of the United States of America in
Speaker 1: seventeen seventy six. In a broader sense, this means all
Speaker 1: the peoples on the earth are equal from birth. All
Speaker 1: the peoples have a right to live and to be
Speaker 1: happy and free. Now that is a lovely statement. That
Speaker 1: is not what Thomas Jefferson meant by writing it, which
Speaker 1: is the at of what we'll be talking about.
Speaker 2: Yeah, Like I would say Thomas Jefferson when when I
Speaker 2: was teaching high schoolers the phrase cognitive dissonance came up,
Speaker 2: and I'm like, if cognitive dissonants were a person, it
Speaker 2: would be Thomas Jefferson. Because there are things that have
Speaker 2: came out of his mouth that are that I quote
Speaker 2: to this day.
Speaker 1: Like him some of the best things anyone ever wrote.
Speaker 1: The best is the concept of human liberty.
Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, sure, even about the institution of slavery. Like
Speaker 3: if he was like if God is just yeah, right,
Speaker 3: that's about favorite one. If God is as just as
Speaker 3: we say he is, then oh shit, is we're gonna
Speaker 3: be fucked.
Speaker 1: We'll getto that line in its context and history. I
Speaker 1: want to talk a little bit more about Ho Chi
Speaker 1: Men because I don't think this is known enough, which
Speaker 1: is that prior to the US really get involved in Vietnam,
Speaker 1: he was a little bit of an America boo, right,
Speaker 1: Like he kind of stannd the Founding Fathers just a
Speaker 1: little bit and part of you get in this speech
Speaker 1: he's got these like very valid complaints about the French occupiers.
Speaker 1: He doesn't just quote the Declaration of Independence. He quotes
Speaker 1: the Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen,
Speaker 1: which is made in seventeen ninety one during the French Revolution,
Speaker 1: and is like, basically, hey, these are great things. You
Speaker 1: guys are saying, why aren't you acting that way? Do
Speaker 1: you should do it? Yeah, there's there's a heartbreaking line
Speaker 1: in here where he's like, we are convinced that the Allies,
Speaker 1: which at the Tehran in San Francisco conferences upheld the
Speaker 1: principle of equality among the nations, cannot fail to recognize
Speaker 1: the right of the Vietnamese people to independence. Oh boy,
Speaker 1: they share dead buddy. Yeah. Oh, will apologize for that one.
Speaker 1: But uh. He was generally Ho Chi Minh generally a
Speaker 1: guy who like gauged the moment correctly. He was pretty
Speaker 1: good at that. But he did not in this moment.
Speaker 2: No no, no, no, no, no no no.
Speaker 1: So if you care at all about understanding the history
Speaker 1: of human freedom as an ideological concept and a value system,
Speaker 1: you do have to study Jefferson, not just because he
Speaker 1: wrote eloquently on the matter, but because his words influenced
Speaker 1: revolutionaries in the world over his lifetime and do so today.
Speaker 1: At the same time, you can't study Jefferson without coming
Speaker 1: to understand what ho Chi Minh eventually did about the Allies,
Speaker 1: which is that it's one thing to express nice sentiments
Speaker 1: about human liberty, and it's another to take any concrete
Speaker 1: steps to further that end, especially if they might exert
Speaker 1: a cost from you. So again, we're not doing a
Speaker 1: political biography on the man, or even an exhaustive look
Speaker 1: at all of the bad things he did in his life.
Speaker 1: We are instead, Yeah.
Speaker 2: He's like he just called cap and yeah and had
Speaker 2: right to because it's like, bro, and that's to me, Like,
Speaker 2: I'm glad we're doing this to me, because that's to
Speaker 2: me what is so fascinating about history, and specifically American history,
Speaker 2: the history of racism, the history of all of it
Speaker 2: is like when you drilled obviously I am a recipient
Speaker 2: of all of this stuff, but like when you drill
Speaker 2: down into what's going on in the heart and the
Speaker 2: mind of a person that knows intellectually and even morally
Speaker 2: and spiritually what they're doing is wrong, yeah, and continues
Speaker 2: to be a part of it that you know, three
Speaker 2: hundred years later, we could be like, I don't understand
Speaker 2: what the hell you're doing. You know, obviously this isn't
Speaker 2: on the same playing field. But like fast forward to
Speaker 2: me tomorrow hopping on this plane to sure fly, you
Speaker 2: don't say like that's knowing full well, yeah, you know
Speaker 2: what I'm saying.
Speaker 1: That's particularly a good point because one of the chief,
Speaker 1: if not the primary, moral issues that we are dealing
Speaker 1: with right now is like the damage that we're doing
Speaker 1: to the planets holding capacity for life. Yes, and it's
Speaker 1: damaged especially all of us in the first world contribute
Speaker 1: to because like it allows for our lives to be
Speaker 1: very comfortable in comparison to most human lives. And that's
Speaker 1: what's happening with Jefferson. Kind of at the end and
Speaker 1: at the beginning, this is the guy we're gonna trace him.
Speaker 1: He goes through changes, but kind of ultimately a big
Speaker 1: part of why he betrays his principles on slavery is
Speaker 1: because he builds kind of a first world life for
Speaker 1: himself in the seventeen hundreds, and he's not willing to
Speaker 1: give up that comfort. Right, There's more to it than that,
Speaker 1: but that is ultimately what we're building too, because people
Speaker 1: don't know enough about Monticello. So Thomas Jefferson Tommy Jeffs
Speaker 1: was born in what biographer Dumas Malone called a simple
Speaker 1: wooden house in today's Ablemarle County, Virginia. In those days,
Speaker 1: Virginia was the property of King George the second of
Speaker 1: Great Britain, ancestor to modern sausage fingered potentate Charles. The
Speaker 1: calendar was different when Jefferson was a baby, but using
Speaker 1: modern measures, we'd call his birth date April thirteenth, seventeen
Speaker 1: four to three. So calling his family home simple probably
Speaker 1: accurate enough, especially by like our modern you know, judgment,
Speaker 1: but it loses some context, which is that his father
Speaker 1: is quite wealthy for his time period and for his era,
Speaker 1: and he's also kind of like famous. He's local boy
Speaker 1: who made good. Specifically, he had helped to map and
Speaker 1: lay out the boundaries of what became Virginia as a
Speaker 1: young man, and as a result of that, in like
Speaker 1: the work he did during that time, he comes to
Speaker 1: own thousands and something like eleven thousand acres. I think
Speaker 1: it was and a significant number of enslaved human beings.
Speaker 2: To work that acreage.
Speaker 1: So his dad, it's important to note, does not inherit
Speaker 1: like builds what he has right primarily at least, that
Speaker 1: is not going to be the case with Thomas. Thomas's
Speaker 1: family home was called Shadwell, but when he was a
Speaker 1: little boy around age three, his father moved the family
Speaker 1: from Shadwell to a nicer plantation that he had been
Speaker 1: hired to manage as the executor of his friend's estate.
Speaker 2: Yeah, you can't tell me you come from meager beginnings.
Speaker 2: If your house has a name.
Speaker 1: If your house has a name, yeah, that's really the
Speaker 1: easiest quick way to like judge people's so geoeconomically, they
Speaker 1: call your house. That's not just the apartment complex, like
Speaker 1: the one what the this window?
Speaker 2: Yeah yeah. If you come from like you know, Imperial Courts,
Speaker 2: that's a housing project. So I'm like, okay, that's the
Speaker 2: name of the projects. But you're telling me your house
Speaker 2: itself as a name just shaf Well.
Speaker 1: Yeah, that's that's a rich guy house.
Speaker 2: I'm sorry.
Speaker 1: Thomas's first memory is, as a three year old, a
Speaker 1: fifty mile ride on horseback through the woods to come
Speaker 1: to this new home, and he's carried He's on like
Speaker 1: the lap of one of his father's enslaved people. Right.
Speaker 1: That is his earliest memory is being carried by one
Speaker 1: of the people his dad owns to a new plantation.
Speaker 1: His parents would have several more children, three other sisters
Speaker 1: or three sisters and one brother, and Jefferson spent age
Speaker 1: three to about nine or ten wandering freely through the
Speaker 1: semi wilderness around the plantation. He grew up on and
Speaker 1: reading obsessively from works of classic history. We are talking
Speaker 1: Roman shit. Yeah, he had an odd relationship with his family.
