Behind the BastardsPart Three: Thomas Jefferson: King of Hypocrites
Robert and Prop talk about Jefferson's wild years as a slavery debate bro in Paris, and also the fact that he was for sure a pedophile.
Also media.
Thomas Jefferson more like Thomas.
Jerk jerk jerk made sons that.
Come on, I don't what are we doing?
What are we doing here? Tried?
You know, likes Anderson? How about the mass?
And there you go.
He apologize, the queen apologize, and I'm getting a very dirty look.
This is this, This is like.
Hold up, caught a stray over there? I apologize.
This is like when when two climbers trying to do like Killimanjaro, but is a surprise storm apologize like because because what we do, I would say, is like the emotional equivalent of climbing kill him and Jarro, which I assume is one of the hard mountains.
I don't know much exactly the same.
Yeah, it seems like it's difficult. You know what else is difficult?
Prop what else is difficult?
Talking about the life and many moral compromises of Thomas Jefferson.
And we're gonna do it four hours several.
More hours to go. Yes, I hope you're feeling nice and rested after our first two parts, because we are getting into well, I guess we already got into the meat of it. We're getting into more of the meat of it. It's like like an RB's sandwich. There's a lot of meat. Yeah.
Did you have a nice birthday?
Prop?
I did? It was fun. I went fly fishing for a little bit. Then I came home and I wrapped at the La County Fair. Oh cool. Which they're now like they're curating the stage a little better. So it's like usually if you're not like War or Steely Dan, it's like it's not worth your time, like to perform at the fair. Yeah, but now like you're usually you're going after like a Journey cover band, But now like they're curating the stages better. So this was like a hip hop stage next best La And that was dope.
Man.
It is something every man has to ask himself at some point. Are you more of a Journey cover band or are you more of a Steely Dan cover band?
Man? I think I think I'm a Steely Dan guy.
I'm Journey. I've known that about myself for a long time.
Yeah, I'm neither.
Yeah, Yeah that makes sense, Sophie, I wouldn't.
I mean, yeah, I.
Feel like you could do a really good rendition of Come sail Away by Sticks.
I'd do a War, You'd you'd be a fun Telly cover band. Okay, okay, I could see you do I could see you in a George Clinton band like yeah, in the base maybe, and.
I could see you in the mov PCU like George Clinton.
I can't do any of these performance I have no talent, so I can't do any of these things.
Being a boss, Jeremy, he was, Okay, you're right, Sorry, we should stop. I shouldn't make my twelfth reference to that movie.
Yeah, don't, don't do it.
So that's the cold open. We'll come back in a second with some Thomas Jefferson for you, and we're back prop. You would have guessed how many kids Martha Jefferson had during the first ten years of her marriage to Thomas.
How many kids Martha Jefferson? I wish I knew this. Ten?
No, No, six, six, That's still that's still a lot of kids.
For Test's still a gang of kids, dude. After now, I've obviously I've never given birth to a child, but I watched it once and if I were a female, I would be like, yeah, never get yeah, never akin, Am I going to do that?
Yeah? I don't feel like I would want to, and I especially wouldn't want to if I had the kind of track record Martha has, cause you want to I want you to guess how many of those six kids do you think made it to adulthood?
Oh my god, five, two, two.
They didn't do great. This is a difficult time to have kids. But that's not a good race. Six kids two out of six is not good, man. And it's some of this is I think Martha. Martha has from what we can tell, difficult pregnancies, like and this is going to do a lot of permanent damage to her, right she.
Just had Obviously, you know we've we've said this many times. You're considering the state of like, let's sit racism aside for a second, but considering just the state of medicine, there's no other air i'd want to live in.
Absolutely not.
Yeah, there's no thank you, But there's some like sorry, I'll pass. I'm just yeah, I'm like, okay, uh, you got to cut on your arm. We just have to chop it off. And there's this, here's some whiskey and a stick to bite down on. Nah, I'm good, No, I'm good.
From that narrative, Yeah, I.
Would give up modern medicine for one thing, and it's if they could send me back far enough to see dinosaurs. I would give up most things for dinosaurs, Like even if they immediately come after me and eat me, Like I mean, I feel thirty seconds would be worth it.
Yeah, your thirty seconds would be worth it because whatever ancient mosquito that bites you immediately, right, it's.
Like yes, super super yellow fever. Yeah, yeah, your malaria gets malaria, yeah immediately. Oh yeah, just just ruined. So anyway, the Jeffersons, I don't know if I want to say, like give him too much shit for this ratio. I kind of a get we get so little from Martha in part because Thomas destroys a lot of her correspondence after she dies. So maybe she was super as much into having kids as he is. It's kind of hard for me not to look at how he treated the people he owned and the fact that Martha was basically pushed into having so many kids until her body gave out, and like, yeah, kind of drawing a line between those two maybe wow, But maybe that's not fair because we just don't know anything about what she really felt on the matter. Yeah, you know, sure, as a result of you know the fact that Martha's in ill health this whole time, the whole time that they're married and trying to have kids. But Jefferson's engaged in an activity that was very common for American slave owners, and in fact very common for rich people using like not enslave, but like peasants and stuff over in Europe too, which is having a wet nurse. Right in their case, the wet nurse was Ursula, who's again, you know, one of the people that Thomas owns, and she is the wet nurse for basically the entirety of the time that Thomas has kids and grandkids. Ursula is almost as much of an unknown as Martha, or is actually more of an unknown even than Martha, because we do get a little bit from Martha, but we can assume from the facts that she was almost super humanly tough. She nursed for base twenty five years straight, both je kids and his grandkids. That's a lot sheesh, Yeah, that's that's a lot of nursing.
That's a lot of milk. Her poor boobs, got it? Ya know?
It hurts to hear that, Yeah, it does.
You're just in and I still don't understand how you can I mean, I don't. I don't know how how a person can laxate when it's not their child. I know it's a normal thing, but like idea, Yeah, I just there's there's parts of science and me me being a girl dad with like a wife and two daughters. I'm still there are still parts of Therefore, I'm sorry. I'm one of those basic men where it's like I feel like I'm pretty progressive, but there are certain things that I'm just like, aw, that's a mystery. I don't know how you do that magic.
I don't know how like emotionally because it's it's it seems like it's such a head fuck, right, yeah, you really you can't even like these are the kids of the people who own you. You can't nurse a baby and not develop a connection to the baby. Like it's just it's a baby. You're nursing it. That's like what people do.
An incredibly intimate moment, yeah, of bonding, which is like why we the humans do it? You like you bond you know?
Yeah? Yeah, it just feels like almost unavoidable. And Thomas has a habit of crediting in his writing Ursula's milk with almost supernatural power writing that when one of his children was sick, a quote a good breast of her milk would heal them almost instantaneously. That's how he writes about the quantity a.
Good breast.
Of breasts. Yeah, wow, yeah, one a unit of breast. I get. Yeah, I don't know, it's weird. Seems like a weird way to write it, but I don't actually know how else you'd write it. Yeah.
Is he trying to be poetic?
I think he usually is. Yeah, in this case it comes across off putt it doesn't y y.
Yeah.
And it's one of those things, like, you know, we have to keep a couple again, of kind of complex things here, which is that this is on Jefferson's part, you know, obviously a system based on violence. On Ursula's part, this is also like her family, and that might be how she, at least from what little we know about her, that may very well be kind of how she felt about these kids that she's nursing. Yeah, and again kind of saying that I'm not saying that like Jefferson was a good slave master because that didn't exist, or that like, well, this was one of the good places to be in. But if you're nursing two generations of babies, you probably feel something for those kids, And that seems to be the case. And one of the reasons I like Henry Winseck's book Master of the Mountain is that he reflects on the complex dimensions of this relationship with a line that I think is really useful to parsing out what's going on here on a moral level. Quote asked to reminisce about Jefferson, several summoned up warm memories of their master. On the other side of the divide. However, Jefferson left no intimate account of the Monticello slaves. In other words, members of the Hymmings, Granger Evans families expressed affection for Thomas Jefferson. Jefferson relied utterly on these people for the health and safety of his family, and, based on the writing We left Behind, never gave them a second thought. Beyond that, there's no real evidence he thought of them as people. Yeah.
Function, They were able to see him as a person, which I think is interesting. Yeah, yeah, complete function. Transaction in the way that you would take care of your car, right right, the way Cato thought of slaves, Yes, exactly.
Yeah.
Man still hung up on like the mother part of this, I'm like, because again, like my organizing premise is that people are just the same. As long as the time changes, it's still the same. So like, is it vanity for you're a woman to be like I'm not gonna nurse my own child because I want to keep being a part of like the social life. Is this like is my baby like a is it like an accessory? You know what I'm saying. So like I caught them out to impress the other girls, but far be it for me to let my figure look weird now, Like, so I don't want my boobs to sag? Or is it like are you jealous? Is it a sign of status that someone else's nursing your child? Like, I just I want to know so much more about like what's the mindset on that, which, of course is like.
It's actually like super com it's not super uncommon even in today's day and age.
So no, that's why I was like, it's got to be I'm like, it's got to be a thing because clearly we still do it now.
Yeah, a lot of times it's health based.
