Hello everybody, Ladies and gentlemen, brothers and sisters, comrades and friends. Happy to be back again so soon with another special interview episode of History Impossible. An impossible interview as I used to call them, but we're doing them a lot more often now, so I guess they're not that impossible
after all. Sorry for the dumb joke, but yes, we are here today doing another interview with a fellow writer from Kinrath Publishing, who, again I really want to thank for getting this really cool project of theirs off the ground and letting me be a part of it, letting all of us be a part of it who have contributed, and in this particular case, we're talking with Isaac wa Lauer, who contributed a very cool story about a very interesting
and important but underappreciated figure in the Revolutionary War, very much up my alley. In terms of the kind of stuff History Impossible covers, we'll be getting into that in the interview itself here in a couple of minutes. But I just want to also thank everybody who supports this show over on Patreon dot com or over on substack as paid subscribers, people like John Andre Saith and Mike maylimit my longtime, very very generous supporters over on Patreon.
If you want to support the show like them, please head over to patreon dot com, slash history Impossible oristory impossible dot substack dot com and make whatever donation you feel comfortable making. Anyway, that's enough of all that. I really appreciate all the support. Please spread the word about the show, and let's get into some really fun impossible history with this interview with Isaac Wilauer.
I'll let me to tell you what you would have seen and heard. If we'll not be pleasant listening, if you were at lunch, or if you have no appetite, now is a good time to switch auth the radio. An ancestor of mine maintained that if you eliminate the impossible, whatever remains, however.
Can come. EVA mustn't Banjie.
I want to it.
You don't general. I'm GOSPI you.
I wish I could say tonight that a lasting peace is inside.
I don't see any laughing dream. I feel a laugh in the night.
Wore.
On.
I wish you pressure to kill. I wish you were asure together.
Some say the world will end empire.
Some stay a night from what I've tasted of desire, I hold with those of favor fire, but if.
It had to perish twice, I think I know enough of hate to say that the.
Destruction nights is also great and look sufficed.
This is history or possible.
I am here today with Isaac Willure. I hope I got the pronunciation of your last name, right, man will Our Okay, yeah, okay, yeah, sorry, I was gonna say that's not a good start. That's good, But yes, I am with Isaac Willar and he is a corporate analyst and writer who has appeared in various publications, including The New York Times, Wall Street Journal, and Daily Wire, among others.
And we're going to try really hard to stay focused because last time we met we were talking for like two and a half hours about all sorts of things. But I think it really does come down to, you know, we have some shared interest in politics and history and
so forth. And you wrote a really good piece for Kinrath, similar to the one that David McGarry wrote and the one that I wrote, and I just, you know, happy to talk to you guys about your work, and in this particular case, you talked about a man who as the channel you just turned me on too, over on YouTube called Forgotten Lives, just covered coincidentally James Armistead Lafayette, and I was thinking we could just sort of get into that, but I just wanted to let you introduce
yourself to start out, discuss your work that you've done, and also I really wanted to get your just sort of interested history nailed down, because I mean, this one story is very interesting, but I feel like the audience would benefit from having a broader sense of, like what you're interested in in history too, So I'll let you take it away from here.
Yeah, sure, well, thank you for thanks for having me Alex. This is this is fun, and yeah, we're gonna try and not go two and a half hours like we did last time, although we could do so easily.
Sure.
So, I mean, in terms of what I do, I mean, I work for what's called a proxy consulting firm, so we work with a lot of shareholders. Our clients range from ordinary investors to state pension funds, So I exist a lot in that kind of finance business world, and kind of the hope of this was to get completely outside of that world and go do something completely different because Aside from obviously the world of finance, the world of proxy, everything, all of that stuff, questions about ESG
and Ei. Outside of that, I do have an interest in history, right. I think apparently World War Two is much too controversial to be interested in anymore, and it's kind of boring. Every guy who's over the age of like twenty.
Five is into that sort of thing age lowering. It's a right, yeah, Like what's the Shane Yellis joke. It's like, once you hit thirty and you start like in World War two, you're gonna be.
Like, all right whatever. Yeah, yeah, one hundred percent. Yeah, that's kind of boring. Binary, So I decide we'll go back to the Civil War. Oh, turns out everyone in the United States apparently still really has deep feelings about that, So we'll go back to the rest.
It's the nerdiest part too, that's true.
Yeah, No, it's really bad. I mean, I love the Civil War. I love learning about the Civil War. But it's let's not pretend like it's not. It's just way too many people, like their families were involved, and so they still think that their opinions have to be guided by that. That's really strange. So we went back to the American Revolution because that's pretty much universally considered positive if you're not a brit and if you are, well whatever,
I don't care. So that's pretty much what this is at. But I think my interest in the American Revolution is is a couple of points. One it is it was the conflict that fundamentally shaped our nation in its very early days, and it had to and it very much interacts with I'm not gonna say more than the Civil War obviously, but similarly to the Civil War, inter intersects with some of these questions around race, how race impacts society, that sort of thing.
Are you saying that that the Revolution was an intersectional conflict?
I contract prevents me from using the I word, but what one could say it it engages in different sectors
that are close to one another. Yes, but yeah, I think the Revolutionary wars fascinating for a variety of reasons, including that, and also it introduces you to this insane plethora of very interesting characters, like I mean, including the big names, right Washington, Rush, Adams, Jefferson, these kind of people, but also people like James Armistead Lavia, who we're about to talk about, right, Yeah.
And it is interesting and we're gonna get into this a little bit later because I think the big theme in your piece that I think is a big theme in the American Revolution that I do appreciate it. When it's talked about, I think it gets a little too
moralistic sometimes depending on the source. But the contradictions at work, the moral contradictions, the political contradictions, the you know, you could, I sort of am fascinated by the revolution as a conflict or moment even of history in general, where contradiction kind of defined it at its subtext throughout. It didn't take away from the significance or the importance or the
greatness of a lot of it. In fact, I would argue even that the contradictions that we found is what makes America maybe not great, but unique in like world history, especially at that time.
Yeah, I can certainly concur with that.
