Also media.
Ah boy, it sure is cold in here, because we're doing a cold open, prop. How do you feel about cold opens?
Hey? Man, you know I don't like being cold at all, but you know, opening is great.
How many you've done that bit? How many times are you gonna do it?
How many times I've done.
I don't know that I've done that exact bit.
Oh you have, because I remember being like fair Fair, I remember being.
With our good friend prop.
You know, hey, I'll give you a cold opening question. Okay, yeah, okay, what's the what's what's the worst thing you love?
What's the worst thing?
Man? I love so many bad things.
I tell you it is right now. It's harsh. Chemical cleaning products.
Oh yeah, yeah, some of that. Yeah, those big those big jugs of green ship that Oh my god.
Yeah yeah, give oh yeah, I need to kind of make like nerve gas when I cleaned the bathroom.
Yeah that's right, that's right. Oh yeah, I love that kind of shit.
Over overpriced skin care products sharp, Oh my god.
I like driving, which is killing everyone, but I really enjoy it. So who's to say if it's bad or not? Scientists scientists speaking of scientists, Most scientists will agree that the Revolutionary War happened. Why would they disagree with that? It definitely did. I was going to do speaking of cold opens Valley Forge pretty cold, but also, you know, the revolution lasted years, so I assume it was warm for periods. Validy Forge is just like, you know, that's one of the high points.
It's one of the moments.
Yeah. A lot of freezing cold colonial militia, Yeah, keeps me west. Yeah. That boat that they had to cross and to kill some Hessians. A lot of Hessian killing in early American history. Yeah. Anyway, Thomas Jefferson is not around for a lot of that. He's involved with the revolution obviously, but he's a lover, not a fighter, not really a lover even he's a guy who likes to write things.
Not like, oh no, man, he's not really a lover either, pretty sigma.
Yeah, yeah, very much so. He's the John Wick of writing essays. Now, as the Revolutionary War starts to pick up speed, most of the prominent figures urging rebellion held
a Continental Congress. Jefferson was not enough of like a front burner kind of dude to get elected to that in seventeen seventy four, but the next year, he gets appointed as an alternate for another guy in the Second Continental Congress, and that guy wounds up having to bounce, which is how the future president first gets into Congress.
The fighting against Great Britain had just begun, and Washington was chosen for the commander of the American forces, and he's you know, Jefferson soon gets elected to be in Congress properly, and he serves through the opening years of the war, returning home in seventeen seventy six to deal with the death of his mother, about whom he writes nothing. So he is, you know, from this point on a figure in the leadership of the revolution, but not yet
through he kind of gets in. It's still a lot of his dad's like reputation that kind of secures him this position. Ellis and American Sphinx describes him as entering national affairs by the side door, his main claim to fame in these early years. Yeah, that's an interesting way to Yeah. The kind of the first thing he does that really gets him some attention on his own merits is that in seventeen seventy four he kind of almost accidentally publishes a pamphlet called a Summary View of the
rights of British America. This had been written as a set of instructions for the Virginia delegation to the First Continental Congress, right because he's in He's held office in Virginia, Virginia sending people to the First Continental Congress, which he is not at, and he writes some instructions for how they should what lines they should hold to in this kind of debate over what posture delegates should take towards Great Britain, and Jefferson urges them to take the most
radical course in writing, arguing that again Parliament has no
right to control or tax the colonies. But he doesn't actually have the stones to get up in front of everybody and argue his point, so he plays sick when the debate in Virginia over this goes down, and this track that he writes gets published later by his friends who like basically are like, well, this is a good thing you've written, and we agree with it, so we're just going to put this out there, even though you decided to play hooky when it was time to stand
up for it. Lame uh huh, that's TJ. Baby. Now there's a lot to criticize about Jefferson. But we see in this document the skill with word play that's going to become evident to the world when the Declaration of Independence gets published. But here's a sample line from this
first pamphlet. Single acts of tyranny may be ascribed to the accidental opinion of the day, But a series of oppressions begun at a distinguished period and pursued unalterably through every change of ministers too plainly prove a deliberate, systematical plan of reducing us to slavery. Now, hmm, that's interesting
that that's how he is. That's what he says that England is trying to do to them, and he part of kind of making England into the heel is that he decides to make to blame them for the whole state of slavery in the colonies. This is where Jefferson's going to publish his first kind of statements against slavery that are under his own name, arguing that not only should the slave trade be stopped, but the new government should push for the enfranchisement of the slaves that we have.
And he's arguing basically that like the king started the slave trade, that's yah, yeah, yeah. He like we we like it's almost talking about him, like he was like a drug dealer who came in. Like, look, we can't be blamed for getting hooked on this stuff. Maybe one's pushing it, you know.
Yeah, yeah, we were born into this asylum, guys. Yeah, and yeah, that's why I was like, dude, it's the King Thomas cognitive dissonance. Jefferson.
Oh yeah, yeah, yeah, he's the best.
He is the best. Added to be, like, well, that's like slavery.
Wait a minute, he's got a hole between his course corpus colossum, right, like his brain has just two rattling separate albs.
Yeah.
Jefferson's writing gets shared widely, including by the most prominent leaders of the revolution, but he himself is going to initially be a marginal figure even after he enters Congress, for the simple fact that he sucks at public speaking and he has no heart for argument. While he awkwardly, almost accidentally stumbles into revolutionary leadership, he devoted most of his mental efforts to crafting his inherited home Monticello, into a functioning vision of the agrarian ideal that he had
inherited in somewhat mutated form. From Romans like Cato and Master of the Mountain, Henry Winsack writes, in the winter of seventeen seventy four, Jefferson started his farm book, the Plantation Ledger, he would keep until his death, writing out a census of the forty five slaves he received from his parents, one hundred and thirty five from the Whales estate, and the five he had purchased he owned the future. The census included the astonishing total of seventy nine children
under the age of fourteen. About forty percent of Jefferson's slaves were children. Jefferson's architectural papers contain an intriguing document, probably dating to the mid seventeen seventies, when the Monticello household was taking shape. Jefferson sketched out plans for a row of substantial, dignified Neo classical houses with stone or brick hearths and ample windows for George and his family
and Betty Hemmings and her family. The enslaved people of Monticello were nearly all members of a couple of different slave families, including the Hemmingses and the Evanses, from whom
we get Jupiter. Jupiter is and Evans. They were an inheritance from his wife's side of the family, and also literally his wife's side of the family, because Martha's dad has had as many as six children with the matriarch of the family, Betty from American Sphinks quote, it was an open secret within the slave community at Monticello that the privileged status enjoyed by the Hemmings Face family it
derived from its mixed blood. Several of Betty's children, perhaps as many as six, had most probably been fathered by John Wales. In the literal, not just figurative sense of the term, they were part of Jefferson's extended family. All the slaves he eventually freed were hemmings Is, including Robert and James in seventeen ninety four and seventeen ninety six, respectively.
