Speaker 1: Hello, and welcome to Cool People who did cool stuff.
Speaker 1: I'm your host, Margaret Kiljoy, and this is a flashback week,
Speaker 1: which just means we're gonna rerun something because Cool Zone
Speaker 1: Media has the week off because people fought and died
Speaker 1: for days off or even entire weeks off. Sometimes it's
Speaker 1: called vacation. This week, I'm going to rerun the Civil
Speaker 1: War within the Civil War with prop as the guest,
Speaker 1: because it was the second episode we ever aired and
Speaker 1: it's one of my favorites. And so if you've never
Speaker 1: gone back and listened to the old episodes, here's your
Speaker 1: chance to listen to it. And if you have already
Speaker 1: listened to it, I have absolutely not gone through and
Speaker 1: interspersed different Easter eggs for you to find. That has
Speaker 1: not happened, but I will say this week or very soon,
Speaker 1: I have yet another game that is going to kickstart
Speaker 1: called Defenders of the Wild. It is a board game
Speaker 1: and then I helped with the role playing game side
Speaker 1: of it, and that also comes with a complete role
Speaker 1: playing game system and you can find it on Kickstarter
Speaker 1: you by searching Defenders of the Wild by Outlandish Games.
Speaker 1: Here's an episode. Hello and welcome to Cool People Who
Speaker 1: Did Cool Stuff, which is, of course the only podcast
Speaker 1: that clearly says what it's about in the title, leaves
Speaker 1: no room at all for confusion about its contents. Nope,
Speaker 1: I'm your host, Margaret Kiljoy, and each week I'm going
Speaker 1: to bring you another story about rebellion, resistance and all.
Speaker 2: The cool people who did cool stuff.
Speaker 1: My guest this week is Prop, who I believe you're
Speaker 1: a poet, an mc and activist and you're also the
Speaker 1: host of Hood Politics.
Speaker 2: Nailed it great. How are you doing today? Man? I'm
Speaker 2: all right, it's pretty hot out here. I'm I'm good.
Speaker 3: You know, I'm apprehensive because I'm so nervous about any
Speaker 3: any pod that somebody says is like it's kylic bastards
Speaker 3: and I'm like, but reverse, and I'm like, ow, I'm
Speaker 3: just nervous. I'm going on comany in blind Yeah, I'm
Speaker 3: saying Margaret, Yeah, but I'm here for the ride.
Speaker 1: All right, all right, And we have Sophie on the
Speaker 1: call to Sophie, how are you doing.
Speaker 4: I'm good. I'm excited to have Prop here for this one.
Speaker 4: I think I think he'll enjoy it. And I mean
Speaker 4: that like, I'll actually think you'll enjoy this. Okay, when
Speaker 4: you're on bassards rou I'm like, oh, this is going
Speaker 4: to be a good one, which means it's not going
Speaker 4: to be a good one.
Speaker 2: Yeah, which means oh, you're going to enjoy this. I'm like,
Speaker 2: oh yeah, murder, murder, murder, racism, So enjoy it.
Speaker 4: So and so, Margaret, what are we talking about today?
Speaker 1: Well, there is there is murder and racism, but it's
Speaker 1: not from the point of view of the people who
Speaker 1: do the murder and the races.
Speaker 2: Okay, okay, okay.
Speaker 1: So because this week we're going to talk about this
Speaker 1: war you might have heard of, called the Civil War,
Speaker 1: the US Civil War, but specifically yeah, yeah, but specifically
Speaker 1: I'm going to talk about the civil war within the
Speaker 1: civil war, okay, which, if you write it out and
Speaker 1: you put it in between, is the civil civil war war.
Speaker 3: And I'm going to talk about Well done, Thank you,
Speaker 3: old y'all. Pause, foot at that was great, Okay, I
Speaker 3: am now impressed. Like again, I was apprehensive. I know
Speaker 3: what I was getting into. But the civil civil war war,
Speaker 3: that's brilliant. Yeah, I like that.
Speaker 2: Thank you.
Speaker 1: And so we're going to talk about the basically how
Speaker 1: there was a civil war within the Civil War, there
Speaker 1: was a race and a class revolt against the white Confederates. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and so in the first half, we're going to talk
Speaker 1: about the ways that a lot of different black people
Speaker 1: in the South pot for their own freedom, whether under
Speaker 1: the US flag or not under the US flag. And
Speaker 1: we're going to talk about how the South wasn't a
Speaker 1: unified place and support of the Confederacy, and how all
Speaker 1: types of people from the South basically were like, well,
Speaker 1: fuck this Confederacy thing and fought against it.
Speaker 2: I love it.
Speaker 1: And in the second half, we're going to talk about
Speaker 1: the Lowry Gang, who're an indigenous led guerrilla insurgency in
Speaker 1: northwest Carolina.
Speaker 2: Let's go, all right, let's go.
Speaker 3: I also, dude, you know what, I'm glad I'm on this,
Speaker 3: you know, for a number of reasons. But one I
Speaker 3: think it's like, obviously it's so timely with like you know,
Speaker 3: adding Ukraine to the list of like conflicts and wars
Speaker 3: across the world right now. But like the idea that
Speaker 3: like you can't just you know, say, it's not like
Speaker 3: everybody in Russia is down with this, you know what
Speaker 3: I'm saying, And it's like it's good to remember that
Speaker 3: when you start, like, you know, making your like sort
Speaker 3: of American versions of like good guys and bad guys
Speaker 3: to be like, yo, do you.
Speaker 2: Agree with everything your country do?
Speaker 3: So why you think why you think anywhere else would
Speaker 3: be the same, you know what I'm saying, Like or
Speaker 3: wouldn't be the same, Like people say everybody ain't down
Speaker 3: with what you know they government do or what they
Speaker 3: saw do. Like so I think that this is I'm
Speaker 3: glad that this is coming up because that mugg is like, like, yo,
Speaker 3: like be realalistic about what you're watching, you know what
Speaker 3: I'm saying, And it's that like, well, man, no.
Speaker 5: I think China really, I think China loves China, you
Speaker 5: know what I'm saying, Like, yeah, they gon't do what
Speaker 5: we do where it's like I'm not gonna let you
Speaker 5: talk about us, but you know what I'm saying, Yeah,
Speaker 5: but nah, it's full be on some bullshit, you know.
Speaker 1: Yeah anyway, no, no, and like and it's even true
Speaker 1: on the other side too, right, like because the North
Speaker 1: was not like yeah, I mean you got the bad
Speaker 1: guys in the story the Confederacy are the bad guys,
Speaker 1: Like I'm not going to tend anything else other than that. No, no, no, no,
Speaker 1: but the North is like, well some of them are
Speaker 1: good guys and assholes too, you know.
Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, just because you lived up there, you know
Speaker 3: what I'm saying that somehow your locale means that you
Speaker 3: think differently, like nah man, yeah for sure.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 1: So the So the Civil War, it runs from eighteen
Speaker 1: sixty one to eighteen sixty five. It kills six hundred
Speaker 1: and twenty thousand people, which, to put that number in perspective,
Speaker 1: that's half again as many Americans died in World War Two,
Speaker 1: or two thirds as many as have died from COVID
Speaker 1: as of the time we're recording this.
Speaker 2: Sheesh.
Speaker 1: But uh, Civil War starts because eighteen sixty Abraham Lincoln
Speaker 1: got elected on a new States out West, shouldn't be
Speaker 1: Slave states platform and a bunch of rich white people
Speaker 1: in the slave States didn't like that, so they succeeded.
Speaker 1: The North said now you're not allowed to do that,
Speaker 1: and then in eighteen sixty one, ya.
Speaker 2: Have a war.
Speaker 1: And to be clear, and I don't know what did
Speaker 1: you get taught growing up that the Civil War was
Speaker 1: about slavery?
Speaker 3: Well, yes, I mean, I'm remember I'm in California, and
Speaker 3: some black panther from the inner city. So I absolutely ay,
Speaker 3: was thought this was about slaves.
Speaker 2: That's that is better than the education I received, dude,
Speaker 2: I tell you man.
Speaker 3: Like when I heard people like it was like, it's
Speaker 3: the other way around, where like you know, obviously from
Speaker 3: your section, like for somebody you to become a full
Speaker 3: grown adult and somebody would be like, no, this is
Speaker 3: about slavery, and how y'all probably like in y'all's area,
Speaker 3: was like, what, No, it's about states rights? You Like,
Speaker 3: I felt the other way around when somebody actually said
Speaker 3: what was about to say, He's like.
Speaker 2: What what are you talking about? Yeah? Like you who
Speaker 2: told you that states rights to do?
Speaker 4: What?
Speaker 2: This is a big question? That was like that's what
Speaker 2: I was thinking. I was like, you hear yourself.
Speaker 3: States rights to own sly, don't I get seriously? You know?
Speaker 2: Yeah? Yeah?
Speaker 1: And so I will argue that the entire South, white
Speaker 1: and black new is about slavery. Then the North wasn't
Speaker 1: sure about what it was about. For a lot of
Speaker 1: the North, a lot of the white North and obviously
Speaker 1: all the black North, A lot of the white North
Speaker 1: knew is about slavery, but some of the white North
Speaker 1: was fighting for like, you're not allowed to break away,
Speaker 1: fuck you, And some of them were even arguing. I've
Speaker 1: read some scholars arguing that some of them were fighting
Speaker 1: to free the poor whites in the South. But the
Speaker 1: Confederates knew what the fuck they were fighting for. They
Speaker 1: were fighting for slavery.
Speaker 2: There's no question they didn't know.
Speaker 1: Yeah, so the start of this war, the Confederates, they're outnumbered,
Speaker 1: just proof that just because you're the underdog doesn't make
Speaker 1: you a better person. And they have little industrial production
Speaker 1: so they can't make their own weapons. Really, but they
Speaker 1: have this advantage that they're fighting on their home territory,
Speaker 1: and then since their population's more rural, more of the
Speaker 1: soldiers come in, better horse riders and better shots, so
Speaker 1: they have some advantages. But they have one big disadvantage
Speaker 1: because their entire economy. You probably know this, and probably
Speaker 1: the audience knows this. The entire economy of the South
Speaker 1: relied on slavery and repressing people. It turns out takes
Speaker 1: constant attention. Yes, and all their best fighters suddenly went
Speaker 1: off to war. Yes, So this is going to bring
Speaker 1: us to a woman named Rose from South Carolina.
Speaker 2: Well, saw a Rose okay.
Speaker 1: And so at the beginning of the war, the Union
Speaker 1: didn't let black folks in as soldiers, right, But it
Speaker 1: turns out you don't actually need anyone's permission to kill
Speaker 1: slavers or steal all their shit, or grind their economy
Speaker 1: at a halt, or help everyone run the fuck away.
Speaker 1: You could just do it. It's cool and good. It
Speaker 1: is always morally correct. Yeah, and so people realized that
Speaker 1: it was actually this this woman Rose. She's one of
Speaker 1: my favorite stories in all of us, but she's actually
Speaker 1: one of the hardest to get any information about. This
Speaker 1: Historian Favolia Glymph is the only historian I found who's
Speaker 1: collected information about this woman because the only primary sources
Speaker 1: we have are all of the terrified white women writing
Speaker 1: in their diaries. How fucking scared they are. This woman
Speaker 1: named Rose.
Speaker 4: Story name is like, it's so classic, it is so
Speaker 4: it is.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it's perfect name, Glymph, you said, yeah, perfect name.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 3: I was definitely gonna want to put a pin in
Speaker 3: her name too. So but I'm glad you did, Healfie,
Speaker 3: because that's that's quite a name. Also, terrified white women
Speaker 3: journals is like the thing that just doesn't die.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it really does.
Speaker 1: God, they seriously like all journals are like, I can't
Speaker 1: sleep at night. I'm up at four am writing this
Speaker 1: note because I'm so terrified of the Negroes and the Yankees,
Speaker 1: and specifically I'm afraid of this you know, Rose that
Speaker 1: is leading an insurrection.
Speaker 2: In their town. Yes, so so.
Speaker 1: Pineville, South Carolina is this like small resort town. It's
Speaker 1: basically sixty summer homes for like the rich fock slavers
Speaker 1: when they're like taking breaks from their plantations. But with
Speaker 1: the Civil War, a lot of the families moved their
Speaker 1: full time okay, and basically saw as this place of
Speaker 1: refuge against to hide from the war. And they tried
Speaker 1: to bring like all the people they claim to own,
Speaker 1: but most of them were like, no, we're not going
Speaker 1: to come with you.
Speaker 2: Fuck you.
Speaker 1: You have no means with which to compel us to
Speaker 1: come with you, so fuck.
Speaker 2: Off to oversee you going at war?
Speaker 3: Yeah you you ninety two years old and your wife
Speaker 3: keep catching the vapors every time it gets too hot.
Speaker 2: No, we not going I love it. Yeah.
Speaker 1: And some people did go, and then they kind of
Speaker 1: just didn't work, or everyone who went there just refused
Speaker 1: to work and then this was happening all over the South.
Speaker 1: I want to use this. This is one of my
Speaker 1: examples because it ties into this other thing. The socialist
Speaker 1: author W. E. B. Du Bois is the first person
Speaker 1: I've heard of really talk about this. In his nineteen
Speaker 1: thirty five book Black Reconstruction. Basically, he claims that the
Speaker 1: thing that won the Civil War was the most powerful
Speaker 1: general strike the US has ever seen, which was the
Speaker 1: Confederate economy was just completely gutted as black workers, as
Speaker 1: he refers to them as black workers withhold their labor
Speaker 1: from the Confederates and then offer it for a wage
Speaker 1: to the union. And half a million black workers ended
Speaker 1: up working for a wage at union camps. And then,
Speaker 1: I mean, under really shitty conditions. And we're going to
Speaker 1: get into this, but.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I think that, like, I'm glad you kind of
Speaker 3: like landing there, because I think like the you know,
Speaker 3: when you think about the arc of somebody like an
Speaker 3: Abraham Lincoln, and arc of like the country finally falling
Speaker 3: into secession and then accepting the fact that like, okay,
Speaker 3: this is about slaves, like like finally letting themselves say
Speaker 3: it out loud, like what we already do? You know
Speaker 3: what I'm saying when you take a slaver that was like,
Speaker 3: I mean, it's just it's just way too much money
Speaker 3: on the table. Like I'm being as obviously, I'm like,
Speaker 3: this is me being a slave descendant, just understanding like
Speaker 3: what's happening in this moment in time when you like
Speaker 3: looking man, that that cotton crop like it, I mean
Speaker 3: you're talking about the the the entire like makes more
Speaker 3: than every other commodity in the country combined, Like when
Speaker 3: you add it all together just from that because you
Speaker 3: ain't paying the workers.
Speaker 2: You know what I'm saying, this is this is pure profit.
Speaker 3: You know what I'm saying, you know, notwithstanding the investment
Speaker 3: to get the get and feed as small as you can,
Speaker 3: you know, the slavery, the slave that you had, and
Speaker 3: you could take somebody who might have been in the
Speaker 3: beginning like on.
Speaker 2: Some like.
Speaker 3: A I know, I just kind of like close my
Speaker 3: eyes and do it. I mean, ye, that kind of sucks,
Speaker 3: but I'm like, I'm just one guy. I mean, you know,
Speaker 3: you're in the ocean. You might as well swim. I
Speaker 3: mean it sucks, but like here, what's a loon of money?
Speaker 2: You know what I'm saying, and then at first check
Speaker 2: come and you're like nah, fam nah this much. Look
Speaker 2: you can't get it. Look, look I'm.
Speaker 3: Sorry, sorry, not sorry, you know what I'm saying, Like,
Speaker 3: and how that evolution of just being like and then
Speaker 3: then the whole like, well, it's it's too big to fail,
Speaker 3: Like I mean, it's you know, you if we shut
Speaker 3: this down, you shut down the whole country, Like there's
Speaker 3: no it's the biggest of what do you want us
Speaker 3: to do, dude, just the biggest money maker, you know
Speaker 3: what I'm saying. And that evolution of like assuming that
Speaker 3: at some point, like you said, my ancestors would be like,
Speaker 3: uh nah.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I mean what worse can you do to us? Yeah?
Speaker 1: You know yeah yeah no, And and du Bois makes
Speaker 1: the argument, I have no counter argument. I believe this
Speaker 1: whole heartedly. This is what fucking wins the war on
Speaker 1: the end more than anything else. Yeah, black workers refusing
Speaker 1: to work, also, black soldiers fighting, but.
Speaker 3: Black soldiers, yeah in it and being still paid less yeah,
Speaker 3: less food, still being treated like you know, really human,
Speaker 3: but carrying the work, you know what I'm saying. But yeah,
Speaker 3: like absolutely yep, who's being like, well, hit you in
Speaker 3: your pocket?
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah.
Speaker 1: And in the end, as so people would flee, especially
Speaker 1: once as the Union would come through the South, they'd
Speaker 1: be like, yep, and they cross the lines. In the end,
Speaker 1: apparently twelve percent of the South's labor pool, I guess
Speaker 1: you could call it. They just fuck off and they
Speaker 1: cross Union lines. But then further historians have argued that
Speaker 1: it's not just the people who left who did this work,
Speaker 1: who did this general strike. So in Pineville, South Carolina,
Speaker 1: it's happening everywhere, It's happening everywhere. When folks on Pineville,
Speaker 1: South Carolina in eighteen sixty five, in the very last
Speaker 1: months of the war, this woman named Rose is an
Speaker 1: enslaved house servant. She has at least two grown up kids.
Speaker 1: There's very little known about it, right, but she frees
Speaker 1: herself and then she doesn't fuck off across the Union lines.
Speaker 1: She sticks around to help fight and organize. And she
Speaker 1: was probably the leader of the insurrection along with her
Speaker 1: son Pringle.
Speaker 2: And we know that what Pringle. Yeah, man's name is Pringle.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I looked it up at way pre date. Springles.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 3: I was gonna again another name that I was like,
Speaker 3: I'm gonna let this pass because he let a slave revolt,
Speaker 3: So I'm not going to drag you. I'm not going
Speaker 3: to drag you right like I think it's yeah, yeah,
Speaker 3: it's like, you know, two hundred years later, the association
Speaker 3: with the chips.
Speaker 2: You know what I'm saying. But he could say my
Speaker 2: name is Pringle because I get all the chips. You
Speaker 2: know what I'm saying. Yeah, I made him a rapper.