And I mean it didn't spiral out of control either the way the French Revolution no, actually worked, Yeah, exactly, which is an interesting thing, right, It's very fascinating. Yeah, yeah, Yeah.
The trend with movements that are really sustained by actions is that they either really work, in which case we all talk about them and how awesome they were, and if they don't, there's like a sixteen part part cast about everything that went wrong right or And the problem is when when things go right, oftentimes we don't talk about them right. So like you can think about right,
I'm a Christian. We've talked about this before, but like that whole Rise and Fall of Mars Hill podcast series was about a church that didn't work right, a church network that didn't work. But the fact is there are tons of church networks and tons of pastors that do completely normal work and they'll never get a podcast about them, which, in fairness, you don't want that podcast about them, but
the analysis can there's some we can tend to ignore it. Weirdly, from historical terms, we tend to ignore the planes that actually survived because the stories about them once that got shot down are way more cool.
Yeah, exactly, yeah, I mean, well there are those moments though, that are covered for their non happening. I mean, not to get too off topic, but we have the guy oh I am blanking on his name, but he was the Soviet officer who saved the world by not launching the nuclear weapons against the United States in the nineteen eighties Petrov Sennis love Petrov, that was his name, And there's stories like that in the United States as well.
So it's funny. We do have stories where we really amp the importance of things not happening, but it's always in the contextuff, well the world would event did that's right. Yeah, but yeah, so we're talking about this guy with the name Lafayette, which you know, Revolutionary War buffs are going to perk up their ears and they hear that, and there's a good reason for that. But that's not the beginning of the story. I just wanted to let you
sort of let's not like spoil your article. People should go read it for themselves, but just sort of summarize what you're talking about. Who this Lafayette, Armistead Lafayette, We should say who he was, and just walk us through the story in the broadest strokes possible.
And yeah, sure, so, I mean, think about James Armistead lafayet. He hasn't called James Armstead lafay until much later in his life after his Revolutionary War service, right, He's right. For his most of his entire life he was named James Armistead. James Armstead is a black man who was born into slavery in southeastern Virginia in the mid seventeen hundreds, I think around between seventeen forty and seventeen sixty. His master is this guy William Armistead, which is where the
last name came from. William Armistead is a fascinating character in his own right. Right, He inherits several dozen slaves from his father, right, and that's part of what shapes its relationship. So a theme that comes up a lot when it comes to James's story is this idea of things that are intended for evil or intended not for his benefit end up working very well to his benefit.
Which is not just a providence thing, although I could argue about that it is a providential thing, but it's also James's truly uncommon level of with self awareness and ability to actually make a choice and a crucial moment that actually ends up turning a lot of these potential obstacles into advantages. And this is one example. Right, So James's master grew up learning with because James is raised on this plantation in Virginia, right, so educating slaves at
the time, right in the seventeen forty seventeen sixties. It was legal in places like in like the Carolinas, that sort of thing. But it is legal in places like Virginia, and it was especially common among people who are religious because they believed that they had a mandate to educate their slaves, that sort of thing. Right, So James grows up and he's educated despite being born in slavery. Why
is that, right? One, it's a calculation to make him a more valuable commodity, and that kind of capital based system. You want an educated slave because an educated slave can at some level sell for more money. But it comes back what's intended for the good of like another master, a potential buyer ends up working towards James as good because he grows up not only literate, able to read and write, but bilingual. Right, He grows up learning to read and write English and French, which makes him a
very small minority, right. I think there is some sources estimate that it's like five percent of enslaved people in Virginia literate at all. Right now, notably, if James had been born obviously his entire life story would be different. But if he had been born a few decades later posts like Nat Turner's rebellion in eighteen thirty one. The chances of him being educated at all is almost nothing, because that you have educating slaves after the Turner rebellion
tanks very severe. But he was born and educated before that.
We all know about Frederick Douglass. Of course, he's the most famous, right self educated mostly if I remember, right slave. But the big deal about him is it was so rare, and I think people do make the mistake of thinking that it was rare. I mean, it was rare, as you just said, but that the rarity of him doing it was in a different context of the rarity of
someone like James Armistead. And that is really interesting. I mean, I've always thought that the story of American slavery is really interesting in the sense that it was always evil, obviously, but the way we imagine it in the I shouldn't say. That's a really bad way of phrasing it. It was evil, but no, there is no blood.
But you know what I'm saying, Yeah, here's we're going to talk about some things in the context of slaver. Here for people who are listening, we're going to talk about some ways that might seem, especially if you have that kind of filter of tone, kind of policing matters. I need you to set that aside for this entire discussion. Make it much more comfortable for all of us. Right,
I'm not white, so this is fine. Yeah, And this is like, if there's something that seems super unnuanced just because of the words, I need you to take that point of view and just discard it for.
A little bit.
Run with the identity politics too. You're allowed to say it totally.
I'm only partially allowed. I have the heritage, it's not right. Yeah, yeah, so I can talk about slavery, but only the content. Yeah, four thousand years.
Ago, that's right. But but the point being like, take that, take that filter and set it aside.
Right.
So anyway, So the way this ends up happening is that James's master, WILLIAMS. Armstead, ends up meeting the Marquis de Lafayette. Marquis de Lafierte is his French aristocrat fights in the side of the Continental Army, very closely connected
with George Washington, and notably really abhors the institution of slavery. Right, It's he has this belief in natural law the rights of the human person, and it actually goes on because the Marquis ends up becoming a key figure in the French Revolution and the writing and the Declaration of the Rights of Man in which he is a pivotal figure.
And there's a whole story about the Marquis de Lafayette, George Washington and slavery in the free market, which we can get into later if you want sure, But anyway, so James's master meets the Marquis de Lafayette, Marquis de Lafiette in turn meets James. So Marquis de Lafayette sees this slave who's enslaved person we want to say, but refer to previously what we said about words, right, he realizes that James is not only incredibly intelligent, but he's
bilingual and literate. Right, this is a huge asset to someone like the Marquis de Lafayette.
The details of how they met, no, just I mean, because yeah, I mean James. Like again, I'm jumping ahead a little bit, but you pointed out how James didn't write anything, so we are really operating off of not scant evidence, but just like it's secondhand by its very nature.
