Part Three: Thomas Jefferson: King of Hypocrites
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Call zone media. Thomas Jefferson. More like Thomas Jerk-person. Jerk. Jerk made sons. What? Come on. Come on. What are you doing?

What are we doing? What are we doing here? We tried. You know, props, we tried. More like dumbass Anderson. How about that? Dumbass Anderson. There you go. Hey, hey, hey. Hey, hey, hey. Hey, hey, hey. Flag on the play. I apologize. Flag on the play. Don't insult the queen. I apologize. She's right under me and I'm getting a very dirty look. This is, this is like. Wait, hold up, hold up.

Caught a stray over there. I apologize. This is like when two great mountain climbers try to do Kilimanjaro, but there's a surprise storm. Apologize. Yeah. Because what we do, I would say, is like the emotional equivalent of climbing Kilimanjaro, which I assume is one of the hard mountains. I don't know much about mountains. 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 going to do it for hours. We've got 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 an Arby's sandwich. There's a lot of meat. Yeah. More meat. Did you have a nice birthday prop? I did. It was fun. I went fly fishing for a little bit. Ooh, I love fly fishing. Then I...

Came home and I rapped at the L.A. County Fair. Oh, cool. Which they are now like they're curating the stages 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 L.A. and it 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'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 really- I mean, yeah. I feel like you could do a really good rendition of Come Sail Away by Styx.

You could do a war. You'd be a Funkadelic cover band. Okay. Okay. I could see you in a George Clinton band. Yeah. Absolutely. Kind of playing the bass maybe. And I could see you in the movie PCU like George Clinton. I can't do any of these things. Classic performance. I have no talent, so I can't do any of these things.

Except for being a boss. Jeremy Piven didn't have any talent. And he was, okay, you're right. Sorry, we should stop. I shouldn't make my 12th reference to that movie. Yeah, don't do it. Don't do it. So that's the cold open. We'll come back in a second with some Thomas Jefferson for you. Be warned that once you pick up a refreshingly cold drink from McDonald's and

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check out a stylish and comfortable Highlander with seating for up to eight passengers and available panoramic moonroof. You can sit back and enjoy the wide open views with the whole family. Check out more national sales event deals when you visit buyatoyota.com. Toyota, let's go places. And we're back. Prop, you want to guess how many kids Martha Jefferson had during the first 10 years of her marriage to Thomas? How many kids Martha Jefferson had? I wish I knew this. 10. 10.

No, no, six. That's still a gang of kids. That's still a lot of kids for 10 years. That's still a gang of kids, dude. Now, 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 again.

Yeah. Never again 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. Because 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. Sheesh. This is a difficult time to have kids, but that's not a good ratio. Two out of six kids? Two out of six is not good. That's bad, man. Ouch. Some of this is, I think Martha has, from what we can tell, difficult pregnancies. And this is going to do a lot of permanent damage to her. She does not live a long or healthy life.

you know, we've said this many times, considering the state of, like, let's set racism aside for a second, but considering just the state of medicine, there's no other era I'd want to live in. Oh, absolutely not. Yeah, like, there's, no thank you. Yeah, 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 here's this. Here's some whiskey and a stick to bite down on. Yeah, I'm good. No, I'm good. Would like I would only give up 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 like 30 seconds would be worth it.

Yeah, your 30 seconds would be worth it because whatever ancient mosquito that bites you immediately, right? It's like, don't go. Super yellow fever, yeah. Your malaria gets malaria, yeah. Right, immediately. Oh, yeah, 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 again we get so little from Martha in part because Thomas destroys a lot of her Correspondence after she dies. Mm-hmm So maybe she was super and 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. Sure. As a result of the fact that Martha's in ill health this whole time, the whole time that they're married and trying to have kids. Yeah. 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 enslaved, 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 that Thomas owns. And she is the wet nurse for basically the entirety of the time that Thomas has kids and grandkids. Yeah. 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. Yeah.

But we can assume from the facts that she was almost super humanly tough. She nursed for basically 25 years straight, both Jefferson's kids and his grandkids. That's a lot. Sheesh. Yeah. That's a lot of nursing. That's a lot of milk. Her poor boobs. God damn. It hurts to hear that. Yeah. It does. And I still don't understand how you can, I mean...

