Behind the Bastards - Part One: Robert E. Lee: A Lifetime of Failure
Aired: 2024-02-13
Duration: 01:11:36


=== Behind The Bastards Intro (02:05) ===

[00:00:00]  This is an iHeart podcast.
[00:00:02]  Guaranteed human.
[00:00:04]  When a group of women discover they've all dated the same prolific con artist, they take matters into their own hands.
[00:00:13]  I vowed I will be his last target.
[00:00:15]  He is not going to get away with this.
[00:00:17]  He's going to get what he deserves.
[00:00:19]  We always say that.
[00:00:21]  Trust your girlfriends.
[00:00:24]  Listen to the girlfriends.
[00:00:25]  Trust me, babe.
[00:00:26]  On the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
[00:00:36]  I'm Laurie Siegel, and this is Mostly Human, a tech podcast through a human lens.
[00:00:41]  This week, an interview with OpenAI CEO Sam Altman.
[00:00:44]  I think society is going to decide that creators of AI products bear a tremendous amount of responsibility to the products we put out in the world.
[00:00:51]  An in-depth conversation with a man who's shaping our future.
[00:00:55]  My highest order bit is to not destroy the world with AI.
[00:00:58]  Listen to Mostly Human on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
[00:01:07]  Hey, it's Nora Jones, and my podcast, Playing Along, is back with more of my favorite musicians.
[00:01:12]  Check out my newest episode with Josh Groban.
[00:01:15]  You related to the Phantom at that point.
[00:01:18]  Yeah, I was definitely the Phantom in that.
[00:01:20]  That's so funny.
[00:01:21]  Shari stay with me each night, each morning.
[00:01:29]  Listen to Nora Jones is playing along on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
[00:01:38]  Cool Zoom Media.
[00:01:42]  What's morning, my Carl Weathers?
[00:01:46]  This is Behind the Bastards, a podcast where me and my friend Jason Petty, aka Prop, are huge fans of the recently deceased Carl Weathers.
[00:01:56]  Prop.
[00:01:57]  Man, sadly.
[00:01:59]  He was a fucking real one.
[00:02:00]  What was your favorite Carl Weathers?
[00:02:03]  You have to pick a decade.
[00:02:04]  You know what I'm saying?

=== Reality Vs Lost Cause Shit (14:40) ===

[00:02:05]  Like, that's the hard part with him.
[00:02:07]  Damn, you know, that man had a fucking career.
[00:02:09]  Because, I mean, obviously, like, Happy Gilmore, the culture is just absolutely.
[00:02:16]  It's in the pantheon.
[00:02:17]  Yeah.
[00:02:18]  Yeah.
[00:02:18]  Like, that's in the pantheon.
[00:02:20]  Like, you can't, yeah, you can't pick a character, you know?
[00:02:22]  Just so important.
[00:02:23]  I think Happy Gilmore.
[00:02:25]  It was like my favorite movie as a kid.
[00:02:27]  Like, we would paint Warhammer minis and watch it every, I probably saw the movie 200 times.
[00:02:30]  And yeah, he just, and then fucking Predator too.
[00:02:33]  And Rocky.
[00:02:34]  Don't forget.
[00:02:34]  Don't forget.
[00:02:35]  Rocky, my Rocky Predator.
[00:02:36]  Like, he had the big old like 20-inch pythons and like Rocky.
[00:02:40]  Like, fucking huge.
[00:02:41]  He got doped crazy, dude.
[00:02:44]  I mean, rest in peace or real on this second day of Black History Month.
[00:02:48]  Matter of fact, Happy Black History Month.
[00:02:50]  Yes.
[00:02:51]  And I'll trade, if I could speak for the Black Delegation, like I'll trade Tim Scott for a, let's say, Simply Red.
[00:03:01]  We're going to call Simply Red Black for this month.
[00:03:04]  Okay.
[00:03:04]  We're going to call him Black because that, like, we're going to call him Black.
[00:03:08]  We're going to call him Black for this month.
[00:03:10]  Like, that white boy has some soul.
[00:03:12]  Wow.
[00:03:13]  Okay.
[00:03:13]  Well, keep holding on.
[00:03:18]  There's no way that man ain't black.
[00:03:21]  We'll send out a letter.
[00:03:21]  We'll send out a letter.
[00:03:22]  But yeah, send it to Manchester.
[00:03:24]  You know who definitely isn't black prop.
[00:03:26]  Oh, boy.
[00:03:28]  What a terrible transition.
[00:03:30]  What a terribly drawn.
[00:03:32]  What am I doing?
[00:03:33]  Take a bow, bro.
[00:03:34]  Take a bow.
[00:03:35]  I'm saying in four seasons.
[00:03:38]  This is, yeah, like this might be, this might be a top five.
[00:03:43]  Top five transition.
[00:03:44]  Yeah.
[00:03:45]  We are, we are doing finally the Robert E. Lee episodes.
[00:03:49]  Yeah.
[00:03:51]  Which, like, you know, growing up in the South, as I did, I'm a Texan boy, right?
[00:03:56]  I think that people are broadly aware of that.
[00:03:58]  There were like three heroes who were like the canonical, three male heroes, because everybody loves Dolly Parton and Dolly's Dolly's.
[00:04:06]  She wolly gym.
[00:04:07]  Yeah, she walks with her.
[00:04:08]  But there were three men that were like the holy trinity of like southern masculinity when I was a kid.
[00:04:13]  There was Dale Earnhardt, Samuel Houston, and Robert E. Lee, right?
[00:04:17]  Samuel who?
[00:04:18]  Samuel Houston.
[00:04:19]  He's the founder of Houston.
[00:04:20]  He's the George Wall Jackson.
[00:04:23]  I mean, I led him as a curve.
[00:04:26]  I was not prepared for that.
[00:04:28]  I wouldn't call him like an archon of southern masculinity, though.
[00:04:32]  And honestly, of those three, Dale Earnhardt's the only one who was actually a decent person, right?
[00:04:37]  I think that's brought people are broadly aware of that now.
[00:04:39]  Robert E. Lee was a deep, at least the kind of people who listened to this podcast was not a great man.
[00:04:45]  But there's still this kind of attitude that like, well, yeah, he was, he was obviously fighting for an evil side.
[00:04:50]  And so that says bad things about him.
[00:04:52]  But he was a really good general.
[00:04:54]  He was a great commander.
[00:04:56]  And revisionist history.
[00:05:00]  We will be talking about what he was good at and what he was bad at in these episodes.
[00:05:05]  And we will also be talking about, in addition to his life, kind of the ways in which his life has been distorted and deranged by the kind of media that's come out in the century and a half since the first Civil War.
[00:05:18]  Right.
[00:05:18]  Yeah.
[00:05:18]  And obviously, you know, we'll be, you'll be doing an episode in our second week of these about the lost cause mythology and how that took off.
[00:05:26]  I'm going to sprinkle a little bit of that in here because for one thing, Robert E. Lee is kind of like on his own.
[00:05:33]  He's not like Saddam Hussein.
[00:05:34]  He's not threatening his high school teacher with a handgun to teach him how to read.
[00:05:38]  Right.
[00:05:38]  He is kind of this like goody two-shoes.
[00:05:41]  So in order to keep it interesting, we do need to kind of pepper in some of the deranged things people have said about him since that really exaggerates his legacy.
[00:05:48]  And a good example of this, a modern example of this, is the book, Who Was Robert E. Lee by Bonnie Bader.
[00:05:55]  Now, you have seen books in the Who Was series.
[00:05:58]  These are these kids' books where everybody has a huge head, right?
[00:06:01]  It'll be like some massive head.
[00:06:05]  Yeah.
[00:06:06]  Yeah.
[00:06:07]  He's got one of those.
[00:06:08]  And they're not, from what I can tell, they're not on the whole super problematic.
[00:06:12]  And I will say this one is not fully lost cause.
[00:06:15]  It's more that it like absorbs some lost cause stuff in the middle of like it's trying to be fair, but it's almost impossible unless you're actually being a rigorous historian to not absorb some of that because there's so much of it.
[00:06:27]  I'm not saying that to like forgive these people for doing it, but it's not like a, it's not like a pro-Confederacy book, right?
[00:06:34]  Yeah.
[00:06:34]  The cover of this is very funny.
[00:06:37]  All of the covers of these are unhinged.
[00:06:38]  I don't know why they give, it's like everybody does like the golden eye big head sheet for the people on these books.
[00:06:43]  Yup.
[00:06:44]  Yeah.
[00:06:44]  Like we got a Rosa Parks one for our daughter.
[00:06:46]  Like yeah, we got a ton of those.
[00:06:49]  I will say this though, speaking to speaking to like, you know, obviously, like as far as like American bastards, like Robert E. Lee's, he's on our rush more.
[00:06:58]  Like you can't not take him off the rush more.
[00:07:02]  But to add to his mystique, like I can even say me as who, again, listeners are not, I say it all the time, you know, I'm a child of a freedom fighter, a, you know, black militant.