Yeah, no, it's fair. I mean we can kind of infer, right, So William Armistead was a patriot. He sold a lot of materials to clients that included members of the Continental Army. So you can kind of infer that somehow by whatever means that happened. But it's true, we don't know quite how that happened. But yeah, right, regardless, it does happen.
And what the Marquis Blafayette realizes in James is this is someone who could be a very useful and very very competent spy, right, so he makes him this offer, you can come spy for the essentially on the side of the in an army against the British right. So at the moment, there are two kind of forces pulling on James when it comes to loyalty. Right, this is in I believe this is in like late seventeen seventies, right. So the first one is obviously Marquis a personal friend
of James Armistead, right, friend of his master. Right, he's offering this opportunity, work adventure. You get to go out and see the world and take part in this conflict that at that point was entirely inevitable and was already beginning on the other side, on the British side. Right, the Royal Governor of Virginia in seventeen seventy five, Lord Dunmore, issues this proclamation that any slave who wants to join the British Army, who's willing to join, gets their freedom
in exchange for their loyalty. Right, and James has a wife and kids at this point, notably to point out like this is not an easy This is not like a twenty two year old deciding do I want to go to college or do I want to go like run a Hemp sweater store. Right, these are completely the variables here are very strong, right, So that choice in and of itself is kind of instructive.
Right.
So if if James adjoined the British Army, right, he's a slave in Virginia, he's bilingual. If he joins the British Army, he gets his freedom. It's free freedom, more or less completely contingent on his continued loyalty to the crown. And notably, and we'll get into this a little bit more, I'm sure the British Army are not exactly the best when it comes to treating their people. It is a
notable problem throughout the Revolutionary War. On the other hand, if he decides to join the Continental Army, right, it's this is the most risk laden thing ever for many reasons. I mean, we can just say he does take the marquis offer to join the army, because that explains some of the dangers inherent in this. Right he's a spy. He can't carry papers right of his identity or his freedom or anything like that. He can't carry papers at all,
which makes it easier if he's discovered. But if he has to come clean, there's no way to verify if he comes clean. So he takes on a ton of risk in choosing to work for the Marquis de Lafayette, and he does not get his freedom at this point. That was not something the Marquie could offer at that point. So he enters the Continental Army in seventeen eighty one, and he becomes a double agent, right, so he infiltrates
the British camp. The British camp realized the same thing that this guy who's bilingual and literate and very clearly very intelligent, would be a great spy, and also for the British. It's very important. He's from Virginia and he has intimate knowledge while the supply lines and trade routes through Virginia near Richmond, et cetera. Which, if you're from Britain, you're here fighting essentially a guerrilla fighting for us from Virginia. That's kind of beneficial to know. So he becomes a
double agent, right. He goes back to the American lines and they feed him faulty information he passes to the British, and then he goes to the British and he feeds the correct information back to the Americans, and he basically becomes Again this is don't if you're one of those Edgelord people, you've already thought about a joke for this. But James essentially kind of becomes this gray man kind
of figure. Right. So because the British at the time, they're not going to think about a black servant being a source of intelligence. These people are essentially invisible to them. They don't think about that.
Well, and let me just cut in here really quick just to point out that, yes, the British were offering freedom and manumissioned specifically to people like James. They were they and yes, the British love to bring this up. This is gonna become the anti British podcast. I'm sorry to my British listeners.
I'm not I'm not sorry. Okay, yeah, we're patriot but yeah I'm Indian. Oh please spare me. Oh okay, yeah, yeah, yeah, I don't care. Indian and American. Yeah, Indian adopted to America and I call it soccer.
It's yeah, I think you have more of a more of a right to be even more patriotic than me.
And yeah, respectfully come at me, dorks. Yeah, yeah, in all serious.
And so the British love to point out that they abolished slavery and then you know, enforce that well before America did. And yes, fair true, but they didn't do it because they suddenly thought that black people were human beings, right, that is not And as you just said, they this guy was invisible and it doesn't matter how heroic they thought he was. They were like, oh, he's a means to an end for us. Well. Yeah.
Notably the person who he ends up serving through his time in the war is Charles Cornwallis, who go on to become a governor in India, and notably did not exactly adopt this perfectly twenty first century post racial paradise approach to the separation of the races. It just didn't happen that way. Yeah, but it made it very easy
because if because James Blackman, Sirs. Charles cornwallis leading one of the leading British generals in the American theater, this just becomes the easiest intelligence relationship of all time.
It's almost about it.
I actually use it's perfect.
I was gonna say, maybe it's like, maybe it's providential, depending on what you believe. I mean, it's like, regardless of what anyone believes, I think it is providential, Like regardless of how one interprets that. That is so perfect it is it is like the most perfect, at the very absolute least, the most perfect coincidence, you know.
Yeah, well, let's we can also dig into that whole thing about Cornwallace, right, Yeah, so we have a lot of discussions in the modern sphere about the whole role that unconscious racism does or doesn't play in the world. Right at the time, there is no doubt the unconscious racism was baked into the case of how many many the plurality, if not vast majority of people thought about
the world, including on the British side. Yes, that pays dividends for James here, because the reality is, if if the British did not have that view, if General Cornwall's did not have that view about racial separatism, he probably would have treated James a great deal more suspiciously and more humanely. But it would have it would not have worked in the same way the espionage mission likely would not have succeeded in this way. There is a there's a providential thing there that matters, right.
It's the uncomfortable reality of trade offs, of moral trade offs in history. I mean, as you say, it's it's like had he been had they just like been like, you know, blanket equality for everybody, and then James probably just would have been pressed into service as a you know, as a as a soldier or something.
Yeah, that's right, and none of this would have happened exactly.
Well, And that's a big thing that I really wanted to stress because like the big ripple effect that you discuss in your piece is what James managed to accomplish because it was his intelligence that led to a very important victory. I'll let you take it away from here though.