Yeah, I think everything that you said, all of the different reasons are reasons why people in the past and probably the sumach sent today have had nurse maids, especially when you're talking about like we are talking about enslaved people being used as nurse maids here, but like in Czarist, you have people who are not slaves, they're not really fully free, and they're used as nursemates by like the wealthy families, the czar and stuff. And sometimes it is it like, well, I don't want to be doing that, you know, I don't want to take this onto my body. I don't have time but a lot. I think with Jefferson in particular, and with with Martha Jefferson, it's that she's just not well, she's not yeah, and they're they think that this will help make the children more because the kids are also not healthy.
Oh yeah, because they keep dying and they keep they keep things. Okay, yeah, obviously, like the health stuff is like I mean, every woman can't like to it like that. It is what it is, you know what I'm saying. So I totally understand that. Please guys, don't come at me like I know like you, I'm a dad. I know that, like everybody can't make milk, But it just seemed like this was a strange, like yeah, the grankiest cuz, like you know what I'm saying, Like you tell me nobody in this family, you know. So that's why I was like, what's going on?
You know? I wonder too if someone what's going on with like ursula is Obviously, when you're a slave, you are being constantly taken advantage of by all of the people who own you, right, But these babies, even though like they're their parents, obviously are taking advantage of you. Yeah, the babies, they're babies, right, Like they need milk, you know. And so to a degree, maybe I understand like why that would be that would make the whatever you have connection you have to them like stand out more because like it is this thing that needs you that is blameless. I don't know, I don't know, can't get it. You know. There's probably a million different ways people felt when they were in this situation, and we'll never know because they were denied the ability to like express themselves anyway. So that's a bummer. And the eighteen nineties, du mas Malone writes a six volume history of Thomas Jefferson. This is generally considered to be like the first definitive biography of Jefferson. It still gets cited quite a lot to the present day because obviously the eighteen nineties you're probably not talking to a lot of people who knew Thomas directly, but a lot of people who's like parents knew Thomas you can still talk to, right, So you do have a lot closer access to a lot of those sources. And obviously Dumas's book there's a lot of scholarly value to it. But Dumas Malone also very much wants to pretend slavery is not happening, right, or not that it's not happening, but that it wasn't Jefferson was not a bad example of a slave owner. Right. Part of how he does this is he really emphasizes all of the things Jefferson would say about how ugly slavery was, like this quote. No one could find in his words any ground whatsoever for the opinion that slavery in eighteenth century Virginia was or would ever become a beneficent institution. He regarded it as fundamentally cruel and was in no possible doubt that it undermined the morals and destroyed the industry of the masters while degrading the victims. So we see, even decades after the Civil War, you've got this respected historian parroting Jefferson's line. And we talked about this in the early episodes. Jefferson would always be like, Yeah, slavery's bad because of all of the bad things it does to white people. It makes the masters lazy, and it makes them like worse people.
Right.
I find it interesting that Malone is carrying that forward kind of and not really he doesn't do what a historian should, which is examine what wine Seck is going to do more than a century later, which is actually examined, well, how did Jefferson actually behave in his life? Did he act like a man who felt like it was unethical to yet these people he owned do all of the work for him, and he doesn't, you know. Yeah. Malone goes on to quote another line from Notes on the State of Virginia, which he describes as perhaps the most erudent summary of the evil of slavery, and can the liberties of a nation be thought secure when we have removed their only firm basis a conviction in the minds of the people that this liberties are of that these liberties are of the gift of God, that they are not to be violated but with his wrath. Indeed, I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just, that his justice cannot sleep forever. That considering numbers nature and natural means only a revolution of the wheel of fortune and exchange of the situation is among possible events. That it may become probable by a supernatural interference. The Almighty has no attribute which can take a side with us in such a contest.
That that's the quote, that's the one who that's the one? Yeah, yeah, at least that I've been refercent where I'm just like, bro, yeah, if if God is just, he's not on our side. Yeah, Like what like how you let that come about your mouth? Like, well, I mean it's true, you know what I mean.
It's true, and it's it is good writing, like just yes, structurally obviously as a piece of like craft, it's it's good, except for I think you can't you can't view it as craft in a vacuum. You have to look at in part what he actually meant by this, And I don't think it's often enough stated that what he's talking about here is his belief that a race war is inevitable if black and white people live too, true, right, Yeah, Like that is what he's expressing, and that is something.
He believes, and and they and a genuine fear at the time. Yeah, you know, it's like we can't like at this point, you can't let them because they're just gonna there's more of them, and they're going to destroy us because we've been treating them terribly. Yeah, obviously this is such a sensitive topic, especially with like being like all eyes on Rafa, you know, and just a sentiment that I would venture to say is might actually be a motivating factor for how you know, obviously I'm not at the table, but how like some of the people in the government of Israel might be thinking too in that, Like, you know, every we've covered it so many times, a hood put politics, like every piece of research, every piece of research is like, when you have state sanctioned violence like this, you inevitably radicalize and create insurgencies. What you're doing will do this. And and if you are trying to eradicate every possible threat to your safety, it's genocide. That's your only option. You gotta kill everybody, you know, what I'm saying because someone's you can't you know what I mean. So it's like, so I wonder if they're like, well, shit, we can't stop now, like we went this far. Like if they do, they're gonna wipe us out because we're wrong, you know. So I just I wonder if that thinking is like a part of it, a part of their calculation right now, Well, I mean, what are we gonna do?
You know, I certainly, I'm sure, I certainly don't think when we're talking about like net and Yahoo right that I don't know that I think he's capable of thinking that he's wrong on a moral level. And also, you know, a lot of this comes down to like beliefs about religion and God, which totally further kind of derange some of that. Yeah, Jefferson expresses accurately why slavery is evil and expresses a fear that that evil will rebound upon white people in America. Yeah, and then he doesn't do anything to even make a better situation for the people he owns, right, And that is contrary to how he is depicted. Even in Ellis's book American Sphinx, they had this long passage where he's like there was no such thing as good slavery, Like it was bad and it was hypocritical of Jefferson, But among people who owned people in the Americas, he treated the people he owned better than most. And the case that win Seck makes is that like he really didn't. And this is going to bring me prop to a thing that I did not know about, which is Thomas Jefferson, slavery and smallpox. Yes, yes, okay, so you're are you yeah yeah yeah, yeah, yeah yeah, give it to. At the time of the Revolutionary War, there existed a fairly effective inoculation against smallpox. Now by modern standards, it was brutal and dangerous, like by the by the standards of a modern vaccine. This is basically cutting someone's skin and sticking like the scab from like what's called like either from cowpox or another like smallpox or whatever, like under their skin, and it kind of where it works basically the way that a vaccine works. Obviously it is one or two percent of people die that you need.
Yeah, it's an analog. It's an analog vaccine, you know.
Yeah, yeah, it's it's an anally. That's a good, A good way to look at it. And it's it's pretty unpleasant to receive, but it's also a one or so percent chance of dying from this is wildly better than your odds of just raw dogging smallpox. Right, Like, smallpox is one of the worst things that human being never in count vicious. So because if you are a slave owner, the human beings you own are probably, if not most, then at least a very significant chunk of your wealth, a lot of slave owners chose to vaccinate the people that they own right against smallpox, or inoculate, I think is the more accurate term to use, and not because like, you know, we're great people, but because like, this is a sensible way to protect assets.
You know.
Yes, one of the slave owners who chose to vaccinate the people he owned was George Washington. Now I don't say that to like be like, look at all wonderful George Washington hanging out vaccines. I say that to contrast Thomas Jefferson, who refused to take the same preventative action for the people that he owned, even though he could have, and he was not. This is not because you, I think, could be not for like being a slaver, but you could be forgiven for not like vaccinating your kids in this era if you didn't have access to information about how much better it really was, and it's information is harder to come by than good information. On Thomas Jefferson as president is at one of me. I think the first president who's like a vocal advocate for smallpox inoculations, right, he is like really really insistent upon this. He himself was inoculated at age twenty three, so he knew that this worked, which suggests that he did not fail to vaccinate his slaves out of ignorance. We don't know why he didn't either. I think it comes down to either just like laziness, like he just didn't get around to it, or he was too cheap to do it right, And I don't really know what which it was. Right, there's a darker possibility, which is that he may have done it because he thought it would make the people he owned less likely to flee, right, because if they run away, they're more likely to encounter smallpox. And maybe if they know that they don't have any sort of defense against it, it'll make them And that's relevant because of what happens during the Revolutionary War. So as is always the case, whenever anyone went anywhere back then, in large numbers. British soldiers who like came to North America to fight in the Revolutionary War brought smallpox with them and spread it like wildfire everywhere they went. There is evidence that they had done so purposefully in the French and Indian Wars as part of like is essentially part of smallpox blankets, right, Yeah, significant evidence there. So during the Revolutionary War, Virginia's royal governor promised freedom to slaves who would leave their masters and fight for the king, and the British army provided shelter to run away families of slaves. Jefferson would later claim that thirty thousand slaves tried to take the British up on this offer, and twenty seven thousand of them died of smallpox. Now that's a hideous number. Prop Do you want to guess where Thomas Jefferson came up with that number?
