Speaker 1: Also media. So so prop you listened to the Boston
Speaker 1: Slide cop, Yeah.
Speaker 2: I just yes, mainly because like I just feel like
Speaker 2: Boston city people are the most on brand people, like
Speaker 2: the Boston people are the most Boston ever. And it
Speaker 2: was a joy to hear Jamie bring back her accent. Yeah,
Speaker 2: because I'm like I missed that. I'm like, I need
Speaker 2: you to have more.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I mean she does a nice imitation of a
Speaker 3: Boston accent.
Speaker 4: I just really a lot of I.
Speaker 1: Just really want a techno remix of the end of
Speaker 1: the the side cap video where he's like a fuck,
Speaker 1: I don't know, Robert, could you do it better?
Speaker 2: Yeah? You teach us how to do it? Boy slow.
Speaker 3: So that was it's like East Boston, you know, I
Speaker 3: think this guy was some other.
Speaker 4: Part of town.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I'm slid in classic Boston line what you would say.
Speaker 2: I'm getting better it. I'm getting better at it. Yeah
Speaker 2: you are.
Speaker 1: Anyway, I'm very I'm very proud of that show. So
Speaker 1: sixteenth Minute of Fame.
Speaker 3: Yeah, that's a great show to open about sixteenth Minute
Speaker 3: of Fame. And you know, sixteenth Minute of Fame is
Speaker 3: made by our friend Jamie Loftus And when we start
Speaker 3: part four, We're going to talk about Thomas Jefferson's friend
Speaker 3: Dabney Carr, who died. Anyway, we're back. So we've talked
Speaker 3: about Dabney a couple of times here. Prop and his
Speaker 3: best childhood best friend. They go to school together, they
Speaker 3: live at school together. Then Dabney dies at like thirty,
Speaker 3: you know, tragically young. And as little kids they had,
Speaker 3: they'd spent a lot of time hanging out, and you know,
Speaker 3: the vast property, all these thousands of acres his dad owns.
Speaker 3: Thomas's favorite part is this place called montes Cello. This
Speaker 3: place he calls montes Cello, which is like this little mountain.
Speaker 3: And as a child, he and Dabney made a promise
Speaker 3: that the first one of them to die would bury
Speaker 3: the other under a specific oak tree atop Monticello. Jefferson
Speaker 3: followed up on this promise by having the people he
Speaker 3: owned dig it because he's not going to dig a
Speaker 3: grave for his dead friend. And then he took notes
Speaker 3: like a serial killer about it.
Speaker 2: Weirdo, But the mountain.
Speaker 3: Monticello, where his friend chooses to be buried, gets its
Speaker 3: name from Jefferson, who took the Italian word for small mountain. Now,
Speaker 3: I've always heard that Monticello was a mountain, and that's
Speaker 3: what people always say about it. But before I sat
Speaker 3: down to write these episodes, I hadn't actually looked up
Speaker 3: the height of the fucker. And as soon as I did,
Speaker 3: it's eight hundred feet tall. Prop that doesn't seem like
Speaker 3: a mountain to me. That's a hill, right, That's a hill. Yeah,
Speaker 3: that's a fucking hill. And like, I don't know, it's
Speaker 3: one of those things. There's not actually a universally agreed
Speaker 3: upon definition of a mountain, right, and this is this
Speaker 3: is petty. We're talking about a man who does some
Speaker 3: terrible things. But it annoys me.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it's kind of yeah, the size of a mountains
Speaker 2: kind of a vibe thing. But yeah, but I feel like,
Speaker 2: but you know a mountain when you see it, You
Speaker 2: know a mountain.
Speaker 4: When you see it.
Speaker 3: Yeah, some places, like in I think in the UK,
Speaker 3: I think it's a thousand feet it has to be,
Speaker 3: so it's not a mountain if we're going by like
Speaker 3: British standards.
Speaker 1: Right, But obviously I see you take this very seriously.
Speaker 1: I do.
Speaker 3: I'm livid, Sophia. I've never been anything because it's like anger,
Speaker 3: but I still find it frustrating.
Speaker 2: Because it's just like, okay, like if we were anyone else,
Speaker 2: like if it was just like a like I would
Speaker 2: be like, oh I get it, bro like yeah yeah,
Speaker 2: not it's mountain, Like.
Speaker 4: You got a mountain?
Speaker 2: Yeah, good king, you know what I'm saying, Like, I'll
Speaker 2: be on your side, But like this fool like nah,
Speaker 2: fam ain't no damn mountain.
Speaker 4: It is a hill.
Speaker 1: If this, if this, if this mountain verus hill issue
Speaker 1: is so important to you, Robert, and it makes you
Speaker 1: so livid. I just want you to know I would
Speaker 1: die on that hill for you.
Speaker 4: Thank you, thank you, yes, so thank you.
Speaker 1: Well.
Speaker 3: I looked into it a little further, by which I
Speaker 3: mean I read an article on adventure dot Com but
Speaker 3: spelled without the e in the middle of adventure which
Speaker 3: He points out that both the Oxford English Dictionary and
Speaker 3: the American English, Merry and Webster Dictionary to find a
Speaker 3: mountain is a land mass that projects conspicuously above the
Speaker 3: surrounding area. So they do literally say it's a vibe thing, right, Does.
Speaker 2: It look like a mountain toew? Yeah, totally.
Speaker 3: The USGS, the United States Geological Survey used to have
Speaker 3: a minimum height of a thousand feet for a mountain,
Speaker 3: but they don't do that anymore. I'm sure Big Mountain
Speaker 3: got to them, you know, all that mountain money coming
Speaker 3: to the four anyway, Thomas Jefferson at least got mountain
Speaker 3: vibes from Monticello, because that's what he always called it,
Speaker 3: even though it's a hill. Jefferson inherited the property at
Speaker 3: age twenty one. It had been owned by his father,
Speaker 3: but he had loved the land since boyhood. The people
Speaker 3: like he so basically he starts building in seventeen sixty eight.
Speaker 3: I think that's just when he's finally in like a
Speaker 3: financial situation where he feels like he can afford to
Speaker 3: do that. And I say he starts building, he has
Speaker 3: the people that he owns built.
Speaker 4: He does not do that.
Speaker 3: He which he does sometimes hire people too, Like he
Speaker 3: has laborers come in to do parts of it.
Speaker 4: Obviously.
Speaker 3: One of the interesting things is a lot people are
Speaker 3: fascinated with Monticello.
Speaker 4: It's like it's a whole deal.
Speaker 3: And one of the things people will point out is
Speaker 3: that he is like he designs the whole thing himself.
Speaker 3: Like he does He's not like a professional architect but
Speaker 3: he like becomes one because he has like no training,
Speaker 3: but he drafts blueprints for Monticello, and normally when people
Speaker 3: are like self proclaimed architects, it's a bad thing. He
Speaker 3: actually seems to have been pretty good at this, and
Speaker 3: he like becomes he does like he designs a bunch
Speaker 3: of professional buildings later in life. Because I started the
Speaker 3: series by noting that he was kind of the ancient
Speaker 3: Roman equivalent of a web like he's he's obsessed with
Speaker 3: ancient Rome, the way that like some people are obsessed
Speaker 3: with Japan over in the US today. So it's based
Speaker 3: a lot on like ancient Greek and Roman sort of
Speaker 3: classic designs. And he, you know, this is like, at
Speaker 3: least in the things that he expresses through his writing,
Speaker 3: Monticello was like the center of his being. He wrote
Speaker 3: about the property. I am happy nowhere else and in
Speaker 3: no other society, and all my wishes end where I
Speaker 3: hope my days will end at Monticello. Now the reason
Speaker 3: for his happiness that that's always portrayed romantically, he was
Speaker 3: just so in love with this, this land and this
Speaker 3: beautiful house that he built. I think what's actually happening
Speaker 3: here is a little more sinister because not that he's
Speaker 3: just like I really love this hill. I really love
Speaker 3: this hill.
Speaker 4: I really like my living room.
Speaker 3: No, it's the real world constantly falls short of Jefferson's beliefs, right,
Speaker 3: Those beliefs are kind of incoherent, but he is like
Speaker 3: a dreamer. He expresses these kind of like constant revolutionary
Speaker 3: fantasies that never quite come true. Right, the French Revolution.
Speaker 3: We can argue if it's better or not, but like
Speaker 3: it doesn't work out the way everyone hoped it would
Speaker 3: when it.
Speaker 2: Started, right exactly.
Speaker 3: Yeah, And he has this obsession with like Cato's idea
Speaker 3: of the idyllic free farmer is the backbone of a
Speaker 3: mighty republic. And also all these weird beliefs about these
Speaker 3: independent sacks and explorers who'd founded the colonies, and like
Speaker 3: none of that's real. And he wants to kind of
Speaker 3: make these dreams that he has from the things that
Speaker 3: he's read. He wants to like build. He's kind of
Speaker 3: the same thing a lot of cult leaders want, right, Like,
Speaker 3: I just want to go out into the woods and
Speaker 3: build my own society, a perfect utopia right now. Yeah,
Speaker 3: in modern America you can do that, and people do,
Speaker 3: but you have to be a cult leader, right, you
Speaker 3: have to get a bunch of people to like follow you,
Speaker 3: otherwise you're not going to be able to build your utopia.
Speaker 3: Thomas just owns people like That's what he's doing here though, right,
Speaker 3: he is, he is. This really is very much like
Speaker 3: a cult leader motivation, but just using slaves. Yeah, I
Speaker 3: hadn't thought about it that way.
Speaker 2: Yeah. Yeah, like a place that you could pretend it's
Speaker 2: like you know, and it becomes like you saying that now,
Speaker 2: like becomes such a part of the mythos of the South,
Speaker 2: even like the you know, like the Lost Cause thing
Speaker 2: I mean that we did where it's just like you
Speaker 2: want this like Whistling Dixie, you know, lazy afternoon sip
Speaker 2: and sea tea like kind of lifestyle where we could
Speaker 2: just hang out and talk about the new scuttle bucket.
Speaker 2: It's just a perfect like world on our Sunday tea
Speaker 2: on the porch while we're trying not to catch the vapis.
Speaker 2: You know, Yes, you just want that, you know what
Speaker 2: I mean?