I don't know how a person can lactate when it's not their child. I know it's a normal thing. I have no idea. There's parts of science. And me being a girl dad with a wife and two daughters, there are still parts of their... 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, oh, that's a mystery. I don't know how you do that. Man.

Magic. I don't know how like emotionally, because it seems like it's such a head fuck, right? Yeah. Because you really, you can't, even if 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, you know,

humans do it. You know what I'm saying? 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 milk. A good amount of breasts. Yeah. Wow. Yeah, one. A unit of breasts, I guess. Yeah, I don't know. It's weird. It 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. Yeah. In this case, it comes across off-putting, doesn't it? Yes. 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...

Yeah.

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 I one of the reasons I like Henry Winesack'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,

In other words, members of the Hemings, 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, functional. But they were able to see him as a person. Yeah. 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.

I'm 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, is it vanity for a woman to be like, I'm not going to nurse my own child. Cause 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 card 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 is nursing your child? Like I'm what 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, it's not super uncommon to,

Yeah. 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 to some extent today have had nurse mates, especially when you're talking about

Like we are talking about enslaved people being used as nursemaids here. But like in Tsarist Russia, you have people who are not slaves. They're not really fully free. And they're used as nursemaids by like the wealthy families, the Tsar and stuff. And sometimes it is 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.

and 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 being hard things. Okay, yeah. Obviously like the health stuff is like, I mean, every woman can lactate. 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 again, I'm a dad. I know that like,

everybody can't make milk, but it just seemed like this was a strange, like even the grandkids, cuz, like, you know what I'm saying? Like, you telling me nobody in this family? You know, so that's why I was like, what's going on? You know? I wonder too, if some of what's going on with like Ursel is obviously when you're a slave, like,

You're 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, their babies. Right. They need milk, you know. And so I 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 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 yourselves anyway So that's a bummer

Very much so.

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, yes, slavery is bad because of all of the bad things it does to white people. Right. 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 Weinstein is going to do more than a century later, which is actually examine. Well, how did Jefferson actually behave in his life? Did he act like a man who felt like it was unethical to let these people he owned do all of the work for him? And he doesn't, you know? No, yeah. Yeah.

Malone goes on to quote another line from Notes on the State of Virginia, which he describes as perhaps the most erudite 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 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, an 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's the quote. That's the one. At least that I've been referencing where I'm just like, bro, if God is just, he's not on our side. Yeah. Like what? Like how you let that come out your mouth? Like,

I mean, it's true. You know what I mean? It's true. And it is good writing. Like just structurally, obviously, as a piece of like craft, it's good. Except for I think you can't view it as craft writing.

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 stayed that what he's talking about here is his belief that a race war is inevitable if black and white people live true. Right. Yeah. Like that is what he's expressing. And that is something he believes. And they and was a 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 going to there's more of them and they're going to destroy us because we're treating them terribly. Yeah. Yeah.

obviously this is such a sensitive topic especially with like being like all eyes on rafa you know and um just a sentiment that i would venture to say is might actually be a motivating factor for how you know i'm 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 on Hood 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 if you are trying to eradicate every possible threat to your safety,

it's genocide. That's your only option. You got to 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 going to wipe us out because we're wrong.

Right. 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 going to do? You know, I certainly I'm sure I certainly don't think when we're talking about like Netanyahu. 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. And then he doesn't do anything to even make a better situation for the people he owns. Right. And that is.

Contra to how he is depicted, even in Ellis's book, American Sphinx, they have this long passage where he's like, there was no such thing as good slavery. 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 Weinstein makes is that 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. Give it to him. Okay. So you're aware. Yeah. I'm aware of this. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Give it to him. 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 standards of a modern vaccine, this is

Yeah, yeah, totally. Like 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. Yeah. And it kind of works, it works basically the way that a vaccine works. Obviously, it is one or two percent of people die that you do this to. Yeah, it's an analog vaccine.

vaccine, you know? Yeah. Yeah. It's an animal. That's a good way to look at it. And 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 beings have ever encountered. Vicious. Yeah. So because the...