Where you come up with the number.
He made it up. He just made it out.
I was like, there's no as he was as you were talking, I was like, how would you get that data?
Like just lie?
I was like a census where they taken Like, there's no census on this. Bro. Yeah, I was totally thinking. I was like, unless I'm wrong, that's funny.
No.
It was also I also wonder if there's this if if you know, the whole eugenics, the eugenics of it all plays plays a role in just believing Africans are stronger, and just you know what I'm saying, it's like, well it doesn't affect them.
The way, maybe they won't. Yeah, yeah, I think that that. That's probably a number of things that feed into it. But this is like like when I was a kid and Wikipedia was new, I would just edit Wikipedia articles to win arguments with my friends, and I think that's kind of what Thomas Jefferson is.
Bro.
No, listen, I'm looking at it. It was like thirty thousand.
Yeah, like word. Trying to figure out where this number came from, historian Cassandra Pybus went through the original sources and found that Jefferson had written that thirty of his own enslaved workers fled during the revolution and twenty seven of them died of smallpox. Right, Thus, he just did ten thousand, That's literally what he did. Yeah, as far as he can tell, he was like, yeah, probably about one hundred times that many people or whatever.
Why not.
Very I mean, it's just such a like slap dash. He gets such a reputation as being like the most the greatest political genius in American history, and like he certainly wasn't that he had his areas of intelligence, but like that's just such lazy work.
Nah, bro, you're a regular dude, like all of us do that like nine years last night, you know you didn't.
Yeah. Yeah. So the actual evidence based estimate is that about five thousand enslaved people in Virginia and Maryland fled to the British lines, and a huge number of these people did die of smallpox, but the blame for that should go to owners like Jefferson, who had neglected to inoculate them. The British army. This is weird because this episode they're kind of some of the good guys. Normally I would not call them a particularly ethical force, but they attempted to mitigate this right and save these enslaved people. They inoculated runaway slaves as soon as they arrived in camp, but the disease was just spreading too quickly. They did not have enough doctors to actually do this right. Yeah, like they did try from what I From what I've read, it seems like they tried pretty hard to avoid to save as many people as possible. It was just kind of beyond their capability, right, which is fair given like the realities of above smallpox and the realities of smallpox. Sure. In his farm book, Jefferson holdly recorded the losses, writing quote, joined the enemy and died next to the names of two girls, Flora and Quomina, who were eight and six years old. God again, he writes that as if like it's like a free adult who has made the decision to become a traitor. Right, this is talking about even joined the enemy.
Hoping none of us look at the age.
Yeah, these kids together are fourteen years old. Like, come on, man, I'm gonna lay out the story of these two girls, but I want you to keep that very cold description about the deaths of two children in mind and compare that to this passage from Dumas Malone's biography Jefferson and his Time, written in eighteen ninety two. Quote, At Monticello, domestic servants were abundant, and a number of the favorites came into his possession through her ursula. The fat woman who nursed Patsy and later children, and her husband, King George had been acquired for Missus Jefferson. Well. The noted Hemming's family, who were mostly bright Mulattoes, came through the Wales estate. Jefferson was kind to his servants to the point of indulgence, and within the framework of an institution he disliked. He saw that they were well provided for. Seems like well provided for would include an inoculation from small parties.
Yeah, I was like a little bellies is fool, that's what you're saying.
Yeah, And he closes with the lion. His people were devoted to him and they made his home life comfortable and jolly. I don't know, man, the six and eight year old but died didn't seem jolly. Yeah. Yeah.
Demoted to you, bro like this words, doing a lot of work, buddy, Yeah, become a devoted Okay.
Flora and Quomina fled with their ten year old brother Jimmy and their mother sal. Earlier, we talked about Jefferson's household slaves like Ursula and George, who expressed affection and acted with loyalty towards Jefferson. These were members of the families that Jefferson kept close. Some of them were literally his cousins and brothers and sisters in law, but Sally and her family lived further down the mountain doing menial work. Jefferson records Sal as a quote laborer in the ground. Now to speak about the British Empire again, you know, prop and we've talked about this on the show. When the British Empire would take a place right, like India, right, they would find a group of people to be like the term used is like warrior people right there. This is the tribe or the community or whatever that we recruit soldiers from to help us police the and they get extra privileges. And part of obviously the most obvious way that this helps a colonizing entity is that it gives you soldiers, right. But the other way it helps is that it creates division within the community you're ruling, and people will be angry at the warrior race, right, you know, as opposed to being as angry it focused on you. Jefferson does that at Monticello right between He deliberately kind of sets up conflict between these laborers in the ground and the people who are working in the house. So the people who are allowed to like learn a trade and become something like a blacksmith, right where you're able to make some money for yourself and you have a degree of independence. That conflict is a part of what he is kind of he's very deliberately stoking because it makes it easier for him to control people, right.
And persist to this day. Yeah, yeah, yeah among the black community for sure. Yeah, we've gotten a lot wiser, but it definitely persists to this day.
And it you know, there was possibly violence as a result of this. One of the kind of I don't want to get too much into it because it just the the actual evidence on this is unclear, but Ursula and a number of the people he owned who were like close to the Jefferson family, who like in the house, died all at the same time. This is a lot later in life, is after I think after his presidency. Yeah, and there were there were kind of suspicion at the time that they might have been poisoned, and it's possible that it was like kind of as a result of a conflict between the different sort of communities of people at Monticello. Yeah. I don't think we'll ever really know. But that sort of thing happens elsewhere, right, Like we have like it's not impossible that like he kind of incited something that led to a lot of people, including like the woman who nursed his children getting murdered. Yeah, you know, unclear as to what actually went down. Some of this is like it's just so long ago and so little of this was documented. We'll never know. And they didn't have the ability to like do blood tests and stuff for poison, you know, yeah, it being the seventeen hundreds or eighteen hundreds, yeah, and all that stuff. So Flora and Quomina died of smallpox in the British Army camp. Jimmy and sal returned to Monticello, I think, frightened by how much smallpox there was in the British camp, and then they died at Monticello. Shortly thereafter. Another family of laborers in the ground, Hannibal and his wife Pat fled with their six small children, all of whom of smallpox. And I again, I'm not used to writing about the British Army as like good guys here. Yeah, but that is kind of what we're building to. But you know, who are good guys?
No, I don't, please tell me who is.
The products services. Oh we'll be back in a minute, folks. Okay, we're back. So I want to talk about the British Army here prop because I didn't know this history. It kind of makes me surprised at the humanity shown by the literal British Army that the Americans do not show here.
Yeah, the place that colonized eighty percent of the world, right there to show some humanity Okay.
Yeah, a surprising amount here, because when the Revolutionary War ended, the victorious Americans wanted the slaves that had fled and were currently living with the British army back, right. That was a demand that was made British diplomats. Obviously, British diplomats didn't give a shit about these people, so they're like, yeah, sure, you can have them back. That seems like an easy thing we can give you as we sure, Yeah, who cares.
If we want to be different? Yeah, right when I get it.
Yeah, But the British generals, the field commanders were like, no, no, no, we promised these people freedom as a matter of our personal honor. You don't get to give them back. Wow, we made them a promise, and I think this is the largest act of emancipation prior to the Civil War because these British commanders ignore their diplomats and take eight to ten thousand black Americans away by boat and they are freed.
Wild.
You have to be pretty evil for the British Army and the seventeen hundreds to be the good guys. Yeah, anyway, I don't know, kudos to those British commanders.
Oh yeah, that's even an interesting thing to where they're like they're honor code. They're like, dude, we gave our word. Yeah, like we made a promise. Yeah, we made a promise. And it's like whether however they feel about probably, you know, the humanity of it all and seeing like these people is like one thing, but then it's like the other thing of like, well we're no, we're like, we're members of the Royal Army. We have a certain amount of dignity and honor in our word means something, so like we gave them our word and also fuck y'all.
Yeah, so fuck y'all. That probably wasn't none of it.
Yeah yeah, yeah, like man, fuck you like no, you know, yeah.
Yeah, yeah. In seventeen eighty two, Martha Jefferson died. We don't know what killed her. It seems to be one of those deals where you know she's not healthy, she has a lot of difficult pregnancies. Her body just kind of gives out on her thing man. Yeah, Yeah, it seems like she had kind of a rough life. Jefferson again, I think he destroys the correspondence that he and Martha had had earlier in their relationship. There's a you get the feeling he wanted to obscure a lot of this as much as possible of Martha's personality and who she was from the eyes of history. I don't know why. I guess it's possible and maybe even probably likely that it was just he was devastated by this and he couldn't bear having them around. It may just literally be a human moment for him where he just like couldn't he couldn't take having those those letters exist. I don't know his friends at the time, do right that he was unusually devastated by which I mean people like Edmund Randolph wrote stuff like this in a letter to James Manison. I never thought him to rank domestic happiness in the first class of the chief. Good, But I scarcely supposed that his grief would be so violent as to justify the circulating report of his swooning away whenever he sees his children. So that's like the claim that he makes is that, like Jefferson's like can't even be around his kids without passing out. He's so so stricken by grief. So that may that may honestly explain enough of like why he Obvio destroyed their letters and stuff. He just he may have just been really shabow. Yeah, yeah, he's still a person, right, It's sad. In seventeen eighty five, our boy TJ was sent to France to act as basically ambassador. They use a different term back then than ambassador, but he was an ambassador, right, his actually attache. Yeah, something like that.