Speaker 3: Yeah, And that is that's what's happening here. Jefferson starts,
Speaker 3: you know, has construction started in seventeen sixty eight, He
Speaker 3: moves there for the first time in seventeen seventy. Because
Speaker 3: their old home, Shadwell, had burned down. They lived at
Speaker 3: first in an outbuilding until the main house was finished
Speaker 3: enough to allow occupation. Jefferson occupied the house there with
Speaker 3: his wife Martha for about ten years before she passes
Speaker 3: on and he takes a break to.
Speaker 4: Become French for a while.
Speaker 3: The architecture that he witnessed in Paris inspired further changes
Speaker 3: to the property when he returned in seventeen eighty nine,
Speaker 3: and as we noted, he pays for that by using
Speaker 3: the people that he owns as collateral. His goal when
Speaker 3: he comes back is to kind of retire from public
Speaker 3: life and live in Monticello. That only lasts like three
Speaker 3: or four years. Like he's never actually good at, you know,
Speaker 3: retiring and given up public life. But when it gets
Speaker 3: home from France, he's like, I'm so tired of the
Speaker 3: the weariness of the world.
Speaker 4: I just want to.
Speaker 3: Retreat to have a lie, Yeah, having a bullshit all
Speaker 3: these French exhausting yeah. Yeah, to a lie to someone else, yeah, totally.
Speaker 3: So part of what's going on here with Monticello is
Speaker 3: he has built for himself or he has had built
Speaker 3: for himself a home that includes he's almost made a
Speaker 3: smart house, right. It is filled with ultra modern amenities
Speaker 3: and a lot of things that you couldn't actually have
Speaker 3: in a house until the age of like automation and
Speaker 3: like machines and electricity, using like human beings to actually
Speaker 3: fulfill that role. And I was unaware about this. People
Speaker 3: always talk about, like, how what an architectural marvel it is,
Speaker 3: but like the idea that he has built a slavery
Speaker 3: powered smart house was not expressed to me.
Speaker 4: Wow, that's phrase, that's what it is.
Speaker 3: You're right, yeah, yeah, I'm gonna read you a quote
Speaker 3: from the Smithsonian magazine article by Henry Winsack. The mansion
Speaker 3: sits atop a long tunnel through which slaves unseen hurried
Speaker 3: back and forth, carrying platters of food, fresh tableware, ice, beer, wine,
Speaker 3: and linens, while above them, twenty or thirty or forty
Speaker 3: guests sat listening to Jefferson's dinner table conversation. At one
Speaker 3: end of the tunnel lay the ice house. At the
Speaker 3: other the kitchen, a hive of ceaseless activity where the
Speaker 3: enslaved cooks and their helpers produced one course after another
Speaker 3: during dinner, Jefferson would open a panel in the side
Speaker 3: of the fireplace, insert an empty wine bottle, and seconds
Speaker 3: later pull out a full bottle. We can imagine he
Speaker 3: would delay explaining how this magic took place until an
Speaker 3: astonished guest put the question to him. The panel concealed
Speaker 3: a narrow dumbwaiter that descended into the basement. When Jefferson
Speaker 3: put an empty bottle in the compartment, a slave waiting
Speaker 3: in the basement pulled the dumbwaiter down, moved the empty
Speaker 3: inserted a fresh bottle, and sent it up to the
Speaker 3: master a matter of seconds. Similarly, platters of hot food
Speaker 3: magically appeared on a rough volving door fitted with shelves
Speaker 3: and us and the used plates disappeared from sight. On
Speaker 3: the same contrivance, guests could not see or hear any
Speaker 3: of the activity with the leaks between the visible world
Speaker 3: and the invisible that magically produced Jefferson's abundance.
Speaker 2: He made it Disneyland.
Speaker 3: He made a Disneyland. Yeah he's got Yeah, that's crazy, like, yeah,
Speaker 3: it's Disneyland. Yeah huh, Yeah, it's a Disneyland and it's
Speaker 3: all powered by slavery. And I I didn't like I
Speaker 3: knew that his life, you know, relied heavily on slavery,
Speaker 3: or I didn't realize like he built like a magical house.
Speaker 2: He figured out how to hide him.
Speaker 3: Yeah, you don't even see the people serve because that's uncomfortable, right,
Speaker 3: It's really awkward to like have to look at slavery
Speaker 3: like yeah, like, especially.
Speaker 2: As you're discussing the tenants in the in the nuances
Speaker 2: of liberty, right you know, so it's like we can't
Speaker 2: just be like, oh, out in the open about it.
Speaker 3: Yeah, you've just got your magical wine box that keeps
Speaker 3: being filled with bottles, Yeah, Disneyland.
Speaker 4: Yeah kind of.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 3: And in learning this, it kind of brought Jefferson into
Speaker 3: clarity for me. You know, there's this how can he
Speaker 3: write so well about the concept of liberty while still
Speaker 3: owning people?
Speaker 1: Right?
Speaker 3: Why did he ultimately fail? He used to It seems
Speaker 3: like he used to when he was younger, have some
Speaker 3: convictions about abolition, and then he failed, Like why? And
Speaker 3: it's it's I think part of it at least is
Speaker 3: because using the people he owned let him mimic aspects
Speaker 3: of what we would call a first world lifestyle with
Speaker 3: eighteenth century technology, right, Like it's.
Speaker 2: Kind of rad. Yeah, Yeah, it's kind of rad to
Speaker 2: stick a wine bottle into a wall and then a
Speaker 2: new one comes out.
Speaker 3: Yeah, And I think that, honestly, that makes him more
Speaker 3: comprehensible because we do all see we all know that, Like, shit,
Speaker 3: that's really convenient, you know, like have like Amazon Prime
Speaker 3: or whatever. Right, Yes, great being able to get a
Speaker 3: thing the next day, and you know why you're able
Speaker 3: to write, Yes, access to all of these like wonderful
Speaker 3: luxury items like comes through a lot of like not
Speaker 3: just environmental waste that's you know, we are going to
Speaker 3: pay for one day, but like a lot of human suffering,
Speaker 3: and you're all pretty yeah.
Speaker 2: Like I totally love this, and I think this is
Speaker 2: the like this is the big This is a big
Speaker 2: takeaway because it's like, you know again like the answer,
Speaker 2: you know, motivations of stuff. Again, my organizing premise is
Speaker 2: like history is just us back then, So like the
Speaker 2: answer is actually as simple and as obvious as it's.
Speaker 2: It's not a deep mystery. It's this made my life easier. Yeah,
Speaker 2: and I know it's wrong, but god damn it, I
Speaker 2: really I really could use a new pencil holder. So
Speaker 2: it needs to come right now. I can't wait two days.
Speaker 2: It has to come right now.
Speaker 3: I understand that this is the great evil of my era,
Speaker 3: but I'm not walking down to the wine cellar right all.
Speaker 3: It makes it so petty but also so comprehensible, I think, exactly. Yeah,
Speaker 3: Monticello has been a famous property for generations, and it's
Speaker 3: innovative design gets sort of folded in with long standing
Speaker 3: myths about Jefferson's genius. A classic example would be this
Speaker 3: quote from John F. Kennedy during a dinner honoring Nobel
Speaker 3: Prize winners at the White House. I think this is
Speaker 3: the most extraordinary collection of talent of human knowledge that
Speaker 3: has ever been gathered together at the White House, with
Speaker 3: the possible exception of when Thomas Jefferson dined alone. And
Speaker 3: you'll you run into that quote a lot because it's
Speaker 3: it's that like Aaron Sorkin era, like American mythos, like
Speaker 3: our great like these men were really like Titanic minds.
Speaker 3: And yeah, it's weird both because like, yeah, I don't know,
Speaker 3: I don't see as much evidence for genius as you do.
Speaker 3: Like was he a really good writer? Yeah, absolutely, but
Speaker 3: like I don't know genius. I don't even know if
Speaker 3: I'd call him a genius writer, right, Like yeah, But
Speaker 3: more to the point, that's also that's a shitty thing
Speaker 3: for JFK to say to a bunch of Nobel Prize winners,
Speaker 3: because the nineteen sixty two Nobel Prize winners list included
Speaker 3: John Steinbeck, who was the better writer the Jefferson.
Speaker 1: Oh.
Speaker 3: It included Linus Paulin, who had attempted to end the
Speaker 3: nuclear arms race and like done, made significant progress in
Speaker 3: doing that. Included Francis Crick, James Watkins, and Maurice Wilkins,
Speaker 3: who put out a paper describing the helical structure of
Speaker 3: DNA for the first time. So I actually think that
Speaker 3: crew is a lot more impressive than the guy who
Speaker 3: had been to the wine cellar powered by enslaved people.
Speaker 2: Yeah, definitely, like a like it's like you say that
Speaker 2: line and then you stop and look at the room,
Speaker 2: like when Thomas Jefferson died dined alone. Yeah, he get
Speaker 2: it because he's the smartest guy ever.
Speaker 1: Get it.
Speaker 3: Yeah, you guys just figured out DNA. He figured out
Speaker 3: how to get wine bottles up to his house without
Speaker 3: looking at people.
Speaker 2: Listen, he figured out how to hide evil. That's what he.
Speaker 3: Man so as it happens. Obviously, the whole machine that
Speaker 3: was Monticello was powered entirely by the work of child
Speaker 3: slaves in particular, and by powered, I mean that's what
Speaker 3: funded his lifestyle in a very specific way, Like that's
Speaker 3: generally true in that like that was just a thing
Speaker 3: across later, like specifically, young boys are what pay for
Speaker 3: Jefferson's lifestyle. You get hints of this in more casual
Speaker 3: popular coverage of Monticello when rite up i found on
Speaker 3: history dot Com notes at a time when most brick
Speaker 3: was still imported from England, Jefferson chose to mold and
Speaker 3: bake his own bricks with clay found on the property.
Speaker 3: Monticello's grounds provided most of the lumber, stone and limestone,
Speaker 3: and even the nails used to construct the buildings were
Speaker 3: manufactured on site. Now that kind of makes it sound
Speaker 3: like Jefferson is like a shop local pioneers, an off
Speaker 3: grid king, right, Like he's built this. Wow, they even
Speaker 3: made their own nails. That is leaving that description. The
Speaker 3: way they talk about the nails leaves out something important,
Speaker 3: which is that Thomas Jefferson is horribly in debt and
Speaker 3: because he is not going to work with you, and
Speaker 3: I would consider a job. He needs a way to
Speaker 3: cover his bills with labor performed on the property.