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 we're great people, but because this is a sensible way to protect assets. One of the slave owners who chose to vaccinate the people he owned was George Washington. Right.

Now, I don't say that to be like, look at all wonderful George Washington handing 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 being a slave, but you could be forgiven for not 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 and inoculations. Right. He is like really, really insistent upon this. He himself was inoculated at age 23. 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 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, as essentially part of a genocide. Smallpox blankets. Right. Mm-hmm.

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 runaway families of slaves. Jefferson would later claim that 30,000 slaves tried to take the British up on this offer and 27,000 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 he come up with the number?

He made it up. He just made it up. It's bullshit. I was like, there's no, as he was, as you were talking, I was like, how would you get that data? Like, I was like, type of census where they take it. And then like, there's no census on this, bro. Yeah. Totally thinking. I was like, unless I'm wrong, that's funny. 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. Yeah.

And just, you know what I'm saying? That's like, well, it doesn't affect them the way it affects us. Maybe they won't. Yeah. Yeah. I think that's probably a number of things that feed into it. But this is 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 doing. Yeah, he totally did. Like, bro, no, listen, I'm looking at it. It was like 30,000. Yeah. Like, word. Trying to figure out where this number came from, historian Cassandra Pibus went through the original sources and found that Jefferson had written that 30 of his own enslaved workers fled during the revolution and 27 of them died of smallpox, right? Yeah.

He just added 10,000. That's literally what he did. Yeah. As far as we can tell, he was like, there are probably about a hundred times that many people or whatever. Why not? Yeah.

Very. I mean, it's just such a like slapdash. He gets such a reputation as being like the most the greatest political genius in American history. And like he certainly wasn't. 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. I had like nine beers last night. No, you didn't. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

So the actual evidence-based estimate is that about 5,000 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. Yeah. 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? Like they did try 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 medical science at the time. Of smallpox, yeah. And the realities of smallpox, sure. Yeah. In his farm book, Jefferson coldly recorded the losses, writing, quote, joined enemy and died next to the names of two girls, Flora and Quomina, who were eight and six years old. Wow.

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 a six and an eight year old man. What are you talking about? What do you mean joined the enemy? God.

Hoping none of us look at the age. Yeah. These kids together are 14 years old. Like, come on, man. I'm going to 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 1892. 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 from Mrs. Jefferson, while the noted Hemings 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 smallpox. Yeah, I was like, you're saying their little bellies is full. That's what you're saying? Yeah. And he closes with the line, 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 that died didn't seem jolly. Yeah. Yeah. That devoted to you, bro? Yeah. Like that's...

That word's doing a lot of work, buddy. Yeah. You're talking about devoted. Okay. Flora and Quamina fled with their 10-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 Sal and her family lived further down the mountain, doing menial work. Jefferson records Sal as a, quote, 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? This is the tribe or the community or whatever that we recruit soldiers from to help us police the, and they get extra privileges. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

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? As opposed to being as angry at 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 or the people who are allowed to, like, learn a trade and become something like a blacksmith. Right. We are 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 go too much into it because it just, 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 were like in the house, um,

all at the same time. This is a lot later in life. This 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.

Yeah. I don't think we'll ever really know, but it, 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 1700s. And all that. Or 1800s. Yeah. And all that stuff. So Flora and Quamina 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. Yeah.

Another family of laborers in the ground, Hannibal and his wife, Pat, fled with their six small children, all of whom died 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 they are. Products, services. Oh, we'll be back in a minute, folks. OK. This podcast is sponsored by BetterHelp.

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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 80% of the world.

Right. Was able to show some humanity. Okay. Yeah. A surprising amount here because when the, 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 deal with it. Yeah, who cares? If we want to be different. Yeah, right. We didn't win. 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 10,000 black Americans away by boat and they are freed. That's wild. You have to be pretty evil for the British army in the 1700s to be the good guys. Yeah.