If what struck the other slaves at Monticello was the quasi independent character of the Hemmings clan with its blood claim on Jefferson's paternal instincts, what most visitors tended to notice was their color. Yeah, and what Ellis means here is that the Hemmings family's very light skinned. Some of them are described as looking white, a fact that has suggested for some time that Thomas Jefferson continued his father
in law's tradition, and he definitely did. By the way, we will be talking about that later because that really becomes a factor when he's in France. In factual terms, there's no other way to describe this than as rape because Betty and Sally Hemings could not say no. That said, we don't know how the Hemmings women themselves would have talked about what happened to them because they weren't allowed to r yeah exactly, yeah, yeah, or at least like
they didn't. You know, it's a black box to us, right, like we just don't have And that's part of kind of where I see some of like the evil of this, right is in that fact.
Yeah, and the subsequential view of like like I'm tying this all to like the subsequent view of like black masculinity and like you know, and how they were played in like coon songs and like menstrual shows that like we were known for having just this amazing sexual prowess that like had to be curved and while at the same time being lazy, dumb, and docile, while at the same time being incredibly strong and powerful man.
Yeah, like most historians that I've read, you know, and this has started to change, thankfully because of some stuff that came out in the late nineties, but you know, even up until then, and Ellis's book comes out in ninety six, which is like to cut ahead a little bit, two years before DNA evidence makes it very clear what
Jefferson was doing with Sudah. There was, so he writes Americans thinks in a period of time where there's actual debate over whether or not this happened between historians, And as a result, Ellis cuts Jefferson more slack for his behavior than I think is reasonable. But he does make a point to outlight one of the more fucked up dimensions of the situation at Monticello, which I had not really thought about as much before I read his book.
Jefferson had so designed his slave community that his most frequent interactions occurred with African Americans who were not treated like full fledged slaves, and who did not even look like full blooded Africans because in fact they were not in terms of daily encounters and routinized interactions. His sense of himself as less of a slave master than a paternalistic employer and guardian received constant reinforcement.
Yeah, and stoking the Still there's still an issue of fair skin and dark skin black people still an issue, you know, Yeah, yeah it is.
And I I mean Jefferson you can almost see as like he's certainly not alone, but certain but one of the founders of that, like that conflict. Yeah, and it's it exists. His contribution to that exists so that he can see himself not as a guy who owns people and holds them in brutal bondage, but as like I'm like the patriarch of the family, you know. I mean, well, everybody's got a job, you know, you'll get it, come with come work for Uncle Tom, you know.
Yeah, yeah, you know, I mean it's like.
Yeah, I'll take care of you. Yeah.
The word slave is a little crass, you know, It's just it's crass. Like we prefer family, right, community.
We're all a family here at Manticello. Yeah. If you think of if you watch that show the Bear, he's like the he's like the uncle character who has he's always bailing him out, right, Like that's how he wants to be seen, you know. Yeah, And again this goes back to this, this talent he has for crafting reality for himself that differs from what you might say is objective, factual reality, but that you know, he is able to certainly make real for himself a lot of the time,
and he's also able to like extend through history. Like a lot of people buy this vision that he puts out.
Yeah, I better like just like the just like the Jefferson Bible. It's like, let me just let me just remove the shit.
Out makes this Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly, yeah yeah. Between Monticello and Philadelphia, Thomas Jefferson spent the mid seventeen seventies flitting between the gritty real world of war and revolution and his utopian fantasies. I am convinced he would have been a podcaster today because he hated talking in front of people, but he loved going on deep dives through history books and then writing weird political rants inspired by the experiences. In seventeen seventy five, the book he read
was Diverse Voyages by a guy named Richard hackelyut hackelut hackelute. Yeah, Okay, it's the weird name. JK. L Uyt. Written in eighteen fifty two, This is a set of three tracts that were probably published separately at first going into the history of European exploration of the Americas. Hey, everyone, Robert here, I completely misspoke. Obviously eighteen fifties as well, after Jomas
Jefferson's death. Richard Hackelut's Diverse Voyages was written in fifteen eighty two, which makes a lot more sense in context.
Sorry.
Hackeleute, who's the first professor of modern geography at Oxford, was an early ideological advocate of English colonial expansion. He was essentially an early propagandist for British imperialism. Despite this, Jefferson loved him because his idiosyncratic reading of Hackeliut was that the original colonists from England had traveled to the
Americas without help from the British government. Thus the colonies from the beginning represented a clean break with the mother country, and the English clean in Parliament, had no right to govern them. America was the creation of this almost mythic independent group of Saxon explorers, not a colonial project of Great Britain.
Oh okay, yeah, yeah, so it's like well not well, y'all, ay, that's right, y'all ain't pay for us to come, and we just kind of came, so like you don't get to Yeah, nah, yeah, that is that is mythology, bro.
It is revisionist history, we might say in modern terms. Yeah, right, yes, And it's one of those things nobody really buys this except for his old mentor mister with right. He's like, yeah, you've got it, Tom, but he's kind of like he's
like a little bit of a crank, right yeah. Now, right around the same time to John Adams is kind of going to do his own version of like searching back through the history to look at like how was the how were the colonies, you know, colonized initially, and like how how much right does Great Britain have to
government tax us? And his work is done, I mean, you wouldn't call this, by our standards perfect history, but it's done with more rigor than Jefferson's's, right, you might equivocate Jefferson's work here to almost like sovereign citizen shit, right, Yeah. And the main reason it's not seen that way, even though it is a historical is that his ultimate contention, which is that the colony should be independent, was not
controversial among the people who win. Right, But it is important to see that he is just inventing history here for the purpose of political experience.