Speaker 2: Wow.
Speaker 3: Jefferson's image is as like a farmer, right, because he's
Speaker 3: obsessed and he writes a lot like Cato did about
Speaker 3: this Yaleman farmer. Right, So you might expect him to
Speaker 3: have made his living by having slaves work his farm
Speaker 3: men grow crops, which is what I had always assumed. Right,
Speaker 3: he didn't try to do this. But he's a terrible farmer,
Speaker 3: like he's dog shit at the His job is the
Speaker 3: business side of this, right, and.
Speaker 2: His business at farming.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 2: Oh, so he out here saying like, I've made millions
Speaker 2: of dollars on my online store, and I'll teach you
Speaker 2: how to do it right. Where's your I've never seen
Speaker 2: your store. Yeah. And if you're making millions of dollars
Speaker 2: on the store, why are you're teaching classes?
Speaker 1: Yeah? That he is.
Speaker 4: He is the old time.
Speaker 3: The equivalent of that guy sitting in is like garage
Speaker 3: next to a Lamborghini in a bookshelf, being likely a
Speaker 3: book every day. Yeah, do you yelling at you on
Speaker 3: YouTube to send him money so he can tell you
Speaker 3: how to do drop shipping or whatever the fuck. Yeah,
Speaker 3: basically now, so you know, he does try to make
Speaker 3: it as a farmer in the business of farming. The
Speaker 3: first crop he really tries is tobacco. Now, the problem
Speaker 3: with tobacco is that it's.
Speaker 4: Dog shit for the soil.
Speaker 2: Right.
Speaker 3: If you just at growing a little bit because you
Speaker 3: want to smoke, you can do okay, as long as
Speaker 3: you like really know what you're doing and like, yeah,
Speaker 3: you know you understand how to like regenerate the soil
Speaker 3: and stuff. But like tobacco farming on an industrial level,
Speaker 3: which is what he and everyone else is trying to
Speaker 3: do because they want to make money. And that's the
Speaker 3: same thing Washington does, the same thing a lot of
Speaker 3: people do.
Speaker 2: Right.
Speaker 3: The climate is actually changing in Virginia during this period,
Speaker 3: so like tobacco becomes something that gets done elsewhere, and
Speaker 3: a lot of them move over to wheat. But the
Speaker 3: other problem that Jefferson has is that Monticello is, you know,
Speaker 3: a hill whatever, but it's like an alpine terrain, righty,
Speaker 3: and the soil is bad in that kind of a place.
Speaker 3: You get a hint of this, and like they made
Speaker 3: their own bricks for Monticello out of like local clay. Well,
Speaker 3: if there's a lot of clay in the ground, it's
Speaker 3: probably not great for industrial agriculture, right, You kind of
Speaker 3: want soil more than clay.
Speaker 2: Yeah, you can't grow clay, guys.
Speaker 3: Yeah, it's it's not not very good to do right now,
Speaker 3: Monticello is he probably he could have if this if
Speaker 3: this was like, you know, somebody who was just trying
Speaker 3: to live, you know, off grid or I mean there
Speaker 3: was no grid back then. Everybody lived off grid. But
Speaker 3: if there's somebody who was just trying to like live
Speaker 3: in an independent farm and like make all of their
Speaker 3: own food, you could do that because they had enough
Speaker 3: land there. But Jefferson needs a business that's going to
Speaker 3: get him out of debt, right, so he gets very
Speaker 3: excited at first with wheat because wheat is the crop
Speaker 3: that wheat is in a lot a lot of ways.
Speaker 3: What revitalizes slavery is a profitable industry, right because it's
Speaker 3: it requires a lot. It's for one thing, it's not
Speaker 3: nearly as bad for the soil, So you can do
Speaker 3: it a lot more. You have you can at least
Speaker 3: have the option of kind of doing it indefinitely without
Speaker 3: the soil failing if you know what you're doing. It
Speaker 3: requires a lot less human labor than tobacco, so you
Speaker 3: can grow more wheat with less people, or, as Jefferson
Speaker 3: sees it, you can free up a chunk of the
Speaker 3: workforce that you own and have them do other things
Speaker 3: that make you right while still selling wheat and making
Speaker 3: money off of that wheat is also it requires there's
Speaker 3: a more like regimented process to grow and harvest and wheat,
Speaker 3: which encourages more on the job training and kind of
Speaker 3: a more stratified system for like slavery in these in
Speaker 3: these communities that you've got. And Jefferson wanted Mont to
Speaker 3: sell it a function.
Speaker 4: As a community.
Speaker 3: It's like an independent little society, which means he needed
Speaker 3: blacksmiths to forge and repair tools. He needed people to
Speaker 3: spin thread and make clothing. There was a tinsmithing operation
Speaker 3: on the property. There was a cooper ridge making barrels,
Speaker 3: and what we see here. I think it's not worthless
Speaker 3: to like tie us to that common kind of rich
Speaker 3: white person dream of having your own intentional off grid community.
Speaker 4: In the mountains.
Speaker 3: Only like again, he's not it's not like a cult,
Speaker 3: right because they don't have the choice to be there.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and you also didn't.
Speaker 4: But it is like this, yeah, no, no, you're just
Speaker 4: telling people to do it right now.
Speaker 3: Yeah, the closer you work to the family, like physically,
Speaker 3: the closer you are to the house on the top
Speaker 3: of the hill, the higher your place in the slave hierarchy.
Speaker 3: Is right, some of the people who are like working
Speaker 3: in the house or who were doing stuff like being
Speaker 3: a blacksmith would even receive gratuities, as Jefferson called it.
Speaker 3: That's what he wrote it out down this which is
Speaker 3: basically small amounts of money as like an incentive for
Speaker 3: them to work.
Speaker 2: Right.
Speaker 3: Jefferson took a system for human bondage for agricultural profit,
Speaker 3: and he modernized it into a semi industrial society, still
Speaker 3: based around slavery, but also much more complex than just
Speaker 3: kind of these like big arms that had existed previously.
Speaker 3: And the anchor of profit for Monticello was his nail factory.
Speaker 3: That's what makes the money at Monticello is he has
Speaker 3: like an industrial factory for producing huge quantities of nails. Wow,
Speaker 3: and the best people to make nails are little kids
Speaker 3: on No. Part of why he lands on nails as
Speaker 3: a profit engine is that in the tobacco era, large
Speaker 3: numbers of children were needed in the field because their
Speaker 3: tiny hands could kill the bugs. Right, Like, there was
Speaker 3: a lot of child labor that was necessary for tobacco.
Speaker 3: It's really not for wheat. But obviously Jefferson isn't gonna
Speaker 3: let all this perfectly good child labor go to waste.
Speaker 3: He's not excited about this because like, oh, good, these
Speaker 3: children get to have a childhood. He's excited because, oh,
Speaker 3: I can work them in something more profitable, you know,
Speaker 3: oh hell yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly. In his Farm Book,
Speaker 3: Jefferson writes this to describe the standard plan for the
Speaker 3: children born into his property. Quote children till ten years
Speaker 3: old to serve as nurses. From ten to six the
Speaker 3: boys make nails, the girls spin. At sixteen, go into
Speaker 3: the ground or learn trades.
Speaker 2: O sheesh.
Speaker 3: And it's you know, all this stuff in the Farm
Speaker 3: Book is a big part of what Winesack bases his
Speaker 3: book Master of the Mountain on. We had a lot
Speaker 3: of this info about how he's using these like this
Speaker 3: child labor system that he consciously crafts for profit, and
Speaker 3: it gets hidden. Like one of his biographers, basically, he
Speaker 3: doesn't destroy the work, but he just doesn't write about
Speaker 3: it when he's like analyzing the farm book for his
Speaker 3: for a biography on Jefferson. He like a conscious choice
Speaker 3: is made by a lot of historians just to not
Speaker 3: go into as much detail as we actually had about
Speaker 3: what Jefferson was doing at Monticello because it's ugly.
Speaker 2: Yeah, they're so precious about it. Yeah, like there's I'm
Speaker 2: telling you precious about him specifically.
Speaker 1: It doesn't it doesn't quite make sense, right, Like why
Speaker 1: is he the equivalent of the white boy of the
Speaker 1: month on tik talk but for all of America in death?
Speaker 3: Yeah, it's I think the way they want to portray
Speaker 3: him is like I keep going back to an artist,
Speaker 3: but like a great musician with a heroin problem. That's
Speaker 3: how they want to portray him as, Like, well, he
Speaker 3: was great and genius, he was brilliant, he has this
Speaker 3: he has this fatal flaw, you know, and like that's tragic,
Speaker 3: but it doesn't mean that, you know, he didn't do
Speaker 3: a lot of great stuff. Yeah, but like you know,
Speaker 3: heroin it could be bad for you, but like you're
Speaker 3: not harming other people in a way that is evil necessary?
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, multiple families, yeah, come on, Yeah.
Speaker 3: Yeah, like you can destroy like fundamentally your damn it.
Speaker 3: And that's kind of how they treat it. Like, yeah,
Speaker 3: he had this thing that was like this fatal flaw
Speaker 3: where like, no, the man built his own industrial society
Speaker 3: around child labor for profit, Like that's what he did.
Speaker 3: He knew exactly what he was doing, and he documented it.
Speaker 3: Now in that line, he said that like yad, once
Speaker 3: everyone's sixteen, they go into the ground or learn trades.
Speaker 3: Going into the ground means you're on the lowest rung,
Speaker 3: right of the hierarchy you work in in the field, right, Yeah,
Speaker 3: And learning a trade, as I said, is like your
Speaker 3: best path if you're one of these people to like
Speaker 3: some kind of autonomy, right, because the blacksmith, you kind
Speaker 3: of just need to let him be the blacksmith, right
Speaker 3: you know.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 3: So if you were a boy before you had chance
Speaker 3: to do either of those things, you worked in the nailery, right,
Speaker 3: you made nails.
Speaker 4: And that quote I read.
Speaker 3: Earlier makes it sound like the nails are just kind
Speaker 3: of part of Jefferson's plan for a self sufficient community,
Speaker 3: but the reality is that they are where his money.
Speaker 4: Is coming from.
Speaker 3: For quite a while, the most successful profit earning business
Speaker 3: in Monticello, and alone paid for all of his family's food.