[00:07:13]  I'm the child of one.
[00:07:15]  But kudos to him because the first time I heard of the General Lee was Dukes of Hazard.
[00:07:21]  Yeah.
[00:07:22]  And I loved the show.
[00:07:24]  And I had the little, I had a little General Lee Hot Wheels with the Confederate flag on top and shout out my dad for not ruining my innocence and letting me love this thing having no idea or not connecting the dots.
[00:07:38]  You know what I'm saying?
[00:07:39]  Because I didn't know what slavery was.
[00:07:40]  You know what I'm saying?
[00:07:41]  But like, I didn't connect the dots.
[00:07:43]  I thought it was cool seeing the car jump over to, you know, in the stupid 80s show, they jump over ditches.
[00:07:49]  Yeah, I watched that show as a kid, right?
[00:07:51]  And I watched the, I watched the reboot movie, which wasn't great.
[00:07:55]  And that probably was like part of the lost cause stuff, right?
[00:08:00]  Yes.
[00:08:01]  But these like who was books, one of the things that's interesting about me is the kind of dichotomy between the bits of lost cause shit in there and the stuff that is trying to be like accurate history.
[00:08:09]  Like, for example, there's this paragraph about the plantation system in the book that's like not bad, right?
[00:08:16]  And this appears.
[00:08:17]  This is like a little box that they put in when they say that like the Lee family had a plantation.
[00:08:22]  It's like a plantation life.
[00:08:23]  Rich white people in the South lived on big farms called plantations where crops such as cotton and tobacco were grown.
[00:08:29]  Most of the workers on these plantations were slaves who were either born in Africa or descended from people taken from there.
[00:08:35]  These slaves were forced to work for free from sunup to sundown.
[00:08:37]  The slaves had no rights and the plantation owners grew rich.
[00:08:41]  And that's like not bad.
[00:08:42]  That's a pretty good way to explain that to a kid, I think.
[00:08:44]  Those are bullet points.
[00:08:46]  That is correct.
[00:08:47]  That's the important stuff.
[00:08:48]  Yet here's how the book summarizes Lee's decision to fight for the Confederacy and fight for slavery.
[00:08:54]  When asked to lead Northern troops against the South, Robert E. Lee was even more torn.
[00:08:58]  How could he go to war against his friends and family who lived in Virginia?
[00:09:02]  It was a hard choice.
[00:09:03]  Robert thought about loyalty.
[00:09:04]  He thought about honor.
[00:09:05]  In the end, Robert decided to fight against the country that his forefathers helped to create.
[00:09:09]  For Robert, the most important thing was his family and his home, Virginia.
[00:09:13]  And that is bullshit.
[00:09:15]  And we will talk, we will, in the episode where we get to this, we will talk more about that.
[00:09:20]  But like, just as a quick aside, he had multiple family members who fought for the union.
[00:09:24]  So like, no, it wasn't just a matter of not wanting to fight his family.
[00:09:28]  No, not at all.
[00:09:29]  Because he did.
[00:09:30]  He objectively did.
[00:09:31]  Yeah.
[00:09:33]  That said, this is a good example of like the milder and kind of the more modern side of the pro-Lee spectrum, right?
[00:09:39]  This is a casual absorption of the lost cause narrative as opposed to a dedicated one.
[00:09:43]  And I think it's interesting to kind of look at that in addition to some of the older and harder stuff, right?
[00:09:48]  Yeah.
[00:09:49]  I think I'm going to like, I'll, when, when we do the lost cause thing, I'll probably hit this point hard, but I think it's important to, because it keeps coming back, like that, the difference between and the importance of the difference between history and memory.
[00:10:03]  Yeah.
[00:10:04]  And like, and that memory is really more about the future and history is more about the past because I like memory is malleable.
[00:10:13]  Like you can shape that.
[00:10:14]  Memory shapes identity.
[00:10:15]  It forms culture.
[00:10:16]  It, it, you know, I'm saying it, it, it creates narrative.
[00:10:19]  That's what memory does.
[00:10:20]  Whereas history is, is the factual truth of what happened, which for most of us, even now, for most of us, is rarely the point is like what actually happened.
[00:10:32]  It's our memory of what happened and how that shapes how I view the world now.
[00:10:38]  And I think that he's a perfect example of that in choosing to remember him a certain way.
[00:10:43]  And it's interesting.
[00:10:44]  I think that that dichotomy between like reality and memory is especially harsh when it comes to war.
[00:10:50]  And I can think of a modern example of this from my own life.
[00:10:52]  I have a couple of friends who served in a Marine unit in the early invasion of Iraq.
[00:10:57]  And I've gotten to spend some time both with them and some of their like gatherings of their old unit.
[00:11:03]  And one of the interesting things is hearing different people tell stories about the same event and then talking to others about them and be like, that is not what happened.
[00:11:10]  That is absolutely.
[00:11:11]  And they were all there, right?
[00:11:13]  And some people have convinced themselves of, and who knows how much of it is like wanting to believe that you did better than you did.
[00:11:19]  Who knows how much of it is just honestly like it's a chaotic situation.
[00:11:23]  Like your memory gets fucked up.
[00:11:24]  Trauma fucks up memory.
[00:11:26]  Like it's it's super malleable.
[00:11:28]  So when you get to the history of warfare, right?
[00:11:30]  Yeah.
[00:11:31]  Like just be even just because something is an eyewitness account doesn't mean it's fucking true.
[00:11:35]  That's not even what it is.
[00:11:37]  Yeah, that's just the reality of the situation.
[00:11:39]  But to get to the truth of who Robert E. Lee was and why he did what he did, we have to start a lot further back than his own life, back, in fact, to the earliest Lee's in the historical record.
[00:11:50]  Now, the precise reality of his genealogy past a certain point is up for questioning, right?
[00:11:54]  Given the state of record keeping, you should interpret what I'm saying is not like this is the objective genealogical truth, but this is the family lore that he was raised with, right?
[00:12:03]  So, this was the truth for him, which is what matters for how his background affected him more than the reality of it, right?
[00:12:09]  Yeah.
[00:12:09]  And the family lore of the Lee's traces their line back to the Norman conquest of England.
[00:12:15]  The founder of the family, according to legend, was Lancelot Lee from Ladune, France.
[00:12:20]  He marched into England with William the Conqueror and earned a name for himself in the Battle of Hastings in 1066, right?
[00:12:27]  That is the origin of the Lee family and family lore, right?
[00:12:31]  Wow, and they know it, that like they formed modern England.
[00:12:35]  Yes, yes, wow, that's quite a claim.
[00:12:38]  Yeah, from the beginning, military men and aristocratic military men, right?
[00:12:43]  That is, that is a high social status.
[00:12:45]  And his descendants have continued up to the present day.
[00:12:48]  There have been Lee's in modern wars, right?
[00:12:50]  Descendants of his family, and serving at a pretty high rate.
[00:12:54]  So that is, I think, probably a mix of both the weight of legacy and just like, yeah, some people are naturally inclined to be warriors, right?
[00:13:01]  Like, that's just a reality of history, you know?
[00:13:03]  Yeah.
[00:13:04]  Like, if all of your ancestors served in various militaries, it probably means like you're drawn to that kind of thing inherently.
[00:13:10]  Yeah.
[00:13:11]  Like, yeah, a good bit of like nature and nurture.
[00:13:14]  Like, you know, that's just, like I said, how this is, this is how we form identity.
[00:13:19]  This is what the men in our family do.
[00:13:21]  Yes.
[00:13:21]  Yes.
[00:13:21]  They are violent.
[00:13:23]  And this is a consistent thing for the Lee's.
[00:13:25]  Generations after Hastings in 1192, his ancestor Lionel Lee was a cavalryman in the Third Crusade, which ended well, I think, right?
[00:13:35]  One of the things about the Lee's is that first Lee who picked the Norman side is like the best of them at deciding what side of the war to be on.
[00:13:43]  They're pretty much one in 50, apparently.
[00:13:48]  Yeah, maybe two, maybe two.
[00:13:49]  We'll talk about the other one.
[00:13:50]  Yeah.
[00:13:51]  Okay.
[00:13:51]  Centuries of service, though, to the crown and expanding wealth eventually kind of culminates in Sir Henry Lee.
[00:13:58]  And he is a knight of the garter under Queen Elizabeth, but he's also a young son.
[00:14:02]  So he's not going to inherit any of the family money.
[00:14:05]  If you know anything about the colonization of the Americas, a lot of it was done by like second, third, fourth, a lot of like the leadership, right?
[00:14:13]  Would have been these second, third, fourth, fifth, whatever sons of wealthy families who like, I'm not going to get anything unless I go take part in this, right?
[00:14:22]  My family name can secure me a position, but like I'm not going to inherit, you know?
[00:14:26]  Yeah.
[00:14:27]  And that's what Sir Henry Lee does.
[00:14:29]  And that's why he winds up moving to America to be the colonial secretary of the Virginia colony under Governor William Berkeley.