Yeah, So in August of eighteen seventy one, James discovers as seventy dodgy seventeen. Oh yeah, that's my notes, man, that's crazy. Yeah. So actually, no, I'm correct. So ninety nine years go by and that carries on and right, So Frederick Douglas's I guess would have been like fifty nine at this exactly. James still served, right, correct, Yeah, that's totally correct. How dare you correct me on that
sort of thing? So it's in August of seventeen seventy one, Yeah, James discovers that the British troops are planning to move from Portsmouth to Yorktown. Right, so, there are supply lines coming through the Chesapeake Bay, and Cornwallis thinks that if they can get to Yorktown, they can more easily access both the supply lines and their potential reinforcements from New York. He assumes that that is all being done without any
knowledge from the constant from the Continental Army. Wrong story short, that didn't happen because this serving man, James, is working for the Continental Army. So that gets so James alerts the Marquis de Lafayette. Right, So the French Navy blockades the Chesapeake Bay, it cuts off the supply lines from and it cuts off any chance of British reinforcements coming through.
So the French quashed the base supply line, and the Continental Army strikes at the Yorktown position on a land route, so it basically cuts them off completely, and cornwallis thing goes on to surrender in October. It's seventeen eighty one. It was yeah, yeah, it was just two flip numbers there.
You go, Yeah, exactly. That's remarkable because that is known in you know, in grade school. That's the battle we learn about. It's like, that's what we won at that point.
Yeah, well it's interesting, right, people, So I'm the most pro America person you'll ever meet, but this is like the one bit where we're going to talk about this. There's a little bit of nuance here, right. It's called an American victory. It's a victory for the American side. Yeah, the victory is almost completely affected by the French Navy.
So there is that, right. So, like, look, we can talk about like baguettes and cheese and whatever, but like fa they really pulled in a solid one here, the point being that intel would not have come if James had been in any other place. And it is the last major land battle at the Revolution, right, and the British lost by being outspied by people like James.
Well, and that's what's so remarkable to me, because you know, you know, I'm been in grad school now for my fourth semester and we are and I was already doing this just on my own, like trying to avoid this, but we're still taught it. You cannot play around too much with de terminism. In history, nothing is preordained, but when you look at it from that, you know, pesky counterfactual standpoint, I do find it hard to believe that the outcome of the revolution would have been It wouldn't
have been identical. We still might have won, but without that intelligence, I can't. I'm not a revolutionary war scholar obviously, so maybe we could defer to somebody who is, if they've ever talked about this at any length. But I find it hard to believe that the revolution would have ended when it did and how it did without this
intelligence that James provided. That's I mean, it's incredible, and and that you know that actually gets into like what happens afterward, because you would that he would be hailed as this hero and given everything you know, he deserved, and then some not just you know, manumission for him and his family, but hefty paycheck for the rest of his life.
Well this is the interesting thing, right. So but by pure coincidence, this is podcasting day here in my office. So literally after we're done filming this, I have to go film one about the Tuskegee Airmen. Oh yeah, and it's a very similar experience. Right. So James fights. Here's the thing, right, he fights in the revolutionary but revolutionary war,
but he fights as a spy, not a soldier. Right, So he comes out and there is a decree that everyone who fought I believe it was all blacks who fought in the Revolutionary War as soldiers would receive manumission. James was not a soldier, who's a spy. And it takes I want to say, it takes about eight years before at seventeen eighty three, I want to believe, before James actually becomes free. And it takes direct intervention from the Marquis Lafaiett, who has to write a letter to
Virginia Legislature asking for this to happen. His own master, who is a member of the Virginia Legislature, could not make this happen on his own because bureaucracy ruins everything. And that's just that's really where my kind of libertarian, right leaning sensibilities are going to come out. It directly prevented that from happening. But that's a different point, right, But yeah, and that's and.
That's the part that I think is also like an unfortunate reality of of you know, of that time, is that you know, they're not going to go out of their way to they being the you know, the bureaucratic authorities of the time, they're not going to go out of their way to help this guy, even if they know what he did. I mean, it's not, if I remember right, they did know what he did. They were
made aware even before Lafayette got in. It was, as you say, only Lafayette's intervention, as in writing a letter and being like, hey, this guy is a hero, treat him as such.
Please. Yeah.
So, but he did get his freedom, his manuduction.
Yeah, and then he yep, and then he gets he gets forty acres, which is interesting if you if you read history or have listened to Kendrick Lamar, you know what, it's important. I was gonna it's bigger than the music. I was gonna say, a one that was gonna take ye. So he settles, and he eventually does get a military pension, and he lives out the rest of his life that way. But he also owns slaves.
That's the craziest part.
Yeah, that's the wild thing.
Yeah, and that I'm not willing to make any generalizations about, you know, freed slaves who then maybe did that because I have no idea.
But he did.
It's not super uncommon to see moments like that in history, and it was something I wanted to talk about a little bit. But yes, uh, maybe this is probably a good enough transition anyway, because they're just there. Does seem to be an interesting, uh sort of contradiction within that, as well as the contradictions of you know, of well, like I was saying earlier, of the United States in general.
I mean, certainly the best example of that obviously is Thomas Jefferson, the man who probably you can't find another Founding father who wrote so vociferously against slavery and yet I was gonna say, and not only did it enjoyed it a little too much if you look in certain certain areas, yeah the sally he means area. Yeah. But yeah, there's a contradiction though that Armistead, you know, owned slaves
despite not wanting to be a slave himself. It reminds me of the contradiction that seems to occur that a lot of people don't know about. Is one of the most shameful parts of American history is the Trail of Tears during the Jackson administration, done without congressional approval of memory serves uh. And in the midst of that, you have a lot of high like Cherokee notables and like noble men. I guess you could say, even though they have, you know, it's not exactly the same as we have.