It's a fun word.
Yeah, I like it. I like the word act.
I want.
I hope to be an attache at some point someday. Yeah, I'll do it in France, you know, fuck it, I think I could represent this country. His actual day job was negotiating various treaties, but he spent most of his time bullshitting with French intellectuals and radicals and watching the precursors to the French Revolution wind their way into being right. So he is. He is a famous and highly sought after dinner guest, and like the father of liberty is how a lot of people see him when I talk to him, Except he's also he owns a bunch of people, right, Like the same year he moves to France to do the job, he sells thirty one slaves to appease his creditors, right to deal with the interest on the debts that he has. Oh wow, Yeah, the end of the war had come with a resumption of interest payments and the expectation that indebted planters like Thomas Jefferson would make good on their obligations because most of them, including Thomas and Thomas, most of these Virginia planters who owe money owe it to British people, right to like banks and other creditors over there. He is, you know, infuriated by the fact that as part of negotiating it into the war, his debts have come due again, because he's come to understand by the time he's in Paris that a mixture of his own debts and his father in law's debts and the brutal realities of the interest rates both had agreed to meant that he couldn't really escape the situation he was in right, like he was never going to be It's like, you know, a lot of people have student loan situations right like this, right where it doesn't matter. I will never be.
Able to chain this.
Yeah. Yeah, this is like one of the most important things for understanding him as a thinker, because he is number one, He's he's hugely against the idea of inherited debt. This is like a major part of like what he's going to advocate for in politics. And just this, the mix of shame and desperation is like a major factor in shaping the man that he is because he always has this this kind of like it's like a fucking wolf, like always chasing him right gnawing at his back. And this is part of what's going to shape his attitude towards slavery and Jefferson's feelings here come from a series of complex things. He is a believer that the American struggle for independence, our revolution was the start of an inevitable wave of liberty that was destined to sweep the globe. If you read about how the guys like you know, Marks in eighteen forty eight and the people after him talk about the inevitable socialist world revolution that's coming. Thomas talks a lot like that. You know, he's not a socialist, but he's talking about like liberty as he conceives it, and he sees that, like well, it's going to come, probably in France next, but it's destined to sweep the world and the only things standing in the way of liberty are the British, who are an inherently counter revolutionary force. And he has this belief that, like, well, because the British are inherently opposed to human freedom, they're doomed. The empire is inevitably on its way to collapse. It's past its height, it's falling apart. Now, that was not accurate, right at all. No, the British Empire doesn't reach its height for more than a century after this point, right, Like it does quite well for a while. Yeah, And it's also like you, no one would call the British Empire a force for human liberty, but they did ban slavery decades before the United.
States, much earlier, day, earlier, much earlier, and I would call that a meaningful ass if you're thinking about like liberty is a global cause, that's a mean thing.
It's more meaning. Jefferson does after this point.
Yeah, that's pretty big, man, like that that's that's a that's a that's that's a. Yeah, that's a that's in the W line. Man, I gotta tell you, bro, that's in the W line. Yeah.
You can and should point out that the British still made use of situations that were not all that different from slavery, and even still did profit from slavery in some ways and the periphery of the empire. But like they still this is still a major step that they take well before the US does.
Yeah, they were doing prison reform earlier too. Yeah, looking at like how to make our prison a little better? Like at least can we them at least it.
Yeah, Jefferson is kind of racist against the British, so he can only see them as like this inherent counter revolutionary force with realities like well, actually the things that pe like British people within the British Empire are major parts of this swing towards greater human liberty and respect for like the autonomy of man. They play it, their role, they also play their role in trying to quash it. You know, it's accomplishing.
Everybody else, Yeah, just like everybody else. I wonder, like, I think it's an interesting moment in time too that like, actually I never thought about it to you said it that like, by luck of the draw, you get to be born in an era where there are sweeping international changes or revolutions that are happening, like when you if you just happen to be in one of those moments like an industrial revolution, like a you know, or like you said, like this idea of like, you know this for for us, it would be like at least for a black person, it would be like being around in the sixties and being like, this is international the world is changing, you know type moment. And I never thought about this time after the revolution and this concept of being like yo, like it's democracy thing y'all, like trying to tell you, homie, like this this whole this is different, fam like you know, we don't King's homeboy, like it was about to go crazy right now, like what it you know again, barring what my personal experience would have been at that time that moment in history, man, I never thought of it as like, wow, it's kind of like a moment, you know.
Yeah, yeah, a lot of people do. And there's like good reason too, right, I mean, like the Haitian Revolution also totally all that was happening, not that right, like yeah, yeah, yeah, and we know how that ends. But at the time it could have it would have looked to someone who was like less not racist, you know, in the way Jefferson was, you might have been like, look, really it is like this wave is it's coming more seriously, this is just the start of it, you know, exactly, at least for a while. So you can see how someone might have believed that as a representative of the new nation of the United States and a slave owner, Jefferson found himself regularly needing to defend his people and himself while he was in France to all these kind of like philosophers of liberty. These guys, a lot of whom are going to become like politicians who are going to have elected leaders in the Republic that's coming. A lot of these guys see him as an advocate of the cause of liberty, and they're confused because they're like, yeah, we love what everything you say, and it's amazing that you guys won your war. How do you own people? How can you be this guy and own people? My boy? But yeah, like.
Bars everything you say, yeah, bars, yeah, like yeah, help me, yeah, help me figure this out.
And for a time, Jefferson is kind of able to He kind of is able to bamboozle a lot of these people by pure eloquence. He had first written out an abolition plan, and that pamphlet his friends had published, right, the kind of first thing that starts his political career, proposing first that the slave trade be ended, and then that the enfranchisement of the enslaved people already here carried out gradually. Right, And part of this does happen. We do ban the Atlantic slave trade, right.
Yeah, that's first. He can bring no new ones.
Yeah yeah, but we never there's never like that gradual. There's never a graduate emancipation of the enslaved people here, right, because he's kind of proposing basically, we like, I don't know, draw lots or whatever and over you know, twenty years or whatever, everyone gets freed. You know, that's kind of the idea. You're let believe reading this.
Yeah, you ramp down. It's like it's like the switch to electric cars where it's like, yeah, you can't just like you know, put every mechanic out of business. Today it's like, yeah, we gotta you gotta like slow it down, and you know, yeah, yeah is what he's saying.
Yeah, that's what he's saying. And obviously, like that's bad, right, the idea that like you would you would feel the need to not, you know, fuck over the slavers. But it would have been if we'd done that, it would have been better than what we did, which was nothing until we had a war, right until we fought. Yes. In Notes on the State of Virginia, as part of this European charm offensive, Jefferson had laid out a more detail plan for emancipation. So he writes this first plan out kind of before he gets into Congress, and then during the Revolutionary War, as he's trying to really make sure that like these these French thinkers that he admires so much and who are backing our war effort, stay on his side, he lays out a different emancipation plan, and it's a much colder one than the last one. Under this plan, enslaved adults would stay that way forever, their children would not and in fact, those children would be taken away from their parents and put into some sort of public training program that amounted to a crash course in being a free person, and then, at age twenty one or eighteen for women, they would be given guns, tools, a small amount of livestock, and be sent somewhere else, right, And the idea is, we can't have them living among us killers, but they can have a colony, you know, and that'll.
Give you a gun and leave you here crazy. Yeah, Like okay, say, look, man, that's just not smart.
Yeah, it's kind of I think like this thinking is sort of what leads to liberia. Like Jefferson is kind of the I don't know if he's the very first, but he's one of the first, certainly the first guy. The level of prominence he's at, who's kind of laying out that sort of a yeah right yeah, and it's god the level of evil in like, well, of course, we can't free people who are already slaves, but we will take their children away from them and have an orphan colony.
Bro. Like, like, just say it again out loud, bro, Like, just say it out loud to yourself again, Like word, that's yeah for real?
Fam like, Yeah, I want you to sit alone at the mirror and just look into your own eyes as you say, I want to abduct the children of slaves to make an allied colony.
Yeah. Yeah, and that's and that's going to make them be appreciative what you did for them, that's yeah. And he's like, oh, absolutely, now we're sending him back to Africa.
No, they're gonna be fissed. Yeah, his attitude was more like Kansas. I don't think he's saying Africa. Yeah. I think he wanted you because he's colonizer right right, And that's you know, in these Jefferson episodes, that is very much part of like the bad things that he did, his attitudes towards colonization and the Native Americans. This is there's so much to say just about slavery. I didn't really feel like I could, like I kind of wanted to focus these episodes on that. I'm not leaving that out because it's not important. It's just no, there's a lot to say about Jefferson, you know.
Yeah, he's he's a multi dimensional character that, like you know, obviously when you at least from from my perspective, once you add it all together. I'm like you, I mean, you're still a ship bag.
Yeah, you know what I'm.