Right because Yeah, because he could argue that, like, hey, listen, from Britain's perspective, they're saying this, this, and this. He's like, from our perspective, he is what we was actually doing. So he can make that argument as like, yeah, I'm not just making this up from out the thin air, which is kind of was, but like he could be like, well, no, like that's how they viewed it. Their view is incorrect. We knew what we was doing and they had a
limited perspective. I know what we was doing, you know, And you could make that again, and it's because we, like you said, we've already they've already accepted the point. The point is we supposed to be.
We got to get out of here. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Who's homeboy's name? I forget how he's.
Name Hackle yet, huh Hackle yet?
Maybe that's him.
Yeah.
Yeah, there was one homeboy that was like and they ended up burning his books. God, what is his name?
Oh you're talking about Thomas Pain.
Yeah.
It was just like, yeah, Pain is dope.
Yeah, he was like, I'm here for money. I don't understand, Like, I don't know about the pirits and ship. I don't understand about this independent ship. Y'all doing this, y'all doing the Natives wrong. They seem to be nothing like what y'all said. I came to make some money.
I don't know.
Me and homies came for money. I don't understand what the rest of y'all is doing. Yeah, and they burnt his books. Boy, it was oh yeah, I mean, I'll be telling everybody.
Jefferson's actually gonna it's weird because like Pain is much more of a radical than Jefferson and is, by the way, an abolitionist. Yeah, Jefferson's gonna be getting a lot of trouble later in his career for going to bat for Thomas Payin after on his Pain loses a lot of his support because he's, I mean, he's too much of a radical. He's like very critical of Christianity, Yeah, in ways that are pretty modern actually, yeah, exactly his views.
Like yeah, man, at some point, at some point we got I figure out how to do a deep dive on him.
Because he was just fascinating thing.
Yeah, Like y'all tripping like I don't understand, like you supposed to be the ones you supposed to be to God believers, like I don't believe none of that. And look how you treat these people that Yeah, weird to me.
He's like the most reasonable man in the seventeen hundreds, yeah right, or at least the most reasonable white guy in the seventeen yeh yeah. Yeah. So Jefferson's skill and making up bullshit to justify his beliefs after the fact would reach its apex with the Declaration of Independence and prop we are finally getting to that. That's the money shot of any history of Jefferson. But looking at my little clock here, because so if he's not around to warn us and we are flying like blind here and ads.
Yeah, yeah, we should probably do some mads.
Now, yeah, take some ads and call me in the morning or in like four minutes after you skip ahead to the part without ads, we're back. So the whole Declaration of Independence project kicks off in seventeen seventy six when Jefferson was appointed with four other delegates to write a declaration of Independence. And it is a sign of how good he is as a writer that the other committee members, which include Ben Franklin and John Adams, all
agree to let him handle the pros. I think Franklin says he does it because he can't stand being edited, right, Like, I'm not going to write something for somebody else to edit, you know, And this is going to go through, Like the Congress is going to have to approve this, and they're going to make changes. Yeah, John Adams, I think is like Jefferson is just such a good writer, will let you do it. He spends the rest of his life regretting this, by the way, which you would you know.
In his first draft of the document, Jefferson spent a good number of words blaming King George the Third for sparking and growing the slave trade, framing it as a great evil forced on the colonies by their vile king. Now this specific charge is silly, but Jefferson's description of the slave trade is not. He describes quote a market where men should be bought and sold as a hideous thing, in large part due to the brutality involved in transporting them.
Henry Winsick writes, for many slaves suffered, as Jefferson wrote, miserable death in their transportation. Every vessel tossed overboard twenty fifty one hundred corpses in its passage across the Sea. Jefferson most likely learned of the shrinkage of inventory from his father in law, John Wales, and Jefferson describes slavery in his initial draft of the declaration as an execrable commerce. It's shitty, he says, it's shitty, right, yeah, and that's
good and accurate. But all of this writing is cut from the final draft, as an article for The Miller Center explains, after deleting Jefferson's biting attack on King George the Third for trafficking slaves and debating other issues of substance for three days, Congress approved the unanimous Declaration of the Thirteen United States of am America on July fourth. The Continental Congress never calls it the Declaration of Independence,
by the way, it's just a better name. Sometimes that happens. Yeah, these guys sucked at titling. Only Thomas would have been a good podcaster strong on that one.
No, that's real, Yeah, that's real because he's actually like because yeah, he's one of those dudes who are like, yeah, damn on paper, bro, like you yeah, you got it.
Fam that's right, especially, you know, and at this point he still is a guy who could have wound up. He's a guy who inherited a lot of enslaved people. He is writing now and he's taken at least minimal legal steps to trying to end the practice, and he's now made some really bold statements about it. He could have gone and he could have been like an early abolition. He could and a struke and might have pushed a lot of the country, Like God only knows, right, given the degree of you know.
We minted it in the first Yeah, we mentioned it in the first first episode. I just I like, I need to get the quote right. But the one which we'll probably get to, the one where he was just like essentially like if yeah, yeah, God is there, if God is who he says he is, we're about to get judged.
Yeah okay, yeah, no, no, we're we'll be We'll be putting that in its context where yeah yeah, ok So. The primary reason his condemnations of slavery were cut from the final draft was that South Carolina and Georgia refused to close their slave markets. Despite the fact that this final draft was compromised Jefferson's statement in the Declaration that all men were created equal and endowed by the Creator with an alienable rights took off like a summer brushfire
among progressives of his day, and not just in the Americas. Yeah, before too long, it would be cited by several states who were early to after the war. It's going to be cited by like the first states to abolish slavery. Is like why, and they're like, well, based on this declaration.
We said, that's what you said.
Yeah, this stuff seems like we shouldn't have this. Yeah.
Frederick Douglas's you know, Fourth of July speech was just like, bro, that's this what y'all said.