Speaker 3: The nailer reopened in seventeen ninety four, and in a
Speaker 3: seventeen ninety five letter, Jefferson explained his reasons for starting
Speaker 3: it in a letter to a French friend. In returning
Speaker 3: home after an absence of ten years, I found my
Speaker 3: farm so much deranged that I saw evidently that it
Speaker 3: was necessary for me to find some other resource.
Speaker 4: In the meantime.
Speaker 3: Cancluded at length to begin a manufacture of nails, which
Speaker 3: needs little or no capital. And I now employ a
Speaker 3: dozen little boys from ten to sixteen years of age,
Speaker 3: overlooking all the details of their business myself, and drawing
Speaker 3: from it a profit on which I can get along
Speaker 3: until I put my farms into a course of yielding profit.
Speaker 2: Two things I never thought about is, oh, yeah, nails
Speaker 2: have to be made, and just you just go to
Speaker 2: store and get nails, Like I forgot about that. There's that.
Speaker 2: And then secondly I was like, oh, yeah, what was
Speaker 2: his farm doing for the ten years he was going?
Speaker 2: That was another thing I just I didn't think about
Speaker 2: it right now, like yeah, what what? Like who was
Speaker 2: was is there any right on it? Who was there?
Speaker 2: Like and why didn't thereby.
Speaker 4: Leave Like, yeah, well, we'll talk about that.
Speaker 3: He has white people who are employed as overseers.
Speaker 4: Who he is.
Speaker 3: Some of them are like kind of business partners of his,
Speaker 3: but like as part of their job and like being
Speaker 3: a partner, they get a cut of like the profits
Speaker 3: from the wheat or whatever, but they also have to
Speaker 3: manage the overseers who live on the property and a
Speaker 3: responsible pity and line.
Speaker 2: Right, you knew that propaganda overseers.
Speaker 3: Yeah, and we'll talk a little bit more about that
Speaker 3: later because we have some of his letters to his
Speaker 3: overseers while he's in Paris, so we actually know when
Speaker 3: he's talking about liberty some of the things he's directing
Speaker 3: them to do, and they're pretty ugly. But the other things, yeah, yeah,
Speaker 3: you're right, you know, I don't know. I don't have
Speaker 3: a good way to lead into the ads. Just just
Speaker 3: listen to the ads and we'll come back and talk
Speaker 3: about nails and crimes against humanity and we're back. So
Speaker 3: Jefferson is managing you know, Monticello from Paris, as we
Speaker 3: talked about through like letters and stuff that he sends back,
Speaker 3: and the other thing he's doing in Paris is he's
Speaker 3: spending shitloads of money and going even more into debt
Speaker 3: because he is just not actually capable of living on
Speaker 3: like a normal allowance. Right Like Again, for all of
Speaker 3: his talk about like autonomy and self discipline, he's never
Speaker 3: able to like live within his means. Yes, I always
Speaker 3: find funny when he leaves for public office in seventeen
Speaker 3: ninety four. He comes back in seventeen eighty nine, but
Speaker 3: he leaves public office for a while in seventeen ninety four.
Speaker 3: Jefferson is horribly in debt, right Like, he doesn't he
Speaker 3: goes even more into debt in France, and he doesn't
Speaker 3: get out of it in those like five years where
Speaker 3: he's back in the US, but he's still kind of
Speaker 3: like working in politics. And around that time, Jefferson states
Speaker 3: publicly that he wants to retire, and he kind of
Speaker 3: frames this as like I need to get away from,
Speaker 3: you know, Washington. I had to get away from like this,
Speaker 3: this cutthroat political world so that I can be a farmer.
Speaker 3: And he kind of compares himself to Cincinnatus, who is this?
Speaker 3: Have you ever heard of Cincinnatus?
Speaker 4: Prop No, he was this.
Speaker 3: He was a Roman general who, like Romans, used to
Speaker 3: like elect a dictator, right yeah, when they had like
Speaker 3: a problem, right, like there's a war, we're getting invaded,
Speaker 3: we need a guy to be in charge for six months.
Speaker 3: Cincinnatus was this like farmer who he got all this
Speaker 3: power because he was the only guy who could win
Speaker 3: this war, and then he gave it all up because
Speaker 3: what he really wanted to be was a farmer. That's
Speaker 3: what he loved more than anything. I actually don't that
Speaker 3: may actually be what Cincinnatus did, but Jefferson likes to
Speaker 3: compare himself to Cincinnatus.
Speaker 2: Yeah that's like no.
Speaker 3: One needed you in DC, bro, And like, by the way,
Speaker 3: you suck at farming.
Speaker 2: Yeah, the game needs me, guys.
Speaker 3: Yeah yeah, deaf Cincinnatus couldn't grow shit.
Speaker 2: Yeah how about that?
Speaker 4: Uh huh.
Speaker 3: Now, the real reason why he like basically goes into
Speaker 3: retirement is that he needs to get a handle on
Speaker 3: his debts. He talks to his colleagues in Washington about, like,
Speaker 3: I actually can't keep working in politics. I really got
Speaker 3: to like fix Monticello, like otherwise I'm gonna lose everything
Speaker 3: in American Sphinx Ellis estimates Jefferson's debt at several hundred
Speaker 3: thousand dollars. Now, this was a common state of affair
Speaker 3: for wealthy quote unquote wealthy Virginia planters. Right, but it's
Speaker 3: embarrassing too. And Jefferson attempted to defray his responsibility for
Speaker 3: his bad economic situation by blaming his overseers for not
Speaker 3: hitting the workers enough. Now it's such a.
Speaker 2: Continued but yeah, yeah it.
Speaker 1: Is.
Speaker 3: It's such like a No, it's not that like I'm
Speaker 3: planning things badly. It's not that I picked a bad
Speaker 3: location for a working farm, right, Like, fundamentally a lot
Speaker 3: of this comes down to Monticello is a bad place
Speaker 3: to do what he's trying to do. But like he
Speaker 3: can't accept any of that, so he's got to find
Speaker 3: someone to blame. And it's like, well, my overseers aren't
Speaker 3: strict enough, you know, that's got to be.
Speaker 4: That's got to be what's going on?
Speaker 2: Taught him?
Speaker 1: Location, location location.
Speaker 2: No, you know, it's middle management. You know these managers
Speaker 2: they don't want to work. Did you hire all them?
Speaker 1: Was it?
Speaker 4: Yeah?
Speaker 2: You hired them all?
Speaker 3: Right? Yeah, and so this is entirely you yeah, yeah, yeah,
Speaker 3: so and I you know, I think it's one of
Speaker 3: those things he can't admit this public. I think he knows,
Speaker 3: and part of why we I think he knows is
Speaker 3: that he writes this in a letter to his daughter
Speaker 3: during this period. The unprofitable condition of Virginia estates in general,
Speaker 3: leaves it next to impossible for the holder of one
Speaker 3: to avoid ruin, and this condition will continue until some
Speaker 3: change takes place in the mode of working them. In
Speaker 3: the meantime, nothing can save us and our children from
Speaker 3: beggary but a determination to get a year beforehand and
Speaker 3: restrain ourselves vigorously to the clear profits of the last.
Speaker 3: And I find that fascinating because he's admitting, well, it
Speaker 3: seems like none of these big Virginia farms, that our
Speaker 3: whole culture is based on, these huge plantations, basically none
Speaker 3: of them work right, none of them can like actually
Speaker 3: make a profit. We're all horribly in debt and it's
Speaker 3: getting worse every year.
Speaker 2: Uh huh.
Speaker 3: Maybe our whole culture is wrong. Maybe we built a
Speaker 3: bad society. He's like, no, we need more financial discipline.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, you're not. Like, I don't know, guys, Maybe
Speaker 2: there's maybe just ain't working.
Speaker 4: Yeah. Maybe we built a civilization and we should start over.
Speaker 2: I love it.
Speaker 4: Maybe without the slaves.
Speaker 2: I hate it, but I love it.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 3: Yeah, So he refused to actually live within his means,
Speaker 3: and he refused to sell his lands past a certain
Speaker 3: point because he saw his land as his only real wealth,
Speaker 3: and thus that's what he was going to pass down
Speaker 3: to his kids. He did attempt to make a business
Speaker 3: out of wheat, but he was dogshit at this, just
Speaker 3: like he was dogshit at everything he tried to do
Speaker 3: with farms. Jefferson actually operated seven farms on his vast holdings,
Speaker 3: but only about ten percent of the acreagch he owned
Speaker 3: was actually under cultivation. So when he hit upon nails
Speaker 3: as a business, he treated it as a life preserver,
Speaker 3: making it the focus of his day to day exertions.
Speaker 3: This passage from American Sphinx describes how much of a
Speaker 3: personal focus Jefferson made of his new nail business.
Speaker 4: Quote.
Speaker 3: Every morning except Sunday, he walked over to the nailery
Speaker 3: soon after dawn to weigh out the nail rod for
Speaker 3: each worker, then returned at dusk to weigh the nails
Speaker 3: each had made and calculated how much iron had been
Speaker 3: wasted by the most and least efficient workers. Isaac Jefferson
Speaker 3: recalled that his former master made it clear to all
Speaker 3: hands that the nailery was a personal priority and that
Speaker 3: special privileges would be accorded the best nail makers. He
Speaker 3: gave the boys in the nail factory a pound of
Speaker 3: meat a week. He gave them that worked the best
Speaker 3: a suit of red or blue, and encouraged them mightily.
Speaker 3: Jefferson even added the nailary to his familiar refrain in
Speaker 3: the pastoral mode, I am so much immersed in farming
Speaker 3: and nail making. He reported in the fall of seventeen
Speaker 3: ninety four that politics are entirely banished from my mind. Now, wow,
Speaker 3: this is not I think it's worth emphasizing, like a
Speaker 3: tiny picturesque blacksmith shop. This is a little factory. Right Yeah,
Speaker 3: it is dirty, and it is loud, and it is
Speaker 3: maybe not dangerous compared to the work most adults were doing,
Speaker 3: but it is very dangerous work for children.
Speaker 1: Right Like.
Speaker 3: It makes money though, right Like, it's actually very profitable.
Speaker 3: And this is kind of another example of him being
Speaker 3: a hypocrite, because he writes a lot about like industrialization
Speaker 3: and like what's happening in you know, back in Great
Speaker 3: Britain during the early Industrial Revolution, is like hideous and
Speaker 3: he has all this like these hippie back to the
Speaker 3: land ethos that he expresses a lot in writing. But
Speaker 3: the only real money making venture he was good at
Speaker 3: was like a nail factory.