Saying, Like, at the end of the day, you are. But it's but it's a complex shit bag, you know that that Like yeah, and.
He had he was in power for or he was in you know, a political an active political figure for more than forty years. So there's just you.
Can't to say, yeah, you can't shake your fist at that, Like that's that's some real Where did I get that phrase shake your fist that?
Yeah, you can't prize myself, you can't do all the shaking of your fist that's necessary in four episodes right where we're really just there's even stuff, there's a lot plenty about Jefferson and slavery that we're leaving out. I just didn't know how to fit at all. Besides like his fourty five keys. Yeah, So Jefferson when he's talking about you know, he has a lot of these like salon meetings, these like long dinners with these different French intellectuals, and his chief argument as to why it's just not possible to do a general emancipation yet is that if they did one, a race war would inevitably follow and his credit and one letter to a friend, he placed the blame on deep rooted prejudices by white people, which is, you know, sounds sympathetic, but then he also blames ten thousand recollections by the Blacks of the injuries they have sustained. And then beyond that he adds the real distinctions which nature has made, which is race science. Right now, he was talking about, yeah.
You're two for three, bro, Yeah, yeah.
Yeah, those first two points, well those are things. Yeah, like people are going to be very angry about what's been done to them, and you do have to account for that somehow. And then he gets then he gets into the race science. And this all worked on a lot of his admirers though, right, like a surprising number of people kind of bought that, like, well, he doesn't really like this, but this is a really thorny problem, and like maybe he's right, you know, we have to avoid a race war. Like you've got these kind of intellectuals who know slavery is wrong, and they also don't they haven't been in a lot of cases to the United States. They don't have great context for like how brutal the system really is, or how much Jefferson is full of shit?
Right, Yeah, It's like you got your little brother in a headlock, and you're like, if I let you go, do you promise not to punch me? Swear swear swear on mo sweared on our mother that you will not punch me. I can't let you go unless you swear. Are you gonna punch It's like, man, yeah, what are we talking about here?
Yeah? That is Jefferson like gets himself trapped very much in that that mode of thinking, dude, but he's good enough about talking about it in a way that it makes it seem less fucked up than it actually is. That said, by the time Jefferson's been in Paris a few years, some of these admirers of his have started to notice that it shure didn't seem like any kind of gradual emancipation program was in place, right. They were like, Okay, we agreed with you, maybe this has to be done gradually, but like, it doesn't actually seem like you guys are doing anything over there. Yeah, what's up with that?
Yeah? I hate that. I hate the like the what I was going to guy? Yeah, that's the guy. I got a lot of plans like, well, my plan is to do this, but we got to make sure this, and then I forgot about that, and then probably tomorrow we'll go get it. Oh you was the I was going to guy, You're not finna do it.
I'm definitely gonna write this screenplay one day. It seems like you talk about it a lot, but you're not doing anything.
A man maybe should write, maybe you should start.
Yeah. Yeah, Jefferson is writing, but he is not doing any emancipating. And one of the people who notices that is French editor and future revolutionary politician Jean Nicholas de mune who.
You should talk about after this ad break.
Oh yeah, shoot, yes, speaking of John Nicholas d'munet, these ads would he'd love, would you? Yeah? Yeah? Yeah. D Mooney yourself towards spending money, you can that one. Yeah, we figured it out basically. Ah, we're back. So his friend Demuinae is like, hey, it doesn't look like you're doing any of the stuff you'd said you were going to do, and Jefferson responds He sends a letter back writing that emancipation has only been delayed because quote persons of virtue and firmness thought the timing wasn't right. Quote. They saw that the moment of doing it with success was not yet arrived, and that an unsuccessful effort, as too often happens, would only rivets still closer the chains of bondage and retard the moment of deliberty to the suppressed description of men. No, these really smart guys. You don't know them, but they're like, they're super smart.
They actually funny.
If we like fuck this up, it'll be even worse for the people we own. So we really just got to kind of wait, you know, we gotta do it right. We want to do it right.
Yeah, We're gonna do it. We want to do it right.
Yeah.
I still believe there needs to be in all of our halls of justice and dialogue and stuff like that, the command FAM button. Yeah, like just to come on, fam, Like there needs to be that needs to be a button where it's like you can have these high and lofty, you know, precedent setting you know, swooping, uh, you know, air tight logical discussions that are probably again incredibly articulate and air type. But I'm gonna hit the command fan button. Come on fan, yeah, bright, yeah, and everybody in the room knows what that means. You know what that means. Come on, f Yeah, you tell me smarter people.
Come on, fam, have you to have the come on fan button and get the fuck out Claus in all situations?
Yes, and to get the fuck out Claus get the Yeah. Those are the two things we are.
Adding pressing the pressing the common fam button and mashes the mountain Henry Winsick Rights. Jefferson admitted mentioning that the Virginia legislature had liberalized the slave laws so as to enable individual owners to free people at will. For Demione would have then asked why persons of virtue and firmness had not yet freed their slaves, particularly why Jefferson had not freed his. Jefferson also did not mention that in revising the slave code, he had suggested a law compelling a white woman who bore a mixed race child to leave Virginia or be placed out of the protection of the laws.
Damn.
So yeah, yeah, that's pretty that's pretty bad. Yeah.
So they already do it, jo like y'all, Yeah, y'all did, we don't already y'all can do it, but ain't nobody doing it? Mister virtue of people.
Yeah, yeah, and it's what we're going to talk more about his attitudes towards you know, what was then called missagenation, because they're really incoherent, right, like they he is not at all consistent about this, but that is a particularly hideous moment, right.
Like yeah, the missigenation. Yeah, the misigenation stuff is the stuff that like swoops around like black community so much, specifically about Thomas Jefferson. Why we're like, you're shitbag, bro, Like.
Yeah, yeah, he wanted to because what he's saying there is like if a white woman has a mixed race child, they're not protected by the law, so like members of their family can murder them and not get in trouble, right, Like that is what he's suggesting, Like it's it really is ugly. So the ideological incoherence behind between some of the words and most of the actions of this prophet of liberty are really well described in Ellis's book American Sphinx, which is kind of written to explain this part of Jefferson that like, wow, it really seems like he says a bunch of shit that he does not do right or that. Yeah. Yeah, And in that book, LS lays out another example of how Jefferson jinked away from confronting this issue in his correspondence with his French friends. You know that nobody wishes more ardently to see an abolition not only of the trade, but of the condition of slavery, he wrote to a French friend in seventeen eighty eight. But I am here as a public servant, and those whom I serve have not yet been able to give their voice against this practice. It is decent for me to avoid too public a demonstration. If my wishes to see it abolished without serving the cause here, it might render me less able to serve it beyond the water, he began to develop the argument. It became the centerpiece of his public position on slavery throughout his mature years and until the end of his life, that the problem should be passed along to the next generation of an American statesman, and he really becomes the father of our country in that moment, Like, well, really, what I got to do is just push this on a generation.
Sounds like it sounds like it sounds like a tomorrow problem. Yeah, got it.
Wow.
When I was a kid at our church, one of our pastors Pastor Renee, he's just alg black woman. She used to say, a lot of taki taki, not a lot of dewey dewey. You know, you guys got a lot of It's a lot of talkie talkie, you know, Like I need to see a little more dewey dewey, you know. So like every time I'd hear like this, that's what I think of, Like, all right, pastor a right, Pastor Renette, You're right, I need we need some more dewey dewey. Yeah.
So the question I'm left with here is was he just a psychopath?
Right?
Like? Is he just one of the like a lot of American politicians or politicians in general, who's calculating whatever will he can say to further his interests, but he just does not care about the reality of like what he's doing. Or is it like you know, people use that term for Steve Jobs, the reality distortion field, which he eventually used on himself when he used to treat his cancer. Is it that is he like, is he really convinced himself that this is a well, I can't be you know, most of the other people in American politics, all these other politicians that I need to do these other great things that I want to do. They can't be anti slavery because of the realities of the you know, the state that they're in, you know, the terrible time that we're in. And I don't want to make them. I don't want to embarrass them because then I won't be able to do the other important things that I need to do. Right, has he convinced himself of that? Is it just the lie that he knows will work? And I don't know. I contend that part of what's going on here is what I like to call speech and debate syndrome. Right, This is a tendency I've noticed in public figures who came out of competitive speech and debate, guys like Ben Shapiro, and it convinced themselves. Competitive debate is a game with rules that you can, you know, take advantage of based on what you can convince a judge is true with wordplay and it's not or sorry. They convince themselves that, like, because that's what debate is. Yeah, they guys like Ben Shapiro convince themselves it's actually a search for truth. Right that, Like, being able to win a debate means that you're right even if you're just like lying and saying whatever dumb shit comes into your head to try and make an argument in that moment. Yeah, and that means my arguments better. Yeah, exactly, It's like, no, it means that, like, this is a game that you score points in and you have found a way to maximize your point And you can maximize your points by just making shit up or exaggerating, lying about what's in sources. Like I've done all of those things to win speech debate competitions.
Yeah, totally.