[00:14:37]  One of my sources for this is the very dishonestly named Memoir of Robert E. Lee, which is like it's billed as his autobiography that he never finished.
[00:14:45]  So like other people put it together based on interviews and notes.
[00:14:48]  It's a biography.
[00:14:50]  It's a very cloying positive biography, but they call it a memoir, which should let you know how reputable it is.
[00:14:56]  But it's interesting how it describes some things.
[00:14:59]  And this is how it describes Sir Henry Lee, the first American Lee.
[00:15:03]  He was possessed of a handsome person, fine talents, and popular manners.
[00:15:07]  And by these qualities, he was enabled to secure influence over the colonists.
[00:15:12]  Now, when I say influence, what that means is like the Virginia colony is a corporate monopoly, right?
[00:15:19]  It is a corporation.
[00:15:21]  And it is a dangerous thing.
[00:15:23]  Like going there, you don't have a high odds of surviving.
[00:15:26]  About 65% of immigrants to the colony in the period that he came over died soon after moving there.
[00:15:31]  So this is a dangerous gig.
[00:15:33]  I'd also say, too, like, you know, to interrupt you real quick, is like the like telling of it's, it's man, it's just it keeps coming up, but like the telling of even just the founding of America, that these it was, these like lofty ideas of these, like extremely pious people searching for freedom to practice their faith freely, is like it's like well,
[00:16:03]  that's one way to tell it.
[00:16:04]  You know yeah, another way to tell it is kind of what was the majority of it?
[00:16:09]  Which was, like you said, it's like people that ain't gonna get no inheritance.
[00:16:13]  Well, i'm gonna go try to get some land and we're gonna go make some money.
[00:16:16]  This was a financial move for the vast majority of people that came over here.
[00:16:21]  It was a money move.
[00:16:22]  It wasn't like that's one group of and and according to the rest of the uh, the rest of the like the colonists coming from from Britain, like the parents, were weirdos, like yeah, like y'all are, y'all are religious weirdos, like we out here trying to get this bread.
[00:16:39]  You know it's a fight yeah yeah, it's so.
[00:16:41]  Like you said, Virginia was like yeah no, we're like we try to get this bread.

=== Lee Family Financial Moves (14:43) ===

[00:16:46]  Like that's what we here for yeah yeah, and that's what Dickie Lee is there for Right um, and he does pretty well in this position.
[00:16:53]  He's able to buy up huge tracts of land which he works with enslaved people.
[00:16:57]  Uh, by his death in 1664, he presided over an empire of about 16 000 acres in the northern Neck of Virginia um, and Thisly is the very first in his family line to serve during a civil war.
[00:17:09]  Right, this is the English Civil War.
[00:17:11]  This is Cromwell versus the, the Cavaliers I think they're known as right, and obviously Cromwell wins.
[00:17:17]  Unfortunately, one of we'll, we'll be doing him.
[00:17:19]  He's one of the very worst people who ever lived.
[00:17:22]  Um, and kind of how this Lee makes his name, very differently from the last Robert E Lee, right, who picks a side right away.
[00:17:29]  This Lee's job, his influence over the colonists, is to stop them from picking a side until it's over, basically because like fucking, we're sitting there, we are about making money, we don't need to be picking a side.
[00:17:39]  This ain't our way, this is not going to help us until, and then, as soon as it becomes clear Cromwell's winning, he's basically like, yeah, we thought you were, you were the tits this whole time bro congrats, you know.
[00:17:49]  And in return, Cromwell didn't kill everybody, which was his, his general move right, yeah.
[00:17:53]  So when the war ends, Lee had to like he had acquired this land during the English Civil War but like he hadn't been able to actually like lock it in as a legal purchase because you couldn't do that while the war was going on.
[00:18:05]  So after the war, he and his descendants, in order to basically lock in their inheritance, have to make friends, make themselves into the patsies of the most powerful man in the area or most powerful family in the area, the Fairfaxes.
[00:18:18]  And they basically do this by becoming their tax collectors.
[00:18:20]  Right, that's.
[00:18:21]  The Lees are like musclemen for the biggest guy in in the Virginia planter aristocracy.
[00:18:26]  Wow, yeah.
[00:18:28]  And you know that they become in the generations after Dickie Lee.
[00:18:32]  They become like one of the biggest families in terms of like wealth in the area.
[00:18:36]  There are about 7 000 tax paying white citizens in the neck.
[00:18:40]  That means men right, we're saying men right, there's more white people than that.
[00:18:44]  Um, by the late 1700s, and basically none of them owned significant land, only one percent had more than 300 acres.
[00:18:51]  So the Lees are part of that, That 1.
[00:18:54]  Like most, yeah, very rich.
[00:18:57]  And like most generationally wealthy families, the Lees are kind of full of themselves.
[00:19:01]  You can see some of this from the fact that R. Roberts' grandfather, his 3,500-acre estate is named Lee's Sylvania.
[00:19:08]  Oh my God.
[00:19:09]  They love, there's a good bit, actually.
[00:19:12]  There's that up.
[00:19:13]  Seriously, that's like the lamest thing I've ever heard.
[00:19:15]  Oh, my God.
[00:19:16]  There's that movie, that musical 1776.
[00:19:19]  I haven't watched it since I was a kid, but it stars Mr. Feeney from Boy Meets World.
[00:19:25]  My high school history teacher made us watch it.
[00:19:27]  Yep.
[00:19:28]  And one of the, I'm sure that movie's got some problematic things, but one thing it does get accurate is it portrays Robert E. Lee's dad in this, and he's like naming everything after him.
[00:19:37]  He has a whole song where like everything is Lee.
[00:19:40]  And that does seem to be the family's thing, right?
[00:19:43]  It's like we are obsessed with ourselves.
[00:19:46]  That's hilarious.
[00:19:48]  Yeah.
[00:19:48]  Now, that said, Robert's father, who's going to be Henry Lee, is not, he's again, kind of like their first ancestor in the Americas.
[00:19:57]  He's not one of the wealthy Lee's.
[00:19:59]  Like his family is wealthy, but he's not going to get a bunch of money on his own because of, I think, just his position.
[00:20:04]  Like he doesn't get, you can tell this, he doesn't get sent to England to be educated.
[00:20:08]  Like his cousins in Stratford, the Stratford Lee's, send their kids to England to be educated.
[00:20:13]  But Robert E. Lee's dad doesn't get that.
[00:20:16]  So yeah, we're clearly we're talking like patrilineal.
[00:20:18]  We're talking dad's side of the family here.
[00:20:21]  Yeah, yeah, yeah.
[00:20:21]  So it's again, he's wealthy for normal people's standards, but from the standards of the aristocracy, Robert E. Lee's dad on his own isn't going to get the big payday, right?
[00:20:31]  Now, the Lee's put a lot of stock in being farmers.
[00:20:33]  That is how they identify.
[00:20:35]  And it is important to note that when rich white people in this period talk about being farmers, they are not doing any real farmers.
[00:20:42]  They're not farmers.
[00:20:43]  Yeah, absolutely not.
[00:20:44]  And one of the major sources for this episode is an excellent biography of Lee by Alan Guelso.
[00:20:50]  And I'm going to read a quote from that now talking about the degree to which these people were farmers.
[00:20:55]  And he's talking about Lee's family and his cousins.
[00:20:57]  The Lee's, Taylos, and Carters never owned fewer than 50 slaves each across the decades of the 18th century, while Robert Carter owned 345 slaves, John Taylor, 173, and George Touberville, 68.
[00:21:09]  Thomas Lee had, at varying times, owned between 60 and 100 slaves at Stratford.
[00:21:14]  And as late as 1782, 83 slaves worked for Thomas Lee's successors there.
[00:21:18]  But these grandees were not necessarily prospering on their land.
[00:21:21]  Although Virginians had made early fortunes in the 17th century through tobacco, the demand for Indian weed declined throughout the 18th century, as had the nutrients in the soil of the neck that supported it.
[00:21:31]  Few people in England, complained Richard Henry Lee in the 1760s, understood how much labor is required on the Virginian estate and how poor the produce.
[00:21:40]  Interestingly, the great plantations turned to growing wheat, fodder, and pork for export to the West Indies, where they could be fed to the slave and animal populations of the sugar islands, whose vastly wealthier owners declined to waste arable sugar lands on growing food.
[00:21:53]  So that is what that is what the Lee family farming goes towards is to feed slave plantations growing sugar cheaply, right?
[00:22:02]  That is, that is where their family money comes from.
[00:22:05]  Yeah.
[00:22:06]  So like, I did a quick little Google search.
[00:22:08]  I want to make sure I got the numbers right.
[00:22:10]  Like just to understand like the economy of the time, I feel like, you know, with anything, the further away from us, like timeline-wise, the more like narnia it becomes to us.
[00:22:22]  Like we don't really understand like one, how recent it was and two, like the connections of it.
[00:22:27]  So like you just said somebody had 385 slaves.