Anyway, I don't know. Kudos to those British commanders. Bro, like, yeah, that's even an interesting thing to where they're like, their honor code, they're like, dude, we gave our word. Yeah. We made a promise. Yeah, we made a promise. And it's like, 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 and our word means something so like we gave them our word and also fuck y'all yeah that probably wasn't none of it yeah yeah yeah like man fuck you like no you know yeah

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. In 1782, 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. 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. Mm-hmm.

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 write that he was unusually devastated By which I mean people like Edmund Randolph wrote stuff like this in a letter to James Madison I never thought him to rank domestic happiness and 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 and

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 stricken by grief. So that may honestly explain enough of like why he –

like destroyed their letters and stuff. He just, he may have just been really sad. Yeah. Yeah. He's still a person, right? He's able to feel sad. In 1785, 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?

Attaché. Attaché. Yeah, something like that. It's a fun word. Yeah, I like it. I like the word attaché. I hope to be an attaché at some point. At some point. Someday, yeah. I'll do it in France. Fuck it. I think I can 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...

A famous and highly sought after dinner guest and like the father of liberty is how a lot of people see him and talk to him. Except he's also he owns a bunch of people, right? Like the same year he moves to France to do this job. He sells 31 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, most of these Virginia planters who owe money, owe it to British people, right? To banks and other creditors over there. Yeah.

He is 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.

Yeah.

And just the mix of shame and desperation is like a major factor in shaping the man that he is because he always has 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

like, you know, Marx in 1848 and the people after him talk about the inevitable socialist world revolution that's coming. Thomas talks a lot like that. Mm-hmm.

You know, he's not a socialist, but he's talking about 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 thing 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, it's fine. And it's also like,

No one would call the British Empire a force for human liberty, but they did ban slavery decades before the United States. Much earlier. Way earlier. Much earlier. And I would call that a meaningful... If you're thinking about liberty as a global cause, that's a meaningful thing. It's more meaningful than anything Jefferson does after this point. Yeah, it's pretty big, man. That's a...

Yeah. That's in the W line, man. I got to 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 in the periphery of the empire. But like they still this is still a major step that they take well before the U.S. does. Yeah. They were doing prison reform earlier, too. Yeah. Looking at like how to make our prisons a little better. Like at least can we get them at least, y'all?

It's this thing. God damn, can we feed him? Yeah. Jefferson is kind of racist against the British. So he can only see them as like this inherent counter-revolutionary force with reality is like, well, actually the things that 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 their role. They also play their role in trying to quash it. You know, it's a complicated country. Just like 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 till 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, um,

this for us, it would be like, at least for a black person, it would be like being around in the 60s 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 this democracy thing y'all like i'm trying to tell you homie like this this whole it's this this it's different fam like you know we don't king's homeboy like it's about to it's about to go crazy right now like what did you know again what

barring what my personal experience would have been at that time, that moment in history is

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 to, right? I mean, like the Haitian revolution also. Totally. All that was happening. Not that, right? 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've been like, look, really, it is like this wave is, it's coming

No, seriously. This is just the start of it. 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 the 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, we love 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. Yeah.

Bars. Everything you say. Bars. Yeah. My boy though. Like, 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. Yeah.

He had first written out an abolition plan in 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 be carried out gradually, right? And part of this does happen. We do ban the Atlantic slave trade, right? Yeah, that's first. You can bring no new ones. Yeah. Yeah. But we never, there's never like that gradual, there's never a gradual change.

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, 20 years or whatever, everyone gets freed. You know, that's kind of the idea. You're led to believe reading this. Yeah, you ramp down. It's like the switch to electric cars where it's like, you can't just like, you know, put every mechanic out of business today. It's like, you got to 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 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. Yeah. Yeah.

In notes on the state of Virginia, as part of this European charm offensive, Jefferson had laid out a more detailed 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. Yeah.

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 21 or 18 for women, they would be given guns, tools, a small amount of livestock and be sent somewhere unnoticed.

Yeah. And the idea is we can't have them living among us. Yeah, don't kill us, man. But they can have a colony, you know? Yeah. And that'll be our ally. I'm gonna give you a gun and leave you here? You crazy? Yeah, we don't want that. Like...

Like, okay, you know what I'm saying? Like, 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 of the level of prominence he's at, who's kind of laying out that sort of a plan, right? Yeah, send him back.