Speaker 1: One biographer I have read said that he adored and
Speaker 1: admired his father Peter, but had it best a strained
Speaker 1: relationship with his mother, Jane Randolph Jefferson Dumas, who is
Speaker 1: Jefferson's most detailed early biographer. He writes like the first
Speaker 1: kind of definitive Jefferson biography simply says there is no
Speaker 1: positive testimony about her in Jefferson's notes and describes her
Speaker 1: as a shadowy figure.
Speaker 2: He got none sad about his mama.
Speaker 1: He has. He has mom issues. They are mysterious mom issues,
Speaker 1: but they are mom issues.
Speaker 2: That's weird. Homie like I don't know she alright, I guess, like, well's.
Speaker 1: Weird he doesn't say shit about her.
Speaker 2: Yeah yeah, well, you know in him being a product
Speaker 2: of his time because all the mom duties was offloaded
Speaker 2: to slave black women. Yeah, Dot, you know what I'm saying,
Speaker 2: Like you said, like we're riding in fifty miles, you
Speaker 2: sitting on the on the on the lap of the
Speaker 2: help rather than your mom. You know what I'm saying.
Speaker 2: Of course you're gonna feel feel some type of way
Speaker 2: about your mamma because you don't do shit.
Speaker 1: Yes, that is it, And I think that might have Yeah,
Speaker 1: that's an interesting point. Actually, yeh, I've had I think
Speaker 1: I've mentioned this on the show friends who like grew
Speaker 1: up who were rich and had like a nanny, like
Speaker 1: a full time nanny as a kid, and like express
Speaker 1: that like, yeah, it was kind of confusing. It's like
Speaker 1: a three year old I wasn't really sure which one
Speaker 1: was my mom.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 1: Now I find this interesting because immediately after saying he
Speaker 1: could find no positive testimony about Jefferson's mom, he describes
Speaker 1: her dumas Malone describes her as having physical endurance beyond average,
Speaker 1: bearing a total of ten children, and raising eight of
Speaker 1: them to adulthood, which is like, that's hard. That's that's
Speaker 1: that's a not a bad. Eighty percent survival rate in
Speaker 1: that time for kids is solid.
Speaker 2: Kids.
Speaker 1: You're kind of knocking it out of the park if
Speaker 1: you're doing eighty on the percent to ten kids.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it's pretty good.
Speaker 1: Yeah. Yeah, we are awarding her a behind the Bastard's
Speaker 1: T shirt that says, only two of my ten children
Speaker 1: died here it is. Yeah, we love giving that shirt out.
Speaker 1: I just can that out at show.
Speaker 2: Yeah, there it is. So I got two. I got
Speaker 2: two awards under my belt. We got the No Diddle Award.
Speaker 2: That's right, right, like, hey, you know I'm bad eight
Speaker 2: hundred ki.
Speaker 1: I got some bad news on the No Diddling Award here.
Speaker 1: Thomas Jefferson is not going to win that, bad boy.
Speaker 2: Oh no, no, absolutely no.
Speaker 1: But he's still young. Pins not sure. Yeah, oh yeah,
Speaker 1: maybe if we get a good pen guy. Yeah. So,
Speaker 1: her husband, Thomas's father Peter, was significantly older than her.
Speaker 1: This will prove to be a Jefferson tradition, and he
Speaker 1: died young at age forty nine when she was thirty seven.
Speaker 1: She lived nineteen more years after this and was a
Speaker 1: widow longer than she was ever a wife. When Thomas
Speaker 1: was ten, his father, who was still alive at that point,
Speaker 1: gave him a loaded gun and told him to march
Speaker 1: into the forest and find food. The goal here was
Speaker 1: to increase the boy's self reliance. Thomas failed at first,
Speaker 1: but eventually found a wild turkey that had accidentally been
Speaker 1: caught in a pin. He tied the captive animal to
Speaker 1: a tree, shot it, and brought it home for the
Speaker 1: family slaves to kill it. I might add that if
Speaker 1: like you need the slaves to process your game, you're
Speaker 1: not really living independently. It's kind of a huge part
Speaker 1: of it. Actually.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I was like, wait, wait, wait, wait wait, I
Speaker 2: think the kids just figured out the system found so,
Speaker 2: which also plays well into who he becomes. It's like, oh,
Speaker 2: you just got to work the system. Here's a turkey
Speaker 2: that's already caught, so I'm just gonna shoot it. Yeah,
Speaker 2: and it has somebody else do to dirty work.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 1: Yeah. Take it credit for tie it to its tree
Speaker 1: so I could shoot it, come throttle its neck. At
Speaker 1: that point, man, you have the turkey. I don't know,
Speaker 1: weird kid. So Thomas's family right about the time of
Speaker 1: this hunting adventure, probably a little bit afterwards, his family
Speaker 1: moves back to the Shadowell plantation, but they do not
Speaker 1: take Thomas with them. He has left behind to live
Speaker 1: with a teacher, Anglican minister William Douglas. Douglas was not
Speaker 1: and Thomas's later beckoning a very good teacher, but Thomas
Speaker 1: lived with him for five years, alongside several other kids,
Speaker 1: I think five others. So this is like a pretty
Speaker 1: normal thing at the time, right, Like you have your
Speaker 1: childhood and then it's time to go to school, and
Speaker 1: you know, there's not like us. We all live out
Speaker 1: in the country on these you know, manners and stuff.
Speaker 1: So we're just going to send you to live with
Speaker 1: the teacher for a while and he'll take care of
Speaker 1: you too.
Speaker 2: Far like your school's far. Yeah, yeah, well did you
Speaker 2: just stay there?
Speaker 1: Basically during his adolescence, he's only ever home for like
Speaker 1: short periods of time and only occasionally. His best friend
Speaker 1: at school was another boy who also lived there named
Speaker 1: Dabney Carr, who became his best friend. The one story
Speaker 1: that Dumas Malone gives us about their friendship is that
Speaker 1: Danny had a fast horse, but Jefferson had a slow one,
Speaker 1: and everyone gave Jefferson shit for this, and so Thomas
Speaker 1: tricked Dabney into agreeing to have a race on February thirtieth,
Speaker 1: a day that does not exist. Dumas rites. Not until
Speaker 1: the last day of the month that the others discovered
Speaker 1: they had been taken in. You know, he's a little
Speaker 1: smarter than them, although I might add they're not that bright. Yeah, oh,
Speaker 1: that's not a good one. How many days are there
Speaker 1: in February?
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, that's like two days more like bro like yeah, yeah, yeah,
Speaker 2: come on, guys.
Speaker 1: So Peter Jefferson died in seventeen fifty seven, when Thomas
Speaker 1: was around fourteen. Thomas later wrote of his father's sudden
Speaker 1: death when I recollect that at fourteen years of age,
Speaker 1: the whole care and direction of myself was thrown entirely
Speaker 1: on myself, without a relation or friend qualified to advisor
Speaker 1: guide me, and recollect various sorts of bad company with
Speaker 1: which I associated from time to time. I am astonished
Speaker 1: I did not turn off with some of them and
Speaker 1: become as worthless to the society as they were. Now.
Speaker 1: That suggests a lonely boy and one who had a
Speaker 1: pretty low opinion of most of his friends and like companions. Yeah,
Speaker 1: they're all worthless to society, and they nearly dragged me
Speaker 1: down with them. He also doesn't really seem to be
Speaker 1: very close to his family. It's interesting to me that
Speaker 1: his father seems immune to these criticisms, even though by
Speaker 1: all accounts I can find, he must have been the
Speaker 1: one who locked Thomas away for that at that school
Speaker 1: for five years and kept him away from any kind
Speaker 1: of emotional companionship or whatever. Now it's worth noting that
Speaker 1: Thomas's own recollections during this period ignore the fact that
Speaker 1: he did in fact have someone to advise and help him.
Speaker 1: This friend was an enslaved boy, Jupiter, who was, in
Speaker 1: the style of the time, raised alongside Thomas to be
Speaker 1: his companion and servant. This was not an uncommon state
Speaker 1: of affairs for the landed gentry and the colonies. In
Speaker 1: the book Master of the Mountain, Henry Winsick writes he
Speaker 1: had grown up with Jupiter, born at Shadwell the same
Speaker 1: year as he. If they followed the custom of the time,
Speaker 1: the two of them were playmates and companions in fishing
Speaker 1: and hunting. Though Jefferson left no recollection.