[00:22:32]  Like and a slave at the time to purchase a slave was about like $150, $160.
[00:22:39]  And if you adjust that to like inflation, like you could, it could be like $3,200 a person.
[00:22:47]  Like that to purchase, you know, and obviously you're not paying for the labor, but to have, so, so to have a workforce of 300 people want to have the land acreage to even if you're putting them in slave shacks, you still have to house them.
[00:23:06]  They're still in a slave shack.
[00:23:08]  Yeah.
[00:23:08]  And they're still functioning on your land.
[00:23:12]  Like it is a, it is a lot of money.
[00:23:16]  And you're generating a lot of wealth.
[00:23:19]  And like you said, it's like for any of their lifestyle to exist, which I'm fast forwarding, but like to get to the lost cause shit, but like all of the whole southern gentlemen, southern gentle shit clearly means they're not working.
[00:23:35]  Like, you know what I'm saying?
[00:23:37]  And your whole lifestyle only works if you got enough money to support this type of labor to do the labor that generates the money to live the lifestyle you live.
[00:23:49]  Yeah.
[00:23:50]  And I also want to, I also want to note something, which is that like you talk about like it costs about like 3,500 bucks a piece, something like that for each of these enslaved people.
[00:23:59]  Even that kind of understates how expensive this is and how rare it is.
[00:24:04]  Right.
[00:24:04]  Because not just like that makes it seem like, well, a middle class person might be able to have like slaves working their land, which wasn't really the case often because like most people just don't have money.
[00:24:17]  We're going to have a whiskey rebellion right after the U.S. is independent.
[00:24:20]  And it's part of the whiskey rebellion is that like whiskey is currency because people just don't have money.
[00:24:26]  You know, like poor white people do not actually have money in this period.
[00:24:30]  Yeah.
[00:24:30]  So like the people who have slaves are so far above the norm.
[00:24:34]  Yeah.
[00:24:34]  Because like you said, like there isn't like this is pre-industrial revolution.
[00:24:37]  Like there's no, you don't go to the office to work and you get a paycheck.
[00:24:42]  No, you grow your food and you take care of your family and you hopefully chop down some timber and sell it at the corner, but you, there's no jobs for you to be able to, like you said, to have a middle class thing to be like, oh, I'll just save up 160.
[00:24:57]  I'll save up 3K.
[00:24:58]  It take like two months.
[00:24:59]  Yeah.
[00:24:59]  No, you have to have a job for that.
[00:25:01]  Like there is no jobs.
[00:25:03]  Yeah.
[00:25:03]  Yeah.
[00:25:04]  And now, and again, we also state like these people are rich, but rich means a different thing because most of them are really bad at running these plantations, especially after a couple of generations.
[00:25:14]  So they're rich in land and rich in the number of enslaved people they have, but they are also generally cash poor.
[00:25:21]  Part of keeping up socially in the culture of rich plantation owners is going horribly into debt.
[00:25:26]  And this is a holdover.
[00:25:27]  This is something they inherit from the English aristocracy, right?
[00:25:30]  You can't get be given money as an aristocrat.
[00:25:33]  That's dishonorable, but you can take loans, often from other aristocrats and the like.
[00:25:38]  And this is what all of these big families, including the Lees, would do to maintain these big, palatial, beautiful manners that are such a part of this imagined like southern heritage.
[00:25:47]  All of this is taken on with debt, right?
[00:25:50]  This is like such a thing.
[00:25:52]  There's this Anglican parson, Jonathan Bucher, who lives in the neck for a while and preaches there.
[00:25:57]  And he later said of his time there, I can hardly remember a time when I did not owe sums larger than my credit might seem worth.
[00:26:04]  All I have to offer in vindication of it is that determined as always to raise myself in the world, I had not the patience to wait for the slow savings of a humble station.
[00:26:12]  And I fancied I could get into a hire only by being taken notice of by people of condition, which was not to be done without my making a certain appearance.
[00:26:20]  So all of these people, no matter how wealthy they are on paper, most of them are like desperately in debt and they're in debt purely because they're trying to keep up with each other.
[00:26:30]  They're trying to like, it's all about image.
[00:26:32]  Like the degree to which this is shallow and irresponsible and always based on a house of cards is not discussed enough when we talk about the South.
[00:26:41]  Exactly.
[00:26:41]  Yeah.
[00:26:42]  Yeah.
[00:26:42]  That, that, and that, and that legacy of like, So let's take our favorite person, Elon.
[00:26:51]  Yeah, this guy gets a contract from NASA to be like, hey, we want to build, want you to build our next four spaceships.
[00:26:57]  And it's like, okay, dope.
[00:26:59]  It's going to cost me $7 billion to build these ships.
[00:27:06]  He doesn't just go to the bank and swipe his card.
[00:27:09]  Like he doesn't have $7 billion.
[00:27:12]  He goes to someone else and says, hey, I got this PO, I got this purchase order for these things and I'm going to make this much money.
[00:27:21]  Will you give me the money to make this?
[00:27:24]  But he ain't got it.
[00:27:25]  Like, I can't stress this enough.
[00:27:27]  They don't have the money.
[00:27:29]  Yeah.
[00:27:29]  No, it's important to note that.
[00:27:33]  Yeah.
[00:27:33]  So this is all going to be important also for just understanding what happens to Robert's father and how it influences the man he's going to become.
[00:27:39]  And Robert E. Lee's daddy was Richard Henry Lee III.
[00:27:43]  He graduates from law school in 1773.
[00:27:46]  But as you can guess from the time, he's kind of diverted from serving as a lawyer by the outbreak of what will become the American Revolution.
[00:27:53]  Henry is a hot-headed young man and like his ancestor, insecure about being born without the expectation of a great inheritance.
[00:28:01]  He saw in war with England an opportunity to make himself into a great man, like his ancestor had done after the Norman conquest.
[00:28:10]  Hey, everybody, Robert here.
[00:28:11]  Quick correction.
[00:28:12]  I misidentified in the original edit of this Richard Henry Lee as Robert E. Lee's father.
[00:28:17]  Henry Lee III was Robert E. Lee's father.
[00:28:20]  Sorry, that was something I flagged during editing and then forgot to tell to the editor.
[00:28:24]  So this one's all on me.
[00:28:26]  Anyway, Robert E. Lee's dad was Henry Lee III.
[00:28:28]  And to his credit, Richard Henry Lee is not just talk.
[00:28:32]  He joins the army.
[00:28:33]  He becomes a captain in the Dragoons, which is like a mounted infantryman, and is an excellent soldier.
[00:28:40]  That is one thing you have to give the man.
[00:28:42]  The Lee's are all as foot soldiers, as grunts, really, even Robert E. Lee is a really good, like lower level officer.
[00:28:49]  Like when we talk about him being incompetent, it's as a commanding general.
[00:28:53]  But like they are all good at normal soldierly jobs.
[00:28:57]  And Henry shows his skill particularly as a scout.
[00:29:00]  He is a small unit commander.
[00:29:01]  He's basically an early special forces guy, right?
[00:29:04]  He's leading these.
[00:29:06]  Yeah, yeah, his dad.
[00:29:07]  Yeah, okay.
[00:29:08]  Yeah.
[00:29:08]  He's leading these small units of scouts, often doing ambushes and the like on small British units, supply depots.
[00:29:16]  And he kind of gets a reputation for this almost suicidal disregard for his own safety.
[00:29:21]  He earns the attention of George Washington after he takes a 10-man unit out and they are ambushed by 200 British cavalry and somehow fight off the ambush.
[00:29:32]  Yeah, he's good at fighting, right?
[00:29:34]  And Washington is kind of like, well, shit, this guy needs to be in my inner circle.
[00:29:40]  Henry Lee earns the nickname Light Horse Harry.
[00:29:43]  And in 1779, he achieves one of his greatest successes, marching a small unit of men 30 miles in the driving rain to attack a much larger British garrison, armed only with bayonets.
[00:29:53]  They secure the element of surprise and take 158 men prisoners.
[00:29:57]  Congress minted him a special gold medal.
[00:30:00]  This is an extremely rare decoration for the period.
[00:30:02]  There's like seven of them given during the war.
[00:30:05]  And then he's sent south to fight alongside Nathaniel Greene.
[00:30:08]  And he basically, his unit is like the eyes of the Southern Revolutionary Army, right?
[00:30:14]  The southern colonies had been occupied by British forces, and Greene and Lee carried out a successful campaign to retake them.
[00:30:20]  Lighthorse Harry played a crucial role here, cutting off supply lines, raiding depots, and forward bases.
[00:30:26]  Now, he's a good soldier, but he is not a good person.
[00:30:29]  He is not overly concerned with the niceties of wartime ethics.
[00:30:33]  From an article in the Gettysburg Compiler, quote, during the war, he was known for his brutal tactics.
[00:30:38]  In 1778, he assisted General Anthony Wayne in capturing a fort at Stony Point, New York, where he caught three deserters, one of which he ordered to be hanged and decapitated.