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...

For real fam? 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 going to make them appreciative of what you did for them. Yeah.

And he's like, oh, absolutely not. We're sending him back to Africa. No, they're going to be pissed. I think his attitude was more like Kansas. I don't think he's saying Africa. I think he wanted, because he's also a colonizer, 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, there's a lot to say about Jefferson, you know? Yeah. He's a, he's a, a multidimensional character that like, you know, obviously when you at least,

from my perspective, once you add it all together, I'm like, I mean, you're still a shit bag. 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 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 40 years. So there's just so much to say. Yeah. You can't shake your fist at that. Like that's, that's some real, where'd I get that phrase? Shake your fist at. Damn. Yeah. You can't surprise myself. Anyway, you can't do all the shaking of your fist that's necessary. And for episodes, right. We're, 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 it all.

Besides, you know, like his 45 kids. 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 to his credit, in 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 10,000 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. Yeah. I was like, I was talking about. Yeah. You're two for three, bro. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah, those first two points. Well, those are things you'll have to deal with, right? 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 on our mother that you will not punch me. "I can't let you go unless you swear "that you're gonna punch me." It's like, man, what are we talking about here? - Yeah, that is, Jefferson gets himself trapped very much in that mode of thinking. - Yeah, 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 sure 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. Y'all ain't started yet. Over there. Yeah. What's up with that? Yeah. I hate the, I hate the, like the,

well, I was going to guy. Yeah. That's the guy that 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 going to do it. I'm definitely going to write this screenplay one day. It seems like you talk about it a lot, but you're not doing anything. Hey man.

Maybe you 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-Nicolas Demunier. Who you should talk about after this ad break. Oh, yeah. Shoot. Yes. Speaking of Jean-Nicolas Demunier.

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Ah, we're back. So his friend Demunet 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 rivet still closer the chains of bondage and retard the moment of deliberation. To this oppressed description of men.

No, these really smart guys, you don't know them, but they're like, they're super smart. They actually figured out 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 just got to do it right. We want to do it right. Yeah. Yeah. We're going to 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 come on fam button.

Yeah. Like just 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, you know, airtight logical discussions that are probably again.

incredibly articulate and airtight, but I'm going to hit the come on fam button. Come on fam. Yeah. Yeah. And everybody in the room knows what that means. You know what that means. Come on fam. Yeah. You tell me smarter people. Come on fam. You need to have the come on fam button and the get the fuck out clause in all situations. Yes. And the get the fuck out clause. Get the fuck out. Yes. Those are the two things we are adding to the market. Pressing the come on fam button. In Master of the Mountain, Henry Winesick writes,

Jefferson omitted mentioning that the Virginia legislature had liberalized the slave laws so as to enable individual owners to free people at will, for Desmunay 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.

So, yeah, yeah, that's pretty bad. Yeah. Yeah. They can already do it, Joe. Like, y'all can...

Then we didn't already, y'all can do it, but ain't nobody doing it. Mr. Virtue of people. Yeah. Yeah. And it's, well, we're going to talk more about his attitudes towards, you know, what was then called miscegenation 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 we should be able to. Yeah. The miscegenation stuff is the stuff that like swoops around like black communities so much specifically about Thomas Jefferson. Why we're like, you're a shit bag, 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 are 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' 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? Tucky, tucky. Yeah, yeah. And in that book, Ellis 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 1788. "'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 of 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 American statesmen. 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 a tomorrow problem. Yeah. Y'all got it. Wow.

when i was a kid at our church one of our pastors pastor renee she's just lg black woman she used to say a lot of talkie talkie not a lot of do we do we you know you guys got a lot of that's a lot of talkie talkie you know she's like i need to see a little more do we do we you know so like every time i hear stuff like this that's what i think of like all right pastor all right pastor renee you're right i need we need some more do we do we you know 100 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 refused to treat his cancer. Is it that? Yeah.

Is he like – has he really convinced himself that this is a – well, I can't be – 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 state that they're in, 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 they 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. 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 like try and make an argument in that moment. Yeah, I just defeated the other argument.