But then you have a number of them like John Ross is the most famous one, bringing their dozens of slaves with them on the Trail of Tears, so their slavery existing among the victims of an ethnic cleansing effort. Like that kind of contradiction lies in the face of so much much we assume about history. And I think James kind of fits into that too, And what that kind of says to me. It's sort of what I was getting at earlier when I was talking when we
got a little sidetracked on Frederick Douglass. But my point then was that slavery really only became the brutal thing of our imagination, like truly the with all the you know, corporal punishment and outright evil that was going on. It really became a problem in the nineteenth century. It wasn't
really as much of an issue in the eighteenth. It obviously was an issue in some cases, but certainly Yeah, but it seems to me that the racism element, like as you said, it was kind of normal, but it wasn't institutionalized in the same sort of like like a dick tot kind of way as it was. And it seems like slavery was more of a social status kind of thing. And that's how something like James could probably maybe not excuse it, but just sort of be like, well,
this is just what men of my position do. It's not about it.
I think that's I think that's right.
It's not like self hatred or anything like that, like I think some modern people might be tempting to assume. But I want to let you respond to that.
Yeah, I think that's fair. I think one of the other points about this that gets brought up, I mean, this is the oldest accusation that gets lobbed at all the Founding Fathers is this idea of they own slaves, so therefore their belief in America, their belief in American exceptionalism, all these things are somehow moot, right, right, I think the argument that's made to defend them, I think the most compelling argument that's made to defend them also exists here,
and I think is actually made made more compelling by the fact that it goes for James as well. Right, So, born into slavery, right, serves in the Revolutionary War, despite not being guaranteed his freedom, gets out, still doesn't get his freedom. It takes almost a decade for him to get his freedom. And then he goes and then he retires in luxury, and then he owns slaves. Why why does that happen? Well, there are two ways to look at that. One is he simply somehow internalized some level
of prejudice that was part of his time. And maybe that's true, Maybe that was part of it. I'll be fair, but there's another thing of we look at that with the certain arrogance almost that we would have done something differently. I get this a lot, right, I hear this from all kinds of people. Right. It's like, if I had been in seventeen eighty five, I would have been protesting for I don't know, ye, right, gabits, which I okay, I would.
Never be the guard at Ashwitz, you.
Know that, yeahs or like I would have been. I would have been completely supportive of the LGBTQ community if I had existed in seventeen eighty five. And I'm like, look, non discrimination is great, right, I agree with it, and the fact that that was not realized fully in seventeen
eighty was a problem. But yeah, however, Yeah, there is this other thing where if some of the most virtuous and most accomplished people of that time think about people like George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, sure he's.
Let's get sidetracked.
He's in a great area, right, People of the moral character of George Washington and the moral character of people like Aames Armistead Lafayette own slaves, we should not by default take that as an indictment of their moral character. We should, in fact take it as an indictment that if people who were so accomplished and so generally sought to be so morally upright could not see past their own blinders, that is an indication that we almost certainly would not have been able to.
One hundred percent. Yes, it's it's it's a lesson in historical humility that I really appreciate a lot of the time. But it also I see it as a sort of how would I put it, a unifying principle. It reveals how human beings like, our circumstances changed constantly, our outlooks changed constantly, but we're still the same creatures as we always were, right, I still all have I mean, they have blinders for that, as you just sort of said, here, we have blinders for things now and we can't pretend
we don't. And in a way that's kind of comforting because it reveals not our defaul actually can I suppose you can look at it that way, and I sometimes do on a you know, darker day, sometimes I'm like a humans suck but sure then or humans are weak is usually what I default too. But then they remember, well, if humans back then, as you say, as upstanding, as James Armis said, Lafayette or George Washington or whoever can be so weak, we'll say even that mean and we're
so weak. We're all the same, we are all part of the same species. And it feels very unifying in a strange intuitive way.
If that makes Yeah, this is this is sort of maybe I'm gonna try and not turn this into a rant, but it's like, especially people like I'm so I have twenty three right, so I'm a very much a gen zer hellyeat right, And when I see people who talk about who really just lobb this really morally high horsed criticism of people of days past who accomplished far more than most people. Which again we're not saying that accomplishment is the proxy for moral goodness. We're not saying any
of that at all. Don't know, No Marxists come after me saying that that proves anything. It doesn't. But all that all that aside, right, let's just have the humility to acknowledge that if some of the greatest men of our history, of our history, right, it's not white history, it's not any of this, it's our history. We're all Western civ people here right.
I'm hearing some Glenn Lowry echoing there.
Well not because you go read my interview with Glenn Lowry that happens like two days after KBJ was confirmed, and he said some things he is apt to less profane than he sometimes is, which is good.
Yeah, yeah, I just I just always do I always I want to make it a sound clip that I don't do like sound effects on my show, but I think I should, and I think I just want to get the one of him saying keep yo, goddamn hands off my dignity.
I thought you were going to talk about like the empty suited, empty headed Oh.
That's always fun too.
Yeah, it's great. Yeah, he's funny. He's great fun.
Anyway, as you were saying.
Let's just dispense with this idea, with this completely unfounded notion that we who are in the twenty first century and like fifty percent of us get our news from TikTok or whatever, would have been these outstanding moral arbiters of things that like even the greatest men of that time struggled with. Let's just dispense with that. There's no evidence for that beyond like people's own inflated self work. Again,
none of us to say that slavery was good. None of that's even to say that James Armistead Lafiya it was necessarily correct in owning slaves. It's to point out there are blinders here. And if we think that those blinders magically disappear with the passage of three to four hundred years, I got some news for you. I got some more nature ard books to sell you well.
And that was the thing, interestingly too, that I think the moral debates of the time were different too, Like it seems to me, and you can maybe correct me on this, but like the big sort of indicator of where you stood on the question of slavery really was whether or not you freed your slaves upon your death, as George Washington did, as Thomas Jefferson famously did not. And if I remember right, did James Armistead Lafayette free his slaves when he died?
Ah, Yeah, that's a good question.
I don't remember if he brought that up.