This This line seems pretty clear. Yeah, that said but you know this is again that generations of abolitionists will take a lot out of that line. Jefferson himself is never really an abolitionist, right, far from it. In fact, this is a bit puzzling given where he sits in seventeen seventy six, because he kind of it feels like he might have right, there's a moment here where it
feels like he could have tipped that way. Historian David Breon Davis notes, quote he was one of the first statesmen in any part of the world to advocate concrete measures for restricting and eradicating Negro slavery, which is not, you know, nothing, but in the seventeen eighties it kind of becomes nothing because he sings a very different tune
during the last years of the seventeen seventies. Then he's going to serve in the Virginia House of Delegates, where he championed progressive measures like freedom of religion and a radical free public education system for all white male Virginians. He also crusaded against legally mandated primogenitor which saw landed estates passed on exclusively to eldest son. Jefferson had good
reasons for all this. He saw inherited wealth is dangerous despite benefiting from it himself, and he opposed state religion, both because it violated individual liberty and as the Miller Center notes, he also feared that religion would hinder the development of a national elite, a moral and ethical group of aristocrats who would lead the nation. And this is because again Jefferson is this as ellis as a sphinx.
This gives us kind of an unegalitarian explanation for some of the things he said that seem egalitarian, even some of the policies he pursued that were good, which is that he's not a guy who believes everyone is and should be equal. He believes everyone should have an equal shot. All the white men, they should have anything shot it becoming a part of the aristocracy, and that aristocracy is going to be based on their natural levels of intelligence and ability.
Right.
But we need an aristocracy, right, it just needs to be a natural.
One, right, Yeah, it's not just built on the fact that your daddy came from this place.
Yea.
Yeah, yeah, that that is kind of what he says he's arguing for, right, and Heaver views artificial methods of curtailing membership in this elite as bad. He also sees himself as a natural member of the aristocracy.
Yeah except for me, though, Like, and I should be.
You know, I didn't errate everything, but like I'm clearly so capable, right.
Yeah, Yeah, Yeah, I'm different.
I'm different. I'm built a little different than these these other first sons who got rich, Yeah because of their daddies. I'm built a little different.
Yeah.
In seventeen seventy nine, Jefferson was somewhat to his own frustration, elected governor of Virginia. This is a bad time to be the governor of Virginia because it doesn't look great in seventeen seventy nine, right, like, Virginia's economy is in the shitter. The British are doing pretty well in the field. There's a counter revolution by Tories, which of these like loyalist assholes. And Jefferson not a great warrior. He's not
like a warrior poet type guy. There's like one campaign that he like supports in southern Virginia and it's a disaster because he's he's not really good at that stuff. Now, when he first goes to I think Williamsburg and then he goes to Richmond as governor, he's like the last
governor to live in the Williamsburg mansion. Jefferson brings his some of his slaves with him, right, members of the Hemmings and Granger families mostly, and it's from them that we get a lot of the memories of Jefferson during
this chaotic time. In January seventeen eighty one, Benedict Arnold lands in Virginia with a whole buttload of Brits Virginia's militia were mostly engaged in conflict with Native Americans, and Jefferson showed no aptitude for gathering these s gathered forces together and welding them into a functional army, which, to be fair, is hard, but he doesn't do it. So what he does do is send his family away and he cloisters himself in the attic of the governor's mansion
with a spyglass. When the British finally came, it took only a few cannonballs to send every white man in town fleeing for the hills. Jefferson included several of his house slaves, acted like to kind of protect the family wealth. When he leaves them behind. One of them. We get this story from Isaac, who's five at the time, and
he describes the British invasion as an awful sight. It seemed like the day of judgment was come, which is not all that different from how my family members who were there speak of the British invasion in the nineteen sixties, you know, talking about the Beatles was a Beatles Beatles bit.
Jefferson has fled the scene, and he has left behind like this enslaved family, including this little boy, Isaac, who's from whom we get most of this story, and Isaac's father, George, I believe this is George Granger went through the house collecting valuables, primarily the family's silver, which he hid under There's like a bed in the kitchen with like a hide a bed under it, and he like hides it
underneath that. So when the British arrive, he lies and he's like, my master's you know, fled and he took all the silver with him. I don't know what's going on. And these British soldiers they rampaged through the mansion, but they don't find the silver. George then flees, leaving his family behind, to find Jefferson's family at monte Cello and help them. Right, So he he leaves his family to go find and help Jefferson and his family get out of Monticello. And while George is away, his wife and
son are taken captive by British forces. What now again? This is like it's no, like this is it's it's such a confusing thing because George has he's an opportunity one a decent number of enslaved people take to find his freedom, right, to get himself and his family out of there, either with the British or just by using the chaos to get out.
Wow, Okay, he doesn't.
Not only does he not do that, but he like leaves his family kind of trusting that the British will, you know, not fuck with them too much, and they wind up getting captured. And it's we're gonna talk about all this because this is like, this is not He's not the only person that is going to happen to This is a major part of the history for enslaved people during this period is like what happens, you know, when they try to decide to flee, what happens if
they go over to the British. We're gonna talk about all of that, but first it's time for some ads.
I'm back, I see.
Yeah, Sophie's our second ad break.
So wow, that's so nice.
I lost power for however long I was gone for.
Yeah, Well, for the audio people, it'll be nothing, but for the other.
People, don't miss my, my, my, my wonderful remarks.
Speaking of losing power, Thomas Jefferson has lost power because he just had to flee from the Governor's mansion because the British Benedict Arnold came rolling around there. So yeah. The next couple of months of Jefferson's life are chaotic, with British forces rating every Jefferson property they could find, and Thomas keeping himself and his family just barely out of their grasp. This was obviously hard on them, both
physically as well as mentally. Their new worn daughter Lucy died in April, and the whole constantly on the road thing did not help with that. Jefferson and his men retook the capitol after the British left, but when they returned, when the British come back, he has to flee again, and he makes it. He flees back to Monticello. He wounds up like leave, fleeing Monticello minutes ahead of this group of British dragoons, which is like a kind of
mounted soldier. And here again one of the people that he owned acted to protect his absent owner from the book master of the Mountain quote. When the raiders swarmed into the house at Monticello, it quickly became a parent that once again Jefferson had eluded them. But they knew he could not be very far off. So one of the dragoons jammed a pistol into Martin Hemmings's chest and said he would shoot if Hemmings did not tell them where the governor had gone. Fire away. Then Hemmings replied
and refused to say anything else. Martin Hemmings was not one of the half siblings of Missus Jefferson. His mother had borne him before she began her relationship with John Wales. Kin ship tied to the Jeffersons was not as direct as that of his younger siblings fathered by Wales. As the Jefferson grandchildren recounted the story, Hemming stood his ground fiercely, answering gaze for a glance, and not receding a hair's
breadth from the muzzle of the cocked pistol. Unbeknownst to the British, another servant named Caesar lay in silence beneath their feet under the floor of the portico with silver. He and Martin had just finished hiding when the raiding party rushed in.