Speaker 4: You did, you did, and I appreciate it.
Speaker 1: So this insurrection they lead, it leads hundreds of people
Speaker 1: to safety during the time before the Union army even approaches.
Speaker 1: And then by the time at one point the Union
Speaker 1: army like sweeps through really quickly. They don't actually conquer
Speaker 1: the area, but they get a thousand people across the
Speaker 1: line when that happens. And then it's hard to tell
Speaker 1: how much it was a quiet insurrection versus a loud one.
Speaker 1: A lot of it was that people just refused work,
Speaker 1: slowed down. A lot of them gave themselves quotas like oh,
Speaker 1: I'm going to do half a task per day, so
Speaker 1: they were like working just fast enough and.
Speaker 2: They love it.
Speaker 1: Yeah, and there's no one around to compel their labor,
Speaker 1: right because yeah, all the white dudes are off fighting
Speaker 1: the war. Yeah, and at its peak, this insurrection has
Speaker 1: the run of the town. The scared white folks hide
Speaker 1: in their houses and write in their journals while black
Speaker 1: folks are drilling in the streets and military formation.
Speaker 2: I love it.
Speaker 1: And they stole whatever they needed from the people who've
Speaker 1: been stealing from them their whole fucking lives. And it's
Speaker 1: just kept spreading miles and miles in every direction. People
Speaker 1: kept coming here, and eventually Confederate armies like, all right,
Speaker 1: we have to fucking do something about this, and so
Speaker 1: they send these these scouts, who are the gorilla troops
Speaker 1: for the Confederate Army. The Union Army has scouts too,
Speaker 1: but they're the official gorillas and they go around do
Speaker 1: the dirty work. And so they round up and kill
Speaker 1: a bunch of the leaders this insurrection. They don't get
Speaker 1: Pringle or Rose yet, and they force everyone back to work,
Speaker 1: and this kind of turns into this protracted, slow guerrilla
Speaker 1: war between the scouts and the insurrection, and eventually it
Speaker 1: keeps going on long enough that the Confederate Army has
Speaker 1: to send an entire company of cavalry, which is like
Speaker 1: one hundred cavalrymen could have been off fighting the war
Speaker 1: and instead of to keep going to fight this civil
Speaker 1: war happening within the South.
Speaker 2: They have a big battle.
Speaker 1: It goes really badly for Rose and Pringle and the
Speaker 1: rest of them. Twenty to thirty of them die and
Speaker 1: they only managed to injure some of the cavalrymen, and
Speaker 1: Pringle and Rose get found and executed. But even though
Speaker 1: they lose this specific battle, this is after they freed
Speaker 1: you know, the record I see as like implying at
Speaker 1: least thirteen hundred people.
Speaker 2: Right, wow, and so knows that many?
Speaker 1: Yeah, like, yeah, that seems like an all right, you know,
Speaker 1: like the.
Speaker 2: Mathos And I'm positive that, like I know, like.
Speaker 3: Those executions were burutal, like they were like trying to
Speaker 3: you know, they try to make a statement when they
Speaker 3: capture somebody that like led.
Speaker 2: You know, other people to freedom.
Speaker 3: So I already know, like, even without knowing her particular story,
Speaker 3: I already know the way they killed them two was
Speaker 3: public and disgusting.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, it was, and which I mean leads to
Speaker 1: the argument that dying in the streets fighting, you know,
Speaker 1: seems nice.
Speaker 2: It's still pretty rad like it just yeah.
Speaker 1: And then so the end, the Union Army of course
Speaker 1: it doesn't have their backs at all. There's Lincoln's like
Speaker 1: Rules of War that he wrote specifically called this type
Speaker 1: of thing. It's qualified the same as piracy or banditry.
Speaker 1: But they still do all this awesome shit. Yeah, so
Speaker 1: let's go Rose, And speaking of Pringle and potato chips,
Speaker 1: I'm trying to get sponsored by really wholesome products on
Speaker 1: this show, and so our official sponsor, I believe, our
Speaker 1: only official sponsor all the other ads you here are
Speaker 1: unofficial and they're not allowed, is potatoes.
Speaker 2: The concept of potatoes.
Speaker 3: I'll take that because, like you know, I just I
Speaker 3: just listened to three hours on a potato famin So
Speaker 3: how good potatoes are? You know?
Speaker 2: And I am a French fry connoisseur. All right, so
Speaker 2: I'm here for that.
Speaker 1: Well you're on the right show, then, yes, yes, all right,
Speaker 1: here's some ads and we're back after those ads that
Speaker 1: were not about some I hope most of them are
Speaker 1: about potatoes.
Speaker 2: I hope they're potatoes.
Speaker 3: Let me tell you something, man, I'm going to invoke
Speaker 3: something right now that's probably not fair. The thing is, like, okay,
Speaker 3: I am fully aware of the totality of the problematicness
Speaker 3: of somewhere like a Chick fil a. However, crossed by
Speaker 3: feed at some point was this person with two buckets
Speaker 3: of French of like the Chris cut fries, and I
Speaker 3: was like, that's an immediate retweet. I'm like, this is
Speaker 3: and all I saw I just saw fries and my
Speaker 3: eyes glazed over.
Speaker 2: I was just like, oh my god, the buckets. Let's go.
Speaker 2: And then I was like, damn, man, I know, I
Speaker 2: know it's I know, I know, I know. It's okay, guys, like,
Speaker 2: hear me out though, I know it's.
Speaker 1: Chick filet, but it's not the potato's fault, you know,
Speaker 1: but it ain't the potato fault. Yeah, you understand what
Speaker 1: I'm saying. I'm like, they pay whale, the places pay whale. Okay, okay, anyway, yeah, yeah.
Speaker 2: All right.
Speaker 1: So the next next chunk of the story is about
Speaker 1: a man named Abraham Galloway okay, and he and the
Speaker 1: Coastal the Coastal Black Militia North Carolina. And we've got
Speaker 1: way more information about him, in part because he survives
Speaker 1: the war, which is a nice anti spoiler, you know,
Speaker 1: like he's not king died during the story, at least not.
Speaker 1: They were like done with the story as the downside
Speaker 1: is right. With bastards, you have this part where you're like,
Speaker 1: all this bad stuff's happening, but then they die in
Speaker 1: the end and you're happy that they die.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 1: And then with cool people hit cool stuff, they die
Speaker 1: in the end, it's not as good. That's history. So
Speaker 1: Abraham Galloway he was born enslaved in a tiny fishing
Speaker 1: town near Wilmington, North Carolina, and he was he was
Speaker 1: owned by his own second cousin.
Speaker 4: Great.
Speaker 1: Yeah, he moved to Wilmington. He becomes a brickmaker and
Speaker 1: basically his fucking cousin tells him that he has to
Speaker 1: go work and give him the money. And but Wilmington
Speaker 1: is a hot bed of abolitionism, which is which I'm
Speaker 1: not talking about. Like like when I got told about
Speaker 1: abolitionism when I was in public school or whatever, I
Speaker 1: got told it was like well meaning white people who
Speaker 1: like wrote the government about how morality demanded the end of.
Speaker 2: Slavery or whatever.
Speaker 1: Wilmington was a hotbed of abolition And by that I
Speaker 1: mean it was full of black people free and enslaved,
Speaker 1: who are teaching black people how to read and write,
Speaker 1: who are smuggling fugitives north who are passing around tracks
Speaker 1: that called for the moral necessity of violence to end slavery,
Speaker 1: including this tracked by black abolitionist David Walker to the
Speaker 1: colored citizens of the world, which and this is a
Speaker 1: reoccurring theme, and all the abolition is propaganda I've ever seen,
Speaker 1: specifically includes the need for the rights of women. Also,
Speaker 1: and this is the pamphlet that basically Nat Turner's eighteen
Speaker 1: thirty one rebellion gets blamed on. And so David Walker
Speaker 1: might have written it in Boston, but he was born
Speaker 1: in Wilmington, which is where our hero is currently. He's
Speaker 1: twenty years old, it's eighteen fifty seven. He decides to
Speaker 1: get the fuck out. He was nervous that he was
Speaker 1: going to get sold further south, so his friend Richard Eden,
Speaker 1: decides to come with. Richard was a barber who had
Speaker 1: just gotten busted for daring to marry a free mixed
Speaker 1: race woman. So he was facing the lash and he's like, yeah,
Speaker 1: fuck this, I'm getting out, And it was hard to
Speaker 1: get out. Anyone who was caught helping them would have
Speaker 1: been killed or sold. One anti slavery ring that had
Speaker 1: just been busted right before this or around that time,
Speaker 1: the black pilot got sold further south, which was like
Speaker 1: one of the main threats that people would face, and
Speaker 1: the white Quaker, who was involved in the whole thing
Speaker 1: also as a pilot, got murdered. Yeah so, but they
Speaker 1: eventually they do find a pilot who will sneak them
Speaker 1: onto the boat and off they go. They make it
Speaker 1: to Philly. They join up with a Vigilance Society there,
Speaker 1: which is a crew of abolitionists who fed and housed
Speaker 1: and generally helped fugitives. The Fugitive Slave Law of eighteen
Speaker 1: fifty means that even the Free States weren't free for fugitives, right,
Speaker 1: Bounty hunters could just show up and yeah, yeah, And
Speaker 1: so they keep going right because the North isn't even safe.
Speaker 1: They make it up to Canada with train tickets that
Speaker 1: the society buys them, and they once they're up there,
Speaker 1: the abolitionists give them room and board and find them work.
Speaker 1: Galloway gets a job laying brick eating gets to open
Speaker 1: a barber shop. I just like including Eden. He kind
Speaker 1: of disappears from the story here, but I'm glad he
Speaker 1: gets to go fucking be a free barber. You know, yes, yes, yes,
Speaker 1: but Abraham Galloway, he didn't want to lay bricks, not really.
Speaker 1: He wanted to destroy slavery. So he goes back across.
Speaker 2: The throw bricks.
Speaker 1: Yeah, exactly, Yeah, and I'm sure he got the chance. Yeah,
Speaker 1: he goes back across the border, and he starts giving
Speaker 1: speeches and then getting in fights with all the people
Speaker 1: trying to kill him.
Speaker 2: And then I knew. I knew his name before.
Speaker 3: I was like, I know Abraham Galloway, and now now
Speaker 3: you're at the park that I know him.
Speaker 2: Yeah, okay, anyway, go on.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 1: So in Boston he hangs out with the Vigilant Society,
Speaker 1: and then he hangs out with this this league I'd
Speaker 1: never heard of before I did this research. You've ever
Speaker 1: heard of? The Anti Man Hunting League?
Speaker 2: Yes? These people fucking rule so dope. Yeah, yeah, tell
Speaker 2: him about him. I'm leaning back. Let you tell the story.
Speaker 4: Yeah, not.
Speaker 2: These fools are hard.
Speaker 1: So it's a crew of people who are basically like,
Speaker 1: all right, well, kidnappers keep coming here and kidnapping people,
Speaker 1: all right, so we should just track down the kidnappers
Speaker 1: and then kidnap them basically, And they show up and
Speaker 1: basically their their dealers they'll find they'll find a fucking
Speaker 1: bounty hunter and they'll be like, hey, you would be
Speaker 1: so much happier and healthier if you just left Boston
Speaker 1: right now. So that's what they did.
Speaker 2: It was so dope. It was so dup.
Speaker 3: I know, fools were just like, hey, listen, don't come
Speaker 3: to Boston. Yeah, I'm telling you right now, don't come
Speaker 3: to Boston. We body snatches, all right, yeah, don't come.
Speaker 3: Oh you're gonna come, okay, cool?
Speaker 2: Yeah, we told you. What would happen? I told you
Speaker 2: not to come?
Speaker 3: Fan.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 1: And so the reason that this league starts is another
Speaker 1: interesting story. Eighteen fifty four, you have a guy named
Speaker 1: Anthony Burns who also decided to fuck off from slavery,
Speaker 1: and he gets smuggled up to Boston, and because of
Speaker 1: the fugitive slave law, the marshals come after him and
Speaker 1: he gets arrested and a crew of black and white
Speaker 1: abolitionists storm the courthouse. They break down the door of
Speaker 1: the battery ram and then shoot a federal marshal dead.
Speaker 1: Let's go, and then they get they eventually get repelled. Apparently,
Speaker 1: I think they have to call in the army or
Speaker 1: some shit. Yeah, and so so Burns gets returned to slavery,
Speaker 1: but for a moment, and as he's been like marched
Speaker 1: out of town, fifty thousand people in Boston come out
Speaker 1: to like really aggressively protest his capture. Yeah, and I
Speaker 1: don't have in front of me the population of Boston
Speaker 1: at the time, but the population of the United States
Speaker 1: was not particularly large back then, so.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah.
Speaker 3: It's also I love this because it's like, you know,
Speaker 3: a lot of times when you flatten history, you just think, like,
Speaker 3: you know, these two armies and you have citizens just
Speaker 3: kind of like sitting around waiting to see what happens,
Speaker 3: you know, especially like this the American slave narrative that
Speaker 3: was like, well, I guess we were just out in
Speaker 3: the fields hoping everything worked out, you know what I'm saying,
Speaker 3: totally nah fam like yeah nah fighting, Yeah, yeah, I
Speaker 3: gave us a green light. We was like, all right,
Speaker 3: it's own, We're gonna do our best. Yeah, you know, yeah, no,
Speaker 3: that's fucking exactly it.
Speaker 1: And like, yeah, okay, so this change is Boston overnight.
Speaker 1: And then that's how they pass all these laws making
Speaker 1: it harder to come and capture people, but just in
Speaker 1: case people try it anyway, you have the Anti man
Speaker 1: Hunting League that starts after this and then burns himself.
Speaker 1: The abolitionists raise up enough money to buy his freedom.
Speaker 1: He goes to college, he becomes a minister, and then,
Speaker 1: because it was the fucking nineteenth century, he dies of
Speaker 1: tuberculosis like fucking everyone else, twenty eight when he dies
Speaker 1: of tuberculosis.
Speaker 2: Life before penicillin.
Speaker 3: Dog, These dudes be living triple lives in one life.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and then and then you die at twenty eight
Speaker 2: after all that.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I'm thirty nine and I haven't touched a quarter
Speaker 1: of what this person.
Speaker 2: Do you understand what I'm saying.
Speaker 3: I'm like that you did all that in about twenty nine, Okay.
Speaker 1: Yeah, So so Galloway, he's passing through Boston on his
Speaker 1: way to Haiti because the abolitionists, right after John Brown
Speaker 1: gets executed, they're not just like waiting around for the
Speaker 1: US to get its act together to abolish slavery. They
Speaker 1: head to Haiti and they organized they're organizing a raid
Speaker 1: from Haiti on the American South, hoping to directly incite
Speaker 1: a civil war to end slavery.
Speaker 6: Yeah.
Speaker 1: So, so Galloway takes passage alongside some other abolitionists, including
Speaker 1: this the Scottish immigrant named James Redpath, who helped secure
Speaker 1: Haiti's diplomatic connections to the US, this guy Francis Mariam,
Speaker 1: who was one of the only people to escape from
Speaker 1: John Brown's Harper's Ferry raid, who later fled to Canada
Speaker 1: with the help of Farah. Because everyone was actually doing
Speaker 1: all kinds of weird share at the time. The abolitionists
Speaker 1: they show up in Haiti, they're received by by Haiti's
Speaker 1: president because all a Haiti fucking declares three days a
Speaker 1: morning when John.
Speaker 2: Brown is killed.
Speaker 1: And it's not just because they I mean, they fucking
Speaker 1: hate slavery, right, this is the history of Haiti. But
Speaker 1: it's not just that because they're also looking out for
Speaker 1: their own country. Because in the eighteen fifties, the US
Speaker 1: drew up plans to conquer Haiti and turn it into
Speaker 1: a slave state, and then some adventure asshole tried to
Speaker 1: conquer Cuba to turn it into a slave state around
Speaker 1: that time. Yeah, another one fucking actually conquered Nicaragua for
Speaker 1: a moment until the people down there murdered him and
Speaker 1: didn't let him turn it into a slave state.
Speaker 2: Perfect.
Speaker 3: Yeah, And I was the on was going to say, Man,
Speaker 3: I don't know, like what made them think. I don't
Speaker 3: know why you would want it with Haiti if you
Speaker 3: didn't really if you know anything about the history, it's like, nah, fam,
Speaker 3: don't don't come try to down here. Yeah you know,
Speaker 3: we don't. Won't play down here. Don't don't bring it
Speaker 3: down here, fam.
Speaker 2: Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 1: And so Galloway stays in Haiti for a while planning
Speaker 1: this raid, but then the South seceeds, and so he
Speaker 1: hurries the fuck back to States to fight, because that
Speaker 1: was their whole point was to try and get a
Speaker 1: civil war. And you know, but it didn't take invading
Speaker 1: the South. All you had to do to start a
Speaker 1: civil war apparently was to get a moderate Republican named
Speaker 1: Lincoln in offense, right, he was a.
Speaker 2: Moderate and like yo, like.
Speaker 3: The Apple TV just did like for Black History, did
Speaker 3: a dope little three part series on him.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 3: Yeah, it's called the Lincoln Dilemma, which was really more
Speaker 3: about Frederick Douglass and how like really that Frederick Douglas
Speaker 3: kind of radicalized him.
Speaker 2: That was like that, like the and just sort of
Speaker 2: the evolution of.
Speaker 3: This, like you said, rather Khaki, you know, moderate Republican
Speaker 3: turning into this like oh yeah.
Speaker 2: No, we gotta we can't, this can't last, you know
Speaker 2: what I'm saying. And it was really Frederick Douglas.
Speaker 3: So that's but yeah, yeah, what took them to finally
Speaker 3: leave was there just slightly a little less tiny less racist?
Speaker 1: Yeah yeah, yeah, which has no I mean living in
Speaker 1: the US now, it's impossible to imagine the right wing
Speaker 1: getting set by a moderate.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, right, by like just the just vitamin D
Speaker 2: milk version.
Speaker 3: It's just the most plane yeah, saltine cracker.
Speaker 2: Yeah, no, seasoned.
Speaker 3: Fried chicken, undercooked, like just just potato salad with raisin.
Speaker 3: I'm sorry, but yeah, yeah, the most basic, Yeah, moderates
Speaker 3: and they can't handle it.