Yeah, and that means my argument's better. Yeah, exactly. It's like, no, it means that 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 you're 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 in 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 owning 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 you're, you sound like a knuckle dragging, you know what I'm saying? Like, yeah, 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,

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 Demunet about the injustice of slavery.

Like...

eventually God's going to realize how fucked up this is. He'll take care of it, right? It's not on me. God will figure it out eventually. It's going to end because this is wrong. So if I don't do it, I know it's going to. Okay. Right. Good God, man. What a pretzel you twisted yourself in. Yeah. An unseasoned pretzel.

Unseasoned pretzel. Yeah, no salt. No salt. No. No. He would. Yeah. In American Sphinx, Ellis explains away. Boiled chicken season. Yeah. Boiled chicken. Just boil the dough in hot dog water. Yeah. Yes.

Call that the Jefferson. Yes. So in American Sphinx, Ellis explains a lot 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, it does. Right. He is. He is the first 21st century man. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

It'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 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 stay in the field in Virginia. It's fine. Enjoying his French women.

Yeah. He's trying not to get caught up. Get caught, bro. You know what I'm saying? Like, I'm trying to share either. He said XOXO to her 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 and

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, evil, like really gross people. We don't need to be going over to Paris. You know, like, I can't really be telling you what we're doing out here. You know what I'm saying? Like, I need y'all to vote for us. He's every politician ever.

He's every 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, I'm going to 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 10 hours, I realized there was no fire exit. Come on. Come on guys.

Yeah.

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 hmm

That's obviously a lie. Like he's literally just like, I'm just going to 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 is 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 is basically like citation, please. Like, yeah, 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 them back. And I don't actually know their names.

But 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 to be taken back, right? Or they wanted to come back. Yeah. A few things in that story. One is, obviously you can't say this of everyone, but Quakers famously...

abolitionists, famously anti-slavery. So the idea that, so like you starting a story with the people that already disagree with the institution in the first place and helped out in the Underground Railroad. They the ones? Okay, got it. So that's first, number one. And then even if you sit, even if that's true, you sitting across the table and you're like, you set them free in a country where everybody else

Where they going to go with tools? Of course, they're terrified. What the fuck are you talking about? The first other free white person they see is going to kill him or try to enslave him. Yeah, of course, that's what happened. What do you mean they couldn't handle it? Like, yeah. Well, and that's so here's I wanted to like there's actually a real story behind this. And it is completely different from the story that Jefferson tells, which is that. OK.

a bunch of around this time, like in the late 1700s, 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 there 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, man, your mission when this starts happening is

Manumission is illegal in Virginia. This is the mid 1770s. You're not allowed 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.

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 don't remember everything perfectly. So, so don't make it make no use of this imperfect information. If you plan to like 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. Hmm.

right if you want to just lie to 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 what I said but like don't tell anybody but don't tell anybody unless it's like face to face then it's cool so funny

hey look I might be remember like I'm telling you this happened wait I might be remember this but look but but for real though don't quote me on it yeah that's so hilarious yeah it's it's a choice hey so it's like hey so you don't know shit then right yeah like that's like crap yeah so you're full 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, 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 and General Cornwallis's camp. Oh, word. Basically, I shouldn't have to pay you people as much because I didn't vaccinate the people I own. Yeah, they wouldn't have died if you ain't give them 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 1787, 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 Robert E. 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? Sunken costs. Yeah. Yeah.

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. I'm just a racist, you know, I don't really care. Jefferson, the prophet 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 they kind of owe it, right? Yeah, they do have a cost. Yeah.

There is a cost tied to this. And just, you know, I hate it. It's the world we live in. It's our modern world. But I ain't eating this debt. You might as well swim. Right.

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 were 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 as the evils of inherited debt.

Sees no moral quandary in affixing debt to the children who are born into his like 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? Yes, clearly. 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 4% every year, and it's really stable. It's like the most stable investment 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 in a loan, right?

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. Two, I am treating these people I own as an investment vehicle. Asset management now. 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? That's one of his big innovations. Right.