Wow.
Now, yeah, that's like palsy.
Yeah, yeah, it's impossible to get into their heads. Like it's impossible, you know, and especially with a modern brain, like it's just it's impossible. But you can say you're just another slave master anyway, So like, oh, yes, you're not my you're not my rescue, you know what I'm saying. And and then you're like and even if you were, it's like, well fuck you for like storm in my house, like you know what I'm saying, Like I still live here,
Like I mean, fuck this place. But it's but I still live here, and you ain't finna, just like I don't know you, like you don't get to do this, you know what I'm saying. It's like, you know, like if we gonna tear this place down, we gonna take this place down, you won't get to tear the place down. You know.
Yeah, I do wonder because obviously you don't get you don't get this guy's writing. I'm like what he does in Georgia's I do wonder because the British do offer freedom. But it's again we're not talking like they're not putting this out over the Internet or whatever. Everybody's not looking
at this like how much how how much of that information? Yeah, and also, as we're going to talk about, their offers of freedom are extremely dangerous because just the biological realities of the time like fleeing and being held in the British camp even if they're promising you your freedom is not safe.
Yeah, and it's like, well, where you're gonna take me. You're gonna take me back to Britain, like right, so I gotta get back on that boat.
Nah yeah yeah, Like how much are these people being told and by whom? And what are they being told by? Guys like Jefferson?
Right, and you're all the same, but yeah, yeah, that's how you're all the same.
Like, oh yeah, I'm at least gotta like shore up my situation with this guy who I know, who's not an unquantity to me, I know, no fucking dragoons, right, and.
Like still like my mom and daddy, my sister, you know, my brothers, my cousin, Like these are people I know. So if anything, it's like I'm protecting the people I know, Like yeah, it's like.
Yeah, the their comfort because we're in the house is very tied to the success of this guy. So if I defend him and his wealth, that's kind of taking care of my people too. Yeah, you know, these are complicated things happening here. Yeah, this whole episode of like fleeing repeatedly from the Capitol, just barely ahead of British forces. Is a black mark on Thomas's warktime career. He gets
attacked for this a lot. Yeah, he's pilloried for failing to defend his state because he's the guy in charge and he just keeps running away. You're the bro, and it doesn't matter if it's like you didn't have a lot of options. You know what else was like, he doesn't find a better option. He doesn't build a militia into something that can fight these guys, and like you could. You can argue whether or not it's reasonable enough to go after him for that, but people do, right, man.
Yeah, slaying that Turkey didn't do much for you, did it?
No? No, he didn't learn how to deal with noon. Yeah, yeah, they're a little harder.
So.
In June of seventeen eighty one, Jefferson resigns as governor, and the man who replaced him proved to be better at the stuff he'd been bad at, raising a functional militia to assist Washington's army. While the war entered its end phase, Jefferson hit out in a place called Poplar Forest and did what he was good at. He wrote. The work he did on the run would later make up his only published book, Notes on the State of Virginia. And if you are a poly size student, you just
shuddered a little bit. Yes, you have read this son of a bitch in college.
Yeah.
The book was started as a response to questions sent by the French legation in Philadelphia for like all of the different states. They reach out to represents in each of the colonies and are like, hey, here's twenty three questions about like geography and law, and like what's the
culture like here? Right? And Jefferson he answers all of that, but a lot of what he's doing is he's trying to defend his new country to the French because he has this feeling that French intellectuals see Americans is a bunch of dumb yokels, right, Like they're backing us, they're backing our play in a big way, but they don't think much of us as an actual people, right. And Jefferson is kind of trying to defend the what becomes
the American right as a person. There's this strain of thought among naturalists in Europe that the plants and people in the New World are inferior somehow to the plants and people in the old world. Right. A lot of this comes out as racism against Native Americans, Right, But there's this widespread belief that even white people become less
intelligent when they migrate to the New World. One French thinker Abbe ray Now cited this as proof of the fact that quote or cited as proof of this fact that quote, America has not yet produced one good poet. Of course, they're being made dumb by the land. They don't even have poets over there.
Your music don't even slap bro like, yeah, yeah, that's hilarious.
And it's Jefferson. His argument against this is funny because he's like, man, it took how long did it take the fucking Greeks to make a poet?
Right?
Yeah, like they had a long time.
We're new yeah, first of all brands.
Yeah yeah, He's like England was around a while before you guys got a Shakespeare. You gotta give us some dime, you know, anyway, more or less right about that. It takes a minute, I guess. So after so wait year, what years? This is like seventeen eighty one, Like.
We've been a country for five years yeah, yeah, barely right, not even really, because we're fighting this war. You know they've done yet.
Yeah, yeah, what do you expect?
They just haven't published yet. Maybe they're so working on their.
Crad Have you read all of them? I don't know. It's trying to get paper.
Great roast.
He's right when he rebuts this kind of stuff, he's right, but he has a harder time rebutting the other valid allegation that the French make of American savagery, which is, well, you guys have slaves, right.
Well, you.
Definitely ass backwards with this one, guys.