Speaker 1: So they have a whole they can't handle it. Yeah, yes,
Speaker 1: which good. It got them fucking crushed. I'm glad.
Speaker 2: But yeah.
Speaker 1: So so Galloway he shows back up in the US
Speaker 1: and he's like all right, he gets himself recruited into
Speaker 1: the spy service for the US Army and he's not
Speaker 1: really a union guy, but it's like the best thing going. Yeah,
Speaker 1: And he's reporting directly to General Benjamin Butler, who kind
Speaker 1: of starts the war an asshole. He's like, not, he's
Speaker 1: even more let's say moderate than he wasn't even particularly
Speaker 1: anti slavery at the start of the war. But he's
Speaker 1: actually he's the first Union general who starts hiring black refugees.
Speaker 1: And it's the biographer I read, David Sisselski, suggests that
Speaker 1: it's possible he got this idea from Galloway, and if so,
Speaker 1: Galloway just changed the fucking face of history. Yeah, and
Speaker 1: that one moment amazing because all that general strike shit
Speaker 1: I'm talking about, starts with that. And so then Galloway
Speaker 1: goes on and does spy ship for two and a
Speaker 1: half years, and he's incredibly valuable, as are all of
Speaker 1: the black spies in the US Service, because they know
Speaker 1: the terrain. Uh. And also because white people just ignore
Speaker 1: black people and pretend it is because people are fucking racist,
Speaker 1: and so sure.
Speaker 2: Surely they can't figure out how to do things. Yeah, exactly.
Speaker 1: Yeah, And so he actually goes and he scouts the
Speaker 1: landing for the Union Army and the shores of North Carolina,
Speaker 1: which again changes the fucking face of history because the
Speaker 1: landing in North Carolin is how is part of how
Speaker 1: the US runs. It's blockade on Southern shipping and helps
Speaker 1: crush their economy. That's all fucking Galloway. And then I mean,
Speaker 1: it's also a ton of other people, right, I'm not
Speaker 1: trying to be like it's just Galloway. Like, you know,
Speaker 1: he found black pilots to help navigate the ships to
Speaker 1: shore and shit like that, So the black pilots who
Speaker 1: are not named in.
Speaker 2: This also get all the fucking credit. Yeah, And then he.
Speaker 1: Gets set down in Mississippi, and then he sees the
Speaker 1: Union treat black refugees like shit, and they start turning
Speaker 1: away black refugees. They start working other ones to death
Speaker 1: building a canal so that they can siege a fortress
Speaker 1: that was a bad idea in the first fucking place,
Speaker 1: of course, and the Union fails at seizing the fortress,
Speaker 1: and then they just fuck off and they ditch all
Speaker 1: of the people, all the black people who are there
Speaker 1: helping them, including Galloway. They just fucking ditch him, and
Speaker 1: he gets captured by the Confederacy. His story goes dark
Speaker 1: for a minute, and we don't know he actually he
Speaker 1: never literate, and so we don't have as much of
Speaker 1: his own words written down, but we know that he escapes,
Speaker 1: and he makes his way overland over the course of
Speaker 1: months through the entire fucking Confederacy back to North Carolina
Speaker 1: to the city of New Bern, where the Union is
Speaker 1: now in control thanks to his own scouting to town
Speaker 1: besieged the rebel lines are only miles away, but has
Speaker 1: access to shipping, so it's not really fully besieged. More
Speaker 1: than ten thousand black people seeking their freedom now live there.
Speaker 1: And these are like the hardest and most militant refugees
Speaker 1: the war fucking sees, because these are the first people
Speaker 1: who are like, I'm getting the fuck out. They didn't
Speaker 1: get out.
Speaker 2: When it was.
Speaker 1: I'm not try, you know, but they got out when
Speaker 1: the going was hard, you know.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Speaker 1: And all these people, not all these people. A lot
Speaker 1: of these people start working with Scouts and spies formally
Speaker 1: or informally, and they head back into Confederate territory in
Speaker 1: a regular basis. Some of them do it for the Union,
Speaker 1: some of them just do it for their own fucking
Speaker 1: families and their friends and fucking everyone.
Speaker 2: You know.
Speaker 1: Yeah, but Galloway doesn't rejoin the Union. He's like, fuck
Speaker 1: the Union, what the fuck? Trust y'all either, yeah, and
Speaker 1: so instead he just becomes an organizer. He's twenty six,
Speaker 1: he's sarcastic, he's charming, he open carries a pistol for
Speaker 1: the rest of his life.
Speaker 2: Let's go.
Speaker 1: And so in eighteen sixty three, the Union's like, but
Speaker 1: we need Galloway, We need Galloway to get us an army.
Speaker 1: Because at this point they finally decided the fifty fourth
Speaker 1: Regiment Massachusetts is the was the first all black regiment
Speaker 1: of the war. And this is the one that that
Speaker 1: movie Glory is about. Yeah, and it I'm really actually
Speaker 1: the main there's lots of things to be mad about
Speaker 1: that movie. One of the main things I'm mad about
Speaker 1: is two of Frederick Douglas's sons were in the fucking
Speaker 1: fifty fourth. I didn't know that they should have been
Speaker 1: the fucking main characters of that movie.
Speaker 2: But I you just blew my mind. I didn't know that.
Speaker 1: Yeah, Frederick Douglas wasn't afraid to fucking I mean, well,
Speaker 1: his kids weren't afraid to put some skin in the.
Speaker 2: Gay weren't afraid to shoot.
Speaker 1: Yeah. Yeah, And so fifty fourth is all black except
Speaker 1: the not except no commissioned officers are black.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and.
Speaker 1: It works, right, the fifty fourth is a like positive
Speaker 1: test or whatever. And so they're like, oh, and also,
Speaker 1: we're losing this war and we fucking need more people. Yes,
Speaker 1: And so they send down this guy is this white
Speaker 1: recruiter named Edward Kinsley. They send him down in eighteen
Speaker 1: sixty three down to New Burn to find Galloway, who's
Speaker 1: like hidden there, and try and convince him to come over.
Speaker 1: And Galloway won't meet with this guy until he and
Speaker 1: his friends watch him for a week to see how
Speaker 1: he treats black people. And he basically wins Galloway over
Speaker 1: just by like the bare fucking minimum of not being
Speaker 1: a dick.
Speaker 3: Like listen, listen, I hope that's a lesson to all
Speaker 3: white people everywhere.
Speaker 2: That's just like, listen, dog like, it ain't that hard.
Speaker 3: Just we gonna watch you, like I was gonna say,
Speaker 3: like even him just being like I ain't gonna meet
Speaker 3: with you, but I'm ahad of home.
Speaker 2: He's watched you, you know, So which is what we do, right,
Speaker 2: we all do it.
Speaker 3: It's like, well let me, you know, let me let
Speaker 3: me shoot up do our little googles, you know, run
Speaker 3: your name up the flag pole, find that what's going on,
Speaker 3: and then once we see what's up, it's like it's
Speaker 3: just it's like the bar is so low, like just hey, man,
Speaker 3: like just just don't just don't be awful.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it's pretty it's not hard. It's not hard to
Speaker 2: not be awful. Yeah.
Speaker 1: All he did is he he he tipped his hat
Speaker 1: some black workers and got yelled at by the by
Speaker 1: the union soldiers and yeah, and if you do that, you.
Speaker 3: Tip your hat to to to to the black people
Speaker 3: and then the white dudes yell at you like hey,
Speaker 3: what the fuck you're doing.
Speaker 2: You just look at me like, man, fuck you dog,
Speaker 2: Yeah exactly.
Speaker 3: The man just man, shut the fuck up, and you
Speaker 3: just keep going where you're like you then I'm gonna
Speaker 3: be like I like that guy.
Speaker 1: Yeah all right, yeah, like it's that easy. Yeah, the
Speaker 1: bar is on the floor, so he wants you to
Speaker 1: step over the bar.
Speaker 3: Yeah, something like you have to dig a hole into
Speaker 3: the ground to go under this floor.
Speaker 2: Totally.
Speaker 1: Yes, Yeah, there's plenty of people at this point, plenty
Speaker 1: white people are willing.
Speaker 2: To at it.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yes, but so so they end up meeting with
Speaker 1: Galloway and this like perfect like Cloak and Daggers thing,
Speaker 1: you know, where he meets with the innkeeper and she
Speaker 1: takes him upstairs and then the room is just entirely
Speaker 1: full of people and galoways there and they tell him
Speaker 1: point blank why we don't trust the union. They're not
Speaker 1: paying black soldiers the same wage as white soldiers. Black
Speaker 1: people are not being granted citizenship by the Emancipation Proclamation.
Speaker 1: Black people had already been fighting alongside of and dying
Speaker 1: alongside of Union troops with absolutely no recognition. And sometimes
Speaker 1: these were in like scouting missions, and sometimes they were
Speaker 1: like literally like you know, a place is being attacked
Speaker 1: and you know, the black people are there also fucking
Speaker 1: fight and no recognition from the Union army. And then
Speaker 1: also a bunch of specifically racist shit is happening in newbern.
Speaker 2: So they're like, yeah, all this shit's happening.
Speaker 1: And they didn't say like, no, we're not going to
Speaker 1: fight for the Union. They're saying, we're not going to
Speaker 1: do it unless you meet our demands. Yeah, And so
Speaker 1: they say, we want to be outfitted the same and
Speaker 1: paid the same, we want housing for our families, we
Speaker 1: want education for our kids, and we want the Union
Speaker 1: to compel the Confederacy to treat captured black soldiers as
Speaker 1: prisoners of war instead of selling or executing them. And
Speaker 1: and this part's a little like, so Kinsley says yes, right,
Speaker 1: so that of course he does. Yeah exactly. So then
Speaker 1: they hold guns to his head and make him say
Speaker 1: it again.
Speaker 2: Let me tell you how much I love my people? Yeah,
Speaker 2: let me tell you how much? Because that is the answer.
Speaker 3: When that man say yes, like, I don't think I
Speaker 3: need to make sure say it again.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 3: No, wait, wait, no, no, no, I'll say it again now
Speaker 3: you Now you promising on your mama, this, on your mama,
Speaker 3: on your hood, on your children.
Speaker 2: You gonna do this, yeah, Joe said, man, I love
Speaker 2: my people.
Speaker 1: Yeah no, And so he says yes again. And the
Speaker 1: thing I read is like Kinsley knows he can't actually
Speaker 1: do these things. Galloways can't do these things. What they're
Speaker 1: saying is you're gonna fucking try, And he yes, yes,
Speaker 1: and he does try.
Speaker 2: He doesn't.
Speaker 1: Some of the things get met eventually, some of them whatever.
Speaker 1: But Kinsley and Galloway they end up staying friends and
Speaker 1: stay in touch the rest of their lives. And over
Speaker 1: five thousand black men volunteer for the Union Army in
Speaker 1: New Bern alone, they form what was generally known as
Speaker 1: the African Brigade. In the end, one hundred and eighty
Speaker 1: six thousand black men fought for the Union. The vast
Speaker 1: majority of them were formally enslaved people, and they were
Speaker 1: as you point out, they're paid less than white soldiers
Speaker 1: until eighteen sixty four, and part of that gets applied retroactively,
Speaker 1: and there's a million fucking loopholes for the equal pay
Speaker 1: that they eventually get. They're still prevented from being commissioned
Speaker 1: officers and combat roles. You get some commissioned officers in
Speaker 1: like medical roles, and then the Confederacy just keeps executing
Speaker 1: captured black people and any white officer fighting alongside of them,
Speaker 1: and the Union could have done something about it and
Speaker 1: fucking didn't. Except actually, and I didn't write this in
Speaker 1: the script, so I'll get all the details wrong. Except actually,
Speaker 1: the white guy who was the commissioned officer for this
Speaker 1: African Brigade, he was known as like the hanging like
Speaker 1: I don't know, the hangman or whatever the fuck, because
Speaker 1: whenever black soldiers were captured and killed, he would kill
Speaker 1: Confederate prisoners.
Speaker 2: I love it because he was like, no I don't
Speaker 2: do it. Yeah, no, right, yeah, it's like you shouldn't
Speaker 2: kill prisoners a war. But like was, yeah, but you
Speaker 2: take one, we take five. Yeah, it's what you're doing. Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 1: And then but union army is still proving to be
Speaker 1: racist as fuck. And one guy, William Walker, he goes
Speaker 1: on strike until he gets an equal wage. He was
Speaker 1: court martialed and shot. Another guy, William Johnson, he was
Speaker 1: caught deserting. He was executed in this like highly publicized
Speaker 1: case that where they brought out a photographer to make
Speaker 1: a big spectacle of killing this black man. Two of
Speaker 1: the soldiers was to shoot him withere these German immigrants,
Speaker 1: and they refused to shoot, so they were arrested.
Speaker 2: Wow.
Speaker 1: But even with all that going on. So Galloway is
Speaker 1: like two jobs now. One is that he is recruiting
Speaker 1: black men to fight, and he's also fighting against all
Speaker 1: the racism within the military. He even gets his old
Speaker 1: general Butler the Moderate, to press his higher ups for
Speaker 1: equal equal pay. But he's no longer a union spy.
Speaker 1: But his network's ran deep. And I should probably talk
Speaker 1: about potatoes right now. It feels like a good time
Speaker 1: to talk about potatoes and French fries, which I really love.
Speaker 1: I'm really excited about my air fryer, which makes really
Speaker 1: good French fries.
Speaker 2: They really do.
Speaker 3: Man, you could even go with like frozen like a
Speaker 3: bag of frozen ones for that air.
Speaker 4: Right device to reheat French fries.
Speaker 3: Yeah, because you can't reheat fries. It's really hard to
Speaker 3: do that. But if you could do, we could do
Speaker 3: it in an air fry with a little bit of
Speaker 3: olive oil on the mug.
Speaker 2: Little lowries. You good.
Speaker 1: Yeah, And so that's we're sponsored by the idea of
Speaker 1: French fries and these other ads.
Speaker 2: And we're back. Yeah, we are.
Speaker 3: I I sometimes try to put myself in the shoes
Speaker 3: of like a just moderately reasonable white dude at this
Speaker 3: time who like like like you're saying, is like trying
Speaker 3: to tell his higher ups, like yo, we should pay
Speaker 3: these dudes the same as everybody else, and just being
Speaker 3: like and just kind of looking at them like but
Speaker 3: they they holding the same, They the bullet don't care
Speaker 3: like they dying just like we ding Like I don't
Speaker 3: understand why you think they what this don't make no
Speaker 3: sense to me, Like they life in just as much dangerous,
Speaker 3: are not more danger because they running a higher matter
Speaker 3: of fact, we should be paying them more. Yeah, because
Speaker 3: they running a higher risk than we are. Like, don't
Speaker 3: that don't make sense to you? And they got more
Speaker 3: mistake they you think the bullet care what color they are?
Speaker 2: Like, what you know? So just I just wonder.
Speaker 3: I just sometimes I just think, like, man, how maddening
Speaker 3: that must have been, even if you just like slightly
Speaker 3: just logical, You're like, what, we're doing the same job though,
Speaker 3: aren't we Like are we doing the same job?
Speaker 2: Yeah?
Speaker 1: I think a lot of even white people got radicalassed
Speaker 1: by all this, Like in all my reading is a
Speaker 1: lot of people start off being like, oh, I don't know,
Speaker 1: and then they're like, oh, this shit's evil, you know.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 1: So Galloway right no longer a Union spy, but his
Speaker 1: networks run really deep all over the South. He managed
Speaker 1: to smuggle his own mother out of Wilmington, which is
Speaker 1: seventy five miles beyond Confederate lines in one of the
Speaker 1: most heavily fortified cities in the entire Confederacy. He gets
Speaker 1: his mom out, he arranges for her to set up
Speaker 1: to be Boston, where she stays with one of his
Speaker 1: friends from the Anti Man Hunting League.
Speaker 3: Yes, I want to think that I would have the
Speaker 3: balls to do that, have to get my mom out.
Speaker 2: Yeah, you know what I'm saying, Like seventy five mile dang, Yeah,
Speaker 2: that's a long walk.
Speaker 1: Yes, yeah, And so okay, So it's hard to overstate
Speaker 1: the importance of the black soldiers and black insurgents fighting
Speaker 1: like and the striking black workers on the war efforts.
Speaker 1: So I'll just say that they fucking won the war. Militarily,
Speaker 1: they win it by fighting hard and well and by
Speaker 1: spying and scouting. But economically they want it to And
Speaker 1: I've already said that like three times, but I just
Speaker 1: want to make sure everyone leaves with that impression. And
Speaker 1: then North Carolinian journalist David Forbes puts it like this.
Speaker 1: In April eighteen sixty four, Lincoln met with a delegation
Speaker 1: of Galloway and several other prominent insurgent figures from the
Speaker 1: North Carolina ports. The President greeted them with an unusual,
Speaker 1: almost obsequious hospitality. The few observers at the meeting noted
Speaker 1: that the delegates weren't deferential, They were direct that they
Speaker 1: wanted the greatest of privileges, their political rights and autonomy
Speaker 1: and pointedly emphasized the dire straits the war effort would
Speaker 1: be in without their support. The incident comes off not
Speaker 1: as a commander in chief giving orders, but is essentially
Speaker 1: autonomous militias fully aware of their leverage, and a government
Speaker 1: eager to keep them actively on their side.
Speaker 2: That stuff they don't tell you.
Speaker 1: Yeah, exactly, Like everything I'd always read is like, oh
Speaker 1: and then the you know, the grateful black people were
Speaker 1: so excited that the white Irish and Northerners saved them
Speaker 1: or whatever.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, from the.
Speaker 1: Horrible racists of the South, And like, no, first of all,
Speaker 1: the white people are racist everywhere, and some of them
Speaker 1: are on racists everywhere. But yeah, fucking anyway, yeah, I
Speaker 1: love that. So so Galloway end of the war. He
Speaker 1: he moves to Wilmington, the Confederacy takes off their gray
Speaker 1: uniforms and put on white hoods. As we all know.
Speaker 2: We all know.
Speaker 1: In eighteen sixty seven, the KKK demanded that all black
Speaker 1: organizing cease in Wilmington. So Galloway and the black militia
Speaker 1: were like, well, you could, you could fucking.
Speaker 2: Make us if you want. Yeah, how about that.
Speaker 1: There's like four days of street battles with the Klan,
Speaker 1: and then the Klan fucks off out of Wilmington for
Speaker 1: the next thirty years.