Now, it's during this time in France, 1785 to 89, that Jefferson also starts what historians often refer to as his relationship with Sally Hemings. I am going to start by laying out the absolute verified facts of the situation as we know them. In 1787, midway through his ambassadorship, Sally travels to Europe alongside Jefferson's daughter, Mary. We do not know what Jefferson and Sally did during this period or what point they started doing this.

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.org admits, Jefferson did not grant freedom to any other enslaved family unit. So

Sally's the legend that we know about. 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 Hemings. That is a legend in the black community for decades. Historians are like, probably not, probably not guys. We did the math. We, we, there's really just, you know, it's, it's just unlikely. It's just unlikely. And yeah,

The historians are very much wrong. Yeah, he absolutely did. Like, 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 14 years old and Thomas is 44. Yes.

Hey, everybody. As a note, members of the Hemings family have claimed that they think the relationship started when Sally was 16. We'll never know for sure. Either way, you're talking either 14 and 44 or 16 and 46. 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 would not be consensual. Yeah. And I think that the age gap gets left out. That was not emphasized to me, at least. Yeah, no. It was to me. Wait, wait, wait. Good. What was the age gap again?

14 and 44. That's disgusting. It's really bad. He is three times her age. That is disgusting. It is. I would like for one second. Pause for a second. 14, she was a child. 44, he was disgusting. And 44, in that day and age, he is old. He might as well be 95. He is old. He looks like shit.

He's lizard skinny. I think it does. Again, we don't get nearly enough of like Sally or what she thought. 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. So 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 that. Yeah. And it probably should be because this is kind of what says the most about him. But still, you did not know she was 14. I didn't really. I did. No, I did. You knew? 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 them. 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 with Sally Hemings. And like, but really did leave out the whole she was 14 and he was 44. This was one of those like.

the fond moments with my dad. Like, you're coming home from school, you're working on this, and, you know, my dad's like, "Man, them teachers don't know what they talking about." Like, just like those moments, like, that's not what happened. Let me tell you what happened. You know what I'm saying? Like, don't listen to them. 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 would break the shit down and then be like, "You know, you say what you gotta say to them, but here's what happened." So, I have specific memories about this one. He was like, "No."

I know you guys passed your little test, but no, let me tell you about 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 framed it as a romance. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah. Like 15 years ago, something like that. I forget when exactly. There was that one. But then there's like a not specific to... It was like the Declaration of Independence movie that all of us had. We watched it in high school. It's a school one. Yeah. We watched it in high school and I was like...

They try to make Thomas Jefferson seem like, oh, he's just, he's so hot. He's so handsome. And it's like,

I don't know, guys. Yeah, I don't really care what that sounds like. I feel like we don't focus about that or any other 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 Hemings. Betty Hemings was the consort of Martha Jefferson's father, Thomas's father-in-law. Yeah.

Sally is John Wales's daughter, which makes her Martha Jefferson's half sister. So he is sleeping with the child sister of his dead wife.

While working in Paris as a diplomat representing the United States. Now see, you just taught me something. So technically, not incest, but really gross? Is that what you're saying? I mean, it's like incest in law. 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, ew. Ew.

Ew, bro. You're disgusting on every level. Even Robert E. Lee didn't do that. I know, bro. Like, come on, fam.

So we're jumping around a bit, but rumors about all of this that Thomas had a relationship with Sally first broke as a public matter in September of 1802 when a political journalist named James Callender, 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 that 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 concubine. 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 the- You're right. That is the most accurate way to say it because that's what it is.

Yeah. Yeah. It's like, yeah, it's what the con did or whatever, you know? So, Callender further went on to claim that Jefferson had had several children by her. In a write-up on Monticello.org, quote, "...although there were rumors of a sexual relationship between Jefferson and an enslaved woman before 1802, Callender'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 1805 has been interpreted by some individuals as a denial of the story. Sally Hemings 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. Now, yeah, that's both like lying that you're

Nephew, you're like, I guess if they're his nephews, they're like your cousins, right? Did it like to protect your dad is gross. Yeah.

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 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 memetically, right, through communities face to face, both of abolitionists and of black Americans.

Monticello.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 Hemings relationship was perpetuated in private. Two of her children, Madison and Esten, 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 1996.