Speaker 2: Industrializing is industrializing?
Speaker 3: Yeah yeah, yeah, yeah, a child powered nail factory.
Speaker 2: Yeah, bro, Like, come on, man, where's your self awareness?
Speaker 4: The great man?
Speaker 2: Yeah, it's just gone.
Speaker 3: It also represented an efficiency that he found attractive. He
Speaker 3: seems to have been bothered on some fundamental level by
Speaker 3: the idea that enslaved young boys would spend their time idle,
Speaker 3: having like a childhood or whatever. He wrote that the
Speaker 3: nailery made him happy because quote it would employ a
Speaker 3: parcel of boys who would otherwise be idle. That ellis
Speaker 3: quote I included earlier includes a line about how he
Speaker 3: would reward his best workers with extra meat, you know,
Speaker 3: better clothes, But Winesack points out that he really treated
Speaker 3: them as part of like a mechanism by which he
Speaker 3: managed his society, like this is a machine to him,
Speaker 3: that's what's happening here.
Speaker 4: Quote.
Speaker 3: Those who did well received a new suit of clothes,
Speaker 3: and they it also expect to graduate, as it were,
Speaker 3: to training as artisans, rather than going in the ground
Speaker 3: as common field slaves. Some nail boys rose in the
Speaker 3: plantation hierarchy to become house servants, blacksmiths, carpenters, or Cooper's.
Speaker 2: So yeah, yeah, you stratify, you stratify, Yeah, the slaves
Speaker 2: in a way that pits us against each other. Yeah nah,
Speaker 2: it's and then you're fighting for scraps. Yeah, yeah, you're
Speaker 2: doing like there's there's that version of it, the evil version.
Speaker 2: And there's also the fact that like you are using
Speaker 2: this almost as a training program to to fill out
Speaker 2: positions in the rest of the property, right, like, and
Speaker 2: that's part of those traps. And it's so efficient, like
Speaker 2: this this wheel by which he yeah, no, I get it.
Speaker 2: These are transferable skills. You know that, if he were
Speaker 2: a decent man, would be like, I'm giving you job training,
Speaker 2: so you can go anywhere. You're not to make you
Speaker 2: can go anywhere, get a job. You know what I'm saying, Like, yeah,
Speaker 2: but that's not what you're doing because you can't go Yeah, yeah.
Speaker 4: That is right.
Speaker 3: So two months after starting the name factory, he wrote
Speaker 3: that it quote now provides completely for the maintenance of
Speaker 3: my family. The first two months of labor by his
Speaker 3: nail boys prayed for the entire yearly grocery bill of
Speaker 3: Jefferson's family. Right, that's how big a deal this is
Speaker 3: for him. In seventeen ninety six, his gross income from
Speaker 3: nails was like two thousand dollars, which is, you know,
Speaker 3: pretty good money. Back then, his main competitor, this says
Speaker 3: a lot, was the local prison.
Speaker 2: Oh my god.
Speaker 4: Yeah yeah.
Speaker 2: Oh the hell is this world? Okay, so fucked up?
Speaker 3: Yeah, you can see why his biographers for years would
Speaker 3: like hide this shit, right, yeah, Like it doesn't match
Speaker 3: any of the other things that they want people to
Speaker 3: believe about the man.
Speaker 1: They were like, if we take out, you know, the
Speaker 1: fact that he was a pedophile, an abusive piece of shit,
Speaker 1: a terrible business owner, yeah.
Speaker 2: Yeah, they wrote his life the way he wrote the Bible.
Speaker 3: Yeah right, yeah, yeah exactly, kind.
Speaker 2: Of remove all the shit I don't like.
Speaker 4: Yeah yeah, yeah, it's it's it's something else.
Speaker 3: So it's probably worth noting that the nailery did involve
Speaker 3: labor from some young free white boys as well. They
Speaker 3: were paid fifty cents a day on Saturdays to feed
Speaker 3: the fire that were only allowed to work at Saturdays
Speaker 3: because they had school to go to right. Yeah, so
Speaker 3: Jefferson is capable of understanding yeah right, like what the
Speaker 3: actual decent thing.
Speaker 2: To do would be a cave man guys.
Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, yeah, well there is One of the stories
Speaker 3: here I found is like there's you get this little
Speaker 3: piece of like kind of some of the inherent decency
Speaker 3: of some of the little kids, like some of his
Speaker 3: kids and grandkids, because his grandchildren were known to volunteer
Speaker 3: at the nailory sometimes so that the boys that Thomas
Speaker 3: owned could go take days off to go fishing. Wow,
Speaker 3: so you get little legs again. Other people are capable
Speaker 3: of treating them like people, right, Yeah, Jefferson, isn't I
Speaker 3: found that interesting?
Speaker 2: You gotta yeah, without oversimplifying, but like you got to
Speaker 2: beat the humanity out of that kid. Yeah you know
Speaker 2: what I mean, because the kid looks at him and goes, well,
Speaker 2: he's a kid, Like I'm a kid. He sucks. He's
Speaker 2: there every day. Yeah, dude, look bro, I can do
Speaker 2: I can do at least a date. You know what
Speaker 2: I'm saying.
Speaker 4: Yeah, it is.
Speaker 2: And someone has to come and tell you, yeah, well no,
Speaker 2: because yeah you're not property.
Speaker 3: Yeah yeah, they don't need days off, they don't really
Speaker 3: want them, they're fine. You have to like lie and
Speaker 3: abuse people to get them like that. I think it's
Speaker 3: such an interesting example of just like, well, yeah, these
Speaker 3: kids just notice that these other kids don't get to
Speaker 3: have a childhood and did something about it.
Speaker 2: Right.
Speaker 3: Interesting The little bits like that you get, I guess
Speaker 3: are also maybe one of the ways that these kids
Speaker 3: get to speak a little bit out into history, like
Speaker 3: the y beach that was denied them. But you have
Speaker 3: to assume, you have to assume the kind of communication
Speaker 3: that like led to that, like even if it was
Speaker 3: just communication, like, wow, these kids look obviously unhappy here.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 4: I thought about that a lot after reading.
Speaker 2: Yeah, such a human moment, you know.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 3: So, back during his years in France and when he'd
Speaker 3: written notes on the State of Virginia, Jefferson had written
Speaker 3: at length his belief that black people were not mentally
Speaker 3: capable of being free. Right, That's a big part of
Speaker 3: like how he defends himself to these like French intellectuals.
Speaker 3: The success he'd had in turning Monticello into a functioning
Speaker 3: complex industrial society made some of his or semi industrial society,
Speaker 3: made some of his French friends who came and visited
Speaker 3: him at Monticello, Like Duke de la Rochefucoli and Court
Speaker 3: basically be like, I know what you said about these folks,
Speaker 3: but like it seems like they're capable of doing all
Speaker 3: sorts of very complicated jobs that are everything they'd need
Speaker 3: to do in order to live independently and free.
Speaker 2: Right, seem pretty smart to me.
Speaker 3: They seem like they're capable of building an entire society
Speaker 3: on their own.
Speaker 2: Basically, you're telling me these people, case of the people
Speaker 2: that built your house, Yeah, unable to survive on their own.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 3: Yeah, it seems like they have a lot of the
Speaker 3: same kinds of skills that we consider skilled labor in
Speaker 3: outside of society. And so like Duke de la Roche Fucolianchor,
Speaker 3: who's like one of his friends who visits Monticello, is
Speaker 3: so impressed that he's like, Hey, this is great. This
Speaker 3: means you can like free these people, right, Like you've
Speaker 3: taught them all this, so like now they can be free, right, Thomas.
Speaker 2: Remember what you said when we was in France about that,
Speaker 2: Like it seemed like the problem solved.
Speaker 3: Yeah, So we're doing that, right, do we do we?
Speaker 1: Right? Yeah?
Speaker 2: Yeah?
Speaker 3: The Duke recorded Jefferson's response this way quote, he sees
Speaker 3: so many difficulties in their emancipation, and he had so
Speaker 3: many conditions to render it practicable that it is thus
Speaker 3: reduced to the impossible and it's too hard.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 3: Part of why he does that, or why jeff like
Speaker 3: Jefferson's argument is again, it comes down to race mixing,
Speaker 3: right yeah. Like he's like, if we free these then
Speaker 3: they'll inevitably going to like Mary and have children with
Speaker 3: white people, right yeah. Part of his justification to this
Speaker 3: guy is like, again, it all comes down to race mixing.
Speaker 3: He's been doing this for a while since France. And
Speaker 3: what's interesting to me is not like the specifics of
Speaker 3: his beliefs on like this kind of stuff and how
Speaker 3: it ties. I mean, it is interesting that it ties
Speaker 3: into scientific racism, which Jefferson usually doesn't get blamed for,
Speaker 3: and he is very much a part of that. But
Speaker 3: what's really interesting to me is that, like, first off,
Speaker 3: he's actively doing this thing. Yes that like he says,
Speaker 3: is this reason why these people can't be free?
Speaker 2: Yes?
Speaker 3: Second, it's as a public figure, right, he supports brutal
Speaker 3: punishments for this, as I noted earlier, when he's revising
Speaker 3: Virginia's slave code. He proposes that any white woman who
Speaker 3: gives birth to mix mixed race children be cast out
Speaker 3: from protection of the law. But a few years earlier,
Speaker 3: right after he'd finished notes on the State of Virginia,
Speaker 3: he sold one of the women he owned to a
Speaker 3: white man with the understanding that she would be freed
Speaker 3: by him and they would live his husband and wife. Right,
Speaker 3: And he was willing to do this. This guy is
Speaker 3: a friend of his, So you get this mix of like, well,
Speaker 3: he clearly doesn't actually have a problem with this, but
Speaker 3: he thinks it's very important in public to have a
Speaker 3: problem with this.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and God, yeah, yeah, yeah, that's to have books, right, right.
Speaker 3: Yeah, Now, where I think this gets most disgusting is
Speaker 3: in his public protestations of his gentleness as a master.
Speaker 3: He would drop lines like I love industry and abhor severity, right, basically,
Speaker 3: like I love it when people are working. I hate
Speaker 3: the idea of like God forbid you know, having to
Speaker 3: punish you know, these people, Oh, what a horrible thought. Right,
Speaker 3: And he would regularly in his public writings attack overseers.