Speaker 2: Love it.
Speaker 1: He winds up a senator. He refuses to show deference
Speaker 1: to white people. He fought for the rights of women,
Speaker 1: including full subrage. He walked around carrying a pistol. He
Speaker 1: fought for labor rights. He started working to build coalitions
Speaker 1: with poor whites along class lines. And then because of
Speaker 1: the fucking nineteenth century, you know what he did, he
Speaker 1: died at thirty three.
Speaker 2: Thirty.
Speaker 4: Oh my goodness, this man like thirty This man was
Speaker 4: so successful.
Speaker 3: No, listen, we are all like listen, see we're all losers, y'ah, like.
Speaker 2: Uk thirty three dug okay? Yeah then yeah, yeah, he
Speaker 2: dies at thirty three because it's nice thing.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 1: And then he either dies of like a fever or
Speaker 1: he gets poisoned. It depends on what what history book
Speaker 1: you out you read, But yeah, that's that's goll Away.
Speaker 1: And there's a few more parts of this whole Civil
Speaker 1: War within the Civil War, the Civil Civil War, War,
Speaker 1: and Civil Civil War. One part is that the the
Speaker 1: white South was far from united in the support of
Speaker 1: the Confederacy. A lot of people didn't want to fight
Speaker 1: and die for slavery, a few of them because they
Speaker 1: thought slavery was bad, more because they were just like
Speaker 1: too poor to get to own people themselves. Yeah, but
Speaker 1: in eighteen sixty, no, go ahead, I.
Speaker 3: Was gonna say, I think that that's important part of
Speaker 3: the story to this, Like you're like, why intersectionality and
Speaker 3: critical race theory, like why you need to notice stuff?
Speaker 3: Is that type of intersection to where it's like, hey, dude, like, yeah,
Speaker 3: maybe I'm not a slave, but I can see that
Speaker 3: that's bullshit and I can't afford to have one anyway,
Speaker 3: and I can't stand your owner.
Speaker 2: Either, like totally.
Speaker 3: You know what I'm saying, Like, Nah, he's a dickhead,
Speaker 3: you're right, Yeah, nah, fuck that guy.
Speaker 2: But I'm just as poor as you are. Yeah you
Speaker 2: know what I'm saying.
Speaker 3: Well, not just as poor, but like in their perception
Speaker 3: they're just like, I mean, I'm poor too, Like noah, fuck,
Speaker 3: this guy's gonna fight for that, you know what I'm saying.
Speaker 3: So it's more like it's not so much they're like
Speaker 3: you know, like obviously like socially conscious and aware for
Speaker 3: their time, but just more the reality of like this,
Speaker 3: this is what a lack of resources does makes you
Speaker 3: be like man fighting your principal cause like you're talking
Speaker 3: about nah man fuck that guy.
Speaker 1: You know. Yeah, you just summarize the next chunk of
Speaker 1: my script. I just let's go. But yeah, like, okay,
Speaker 1: So in eighteen sixty, most way Southerners they don't live
Speaker 1: in the plantation belt. They live upland they live in
Speaker 1: mountains and hills. And then most of them they don't
Speaker 1: grow cash cash crops though even the ones who own
Speaker 1: land they didn't so they didn't grow cotton. They were
Speaker 1: just subsistence farmers. Some of them were heard Muslim subsistence
Speaker 1: farmers called the and they get called the yeomen, which
Speaker 1: is a word I never knew how to pronounce. I
Speaker 1: only know how to spell because it's also a word
Speaker 1: in like ye oldie medieval stories. But yeah, So that
Speaker 1: when the Confederacy formed and seceded, a lot of delegates
Speaker 1: from the mountains voted to remain within the union or
Speaker 1: only voted for secession after they were threatened. That's another
Speaker 1: thing that doesn't get talked about. Even some of the
Speaker 1: people voted for secession were like or you're gonna kill me,
Speaker 1: So I all right, you.
Speaker 2: Know, yeah, yeah, I guess, uh huh.
Speaker 1: And then the reason West Virginia, where I live, the
Speaker 1: reason it exists is because it didn't want to secede
Speaker 1: from the Union, so it seceded from Virginia.
Speaker 2: I love it.
Speaker 1: The whole of East Tennessee voted to remain in the
Speaker 1: Union two to one, and they they weren't playing around.
Speaker 1: Pro Union military companies formed in every county. One guy
Speaker 1: went up to d C to be like, hey, if
Speaker 1: we blow up all the bridges from the rest of Tennessee,
Speaker 1: where you send down troops to protect us.
Speaker 2: I love it.
Speaker 1: And the general is like, yeah, sure, guy, we can
Speaker 1: do that. So they went and they torched for bridges,
Speaker 1: but they weren't able to capture the rest so they
Speaker 1: were too heavily guarded by the Confederates. Uh So, instead
Speaker 1: of a Union army marching in, a Confederate army marched
Speaker 1: in and occupied East Tennessee.
Speaker 2: They declare martial law.
Speaker 1: They start seizing property, A bunch of the ring leaders
Speaker 1: are executed, hundreds are arrested, and then thousands of men
Speaker 1: of military age flee through the mountains through the Confederacy
Speaker 1: to go join the Union Army.
Speaker 2: When the when the Union.
Speaker 1: Recaptures East Tennessee, it was it was led by a
Speaker 1: Union regiment of Tennessee infantry. They had enough fucking people
Speaker 1: fuck off that they were able to form an entire
Speaker 1: fucking regiment.
Speaker 3: That was like, no, we know, we know these we
Speaker 3: know these blue mountains. Now we know these smoking mountains.
Speaker 3: Because let me tell you where to go. You know
Speaker 3: what I'm saying.
Speaker 1: Yeah, Winston County, Alabama, in the northern part of the state,
Speaker 1: they voted to secede from the Confederacy. So they decided, look,
Speaker 1: if the Confederates are allowed to secede from the Union,
Speaker 1: were allowed to secede from the Confederacy. They they four
Speaker 1: militia bands that stopped Confederate conscription and they protected local
Speaker 1: families from being robbed by the army. The Peace and
Speaker 1: Constitutional Society of Arkansas again in the mountains, this time
Speaker 1: in the Ozarks and so Yeapalaccha. They resist conscription. One
Speaker 1: hundred of them are arrested, eight thousand of them fled
Speaker 1: and served in the Union Army. In the total, over
Speaker 1: the course of the war, one hundred thousand Confederate troops deserted,
Speaker 1: most of them facing execution if they got caught. Yeah,
Speaker 1: almost all of them are folks who didn't own slaves,
Speaker 1: and they knew that there. They ran off because they
Speaker 1: were like, my family will fucking starve. I'm a subsistence farmer. Like,
Speaker 1: if I'm not there to put crops in the ground,
Speaker 1: my family will die. Yeah.
Speaker 2: Fuck this war. Yeah.
Speaker 1: In the hills of Choctaw County, Mississippi, a loyal league
Speaker 1: of deserters spied for the Union, helped people desert robbed
Speaker 1: the families of those who were loyal to the Confederacy.
Speaker 1: Northern Alabama started off loyal to the Confederacy, but by
Speaker 1: eighteen sixty three was full of people resisting and Floyd
Speaker 1: County was go ahead.
Speaker 3: I was gonna say, man, at some point, it's like,
Speaker 3: I don't care what your politics are, man, you're not
Speaker 3: gonna feed your children and know me, grinder, Yeah, you
Speaker 3: know what I mean. Like, at some point you like
Speaker 3: this is yeah, like you said, it's some bullshit, man.
Speaker 3: Like even if you started off being like yeah, you know,
Speaker 3: and then you're like, you know what this look, man, I'm.
Speaker 2: Go home grow some potatoes. Yeah.
Speaker 1: Basically, all through the South, people just fought against the Confederacy.
Speaker 1: They would ambush, they would rob, they would sabotage, they
Speaker 1: would assassinate, and then they were met with massacres. In Arson,
Speaker 1: there's a whole fucking civil war within the Civil War
Speaker 1: in North Carolina. The coast had black and indigenous gorillas.
Speaker 1: They had maroons hanging out in the swamps who would
Speaker 1: attack the center, had these like direct action abolitionists. The
Speaker 1: west in the mountains had diehard Unionists. Madison County, which
Speaker 1: is where I lived for four or five years before now,
Speaker 1: was called Bloody Madison. The Confederates there came from the cities,
Speaker 1: but they were outnumbered by the anti Confederates who came
Speaker 1: from the hills and the unions there. Basically, they're tired
Speaker 1: of being robbed constantly by the Confederates, so they robbed
Speaker 1: all their own shit back. And then the Confederates came
Speaker 1: and they rounded up thirteen people and shot them in
Speaker 1: the mountains, including a thirteen.
Speaker 2: Year old boy.
Speaker 1: Some of the soldiers hesitated to shoot, and the commander said,
Speaker 1: anyone who doesn't shoot is going to get shot to
Speaker 1: the most famous of these yeomen results revolts.
Speaker 2: Sorry.
Speaker 1: In the Civil war was the Free State of Jones, Mississippi.
Speaker 1: It is another Hollywood movie you ever seen, Free stated Jones.
Speaker 1: It's another Hollywood movie that gets fucking white savory about
Speaker 1: this shitah. But basically, there's this Confederate soldier named Newton Knight.
Speaker 1: He heard that his brother in law was abusing his kids,
Speaker 1: so he deserts. He walks two hundred miles home, and
Speaker 1: he kills the aforementioned brother in law. Then he takes
Speaker 1: to the swamps where he's hanging out with the maroon community,
Speaker 1: the runaway enslave folks, or the people no longer enslaved,
Speaker 1: the people fleeing enslavement. So he's hanging out there and
Speaker 1: then other Confederate deserters. They form a multiracial gorilla gang.
Speaker 1: They raid Confederate storehouses, they distribute the food back to
Speaker 1: the farmers. They fought fourteen skirmishes with the Confederate Army.
Speaker 1: Newton Knights said their numbers never exceed one hundred and
Speaker 1: twenty five fighters, but a general from the Union Army
Speaker 1: claims it was six hundred. They declared their county free
Speaker 1: from Confederates. They raised the US flagger of the courthouse,
Speaker 1: and they declared a free state of equal rights and
Speaker 1: so dope. After the war, Newton Knight writes to the
Speaker 1: US government and he asks for compensation for the families
Speaker 1: of the men who died in battle. The US is like, no,
Speaker 1: we don't know you all.
Speaker 2: We do and you don't know you nothing.
Speaker 1: Yeah, because my argument is that the Union isn't really
Speaker 1: the good guys in the story.
Speaker 2: They're just the better than the Confederates guys, the other guys.
Speaker 3: Dude, there's a this this is a dope moment, like
Speaker 3: culturally for a number of reasons. But I think one
Speaker 3: of the doper like modern tie ins is especially around
Speaker 3: like the Appalachia stuff because just like the origins of
Speaker 3: like folk music, like the banjo is West African, Like
Speaker 3: that's a West After instrument. So when you have this
Speaker 3: like interaction of freed or like you know, self emancipating slaves, right,
Speaker 3: former slaves hit these Appalachian with these like Gaelic and Irish,
Speaker 3: So you have these type of sing songy stuff that's
Speaker 3: Gaelic and Irish that were hiding in the Appalachians, plus
Speaker 3: this like African banjos, and it made what we know
Speaker 3: as folk music. You know what I'm said, yeah, is
Speaker 3: these people existing in these mountains who was poor trying
Speaker 3: to figure out what they did and they was playing
Speaker 3: music outside And I'm like that to me is like
Speaker 3: a sign of like you said, what you talking about
Speaker 3: to where it's like these these people up in the
Speaker 3: mouths like, man, fuck your war, Like I had nothing
Speaker 3: to do with that. Nah, y'all come stay with us,
Speaker 3: you know what I'm saying, Or the other way around,
Speaker 3: Like black people just found this mountain and was like,
Speaker 3: oh damn, people live up here, you know.
Speaker 2: It was like what y'all doing?
Speaker 3: You know?
Speaker 2: Yeah we free.
Speaker 3: Now I ain't scared of y'all, you know, but uh yeah,
Speaker 3: So I just think they have these I wish more
Speaker 3: people would tell these stories, if anything, just not for
Speaker 3: those no, like you know, make make us feel better
Speaker 3: about like well not all white people, right, not for
Speaker 3: that thing, but to just understand that, you know, history
Speaker 3: is way more complicated than we was taught.
Speaker 2: Yeah, no, exactly.
Speaker 1: Like even as I was trying to write this, I'm
Speaker 1: trying to be like, I'm not trying to fucking center
Speaker 1: the white anti racist in this, right, but I want
Speaker 1: people to know that, like, for whatever the reasons, the
Speaker 1: South was not a fucking unified place, you know, and
Speaker 1: then to close off this whole thing about it. Even
Speaker 1: some of the fucking plantation owners.
Speaker 2: Fuck them. I'm not defending them.
Speaker 1: They get in on the effect of hating the Confederacy,
Speaker 1: but they do it purely out of self interest because
Speaker 1: they're a bunch of fucking capitalists, right and so yes,
Speaker 1: of course when well, they'll do whatever is the most profitable.
Speaker 1: When New Orleans gets occupied in eighteen sixty two and
Speaker 1: then throughout Mississippi in eighteen sixty three, some rich focks
Speaker 1: are like, you know what, fuck it, Well, so we
Speaker 1: got cotton and sugar will sell it to the Union
Speaker 1: Army instead, which is like, it's basically what you get
Speaker 1: when you try to run a war based on the
Speaker 1: idea of creating like the collective self interest of capitalists.
Speaker 1: They don't have collective self interest, Like, no.
Speaker 2: There is no Yeah, it's the self interest is the money. Yeah,
Speaker 2: so I love it.
Speaker 3: They was like, y'all fighting for us to be able
Speaker 3: to keep slaves, but y'all don't buy enough, so, uh.
Speaker 2: What's up with y'all?
Speaker 7: Y'all, y'all, y'all, y'all was some sugar, yo, say, and
Speaker 7: then y'all smoke y'all, smoke y'all, smoke yo, we got
Speaker 7: this tobacco.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it's ridiculous.
Speaker 2: And that is the story of the Civil Civil War war.
Speaker 2: I feel about the Civil Civil War war, man, I am.
Speaker 3: I hope that this pod gets so much like air
Speaker 3: and oxygen in it because of the amount of stories
Speaker 3: that aren't told out of this, not only just to
Speaker 3: like the culture as a whole, but black people period.
Speaker 2: I think a lot of times, like.
Speaker 3: You know, we know that we know the uh, we
Speaker 3: know the highlight reels, you know what I mean, the
Speaker 3: Harriet Tubmans, then that Turner.
Speaker 2: It's the soul Jenner truths, you know what I'm saying.
Speaker 3: You know, the Frederick Douglas is the ones that were
Speaker 3: literate and you know, wrote biographies and autobiographies and such.
Speaker 3: But like these like you know, regular dudes that were
Speaker 3: like nah, fam, you think you think your ancestors, you
Speaker 3: know what I'm saying, You really think your ancestors just
Speaker 3: took it like they didn't just take it like you
Speaker 3: know what I'm saying, Like nah, like fuck tooth and
Speaker 3: nail the whole time, you know, So I think they're
Speaker 3: like even just hearing that you're right this. I have
Speaker 3: the opposite feeling of the best thing, where I feel
Speaker 3: like invigorated and inspired, like yeah food.
Speaker 2: Yeah, you know what I'm saying. Yeah, I succeeded.
Speaker 3: You did, Margaret. I appreciate you calling me for this one.
Speaker 1: Thanks for coming on. And on Wednesday, we're gonna talk
Speaker 1: about the Lowry Gang, which is tying into all of this,
Speaker 1: and you all will not be disappointed by this.
Speaker 2: Let's go prop.
Speaker 4: You got any pluggables for us at the end here?
Speaker 3: Yeah? Uh, prop hip hop dot Com.
Speaker 2: You know what I'm gonna do.
Speaker 3: Haven't plugged this on any other podject, But if y'all
Speaker 3: are in the LA area, I do this thing called
Speaker 3: Club Real Ones.
Speaker 2: It's every first Sunday in Long Beach.
Speaker 3: It's and it's it's just the day party for y'all
Speaker 3: grown folks that gotta work the next day. We're done
Speaker 3: by eight, you know what I'm saying. And there's there's
Speaker 3: at there. I mean, there's an after part. If you
Speaker 3: want to, you can go get cocktails next door. We
Speaker 3: have that too if you don't got to work tomorrow.
Speaker 3: But if you do, yo three to three to eight,
Speaker 3: just come chill with us. It's the greatest DJs in Cali.
Speaker 3: You know what I'm saying. Uh yeah, Club real Ones
Speaker 3: dot It's on my website prop hip hop dot com.
Speaker 2: And then all the professional stuff like, oh, I wrote a.
Speaker 3: Book, you know, I got my podcast or politics, yeah, Terrify.
Speaker 2: Yeah, which I just got an award yesterday for which
Speaker 2: is a shito. Yeah. Anyway, so yeah, those are my plugs, Margaret.
Speaker 4: Anything you want to plug at the end here.
Speaker 1: Uh well, at the moment, I seem to like plug
Speaker 1: in my new podcast, Cool People Did Cool Stuff. You
Speaker 1: can also follow me on Twitter at Magpie Killjoy and
Speaker 1: a bunch of books out. I guess the most recent
Speaker 1: one that's out is called A Country of Ghosts. It's
Speaker 1: an anarchist utopian novel.
Speaker 4: Okay, so we'll be back. We'll be back on Wednesday.
Speaker 2: We're back in the feeds. We're back in the feeds.
Speaker 2: The wrapping is mean.
Speaker 4: By my.
Speaker 1: Hello, and welcome back to Cool People Did Cool Stuff?
Speaker 1: The podcast my podcast in which I declared myself the
Speaker 1: arbiter of what counts as cool for both people and stuff.
Speaker 1: And then I tell you what I decided.
Speaker 3: I've got so true, so true, I was like, wait,
Speaker 3: that's I I appreciate it.
Speaker 2: I sure did. Thanks.
Speaker 1: I like when you laugh at my scripted jokes. Okay,
Speaker 1: so I've got too such a great blong with me today.
Speaker 1: I've got I've got prop who's an activist, a poet,
Speaker 1: an MC and the host of the podcast Hood Politics,
Speaker 1: which I'm just assuming you all have listened to, because
Speaker 1: obviously you should listen to it.