Yeah, I mean I don't recall again. But the problem with the problem with studying James Armstead Lafayette, he didn't write that much. I think the only thing that he verifiably wrote himself was his petition for manumission. Everything else was either written by other people or compiled from like
public records at the time. But let's I want to bring go back to that whole Washington slaves free before death thing, because there's this interesting story that I found actually in the in the research for this podcast, not
in the kine rathbiece. So this is new, right. So there's this moment later during the near the closed the Revolutionary War, right, So the Marquis de Lafayette writes to George Washington, very late in the Revolutionary War, and he has this idea and he's like, look, we're going to purchase land and your slaves can work on that land
as free laborers. And if we do it, and because you're you know, you're George Washington and people like pay attention to what you do, right, it's it's maybe the practice will spread nationwide and this will become the default for what people want to do with slaves, right, is that you turn them into freed labors and they work for their own money, and then it becomes kind of a way to not only build up the community economy,
but also for your slaves. Right. And the Marquet actually did purchase the land right, so he stood so as the kids say, he stands on business right. Washington does similar things. He tries to negotiate with other farmers to come in and be kind of overseers of this land on which these people are going to work. The negotiations never work out. But I think there's this idea that these people were serious about what ending slavery actually would
have meant. They recognize that when you free slaves, they don't just like get transported somewhere and have all their needs taken care of. There are real economic implications in the time. Oh, there's a lot of stories we're freeing them without thinking about them arguably would have been significantly worse.
There's a lot of stories like that following the Civil War, if I remember correctly, where it's like a lot of like well, and they even kind of played it out. It's funny, like it came out of the midst of like you know, culture warship in the in the in the twenty tens. But they even played that out in an episode of Game of Thrones where Denares Targarian, frees all the slaves of the city of Marine and then a slave, an old man comes in petitions, or can
I please work for my master? Because that's all I've ever known, you know, he and his family were my family. They fe and it's like that. It really gets into the really like self evidently to us ugly reality of it, but also the logistical challenges of things like mass emancipation and so forth. That that's right and not to really think about.
Right, And that takes us to an interesting point when it comes to we referenced before, right the Dune Moore Proclamation in seventeen seventy five, Like anyone who comes to works with the British armies.
Can be free.
Right. A lot of people did that, right to some sure estimate, like twenty thousand escapes like slaves joined the British army during the revolution, right, and why would they not? It's right because like that's a that's like if you if you're looking at that, that's a pretty sweet deal. Right, you get your freedom and you get to.
Go where.
Decide that based on some calculations, should probably win this war because like these are just gun tote and twenty five year olds like these are like doja, These are like doge people fighting like fighting like the fighting Green Berets, right, like, this is insane. Why would you ever think that that
will work? And a lot of people join the British Army for that reason to get out of slavery, and more than fifteen hundred of them specifically in relation to the Dune Moore Proclamation, and then like two thirds of them die of disease and it's just really bad. But the point we're making is after the war ends, right, and the British Army is evacuating New York City in seventeen eighty three, there's a bunch of former slaves who go with them. But the problem is what happens after that?
Right?
Do they just go and have like completely fulfilled lives that they were prevented from living in America? No, they go and live in Nova Scotia in exile with a bunch of the other British loyalists. Some of them just go back to Africa. The country's like Sierra Leone, right, And notably not all these people are slaves.
Right.
So there there's one I've found named gentleman named Newton Prince, who was I think a lemon merchant in Boston who had kind of lost favor in his community because he testified in defense of the British soldiers during the involved in the Boston massacre. Right, all right, Yeah, so he had become kind of persona on Grada, and when the British are leaving New York City, he goes with them. And it is difficult to argue that his life got
exponentially better because he took a British deal. Now he wasn't a slave, notably, but it's very difficult to argue that the people who took the slaves, who took the British deal really ended up doing so much better. And that's an interesting thing because that choice could have gone either way, and games had done the same thing, JN, you wouldn't have had this story. And too, he wouldn't exactly have ended up better in Nova Scotia somewhere. Well.
And also there's a presumption, I think, and it's a reasonable one again, because we value as Americans, especially as modern Americans, we value individual agency and freedom and so forth so much. But it's easy for us to therefore assume that the number one priority of someone who is a slave in the seventeen eighties is manumission. Yep, that might not be the highest priority. It's it's it's yes, there's there is a concrete, material reality to being a
freedman versus an enslaved man. However, there's a lot of logistical realities, like day to day Maslow's hierarchy of needs, stuff you have to consider. And at the end of the day, freedom, something that you've never experienced in your life, is an abstract ideal, even if you see it as a as a it's an important one.
That's the thing.
Here's my throw clear. And I'm not trying to say but I'm just making I'm not trying to say that it's not important, but I'm just can't exactly. Yes, you can, and as ugly as it is self evidently to be a person who cannot leave the land that you're on, and if you do, you'll probably get killed, if not, you know, physically punished in a horrible way. Not to say anything about what's going to happen to your family or what does happen to your family, to your wives
and daughters. I'm not saying that that's ideal, but at least those things are certain. Those the circumstances of your of your being fed sheltered clothes. That's certain, and it's smartly within this era, right, it's like very hard yeah.
Right, So like remember we mentioned before, right, James has a wife and kids, right, and he goes and joins the Continental Army as a spy. His wife and kids are as far as I can tell, still we're still in slavery during that point, but they were in slavery. To his master, William, who had grown up with James, and this was not chattel slavery, that they do not perceive these people as less than human. I don't know if that's true in the aggregate, but all indications indicating
that his master viewed him as a person. I mean you literally let him go be an espionage agent for the Continental Army. I mean presumably you think this person at least human, if not fairly smart. Right, that was a better deal than him taking the freedom and having nothing to do, right or better? Yeah, his wife and kids.
Well, and that's something I wanted to talk to you about a little bit too, is the theme that another contradiction that I think exists in this story is the idea of ideals overriding self interests. But we kind of just got into a little bit where I'm thinking, like, you know, yes, it's self evident to us that freedom manumission is you know, you in your self interest, but it probably wasn't for a lot of people, including James.
But I think in the sense of James being educated, he probably had a and he clearly wanted to be freed later on in life, So he clearly had a very positive view of being freed, of being his own man. But it's interesting that he had that value. We can assume and he still saw the value of basically staying a slave and working with the people who enslaved him.
Because I can only assume, and I'll let you, you know, explain this to me, but I can only assume that the ideals that William had and that the Marquis de Lafayette had about freedom were much more important to him than and guaranteed manumission. He maybe had it in his head that he would be free to if he did this, And I don't know, but I get the feeling that there were there were some ideals at work within James that were much more powerful than just the idea of getting automatic freedom.