Yeah yeah. And to discuss how he tries to kind of answer this, Henry Weinsack writes, having accused King George of attempting to enslave them, American leaders laid themselves open to the charge of hypocrisy by their failure to enslavery in their own country. Samuel Johnson jibed, how is it that we hear the loudest yelps for liberty among the drivers of negroes. Slavery had been outlawed in England's homeland,
not in its home, though not in its colonies. In the landmark seventeen seventy two Somerset decision by an activist judge who concluded that enslavement was such an egregious denial of rights that slavery had to be specifically authorized by law, and Parliament had never done so. When there were calls for Parliament to pass enable legislation for black slavery, the proposal was derided in a widely circulated joke which was
eventually published in the Virginia Gazette. If Negroes are to be slaves on account of color, the next step will be to enslave every Mulatto in the Kingdom, then all the Portuguese, next to French, then the brown complexioned English, and so on, until there'll be only one free man left, which will be the man of palest complexion in the free three kingdoms.
Just your your boiled chicken. That's all is left. The boiled chickens gotta do right. This is absurd, Guys like this just doesn't make sense.
It is interesting because this is before scientific racism is starting to be a thing at this time, and it's you don't get enough of like that. Of just like some regular guys writing as a columnist in a newspaper being like, you guys, see how ridiculous this is, right, Yeah, Like just.
Like I can't tell her, like I don't know not none about it. You book learning. I'm just saying, yeah, yeah.
How far are we taking this? Because it seems like you can make a case for basically everybody essentially.
Yeah.
So, speaking of scientific racism, this is the heel turn moment really for Jefferson because while he's writing notes on the state of Virginia, which he does we'll talk about in the next episode, he does include a plan to end slavery in that, but he also starts his first kind of dipping into like scientific racism, right, And this is a big pivot from the all men are created equal guy, right, and so that the hoops he has to jump through to do this are worth laying out.
He starts by admitting that slavery is a horror, right, but he cites is one of its evils, and you're kind of you kind of take from this. He sees this as the worst evil is what it does to young white men, right, because it makes them lazy, right right?
Okay, yeah, not that it their conscience, no, no, not that it distorts their understanding of morality. And how the earth. Yeah, it makes them lazy.
It does a little bit. But he's because he does say, like, the man must be a pro who can retain his manners and morals undepraved by such circumstances. And he's talking about like growing up with like a slave that's raised next to you. That's like you're you know, raised to be your servant, right, that that's going to like how can you not have your morals work worked? But then he does go right into like it makes white men lazy and it forces them to be tyrants, right, they
have to be tyrants when they're raised this way. Yeah, it's just this focus on what it does to white people that's so like off putting.
Yes, Like it's kind of burying the lead here, buddy, Like, yeah, words, that's what you john from this, Okay. Yeah.
It's interesting to me that this argument does put him at odds with some pro slavery advocates of his day, because there are people arguing in like newspapers and whatnot at the day that like, part of why slavery has to remain in the in the new country is that working is too hard for white men. We can't do it.
We can't do it. Yeah. Yeah. Win Sex cites a series of letters to a Virginia paper during this period in which one man argues, general utility is the basis of all law and justice, and on this principle, the right of slavery is founded. Well, it's really useful for me, right, Well, how about people super convenient?
I hear everything you're saying, bro, I hear everything you're saying. But like counterpoint is really it really it's really good for me though.
Yeah. Have you tried to work eight hours? It's like, really it sucks. Have you, man?
Have you actually tried to harvest? Come back? Oh? Like it really hard work.
It's hot doing things, man sucks. Yeah. There's another letter that Winstt quotes. That's to a newspaper in Pennsylvania, where a Southerner argues that abolitionious to a quote totally blind to our ease and interest. The certain consequence would be that we must work ourselves. Come on, yeah, man.
Like, yeah, yo, that is that is my patron saying Ricky Bobby when he was like when cale not ju was like, how about how about how about I you let me win? Sometimes he goes, Okay, yeah, I hear you. But if if you win, then that means that I don't win.
I gotta lose.
Yeah, but like and you know, you know how I roll in first and last, like I can't. But if you're first and I'm not first, so we can't do that?
Is I like reading stuff like that just because it's like, okay, so that is as like blatantly selfish and evil as the reality was. Right, that's a guy. There's no dressing that up. He's like, yeah, but i'd have to work if we didn't have work.
Bro, Like, do you want to work? Like there? Yes, It's like a point that's made often in both of our shows is that history is history is us. These are just regular. There's nothing uniquely evil or there's no unique malady about. They are just there us we are, Like that is the most regular, regular answer that yeah, that anyone would give today to where you're like, well, well, I don't want to pick the fruit, you know what
I mean? Well, like I don't know, you know what I'm saying, Like I want to go to the store and buy it, like you pick the fruit.
You know.
That's so that's such an awful thing. Like what they're saying is so awful, and it's so much uglier than
than Jefferson's flowery pros. But they're also they're honest, and he is full of shit, and this is really this is the full of shit stuff that comes out because since he's not going to make that well I don't want to work, you know, argument, he's going to like have to dress it up, and he has these it's it's this notes on the state of Virginia is weird because he has these moments of like where he'll land kind of in between racism and some kind of actual wisdom.
Like he takes on the common argument by white people that that black people, if they're freed, they're they're inclined to criminal behavior, right, And he actually makes a good argument here, which is like that disposition to theft with which they have been branded must be ascribed to their situation and not to any pravity of the moral sense. The man in whose favor no laws of property exist probably feels himself less bound to respect those made in
favor of others. Come old, Well, if the law says your property, why are you going to give a shit about the law?
Yes, like yeah, again, just this like dizzying, like yes, yes, right, yes, you're right.
Yeah, yeah. Now this descends very quickly though, into what, again, is kind of proto scientific racism. Jefferson doesn't. He does argue that he believes He states his belief that black people are inferior, but he also he hymns, He's like, well, I'm a scientist, and right, we don't have conclusive data yet. I'm just saying this might be what's happening, right, But he does state his belief that black people and white people are fundamentally different, with differences that are quote fixed
in nature. Now, what he actually means by this is pretty shallow. His like, his his scientific justification is like, well they look different, yeh, look at it, like yeah, and he's like, white people have flowing hair and more elegant symmetry of form. And then he gets into the real racist shit where he's like, black people inherently prefer to have sex with white people, and he makes a comparison to how orangutans prefer to have sex with human beings,
which is not true about orangutans either. No, one very racist in so many ways.
Yeah, yeah, you're yeah, you're beating the dog and you're like he likes it. See you look the dog likes it.