Speaker 2: How are you doing, that's a fair assumption. I'm cool.
Speaker 3: I'm hot as hell over here. So I got my
Speaker 3: little glass of water, you know what I'm saying, so
Speaker 3: I don't catch the vapors. That's my southernsumption. Oh yeah,
Speaker 3: that's my Southern bell.
Speaker 2: Well I do declare.
Speaker 1: Well, then you're gonna get robbed in this episode. Yes,
Speaker 1: as a Southern bell. Okay, no, no, I'm with it. Yeah.
Speaker 2: Let them they sitting there, what they eliminate? Talk about?
Speaker 3: They lemonade while Big Daddy just beats my ancestors like, nah,
Speaker 3: rob dad lady.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 1: And I've got Sophie on here as well. She's our producer.
Speaker 1: She's the reason that podcasts exist, all podcasts. She invented podcasts.
Speaker 4: Yeah, invented podcasting and no podcast exists without my.
Speaker 2: Approval, yep, exactly. And sports invented the concept of sports.
Speaker 4: Invented the concept of sports. And for the record, the
Speaker 4: Joe Rogan Podcast is a YouTube show.
Speaker 1: This is the second part in our two part series
Speaker 1: about the Joe Rogan experience. No, about the Civil War.
Speaker 2: Within about the Civil Civil War war.
Speaker 1: Yeah, the Civil Civil War war. So you probably go
Speaker 1: back to listen to part one, or you could just
Speaker 1: listen to this part. Who am I to tell you
Speaker 1: what to do to your life?
Speaker 2: You're the person that gets to You're the arbiter of
Speaker 2: what is cool? Oh I should tell people?
Speaker 1: Well you should tell Okay, go back and listen to
Speaker 1: part one and we'll wait here.
Speaker 2: Okay, you're back. Okay.
Speaker 1: So the last time, we talked about a whole bunch
Speaker 1: of different, various ways that people across the South work
Speaker 1: to fuck up the Confederacy because the Confederacy needed getting
Speaker 1: fucked up. But today we're going to deep dive into
Speaker 1: one of my favorite groups of all time. Who fucked
Speaker 1: up with the Confederacy. They fucked up the Confederacy, they
Speaker 1: fucked up the Klan, they fucked up the rich plantation owners,
Speaker 1: all Robinhood style. They even fucked up the hypocrite reconstructious
Speaker 1: Republicans eventually, and they were indigenous led multi racial insurrection
Speaker 1: or bandit crew, depending on what you want to call it.
Speaker 1: From North Carolina. Dozens of racist sheriffs and far right
Speaker 1: militia members get murdered in this story. There's at least
Speaker 1: five prison breaks. And that's right. I'm talking about the
Speaker 1: one and the only lowry gang. I wrote air horns
Speaker 1: please so if.
Speaker 2: I think it's very.
Speaker 3: Important to remember too that like the Confederate Nation lasted
Speaker 3: four years, like y'all, Like Nirvana had a longer run,
Speaker 3: Like yeah, there's y'all, like y'all, Audi hoop over something
Speaker 3: that was four years long, like Lebron got a longer
Speaker 3: career than the Confederate Nation.
Speaker 2: You know what I'm saying. I'm just like y'all anyway.
Speaker 1: No, no, yeah, Like, which is actually why when you
Speaker 1: talk about principled people, you're talking about shit that they
Speaker 1: were doing before and after the Civil War, because like, yeah,
Speaker 1: because fuck, you have Confederates is great, but there was
Speaker 1: people worth fucking up before the Confederacy and absolute literacy.
Speaker 3: Absolutely, it's like yeah, and then y'allo and then y'all
Speaker 3: like fifty years later, fifty one hundred years later, decided
Speaker 3: to like raise some monuments, Yeah for your four year
Speaker 3: long career anyway, where.
Speaker 2: You just terrorized everyone who lived there? Were you just terrorized?
Speaker 3: Yeah, in your own hood, like you've just heard, your
Speaker 3: own hood didn't mess with you.
Speaker 2: These people really ain't fooling with y'all like this.
Speaker 1: So, so before I can tell you about the Lottery Gang,
Speaker 1: I want to I want to go way the fuck
Speaker 1: back and tell you some shit from hundreds of years back.
Speaker 1: And I'm going to tell you about going to Croatan, Okay,
Speaker 1: the lost colony of Roanoke.
Speaker 2: What you know where this is going.
Speaker 3: Discovery Channel styles, Yeah, exactly, Yeah, I love this.
Speaker 2: This story is incredible. Yeah.
Speaker 1: There's an island off the coast in North Carolina called
Speaker 1: Roanoak Island. In fifteen eighty five, the English tried to
Speaker 1: put their first permanent settlement in the New World there,
Speaker 1: like this is before the fucking Mayflower. Jamestown, Virginia wasn't
Speaker 1: until sixteen oh seven. But this settlement effort was led
Speaker 1: by some piece of shit household named Ralph Lane, who
Speaker 1: had spent the last two years as a colonial sheriff
Speaker 1: in Ireland before he had, Before that, he'd been the
Speaker 1: kind of asshole. His job it is to catch smugglers.
Speaker 1: I really don't like this guy.
Speaker 2: No, he's the worse.
Speaker 1: He lands on the island and he tries to set
Speaker 1: up shop. One of the first fucking things he builds
Speaker 1: is a fucking jail, yes, and then he gets mad
Speaker 1: at one. It turns out people lived there already. He
Speaker 1: gets mad at one of the indigenous leaders and he
Speaker 1: kills him, and for some odd reason it's hard for
Speaker 1: me to totally understand, the local folks didn't like this,
Speaker 1: and they didn't ye, they didn't actually he the white
Speaker 1: people out after they killed their leader, and so the
Speaker 1: colony fails and Ralph Lane fucks off back to England
Speaker 1: and he leaves behind a couple guys so that they can, like,
Speaker 1: so England can be like it's ours or whatever. You know,
Speaker 1: clearly there's plenty of a couple guys there already, but whatever.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 1: Fortunately, like ten years later, just to close the Ralph
Speaker 1: Lane saga, he goes back to colonizing Ireland, and then
Speaker 1: the Irish fucking rise up and gravely wound him, and
Speaker 1: he lives in terrible pain for the few remaining years
Speaker 1: of his life. Anyway, back to Roanoke fifteen eighty seven,
Speaker 1: you've got another guy, John White.
Speaker 2: He's honestly not that much better.
Speaker 1: He goes on his way to set up a colony
Speaker 1: in Virginia on the Chesapeake, and he swings by to
Speaker 1: drop off supplies for these guys that Ralph Lane ditched
Speaker 1: there except John White. He has a Spanish guy on
Speaker 1: board named Simon Fernandez, Simon Fernandez probably, and he's a
Speaker 1: fucking pirate. He's just he's been arrested for piracy. He
Speaker 1: was going to be fucking killed as a pirate. And
Speaker 1: then the British Crown was like, actually we kind of
Speaker 1: want him on.
Speaker 2: Our ses, that guy.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, exactly, And so they land on this island
Speaker 1: and then Simon is like, actually, we're not going any further,
Speaker 1: y'all are going to stay here. This is where we're
Speaker 1: setting up the colony. And he like forces them to
Speaker 1: set up the colony on Roanoke and no one knows
Speaker 1: why he did this, and so they unload one hundred
Speaker 1: and seventeen colonists and then this one indigenous guy named
Speaker 1: Mantio who was just catching a ride back to North
Speaker 1: America from England, and no one knows why Simon did this.
Speaker 1: He said he did it because they were running out
Speaker 1: of time to get crops in the ground. Like he's
Speaker 1: just in a fucking hurry, he wants to get home
Speaker 1: or something. Other people are like, oh, some spy shit,
Speaker 1: some geopolitical whatever. Others say that he wanted to stay
Speaker 1: close to the West Indies, so he get back to
Speaker 1: Piracy as soon as possible. I kind of think for
Speaker 1: no reason. I'm like, I think he just talked to Mantio,
Speaker 1: and Mantio is like, no, this just set up near
Speaker 1: my friends.
Speaker 3: I honestly think it was like yeah, like the Path
Speaker 3: of Lea's Resistance, just like yeah, yeah, how's you doing
Speaker 3: over here?
Speaker 1: Yeah, totally. And so this guy Mantio, they kept calling
Speaker 1: him a chief, but he wasn't a fucking chief. His
Speaker 1: mom was in charge. But I don't think he worked
Speaker 1: really hard to convince them that he wasn't a chief.
Speaker 1: I think he was like, all right with going to
Speaker 1: England and you call the chief or whatever.
Speaker 2: Sure.
Speaker 1: So Simon and Ralph they are not Ralph the fucking
Speaker 1: John White. They don't stick around. They leave one hundred
Speaker 1: and seventeen people, one hundred and eighteen people, and then
Speaker 1: they just fuck off back to England to get more supplies,
Speaker 1: and they're like, h good luck, see you soon, but
Speaker 1: they they don't come back soon. They get sucked into
Speaker 1: the Anglo Spanish War, which is like a back and
Speaker 1: forth piracy thing. They come back three years later, and
Speaker 1: then fifteen eighty when they show up, the settlement is
Speaker 1: fucking gone.
Speaker 2: It's gone. Yes, yeah, anything.
Speaker 4: On a boat happen quickly, Like.
Speaker 1: No, probably not back then, yeah no, but yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: I like that anyway, No, keep telling the story.
Speaker 2: Yeah yeah.
Speaker 1: So they show up and there's a palisade around the settlement, right,
Speaker 1: and it's completely abandoned, and the word Croatan is carved
Speaker 1: into the palisade, and then the word crow is carved
Speaker 1: into a tree, and people act like this is like
Speaker 1: the greatest mystery of all time. Croatan is the name
Speaker 1: of like the next island over where Mantana's from, Like
Speaker 1: so easy, yeah, And then instead of going to go
Speaker 1: see if that's where their colonists are the next island over,
Speaker 1: they're like, well, this is like a storm coming, so
Speaker 1: I guess I'm going to go back to England. It
Speaker 1: just fucking goes back to England instead of looking so
Speaker 1: and like as if their message is super fucking cryptic
Speaker 1: and no one actually knows for sure what happened to
Speaker 1: the colony but the most likely answer, and people like
Speaker 1: didn't want to accept that people just fucked off and
Speaker 1: joined indigenous groups around there, because people like couldn't fathom that,
Speaker 1: like white people would do that. But there's like more
Speaker 1: and more evidence that basically every single time white people
Speaker 1: join indigenous tribes, they never want to go back to
Speaker 1: be in European and they like the opposite is rarely true,
Speaker 1: but so anyway, people are like, what a fucking cryptic
Speaker 1: note they wrote down the name of the fucking island
Speaker 1: they went to, which brings us to the Lumbye. The
Speaker 1: Lumbia are a tribe in coastal North Carolina. The federal
Speaker 1: government has never recognized them officially, though the State of
Speaker 1: North Carolina has, and the heroes of today's story are
Speaker 1: mostly Lumby and all of its centers around the Lumbee community.
Speaker 1: So the Lumbia descended from a mix of SiO In, Algonquin,
Speaker 1: and Iroquoian people. In addition, at least two Lumbe historians
Speaker 1: claim that when the Lumbee met Scotch Irish and English
Speaker 1: colonists for the first time, the Lumbia were already speaking English.
Speaker 1: In fact, they were speaking this very old fashioned version
Speaker 1: of English, and many of them had gray or blue
Speaker 1: eyes and blonde hair. And so Adolph Diel, who's a
Speaker 1: Lumbia historian, writes this plainly in his book The Only
Speaker 1: Land I Know that the Lumbi are descended. In addition,
Speaker 1: they're also descended from the lost colony of Roanoke, and
Speaker 1: actual birth records and the like don't fucking exist. Dial
Speaker 1: argues that the evidence matches up with the oral tradition
Speaker 1: of the Lumbe as well, and at least one of
Speaker 1: the people im I talk about today in the Lowry Wars,
Speaker 1: which we'll be talking about a second, also believes that
Speaker 1: this is true. But this is not actually full consensus
Speaker 1: about where the Lumbee come from, but an interesting story,
Speaker 1: and it's one that ties into what the Lowries that
Speaker 1: I will be talking about seem to believe about themselves
Speaker 1: as well. I just feel weird being like and this
Speaker 1: is the origin of I mean, these people are still
Speaker 1: fucking around right like, Yeah, you know I'm yeah, but
Speaker 1: and there's not like consensus between in any given group
Speaker 1: either way. In the eighteen sixties, the Lumbee are an
Speaker 1: unrecognized tribe living in their own traditional territory in the Swampson,
Speaker 1: North Carolina, centered on what becomes Robison County, and in
Speaker 1: eighteen sixty four, with the Civil War raging all around them,
Speaker 1: that's where the story of the Lowry Gang begins. Okay,
Speaker 1: so yellow fever had just killed off a lot of
Speaker 1: the enslaved people who are being forced to build a
Speaker 1: place called Fort Fisher the Confederacy. So the Confederacy started
Speaker 1: conscripting the Lumby and they conscript several cousins of the
Speaker 1: Lowry family, which is a large and influential family in
Speaker 1: that area. Henry Barry Lowry, he's our main character, and
Speaker 1: a bunch of others. They hit out in the swamps
Speaker 1: to avoid all this conscription. And it wasn't actually strictly
Speaker 1: legal even within the Confederacy to force manual labor out
Speaker 1: of people who weren't black. So but no white people
Speaker 1: gave a shit that this is fucking happening, and so
Speaker 1: they get away with it, and they would do this
Speaker 1: thing called tied mule conscription, where you basically the example
Speaker 1: version is you set a tied mule out on someone's
Speaker 1: land and then or you like, let loose a bunch
Speaker 1: of hogs or something, and then you wait for them
Speaker 1: to get a quote stolen by the people whose land
Speaker 1: it is. Wow, and then you blackmail them.
Speaker 2: Of course, yeah, of course you do.
Speaker 1: And so they get blackmailed for money or land or
Speaker 1: forced labor so that they don't get taken a court.
Speaker 1: Rich landowners have been doing the shit to the lumby
Speaker 1: for a while, basically slowly stealing all their fucking land
Speaker 1: by doing this. And one history and I was reading
Speaker 1: and pointed out that this is it's comparable to how
Speaker 1: plea bargains work. Right, You catch someone up on some
Speaker 1: fucking bullshit charges and then you blackmail them into pleading
Speaker 1: out for a lesser charger or fine.
Speaker 2: Yes, yes, that's exactly it. Oh, it's so lame.
Speaker 1: Yeah, And that's what they're doing to these people. And
Speaker 1: this guy named James P. Barnes, he was doing this
Speaker 1: to some lowries and he probably would have lived to
Speaker 1: regret it, but he didn't get a chance to live
Speaker 1: to regret it because Barnes was a wealthy slave owner
Speaker 1: and a minor Confederate official. And on December twenty first,
Speaker 1: eighteen sixty four, after he'd accused some lowries of stealing
Speaker 1: his hogs, he's on his way to the post office
Speaker 1: when he gets shot with a shotgun and then takes
Speaker 1: a bullet point blank to the head.
Speaker 3: True colative pointed at your dome, yeah, d.
Speaker 1: So next they kill this guy named James Brantley Harris,
Speaker 1: who's a Confederate conscription officer, a known rape and a
Speaker 1: sheriff who liked to round up all the non white
Speaker 1: people and force them into labor camps. And in order
Speaker 1: to tell you about Harris, I've got to tell you
Speaker 1: about this idea called Scuffletown. Harris was supposed to keep
Speaker 1: peace in this place called Scuffletown. And the thing is
Speaker 1: is that, at least in none of the historians that
Speaker 1: I've read and actually know exactly what Scuffletown means it.
Speaker 1: It might be that some people know and I haven't
Speaker 1: been able to find it. But Scuffletown was it was
Speaker 1: the place that the lumbee met in Robison County at
Speaker 1: the time. It was the center of the social world
Speaker 1: and it was maybe a fixed location or maybe it
Speaker 1: was just the word that they used for wherever they
Speaker 1: all were, right, like a roving free space basically. And
Speaker 1: so they're all at Scuffletown. It's Confederate fuck. Harris is
Speaker 1: harassing a woman and two of the boys of the
Speaker 1: Lowry clan stand up to him and he beats them
Speaker 1: to death, this fucking sheriff. So everyone's fucking furious. They
Speaker 1: all show up at the boy's funeral and a warrant
Speaker 1: goes out for Harris, but he doesn't get to show
Speaker 1: up in court because he was out pleasure riding in
Speaker 1: his buggy when some people just fucking shot it up
Speaker 1: and killed him in his buggy after he did this bullshit,
Speaker 1: and maybe his body was thrown down a well, maybe
Speaker 1: it was buried like facing north south instead of east
Speaker 1: west and like basically as a sign of disrespect. Yeah,
Speaker 1: And so now the Lowries have this sort of problem.
Speaker 1: They've just killed a bunch of fucking people, and they're like, well,
Speaker 1: we're probably not coming back from this, right, So they
Speaker 1: decided to go on the offensive. And decades earlier in
Speaker 1: North Carolina had passed gun control laws that basically said
Speaker 1: free people of color weren't allowed to own guns, and
Speaker 1: this applied to indigenous people as well. Of course, Yeah,
Speaker 1: where fucking most of the gun control laws in this
Speaker 1: country come from.
Speaker 2: Shit like that.
Speaker 1: Yes, But so the lowries didn't have enough guns of
Speaker 1: their own because it was harder for them to get them.
Speaker 1: But they knew where some were kept, the courthouse where
Speaker 1: they kept all the guns for the local militia. So
Speaker 1: they fucking steal all the guns from the courthouse and
Speaker 1: then they're like, all right, fuck it, we're all in.
Speaker 1: And they basically just become robin hoods and they spend
Speaker 1: they rob plantations, they distribute all the shit that they
Speaker 1: steal in Scuffle Town. In all their raids, they avoid
Speaker 1: robbing black folks, Indigenous folks, and then what get called buckskins,
Speaker 1: which are the Scotch Irish who are sort of a
Speaker 1: step below white at this time, they're still above indigenous
Speaker 1: people and black people. And one time they actually do
Speaker 1: rob this buckskin that they think is rich, but they
Speaker 1: found out he only had fifteen bucks, so they just
Speaker 1: give him his money back and let him go. I know,
Speaker 1: they're so sweet.