Yeah, constructing an argument that sounds good is what matters. And if what your writing sounds good enough, people won't pay attention to like the incoherencies inside it. Like as long as you can get you can razzle, dazzle your opponent away from not noticing them, then you can win, even if there are huge inconsistencies and the thing that you're arguing. And I wonder if Jefferson is kind of doing that to himself right in order to kind of avoid getting judged by these people that he admires and that he wants to think well of him, He's coming up with all these kind of like bullshit ways to obfuscate the reality, which is that he just doesn't really want to free his slaves, right, yeah, like he likes stoning people.
And it just but it feels icky. It's almost like, well, I don't want to sound like them fools, like yeah, at least at least I'm like acknowledging and turning myself into a pretzel rather than just sounding like this guy like your you sound like a knuckle dragging you know what I'm saying, Like I'm a I'm a distinguished civilized man like and I wonder if there's that just the pride of like even though I agree with y'all, yeah, I can't accept that I agree.
With y'all yeah yeah, because I know this is evil and I don't want to be judged by people who are better now or folks in the future. So I have to find a way to thread the needle while still getting the thing I want. Yes, So Jefferson writes this banger kind of as an example of this sort of sophistry. He writes this in a letter to Demine about the injustice of slavery. When the measure of their tears shall be full when they're grown, she'll have involved heaven itself in darkness. Doubtless a God of justice will awaken to their the stress, and by diffusing light and liberality among their oppressors, were at length by his exterminating thunder manifest his attention to the things of this world and that they are not left to the guidance of a blind fatality. Like eventually, God's going to realize how fucked up this is. You'll take care of it.
Right, It's going to end because this is wrong. So if I don't do it, I know it's going to okay, Right, God man twisted yourself in.
Yeah.
In Americans, unseasoned season Yeah no, salt no salt no, no.
He would he Yeah. In American Sphinx, Ellis excla season, Yeah, boiled chickens. Just just boil your boil your the dough in a hot dog water. Yeah, yes, call it the Jefferson Yes so in Americans, Ellis explains a lot of the kind of the hypocrisy here by saying that Jefferson's chief goal in any face to face interaction was to avoid awkwardness and confrontation. Right quote. Jefferson always regarded candor and courtesy as incompatible, and when forced to choose, he invariably picked courtesy, thereby avoiding unpleasant confrontations. Letter writing was a perfect instrument for this diplomatic skill, in part because of Jefferson's mastery of the written word, and in part because different audiences could be independently targeted. Yeah, and so he's it's also like, well, part of what he's doing here isn't even necessarily that he wants to be thought of. Well, he just doesn't like to argue with people, and so he's going to say whatever he thinks will get them to stop giving him shit without confronting them.
Right, that's crazy modern.
Yeah, yeah, he does, right, he is. He is the first twenty first century man.
Yeah, yeah, he's crazy.
He's an asshole out of time. So in this passage, Ellis is kind of talking about the fact that while he's living it up in Paris, Jefferson publishes all of these letters back in the United States, like warning young Americans not to go to Paris because it's like decadent and depraved and it'll it'll ruin your morals as a person. Right, He's like living it up and being like, oh, yeah, you don't want to go to Paris, guys, you know, just just just stay in the field in Virginia.
It's fine, and I enjoy his French women.
Yeah, he's trying not to get caught up.
Get caught bro, you know what I'm saying, trying to share.
Either he'sent xoxo to our life.
Yeah, well, I think it's also you know, he's a as a fairly modern, open minded guy. He's perfectly capable of enjoying you know, the scene in Paris totally, but he knows that that's not popular with like American conservatives, so he has to write letters home about like, oh, yeah, there's such decadent even like really gross people. We don't need to be going over to.
You, like, yeah, really be telling you what we're doing out here. You know what I'm saying, he thought about for it.
He's every politician ever.
No guys politician ever. You got to avoid the drugs over there. Like I was sniff testing a bunch of their cocaine the other day to make sure it's safe for other people, and I'm just not sure. I'm gonna need to check on more, right, you know, That's really the only thing for me to do.
Yeah, I wanted to go into these brothels to make sure these women are being well taken care of. Yeah, that they're healthy. And I just went in for that. I just wanted to test.
Yeah, And after nine or ten hours, I realized there was no fire. Exit. Come on, come on, guys.
Yeah.
In one dinner with a bunch of abolitionists in France, he was asked yet again, why hasn't there been any move for general emancipation and you're supposedly liberty loving country. Jefferson just bullshitted, saying that some slave owners had tried to free their slaves out of the goodness of their hearts, and they'd even given them land and like tools, and it had failed because these poor black people weren't ready for the realities of freedom, and they were so scared they asked to be taken back as slaves. Now, hmmm, that's obviously a lie. Like he's literally just like, I'm just gonna lie so that these people I can win this argument, right, that's what he's doing. One of the guys he's at dinner with as an American who was working as a spy for the British. He may have also been a double agent working for the Americans. It's kind of unclear but this guy writes Jefferson a letter after this dinner, and it's basically like citation, please, like you brought this story up? Where can I read more about this?
That's bullshit?
Yeah, yeah, this seems interesting. Is there any evidence that it happened? And Jefferson replied, oh yeah, dude, you know it was some Quakers who did it, who like freed those guys and then had to take him back. And I don't actually know their names. Uh, but he he offers up, let me get back to you. He does offer up more details in this letter, some of which contradict what he'd said during the dinner quote. I remember that the landlord was obliged to plant their crops for them, to direct all their operations during every season and according to the weather. But what is more afflicting, he was obliged to watch them daily and almost constantly, to make them work, and even to whip them. These slaves chose to steal from their neighbors rather than work. They became public nuisances and in most cases were reduced to slavery. Again, and that's very different. I also don't think that's true. But like saying, well, they committed crimes and were re enslaved. Is different from them saying begging taken back, right.
They wanted to come back. RH few things in that story. One is I'm obviously you can't say this of everyone, but Quakers famously abolitionists, famously anti slavery.
Yes, so the.
Idea so like you're starting a story with the people that already disagree with the institution in the first place and helped out in the underground railroad data ones. Okay, got it. So that's first number one. And then even if you sit in even if that's true, you're sitting across the table and you're like, you set them free in a country where everybody else where they're gonna go tools. Of course they're terrified. What the fuck are you talking about? The first other free white person they see is gonna kill them or try to enslave them. Yeah, of course that's what happened. What do you mean they couldn't handle it?
Like yeah, yeah, well, and that's so here's I wanted to like, there's actually a real story behind us, and it is completely different from the story that Jefferson tells, which is that Okay, a bunch of around this time, like in the late seventeen hundreds, a bunch of Quakers had freed their slaves. Because there's kind of this almost it's almost like a meme that overtakes Quaker culture, which is this very specific argument that the conclusion of it is that God has made everybody the same. Right, It's like a scriptural argument, but the conclusion people start making and they are like people traveling different Quaker communities like arguing this is God made everybody the same, which means there are no natural differences between the races. Everybody's just people. We shouldn't own people, right, Yeah, Now, manu mission. When this starts happening, manumission is illegal in Virginia. This is the mid seventeen seventies. You're not a l to free your slaves in Virginia. So Quakers spent years fighting in court to make that legal, which culminates in Virginia legalizing manumission. This is a big deal. During the years that Jefferson was in state politics, he has to have known the reality of the situation, right, which is not that these people all had to go back into slavery. That is not what happens. Like a lot of people just got freed because Quakers were pretty chill. Yeah, Now Jefferson knows he's lying. And part of how you know he knows he's lying is that in that letter back to that dude where he's like bullshitting about this, he's like, you know, I'm probably I don't remember everything perfectly, so so don't make it. Make no use of this imperfect information. If you plan to write an article. I don't want you citing me in an article.
Don't quote me, bro, Yeah.
Don't unless he says. If you want to quote me in face to face conversations, you can do that.
Right.
If you want to just lie at as somebody, that's fine, that's what I did, right, don't quote me. That might get embarrassing when people realize I'm a liar.
He said, I said, he said, I said, But I said, but like, don't tell anybody.
But don't tell anybody unless it's face then it's cool.
So funny. Hey, look, I might be remembered, like I'm telling you this happened. Wait, I might be remembered this, but look, but but for real, though, don't quote me on it. Yeah, so hilarious.
Yeah, it's choice.
Hey, So it's like, hey, so you don't know shit then right, Yeah, so you're folks, so you don't know. So what's the point of the story if you can't tell me?
Okay, great stuff, So speaking of I don't know basic reality. Uh. The famed liberty liberty advocate spent a large part of his years in Paris trying to get out of his debts to his creditors by arguing that he deserved compensation for the slaves who had died of smallpox. In general Cornwallis's camp, Oh word, basically, I shouldn't have to pay you people as much because I didn't want you killed.
Yeah, they wouldn't have died if you ain't give him smallpox. Yeah. Wow.
So his debts. The reason why he's trying to do this is his debts, and a lot of those debts come from that bad deal that he inherited from his father in law. Are crushing at this point. In July of seventeen eighty seven, he wrote to his property manager in Monticello that he couldn't sell any more land because it was quote the only sure provision for his children. But he also couldn't sell more of his slaves quote, as there remains any prospect of paying my debts with their labor. Right, and this is we did the top Roberty Lee episodes earlier this year. That's the same logic as Lee. I'd love to free these people, but I need them to make me money because I'm in debt, right, sucking casts. Yeah yeah. And it's what's fucked up is that, like Lee at least doesn't try to justify it other than like, well, I need the money, you know, fuck it. Yeah, I'm just a racist, you know, I really care. Jefferson the Profit of Liberty has to like twist this by claiming that what he's doing is somehow the best thing for his slaves.