Yeah, okay, yeah it's bad. And that orangutan phrase is like the one you'll encounter most often when you read the sections of Jefferson's racism, and it deserves to be read. But in his book, win Seck brings up another point about this passage that I had not considered. Jefferson probably summoned up the fantastical image of an ape mating with an African woman to deflect attention from the actual reality of Virginia society, the pervasive rape of black women like
white men. Yes, and I hadn't thought about that, but.
Yeah, that's exactly what it is to be like. But they like it, and I'm like, no, they don't. They are property, yeah, like you like we like, which is obvious, like like shit that none of us have to explain, which is like they don't have agency. What are you talking about? And and you are raping them and for their own safety and the safety of their children. They don't pretend like they like it. Yeah, you know, but of course they don't like what the what are you
talking about? What are you talking about? Yeah?
I think one of the things I think about when I read Jefferson's writing here, because he very much frames this is I'm trying to look at this like a scientist, yeah, trying to analyze these different relations between the raceists scientifically.
I think a little bit. You've heard that story about that guy who studied like wolves and wrote this about like alpha wolf behavior, and yeah, yeah, he gave us this idea of the alpha male and then realizes later like, oh, I was just looking at wolves in prison captivity, and they act differently in prison than they do in the time.
They don't actually do this in the wild, right. He is Jefferson is analyzing people that he owns and that other people around him own and their behavior, and he's he's attributing all of their behavior to like natural distinctions and always ignoring like, well but they're enslaved well always, not always, but.
Yeah, yeah, yeah factual And yeah, this is like this is really this is the big heel turn moment.
This is when he commits. This is when it becomes kind of impossible ideologically for him to ever wind up on the side of abolition, right because he is fundamentally defending slavery, and when he defends slavery, he does so by being racist. Right. One of his complaints is that people with black skin are better at hiding their emotions.
Now that's not true. But what's happening here is number one, he doesn't pay attention to them, right, because he owns them, no, you know, and so he doesn't understand them as much as he understands white people. Right. And the other thing is that, yeah, if you are enslaved, you probably get good at hiding certain feelings because they're dangerous.
Right, absolutely, like the idea that which is completely normal of yeah, self preservation and making decisions that are going to uh yeah again, like because we are in fact humans that are going to try our best to protect our children. And if that means I got to do a little shucking job to make sure that you feel placated, is going to stop the overseer from coming over here?
Yeah? Yeah, And yeah, it's one of those this kind of belief again that he does not analyze in any way, right. Yeah, it culminates in a very fortunate set of conclusions for him, which is he decides, like, well, it just seems like black people don't feel as much as white people, right. We know they don't need as much sleep because we don't let them sleep as often. We know they're less sensitive to the heat and the cold. Yeah, you just don't listen when they can complain they feel like they can.
Yeah, and especially with you saying well, like like them saying well, we I mean you kidding me. We couldn't handle this, like yeah, and they're handling it, so I guess you know. Yeah, we wouldn't stand for this. We would look, we would not stand for this. And apparently they're standing for soeah.
So it must be cool. Yeah, he starts. He's one of the first people to make the argument that they don't feel pain in the same way, which exists, I mean less consciously. But like that's still a problem in medicine today. He writes. Their griefs are transient. In other words, they feel sad when they lose family members, but not for a long time. They forget things quickly. Right now. He also he has to acknowledge equality in a few areas. Right, he says that they have an equal equivalent memory to
white people. Right, because he he employes black laborers doing complicated tasks. Right, he can't not see that, right, there can't be any use as workers. Yeah, number one, Right, yeah, yeah, but he also has to argue, but that means they don't have any they don't they lack reason, and they can't imagine things. They really can't want anything better. And part of his argument for this is I've never met a black person who could understand Euclid's writing. It's like,
do you let him read Euclid? But do you teach him like math? You know, like have you tried?
Yeah about that?
Yeah? How about that?
Is it?
And also like, is it are there little white people who haven't heard about Euclid?
Right?
The most of the country that's not can't read and that certainly doesn't know a fucket Euclid? Yeah?
Is it?
Maybe a matter of access to education? Maybe you understand is valuable?
You know?
Yeah, oh my god.
Yeah.
Anyway, Yeah, he's pretty bad. There is one moment here where he's like, it's possible I'm wrong about this because maybe enslaved people feel they have to lock up their faculties and talents to endure. So he has the ability to realize what's going on here. He even hints at it, though he just can't accept it.
Those frustrating moments when you're just in somebody, when he just peeks up and says, yeah, I mean I could be tripping because I mean, clearly we're beating him to death, and yeah, yeah.
Yeah, it could be wrong about this very obvious thing. Yeah. So nevertheless, he concluded that these differences weren't the result of the fact that slavery gave few chances for creativity or intellectual achievement. He decides nature had produced the distinction, and he gives himself out again. He's like, that's just what I think. I you know, now, maybe there will be some more evidence later, but yeah, I consider that kind of like, I don't know, a little cowardly.
Actually, it's very cowardly because of like, yeah, it's the implications of the like freud of it all, like the subconscious continuingly to peek out, like you know you're wrong, Like you know you're wrong. You know what I'm saying somewhere in there, Like you know you wrong, but you also know you not trying to change your way of life, you know, And like you said, the fullest shitty like is on full display here.
You know, you're you're too good a writer to not bring this up because you just inherently make good arguments. But like you have to clamp it down. You can almost feel him shoving that back down inside of himself in order to make this work. And we'll talk a lot more about this kind of and even a bit more about Notes on the State of Virginia. But at the end of this episode, let's just bring it to the end of the Revolutionary War, which the US wins
at Yorktown while Jefferson is still scribbling away. In seventeen eighty three, a peace was negotiated and the US gained its independence. Notes on the State of Virginia was published in seventeen eighty five and then republished several times, and it formed a meaningful part of the backlash or counterswing to a wave of abolitionist sentiment that gripped the new country around the time of its independence. Right because of
the declaration, there's actually starts to be this argument. There's even some will argue Virginia might have been on its way to abolishing slavery. Right weeks before Jefferson turned in his draft, a member of the Virginia State Legislature submitted a draft constitution that would have ended hereditary slavery in the state. It argued that men were born equally free and independent, and that no compact could deprive them of
their rights. The legislature, though, added a line that men only gained these rights when they enter into a state of society, and slaves were defined as not part of society. Still that's pretty fucked up. Yeah, Like these people are literally what your entire society rests on.