Speaker 4: They're like, excuse me, you are broke, broke it's fine.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it's not gonna help. You're not helping, bro, It's
Speaker 2: all good, don't worry about it.
Speaker 1: So okay, So half their members are literally just people
Speaker 1: with the last named Lowry. But the Lowry Gang was multiracial.
Speaker 1: They had a bunch of people who had escaped enslavement,
Speaker 1: at least one Confederate deserter, a handful of like random
Speaker 1: white folks, especially buckskins, and for a while, a bunch
Speaker 1: of Unions solders who are scaping pow camps, including one
Speaker 1: of them who probably like is credited, who's credited for
Speaker 1: training them in guerrilla tactics because he was a Union scout,
Speaker 1: and and the Lowry Gang fucking loved guns. They just
Speaker 1: they each one of them carried two to three revolvers,
Speaker 1: a shotgun, a rifle, and a bowie knife. Apparently, I
Speaker 1: don't even fuck, I don't know, but yeah, I'm impressed.
Speaker 2: It's a little bit excessive.
Speaker 3: Yeah, but I'm like, I'm just like, the how's the
Speaker 3: physicality of carrying that many weapons? Like, okay, well, I mean,
Speaker 3: full respect, there's a lot of things that people do
Speaker 3: in that century that I'm not able to do. Yeah,
Speaker 3: let me go ahead, fall back on these foods.
Speaker 1: And I feel like, because if you did it now, right,
Speaker 1: you just need it. You're going a little overboard. It's
Speaker 1: completely unnecessary to have that many guns. But think about
Speaker 1: reloading in the nineteenth century, you know, and you're like,
Speaker 1: you shoot your rifle, and do you want to wait
Speaker 1: like forty seconds to reload your rifle or do you
Speaker 1: want to drop it pick up your shotgun?
Speaker 2: You know that's actually a that's actually.
Speaker 3: A tooche touche margarete.
Speaker 2: Because yeah, like I ain't really got time.
Speaker 3: You can't just yeah, these ain't automatic weapons, like you
Speaker 3: gotta like dang touche.
Speaker 2: I never even thought you.
Speaker 3: Are absolutely correct. Yeah, no, it makes sense because you like,
Speaker 3: oh yeah, you can't just yeah, you got I just
Speaker 3: need another gun.
Speaker 2: I can't just be like click click click click, like yeah, yeah,
Speaker 2: good point on me.
Speaker 1: So Henry Lowry, he's there a leader, either formally or informally,
Speaker 1: it's hard to know. His history books always pick a leader,
Speaker 1: and sometimes people in history pick leaders, but not always right.
Speaker 1: He always ties into the banjo thing. He's a he's
Speaker 1: a quiet, handsome man. All everyone talks about that, and
Speaker 1: he all he loves playing banjo and fiddle when he's
Speaker 1: not murdering people who need murdering. Okay, and they're all
Speaker 1: and they're all young as shit, which probably ties into
Speaker 1: way have so many guns too, to be real true,
Speaker 1: Like some of them are fourteen years old. Henry is
Speaker 1: twenty when all this starts. They're numbers. They ebb and flow,
Speaker 1: and they often would like just live their normal lives
Speaker 1: and then go run off to the swamps when it's
Speaker 1: time to avoid repression, and then would go join up
Speaker 1: the gang when it's time to go, you know, rob
Speaker 1: somebody who needs robbing full respect, And they basically just
Speaker 1: act as the armed wing of Scuffle Town. It seems
Speaker 1: like they and we know that Henry Lowry was like
Speaker 1: sort of in charge or whatever, but they also operated
Speaker 1: through voting. At one point, they decide to hang someone
Speaker 1: based on majority vote, and whoa, Okay, yeah, I love
Speaker 1: we gotta kill this guy. I thin't werenna kill this guy.
Speaker 1: I'll guess let's story but later yeah.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, what's out thing? We just I mean, so
Speaker 2: we should like we should hang him, right all right?
Speaker 2: So okay, look, show a hands, do we hang this
Speaker 2: dude or not? I love it?
Speaker 1: Yeah, you imagine being that guy, and you're just like, no,
Speaker 1: vote the other way.
Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, i'd you're like, ah, no, man, like you
Speaker 3: raise your mess Yeah, a messy, don't you think.
Speaker 2: Yeah, Like, sorry, dude, you're outvoted. You're gonna get that.
Speaker 2: This is what we're doing. Hey, sorry, homie, we gonna
Speaker 2: hang you. Yeah.
Speaker 1: And the whole larger community is helping them out, the
Speaker 1: entire county, like the Lumbee folks, the black folks, and
Speaker 1: a few of the white folks. Not the rich fucking
Speaker 1: white folks around there, but they're all like passing along information,
Speaker 1: they're scouting, they're treating the wounded, and at some point
Speaker 1: they muster a militia to frustrate attempts to find them.
Speaker 1: And the reason some of that stuff is important, to
Speaker 1: quote historians Neil Shirley and Sarah le Stafford, to privilege
Speaker 1: specific acts of banditry over this larger network of resistance
Speaker 1: would be to misunderstand the roots of a rebellion that
Speaker 1: had already begun well before the first assassinations of Confederate officers,
Speaker 1: and would result in an over emphasis on the quote
Speaker 1: men's work of an insurgency that actually involved the entire community.
Speaker 1: I just like that, because it's like everyone is involved
Speaker 1: in this shit, right, Like some of the people, mostly men,
Speaker 1: are off doing the direct work, but all of the
Speaker 1: other work that helps them is fucking just as important.
Speaker 1: And so okay, So they've killed all these guys, right,
Speaker 1: eighteen sixty five, six of them are rounded up, and
Speaker 1: they go and they're put on trial, and they're put
Speaker 1: on trial by actually I think I've heard you talk
Speaker 1: about them. They're put on trial by the Home Guard,
Speaker 1: which is the local policing body that led later to
Speaker 1: the police that tracks down Confederate deserters, escaped Union prisoners,
Speaker 1: and people escaping enslavement. So this is the precursor to
Speaker 1: the police in the South as the Home Plus, which yeah,
Speaker 1: behind the police. Is actually the first time I heard
Speaker 1: of them, so that's why I was like excited to
Speaker 1: put this in. So six folks are arrested, accused of
Speaker 1: stealing food and weapons from nearby plantations and helping Confederate
Speaker 1: deserters and escaped Union POWs all of They probably did
Speaker 1: all this shit, right, they denied it. They were like, no,
Speaker 1: we didn't do any of that. We're like innocent and stuff,
Speaker 1: you know. Of course, no, we did it, Yeah, totally, nah, no,
Speaker 1: it's not. Two of the Lowryes, Alan and William, who
Speaker 1: are father and son. They get tried by this jury
Speaker 1: that's made up of the fucking Home Guard and they're executed.
Speaker 1: A few days later, the Home Guard shows back up
Speaker 1: and arrests Grandma Lowry Mary. They tired of a fucking
Speaker 1: steak and blindfold her and then mock executor, firing their
Speaker 1: guns into the air above her, demanding that she tell
Speaker 1: them where her sons are, and she refuses.
Speaker 3: Good for her, Yeah, you're you're a rider, Yeah, like
Speaker 3: you have to know if your sons act like this,
Speaker 3: your grant is this your grandchildren that are like riders
Speaker 3: like this, then you definitely come from a stock to
Speaker 3: where your grandmom is like, yeah, I'm a snitch on
Speaker 3: my own grandchildren. Yeah, exactly, shoot your guns, shoot them, yeah,
Speaker 3: keep shooting them and yeah.
Speaker 1: And after this it actually calms down for a while,
Speaker 1: and like several points in the story, it probably would
Speaker 1: have all ended, except then the Home Guard decides to
Speaker 1: fuck with Henry's wedding. Henry he marries his cousin, a
Speaker 1: woman named Rhoda Strong, and the wedding is fucking I know,
Speaker 1: those times are yeah, uh, it's one of them.
Speaker 2: Okay.
Speaker 1: So this is like one of the most important Lumby
Speaker 1: families that universally loved. The feast table is seventy five
Speaker 1: feet long, right for their fucking wedding. Hundreds of people
Speaker 1: are there. And with hundreds of people there, the Home
Speaker 1: Guard shows up to arrest Henry for the murder of
Speaker 1: one of these Confederate focks that they killed earlier. So
Speaker 1: he grabs like one of the only two white people
Speaker 1: there and hides behind them, which I think is fucking brilliant.
Speaker 1: So the cops don't shoot him, and then the entire
Speaker 1: wedding party attacks the Home Guard unarmed. They're beaten back,
Speaker 1: and eventually they do successfully arrest Henry, but they didn't
Speaker 1: fucking kill him, which I think is completely possible.
Speaker 2: They would have just killed him there, you know. Yeah.
Speaker 1: Yeah, he goes to jail, He gets put on trial,
Speaker 1: and he completely re uses to cooperate. He won't speak
Speaker 1: on his own behalf, he won't cross examine witnesses. He's
Speaker 1: just like, now, fuck this, fuck you, yeah, all day
Speaker 1: every day. Yeah, because he knows his family has his back, right,
Speaker 1: So he's in jail for not very long. He uses
Speaker 1: a file to file through the bars of the jail
Speaker 1: and then break out. And the oral yeah, the oral
Speaker 1: tradition here is that that his wife wrote a strong
Speaker 1: baked the file into a cake.
Speaker 3: So it's like, so it's like old school. This is
Speaker 3: a movie cartoon. Yeah, let's go.
Speaker 1: Oh, it's going to get so much more cartoony.
Speaker 2: I love it.
Speaker 1: And so what I was reading this, I was like,
Speaker 1: is this where this comes from? This idea of bake
Speaker 1: the file into the cake. No, it's older than this.
Speaker 1: One time, like twenty years earlier, Alexander Duma had used
Speaker 1: it as a plot point in one of his books.
Speaker 1: And then like years later, so Irish anti colonial forces
Speaker 1: bust someone out of jail in Ireland by doing this,
Speaker 1: so dope, and so.
Speaker 2: I respect it so much. I respect it so damn much.
Speaker 1: So he files his fucking way out of the jail
Speaker 1: and he's out. And then the Civil War comes to
Speaker 1: an end, and when General Sherman passes through the area,
Speaker 1: most of the Union members who are part of the
Speaker 1: gang go and leave and rejoin the military. But even
Speaker 1: with the Confederacy defeated, the US didn't stop Former Confederate
Speaker 1: officials from continuing on in the new administration in the area,
Speaker 1: and the KKK rises to power as an extra legal
Speaker 1: arm of the repressive state, basically of course, and so
Speaker 1: during this time, the poor folks in Robison County they
Speaker 1: turn to the Lowries for protection, and the Republicans are like,
Speaker 1: fucked right, because they're in a their base entirely loves
Speaker 1: the Lowries, right, but their whole thing is that they're
Speaker 1: trying to be like law and order, and so they're
Speaker 1: incredibly divine on it. But in the end they reinstate
Speaker 1: the bounty against Henry Lowry, which again, it all could
Speaker 1: have just fucking stopped. If they'd stopped coming after this guy,
Speaker 1: it all would have been fucking over. But the new
Speaker 1: Republican sheriff and someone from the Freedman's Bureau, which is
Speaker 1: the federal agency test with helping newly freed people. They
Speaker 1: show up at Henry's house very politely, and they have
Speaker 1: like a pleasant meal and a chat, and Henry plays
Speaker 1: fiddle for them. They and they convince him. They're like, look,
Speaker 1: your best shot is to go and stand trial and
Speaker 1: be found innocent and put all of this behind you.
Speaker 1: So he agrees and he goes off to jail because
Speaker 1: he's like, all right, new administration, let's see what's going on.
Speaker 2: It is what it is? Yeah, Yeah.
Speaker 1: But when he's in jail, he starts hearing rumors that
Speaker 1: there's a posse out to lynch him and they're going
Speaker 1: to drown him in the river. So he's like, you
Speaker 1: know what, you fuck this. There isn't enough fucking security
Speaker 1: at the jail to stop a posse, which I think
Speaker 1: Henry must have figured it means that there wasn't enough
Speaker 1: security to keep him locked in. So one day the
Speaker 1: guard comes to the meal and Lowry he pulls out
Speaker 1: a gun and a knife on him, because I guess
Speaker 1: when he turned himself in he just brought a gun
Speaker 1: and a knife in case he needed them in jail,
Speaker 1: just in case.
Speaker 3: How you'd be able to hi, how is his man
Speaker 3: able to hold on to a gun and a knight? Oh?
Speaker 1: I don't fucking know, h man, you lucky dog, and
Speaker 1: saying yeah, His quote to the jailer that he pulls
Speaker 1: the gun on is I'm tired of this.
Speaker 2: And then he just lets himself out of jail. What what?
Speaker 1: And then apparently on his way out of town, he
Speaker 1: stops at a house and breaks in and steals crackers
Speaker 1: to eat, and then leaves and goes into the swamps.
Speaker 2: I know, you know what I'm done playing with y'all. Yeah, exactly.
Speaker 1: So six weeks later, the Lowery Gang is back in business,
Speaker 1: and there's this wealthy landowner named Reuben King. He spent
Speaker 1: decades catching enslaved people on the run, brutalizing Indigenous people
Speaker 1: and evicting poor tenants. So the Lowry Gang shows up
Speaker 1: at his house, kills him in his parlor and steals
Speaker 1: all this shit. And so now instead of just being
Speaker 1: instead of at war with the Confederacy, the entire large
Speaker 1: community they're part of is now at war with the
Speaker 1: new Republican government in the area. Okay, so the Republicans
Speaker 1: they hire an ex Confederate again, Captain Owen Norman, to
Speaker 1: hunt down the Lowryes. And you know his job during
Speaker 1: the fucking Confederacy was that he hunted down indigenous folks
Speaker 1: for the Confederacy, and now he's going to do it
Speaker 1: for the Republicans. The Home Guard is disbanded, but now
Speaker 1: you have the new Police Guard, which is I think
Speaker 1: the same people doing the same thing.
Speaker 2: Literally the same Yeah, we won't let that pass. We
Speaker 2: won't let that pass. Bido. Yeah.
Speaker 1: So the police guard and this led by this guy Norman,
Speaker 1: grab eight of the gang. Two of them do give
Speaker 1: info under torture, but then like later repudiate their statements
Speaker 1: and say not as is made under duress, and but
Speaker 1: eight of their number being in jailed and slow anything down.
Speaker 1: One newspaper at the time, which fucking hated them and
Speaker 1: was like trying to talk shit on them, claim that
Speaker 1: there's three hundred fighters in the Lowry gang, which is
Speaker 1: probably an exaggeration, but there was there was no shortage
Speaker 1: of people willing to go fucking do this shit in
Speaker 1: the area. So a few days before the trial, this
Speaker 1: asshole captain Owen Normant the he hears a noise at
Speaker 1: his door at his fucking plantation, because of course he
Speaker 1: lives on a fucking plantation.
Speaker 2: Of course he does, yes, And so.
Speaker 1: He goes outside because he hears a noise, and he
Speaker 1: somehow finds himself with an extra bullet in him and
Speaker 1: his family runs off to get a doctor who rushes
Speaker 1: over in a buggy with a mule pulling it. And
Speaker 1: then the poor mule is about a mile away from
Speaker 1: the plantation when the mule also develops a case of
Speaker 1: too many bullets and dies, which is as far as
Speaker 1: like its the only innocent victim that the loweries get anywhere. Yeah,
Speaker 1: or collateral damage bent out callous you're feeling, you know,
Speaker 1: like whether you're not you shoot the mule. The mule,
Speaker 1: I know, the doctor goes on on foot and it's
Speaker 1: too late to save Norman. Norman dies and then this
Speaker 1: is going to shock you. It turns out that killing
Speaker 1: uh Norman didn't help the case of the people who
Speaker 1: were on trial. You'd think, right, but no, yeah, it
Speaker 1: didn't help.
Speaker 2: So at all.
Speaker 1: Two of them get tried for one of the sheriff
Speaker 1: killings and they're sentenced to hang. But meanwhile, wrote a
Speaker 1: strong our jail brick, extraordinary wife smuggles an augur into
Speaker 1: one of the three to three of the guys and
Speaker 1: which is basically it's a drill bit with a handle
Speaker 1: on it.
Speaker 2: That's how I was going to ask. So, yeah, just.
Speaker 3: You know, I know what it is, but remind me
Speaker 3: specypically and in detail.
Speaker 6: Yeah, what's an augur? Yo say, I don't know what
Speaker 6: it is? Yeah, No, that was the joke trying to make. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 6: I mean I I put it in the script. I
Speaker 6: was like, I describe it too right, because I hear
Speaker 6: an Augur in an article and I'm like, well, what
Speaker 6: does that mean?
Speaker 1: The fucking nineteenth century? Right, like like now it's a
Speaker 1: big gas power machine that I used to put in
Speaker 1: fence posts. Oh, They're like, no, no, it's a jackhammer.
Speaker 1: That's a that's for concrete thing. No, no, no, no.
Speaker 1: I spend way too much my time think about power tools.
Speaker 1: I live on a fucking such a city boy house
Speaker 1: in the woods.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 1: So, but in Augur in this case, it's like, it's
Speaker 1: a before you have a fucking power drill, you use
Speaker 1: a hand drill. Right, So they they steal in a
Speaker 1: they smuggle in a hand drill, and then they somehow
Speaker 1: in this part I don't fucking get, they drill a
Speaker 1: hole in the wall of they're selling escape Like I
Speaker 1: don't know what they used to make jails out of.
Speaker 3: I'm and I'm like, wait, and I got no guards? Hey,
Speaker 3: you know anybody here that y'all like where y'all? Like what, okay,
Speaker 3: what tell.
Speaker 2: Me about y'all's prison system?
Speaker 3: And the thing is like it's not like I like,
Speaker 3: I'm here for it all, but I'm like, I mean,
Speaker 3: yall ain't here.
Speaker 2: Yall ain't here to augur. Yeah, I ain't see that,
Speaker 2: y'all ain't see the fire.
Speaker 3: Y'all ain't hear the man filing the You ain't walk
Speaker 3: by the jail cell and go, hey, man, why you
Speaker 3: what are you rubbing rigorously on the bars?
Speaker 2: I didn't know.