[00:30:47]  He then sent the deserters' decapitated head to Washington.
[00:30:50]  He also interrogated a loyalist prisoner in North Carolina by pressing a red-hot shovel to his feet to get information out of him.
[00:30:56]  God damn it.
[00:30:57]  So this guy kills people.
[00:30:58]  He puts heads on like pipes and shit.
[00:31:01]  He's torturing prisoners.
[00:31:03]  He's not a nice man.
[00:31:04]  Dude, dude's ancient with his day.
[00:31:08]  So despite these war crimes, Lee ends the war as one of the USA's first great military heroes.
[00:31:15]  On the strength of this, he's elected to the Continental Congress in 1785 and he partakes in Virginia's Constitutional Convention in 1787, where he plays a crucial role in talking his neighbors in Virginia into ratifying the Constitution.
[00:31:28]  He becomes governor.

=== Torture And Decapitation Tales (03:22) ===

[00:31:29]  I think it's a good thing to stop.
[00:31:31]  And you said he became governor.
[00:31:33]  You said the guy that like decapitated.
[00:31:35]  Yeah.
[00:31:35]  Oh, he loves that shit.
[00:31:37]  Yeah.
[00:31:37]  And then sent heads in a bag was a part of the Constitutional Convention.
[00:31:41]  Yeah.
[00:31:42]  Oh, yeah.
[00:31:42]  Governor.
[00:31:42]  Like, yeah.
[00:31:43]  Old baghead.
[00:31:44]  Old baghead.
[00:31:45]  Old baghead, right?
[00:31:47]  I was like, you better, you better put him on there because you don't want to piss him off.
[00:31:52]  You know who doesn't cut the heads off of prisoners and stick them on pipes.
[00:31:57]  Oh, man.
[00:31:58]  I mean, I sure do hope not.
[00:32:00]  Yeah.
[00:32:00]  I hope our sponsors don't do that.
[00:32:02]  Although if they do, maybe those prisoners had it coming, you know?
[00:32:05]  If they do, I just want them.
[00:32:07]  If they do, I just want you to know that we at Hoolib Politics love everything y'all sell.
[00:32:12]  We believe in everything you do.
[00:32:14]  Yeah.
[00:32:14]  Yeah.
[00:32:15]  Great.
[00:32:15]  This is good.
[00:32:22]  There's two golden rules that any man should live by.
[00:32:26]  Rule one, never mess with a country girl.
[00:32:29]  You play stupid games, you get stupid prizes.
[00:32:32]  And rule two, never mess with her friends either.
[00:32:36]  We always say, trust your girlfriends.
[00:32:39]  I'm Anna Sinfield, and in this new season of The Girlfriends...
[00:32:43]  Oh my God, this is the same man.
[00:32:45]  A group of women discover they've all dated the same prolific con artist.
[00:32:50]  I felt like I got hit by a truck.
[00:32:52]  I thought, how could this happen to me?
[00:32:54]  The cops didn't seem to care.
[00:32:56]  So they take matters into their own hands.
[00:32:59]  I said, oh, hell no.
[00:33:00]  I vowed I will be his last target.
[00:33:03]  He's going to get what he deserves.
[00:33:07]  Listen to the girlfriends.
[00:33:09]  Trust me, babe.
[00:33:10]  On the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
[00:33:20]  Hey, I'm Nora Jones, and I love playing music with people so much that my podcast called Playing Along is back.
[00:33:25]  I sit down with musicians from all musical styles to play songs together in an intimate setting.
[00:33:30]  Every episode's a little different, but it all involves music and conversation with some of my favorite musicians.
[00:33:36]  Over the past two seasons, I've had special guests like Dave Grohl, Levy, Mavis Staples, Remy Wolf, Jeff Tweedy, really too many to name.
[00:33:45]  And this season, I've sat down with Alessia Cara, Sarah McLaughlin, John Legend, and more.
[00:33:50]  Check out my new episode with Josh Grobin.
[00:33:53]  You related to the Phantom at that point.
[00:33:56]  Yeah, I was definitely the Phantom in that.
[00:33:58]  That's so funny.
[00:34:00]  Shari stay with me each night, each morning.
[00:34:08]  Say you love me.
[00:34:11]  You know I.
[00:34:13]  So come hang out with us in the studio and listen to Playing Along on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
[00:34:20]  I'm Lori Siegel, and on Mostly Human, I go beyond the headlines with the people building our future.
[00:34:26]  This week, an interview with one of the most influential figures in Silicon Valley, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman.
[00:34:33]  I think society is going to decide that creators of AI products bear a tremendous amount of responsibility to products we put out in the world.
[00:34:39]  From power to parenthood.
[00:34:41]  Kids, teenagers, I think they will need a lot of guardrails around AI.
[00:34:45]  This is such a powerful and such a new thing.
[00:34:47]  From addiction to acceleration.
[00:34:49]  The world we live in is a competitive world, and I don't think that's going to stop.

=== Sam Altman AI Responsibility (15:34) ===

[00:34:52]  Even if you did a lot of redistribution, you know, we have a deep desire to excel and be competitive and gain status and be useful to others.
[00:35:00]  And it's a multiplayer game.
[00:35:03]  What does the man who has extraordinary influence over our lives have to say about the weight of that responsibility?
[00:35:09]  Find out on Mostly Human.
[00:35:11]  My highest order bit is to not destroy the world with AI.
[00:35:14]  Listen to Mostly Human on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
[00:35:25]  And we're back.
[00:35:27]  So that's a pretty full resume for Lighthorse Harry, but we're just actually getting started on this guy because after the war ends, his life veers very quickly from like military hero to hilarious failure.
[00:35:40]  And this is because he's one of these guys.
[00:35:42]  You get these not uncommonly that are like, they're great in war.
[00:35:46]  They're really good soldiers, at least in terms of their like effectiveness in combat.
[00:35:51]  But outside of war, they just are completely useless.
[00:35:55]  Now, there were always some signs of the man's weaknesses.
[00:35:58]  Obviously, he took too many risks.
[00:35:59]  He actually, that big raid he carried out that he won an award for, he got court-martialed for it too, because some people in his command were like, yeah, it worked, but he risked a bunch of men's lives on what shouldn't have worked.
[00:36:11]  Like this was, we shouldn't, we should not award people for being this reckless.
[00:36:15]  In 1782, Lee resigns his commission in the Continental Army because he's angry that he's unappreciated.
[00:36:21]  And again, this man got a gold medal awarded to seven dudes total in the entire war.
[00:36:26]  That they made.
[00:36:27]  Custom-made gold medal.
[00:36:28]  He's not really unappreciated.
[00:36:30]  I think what it is, reading between the lines, he's frustrated that he's not George Washington.
[00:36:34]  Like he loves Washington.
[00:36:36]  They're close buddies and like Washington's his patron kind of.
[00:36:40]  But you get the feeling he's like, why does Washington get to be the father of the country and not me?
[00:36:44]  I was a really good soldier.
[00:36:45]  Get off hands for y'all.
[00:36:47]  Yeah, exactly.
[00:36:48]  Shit, man.
[00:36:48]  And I think that's what I think.
[00:36:49]  And you do get wood teeth.
[00:36:51]  Yeah.
[00:36:52]  I think this insecurity, this is going to drive the Washington insecurity.
[00:36:55]  It's going to drive Robert E. Lee as well.
[00:36:57]  These were not actually wood teeth.
[00:36:58]  No, no, they sure weren't.
[00:37:00]  No players.
[00:37:02]  But this insecurity is going to drive Henry Lee as well.
[00:37:07]  So Washington, for his part, considered Lee a reliable officer and had an opportunity to make him feel appreciated and also betray the spirit of the revolution at the same time.
[00:37:18]  In 1794, a bunch of Pennsylvania farmers started protesting against attacks on whiskey, which was their primary form of currency.
[00:37:25]  Despite the fact that their grievances absolutely mirrored the ones that had sparked the revolution, Washington, now that he's in charge of a country, sends the army in to crack down.
[00:37:34]  This is the whiskey rebellion, and Henry Lee is the guy who's going to command that army.
[00:37:39]  Now, while the actual rebellion itself had a few clashes and a small number of deaths, Harry's not involved in that.
[00:37:45]  By the time he gets there with the army, he's basically there to swing the nation's newly tumenescent dick around until everybody goes home.
[00:37:51]  You know, he like scares them into with an army, right?
[00:37:55]  Yeah.
[00:37:55]  That is the end of his military career.
[00:37:58]  And now that he had earned a position of what he saw would be everlasting respect and fame in the heart of the new nation, he sat down to accomplish the true goal of any ambitious man, making a bunch of fucking money.
[00:38:09]  Now, unfortunately, he's terrible at this.
[00:38:11]  He knows nothing of farming.
[00:38:13]  He knows nothing of business.
[00:38:14]  So his attempts to get rich devolve into a series of incompetent get-rich-quick schemes.