Speaker 2: Of this yeah, he was that house what we would
Speaker 2: call a house and okay, got it?
Speaker 1: Yeah yeah, and maybe you know, you have to. I
Speaker 1: do think you have to. Like theoretically I can see
Speaker 1: how because as a kid, Jefferson's not to blame for
Speaker 1: the system either. How as little kids, this could be
Speaker 1: something where like you legitimately see them as a friend.
Speaker 1: But Thomas doesn't seem to have right because he doesn't
Speaker 1: write about this guy, like he ignores him. And like
Speaker 1: when I read that, like you were supposed to hunt
Speaker 1: together and play together, I'm like, well, was he the
Speaker 1: one who found that turkey?
Speaker 2: You know? Yeah? Yeah, he was a living robot? Like okay,
Speaker 2: you're a you're a man that's alive. You're a living
Speaker 2: teddy bear. So it's like, yeah, I don't you know,
Speaker 2: how many toys do you write about? How many toys
Speaker 2: did you just kind of leave you forgot when you moved,
Speaker 2: you know what I'm saying, Like, if he's just that,
Speaker 2: it's like, oh, hey, look I got you a black dude,
Speaker 2: you know what I mean. It's like, oh great, thanks Christmas,
Speaker 2: you know, and then by Christmas dinner you forgot about
Speaker 2: your new toy, you know.
Speaker 1: Right, Yeah, And I you know, there's definitely people white
Speaker 1: people from this time who write about the relationships they
Speaker 1: had with these kind of these house slaves that you're
Speaker 1: like raised with as your friend and write about it
Speaker 1: being complicated and it leading them to question the system
Speaker 1: that they live under. Thomas does not do that, at
Speaker 1: least we have no evidence that he does that at all. Yeah,
Speaker 1: So Jefferson grows into a robust young man and he's
Speaker 1: very tall by his late teens. He's always noted as
Speaker 1: having been extremely healthy, although Dumas cites many contemporaries who
Speaker 1: also described him as thin skinned and extremely shy while
Speaker 1: his father sat on the House of Burgesses, which is
Speaker 1: like a Virginia congressional sort of thing. Prior to the
Speaker 1: outbreak of the Revolutionary War. He's a prominent his dad
Speaker 1: had been a prominent local politician and leader. Thomas was
Speaker 1: noted from kind of his late adolescence as being anti social,
Speaker 1: or at the very least not what you'd call an extrovert.
Speaker 1: Dumas interestingly describes him as being indifferent to clothes as
Speaker 1: a young man and basically a little bit of a
Speaker 1: feral youth prior to finishing school and starting college. At Williamsburg.
Speaker 1: Dumas credits him finally getting interested in fashion to the
Speaker 1: fact that he had started to notice the girls. It
Speaker 1: is many such cases. Yeah, that'll do it. Time to
Speaker 1: not be naked outside. I guess ladies don't like that
Speaker 1: so much.
Speaker 2: Turns out I smell like this wild turkey I caught.
Speaker 1: Yeah, but exactly, I gotta take care of that.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 1: So in seventeen sixty, freshly Koift, he leaves for college,
Speaker 1: and while he writes little about this period, Winesack notes
Speaker 1: that Jupiter accompanied him on his next adventure. Quote. When
Speaker 1: Jefferson attended the College of William and Mary and Williamsburg,
Speaker 1: Jupiter went with him as his personal servant. Decades later,
Speaker 1: when Jefferson drew up regulations for the University of Virginia,
Speaker 1: he forbade students to have their slaves with him, which
Speaker 1: he thought ruined the character of young white men. Now, okay,
Speaker 1: we simply lack. I don't know if anything happened at
Speaker 1: his own college experience that made him do this, or
Speaker 1: if he's just being like these new kids are lazy,
Speaker 1: like not like me. It was great for me, but
Speaker 1: not that.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, yeah, I know, I uh this you brought
Speaker 2: up something that I feel like might be lacking in
Speaker 2: my knowledge of like African American history, Like where's like
Speaker 2: the writings of a Jupiter character, Like, oh yeah, a
Speaker 2: person who had to play this well, Like I can't
Speaker 2: think of any book I've read, Like yeah, I was like,
Speaker 2: you know, I actually never thought about that, like because
Speaker 2: I'm imagining this situation from his perspective, you know, obviously,
Speaker 2: Like so I'm like, that's where I could put myself
Speaker 2: in that Parce's shoes. And I'm like, I just I
Speaker 2: don't know of any writings from that perspective.
Speaker 1: You know, you get very few of them. We're all
Speaker 1: going to read some quotes. There's a decent amounts, particularly
Speaker 1: of later in his life of like and this where
Speaker 1: these were interviews that were conducted after he died, often
Speaker 1: but of people that he had owned in some cases
Speaker 1: later freed who talked about him, right, Yeah, didn't talk
Speaker 1: about that time. We do have some of those accounts. Yeah,
Speaker 1: but it's very rare and like you just don't get
Speaker 1: and I don't know if it's like obviously, in a
Speaker 1: lot of cases, slaves were just outright forbidden from learning
Speaker 1: to read or write or even if they did, they
Speaker 1: had to be very careful about who knew. Jefferson was
Speaker 1: less strict about certainly not like a hardliner on that
Speaker 1: particular issue. But we still don't have We have basically
Speaker 1: nothing ye on Jefferson or on Jupiter, very little. And
Speaker 1: I Yah, it's made me kind of think because obviously
Speaker 1: part of why you want to do that is because
Speaker 1: it makes it harder for them to find their freedom.
Speaker 1: It makes it harder for them to forge papers and stuff,
Speaker 1: It makes it harder for them to live if they
Speaker 1: escape from you. I wonder if some of it's it
Speaker 1: makes it harder or impossible for them to like give
Speaker 1: a different account of what their lives were, Like that's
Speaker 1: exactly like.
Speaker 2: Yeh, that's one of the biggest things. It's just like,
Speaker 2: don't nobody want to really tell you because because like
Speaker 2: we did with the Lost cause stuff like you're you're
Speaker 2: trying to convince the world. They're like, no, they like it,
Speaker 2: don't you you know, And of course you can't trust
Speaker 2: nobody's statements under duress, you know what I'm saying. Yeah,
Speaker 2: The only like you know, this is why the writings
Speaker 2: of like a Frederick Douglass, you know, are so important
Speaker 2: to the American story, you know what I'm saying, because
Speaker 2: he was like, oh, look I've been I've been slaved
Speaker 2: and I've been free, and I ain't worried about none
Speaker 2: of what y'all saying, you know what I'm saying. So
Speaker 2: I think you know, yeah, so like when you like
Speaker 2: you said, it's like so when you know, the gentry
Speaker 2: gets to say no, the experience is like this, It's
Speaker 2: like what's Dixie? And then somebody goes, uh, actually it
Speaker 2: ain't like that, fam you.
Speaker 1: Know, yeah, yeah, And I it's interesting because we do
Speaker 1: know Jupiter seems to have occupied a place of extreme
Speaker 1: trust in Jefferson's life. Like later in his life he's
Speaker 1: going to like carry explosives like independently for his master
Speaker 1: and stuff. So like yeah, that's like a you know,
Speaker 1: there's a lot of trust there. Same thing with.
Speaker 2: Like yeah, so that's what's so interesting about it because
Speaker 2: it's like you're a slave, but you're not. You're not
Speaker 2: you know, I mean, we could talk free on this.
Speaker 2: I don't know why I'm censoring myself, but you're not
Speaker 2: a field nigga, you know what I'm saying. No, So
Speaker 2: like a field Nigga's story is going to be very different,
Speaker 2: very much so than a Jupiter is, you know what
Speaker 2: I'm saying. And so it's like I just I just
Speaker 2: I like I know, like I can tell you of
Speaker 2: like readings about what it was like to work in
Speaker 2: the house versus working in the field, but like this particularly,
Speaker 2: I was like, dang, I don't think I know any well.
Speaker 1: And that's you know, when it comes to because we're
Speaker 1: going to read a quote kind of about the amount
Speaker 1: of loyalty a lot of these the the like the
Speaker 1: like the people who lived in his househouse once had
Speaker 1: and it's you know, you have to keep in mind
Speaker 1: when you're trying to figure out, like, well, why would
Speaker 1: they be so well, they were raised with him, right Like.