Speaker 3: And then the man that was like, you know what, man,
Speaker 3: And then when Naomi was like, you know what, man,
Speaker 3: fuck this, I'm leaving.
Speaker 2: That's gonna get better. That like y'all like, who are
Speaker 2: you hiring y'all?
Speaker 3: This must be like look, look, look they hiring teenagers.
Speaker 3: You know what I'm saying that like just won't like
Speaker 3: a minimum wate job, and it's like, oh, fuck, you
Speaker 3: know what I'm saying, just woole work at the mall.
Speaker 3: They hire people to work at GAP that are like, yeah,
Speaker 3: steal the sweats. I don't care, am I sweats?
Speaker 2: Yeah, that's what's happening here.
Speaker 3: I don't pay me enough freaking mall cops like, steal
Speaker 3: whatever person you want.
Speaker 2: I don't care.
Speaker 1: So so after this, after some of them break out,
Speaker 1: they take the rest of them and they put them
Speaker 1: in a brick jail.
Speaker 2: You know what, guys, I got some notes from last time.
Speaker 3: Uh, we should go with brick because Homie just drilled
Speaker 3: a hole through the wall last time, so we should
Speaker 3: probably just do you all right, guys, all in favor
Speaker 3: of bricks, and maybe we shouldn't hire your fucking nephew, Jo.
Speaker 3: I'm saying to watch them because that food must have
Speaker 3: been drunk as hell or just don't care.
Speaker 1: And you know what, it was harder for them to
Speaker 1: break out of the brick prison, but they did it
Speaker 1: really quickly.
Speaker 2: Anyway, let's go out.
Speaker 1: So this time, because this is a cartoon, Rona goes
Speaker 1: in and seduces the guards. I fucking kid, you not
Speaker 1: every out?
Speaker 2: Yes, this is who framed Roger Rabbit.
Speaker 3: Yeah this is yeah, he said, hey, you a big strong man.
Speaker 1: So she goes in and does this while and while
Speaker 1: she's doing that, someone else goes to the window and
Speaker 1: smuggles them a hatchet, a file, and a chisel, which
Speaker 1: they then use to turn a spoon into a lock pick.
Speaker 2: How much time you got, how much time you got?
Speaker 2: How fine is this girl? How much time you got.
Speaker 4: To do that?
Speaker 2: Okay?
Speaker 1: Yeah, so then they now they can come and go
Speaker 1: from their cell whenever they want because they got a
Speaker 1: lock pick. So they take their time. I assume at night,
Speaker 1: but I don't know. They take their time. They find
Speaker 1: an outside wall and they slowly chisel through the outside wall.
Speaker 2: Oh my god, this is hilarious.
Speaker 1: Whereupon they climb out on a rope made out of blankets.
Speaker 3: It's okay, you're Margaret, you're making this up, trolling me, Margaret.
Speaker 1: I checked more than one history book about as much
Speaker 1: as the ship as I could.
Speaker 2: Because I'm.
Speaker 1: Like, okay, did you Yeah, some of this might have
Speaker 1: gone into folklore. I'm reading this in history books. But
Speaker 1: these people are fucking They are absolutely mythologized like Robin Hood.
Speaker 2: Of course, so but still.
Speaker 1: Yeah, except one guy doesn't break out. He's in a
Speaker 1: different cell and he's like, you know what, I have
Speaker 1: a solid alibi, which is true. So his employer vouched
Speaker 1: for his whereabouts and he was found innocent, and then
Speaker 1: he like never joins the gang again and just fucks off,
Speaker 1: and it's like lives a quiet life. But but so
Speaker 1: the gang keeps up their raids during all this shit,
Speaker 1: even when people are in jail.
Speaker 2: This is so great. I love this. I got an alibi. Ya,
Speaker 2: y'all do I'm cool.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I love it. I feel like that would be
Speaker 1: me and all this. You know, I'm just like, well
Speaker 1: that was fun, but I almost got hanged.
Speaker 2: And I'm good. I'm good.
Speaker 1: I got stories to tell my grandchildren.
Speaker 2: I'm good. I did all right. I'll just you know,
Speaker 2: I'll just do it, y'all. Y'all, y'all, go ahead, just
Speaker 2: bring me back some of rio.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, okay. So then they hire an undercover cop.
Speaker 1: They hire this guy named John Saunders, a detective out
Speaker 1: of Boston who showed up and pretended to be a
Speaker 1: Republican from the North, a white dude, and he starts
Speaker 1: hanging out in Scuffletown and eventually makes acquaintances with the
Speaker 1: Lowries and basically he's like, hey, you all, I can
Speaker 1: smuggle you out to safety because they're in all of this,
Speaker 1: the Lowries are looking for they're out right, yeah, They're
Speaker 1: constantly like, how the fuck do we get out of
Speaker 1: this alive? Right?
Speaker 2: Yeah?
Speaker 3: And he's fellow youths yeah, and so he's like, hey,
Speaker 3: just follow me west to safety.
Speaker 1: But they don't quite trust him, so they keep an
Speaker 1: eye on him and then they catch him. You know,
Speaker 1: reporting back to his fucking other officers or whatever the fuck.
Speaker 3: Being a snitch. Yeah, they catch him being a snitch.
Speaker 3: Hey guys, you guys want some drugs around this corner. Yeah,
Speaker 3: you guys into drugs?
Speaker 2: Huh. You guys like smoking the smoking on the weed, huh.
Speaker 3: Come over here. I got him. I'm a fellow kid. Yeah,
Speaker 3: I'm a bandit.
Speaker 2: Hey, look at me. I'm a bandit from the North.
Speaker 2: I mean break it out of stuff.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I like vandalism, spray painting, some shit behind the
Speaker 1: seven stupid spray painty.
Speaker 2: Hey, guys, I got some spray paint. Yeah, totally. So
Speaker 2: they fucking catch you, right, of course.
Speaker 1: And they so they catch him, and they're like not
Speaker 1: really into the cold blood and murder thing, but this
Speaker 1: guy knows too much. And so here's where they put
Speaker 1: it to a vote, and they vote to kill him.
Speaker 2: Okay.
Speaker 1: They let him write a letter to his wife. They
Speaker 1: send a photograph of him and his last letter up
Speaker 1: to his wife, and then they I think they shoot him.
Speaker 2: Maybe they hang him, I don't know.
Speaker 1: And at this point they're kind of just winning, Like
Speaker 1: it's eighteen seventy. All the county's best law enforcement are
Speaker 1: fucking dead. The police spy is dead, and all of
Speaker 1: the lowries who've been captured have escaped. So they call
Speaker 1: and federal troops. At this point, the whole fucking army
Speaker 1: comes in, Federal troops, and so militias also start combing
Speaker 1: the swamps for the outlaws. And then again, because this
Speaker 1: is the most cartoon thing I've ever fucking relayed the
Speaker 1: story of when the militia's out hunting for them in
Speaker 1: the swamps, some of the lowries put on militia uniforms
Speaker 1: and joined the hunt for themselves.
Speaker 2: Now now it's bugs. Now it's looney tunes. Now it's bugs, bunny.
Speaker 1: Yeah, like yes, And what they what they found in
Speaker 1: the swamps instead was potatoes, the finest potatoes that money
Speaker 1: can buy, much like the potatoes that we advertise on
Speaker 1: this show.
Speaker 2: Swamp potatoes.
Speaker 3: Yeah, it's nothing like it.
Speaker 1: This is a break to some ads, and now here
Speaker 1: are some ads, all right, and we're back and we're
Speaker 1: talking about swamp fries apparently.
Speaker 2: Which are gator tots.
Speaker 1: Yes, And so the militias in the air, ye're looking
Speaker 1: for them as well as the federal troops. And the
Speaker 1: militia is just fucking made up of KKK as far
Speaker 1: as I can tell, and they, you'll be shocked to know,
Speaker 1: gave up on the whole rule of law thing, and
Speaker 1: so they just started going to the Yeah, they go
Speaker 1: to the lowry residents and they try to capture and
Speaker 1: murder murder them, and they kill at least one of
Speaker 1: them this way. However, the KKK leader responsible, John Taylor,
Speaker 1: also developed a case of too many bullets and dies.
Speaker 1: But then so then the militia is like, all right,
Speaker 1: we're going after your supporters, and so they murder a
Speaker 1: black man who was supporting them, and two of the
Speaker 1: white men responsible for killing that black man were then
Speaker 1: immediately killed by the lowries. And then the Conservatives come
Speaker 1: to power. The Republicans, they kind of lost all their
Speaker 1: wealthy support because they didn't catch the lowries, and then
Speaker 1: they lost all their working class support because they were
Speaker 1: going after the lowries in the first place. And the
Speaker 1: KKK is riding around fucking intimidating voters and being regular
Speaker 1: worse things that's ever happened.
Speaker 3: Yeah, dude, they had their moment, Yeah, their moment of
Speaker 3: shining where and it's like, we should probably end shadow slavery.
Speaker 2: They just haven't clocked a w since.
Speaker 1: Yeah, exactly, God, So the Conservatives put a bounty of
Speaker 1: twelve thousand dollars on the heads of each of the Lowries.
Speaker 1: So the Loweryes then put bounties back on the county
Speaker 1: commissioner and a bunch of the other folks working. They
Speaker 1: don't have as much money, so because they only offer
Speaker 1: a thousand dollars, the county commissioner two hundred for a
Speaker 1: bunch of the people working for him. But then racists
Speaker 1: from all around come to Robison County and they're looking
Speaker 1: for the bounty money. Right one Lowry gang member named
Speaker 1: apple White is ambush near his house. He's shot in
Speaker 1: the back and then in the mouth, But then the
Speaker 1: posse that shoots him is afraid that he has friends around,
Speaker 1: so they take off running and they plan to come
Speaker 1: back later for the body. When they come back, apple
Speaker 1: White he's gone, and so they they harass his wife.
Speaker 1: They arrest his brother for no good reason. A few
Speaker 1: days later, another posse finds Henry Lowry's cabin in the
Speaker 1: swamps and they creep up on it and there's apple
Speaker 1: White and he he had crawled away, spit the bullet
Speaker 1: out of his mouth and was resting in the sun
Speaker 1: at the Lowry's house.
Speaker 4: What, yeah, this really is a movie?
Speaker 2: I know, why is it not one? Yeah? Well raises
Speaker 2: it mostly? Oh well yeah, but well.
Speaker 3: Yeah, uh my man caught the bullet with his two
Speaker 3: front teeth.
Speaker 2: Okay, spits out the bullet keeps going. It's the bullet out.
Speaker 3: Hey, seriously, if you shoot at somebody and they spit
Speaker 3: the bullet out, the fight's over.
Speaker 2: It's done. Lead that person today own devices.
Speaker 1: Oh my god, one time, one day, I'm gonna tell
Speaker 1: the story of al Fusilado and the Mexican in the
Speaker 1: Mexican Revolution. This guy gets put in front of a
Speaker 1: firing squad and shot with like thirteen bullets or whatever,
Speaker 1: and he doesn't die. So the officer comes up, puts
Speaker 1: a gun to his head and shoots him in the
Speaker 1: head and he doesn't die. And so so then they're like,
Speaker 1: you know what, you can go like, we shot you
Speaker 1: in the fucking head and twelve times in the body.
Speaker 2: I don't know what to say anymore. Guys. Yeah, look, listen,
Speaker 2: let me tell you something.
Speaker 3: Your little politics I talk all the time about, Like listen,
Speaker 3: if you if you you know is the rule? If
Speaker 3: you're about to get jumped, you know, which hopefully this
Speaker 3: doesn't happen to anybody. And one, we're full grown adults now,
Speaker 3: so this is stupid. But if you were, it's like,
Speaker 3: you have to like lose your mind on the toughest
Speaker 3: of them. Whoever toughest is or the loudest is in
Speaker 3: that group, you got to lose your mind on them
Speaker 3: so that everybody else thinks twice, right.
Speaker 2: Yeah, la, yeah, you know what I'm saying.
Speaker 3: So that like, and that gives you that split second
Speaker 3: because they're like, oh, dang, he just punched that. She
Speaker 3: just punched the baddest of all of us. Okay, we
Speaker 3: should probably like, yo, let's think twice about this. So
Speaker 3: and it's the same as the other way around. Somebody
Speaker 3: bought a fist up, caught their arm back and fire
Speaker 3: on you and you just take it. Yeah, then then
Speaker 3: it's time then yeah yeah, like that food that your
Speaker 3: jaws steal.
Speaker 2: So lead this person alone.
Speaker 1: That's what I used to do. I was like when
Speaker 1: I was more of a street kid. Someone who's drunk
Speaker 1: and looking for a fight punches you, and it sounds
Speaker 1: kind of counterintuitive. It's not like someone punches and you're
Speaker 1: like oh no, I'm so sorry. I wish you hadn't
Speaker 1: punched me. But instead someone punches and you just stare
Speaker 1: at them. Yes, then they go find someone else to fight. Now,
Speaker 1: if someone's trying to fuck you up, that don't work, right,
Speaker 1: But like yeah, if someone's looking for a fight and
Speaker 1: they punch you and you just stare them down, they
Speaker 1: fuck usually fuck off, yeah, because they're just.
Speaker 3: Like, ah, that just gave you everything I had, Yeah,
Speaker 3: and that was it?
Speaker 6: Yeah yeah yeah, and you just you just take it
Speaker 6: just like Yeah.
Speaker 1: It's a hard it's a hard math to figure out though, right,
Speaker 1: it really is.
Speaker 2: It really is unless you're a fighter.
Speaker 3: Like if you're a fighter and somebody to your best
Speaker 3: punch and just drank it, yeah, then you like, oh
Speaker 3: yeah that's it.
Speaker 2: Let me go ahead, because I don't know what your swing.
Speaker 2: Don't feel like anyway?
Speaker 3: Yeah. So yeah, a man that takes a firing squad
Speaker 3: and a point blank and just looks at you like y'all,
Speaker 3: y'all good, like we done here? Yeah?
Speaker 2: Are we done?
Speaker 1: All? Right?
Speaker 2: Them out?
Speaker 1: Yeah, and he just lives the rest of his life.
Speaker 1: I can't remember what work he got up to. It's
Speaker 1: been a while since I read his story. But all right,
Speaker 1: So they show up at Henry Lowery's cabin. There's fucking
Speaker 1: bullet spinner apple White, and they get into a gunfight,
Speaker 1: and then the gunfight goes on for a while, like
Speaker 1: from inside the cabin, outside the cabin, and then all
Speaker 1: the shooting stops. So they run up on the cabin
Speaker 1: and they break in and there's a hidden hatch in
Speaker 1: the basement of a fucking cabin that leads to a
Speaker 1: tunnel that goes sixty three through the fucking swamps. And
Speaker 1: they've gotten the fuck out brilliant, which is an important thing.
Speaker 1: If you're gonna be a bandit gang, you need a
Speaker 1: fucking tunnel under your house.
Speaker 3: You need a tunnel dog. Come on, man, Yeah, that's
Speaker 3: a no brainer. And you and nim swamps don't nobody
Speaker 3: know where you like, You can't navigate swamp, you can't
Speaker 3: map swamps.
Speaker 2: You have to just be. You have to just be
Speaker 2: from there.
Speaker 1: Yeah, which is I mean, I didn't even get into
Speaker 1: the Maroons during the last episode one day or a
Speaker 1: whole thing about them. But yeah, people, if you know
Speaker 1: the swamps, you can fucking do a lot of shit.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 1: So okay, so they get away, right, But at this
Speaker 1: point two of their people are in jail, one member
Speaker 1: of their gang and then one of their supporters that
Speaker 1: the brother, right, and they're like, well, this isn't going
Speaker 1: to do. So a whole bunch of them show up
Speaker 1: armed at the jail and they just hold up the
Speaker 1: jail at gunpoint and they're like, hey, let our friends go,
Speaker 1: and they do.
Speaker 3: Yes, because it's fifteen year olds that are good in prison.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and fifteen year olds with guns on the outside too.
Speaker 3: To be real, you know, oh yeah, I forgot the
Speaker 3: only I forgot. Everything happens. You've already ran for president
Speaker 3: at nine.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah.
Speaker 1: Nineteenth century, Yes, Lincoln was actually fourteen. He just looks
Speaker 1: real sport, just the haggard fourteen.
Speaker 3: It was just a really hard life out there, man,
Speaker 3: he's real, really fourteen yeah yeah.
Speaker 1: So basically the entire community is ungovernable at this point, right, yes,
Speaker 1: And taxes weren't able to be collected in the area,
Speaker 1: No warrants were being served in the area. Black train
Speaker 1: hands were sending warnings down the line whatever troops were
Speaker 1: approaching by rail, and so the Conservative government by eighteen
Speaker 1: seventy one, they give up trying to target the gang,
Speaker 1: and they just start terrorizing the entire community. And they
Speaker 1: start arresting familiar Yeah, and they started arresting Lumbey women
Speaker 1: in their homes and they basically are like, well, you know,
Speaker 1: these people are involved too or whatever. So and during
Speaker 1: all of this, again this is a story I read
Speaker 1: from one or two historians, but again it's CARTOONI as shit,
Speaker 1: But this is the story. Yeah, during all this, some
Speaker 1: soldiers stumble upon Henry and he's like rowing down the river,
Speaker 1: so they open fire on him, so he dives into
Speaker 1: the water. He overturns his boat as cover, and then
Speaker 1: instead of running away, he advances on them and then
Speaker 1: picks them off one by one until they all fuck
Speaker 1: off and run.
Speaker 2: And now it's now it's Rambo. Okay, yeah, now it's Rambo.
Speaker 3: Now he's Jean Claude Vand now this is the Steven
Speaker 3: Sagall movie.
Speaker 2: Yeah, okay, and I believe it.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I mean I know right like it's it's it's
Speaker 3: fucking because the tropes come from somewhere.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, because tropes come from somewhere. Yeah. So you like, okay,
Speaker 2: that's incredible. Yeah.
Speaker 1: And so then they send the sheriff a letter, and
Speaker 1: they say, we make a request that our wives, who
Speaker 1: are arrested a few days ago and placed in jail
Speaker 1: be released to come home to their families by Monday morning,
Speaker 1: and if not, the bloodiest times will be here that
Speaker 1: ever was before. The life of every man will be
Speaker 1: in jeopardy. That is the most polite. Oh my, I
Speaker 1: love how polite these people were back there.