Yeah. Well, this entire story is one of him thinking very tactically about what exactly it's going to do to come out of this on the other side. Right, and in fairness, presumably most of the slaves who also took the British offer were also thinking about that. The chances and just the way the history played out, these were different choices and they resulted in different things. But I think that's right because if it's very easy for us now in twenty twenty five to look back and say, well,
he should have just he could have defected. That's the other interesting thing, right, Yeah, he could have taken the British offer and just defected, right, which but which is something that I discovered in my research. Some people argued that that would have been better, and I think would it?
Well?
Where his family have gone, they were still yeah, exactly, yeah, there they're they're in trouble.
He's in trouble with the British Army for defecting, and they're not exactly going one. They're not going to exactly do anything good for him because look at what they did to their own right soldiers, right, Lobster back didn't exist for no reason.
Can you summarize that really quick?
Because you wanted to.
You mentioned that earlier, and I want to just go.
Oh yeah, like the whole idea of him defecting. Right, So there is that option of just like you take a British offer and then once you get outside the once you get outside your master with how just leave? But he has a wife and kids, right, He's not going to escape for that, and and for what exactly Right, he's living in the middle of West Virginia not West Virginia, sorry Virginia. Right, it's important distinction. Yeah, what's he gonna
do at that point? Is that practically better for his wife and kids to spend the next couple of years on the run with a father who's wanted by the British Army and is also known as an escaped slave to everyone who's not part of the British Army? Is
that better? We can judge the morality of James's decisions now, and there are there are there are some critiques, I think, but this, this idea that he did something fundamentally wrong by working with the people who enslaved him, is I think fundamentally ignorant of where his of the practical nature that he seems to be. That that seems to characterize much of his life.
Mm hmm. Yeah, well and the and with the with working with the British. He as you said, they're called lobster backs for a reason. I mean they and you're talking about how they were notoriously abusive of their own soldiers, right, and I remember, yeah, okay, yeah, so maybe he knew something about that too. Maybe there was an element of
self interest at work there. There was an element of self interest in terms of just being like, well, I'd rather have my family be safe, you know, but like it doesn't matter really, and I and I do suspect there is an ideal at work with him, because like having been educated, having read all this stuff, and having interacted with somebody like the Marquis de Lafayette. I don't even want to say that he was influenced by Lafayette to you know, to have these ideals.
I feel like he.
Probably came to them on his own. I mean, especially if he was raised alongside you know, his master, who was a patriot, Like you know, he clearly bought into something that was going on there, and you know, maybe
he just I don't know. I mean, that's that is a difficult thing, is that he as you say, he did not really leave any writing behind except for that one request, And that does kind of bring up something I wanted to ask you about, is the question of action versus talking about stuff, because he was a man of action. Ultimately, he clearly knew how to write, but
he didn't really see any value in it. I mean, who knows, maybe there were some it was a collection of letters or diaries out there somewhere that nobody's found. But but I just it makes me wonder, like, like, what do we make of like people who just never left anything behind. People like the fact that we know about him at all is remarkable and all of his accomplishments. There's probably a lot of people out there, slave or
otherwise who did remarkable things. We just don't know about it because they never wrote anything down or nobody.
Was writing about that. I think there's some kind of two things on that, right. One is when we look at the Revolutionary War, we tend to think about it, or at least I do, as like, again, i'm politically right of center, in case you can't tell by now, in which case, like man, that's right, yeah, yeah, he was sorry. I'm sorry. I meant to say this time he's a person of color spelled s P E R s U N.
Right.
I think we when we look at the Revolutionary War, we tend to view people like George Washington, people like James Madison as the baseline. Everyone else there is insignificant because like we just remember what we're told. We tend to remember people like, you know, Alexander Hamilton, this kind of stuff, right. I think that is that that is a view. When it comes to especially kind of an intellectual history of what actually guided the American Revolution, that's
kind of fair. But when it comes to if you let's let's say we went back in time and asked James that question, right, do you do you right, at the end of your life, do you regret? Do you wish that you had been a thought leader instead? I don't. I can't speak for him obviously, but at some level he secured his freedom and the freedom of his wife and children, and he left them property. He left them a good life.
Right.
Forty acre right, forty acres is not nothing. Right, That is a significant in those times, especially for a especially for a free black family. That's a big deal. He left them something that in many ways probably did more for them practically in real terms than if he had just like randomly written a federalist paper or something. Right, I think that emphasis on practical action just constantly pervades his life. And would he have been a thought leader.
I'm sure he had the caliber to be, but that's just not the way it turned out. I think when we look at and even right, I think there's a lot of focus on who is going to be the thought who are going to be the thought leaders that drive various intellectual movements, very different, various different political cultural stripes forward. The reality is that behind all those things are a ton of people who work practically to create things for themselves and their families and make life better
for the people to come after them. And that's that is no less of a legacy than you know, having written some federalist papers. Yeah.
Right, And I don't want to speak, don't I don't want I mean, I think what you're saying isn't that one is better than the other. You're saying that we have value, like people recognize their value. Frederick Douglass, we'll talk about him for a second. He recognized his value or his skills that he developed and was thinking, well, I will try to make the world a better place
with the skills that I have. The skills that I have are writing and speaking and having the ideals, putting forth the ideals that I live by, and knowing that it's the right thing in my heart. And I think that there are some people like him, and then there's some people like James who, as you said, had practical concerns and use that to benefit those in his life,
including himself. And there's nothing wrong with that because what he did by doing that mattered way more than anything he could have possibly said, because he'd already made an accomplishment on top of that. I think it's kind of in a way, I kind of see him like, you know, whatever one thinks about Obama as a president, that kind
of is his attitude at this point. He's like, he's not I remember there was talk of him being nominated to be a Supreme Court justice, which I was thinking, Okay, you could follow the Taft model, I guess and make him yeah, and wouldn't have been and he is. You know, he's a lawyer. He has the qualifications. But Obama doesn't care about that sort of thing. He made his accomplishments as he sees them. Again. If people want to quibble
with those accomplishments, that's fine. But the point is is he saw it as as him doing his job and now he's retired and doing yeah Spotify or.