Speaker 1: We can talk about the objective morality of this system
Speaker 1: and how evil it is, but like to Jupiter growing
Speaker 1: up in this, this is also the dude that you
Speaker 1: were raised with, right like, And we really that's kind
Speaker 1: of in I mean, it's incomprehensible to me, you know,
Speaker 1: of course, but I'm going to I'm going to read
Speaker 1: a passage about that. Dumas Malone writes about Jefferson at
Speaker 1: age twenty.
Speaker 2: Hey, but before you read that passage. Though, before you
Speaker 2: read that passage.
Speaker 1: Should should I do an ad?
Speaker 2: Plug?
Speaker 1: Is it? Type of ads? Speaking of products and services?
Speaker 1: We weren't, but here's some. We're back. So Dumas Malone
Speaker 1: writes this about our boy tj at age twenty, on
Speaker 1: his way to the county court and to Williamsburg. He
Speaker 1: generally went on horseback or in a one horse chair.
Speaker 1: His servant, Jupiter, who was just his age as a rule,
Speaker 1: went with him or followed close behind, possibly carrying his
Speaker 1: luggage in a cart. The name of this trusted companion
Speaker 1: of the road, who had been going with him since
Speaker 1: his days as a law student, recurs in his account
Speaker 1: books with regularity. Jefferson was always giving money to Jupiter
Speaker 1: to pay a saddler and Staunton, to pay for ferriages
Speaker 1: to Williamsburg and for bread and candles there. He even
Speaker 1: borrowed small coin from Jupiter at times when he himself
Speaker 1: ran out.
Speaker 2: And yeah, man.
Speaker 1: It is you have to again not to not to
Speaker 1: take away from the immorality of this system, but you
Speaker 1: also in order to understand what it was like living
Speaker 1: under them, you have to get that there is a
Speaker 1: kind of intimacy that often develops between these people, right,
Speaker 1: and it's yeah, and just the kind of people you know. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and just the like you said.
Speaker 2: The emotional complication of like okay, what what what we
Speaker 2: would call now like survivor's guilt, where it's like, Okay,
Speaker 2: I know I made it, and I know, like my
Speaker 2: situation is not as bad as everybody else is. I'm
Speaker 2: looking at this person that I could truly as I'm
Speaker 2: on this carriage, nicely dressed and smelling good, seeing somebody
Speaker 2: that could be my brother, cousin or uncle or auntie
Speaker 2: or mom on the side of the row picking cotton,
Speaker 2: knowing full well, and I know what they think of
Speaker 2: as they see me, you know. And then you're like, well,
Speaker 2: you know I and in reality is I would much
Speaker 2: rather be on this cart than over there, you know
Speaker 2: what I'm saying, And like, yeah, just the complicated Yeah.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it is complicated. And it's also like that whole
Speaker 1: thing about like I could be related to this person
Speaker 1: in the field in a lot of cases is not
Speaker 1: the case with Thomas and Jupiter, but it's going to
Speaker 1: be the case with Thomas and a lot of the
Speaker 1: other people that he owns. You are also related by
Speaker 1: blood to these people. Right, that's why Daddy, there's that's
Speaker 1: that's your uncle. That's a cousin by marriage, you know.
Speaker 1: That's also and these the fact that these people, these
Speaker 1: that like these these white families, these like slave owning
Speaker 1: families often raise their kids together with like usually there
Speaker 1: will be a family or a couple of families of
Speaker 1: like privileged enslaved people who live in and around the home.
Speaker 1: That is, it creates these bonds that I think pervert
Speaker 1: but often exist in the image of the concept of
Speaker 1: family bonds. Right, I think this is a perversion of
Speaker 1: family bonds, but it does mimic that, right. And A
Speaker 1: Master of the Mountain Windset goes into more detail on
Speaker 1: this phenomenon. I'm gonna read this quote than we can
Speaker 1: talk about it as after the Civil War. Visited after
Speaker 1: the Civil War, visiting Northerner, astonished at the stories she
Speaker 1: had heard, asked a former slave how he could risk
Speaker 1: his life for the family that enslaved him. The answer
Speaker 1: was that the slaves had not lost a sense of
Speaker 1: common humanity. Often we left our own wives and children
Speaker 1: during the war in order to take care of the
Speaker 1: wives and children of our absent masters. And why did
Speaker 1: we do this because they were helpless and afraid, while
Speaker 1: our families were better able to take care of them
Speaker 1: and had no fear. When they saw their oppressors stricken
Speaker 1: with fear, they did not rise up in vengeance but
Speaker 1: offered help.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 1: And that's, you know, e a mess.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it's both both a malady and a testament, you
Speaker 2: know to like you said that, like, well, we didn't
Speaker 2: lose humanity. I know we were being treated like we
Speaker 2: weren't humans, but we know we were. We knew we're humans,
Speaker 2: you know, And like you said, like I still see
Speaker 2: this little boy who's the child of or this little
Speaker 2: girl who's the child of my master. But I'm like you, like, yeah,
Speaker 2: that's that's still a child, you know. And I know
Speaker 2: we're both human, you know, Like maybe you don't, I do.
Speaker 2: And I'm not gonna let you take that from me,
Speaker 2: you know. I think that there was a lot of
Speaker 2: stuff that I was even raised with where it's like
Speaker 2: you can't let you can't let your oppressors strip you
Speaker 2: from your humanity, Like, don't let them take that also,
Speaker 2: And I think that that that's something there. But the
Speaker 2: thought actually crossed my mind as you was talking about
Speaker 2: this weird family bond that like, Okay, it's absolutely obvious
Speaker 2: to everyone in this house, including the master's wife, that
Speaker 2: that little girl, that little light skinned little girl who
Speaker 2: works in my house, looks just like my husband. So like,
Speaker 2: I know that's your child, you know what I'm saying. Yeah,
Speaker 2: And I just wonder if that played a role between
Speaker 2: the relationship of white women and black women where there's
Speaker 2: a level of resentment. That's another thing I never thought about.
Speaker 1: And that's the thing part of the difficulty of getting
Speaker 1: I think. I'm sure that happens. I'm sure that's a
Speaker 1: part of the story that's significant, But they also didn't
Speaker 1: really like let women write a lot like you know,
Speaker 1: it was also not a lot of you don't get
Speaker 1: as nearly at least not as much as we get
Speaker 1: of Yeah.
Speaker 2: I just and I just wonder if like that element
Speaker 2: like plays such a role of like maybe some of
Speaker 2: the vitriol and like besides just run of the middle racism,
Speaker 2: the specific vitriol towards specifically black women, Like I just
Speaker 2: wonder if, like I wonder if that's a thing where
Speaker 2: it's like, well, I mean and that's all in my
Speaker 2: face and rather than rather than like directing the anger
Speaker 2: where it's supposed to be. You'll say it where it's like, well,
Speaker 2: she's properties she didn't have no saying this your husband
Speaker 2: raped her, Like I wan't to understand what you don't
Speaker 2: understand about that, you know.
Speaker 1: But yeah, and also, as we'll talk about later, often
Speaker 1: forced her to be like a nurse maid to your kids, right,
Speaker 1: which I'm sure also especially when you're talking about like
Speaker 1: a woman like like Martha Jefferson is going to be
Speaker 1: his future wife who is sickly, right, and so yeah,
Speaker 1: like that's that's another complication to it. But I think
Speaker 1: we have established these are very complex relationships that we
Speaker 1: are going to be looking into and breaking down. That
Speaker 1: doesn't impact the evil that we attached to them, but
Speaker 1: it is worth understanding if you want to get a
Speaker 1: context for what life was like.
Speaker 2: Now.
Speaker 1: When it comes to where Jefferson lands in the intellectual
Speaker 1: history of slavery, I think it's important that during this
Speaker 1: time he is a voracious reader and he's kind of
Speaker 1: you know the term web we use for like I
Speaker 1: think it came out of initially like like white Americans
Speaker 1: who are obsessed with Japan, right, He's kind of that,
Speaker 1: He's kind of a web for the Roman Republic. Right.