Speaker 4: Yeah, like, now, prop prop did they release them or
Speaker 4: did they not release them?
Speaker 2: Of course they released it. Of course they did. Somebody
Speaker 2: somebody that somebody that dangerous. That calm.
Speaker 3: That's another thing. Somebody that that's dangerous and that calm.
Speaker 3: You know, Okay, you know something I don't because you're
Speaker 3: suposed to come up in here.
Speaker 2: Being like listen, listen, I don't see my ladies by tonight.
Speaker 2: I'm murdering. I'm gonna kill your fucking parakeets too.
Speaker 3: Everybody dying. Everybody, everyone's dying. I'm taking a train. I'm
Speaker 3: taking a train to Tennessee, and I'm finding your grandma.
Speaker 3: I'm murdering. Where your ma mistake? Where your grandma mistay?
Speaker 3: Where your homeboys stay? Everybody dying? That's how you posted
Speaker 3: to talk.
Speaker 2: He's like, you know, this is gonna be a really
Speaker 2: hard day for everybody.
Speaker 3: I'm just I'm just saying, all the men are in
Speaker 3: danger if you don't give us our ladies back.
Speaker 1: Yeah, okay, And so it works, and of course, but
Speaker 1: they can't actually as as fucking hard as they are
Speaker 1: and as much as they rule, they can't actually get
Speaker 1: up keep up their antics with federal troops everywhere, right, Like,
Speaker 1: they're not doing a lot of robbery at this point,
Speaker 1: but they do apparently get up some good shenanigans. And again, okay,
Speaker 1: this is reported by the William Williamton Star at the time,
Speaker 1: a newspaper at the time. Okay, an officer received a
Speaker 1: note from Lowry that said, and I'm paraphrasing here, just
Speaker 1: to make sure y'all were doing okay, I took it
Speaker 1: upon myself to come into your your camp and inspect
Speaker 1: your guns. And so then they they searched their guns,
Speaker 1: and Henry Lowry has signed his name on one of
Speaker 1: the fucking guns these dub And again, I don't know
Speaker 1: what the fuck is truth or myth here, but this
Speaker 1: is what's being reported at the time, this is what's
Speaker 1: being reported in the history books. I'm just yeah, these
Speaker 1: people fucking.
Speaker 2: Rule, even if it's myth it's so great. Yeah, this
Speaker 2: is great.
Speaker 3: This is great mythology, even if it is myth Yeah,
Speaker 3: and wonderful at least some huge chunk of it.
Speaker 2: I mean again, I don't fucking know, you know.
Speaker 1: Yeah, okay, And so both both sides actually want this
Speaker 1: to end at this point, and so there's this brief
Speaker 1: truce and then some of the like wiser heads in
Speaker 1: the government are like, hey, why don't we just give
Speaker 1: them all pardons and then this could all fucking go away. Yeah,
Speaker 1: But the law and order crowd is like, hell no,
Speaker 1: And so the truce disappears.
Speaker 2: Wow.
Speaker 1: So the Lowry's rob one thousand dollars from a merchant
Speaker 1: in town, and then they steal the iron safe out
Speaker 1: of the sheriff's office with twenty two thousand dollars inside.
Speaker 2: Another cartoon moment, all right.
Speaker 1: And then Henry Lowry just fucking disappears.
Speaker 2: Gone. Yeah in the wind.
Speaker 1: Bounty hunters combed the area for the next two years.
Speaker 1: They kill at least three of the gang during all
Speaker 1: of us. One of them this one of the Scott's
Speaker 1: Irish members, Zachariah McLaughlin. He got to drinking with some
Speaker 1: other white guy, and he told him like, hey, you
Speaker 1: should join this gang. And then the white guy for
Speaker 1: Zack to fall asleep, shot him in the head with
Speaker 1: his own pistol and turned his body in for the bounty.
Speaker 1: And then that dude got the fuck out of Robinson County.
Speaker 3: Yes, I was gonna say, like, you're gonna turn You're
Speaker 3: gonna turn in somebody that's like a gangster like that
Speaker 3: dude put the money, you bet it disappear. You better
Speaker 3: get to Canada real soon. Yeah, because get your money,
Speaker 3: get up out of here, which I kind of feel
Speaker 3: like that's what Lowry did twenty two thousand.
Speaker 2: Yeah. Man, he in France, homie.
Speaker 1: Yeah, he's fucking He's gone. And then to quote the
Speaker 1: historians I was quoting earlier, Neil Shirley and sarahly Stafford.
Speaker 1: They have a book called Dixie b Damned about rebellions
Speaker 1: in the South, and they sum up the theories with
Speaker 1: this quote or this is a quote I'm summing up
Speaker 1: with theories. A variety of folk tales, legends, and hypotheses exist,
Speaker 1: some supported by more evidence than others, but all inconclusive.
Speaker 1: That Lowry escaped the county undercover as an injured soldier
Speaker 1: with the help of a sympathetic general, that he faked
Speaker 1: his own death and funeral with a straw stuffed corpse,
Speaker 1: later a skin from the country in a stolen military uniform,
Speaker 1: that he escaped by train in his own coffin, that
Speaker 1: he survived his endeavors and emerged under a different name
Speaker 1: as a leader of native resistance in the Pacific Northwest.
Speaker 1: A few years later, that he died on his brother's
Speaker 1: Tom's land by accidental discharge of his rifle, secretly buried
Speaker 1: by his comrades to continue the legend and rebellion and
Speaker 1: symbolic status. Local newspapers tended to prefer the accidental death story,
Speaker 1: but their papers also had a political interest in undermining
Speaker 1: the legend of the man. What's more, neither the body
Speaker 1: nor the grave site of Henry Barry Lowry has ever
Speaker 1: been found.
Speaker 2: I loved so. Yeah you think he's in France?
Speaker 3: Nah? I think, yeah, headed to the Northwest. I could
Speaker 3: see that and being like, look, we was able to
Speaker 3: do this down here. Yeah, I'll bet you we could
Speaker 3: pull this off if they think I'll go And then again,
Speaker 3: I'm just like, if you got that much money, yeah, yeah,
Speaker 3: you out. Yeah, Like I'm out. What I did, My
Speaker 3: work here is done. I'm out, Yeah, totally.
Speaker 2: Ann ain't an you ain't.
Speaker 3: Fighting federal soldiers, you know what I'm saying. And y'all gangsters.
Speaker 3: So it's like, you know, you look, we'd have done y'all.
Speaker 3: Look y'all get y'all. Y'all got y'all thousand dollars. Y'all
Speaker 3: need to get the fuck out the city too. Like
Speaker 3: you don't need me to tell you, y'all get y'all
Speaker 3: go for I got mine.
Speaker 2: You go get yours. Yeah, I'm out. Yeah, you know
Speaker 2: what I'm saying. Totally. Yeah.
Speaker 1: So there's there's one more story in all this. It
Speaker 1: happens in Robison County with the Lumbee and fighting against
Speaker 1: racist and shit.
Speaker 2: That's worth it.
Speaker 1: I mean, there's a million more stories we're telling. This
Speaker 1: is the other one that looms large in a lot
Speaker 1: of this history, and this is the Battle of Hayes Pond.
Speaker 1: It's like one hundred fucking years later, it's nineteen fifty
Speaker 1: eight and the Lumbee were targeted by the KKK. On
Speaker 1: January thirteenth. The clan burned two crosses, one in the
Speaker 1: yard of a Lumbe family who'd moved into a white neighborhood,
Speaker 1: and one on the yard of a white woman who
Speaker 1: is believed to be sleeping with a Lumbee man, a
Speaker 1: South Carolina grand dragon or wizard or and to whatever
Speaker 1: D and D shit they named themselves.
Speaker 2: Yeah, just yeah, anyway, Yeah.
Speaker 1: His name is fucking James Catfish Coal and oh my god, yeah,
Speaker 1: oh my god, these guys, I know, like, you name
Speaker 1: yourself a wizard and a catfish, I'm supposed to take
Speaker 1: you serious.
Speaker 2: I'm just unpleased to take you serious.
Speaker 1: Yeah, And so he decides he's gonna throw a big
Speaker 1: old clan rally to end all the race mixing, and
Speaker 1: he tries to run a field near town, but everyone's
Speaker 1: like fuck you. So eventually he finds a place to
Speaker 1: have their rally further out of town, like ten miles
Speaker 1: out of town. And apparently the sheriff was like, hey, hey, Bud,
Speaker 1: you really might not want to do this. People might
Speaker 1: not like it if you do this. Yeah, but the
Speaker 1: brave grand l for Hobbit or whatever it decides to
Speaker 1: do it anyway. And so you know, I have to
Speaker 1: hate someone if I'm going to drag D and D
Speaker 1: That's how much I fucking hate them, is that I'm
Speaker 1: willing to pick on nerds even though I fucking play
Speaker 1: D and D. Okay, of course, So they have the
Speaker 1: rally an old grand catfish coal he wants. He thinks
Speaker 1: five thousand of his dudes are going to show up
Speaker 1: fifty two.
Speaker 2: I was like, you ain't getting no five okay, thank you.
Speaker 1: Yeah, but five hundred lumbees show up, and everyone on
Speaker 1: all sides is armed, and so there's this tense stand off.
Speaker 1: It's mostly the lumbe making fun of the dumb fucking clansmen,
Speaker 1: of course, and then there's like the shortest scuffle. One
Speaker 1: lumby man pulls down the KKK bander and the Klan
Speaker 1: only had like one light bulb to light up their
Speaker 1: makeshift stage attached to a generator or whatever. So someone
Speaker 1: fucking shoots it out, and then a bunch of other
Speaker 1: people start shooting, and I think the lumbe might have
Speaker 1: been being nice here and shot into the air because
Speaker 1: no one's injured in all this, and they're surrounded by
Speaker 1: five hundred armed fucking people.
Speaker 3: Yeah yeah, they were like, look, dude, show a little
Speaker 3: lame ass out of here.
Speaker 1: So what happens next Yeah, yeah, exactly. Lumbee historian Melinda
Speaker 1: Maynor Lowry puts it like this, Cole took off running
Speaker 1: in the swamps. His panicked followers dropped their guns, jumped
Speaker 1: in their cars, and drove in all directions, some straight
Speaker 1: into the ditches surrounding the field. Cole abandoned his own
Speaker 1: white Caroline at the scene. She either escaped on foot
Speaker 1: with her three children, or, as some Lumbees like to
Speaker 1: tell the story, drove her car into a ditch and
Speaker 1: had to have Lumbee men pull her out. Miraculously, no
Speaker 1: one was seriously injured. Even though Sandford Lockleyar's threat to
Speaker 1: kill Cole was real, one of the people was like,
Speaker 1: I'm gonna fucking kill Cole. Wow, I'm still puzzled that
Speaker 1: no one got killed, said one of the women who
Speaker 1: confronted the Klan and Catfish.
Speaker 2: Cole.
Speaker 1: He goes and he hides in the swamps and he doesn't
Speaker 1: come out of his hiding place for two fucking days
Speaker 1: after the shit, and he's arrested for inciting a riot,
Speaker 1: extradited from South Carolina, and he's given like eighteen months.
Speaker 1: And one of the one of the jury was like,
Speaker 1: they were like, why do you convict? And he was
Speaker 1: like a lot of very angry people with guns were
Speaker 1: very very interested in this man being convicted this oh
Speaker 1: and you know that catfish. On his like sentencing or whatever,
Speaker 1: he makes this grand statement about how the Core is
Speaker 1: proving him right, that the country is falling into like
Speaker 1: communism and dictatorship.
Speaker 2: Of course, of course it doesn't sound familiar to now
Speaker 2: at all. Yeah, yeah, yeah, no one's ever done that.
Speaker 1: The guy who grabs the banner, he has his photo
Speaker 1: taken to two guys have their photo taken wrapped in
Speaker 1: the banner and become a celebrity. And he gets thousands
Speaker 1: of letters of support from eight different countries. And this
Speaker 1: ends KKK activity in Robison County. So that's the story
Speaker 1: of the Lowry Gang, or sometimes called the Lowry Wars.
Speaker 1: They live on in legend in North Carolina. And I
Speaker 1: thought it fitting to end with them because I think
Speaker 1: it's I think it's important to like really drive home
Speaker 1: that the rebellion against the Confederacy wasn't necessarily a pro
Speaker 1: union thing, it was a pro freedom thing.
Speaker 2: And kept going.
Speaker 3: That's dope, I what am I trying to say here?
Speaker 3: There's something that I've always like, I haven't been able
Speaker 3: to put words on until recently. That's so unique about
Speaker 3: the type of like going back to this clan guy
Speaker 3: then and this last thing in nineteen fifty eight, like this,
Speaker 3: I just don't understand, Like there's so many ways in
Speaker 3: the black community to say that's none of my business,
Speaker 3: just my your own business, Like you know, we just
Speaker 3: be like, look, that's your business, Like listen, listen, my
Speaker 3: n ain't been ittt, I ain't in it. I mean,
Speaker 3: we just have a million ways just to be like,
Speaker 3: that's none of my business, you know what I'm saying, Like,
Speaker 3: I just don't listen. If I see two Korean people
Speaker 3: talking on the train, they talking to each other in
Speaker 3: their own language, that's none of my business you talking.
Speaker 3: So this man is so mad about something? Who is ladies?
Speaker 3: Who this lady smashing fox doors down? What the hell
Speaker 3: she got to do with you? It's none of your business.
Speaker 3: This family moves into this house, what it's none of
Speaker 3: your business. I just don't like, like, why do you
Speaker 3: make shit that's not your business. It's a specific type
Speaker 3: of white supremacy to me that makes everything they business.
Speaker 3: And I'm just like you, Yeah, I'm like, look, let
Speaker 3: me let me okay, clan, let me give you some pointers.
Speaker 2: You can.
Speaker 3: Do your racism. But why you look so stupid to
Speaker 3: us is because you worried about shit that ain't your business.
Speaker 2: What the fuck you can? What the fuck do you care? Like,
Speaker 2: why do you care about that?
Speaker 4: You know?
Speaker 3: And I'm like, and that evolves into the Karen phenomenon.
Speaker 3: You just feel like shit is your business, and I'm
Speaker 3: just like, that's mind your own fucking business. Like, how
Speaker 3: many things would just be if you just mind your
Speaker 3: own just mino, that's not your business. And it's like,
Speaker 3: to me, one of listen, one of the easiest things
Speaker 3: to discern. To me, the easiest thing in the world
Speaker 3: for me to understand is what's my business and what's
Speaker 3: not my business?
Speaker 2: Yeah, Margaret, you are part of the trans community.
Speaker 1: Yep.
Speaker 2: You know why I have.
Speaker 3: No thoughts about that because it's none of my business.
Speaker 2: If that's what you want to do, it ain't my business. Yeah,
Speaker 2: j Unders says. I'm just like, it was so easy.
Speaker 2: It is so easy for me.
Speaker 3: Yeah, you know, I just don't understand why people don't
Speaker 3: understand what is not their business.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I got that.
Speaker 4: Why so many of them are politicians.
Speaker 2: That's what John says. Wad Yeah, why did those people
Speaker 2: grow up? And I'm because they think everything is their business?
Speaker 1: So they should because they take everything they totally.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 1: The number of people who thinks their business whether or
Speaker 1: I'm wearing a dress in public or whatever, it's fucking wild.
Speaker 1: I'm like, it's why, listen, does this impact the fact
Speaker 1: that I'm trying to buy French fries at my favorite
Speaker 1: French frying poor?
Speaker 3: Um no, no, Margaret, if you and front of me
Speaker 3: in address, you know what I'm thinking about? What size
Speaker 3: fries I want? Yeah, exactly, That's what I'm thinking about. Yeah,
Speaker 3: I'm just like, I'm not good, it's not my business.
Speaker 2: That's a total stranger.
Speaker 4: Yeah, you know, it comes back to potatoes.
Speaker 2: It all comes back.
Speaker 3: I just want to know what sized fries I'm gonna get.
Speaker 3: That's all I'm worried about. And I'm looking to see
Speaker 3: if they just fried him back there. I hope they
Speaker 3: hopefully they fresh. That probably impacts what size you want
Speaker 3: to you know exactly.
Speaker 2: If I look out there and I'm like, they ain't
Speaker 2: dip those in in a while, I go to small.
Speaker 2: But if I'm like he just made them right. Let
Speaker 2: me get it, Let me get a bucket. Yeah, you know,
Speaker 2: Oh my god, I want French fries so bad. Learning
Speaker 2: now so bad as soon as we get on. Yeah,
Speaker 2: that's what I mean. Yo, this was great. Thanks for
Speaker 2: having me. Yeah, thanks for coming on.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 2: This the new show on the on the on the
Speaker 2: media zone. Huh the cool Zone.
Speaker 4: Yeah, it's a new Czum joint.
Speaker 2: Welcome, Welcome, Welcome to the Welcome to the family. Thank
Speaker 2: you you.
Speaker 4: Yeah you wanna you wanna plug that cool Zone media
Speaker 4: show that that you host, prop.
Speaker 2: Yo, I'm on a cool zone too, man. It's called
Speaker 2: hood politics. You know what I'm saying. Uh we hood
Speaker 2: politics will prop Like I am of the belief that.
Speaker 3: You understand more than you think you understand. You just
Speaker 3: need somebody to point at it, you know. And especially
Speaker 3: if you were, as Margaret said, at some point a
Speaker 3: street kid, you know, then you understand more than you
Speaker 3: think you do. And that's really what the Hood Politics
Speaker 3: is about.
Speaker 2: And I enjoy doing it.
Speaker 1: It's a good fucking show and people should listen to it.
Speaker 1: Thank you, although I kind of assume most people are
Speaker 1: listening to us. I've already heard it, but just in
Speaker 1: case you haven't.
Speaker 2: You never know, you got your own fans. You know
Speaker 2: what I'm saying, Well, lets you be listening to your show.
Speaker 2: That's what I mean, That's what I'm insinuating.
Speaker 4: Yeah, Yeah, And we'll be back on Monday, right, Margaret.
Speaker 2: Back on Monday. Stuff. Cool Stuff in the Cool Zone Yeah.
Speaker 4: They cool people who did Cool Stuff is a production
Speaker 4: of cool Zone Media. For more podcasts on cool Zone Media,
Speaker 4: visit our website Coolzonemedia dot com, or check us out
Speaker 4: on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get
Speaker 4: your podcasts.