Yeah.
Quote in this, I am governed solely by views to their happiness, which will render it worth their while to use extraordinary exertions for some time to enable me to put them ultimately on an easier footing, which I will do the moment they have paid the debts due from the estate, two thirds of which have been contracted by purchasing them. Right. Well, the money came because we bought these people, so like they kind of owe it, right.
Yeah, we do. They do have a cost, Yeah, there's a cost tied to this, and just you know, I hate it. Yeah, the world we live in, it's our modern world.
But right, yeah, so even what's interesting, Yeah, because he has this view that like, these people owe me for the debt of their you know, bringing them over here, and even the small children who like we're born here owed me a debt. They are born owing me money. Right, that is how he views this. You know, this guy who makes a big part of his career trying to like fighting against what he sees is the evils of inherited debt, sees no moral quandary, and of fixing debt to the children who are born into his ownership. And in fact, a major story of Jefferson's Paris years is that he comes to see slavery as the answer to not just his but the whole nation's financial woes. Virginia planters owed millions to bankers in Great Britain, and the new nation also found itself hobbled by debt to the country it had just beaten at war. Farming, Jefferson had come to see, was a form of gambling because he's a bad farmer. Right, It's like it's not reliable enough for making money. Slavery, though, is a safe investment. It's basically a treasury bond. Right. He writes at length to his friends like gleefully basically that he's calculated a rate of return, right, Yeah, and that I get because of like my slaves are continuing to have kids. The value of the people I own increases by about four percent every year, and it's really stable. It's like the most stable investment he that exists at the time. Right. And this is particularly beneficial because Jefferson is going to use these people as collateral with a Dutch bank to rebuild Monticello. Right, That's how he funds making the house we're going to talk about next episode. Is like using these people as collateral and alone. He is a pioneer in financializing slavery, right, taking it beyond just well, we need to grow food, and we don't want to do it ourselves, so we own people and use them for it too. I am treating these people I own as an investment viasu as it's a bond, you know, it's a treasury bond or something, right like. That's how he's or money market account or some shit, right like that. That's one of his big innovations. Now, it's during this time in France seventeen eighty five to eighty nine, that Jefferson also starts what historians often refer to as his relationship with Sally Hemmings. I am going to start by laying out the absolute verified facts of the situation as we know them. In seventeen eighty seven, midway through his ambassadorship, Sally travels to Europe alongside Jeffery's daughter Mary. We do not know what Jefferson and Sally did during this period or what point they started doing it, right, Sally never writes anything about that, but during her two and a half years in Paris, we know she negotiates with Jefferson what Monticello describes as extraordinary privileges for herself and freedom for her future children. Right like they have a negotiation, Jefferson did free Sally's kids, and as Monticello dot Org admits, Jefferson did not grant freedom to any other enslaved family unit.
Sally's the legend that right, we know about, Yeah.
And that is the legend. Part of this actually is one of the more satisfying, but one of like the it's very interesting. This legend exists that like well, Jefferson had a bunch of children with Sally Hemmings. That is a legend in the black community for decades. Historians are like, probably not, probably not, guys, we did the math. There's really just you know, it's just unlikely. It's just unlikely. And yeah, the historians are very much wrong.
Yeah, he absolutely did. We know us.
Yeah, yeah, we'll get to that. So this is rape, and it's not just rape because he owns her right when she moves to Paris. Sally is fourteen years old and Thomas is forty four. Yes, hey everybody. As a note, members of the Hemmings family have claimed that they think the relationships started when Sally was sixteen. You know, we'll never know for sure either way. You know, you're talking either fourteen and forty four or sixteen and forty six. I don't really think one is less gross than the other. So there you go. Like, even if this had been two free people, this was this would not be consensual. Yeah, and I think that that the age gap gets left out. That was not emphasized to me at least. Yeah, No, was the cap again, fourteen and forty four. That's disgusting, that it's really bad. Yeah, is three times her age.
That is that is disgusting. It is I would like for one second second, Yeah, I would like to pause for a second. Fourteen she was a child. Forty four he was disgusting, and forty four in that day and age, he is old. He looks like shit is lizard skinny?
I think it does? You know, that's again we don't get nearly enough of like Sally or what she thought that what you hear about, like her making this negotiation for the freedom of her kids, Like what it suggests is somebody who is incredibly intelligent and savvy and doing the thing that is going to be best for her kids, like that is in a hideous situation. But like I wish we knew more of her, because what we know suggests a pretty impressive person.
Yeah, she was my entry point to Thomas Jefferson, which is so funny. It's not the other way around, Like, yeah, my entry point was so yeah.
And it probably should be because this is kind of what says the most about.
But still, you did not know she was fourteen?
I didn't, really I did. I did. I learned as a young No, yeah he said he.
Did, Yes, Yeah, I knew she was a child.
Yeah, I feel like they of course they do skip that part.
Of course it is because they were like he was Thomas Jefferson, he was so handsome.
He was such a good man.
No, he's a disgusting creep like the rest of us.
Yeah he's Yeah. I had My teacher really jumped around it and was like, well he probably did, you know, have a relationship. That was always the term that was used with Sally Hemmings and like, but really did leave out the whole She was fourteen and he was forty four.
This was one of those like the fond moments with my dad, like you're coming on from school, you're working on this, and you know, my dad like, man him, teachers don't know what they talking about, Like just like that those moments like that's not what happened. Let me tell you, you know what I'm saying, Like, don't listen, they don't know what they talking about. And then he would sit down and be like, let me tell you the real son, you know, and then and then would break the shit down and then be like, you know, you say what you got to say to him, but here's what happened. So thisd she I have specific memories about this one. He was like no, I know you got to pass your little test, but no, let me say you got that.
Man.
You know what was that movie that like all of us had to watch?
Oh God, which one?
No, there was one that like framed it as a romance. Yeah, right, like yeah, like like fifteen years ago something like that. I forget when there was that one.
And then but then there's like a not not specific to h it was like the Declaration of Independence movie that all of us had.
We watched it in in high school.
It's a school one. Yeah, we watched.
In high school.
And I was like, they try and they try to make Tamash Everson seem like, oh, he's just he's so hot, he's so handsome, and it's like, oh.
No, guys pedophiles. Yeah. And there's another thing that's actually really fucked up about this that I didn't know, which is that so Sally's mother was Betty Hemmings. Betty Hemmings was the consort of Martha Jefferson's father, Thomas's father in law. Sally is John Wales's daughter, which makes her Martha Jefferson's half sister. So he is sleeping with the child's sister of his dead wife while working in Paris as a diplomat representing the United Nazza.
You just taught me something.
So technically not not incest, but really gross.
Is that what you're saying?
I mean it, it's I don't know. I don't know how you want to parse that out.
To be honest, I really don't want to parse it out.
I just want to say, Thomas Jefferson, you you bro, You're disgusting on every level.
Even Roberty Elee didn't do that. Yeah, no, bro, Like, come on, man.
So we're jumping around a bit. But but rumors about you know, all of this that like Thomas was had a relationship with with with Sally first broke as a public matter in September of eighteen oh two, when a political journalist named James Calendar not quite spelled like the word Calendar wrote an article alleging Jefferson had for years quote kept as his concubine, one of his own slaves. Her name is Sally, and actually I find it interesting because by describing her as both one of his slaves and as a concubine, he's more accurate than the historians who talk about it as a relationship. Yes, right, because a concubine doesn't have the freedom to not be a yeah, yeah, And I actually kind of think that that's not a bad way, especially given the way in which people would have actually talked about this at the time.
That's exactly they think that, Yeah, you're right, that is the most accurate way to say it, like, because that's what it is.