Speaker 1: He is a huge fan. He's in love with his idea,
Speaker 1: this distorted idea of the history and culture of that
Speaker 1: place and time, and he understood it through the scholarship
Speaker 1: of his day as like kind of a golden age
Speaker 1: that was lost in a lot of ways, and this
Speaker 1: influences the attitudes and opinions of these ancient Romans he's reading,
Speaker 1: influences his early feelings on how slavery ought to work right,
Speaker 1: and on the morality of slavery, and in a lot
Speaker 1: of ways his opinions on this are more Roman than American.
Speaker 1: In his youth, he's going to age into an acceptance
Speaker 1: of what we now call scientific racism as an older man,
Speaker 1: but that's not entirely where he starts with things. At college,
Speaker 1: Thomas gains a reputation for being, in biographer Joseph Ellis's
Speaker 1: World Words, an obsessive student. Ellis writes in the book
Speaker 1: American Sphinx that Thomas would spend sometimes fifteen hours with
Speaker 1: his books, three hours practicing his violin, and the remaining
Speaker 1: six hours eating and sleeping. He was an extremely serious
Speaker 1: young man.
Speaker 2: Wow.
Speaker 1: Jefferson would later write about the two years that he
Speaker 1: spent at college as the happiest years of his life.
Speaker 1: He was active in sports, and he built a sizable
Speaker 1: friend group, which included Dabney Carr. His mentor was a
Speaker 1: math professor William Small, who was a prominent deist and
Speaker 1: whose views on religion shaped Jefferson's own. This is a
Speaker 1: big part of how he comes to see himself as
Speaker 1: a dist He has this kind of this guy, William Small,
Speaker 1: this professor, as kind of a mentor. He graduates, he's
Speaker 1: gonna have a couple because he doesn't have like a
Speaker 1: dad anymore. Right. He graduates in seventeen sixty two because
Speaker 1: life moved to a lot faster in those days, or
Speaker 1: at least school did. And he took an apprenticeship in
Speaker 1: the law with a guy named George With its spelled withy,
Speaker 1: but it's pronounced with apparently. So this lasted five years,
Speaker 1: and it acquainted Jefferson with the nuts and bolts of
Speaker 1: the kind of law that he was practicing, which was
Speaker 1: mainly land title law. He was representing planters in cases
Speaker 1: involving land claims. For the most part. With was also
Speaker 1: an intellectual inspiration for Thomas, who called him my second
Speaker 1: father and described him as the American Cato. Now, this
Speaker 1: is going to get us into our detailed talk about
Speaker 1: one of the Romans that Thomas reads a lot, and
Speaker 1: that is Cato the Elder. There's a Cato the Younger too.
Speaker 1: Both Catos are related and both were known to be
Speaker 1: kind of these moral paragons of a very specific set
Speaker 1: of austere agricultural values.
Speaker 2: Right.
Speaker 1: They are these kind of guys who still are with
Speaker 1: us today. Right, you know, this kind of like conservative,
Speaker 1: obsessive sort of love of the concept of being a farmer,
Speaker 1: often attached many real knowledge of what being a farmer requires.
Speaker 2: Right.
Speaker 1: Kato the Catos, but particularly Cato the Elder is like
Speaker 1: he's he is ground zero for that. He is like
Speaker 1: the first guy in Western literature to be like, ah,
Speaker 1: we all need to be farmers.
Speaker 2: Yeah, that particular, I think it's important to like drill
Speaker 2: down that type of personality. Like and and while it's
Speaker 2: it's actually very telling that he goes to Kato, because
Speaker 2: it's like if somebody were to say they were a
Speaker 2: karate master or a jiu jitsu master and you're like, oh, word,
Speaker 2: like how many tournaments have you been in? And they're
Speaker 2: like No, I just studied it and I know all
Speaker 2: the things. So it's like, oh, you you're a master
Speaker 2: because you read it, not to dread.
Speaker 1: A lot of guy karate karate for you.
Speaker 2: Yeah, So it's like, no, I can teach karate in
Speaker 2: a classroom, not an adult jo in a classroom, that
Speaker 2: dude Kato.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, exactly. And there's this this reality, this thing
Speaker 1: that's really starting to happen in a major way while
Speaker 1: Cato the Elder is alive. That's like, basically the backbone
Speaker 1: of the Roman military had always been these small, independent farmers, right.
Speaker 1: These guys are freemen. They're soldiers when they're not farming
Speaker 1: if the state needs them. And this is like, you know,
Speaker 1: Rome is going to constantly deal with the problem of that.
Speaker 1: Like once they start to get big, you start having
Speaker 1: all these rich people buying up all of this land
Speaker 1: that smaller farmers had and working it with slaves, and
Speaker 1: this kind of destroys the social backbone that had supported
Speaker 1: the military. A lot of Roman politics is going to
Speaker 1: like revolve around this change that happens.
Speaker 3: Right.
Speaker 1: It's more complicated than we're going to get into today,
Speaker 1: but what's important for you to know is that if
Speaker 1: he were alive today, Cato the Elder would have a TikTok, right,
Speaker 1: and it would be the kind of TikTok where he's like,
Speaker 1: he's like giving these angry rants over ai generated images
Speaker 1: of farmhouses and wives with too many fingers, handling handing
Speaker 1: plates of indistinct food to broods of Norman rock well
Speaker 1: looking kids. Yeah, and he would go on all these lives.
Speaker 1: It'd be a split screen with somebody playing the lies
Speaker 1: on the other side. Yeah, yeah, yeah. He would be
Speaker 1: going these long rants about returning to tradition. He'd be
Speaker 1: really angry about women in video games. I have that
Speaker 1: my suspicions, Oh for sure.
Speaker 2: Oh wow. Yeah.
Speaker 1: In his own day, Cato wrote a lot about his
Speaker 1: idealized concept of the free citizen farmer, a tough and
Speaker 1: morally upright creature who formed the backbone of Roman military might.
Speaker 1: Of course, this citizen farmer was also a slave master,
Speaker 1: and Cato had very specific ideas on how slaves should
Speaker 1: be kept. From Plutarch's Life of Cato the Elder quote,
Speaker 1: a slave of his was expected to either be busy
Speaker 1: about the house or to be asleep, and he was
Speaker 1: very partial to the sleepy ones. He thought these gentler
Speaker 1: than the wakeful ones, and those who had enjoyed the
Speaker 1: gift of sleep were better for any kind of service
Speaker 1: than those who lacked it. In the belief that his
Speaker 1: slaves were led into most mischief by their sexual passions,
Speaker 1: he stipulated that males should consort with the females at
Speaker 1: a fixed price, but should never approach any other woman.
Speaker 1: So he makes his slaves pay him to have sex.
Speaker 2: Wow, there's something to be said about I don't want
Speaker 2: to go down too big of a tangent, but just
Speaker 2: like what the Romans meant when they said slaves being
Speaker 2: rather different than what we meant. Yeah, but also the
Speaker 2: way that they viewed sexuality. It's so interesting that they
Speaker 2: that you brought that up, because sex was, at least
Speaker 2: in the ancient Romans, was much less about pleasure than
Speaker 2: it was about dominance, you know what I mean, And
Speaker 2: and social status and order, you know what I'm saying,
Speaker 2: Like it's a way to display power.
Speaker 1: So certainly when you're talking about like your the people
Speaker 1: that you own, yes.
Speaker 2: Yes, So then to say that, like because if for
Speaker 2: your slave to be able to have choice in who
Speaker 2: they sleep with, is to say that you're letting your
Speaker 2: slave exert power or some sort of authority, and it's like,
Speaker 2: I can't let you do that, Like that's not in
Speaker 2: our worldview.
Speaker 1: Yeah, and Cato seems to be saying that, like, if
Speaker 1: you do that, that little bit of that little bit
Speaker 1: of agency you give them will like lead them spark
Speaker 1: likely could be the foundation of rebellion. Yes, right, yes,
Speaker 1: and yeah, his attitude basically is that, like, slaves are
Speaker 1: living tools, right, so they should be either working or unconscious,
Speaker 1: having exhausted themselves at the end of every single day.
Speaker 1: Because people don't like living this way, and because Cato,
Speaker 1: despite talking about like austerity and how it's great to
Speaker 1: not be to lose yourself to these modern comforts, Kato
Speaker 1: is a guy who seeks a life of comfort provided
Speaker 1: by human bondage, the people who work for him without
Speaker 1: being paid, right, And he understood that in order to
Speaker 1: maintain that life, he has to keep his slaves divided
Speaker 1: and befuddled beneath him. Quote and this is from Plutarch.