[00:38:19]  These seem to have been inspired in part by the advice of George Washington.
[00:38:23]  In letters, Washington warned Henry that investments in such hazardous and perishable articles as Negroes, stock, and chattels were prone to be swept off by innumerable disasters.
[00:38:34]  Thus, an enterprising man with very little money should invest in the rich backlands in the new settlements and wait patiently for them to appreciate.
[00:38:42]  So that's pretty bad.
[00:38:45]  Yeah, don't buy no Washington.
[00:38:47]  Yeah, don't buy no slaves, man.
[00:38:49]  That's gonna be out of style, man.
[00:38:51]  It's just too much work, homie.
[00:38:52]  Like slaves die.
[00:38:54]  They die, bro.
[00:38:55]  It's like, yeah, gold rush, like millionaires were the shovel salesmen.
[00:38:59]  Like, bro, like, you know, you gotta think a little, you know what I'm saying?
[00:39:02]  You're gonna be out here panning for gold.
[00:39:03]  Well, they got to use pans.
[00:39:05]  So why don't you sell them the pans?
[00:39:06]  Yeah.
[00:39:07]  Damn.
[00:39:07]  And then we see between Henry and George Washington, we see the difference between a smart bad man and a dumb bad man.
[00:39:13]  Yes, right.
[00:39:14]  George Washington is a smart bad man.
[00:39:15]  He's good at making money.
[00:39:17]  Like, Henry Lee is a dumb bad man.
[00:39:20]  And he is, he tries to follow this advice, but he is dog shit at picking real estate.
[00:39:25]  And rather than slow, sober investments, he approached his finances the same way he approached war with a series of risky gambles.
[00:39:31]  Here's the Gettysburg compiler.
[00:39:33]  One of these schemes was to build a canal in Great Falls, Virginia, that would link the United States to Western lands on the other side of the Alleghenies.
[00:39:40]  He bought 500 acres around Great Falls that he hoped would make into a city named Matildaville, named after his first wife and second cousin, Matilda Lee, who died in 1790.
[00:39:50]  Neither the city nor the canal came to fruition.
[00:39:52]  He tried to get out of debt by borrowing more money and buying more land, but he only ended up digging himself deeper.
[00:39:57]  He started selling property he did not even own, and he put up chains on the door of his house to keep creditors out.
[00:40:03]  He became very mobile in the early years of the 1800s, hardly staying at home in order to keep from paying his debts.
[00:40:09]  He was the bill collectors.
[00:40:11]  He has ratcheted.
[00:40:13]  He is such a redneck.
[00:40:14]  Like, first off, marrying your second cousin and trying to leave a town after her.
[00:40:18]  And then, like, yeah, hiding from bill collectors.
[00:40:21]  Hey, don't answer the phone, baby.
[00:40:23]  Hey, don't answer the phone.
[00:40:24]  She ain't gonna go to joke.
[00:40:25]  Yeah, don't answer the no and don't answer the phone.
[00:40:29]  Look, they're gonna get their money.
[00:40:30]  I get it on too.
[00:40:31]  They get to you next Tuesday.
[00:40:34]  And that's like my auntie.
[00:40:36]  Look, as a southerner, I'm not proud of this heritage, but this is definitely our heritage.
[00:40:42]  Like, hiding from the bill collectors, selling things you don't really own.
[00:40:48]  Yeah, that's scant.
[00:40:50]  That's scant.
[00:40:51]  Yes.
[00:40:53]  I was like, okay, wait.
[00:40:54]  Of all the things you said, I'm like, yeah, that's the realest shit.
[00:40:56]  Yeah.
[00:40:57]  Everything else you're weirdo, but that's real.
[00:40:59]  As a child who grew up on a farm in Oklahoma, that I knew like 40 of those guys.
[00:41:04]  Listen, let me tell you something.
[00:41:06]  All my friends in elementary school had bad credit because the electric bill was in our name.
[00:41:12]  You know what I'm saying?
[00:41:13]  Because they just, you know, mama put the gas bill in the oldest son's name.
[00:41:18]  And this, because we just try to like, look, they won't get me no more power.
[00:41:22]  So, yeah.
[00:41:26]  So despite owning on paper somewhere around a million acres at the height of his investments, which is an enormous, that's bigger than multiple countries today.
[00:41:35]  Yes.
[00:41:35]  Henry Lee never realized any return on his investments.
[00:41:39]  The towns and canals he speculated on never came to pass, and his creditors came calling long before he could flip them 20 years down the line as Washington had advised.
[00:41:47]  His first wife, Matilda, died midway through his long road to going broke.
[00:41:51]  He'd already sold off most of her inheritance, a plantation in Stratford, to pay off his own debts.
[00:41:56]  Showing a surprising degree of fortitude, while she was dying, Matilda signed a trust with two of her cousins as executors.
[00:42:04]  So the remainder of her inherited property would pass on to her sons with Henry when they were old enough.
[00:42:09]  This meant she was basically, her last act was like, my husband cannot get what's left of my property.
[00:42:15]  He will just waste it being a dipshit.
[00:42:18]  Smart.
[00:42:19]  That is smart, right?
[00:42:20]  Yes.
[00:42:21]  This does put Henry in a desperate state, though.
[00:42:23]  His bills were come due, and legally, there was no one he could pressure to sell her properties.
[00:42:28]  So he remarried.
[00:42:29]  That's how he decides to get out of debt.
[00:42:31]  He marries somebody rich, right?
[00:42:34]  Look here.
[00:42:35]  Here's what we go do.
[00:42:36]  Okay.
[00:42:39]  Let's just freshen up a little bit.
[00:42:41]  Okay.
[00:42:42]  Maybe show off a few of them heads I chopped off and just find us a new dame.
[00:42:48]  Yeah.
[00:42:50]  What a respectable, honorable man.
[00:42:53]  So, Leo.
[00:42:54]  What a real one.
[00:42:55]  Yeah.
[00:42:57]  You simply have to give the man credit.
[00:43:00]  You look dog.
[00:43:00]  Yeah.
[00:43:01]  So, yeah.
[00:43:02]  Lee remarries using his cachet as a war hero to win the hand of Ann Hill Carter.
[00:43:08]  The Carters are a wealthy planter family, and Ann's father tried to protect her from Henry's or from Harry's, well, both is fine, profligacy by putting her inheritance into the equivalent of a trust.
[00:43:20]  And I'm going to quote from Robert E. Lee, A Life Here.
[00:43:22]  A trust fund that was to remain securely in Anne's name, free from the claim, demand, hindrance, or molestation of her husband, General Henry Lee, or his creditors.
[00:43:31]  Anne soon learned how well-founded her father's reservations about Harry Lee were.
[00:43:35]  In the short space of a fortnight, recalled her cousin Mariah Farley.
[00:43:38]  She awoke to a life of misery as every loose Carter penny she could beg from her family was soon thrown away upon his debts contracted previous to marriage.
[00:43:46]  By 1797, Henry's legal or financial situation was beyond repair, and he would spend the next few years juggling debts and loans, but he eventually loses the ability to keep up entirely and he goes on the run, hiding from his creditors.
[00:44:00]  It's during this period of Henry's life when he is a broken, failed shadow of himself that his third son comes into the world.
[00:44:08]  Robert Edward Lee.
[00:44:10]  That's our boy.
[00:44:10]  That's our, well, that's, that's our subject.
[00:44:13]  That's the subject.
[00:44:14]  Yeah.
[00:44:14]  Man, I like that origin sounds like, I mean, he's like better called Saul.
[00:44:22]  He's such a piece of shit.
[00:44:23]  It's so funny.
[00:44:25]  Fucking douchebag.
[00:44:27]  Like you're looking for a sugar mama.
[00:44:29]  And like, yeah, like, and the sugar mama's daddy was like, uh, this nigga?
[00:44:36]  Like, this yo, dude?
[00:44:38]  Bobby Lee is like a goodie to, he's a goodie two-shoes within an evil society.
[00:44:42]  So he's still doing bad stuff, but he is a goodie two-shoes.
[00:44:45]  When I found out about what a piece of shit his dad was like, oh, thank God.
[00:44:48]  We, we really needed something fun to lead into this one.
[00:44:50]  Yeah, yeah, we really did.
[00:44:52]  Cause, yeah, this is like, I, this history, I had no idea about.
[00:44:56]  And I am, it fills me with so much joy to just just how just how ain't shit that man was.
[00:45:06]  Yeah, it's, it's funny.
[00:45:07]  There's a Christmas movie that my mom always had us watch that actually, I mean, it's got some great stuff.
[00:45:12]  It's got Bing Crosby and what's Danny Kay in it, White Christmas.
[00:45:17]  And there's a line in there.
[00:45:18]  The plot is these guys were all in a unit together in World War II, and then they become famous entertainers.
[00:45:23]  They meet their old commanding general, and he's like sunk all of his money into this resort in Vermont that like is hemorrhaging money.
[00:45:31]  And one of like, one of his, his like workers compares him to Lighthorse Harry.