Speaker 2: Right.
Speaker 3: He called them degraded, unprincipled, violent people, which in many
Speaker 3: cases they were that's not an all fair thing, right, yes,
Speaker 3: but he's also hiring these guys.
Speaker 1: Was like, yeah, like so fucking fake.
Speaker 2: Yeah yeah this this this is it. You're not like
Speaker 2: this this this the Thomas Jefferson I know. Yeah, you know,
Speaker 2: just like about the whole you know, misigenation. And then
Speaker 2: like we're all like Nikki, you have like twenty nine
Speaker 2: black children, like were you talking about? And and it
Speaker 2: also brings up an interesting point about how like there
Speaker 2: was a time that like having a mixed relationship was
Speaker 2: an act of protest.
Speaker 4: Yeah you know that.
Speaker 2: That's like such an interesting moment where it was like, no,
Speaker 2: this is this is me being a part of the revolution,
Speaker 2: you know, such a it's a weird position to be.
Speaker 2: You know, it's just wow, I just I don't know,
Speaker 2: I just think about that stuff. And then yeah and
Speaker 2: then publicly yeah anyway, yeah that's sad. And then yeah,
Speaker 2: and and the overseer thing, this like of the many
Speaker 2: things that are so inferior rating. It's just like not
Speaker 2: only are not only you're calling yourself a farmer who
Speaker 2: don't do no damn farming, you know what I'm saying. Now, Now,
Speaker 2: now you you get somebody, you get a goon basically,
Speaker 2: you know, to do the shit that you ain't got
Speaker 2: the you ain't got the stomach to do anyway because
Speaker 2: you know you're wrong. And then you got the nerve
Speaker 2: to stand by and be like, well, I hate we
Speaker 2: have to do this. I wish you would just like
Speaker 2: just comply. I don't want to have to get the Yeah.
Speaker 1: I hate it, but you.
Speaker 2: Yeah, you just if you'd have just worked until you die,
Speaker 2: you know, I know it's.
Speaker 3: Friday and I hate to do this.
Speaker 4: Yeah, totally, you kinda have to work forever. Yeah, like
Speaker 4: it's it's and it's interesting.
Speaker 3: Like again he gets such a there's so many historians,
Speaker 3: even up to the pretty recent period, are willing to
Speaker 3: like go to bad about like how relatively nice he is.
Speaker 3: But Jefferson, not only is he hiring overseers, He's not
Speaker 3: just it's not just that. Like, while he hires overseers
Speaker 3: because everybody does, you have to have someone to watch
Speaker 3: it for you. He hires overseers and talks about the
Speaker 3: violence he wants them to do. Right, Wow, And we're
Speaker 3: going to get into that, but first, here's an awkward
Speaker 3: ad break.
Speaker 4: And we're back.
Speaker 3: So the standard punishment for a slave who tried to
Speaker 3: escape and got caught was what was called an iron collar.
Speaker 3: This is a torture device that forces spikes up behind
Speaker 3: each ear, so that if the person with the collar
Speaker 3: turns their head, they are like stabbing themselves.
Speaker 2: Basically.
Speaker 3: Now, this is a famously evil thing, right like when
Speaker 3: people in Europe are talking about the horrible evil of
Speaker 3: the American system, these collars are one of the things
Speaker 3: that get written about, right and Jefferson and notes in
Speaker 3: the State of Virginia, which is again him trying to
Speaker 3: defend the United States to France, writes about how these
Speaker 3: are one of the worst parts of this really cruel,
Speaker 3: hideous system. Nine he ordered his property manager to purchase
Speaker 3: a load of callers.
Speaker 4: Weinsek.
Speaker 3: In his exploration of Jefferson's farm book and correspondence, lays
Speaker 3: out a clear pattern. Jefferson often says the right thing,
Speaker 3: or at least the less cruel thing, but then acts
Speaker 3: with as much cruelty as any other master. He cites
Speaker 3: the seventeen ninety two letter by Jefferson to his executive overseer,
Speaker 3: Colonel Randolph, about replacing a retiring overseer and the need
Speaker 3: to balance Cruelty and Goodness quote. In his response to Randolph,
Speaker 3: Jefferson also wrote, my first wish is that the laborers
Speaker 3: may be well treated. But what it appears at first
Speaker 3: glance to be an ironclad declaration of principle turns out
Speaker 3: to be just what Jefferson said. It was a wish,
Speaker 3: and it was qualified by a second wish that they
Speaker 3: may enable me to have that treatment continued by making
Speaker 3: as much as will admit it. You see what he's
Speaker 3: saying there, Like I want to treat them well, and
Speaker 3: I hope they make me enough money that I don't
Speaker 3: have to have them beat right.
Speaker 4: Yeah, that's what he says.
Speaker 2: Hey, you know, yeah, I look, dude, this is look nobody,
Speaker 2: I don't want this. Yeah, but like if you like
Speaker 2: basically you're choosing it, like if you choose not to
Speaker 2: because it's your choice, Yeah, choosing not to be compliant
Speaker 2: and work hard. Look if the system works, if you
Speaker 2: work the system.
Speaker 3: Just right, Yeah, yeah, that is exactly like, Yeah, what
Speaker 3: he's saying here. I'm going to continue that quote from
Speaker 3: win Sex book. First, this was Jefferson's contract with the slaves.
Speaker 3: I wish to treat you well, but if you do
Speaker 3: not produce enough, there will be harsh measures. Second, it
Speaker 3: was Jefferson's contract with himself. Having made this mental compact
Speaker 3: with the slaves, he could absolve himself from blame for
Speaker 3: anything unpleasant.
Speaker 4: The slaves were at.
Speaker 3: Fault, right, So he's doing this, he's expressing this because
Speaker 3: that way he can be like, well, we have this
Speaker 3: agreement and you guys didn't make enough, right, it's not
Speaker 3: me having you punished.
Speaker 1: You know.
Speaker 2: There's his through line. His through line is dang, it's
Speaker 2: it's all clear. Now. His through nine. His through line
Speaker 2: is I'm going to find a way to absolve myself,
Speaker 2: Like whatever we're doing, no matter what it is, I'm
Speaker 2: going to provide myself an out. And that's continually what
Speaker 2: he continues to do, like as a politician, as a farmer,
Speaker 2: as a husband, as a father, and now in this
Speaker 2: in this context, it's like, oh, but yeah, he's always
Speaker 2: finding himself an out.
Speaker 4: Right, right, Yeah, that's that's the guy.
Speaker 2: Yeah, that's that guy.
Speaker 4: All of this, if it can be made.
Speaker 3: More infuriating, it is made more infuriating by the reality
Speaker 3: of Jefferson's correspondence with a man named Benjamin Banneker.
Speaker 4: Have you heard, Yeah, yeah, yeah, you know Benjamin h.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 3: Now Banneker was born to well that we were not
Speaker 3: entirely certain, but probably was born to two free black
Speaker 3: parents in Maryland.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 3: Educated as a he was educated as a child. He's
Speaker 3: taught to read. It's arithmetic, and he inherits some land
Speaker 3: which he farms with considerably more aptitude than Thomas Jefferson
Speaker 3: farmed anything.
Speaker 2: Right.
Speaker 3: Yes, Now, Bannicker was an early mathematician, and he was
Speaker 3: in fact so able at mathematics that by the late
Speaker 3: seventeen hundreds he had a popular almanac that Jefferson and
Speaker 3: many other Americans used, like puts out a really good
Speaker 3: and an almanac.
Speaker 4: You have to think about. An almanac is like it's
Speaker 4: like an.
Speaker 3: iPhone, right, it is a it is a the product
Speaker 3: of intense science that is absolutely necessary for your day
Speaker 3: to day life if you're a farmer, right, And it's
Speaker 3: it's impressive being able to like understand astronomy and all
Speaker 3: that kind of stuff, like well enough to to make
Speaker 3: a good almanac is difficult. At age twenty one, an
Speaker 3: ideaf how smart this guy is. When he's twenty one
Speaker 3: years old, Banneker borrows a pocket watch from a friend,
Speaker 3: and carves his own functioning watch out of wood based
Speaker 3: on the pocket watch he borrows that like works his
Speaker 3: whole life, just a like you know, a polymath.
Speaker 4: Right, yeah, I need a.
Speaker 2: Double check my my history. But I believe he designed
Speaker 2: this the disc of Washington, DC.
Speaker 4: Oh did he? I didn't know that.
Speaker 2: Yeah, he designed the roads, yeah, Jesus Yeah. Yeah, like
Speaker 2: so that was like one of those things that I
Speaker 2: I that was one of the yeah, one of the things. Yes, Yeah,
Speaker 2: he established the borders of District of Columbia. So like
Speaker 2: he actually designed Jesus Rose. Now granted they're very annoying now,
Speaker 2: but that's because they were made for then, you know
Speaker 2: what I'm saying. But he definitely designed him.
Speaker 3: You can't blame him for not assuming DC would ever
Speaker 3: get that big Yeah, of course.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 3: So Jefferson had cited, if you remember back to I
Speaker 3: think our second episode, he had cited some of his
Speaker 3: evidence and notes in the City of Virginia when he
Speaker 3: when he wrote out, well here's why I think white
Speaker 3: people are superior. One of it was that he hadn't
Speaker 3: run into a black man who knew Euclid. Right, Well,
Speaker 3: here's a black mathematician who is definitely better at math
Speaker 3: than utah us. Right, Yes, you would think like, well,
Speaker 3: maybe that talking to this guy should have some impact
Speaker 3: on him. Right. And in seventeen ninety one, Anniker actually
Speaker 3: sends Jefferson a letter and he he quotes the Declaration
Speaker 3: of Independence back to Jefferson and is like, hey, man,
Speaker 3: like what the fuck?
Speaker 2: Right?
Speaker 3: Like, He's still like, how can you write all this
Speaker 3: and do this? And I love the way he gets
Speaker 3: Tom's ass here quote this is Bannecker. But sir, how
Speaker 3: pitiable is it to reflect that although you were so
Speaker 3: fully convinced of the benevolence of the Father of mankind,
Speaker 3: and of his equal and impartial distribution of those rights
Speaker 3: and privileges which he had conferred upon them, that you
Speaker 3: should at the same time counteract his mercies and detaining
Speaker 3: by fraud and violence so numerous a part of my brethren,
Speaker 3: under groaning, captivity, and cruel oppression, that you should at
Speaker 3: the same time be found guilty of that most criminal
Speaker 3: act which you professedly detested in others with respect to yourselves,
Speaker 3: He's like, where I'm standing here as bad as the
Speaker 3: King was.