But damn yeah, it makes it that much more like human and like heinous to where it was like, bro, it was people right there. It was like right there, like y'all knew. It just was like, we'll cut that part out.
Like yeah, and it's it's still this is not even probably a few years after the constitution, yeah, Virginia is changed or a few years after this happens, the constitution in Virginia is changed to include black people as citizens if they've been freed. Right, And if you were observing all of this, like these debates and these pushbacks and whatnot, in trying to predict the future, you might have guessed in the mid seventeen eighties, well maybe Virginia is headed
to abolition. Winsett kind of argues that it was, and that it's Jefferson who plays a major role in wrenching it away from that course quote. At this critical moment, Jefferson broke from the dominant progressive thinking of his time to construct an image of the black person as the other, a being with no place in American society. Putting a scholarly sheene on the rationalizations of slaveholders, Jefferson made himself
the theorist and spokesperson for the reactionaries. Jefferson was not as torn as he has taken to be, writes the historian Michael Zuckerman. He was not as confined by his culture as his apologists have often claimed in regard to race, as in regard to so much else. He was a leader, and that's part two.
I love that.
Maybe leaders are a bad idea.
Yeah, maybe leaders are a bad idea.
Yeah.
Maybe race leaders are a bad idea.
Yeah maybe. Yeah. May be like I'm smart, I read stuff. Yeah, it might be a little more to it, you know what I'm saying.
Yeah, he's such a little kind of a little shit. He's a bitch ass he's Yeah.
I mean at the end of the day, at the end of the day.
Yeah, at the end of the.
Day, at the end of the day, It's like I could cover it all you have like like flower it up, man, like twist your brain into a pretzel say that you like while I'm doing it. But I'm not like those dudes. And it's like, bro, like I mean, I like I think of so many modern things I think of, like this may feel very TMZ of it, but like I think of like P Diddy and his apology and was just like you know, I was it really in a dark place.
Man.
You know, I've gone to therapy, and bro, like, don't I won't hear about your therapy, you know what I'm saying. Yeah, And I'm like and the like, okay, like it, there was a lot of lightly dim places that you was
in before you got to the dark one that we saw. Brother, like you don't you don't wake up and get to that homeboy you ever said what I'm saying, that's not that's not that's not a light switch, big dog like you was building this homie, you know, and then I think the like you know, like why like like it's like if I could if I could grab America by the cheek and be like the face cheeks okay and be like.
Uh, I'm glad you're clarified.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, Like why you ain't join the I C C. Big dog, Like why you don't want to? Why you want to say like, tell me, tell me why you don't want to call call this a genocide? Tell me why you don't want to tell me why you don't want to accuse anybody for crimes of crimes agains humanity?
What's the same Why Jefferson does everything he does here is exactly well, because it would mean making your life a little less comfortable, yes, right, And it would mean sacrifices the things you value that.
Maybe people will peak at you and be like exactly, so, like why why why won't America do this?
Well?
Because I don't want you all to look at our centuries of crimes of humanity? So I don't want to.
You know what I'm saying that some acess to like we really use their airspace a lot, Like there's a number of things for the reasons why it comes down to yeah, yeah, like I don't want to. It'll be hard for me.
It comes down to your lyric prop. It comes down to I don't hate America just a man, she keeps her problem, she doesn't.
And she don't just like dude, be who Jefferson is, like, he's he has to because he's this big I am the profit of freedom guy. Internationally, he has to write to these dudes in France, we're going to be the people a lot of the people who are involved in the French Revolution, and who are these like and and he has to explain how am I still the profit of freedom while owning people. That's the big part of
what's happening here. And the answer is that, like, well, they're not really the same kind and there's a lot of problems, Like I agree slavery is bad, but we really have to look at this very carefully because of all of these biological differences, right, Which is all he's doing is he's scientificizing the ship that every slave owner would say, which is like, yeah, but I don't want to work it is he you know, yeah, he's a farmer, but he's not a farmer. Yeah, you know exactly, really.
Every butt guy, he's the I don't hate women, but he's that guy.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, Well it's kind of like but look, look, look, look, if you let me finish, if you let me finish, yeah, I would tell you. It's like all right, bros.
He's every guy I don't want to talk to a bar right, Yeah, like yeah, yeah, those are the guys you have to like they got all these big words, but you just it's almost like, you know, like a toddler out of control, Like I have to you have to just keep them in focus and be like, hey man, here's here's the cornerstone question.
How can you be the profit of freedom while keeping someone enslaved? Yeah, like no, no, no, no, that's all we talk about. That's like you can give me aught. How are you the profit of freedom? Yeah, exactly.
And he's gonna have to We're gonna talk about his time in France because he's the basically the ambassador. Yeah, that's the whole time there is. He's like having that argument with me. Yeah yeah, we'll get to that. But first prop what's your pluggables? Where are they?
Oof?
When are they?
Man?
When are they they are whenever you want?
On?
Do you believe the Internet's dead?
I think large chunks of it are, right, Like you know, that's that's kind of something like a third of old Wikipedia links or whatnot or dead, Like, yeah, it turns out it's not a very good place to store things.
No, But on this, you know, on the on whatever's left of the internet. You can go to prop hip hop dot com. Uh, and that'll get get you to all the other places the politics will prop man, you know where. I feel like this has been probably one of my best seasons, if I do say so myself. Yeah, yeah, yeah, we kind of kind of hit a stride.
He's coming to dude, super good things.
Come in hit a stride. Man. I'm really excited about this. So yeah, the politics prop with the cool Zone crew, you know, yep.
Yeah.
And for us at cool Zone Media and all the things, and for you Robert anything.
No, no, nothing like that Poland diaper bank. Behind the Bastards go fundme. We're doing a go fundme diapers for people who can't afford them. Always a good thing, always a good things. Good to help people have diapers who can't afford.
To buy them otherwise Bye bye.
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