[00:45:36]  But he's like Lighthorse Harry, but he's like charging off into debt.
[00:45:39]  And I didn't realize like, oh, that was just a reference to the fact that Lighthorse Harry was a piece of shit who was like wasted all of his money on bad investments.
[00:45:47]  Good on you.
[00:45:48]  White Christmas with the historical accuracy.
[00:45:51]  You know what I'm saying?
[00:45:51]  Throwing a little dagger in there for you to go Google later.
[00:45:54]  I love it.
[00:45:54]  Funny.
[00:45:54]  Funny.
[00:45:55]  So Robert Edward Lee was born January 19th, 1807 at Stratford Hall Plantation.
[00:46:02]  The year after Robert was born, Henry went to debtor's prison for a year, right?
[00:46:07]  So Bobby Lee is one years old when his dad goes to debtor's prison.
[00:46:11]  He was like, you better have my money today.
[00:46:15]  And it's basically he was tired of being on the run and hiding.
[00:46:19]  So he's like, look, if you put me in prison for a year, can I get out of some of these debts?
[00:46:25]  Anne is left to look after Henry's two sons from his first marriage and the five children he'd left her with.
[00:46:31]  Okay, so you, you, you're, you're hundreds and hundreds of dollars in debt.
[00:46:35]  I'm a big, I'm a big separate checking accounts guy.
[00:46:39]  You know, like, yes, it's just best to keep that out of the room.
[00:46:41]  Listen, I'm married 14 years.
[00:46:43]  She got her own account.
[00:46:44]  I got her own account.
[00:46:45]  We got to count the bills come from.
[00:46:47]  Don't nobody argue over it.
[00:46:48]  What she's, when she, if she, if 72 Amazon packages come to my door, that wasn't out of, that's her account.
[00:46:54]  She buy whatever she want.
[00:46:56]  Now, I judge her from buying at Amazon, you know what I'm saying?
[00:46:59]  But the point is, you know what I'm saying?
[00:47:01]  That's her money.
[00:47:02]  I was waiting for the, for the shade.
[00:47:04]  I saw it in your eyes.
[00:47:05]  You saw it in my eyes.
[00:47:06]  Yeah.
[00:47:06]  I'm like, I don't know why you keep ordering from that evil corporation.
[00:47:10]  And she says, shut your whole ass because my wife's a gangster.
[00:47:15]  Anyway.
[00:47:15]  So Bobby Lee, 1807, Stratford Hell Plantation.
[00:47:19]  Yeah.
[00:47:19]  And so, you know, not long after Henry gets out of prison, his oldest son from the first marriage that he'd had to Matilda comes into his inheritance, the property they're living on, Stratford.
[00:47:30]  And the way Guelzo depicts it, Henry's new wife is kind of, Mary is uncomfortable living under a roof that's not hers.
[00:47:37]  So they put the family financi into kind of order, right, to where they're not completely drowning.
[00:47:43]  They sell off a bunch of stuff and then they move to Alexandria.
[00:47:47]  This is done out of a degree of desperation.
[00:47:49]  The family no longer has a plantation house, nor could they afford one.
[00:47:54]  They had also lost most of their enslaved people.
[00:47:57]  During their last days at Stratford, they probably had around 30 human beings enslaved attending to their needs.
[00:48:03]  By the time they moved to Alexandria, they had sold all but six, three of whom they hired out to make money to pay Harry's debts.
[00:48:10]  So, which, by the way, super fun.
[00:48:13]  Like, that's who's actually trying to like make up for his horrible financial decisions is the people that they own.
[00:48:19]  Yeah.
[00:48:19]  Not an uncommon situation with the landed gentry here.
[00:48:23]  Yeah.
[00:48:23]  Now, Harry blames his financial situation on Thomas Jefferson, and in doing so, became the first great American hero to blame the Democratic Party for his own fuck ups.
[00:48:32]  Yeah.
[00:48:33]  I was like, wait, you got to connect that dot for me.
[00:48:35]  Yeah.
[00:48:36]  Thomas Jefferson, like, did he know the guy?
[00:48:38]  Like, wait, connect this dot.
[00:48:39]  I mean, I think they did, but his argument is basically their financial policies are why none of my investments worked out.
[00:48:45]  No, that's not the case, lighthorse Harry, you piece of shit.
[00:48:48]  Fucking Demerats.
[00:48:50]  Yeah, he called the Democrats that party which has consummated the ruin of the most glorious republic the sun ever shone on.
[00:48:58]  And now it's obvious that the move to Alexandria was a source of shame for Henry and probably the other men in his family.
[00:49:04]  Yet Robert's not actually written by him memoir brushes over this entirely, saying, in 1811, Henry Lee moved with his family to Alexandria for the purpose of educating his children.
[00:49:15]  There's nothing Henry Lee was less interested than than educating his kids.
[00:49:20]  He was barely there hiding from debt collectors.
[00:49:24]  Putting them buying a horse in Robert's name.
[00:49:26]  Yeah.
[00:49:26]  Is this guy?
[00:49:27]  Hey, this says the guy signing this doesn't know his ABCs yet.
[00:49:32]  And you get the feeling this, the fact that they have to move away from a plantation to live in the city is a source of enduring shame for the Lee family.
[00:49:40]  I found a biography written in the 1890s by Fitzhugh Lee, one of Robert's descendants, that says, this is all it says about the move.
[00:49:48]  Robert was four years old when his father removed the family to Alexandria.
[00:49:53]  Why did they do that?
[00:49:54]  Was it deep financial failure and shame?
[00:49:57]  Yeah.
[00:49:58]  Yeah, cool stuff.
[00:49:59]  So Harry's next and last attempt to get rich was to publish a memoir, one he actually wrote while in jail.
[00:50:06]  He hoped it would be a huge hit and like restore the family finances.
[00:50:09]  And it was widely read, but Henry learned a lesson that every writer eventually learns, which is that there's very little money in books.
[00:50:17]  But you are not George R.R. Martin, bro.
[00:50:19]  It's not going to work out for you.
[00:50:21]  You better get your advance and get out because that's all you go seek.

=== Henry Lee Memoir Struggles (02:44) ===

[00:50:26]  Relatable.
[00:50:27]  Yes.
[00:50:28]  He's got, man, I'm telling you, man, this guy's like, his seesaw is balancing out for me.
[00:50:33]  Because that's real.
[00:50:34]  That's real, too.
[00:50:37]  You know what else is real?
[00:50:39]  Yes, I do.
[00:50:40]  The products and services that support this podcast all real.
[00:50:46]  None of them are a money laundering scheme for the Sinaloa cartel.
[00:50:50]  That's not what sponsors this podcast, you know?
[00:50:52]  So don't think about it too much.
[00:50:59]  There's two golden rules that any man should live by.
[00:51:03]  Rule one, never mess with a country girl.
[00:51:07]  You play stupid games, you get stupid prizes.
[00:51:09]  And rule two, never mess with her friends either.
[00:51:13]  We always say, trust your girlfriends.
[00:51:17]  I'm Anna Sinfield, and in this new season of The Girlfriends.
[00:51:20]  Oh my God, this is the same man.
[00:51:23]  A group of women discover they've all dated the same prolific con artist.
[00:51:27]  I felt like I got hit by a truck.
[00:51:29]  I thought, how could this happen to me?
[00:51:31]  The cops didn't seem to care.
[00:51:33]  So they take matters into their own hands.
[00:51:36]  I said, oh, hell no.
[00:51:38]  I vowed I will be his last target.
[00:51:40]  He's going to get what he deserves.
[00:51:45]  Listen to the girlfriends.
[00:51:46]  Trust me, babe.
[00:51:47]  On the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
[00:51:57]  Hey, I'm Nora Jones, and I love playing music with people so much that my podcast called Playing Along is back.
[00:52:03]  I sit down with musicians from all musical styles to play songs together in an intimate setting.
[00:52:07]  Every episode's a little different, but it all involves music and conversation with some of my favorite musicians.
[00:52:13]  Over the past two seasons, I've had special guests like Dave Grohl, Leve, Mavis Staples, Remy Wolf, Jeff Tweedy, really too many to name.
[00:52:22]  And this season, I've sat down with Alessia Cara, Sarah McLaughlin, John Legend, and more.
[00:52:28]  Check out my new episode with Josh Grobin.
[00:52:31]  You related to the Phantom at that point.
[00:52:34]  Yeah, I was definitely the Phantom in that.
[00:52:36]  That's so funny.
[00:52:37]  Shari stay with me each night, each morning.
[00:52:45]  Say you love me.
[00:52:48]  You know I.
[00:52:50]  So come hang out with us in the studio and listen to Playing Along on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
[00:52:58]  I'm Laurie Siegel, and on Mostly Human, I go beyond the headlines with the people building our future.
[00:53:03]  This week, an interview with one of the most influential figures in Silicon Valley, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman.