Speaker 1: At the outset, when he was still poor and in
Speaker 1: military service, he found no fault at all with what
Speaker 1: was served up to him, declaring that it was shameful
Speaker 1: for a man to quarrel with the domestic over food
Speaker 1: and drink. But afterwards, when his circumstances were improved and
Speaker 1: he used to entertain his friends and colleagues at table,
Speaker 1: no sooner was dinner over than he would flog those
Speaker 1: slaves who had been remiss at all and preparing or
Speaker 1: serving it. He was always contriving that his slave should
Speaker 1: have feuds and dissensions among themselves. Harmony among them made
Speaker 1: him suspicious and fearful. So he's like beating his slaves
Speaker 1: after dinner, not even if they didn't do anything, just
Speaker 1: so that, like what, they'll get angry at someone else, right,
Speaker 1: at one of the other people. You know. Yeah, this
Speaker 1: is one of the guys that Thomas Jefferson is reading obsessively.
Speaker 1: You know the fact that he compares his mentor to
Speaker 1: moderate the American Kato is meaningful rites a lot, yes, yeah,
Speaker 1: and yeah, Kto is. He's a conservative, right, and he's
Speaker 1: someone who believes in the maintenance of his own comfort
Speaker 1: through this suffering and subjugation of others, but also someone
Speaker 1: who fetishizes this idea of independence and hard work despite
Speaker 1: getting a lot of their station through inheritance. One of
Speaker 1: Kato's noteworthy sentiments was that a good Roman should seek
Speaker 1: to earn more than he inherited, and Jefferson would always
Speaker 1: obsess over this image of himself as a great businessman,
Speaker 1: even though he never is able to really do that.
Speaker 1: While practicing law, Jefferson entered into adult society found himself
Speaker 1: walking in some of the most respected circles in Virginia.
Speaker 1: He gained easy access to this scene due to his
Speaker 1: father's wealth and reputation, and Jefferson constantly spent more than
Speaker 1: he could afford to spend, burning away his inheritance trying
Speaker 1: to impress his wealthy society friends. It was during this
Speaker 1: portion of his life that he fell in love for
Speaker 1: the first time to a young woman named Rebecca Burwell.
Speaker 1: Her parents had died when she was young, but left
Speaker 1: her a fabulous fortune. Her uncle, who has made her guardian,
Speaker 1: was the governor of New York. When he fell in
Speaker 1: love with her, Thomas he was twenty and she was sixteen.
Speaker 1: And so, unlike Robert E. Lee, our boy, TJ's going
Speaker 1: to fail early to the coveted behind the bastards didn't
Speaker 1: flirt with children.
Speaker 2: Award made to his twenties.
Speaker 1: Yeah, you're almost you're almost in line with that one
Speaker 1: Texas Romeo and Juliet law Right twenty and sixteen. So
Speaker 1: he's not as bad as some people, allowing for the fact, well,
Speaker 1: yet he's going to be actually much worse than most
Speaker 1: people not too long from now, yes, but allowing for
Speaker 1: the fact that this was more common back than wellolk
Speaker 1: on that a little bit later. I also do want
Speaker 1: to acknowledge something most people already know, which is that
Speaker 1: guys who flirt with women who are a lot younger
Speaker 1: than ye them often have issues with control and self
Speaker 1: confidence that make them want to be with someone who
Speaker 1: is less able to exercise agency. And we can infer
Speaker 1: that this may have been part of what's happening with Jefferson,
Speaker 1: from the fact that he is too shy to flirt
Speaker 1: with her directly, and so like, after meeting her and
Speaker 1: falling in love, he flees to Shadwell for nine months
Speaker 1: and then he like he spends the whole time basically
Speaker 1: like getting his courage together, and then when he comes
Speaker 1: back to Williamsburg he does so he tries to reconnect
Speaker 1: with her in this horribly awkward way, being like, hey, sorry,
Speaker 1: I was gone for nine months. I absolutely intend to
Speaker 1: ask for your hand in marriage, probably in the future,
Speaker 1: probably in the near future, but I gotta go to
Speaker 1: England first, Is that cool with you? And Rebecca seems
Speaker 1: to have been like, I don't know what to fucking
Speaker 1: do with this, And so another dude gives her an
Speaker 1: actual marriage proposal and she marries that guy. Dumas writes
Speaker 1: he explained this inactivity to us on the ground that
Speaker 1: he had been abominably lazy. But the probability is that
Speaker 1: he was now deeper in the law than in love,
Speaker 1: by which Dumas means he was just obsessed with his job.
Speaker 1: Yeah right, speaking of workahol, Do you know what cleans
Speaker 1: my palate is the products and services that support this podcast?
Speaker 1: Is that accurate?
Speaker 2: Clean?
Speaker 1: Jo Buck too cleans? Whatever you'll do if we sell that? Yeah,
Speaker 1: and we're back. So. The most noteworthy consequence of these
Speaker 1: early years in law and high society was that it
Speaker 1: started bringing Jefferson into contact with some of the men
Speaker 1: who had become influential voices of the revolution. This was
Speaker 1: seventeen sixty five and he was training to be a
Speaker 1: lawyer still when he first listened to Patrick Henry extempt
Speaker 1: against British tax policy. In this case the Stamp Act. Henry,
Speaker 1: you're all familiar with Henry. They give me bride er
Speaker 1: ging me death guy. Right, he's a fiery orator. That's
Speaker 1: kind of what he's still known for. Yeah, and he
Speaker 1: is he is a very like he's a hardliner for independence, right.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 1: And Jefferson, he's a hardliner because he doesn't believe that
Speaker 1: Parliament has any right to tax the colonies. And Jefferson
Speaker 1: agrees with this very strict stance right that there's no
Speaker 1: reason Parliament should be able to tax American landowners and
Speaker 1: farmers for any purpose in American Sphinx Ellis describes Jefferson
Speaker 1: as turning into kind of a fundamentalist on this point.
Speaker 1: From his earliest days in the House, he opposed all
Speaker 1: forms of parliamentary taxation and supported non importation resolutions against
Speaker 1: British trade regulations. Now, while Jefferson felt strongly about this,
Speaker 1: his participation in the debates of the day was mostly
Speaker 1: limited to watching and listening. He was still very shy
Speaker 1: and not confident in his voice or perhaps his mind.
Speaker 1: Ellis continues, he seemed to most of his political contemporaries
Speaker 1: a hovering and ever silent presence, like one of those
Speaker 1: foreigners at a dinner party who nod privately as they
Speaker 1: move from group to group, but never reveal whether or
Speaker 1: not they can speak the language. He had a deep
Speaker 1: seated aversion to the inherent contentions and routinized hurly burly
Speaker 1: of a political career, and was forever telling his friends
Speaker 1: that life on the public stage was not for him.
Speaker 1: Just as his political career was getting started, he seemed
Speaker 1: poised for retirement.
Speaker 2: Wow, I do know. Just dudes that like are just
Speaker 2: introverted in quiet and just whenever things are happening right now,
Speaker 2: like they actually have a trillion amazing things to say,
Speaker 2: they're just yeah, I just don't feel like I need
Speaker 2: to jump into this. And I actually in some ways
Speaker 2: admire that because I am very much the like, like
Speaker 2: there's lava in my mouth, I have to talk like so.
Speaker 1: Like yeah, for to.
Speaker 2: Loquacious, we'd say surprise, surprise, surprise. Yeah.
Speaker 1: Jefferson is very much one of those, like discretion is
Speaker 1: the better part of being a smart guy. Yeah, but
Speaker 1: he's also he's going to kind of it's gonna cost
Speaker 1: some problems for him too. But he gets chosen to
Speaker 1: represent his district in the House of Burgesses in seventeen
Speaker 1: sixty eight after it had been dissolved by the Royal
Speaker 1: Governor after a dispute around taxation. We're not going to
Speaker 1: labor on this much because I think this kind of
Speaker 1: stuff gets covered in school a lot, and it's not
Speaker 1: super relevant to the bastardrey in Jefferson's life. But the
Speaker 1: basic issue here is that Parliament wanted Americans to pay
Speaker 1: taxes like everybody else, and Americans felt this was unfair
Speaker 1: as they weren't really represented in Parliament. The French and
Speaker 1: Indian Wars, which had concluded a little bit earlier, were
Speaker 1: a major inciting incident here because they had driven up
Speaker 1: debt for the Crown, which inspired a lot of the
Speaker 1: taxes and duties on American goods that Jefferson and his
Speaker 1: cohorts are going to rail against. And it was during
Speaker 1: his time in the House of Burgesses that Jefferson first
Speaker 1: comes into contact with George Washington, who led an effort
Speaker 1: to have Virginia join the Association for the Non Importation
Speaker 1: of British Manufacturers. This was an effort of intracolonial solidarity
Speaker 1: to protest British taxes on goods and support domestic manufacturing.