Speaker 2: Yes, you sound just like yeah, you ain't shit.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 2: And also What I love too about that, that is
Speaker 2: the him saying like, you're doing this to my brethren,
Speaker 2: because even in a brains freed, intelligent black people were like,
Speaker 2: well they're different, Like that's the exception, Like you not,
Speaker 2: these are that's what y'all normally like you and section
Speaker 2: like no they me yeah, wear them they're no, No,
Speaker 2: that's my brothers. Yeah.
Speaker 3: And that's kind of what Jefferson does, is he like
Speaker 3: he says to he praises Bannicker, He's like, you're a
Speaker 3: credit to your race basically, right, yeah, Like, but he
Speaker 3: won't he's not willing to admit that, like, and this
Speaker 3: means I was wrong, right, And therefore it turns out
Speaker 3: if you just let people go to school, some of
Speaker 3: them will learn about YOUU clip, you know, like they
Speaker 3: did it Tom. Yeah, yeah, he does right basically that like, well,
Speaker 3: I guess maybe this does show that that you black
Speaker 3: people are intellectually equal to white people. And he writes,
Speaker 3: I can add with truth that nobody wishes more ardently
Speaker 3: to see a good system commenced for raising the condition
Speaker 3: of both their body and mind to what it ought
Speaker 3: to be. So again, he's not willing to count. He
Speaker 3: says all this, but then he doesn't do anything about it. Yeah,
Speaker 3: and after Banniker dies, in that letter he had said,
Speaker 3: I'm going to send your almanac off to this French philosopher.
Speaker 3: I know he'll be so impressed. And then as soon
Speaker 3: as Bannicker dies, Jefferson's like he lied about.
Speaker 4: Writing that almanac.
Speaker 3: Couldn't have been him, Yeah, couldn't have been him. I
Speaker 3: don't think it was him.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I don't think he did that anyway.
Speaker 4: Anyway, that guy made a lot.
Speaker 2: Of great points. Man, it seems that it seems that
Speaker 2: the Negro could really learn anything. Anyway.
Speaker 3: Yeah, in eighteen hundred, TJ was elected to the presidency. Now,
Speaker 3: I should note that when I asked this question of
Speaker 3: my search engine to double check the AI summaries at
Speaker 3: eighteen oh one, which is wrong. So again, don't trust
Speaker 3: these AI summary things. They get really basic shit wrong.
Speaker 3: This is not a hard question to answer, and.
Speaker 1: Didn't want to know more. Listen to a better offline.
Speaker 2: Yeah on this network, yep, yop, yop.
Speaker 3: Now you would assume right that now that to mus president, right,
Speaker 3: this would be theer if he really did have deeply
Speaker 3: held beliefs about emancipation. Well, now, he's literally the president.
Speaker 3: He should be able to do something, right.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I was like, we always we had power, now
Speaker 2: we have it.
Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, he does worse than nothing. So Jefferson is
Speaker 3: a Francophile, right, really loves France, really loves the French,
Speaker 3: and he loves the French Revolution.
Speaker 4: And you know, being that guy.
Speaker 3: Once he becomes president, he is happy to be approached
Speaker 3: by Louis Pischon the charge a fair of the French Republic,
Speaker 3: which talked a good game about liberty, but was also
Speaker 3: at that point in the process of trying to crush
Speaker 3: the first successful slave rebellion of the modern era in Haiti.
Speaker 3: And this is obviously, this is when Napoleon is running things,
Speaker 3: and at this point it's not Haiti at Sandamang. Now
Speaker 3: that successful revolution had as its most prominent leader, one
Speaker 3: of the most impressive men of that century, to Saint Loeviture.
Speaker 3: Right now, Pichon wanted to know what the third President
Speaker 3: would do if France sent its army to San Domain.
Speaker 3: And here's how Thomas Fleming, former president of the Society
Speaker 3: of American Historians, describes his response. Jefferson's reply exceeded Pichon's
Speaker 3: most sanguine hopes. The new president urged Pichan to tell
Speaker 3: his government that that America was eager to help restore
Speaker 3: French rule in San Domain. He was pleased that France
Speaker 3: wanted to send an army to crush the Black rebels.
Speaker 3: Nothing would be easier for us than to furnish your
Speaker 3: army and fleet with everything and to reduce to Saint
Speaker 3: to starvation. Jefferson said, So again, this guy who's like
Speaker 3: the inevitable world revolution for liberty has started as soon
Speaker 3: as the Haitians overthrow their slave masters, goes, well, yeah,
Speaker 3: we got to starve with those people to death.
Speaker 2: Well that's different.
Speaker 4: Yeah, yeah, yeah, it's out of them.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and that's around the corner. Like, that's cool. We
Speaker 2: could send him down there.
Speaker 3: That's easy, be easy as hell for us. Yeah, we
Speaker 3: had lots of boats, so I should note that. Well,
Speaker 3: the obviously, you know, the story of the international community
Speaker 3: fucking over Haiti is a long one. That's what we've
Speaker 3: done several episodes on it. Yeah, the French do capture
Speaker 3: to Saint. He dies in captivity, but their whole army
Speaker 3: is either you know, a lot of them die by rebels,
Speaker 3: and like I think most of them it's just the
Speaker 3: yellow fever, right, Yeah, anyway, it does not go well,
Speaker 3: they do not, Yeah, but their attempt is so brutal
Speaker 3: that in the wake of their failure, a rebel general
Speaker 3: named Jean Jacques de Saline's massacres every French white person
Speaker 3: he can get his hands on and makes himself the
Speaker 3: new ruler of what he starts to call Haiti. Right,
Speaker 3: So thanks for that, Thomas, great work. Now, Jefferson had
Speaker 3: often expressed his terror at the inevitability of a race
Speaker 3: war if emancipation didn't proceed on very specific ever shifting
Speaker 3: lines the reality, and I think that's why this story
Speaker 3: is worth telling. Part of why, obviously it's worth telling
Speaker 3: for a lot of reasons, is that Jefferson himself provokes
Speaker 3: a race war by betraying his own stated revolutionary beliefs,
Speaker 3: the instant a group of slaves freese themselves, and tries
Speaker 3: to start a republic.
Speaker 4: Yes, yeah, that guy. Yeah, that guy.
Speaker 3: So people might get frustrated that we're not really going
Speaker 3: to cover his presidency in detail, his beliefs about manifest destiny,
Speaker 3: his role in the ideological underpinnings of US colonial expansionism,
Speaker 3: because again, there was just so much to say specifically
Speaker 3: about Jefferson and slavery, and I really wanted to keep
Speaker 3: us focused on that. I do think there's one more
Speaker 3: aspect of his president, or of his life as it
Speaker 3: results relates to slavery, that is worth discussing. And this
Speaker 3: brings me to a guy named Edward Coles. Coles came
Speaker 3: from old money, a family with a pedigree at least
Speaker 3: as impressive as Jefferson's own. Like Thomas, he inherited land,
Speaker 3: and eventually he inherited a bunch of human beings. Like Jefferson,
Speaker 3: in his youth, it became clear to him that slavery
Speaker 3: was evil and the system had to be destroyed. Unlike Jefferson,
Speaker 3: Coles actually believed this. He was influenced by the death
Speaker 3: of George Washington, who had come to similar conclusions about
Speaker 3: slavery and wrote in his will that his domestics should
Speaker 3: be freed after his death. Now, the reality is that
Speaker 3: about half only about half the people held at Mount
Speaker 3: Vernon remained like got freed in relatively short order. About
Speaker 3: half of them were slaves in many cases for decades afterwards.
Speaker 3: But it would be accurate to say that Washington was
Speaker 3: more committed to emancipating the people he owned than Jefferson
Speaker 3: would prove to be. Yeah. That said, for the purposes
Speaker 3: of what Coles see his important it's that Washington is
Speaker 3: seen as having made a real commitment to emancipation. Right, So,
Speaker 3: when his own father dies, Coles tells his family right away,
Speaker 3: I'm going to free all of the family slaves. His
Speaker 3: family calls this folly and attacks him for giving up
Speaker 3: the comforts his parents had worked so hard to gain.
Speaker 2: He's going to piss away.
Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, it is like that's it is like, yeah, yeah,
Speaker 3: that is exactly how they talk about it. Now, this
Speaker 3: was such a problem that his brother, who had been
Speaker 3: Thomas Jefferson's personal secretary, gets Cole's a job offer from
Speaker 3: the next president, James Madison as his private secretary. Coles
Speaker 3: decides he's going to turn the job down because he
Speaker 3: really wants to make emancipating all of these people he's
Speaker 3: inherited a priority. But James Monroe basically convinces him that, like,
Speaker 3: if you do this, if you get this job, you'll
Speaker 3: get into that you can change the system from the inside.
Speaker 3: If you really want to fight for emancipation, this will
Speaker 3: teach you how to do it more effectively. Right, So
Speaker 3: he makes that call, you know, for a while, and
Speaker 3: he spends five years living in luxury at the White House,
Speaker 3: being waited on hand and foot and seeing how men
Speaker 3: like the President lived while regularly encountering coffles of chained
Speaker 3: slaves being marched from the Oxen Block makes him angrier
Speaker 3: and angrier, and in eighteen fourteen, he decides to reach
Speaker 3: out to former President Jefferson. And his thinking here is like,
Speaker 3: I don't think I can do this from inside. We
Speaker 3: have to have some kind of big movement that's going
Speaker 3: to lead us to emancipation. And you're the profit of liberty, right,
Speaker 3: Can you help me with this? Yeah?
Speaker 4: Do you want to do this together?
Speaker 3: You know, he writes, to.
Speaker 2: Bring that same energy. You remember all of the stuff
Speaker 2: he co Yeah.
Speaker 3: Yeah, it seems like this used to matter to you.