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 exhume the remains and do DNA testing on Jefferson, as well as some of his alleged prostitutes,

So that's what Ellis writes in 1996. Yes.

Basically like, well, people tell this as a story and they seem to believe it, but there's really no, right? Right.

Two years after Ellis publishes his book, in 1998, Dr. 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 Hemings descendants. Someone with the Jefferson male Y chromosome fathered Esten Hemings, Sally's last child, born in 1808.

About 25 adult Jeffersons existed at the time, and some of them did visit Monticello. But the study authors 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 Hemings 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 Ellis, I just read you what Ellis wrote in 96, 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-Hemings liaison was remote, offering several plausible readings of the indirect evidence to support my 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 like, look, look, look, look, look, look, look. Pretends to be surprised.

You know what I'm saying? Like that's who's like, oh, word. OK, cool. Welcome to the party. Yeah. Thank you for telling us what we knew. Yes. Yes. Yes. And that is I do find it very the crow that he has to eat. They're like, oh, yeah, generations of like, yeah, yeah. Like oral tradition. We're right. And we the historians, we're not.

Yeah. Jefferson remained ambassador to France until November of 1789, 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 of the bad stuff that the old regime had to do to stay in power too. Like, you know, like on balance, I think this is probably going to make the world a better place, right? Mm-hmm.

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 Lenin and Mao. Not without good reason. Again, Ho Chi Minh'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. Yeah.

Jefferson's colleagues, like John Adams, thought he was insane when he argued that the spirit of 76 and the spirit of 79 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 U.S. as a force for freedom, he truly believed what he said. But there's no way to argue he didn't lie 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 Keeley, 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 is 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 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 kind of obfuscation of reality. Like he's one of these first people doing that, you know, in public life. Like you said, the distortion field that Steve Jobs did, like it was like the gift he gave

Yeah. To the country, you know, of like, and, 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, we talk about how like basically everyone can find a Thomas Jefferson to like agree with them in, in modern stuff. But what I, what I never see him compared to is like,

you know, people like Trump and even, you know, people like every president, like the degree to which presidents lie and obfuscate 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. It's part of modernity. It's part of like our our problem. You know, the war on truth is a result of, you know, social media and all this stuff. But no, it goes back very far. Jefferson is helping to start that. Yeah. That's why there should have been a come on, fam button. Yeah. All the time. I agree. Come on. Yeah. Come on, man. Yeah.

So prop, that's part three. Yeah. Okay. Oh, great. How are we feeling? Yeah, that's, we're going to talk about Monticello next time. Okay, cool. And then we'll be done. Finally. Man, I'm feeling a little faint. Yeah. I, I feel like, or,

I'm glad that like millions of people will now catch up to how we feel about Thomas Jefferson. Sure. You 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. You're not a hero.

You're not a hero, bro. No, you're disgusting. You're disgusting. You're pretty gross. Yeah, he is. He is. And like, I don't know. 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 Winesack's Master of the Mountain, and it's just so fucking good. It's such a damning indictment of...

Jefferson in such a well laid out one that I just kind of 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 how modern politics better. You can articulate your 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 shit bag, you was a shit bag. You know what I'm saying? Like it is what it is. You just use a shit bag. You 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, oh, these dudes are like, these dudes are saints, you know? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I think there's almost like a,

uh, 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 shit. Yeah. 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. That's what Jefferson was mostly famous for was he was really good at writing and also a piece of shit, you know, like, uh,

shouldn't be too hard anyway Prop you got any pluggables to plug I do man uh prophipop.com on the YouTubes on the websites on the socials Prop Hip Hop uh Hood Politics with Prop is uh we're we're chugging along we're getting better we're uh

Putting out video. Better, faster, stronger. There it is. We're out here daft punking. That's right. That's right. And yeah, man. And keep supporting the pod, man. Yeah.

Please, please keep supporting the pod. Listen to Hood Politics. Buy Prop's book, Terraform. Please buy the book. Yes. And 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 GoFundMe, 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 are freakishly expensive. Crazy expensive. And...

You always need them. Yeah. 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. Diapers are 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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