Speaker 1: Jefferson hated the idea that the Americas would have to
Speaker 1: import basic necessities from elsewhere in the Empire instead of
Speaker 1: having their own manufacturing base for those products, which is
Speaker 1: going to be strangled by the taxes and duties that
Speaker 1: Parliament was pushing through. Like a lot of problematic dudes,
Speaker 1: Jefferson is going to grow increasingly obsessed with these ideas
Speaker 1: of autarchy, right of radical self reliance on both an
Speaker 1: individual and a national level, and he kind is going
Speaker 1: to come to believe that the basis of the society
Speaker 1: he wants to build should be these independent Yalemen farmers
Speaker 1: who produce all the necessities of life on their own
Speaker 1: independent properties, or at least most of them. Yeah, and
Speaker 1: kind of the nation that these people build in common
Speaker 1: together will itself be independent. Right, It's not going to
Speaker 1: need anything from elsewhere. Now, this kind of life, the
Speaker 1: reality of it, Like as with Cato's fantasies, it's only
Speaker 1: really possible with large numbers of insides.
Speaker 2: It requires slaves. Yeah, yeah, to that point from what
Speaker 2: I understand, Like, yeah, his picture were of America was
Speaker 2: not big city, you know, and that that that that
Speaker 2: actually became quite a point of contention because of like
Speaker 2: just the very his very just his imagination of what
Speaker 2: this world could be is not modern. It's not so
Speaker 2: that played such a role in his view of slavery
Speaker 2: and a view of this and like yeah, so like
Speaker 2: that that in turn, if you took another like Founder,
Speaker 2: that was like, nah, dude, we could be modern, Like
Speaker 2: let's we can be the future, you know.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, like you know, And there were a lot
Speaker 1: of these, a lot of those guys. Jefferson his his
Speaker 1: vision of kind of his ideal society. For as much
Speaker 1: as he talks about democracy and his interested in progress
Speaker 1: as he is, and he's going to label himself an
Speaker 1: ally with the progressives of his time. Yeah, what he
Speaker 1: talks about really seems like feudile to me in a
Speaker 1: lot of ways. These like little feudal independent states run
Speaker 1: on slavery, right, you know, which is kind of their
Speaker 1: version of serfdom. It's made clear kind of how some
Speaker 1: of his beliefs are moving along. In seventeen sixty eight,
Speaker 1: which is the same year he joins the House of Burgesses,
Speaker 1: and that's the year he decides to build a house
Speaker 1: for himself on top of a mountain Monticello, on a
Speaker 1: parcel of land inherited from his father. Building Monticello is
Speaker 1: going to be the work of a lifetime and in
Speaker 1: some ways the most insidiously evil direct action of Jefferson's life,
Speaker 1: but at this stage his plans were unsettled. In seventeen
Speaker 1: seventy two, he married Martha Whale Skelton, who had been
Speaker 1: widowed young and thus had a huge amount of wealth
Speaker 1: and property to offer him. The family slaves who were
Speaker 1: later interviewed about this marriage describe it as a love match,
Speaker 1: though not something done for property, which is interesting and
Speaker 1: probably suggests that that's what it was.
Speaker 2: Right.
Speaker 1: They wrote about this as different from a lot of
Speaker 1: the other arranged marriages that they saw among the white
Speaker 1: people who were kind of at the top of their society.
Speaker 1: We don't really know much about the relationship because Jefferson
Speaker 1: later destroys most of his correspondence with Martha.
Speaker 2: Great.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I don't know what's going on. There may have
Speaker 1: just been a thing he did out of grief, because
Speaker 1: she's not going to live a long life, and neither
Speaker 1: is her father John. He is less of a mystery, though,
Speaker 1: because he was a slave trader. Henry Winsick writes quote
Speaker 1: when Jefferson courted the beautiful Martha Wales. He spent evenings
Speaker 1: by the fire with her father, Old John, who undoubtedly
Speaker 1: talked business with the young suitor, discoursing on slaves and
Speaker 1: the peaks and valleys in the market for them. The
Speaker 1: incoming tide of slaves washed up against the steps of
Speaker 1: the county courthouses every late summer and fall. The lawyers
Speaker 1: and magistrates had the routine of land transactions and debt
Speaker 1: collections interrupted when overseers herded gangs of newly delivered African
Speaker 1: children under the courthouses through the magistrates to scrutinize, their
Speaker 1: task being to assign each child in age. When children
Speaker 1: reached sixteen, they became taxable, So the planters had an
Speaker 1: interest in low estimates.
Speaker 2: Wow.
Speaker 1: Yeah, the idea that like you don't even really have
Speaker 1: your age. Yeah, that's something that like these guys are
Speaker 1: kind of hash out independent of you.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 1: Now, from what he would write later, we can infer
Speaker 1: that Jefferson was horrified by aspects of what Wales told him,
Speaker 1: particularly about the passage like from Africa the Americans. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and so much so that he eventually is going to
Speaker 1: take action. Not long after this point, soon after joining
Speaker 1: the House of Burgesses. Sometime at the end of the
Speaker 1: seventeen sixties or the start of the seventeen seventies, he
Speaker 1: submitted an emancipation bill anonymously through a cousin. Jefferson himself
Speaker 1: hated face to face conflict and the vicious reaction to
Speaker 1: the bill. His cousin was accused of hating his country
Speaker 1: reinforce his fear of speaking out on the issue. But
Speaker 1: he does at this point, he does try something. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's nothing, I think.
Speaker 2: Yeah, And and to know that, like what gets outlawed
Speaker 2: first is the importation of new slaves, you know, which
Speaker 2: I still which I think indirectly is connected to Jefferson
Speaker 2: being like, yes, some about this is crazy.
Speaker 1: And it's connected to Jefferson's this belief he's going to
Speaker 1: express for a while about how slavery should be brought
Speaker 1: to an end. He's going to consistently advocate for that.
Speaker 1: But yeah, we're getting ahead of ourselves.
Speaker 2: Ye, yeah.
Speaker 1: Yeah. In seventeen seventy three, Jefferson's best friend, Dabney Carr died.
Speaker 1: He had married Thomas's sister, Martha, and his loss was
Speaker 1: an understandable blow to Thomas. What's Harder to understand is
Speaker 1: how he responds to Dabney's death, As described in an
Speaker 1: article by the National Park Service, while slaves were preparing
Speaker 1: Carr's grave, Jefferson sat nearby taking notes on the time
Speaker 1: required to turn the soil. Two men spent three and
Speaker 1: a half hours at this job. Thus, Jefferson calculated one
Speaker 1: man would take seven hours and could therefore be expected
Speaker 1: to turn an acre of ground in four working days. Now,
Speaker 1: that's a weird response to losing your best friend.
Speaker 2: Ji.
Speaker 1: Like I normally I say there's no wrong way to grieve,
Speaker 1: But carefully studying the number of slave man hours needed
Speaker 1: to bury your friend while you watch them dig his
Speaker 1: grave is the wrong way to gree.
Speaker 2: Can you imagine a bad way? You imagine sitting next
Speaker 2: to somebody grieving, putting your arm around him. They just
Speaker 2: real quiet, and you're like bro mans On as you know,
Speaker 2: you could talk to me about anything. Man, I love you, homie, Like,
Speaker 2: I what do you have? What's what's how you feeling
Speaker 2: right now?
Speaker 3: Man?
Speaker 2: What's what's what's feel in your mind?
Speaker 1: I feel like you could turn an acre of soil
Speaker 1: in about four days.
Speaker 2: I'm sorry, Yeah, wait, that's what you were saying about
Speaker 2: right now, okay, such a weird Now I'd be like,
Speaker 2: oh yeah, all right man, Yeah, what do you say
Speaker 2: to that? Like all right, all right, all right, Thomas, okay,
Speaker 2: well let me know if you need anything, bro, Like.