Speaker 3: Can we try it? He writes in one letter, My
Speaker 3: object is to entreat and beseech you to exert your
Speaker 3: knowledge and influence and devising and getting into operations some
Speaker 3: plan for the gradual emancipation of slavery. Coles wanted Jefferson
Speaker 3: to help him write a general emancipation plan for Virginia
Speaker 3: and introduce it to the state. Jefferson gave him a
Speaker 3: semi polite fuck you, saying like, yes, slavery is bad,
Speaker 3: but just that too many Americans, you know, you and
Speaker 3: I get how evil this is, but there's just too
Speaker 3: many people who don't get it, you know. Particularly you
Speaker 3: know who was really to blame. It's the young people.
Speaker 3: You know, they don't really love liberty the way my
Speaker 3: generation did. He is disappointing, Yeah, disappointing, but they don't
Speaker 3: like it liberty the way I do.
Speaker 2: And it was there. I mean, it's and it's on
Speaker 2: them anyway. You remember that, as you said last time,
Speaker 2: it's like kids will figure it out. They don't love liberty.
Speaker 4: Yeah, it is, it is.
Speaker 3: He does kind of start that ball rolling too, all
Speaker 3: of our great democratic traditions. Fuck them kids, the kids.
Speaker 2: That should that should be the T shirt, Thomas Jefferson some.
Speaker 4: Fuck them kids.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 3: Now, At the same time, he argued that the fight
Speaker 3: for emancipation was the responsibility of the young. He's just
Speaker 3: too old and tired to do it now. Cole's was
Speaker 3: left alone and his credit He's like eventually like, well, okay,
Speaker 3: I guess I can't do this, right. I can't make
Speaker 3: the country fix this problem. So you know what I
Speaker 3: am going to do is not be a fucking hypocrite.
Speaker 3: And he travels with he takes the seventeen people he owns,
Speaker 3: and he purchases like one hundred and sixty acres for
Speaker 3: each of them, along with a bunch of farming equipment
Speaker 3: and sets them all up independently on free farms.
Speaker 2: Let's go.
Speaker 4: He actually does the thing.
Speaker 2: Dude, It was already a nail. Like your first nail
Speaker 2: in the coffin is when the guy goes, well, no,
Speaker 2: take the job, because you can change him. You could
Speaker 2: work from within, you could be the you could be
Speaker 2: the adult in the room. Like listen, guys, Yeah, that
Speaker 2: don't work man.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 2: You can't sway an institution like that.
Speaker 4: Yeah. And he does eventually like realize, do the right thing.
Speaker 2: Yeah, so that's nice.
Speaker 3: Another one of Thomas Jefferson's friends was the revolutionary war
Speaker 3: hero Thatius Kosyusko who leaves Jefferson. This is one of
Speaker 3: his friends who, like is, becomes an abolitionist, right, and
Speaker 3: he's frustrated that Jefferson. You know, Jefferson's always got these excuses,
Speaker 3: and so when he dies Thtius is like, here's twenty grand.
Speaker 3: Here's a bunch of money. You can use, like half
Speaker 3: of it on your own debts, use the rest to
Speaker 3: free your slaves and buy them land and equipment for
Speaker 3: them to farm. Right, I'm giving you the money pays
Speaker 3: toll even solve a bunch of your problems, right, Damn.
Speaker 2: I'm giving you to buy it like I'm putting my money. Look, man,
Speaker 2: I'm a pony up. Yeah no, excuse bro, Yeah yeah.
Speaker 3: And he he makes Jefferson the executor of his will,
Speaker 3: so it should be Jefferson's job to do this. Jefferson refuses.
Speaker 3: He just doesn't do it. He doesn't take the money.
Speaker 3: Yeah from Master of the Mountain quote. If Jefferson had
Speaker 3: accepted Kazuyusko's bequest, as much as half of it would
Speaker 3: have gone not to Jefferson, but in effect to his slaves,
Speaker 3: to the purchase price for land, livestock, equipment, and transportation
Speaker 3: to get them started in a place such as Illinois
Speaker 3: or Ohio. Moreover, the slaves most suited for immediate emancipation,
Speaker 3: Smith's Cooper's carpenters, the most skilled farmers were the very
Speaker 3: ones whom Jefferson most wanted to keep. He also shrank
Speaker 3: from any public identification with the cause of emancipation. So
Speaker 3: part of why he does it is he just doesn't
Speaker 3: want to get into the debate, right, he's a political
Speaker 3: Oh my god. Yeah, that's such a vile thing. Like
Speaker 3: your friend, literally, and you were in a horrible debt.
Speaker 2: You can Yeah, he removed every possible obstacle. Yeah, Jefferson
Speaker 2: still wouldn't do it and still wasn't down.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 3: Thomas Jefferson died July fourth, eighteen twenty six, leaving a
Speaker 3: debt of more than one hundred and seven thousand dollars
Speaker 3: for his children to manage. Monticello never became an engine
Speaker 3: of profit, at least not one that could generate enough
Speaker 3: money to cover the interest on his debts. He died delusional,
Speaker 3: sure a public lottery would be created to pay for
Speaker 3: his daughter and her family to keep Monticello and his slaves,
Speaker 3: But within a year, his descendants had sold the land,
Speaker 3: everything inside the house, the famous house itself, and one
Speaker 3: hundred and thirty human beings. Only seven of the people
Speaker 3: that he'd owned were freed, and only five of those
Speaker 3: people were freed by Jefferson in his will and again Washington,
Speaker 3: who's not at all a saint here freeze about half
Speaker 3: of the people at Mount Vernon, So even by that standard,
Speaker 3: not a great guy.
Speaker 1: No.
Speaker 3: Yeah, there's a quote about Jefferson as an abolitionist or
Speaker 3: an emancipator. That's like, never did a man get more
Speaker 3: credit for that which he did not do?
Speaker 2: And yeah that is a dope quote. Yeah, yeah, never
Speaker 2: did a man get mo credit for some he do?
Speaker 4: God dog.
Speaker 2: Yeah, well prop that's the episodes, all right, man, I'm
Speaker 2: glad it's as dead.
Speaker 1: As he is.
Speaker 4: Yeah, yeah, that's kind of where I stand.
Speaker 2: Yeah, bro, Like and like you said, like we ain't
Speaker 2: even talked about him as a president and Mamith's destiny
Speaker 2: and all that shit that like is its own. Yeah
Speaker 2: that we be here, We be here till till December
Speaker 2: talking about all that.
Speaker 3: Right right, Yeah, there's a lot more to say about him,
Speaker 3: but yeah, I think we've done.
Speaker 2: No, this is perfect because it's no, this is definitely
Speaker 2: perfect because it's like you need something to say, like
Speaker 2: before a person gets into the hero status, let us
Speaker 2: remember that this man ain't no hero, you know, and
Speaker 2: I I just you know us, we follow politics, we
Speaker 2: follow geopolitics, we follow all this stuff, and there may
Speaker 2: be characters who may step up and may do something
Speaker 2: that's like, oh, that's cool. You know, it's eight points
Speaker 2: for your team, you know. But like, like, let's think
Speaker 2: about this dude that you're trying to give, you know,
Speaker 2: trying to give some give dap to like that man
Speaker 2: is not your friend, you know, and and people need
Speaker 2: to just yeah, like like this is important. It's just
Speaker 2: like how yo, antenna's up before you start, like man
Speaker 2: is that man is not a hero. And I'm so
Speaker 2: glad you did this and I got to be a
Speaker 2: part of it so I can make fun of him.
Speaker 2: But I will say this, I will say this. I
Speaker 2: believe that there's I might be pulling this out of
Speaker 2: my ass just like him. A gathering of his descendants
Speaker 2: like that that continues and that they're like, we need
Speaker 2: our money. Like you know, I'm saying like, yo, like
Speaker 2: this is what you promised us. We need where our
Speaker 2: money at. And I'm like, I hope they get their money. Yeah,
Speaker 2: I mean I hope we all get our money in operations.
Speaker 3: But it still, yeah, I'm supportive of preparations. I will
Speaker 3: have to say he didn't have any money when her
Speaker 3: you can take it all literally, never.
Speaker 1: Do that so funny.
Speaker 2: It's like, yeah, hey, I'll write your check, bro, you know,
Speaker 2: just don't cash it till Tuesday.
Speaker 3: Yeah. Uh classic welch prop. You have a podcast Tics.
Speaker 2: Of Politics with pop with pop YEP with Soda and yeah,
Speaker 2: where I kind of teach you how to like hey
Speaker 2: U Joe Antennas like don't trust that, don't trust him
Speaker 2: over there. That boy ain't no good.
Speaker 4: You know what I'm saying.
Speaker 2: Yeah, no, so that Yeah, seasons cranking, really trying to
Speaker 2: like step our game up. We're doing hood politics for eyeballs.
Speaker 2: Also that I've attempted to remove this the swear words
Speaker 2: from so that, like you know, you can if you're
Speaker 2: if you're so inclined to have ears around that you're
Speaker 2: trying to keep swear words away from I got one
Speaker 2: for you, what I'm saying, excellent, And I got a book,
Speaker 2: poetry book, terra form.
Speaker 4: That's right, that's right.
Speaker 1: If you don't do some kind of project called you
Speaker 1: know what I'm saying, I feel like.
Speaker 2: We're I don't know what it is.
Speaker 3: I don't know what it is yet, you know what, Like.
Speaker 2: I know right before I even send off the audio
Speaker 2: to Matt. I go through and edit them out. I say,
Speaker 2: I say, it's so much, it's embarrassing. When I listen
Speaker 2: back to myself, it'll be like, you know what I'm saying.
Speaker 2: So it's like I have all the time. Yeah, one day,
Speaker 2: you know what I'm gonna do.
Speaker 1: Just for you.
Speaker 2: I'm going to chop them all and put them on
Speaker 2: one file and.
Speaker 1: Just like, oh I want to you know what I'm saying, remixed?
Speaker 2: I need it on a boat man. You know what
Speaker 2: I'm saying. Okay, I'll tell that it's hilarious.
Speaker 3: Well, what I'm saying is thank you, and uh yeah
Speaker 3: I was. Folks, want to donate some money to the
Speaker 3: Portland Diaper Bank to help people who don't have much
Speaker 3: money afford diapers or you know, just have diapers for free,
Speaker 3: you can do fundme Portland Diaper Bank. Behind the Bastards
Speaker 3: and yeah, that'll that'll get you what you need.
Speaker 1: My dog has decided we're done. She's she's playing in
Speaker 1: the background. If you so, it's it's over.
Speaker 3: Bye bye.
Speaker 1: Behind the Bastards is a production of cool Zone Media.
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