Yeah. Yeah, it's like, yeah, it's like what the con did or whatever, you know. So, Calendar further went on to claim that Jefferson had had several children by her in a write up on Monticello dot org. Quote. Although there were rumors of a sexual relationship between Jefferson and an enslaved woman before eighteen oh two, Calendar's article spread the story widely. It was taken up by Jefferson's Federalist opponents, and it was published in many newspapers during the remainder of Jefferson's presidency. Jefferson's policy was to offer no public response to personal attacks, and he apparently made no explicit public or private comment on this question, although a private letter of eighteen oh five has been interpreted by some individuals as a denial of the story. Sally Hemmings left no known accounts Jefferson's daughter, Martha Jefferson Randolph, privately denied the published reports. Two of her children, Ellen Randolph Coolidge and Thomas Jefferson Randolph, maintained many years later that such a liaison was not possible on both moral and practical grounds. They also stated that Jefferson's nephews, Peter and Samuel Carr, were the fathers of the light skinned Monticello slaves, some thought to be Jefferson's children because they resembled him. Because yeah, now, yeah, that's both like lying that your nephew that you're like, I guess if they're his nephews, they're like your cousins, right, did it? Like it to protect your dad? Is gross? As I said, it took historians a long time to acknowledge that any of this was true, and so for decades there was no proof of this besides the compelling fact that Sally had a lot of kids who looked like Thomas Jefferson. Dumas Malone basically leaves this out of his work, and for decades historians mostly concluded it was bullshit, and the story thus spread kind of mimetically right through communities. Face to face, Both of abolitionists and of Black Americans. Monticello dot Org notes that a major source for the claim was two of Jefferson's children. Over the years, however, belief in a. Thomas Jefferson Sally Hemming's relationship was perpetuated in private. Two of her children, Madison and Eston, indicated that Jefferson was their father, and this belief has been perpetuated in the oral histories of generations of their descendants as an important family truth. Now the story resolves here in a way that I find satisfying, and the best way to lay that out is I'm going to quote first a passage from the original edition of American Sphinx, published in nineteen ninety six. Since Ellis was largely analyzing the work of generations of biographers and historians before then, he speaks with the voice of most of his profession when he concludes, unless the trustees of the Thomas Jefferson Memorial Foundation decide to exhumin the remains and do DNA testing on Jefferson as well as some of his alleged progeny, it leaves the matter and mystery about which advocates on either SAE I can freely speculate and surely will. Within the scholarly world, especially within the community of Jefferson specialists, there seems to be a clear consensus that the story is almost certainly not true. Within the much murkier world of popular opinion, especially within the black community, the story appears to have achieved the status of a self evident truth. So that's what Ellis writes in nineteen ninety six. Yes, basically, like, well, people tell this as a story, and they seem to believe it, but there's really no right. Two years after Ellis publishes his book, in nineteen ninety eight, doctor Eugene Foster carried out a series of DNA tests. And I am not well qualified to discuss the specifics of how you do a DNA test, but the result is that they found a genetic link between Jefferson and Himmings descendants. Someone with the Jefferson male y chromosome fathered Eston Hemmings, Sally's last child, born in eighteen oh eight. About twenty five adult Jefferson's existed at the time, and some of them did visit Monticello, But the study author's note the simplest and most probable conclusion was that Jefferson was the father. For years, Jefferson's descendants had tried to defend their sainted ancestors name by alleging his nephews had fathered the children instead. But his nephews would have passed DNA to the Hemmings from John Carr, their grandfather, and that DNA was missing. This rather forcefully set the historic community into an abrupt about face. And this is so Elis. I just read you what Ellis wrote ninety six where he's like, well, historians don't agree. Here's what he writes in an update to that after this DNA test in the original edition, I went on to speculate that the likelihood of a Jefferson Hemmings liaison was remote, offering several plausible readings of the indirect evidence to support by conjecture. No matter how plausible my interpretation, it turns out to have been dead wrong. Yes, so that's good at least, right.
Yeah. Yeah, and you look, look, look pretends to be surprised. You know what I'm saying, Like that was like, oh word, okay, welcome to the party. Yeah, thank you for telling us, well we knew.
Yes, yes, yeah, And I do find it very the crow that he has to eat there except generations of like, yeah, like oral tradition were right and we the historians were not.
Yeah.
Jefferson remained ambassador to France until November of seventeen eighty nine, several months after the outbreak of the revolution. He was an ardent defender and apologist of the revolution upon his return, which is like controversial because a lot of people are getting killed by the guillotine, right, There's a lot of ugly shit happening. And Jefferson's attitude, which is actually I tend to agree with, is like, yeah, there's a lot of bad stuff happening, but like you're kind of ignoring all the bad stuff that the old regime had to do to stay in power, too, like, you know, totally like on balance, I think this is probably going to make the world a better place, right, And you know that's one of those things I don't, you know, entirely disagree with this. In an American sphinx Ellis calls it revolutionary realism and even compares Jefferson to a as a thinker to Lenon and Mao, But not without good reason. Again, Ho Chi Min's got to quote this guy, you know, wow, Yeah, because he does have this almost religious belief in like the revolution that is coming for human liberty. He just leaves out certain humans. Yeah, Jefferson's colleagues, like John Adams, thought he was insane when he argued that the spirit of seventy six and the Spirit of seventy nine had set the ball of liberty in motion to roll around the globe. The sheer amount of deception in Jefferson's public statements and arguments makes it impossible to know how much Jefferson believed in any of what he was saying. Here, Ellis seems to argue that when it came to the grand design, his concept of the broad sweep of the future, the role of the English as a doomed counter revolutionary anchor, and the US as a force for freedom, he truly believed what he said. But there's no way to argue he didn't like about his intentions for his own slaves, most of whom he'd never freed, and about his overall belief in the morality of slavery. If he truly believed it was evil, as he often said, he used it for financial gain and in Keiley, his own comfort, and went out of his way to lie about that Charles Francis Adams, the son of John Quincy Adams and a diplomat himself, wrote of Jefferson he did not always speak exactly as he felt, either towards his friends or his enemies. As a consequence, he has left hanging over a part of public life, a vapor of duplicity, the presence of which is generally felt more than it is seen. And I kind of like that that description of like this, like he's kind of part of our original sin as a nation, not just his owning people, but like the way in which he made lying central, like this obfuscation of reality, Like he's one of these first people doing that, you know.
And yeah, like you said, the distortion field of that Steve Jobs did. It was like the gift he gave to the country, you know, of like yeah, and being so much more sinister in the fact that, like according to your writings, like you know you're doing.
That, yeah, you know, yeah, yeah, And that's like, you know, we talk about how like basically everyone can find to Thomas Jefferson to like agree with them in modern stuff. But yes, what I never see him compared to is like, you know, people like Trump and even you know, people like every president, like the the degree to which presidents lie and obpus skate and basically the delete reality in order to make it more convenient, which we sort of that sort of gets laid out as like, well, that's just part of politics, part of modernity, it's part of like our problem, you know, the war on truth as a result of you know, social media and all this stuff. But like, no, it goes back very far. Jefferson is helping to start that.
Yeah, that's why they should have been a common fam button. Yeah, old time.
I agree. Come on, yeah, come on man. Yeah, so prop that's part three.
Yeah, okay, how we feel like.
That's We're gonna talk about Monticello next time.
Okay, cool, and then we'll be done finally. Man, I'm feeling a little faint. Yeah. I feel like I'm glad that like millions of people will now catch up to how we feel about Thomas Jefferson. Sure caught up. Yeah, I'm glad you caught up, because like, don't stop quoting this man. I mean some of the quotes by themselves are like yeah, it's a bar.
Yeah, like you're not a hero.
You're not a hero.
No, you're disgusting.
You're disgusting, pretty gross. He is?
He is, Yeah, he is, he is. And like, I don't know, I part of why we did this now, I've been meaning to do something like this for a while. Is I read that book, Henry wind Seck's Master of the Mountain, and it's just so oh fucking good. It's such a damning indictment of Jefferson in such a such a well laid out one that it was kind of like felt the need to read a lot more.
Yeah, it would do I mean obviously, like I'm pissing in the wind here, but it would do our education system such a favor if we would remove the mythos of the founding fathers and understood them like this. And if you understand them like this, you understand modern politics better. You can articulate views better, we can understand laws better like you. We would our democracy would be so much more healthy if you at least were honest about the complexities of who these people were. Like if you was a ship back us the ship bag, you know what I'm saying, Like it is what it is, you just use a ship bag. It did an amazing thing, you know what I'm saying like, and that's and to me, I'm like, I feel like as a kid, it's like I would have felt much better about the future if it's like, dude, sometimes trash people do amazing things, and then sometimes, you know, amazing people can do trash stuff, you know what I'm saying, Like, like, just give me that mythos much better than like all these dudes are like these dudes are saints, you know.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, I think there's almost like a a degree to which it's It's like if you were to say, like, hey, you know this like writer you really liked was actually like a real messy, real piece of shita, people would be like, well, yeah, especially if it's a TV writer, Right, We're all we're all used to accepting that.
Yeah, we know.
Yeah, that's what Jefferson was mostly famous for. He was really good at writing and also a piece of shit, you know, like shouldn't be too hard anyway. PROP any pluggables to plug.
I do man prop hip hop dot Com on the YouTube's, on the websites, on the socials, prop hip hop politics with PROP is we're chugging along, We're getting better, We're putting out.
Videos better, faster, stronger.
There it is. We're out here daft punkin.
That's right, that's right.
And yeah, man, and keep supporting the pod man, you.
Know, yeah, please please keep supporting the pod Listen to hood Politics, buy props, book Terraform, please buy yes and uh yeah we have. By the way, folks, we're helping out the Portland Diaper Bank so that low income mothers can have free diapers. So go to go fund me Portland Diaper Bank Behind the Bastards. Just type all that in, it'll take you to the thing and then you can donate money. Diapers that'll help are freakishly expensive, crazy expensive, and you always need them. Yeah, a lot, a lot of things in our world are morally complicated. But making sure that people who have babies and don't have money don't have to worry about diapers.
Pretty easy, man. Yeah, that's a pretty easy one, you know.
Just help them buy diapers. So, folks, that's the episode. We'll be back in a couple of days.
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