Speaker 1: You're welcome for burying your friends, how about that?
Speaker 2: Yeah?
Speaker 1: So that same year, the same year that Dabney dies,
Speaker 1: his father in law is also going to die, and
Speaker 1: you know, fuck him. Uh, he leaves Martha Jefferson, eleven
Speaker 1: thousand acres of land, thirty five slaves, and what biographers
Speaker 1: generally describe as innumerable debts. The exact reason for those
Speaker 1: debts is important to understand. If we're going to grab
Speaker 1: fully how the man with the post abolition.
Speaker 2: It just says innumerable.
Speaker 1: Debts, innumerable debts.
Speaker 2: That's hilarious.
Speaker 1: This man is under fucking water, and it's we're going
Speaker 1: to talk about why he's underwater, right, because.
Speaker 2: We're vague but also not vegue. Yeah, it's strangely accurate.
Speaker 2: I was like, all right, all right, copy that, sir,
Speaker 2: Yeah you're yeah, what is he what's being communicated? Yeah,
Speaker 2: what's what is said is vague, but what being communicated
Speaker 2: is spot on. Yeah.
Speaker 1: Yeah, and his again this guy Wales, John Wales, I
Speaker 1: think has been a wholesale of human beings. And he
Speaker 1: had shortly before dying, set up a big deal in
Speaker 1: seventeen seventy two for a consignment of enslaved people coming
Speaker 1: in on a boat called the Prince of Wales. Only
Speaker 1: two hundred and eighty of the four hundred people aboard survived,
Speaker 1: which was a high rate of loss. I mean, it
Speaker 1: was never a low rate of loss, right, but this
Speaker 1: was it was bad. Scene is bad, and this shrank
Speaker 1: their potential profits. But then they sold two hundred and
Speaker 1: sixty six of these people, and they did so on
Speaker 1: credit to quote unquote wealthy planters who claim to be
Speaker 1: good for it. And the planters were buying on credit
Speaker 1: because they needed these guys to harvest their tobacco and
Speaker 1: then they were going to sell the tobacco and then
Speaker 1: they were going to pay back Whales. But then the
Speaker 1: tobacco market crashed that year and the planters had no cash,
Speaker 1: and thus Wales and his business partner had to make
Speaker 1: good on the payment to the original slavers in London.
Speaker 1: Thomas Jefferson inherited this debt in seventeen seventy three, and
Speaker 1: he is it's going to take He's not really getting
Speaker 1: out of this, right, Like this is going to be hanging.
Speaker 1: It's like a student loan. It's like an evil student loan.
Speaker 1: Student loans are a different kind of very different Yeah.
Speaker 2: Yeah, study loon only for slaves.
Speaker 1: Yes, yeah, it's like a student right, and like with
Speaker 1: a similarly ruinous rate of interest. Right, So he's not
Speaker 1: going to be able to really pay any of these
Speaker 1: or the debts that he has accrued off. Situations like
Speaker 1: this are not uncommon for the wealthy Virginia planting class, right,
Speaker 1: these guys are wealthy in quotation marks. To explain this,
Speaker 1: we have to talk about what Jefferson and his peers
Speaker 1: considered wealth, right, because they're not talking about like cash, right.
Speaker 1: They are talking about primarily land.
Speaker 2: Right.
Speaker 1: Wealth is land to a lot of these guys, and
Speaker 1: the fact that all of them are hideously in debt,
Speaker 1: mostly to British lenders, is inconvenient and a problem, But
Speaker 1: it doesn't change their impression of themselves right as wealthy men.
Speaker 1: But it does cause all these problems because that land
Speaker 1: can be taken away, right, and debt is inherited in
Speaker 1: this period, and so debt is going to be a
Speaker 1: central issue for Jefferson. Over the course of his decades
Speaker 1: in public life. He would often advocate for the elimination
Speaker 1: of American debts held by English bankers during post war negotiations, and,
Speaker 1: like Robert E. Lee a generation later, he came to
Speaker 1: see the human beings that he had inherited as a
Speaker 1: path out of the debt trap that his relatives and
Speaker 1: his own spending had locked him into. In seventeen seventy
Speaker 1: four and seventeen seventy five, the conflict of a British
Speaker 1: taxation and rule of the colonies reached a fever pitch
Speaker 1: and boiled over into armed resistance. Jefferson became a major
Speaker 1: figure in Virginia and increasingly well known throughout the colonies
Speaker 1: for his full throated, or at least full pinned because
Speaker 1: he's not really a talking guy at this point, defense
Speaker 1: of the Boston Tea Party. Now he writes a lot
Speaker 1: about the tea Party, not historically accurate shit, but what
Speaker 1: he writes sets the popular conception of this moment to
Speaker 1: an extent that it still exists today. You can draw
Speaker 1: a line from what Jefferson writes about these people to
Speaker 1: like the tea Party that we had in the early odds, right,
Speaker 1: And I'm going to quote from American Sphinx here. In
Speaker 1: Jefferson's account, a dedicated group of loyal Bostonians risked arrest
Speaker 1: and persecution to destroy a cargo of the contraband Samuel Adams,
Speaker 1: a major figure in the Continental Congress and the chief
Speaker 1: organizer of the Tea Party, must have chuckled in satisfaction,
Speaker 1: knowing as he did that the loyal Bostonians were really
Speaker 1: a group of hooligans and vandals who would disguised themselves
Speaker 1: as Indians in order to avoid being identified, and who
Speaker 1: had enjoyed the tacit support of the Boston merchants, many
Speaker 1: of whom had made their fortunes in smuggling. Sam Adams
Speaker 1: realized that the Tea Party was an orchestrat act of
Speaker 1: revolutionary theater. Jefferson described it as a spontaneous act of patriotism,
Speaker 1: conducted according to the etiquette of well a tea party.
Speaker 1: But then again, perhaps Jefferson's version was itself a propagandistic manipulation,
Speaker 1: just as self consciously orchestrated as the Tea Party itself. Now,
Speaker 1: the whole point of that book by Ellis American sphinx.
Speaker 1: The reason he calls it American sphinx is that Jefferson
Speaker 1: has really hard to pin down about this and other stuff, right,
Speaker 1: you can you can make a case if you're arguing
Speaker 1: about like modern politics, he would be on both sides
Speaker 1: of most issues of his day or of like today,
Speaker 1: right like, because he's he's very inconsistent and he's really
Speaker 1: had He's fine with lying to protect his own image.
Speaker 1: He does it all the time. But he's also really
Speaker 1: good at writing. He's a great writer, and so like
Speaker 1: the stuff he writ. Ellis describes his writing on the
Speaker 1: Tea Party as being like a fairy tale, right and
Speaker 1: obviously the fact that that distortion gets passed down to
Speaker 1: such an extent is a credit to his ability to
Speaker 1: craft reality, which is very much what he is doing. Right.
Speaker 1: He's building Ellis describes as like a fantasy world for
Speaker 1: himself that is robust enough to occasionally admit the rest
Speaker 1: of the country.
Speaker 2: And that's a good way.
Speaker 1: Yeah, that's a good way to say him. Yes, yeah, wow, yeah.
Speaker 1: And we're going to talk about that and a lot
Speaker 1: more in part two. But prop yo, it's the end
Speaker 1: of part one. I hope you all had a good time. Prop,
Speaker 1: You got any pluggables to play?
Speaker 2: And Politics will Prop. We do a hood politics vyballs
Speaker 2: which don't have a don't have no cuss words in it,
Speaker 2: and it's a little shorter so he could play to
Speaker 2: the kiddos. But yeah bull Politics will Prop. Go to
Speaker 2: prop hip hop dot com. You could find the pod
Speaker 2: on all of the things and uh yeah man, and
Speaker 2: I'm gonna continue to rock with y'all. Man, oh, I
Speaker 2: wrote a book of poetry book Terror.
Speaker 1: You sure did? Yeah and yeah man excellent. Well, everybody,
Speaker 1: that's it for part one. Come back tomorrow where we'll
Speaker 1: talk about more. Thomas Jefferson Bye. Behind the Bastards is
Speaker 1: a production of cool Zone Media.
Speaker 2: For more from cool Zone Media, visit
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