Something that's right. Yeah, him and Gavin Newsom. This this whole generation of podcasts people, it's just bizarre. But I want to go back to Douglas because mentioned Douglass, right, sure, Yeah,
Douglas has this quote about because douglas whole thing. A significant portion of the early part of the narrative of the life of Frederick Douglas is him talking about his self education, right, yes, and how his self education made him realize that the institution of slavery, especially chattel asks slavery in the way that it was practiced in the kind of the eighteen thirties and beyond right within the nineteenth century more broadly, right, was damaging to both slave and slaveholder.
Right.
But he the thing he said about education is that education was emancipation. Right. It's like, it means light and liberty, it means the uplifting of the soul of man into the glorious light of truth. Right. What does that mean?
Though?
Like for Frederick Douglass that meant something very specific, but for James it meant it meant something very different.
Right.
The other thing is not everyone is going to be a thought leader. Now everyone is called to be, and they're plenty of very intellectual people who are who are just not going to be thought leaders because that's not where their vocation lies. And it's interesting, right, So, like you think about the idea of someone like Alexander Hamilton. Right, we mentioned Yorktown before, Right, there was a ground attack launched on the British position in Yorktown under the Marquis
de Lafayette. One of the colonels involved in that rape was Alexander Hamilton. Why does that matter, Well, because at that moment in time, Hamilton did not need to be Okay, I have thought about Hamilton as a thought leader and what that's done for the country, But at that point especially, Hamilton did not need to be a thought leader, right, And for some people they just never They are just better served to be in a place where they can
practically accomplish things. And that's most people. That's my thing about the way we view the Revolutionary War, even the Civil War to a point, right, just wars in general, we tend to have this kind of great man view where it's just buoyed by the actions to those people.
And in a sense that's true. But at another level, there are tons of people who, for lack of a better term, do operations right and James Armistead Lafia it's an operations guy fundamentally, And if we want to understand how things get done, if we want to understand why people do things, we should read people like Washington and Adams and Hamilton maybe right, But if you want to understand how things get done, we need to be digging
into these kind of stories. One of my buddies, Caleb Franz, just had this great book called The Conductor come out. I think it's at Simon and Schuster, about the Reverend John Ranken who was one of the conductors so called that's where the title comes from, on the underground railroad, and he guided hundreds of slaves for he was a Presbyterian minister. He did all these things. He was a
doer fundamentally. He wrote a lot which differentiates him from James, but his fundamentally most important work was in guiding people to add was in guiding slaves to achieve their freedom. That matters, right. The history of thinkers is very very important, right, and we dismissed the history of thinker thinkers at our peril, But the history of doers is also really, really, really important. Yeah, and it's harder to find because doers write less and
do more. But that's that's kind of definitionally the problem. So it's at some level it's just something that it's been a fascinating story to learn about it. It's kind of hard to cobble together because he's really just Yeah, he didn't write that much and there's not all that much information available about him. But he was a doer, as so many unsung heroes of the Revolutionary War were. But if he had not existed, if he had decided he just had a dream of being a thought leader
and it did nothing. Because he's inslaved for Virginia and he does none of those things. The seege of Shorktown doesn't happen. The war rages for a couple more years, or a couple more months, or a couple more weeks, more people die. That's all prevented because of someone who didn't write something. And I'm okay with that.
I can absolutely live with that, And again, it does make me wonder for obvious reasons that we both are like, yeah, that was good, that was probably a good thing.
That's right, Yeah, who's good call?
Yeah, but it does make me wonder again, how many people do we not know about because they were quote unquote just doers.
Yep.
And I think that that's a that's a really good note to end on. I think too for this. I know we have a lot of shared interest in other parts of history, so I will definitely be having you back for them. I think it'll probably have to do with us talking and try not to get derail when talking about Christianity, because there's so much there with American Christian history that I think we're both fascinated.
By, notably a non controversial topic.
Non controversial, but we'll be talking about it. And well, technically the part that we're both interested in that we were talking about before any of this that we talked about today even happened. So we're going back, we're going back really far.
We talked about that the initial lore exactly.
Yeah, So thank you again Isaac for coming on to history impossible. Why don't you just let people know where they can find you if you want them to follow you anywhere or anything like that.
Yeah, I'm on x at isaac quiller I saac w I l l O you are. I don't post about history. I posted about ESG and corporate finance and stuff. So there's there's gonna be a disconnect there. But I think you can. I think you can live with it. But thank you, man. This is really fun. You're great host, You're doing great stuff. It's always pleasure to talk with you.
Matt, for sure. Yes, we'll talk again soon. Have a good one.
Oh mother, dear mother. The daughter replied, I'll not do the thing that you ask for.
Unwilling to pay.
A fair price on the tea, but never a three penny tax. But never a three penny tax. Oh you shall, cried a mother, and Reddin with rage. Pertier may o daughter, you see, and it's only proper for a daughter to pay her mother a tax on the tea. Her mother attack on the tea, so she ordered her servant to be called up to wrap up the package of tea. An eager for threepence a pound, she put in enough for a large family, in enough for a large family.
Then she ordered her servant to bring the tax home, declaring her child must obey or old as she was a woman half grown, she'd half whip her live away, she'd half whip her alive away. So the tea was conveyed to the daughter's own door, all down by the ocean side. But the bound sing girl poured out every pound in a baraga and ball and tide, and the
dark and ball and tie. Then the daughter cried out to the eyland queen, Oh mother, dear mother, cried she, dear tea, you may have when tis deep bed enough, but never attacks from me, bod, never attacks from me.
History impossible has been made possible by the kind and generous donations of great folks like the following people. I want to shout out Bob Downing, Greg Hunter, s O. Skip Pachaco, Molly Pan, John Pisano, Anna R.
PJ.
Raider, Matthew m Rice, Emily Schmidt, Pierre Vorpuni, and of course f you. I really appreciated Isaac Willlauer coming on to have this conversation and tell me and all of you listening about James Armiston Lafayette and really get us thinking about the complexities and weirdness of slavery and American history,
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