=== West Point Admissions Shock (13:10) ===

[00:53:10]  I think society is going to decide that creators of AI products bear a tremendous amount of responsibility to products we put out in the world.
[00:53:16]  From power to parenthood.
[00:53:18]  Kids, teenagers, I think they will need a lot of guardrails around AI.
[00:53:22]  This is such a powerful and such a new thing.
[00:53:24]  From addiction to acceleration.
[00:53:26]  The world we live in is a competitive world, and I don't think that's going to stop, even if you get a lot of redistribution.
[00:53:31]  You know, we have a deep desire to excel and be competitive and gain status and be useful to others.
[00:53:37]  And it's a multiplayer game.
[00:53:40]  What does the man who has extraordinary influence over our lives have to say about the weight of that responsibility?
[00:53:46]  Find out on Mostly Human.
[00:53:48]  My highest order bit is to not destroy the world with AI.
[00:53:51]  Listen to Mostly Human on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
[00:54:03]  We're back.
[00:54:04]  So, Belize are now in Alexandria.
[00:54:06]  They wind up renting for a while this like two-bedroom apartment, basically, which is, that's not great for a family of the landed aristocracy.
[00:54:15]  Right.
[00:54:16]  You're a descendant of somebody that like fought with the norms and now you just have an apartment because you down bad.
[00:54:23]  Now, they move pretty quickly into a large house that's owned by some of Ann's relatives, which is why they're able to afford it, right?
[00:54:30]  Because they are broke.
[00:54:32]  This is not an uncomfortable situation.
[00:54:34]  Again, they're still doing better than 99% of people, but for Henry, it's intolerable.
[00:54:38]  During the War of 1812, which he opposed, he took a job providing security for a Federalist newspaper.
[00:54:45]  This was more dangerous than it sounds because the Jeffersonians, who he'd roundly criticized in his book, regularly attacked the editors.
[00:54:52]  This blew up in late July 1812.
[00:54:55]  After a series of attacks on the paper, Lee recommended surrendering and letting a local militia protect them in jail.
[00:55:01]  This proved bad advice as the mob just burst through the jail, killed one of Henry's colleagues, and slashed him with a sword.
[00:55:07]  They tried to blind him by pouring hot candle wax in his eyes.
[00:55:12]  Hot candle wax?
[00:55:13]  Yeah, fight your paper.
[00:55:15]  It's struggling.
[00:55:16]  Yeah.
[00:55:17]  Listen, dude, like, it's important to remember: okay, it's it as as ill-timed as this might sound, like, you know, we are collectively as a species vastly less violent than we were.
[00:55:34]  Yeah.
[00:55:35]  Like, yeah, yeah.
[00:55:37]  Like, don't get me wrong, violence has not been eradicated.
[00:55:40]  We ain't fully evolved yet, obviously, points wildly across the whole spectrum of our world right now.
[00:55:47]  However, they sliced a man with a machete and then poured hot like we were a violent, violent person.
[00:55:57]  Trying to blind him with hot candle wax.
[00:56:00]  That's creative bad.
[00:56:02]  Dog.
[00:56:03]  And it's funny, like his writing about this, he describes himself as so covered in bruises that he looks like a black man, right?
[00:56:10]  Like that's how Henry Lee describes his injuries, which does nicely evaporate my sympathy for him.
[00:56:17]  Yeah.
[00:56:17]  So there you go.
[00:56:18]  So there's that.
[00:56:19]  Like I said, it keeps balancing.
[00:56:20]  Like probably, never mind.
[00:56:23]  I've never known a guy before who I thought, like, yeah, maybe he should have been blinded by candle wax, but maybe he should have been blinded by candle wax.
[00:56:30]  Yeah.
[00:56:31]  So Robert E. Lee was four, again, when the family moves to Alexandria, and he's six when his father gets injured by that mob.
[00:56:39]  After getting injured, Henry makes the decision to abandon his family and move to the West Indies.
[00:56:45]  He's hoping, basically, he describes this like, I'm hoping that if I move to the West Indies, I'll recover from my injuries, which like, bro, I don't know how going to the tropics is going to help you with getting stabbed.
[00:56:55]  I was like, I'm not really sure how that's supposed to work.
[00:56:58]  It's too cold out here.
[00:56:59]  Let's just go down to where the weather's nice.
[00:57:01]  That does stab wound will heal and it's always confining.
[00:57:05]  This is a lot about medicine of the day that like a doctor's like, yeah, that stab wound will get better if you move to the tropics.
[00:57:11]  That seems like the solution.
[00:57:12]  Listen, listen, hear me out.
[00:57:14]  Sun, humidity, coconuts.
[00:57:18]  Yeah.
[00:57:18]  Just saying.
[00:57:20]  It does not work.
[00:57:21]  He wanders around for five years, mooching off of some friends from the war until he dies horribly when Robert E. Lee is just 11.
[00:57:29]  Now he's going to get buried back at home.
[00:57:31]  Lee will not visit his grave until he's a middle-aged man, which should tell you something about like the degree of esteem in which he holds his father.
[00:57:39]  What he thought of that dude.
[00:57:41]  Yeah.
[00:57:41]  Yeah.
[00:57:42]  Given all this, it probably will not surprise you to learn that the future famous General Lee is a mama's boy.
[00:57:48]  As Fitzhugh Lee wrote, if he was early trained in the way he should go, his mother trained him.
[00:57:53]  If he was always good, as his father wrote, she labored to keep him so.
[00:57:58]  Lee's own memoirs say just this about his childhood.
[00:58:02]  Persons are yet living who remember Robert Lee in those days of childhood and who have an abiding recollection of his thoughtfulness of character and of his earnestness in the performance of every duty.
[00:58:11]  So that is what you'll find from basically everybody.
[00:58:14]  He is a really dutiful kid.
[00:58:17]  He's very serious.
[00:58:18]  He doesn't really have a childhood, right?
[00:58:21]  And this is.
[00:58:22]  I have found that for like, and it's probably true in like a lot of our lives, like when you're, when your parents are like absolute messes and just chaos, like for you to just have a stable psyche, the children are usually square.
[00:58:38]  Yeah.
[00:58:38]  Because just like there's no, there's no stability.
[00:58:41]  So you have to like create your own stability by being as just square as possible.
[00:58:47]  You know?
[00:58:47]  Yeah.
[00:58:48]  Because when I, when I started getting into this, one thing that struck me as weird, Lee is a very well-documented man.
[00:58:55]  For one thing, he grew up in a time when people were taking documentation.
[00:58:59]  There's tons of letters from all of his family because of their social class.
[00:59:02]  There's a lot of people who knew him and who talked about him.
[00:59:05]  And there's almost no anecdotes about him as a kid.
[00:59:08]  And usually when that's the case, it's because of something being covered up.
[00:59:12]  But in this case, I think there's just, he is the head of the family from the time he's 11.
[00:59:18]  His job is managing the family businesses, being the man of the house.
[00:59:22]  I don't think he has time to be anything but just like a little, basically cleaning up his dad's mess, right?
[00:59:28]  That's his job starting at age 11.
[00:59:31]  When I was teaching, it sounds like, I mean, obviously it's not the same, but when I was teaching, there was this kid that used to like, I mean, I taught freshman and like he was, if he didn't, if he didn't drive a Cadillac to school at 13 or 14 years old, just driving, you know, he would be on his bike.
[00:59:52]  He'd show up like 10, 15 minutes late all the time.
[00:59:55]  Straight dude, but like always had his work, super respectful.
[00:59:58]  Hey, Mr. Petty, whatever that miss, here's my homework.
[01:00:00]  Just like, and I could not for the life of me figure out like why this little hood dude was so mature.
[01:00:07]  And, and, and number one, like, why are you driving a Cadillac at 14 years old?
[01:00:12]  Right.
[01:00:12]  And yeah, he was like, pop was an alcoholic.
[01:00:15]  He had to learn how to drive to go pick up his dad every night, you know, so he drove him home from like the bar, had to drop his little brother off at school, you know, before he got to school.
[01:00:24]  And he just had to be an adult already.
[01:00:27]  So I'm like, but also live, but he was just a hood kid.
[01:00:31]  So he was like, like, it wasn't like, you know, like, don't fuck with him.
[01:00:35]  Like, he, he went to shits, but like eventually I just stopped marking him tardy because I'm like, well, you're, you're adulting.
[01:00:42]  You're doing stuff.
[01:00:43]  Yeah.
[01:00:43]  You're doing shit.
[01:00:44]  Like you're adulting, bro.
[01:00:45]  Like, you're good, you know?
[01:00:46]  And that, that is Robert E. Lee in a nutshell.
[01:00:48]  His family's not like what we would call poor, right?
[01:00:51]  They're poor for rich people.
[01:00:53]  But he is, he is the man of the house.
[01:00:54]  And in addition to like needing to fix his disastrous financial situation, help his siblings, his mom is sick the whole time that he's, he's a kid.
[01:01:03]  So he's also, he's also her live-in nurse, you know?
[01:01:06]  And that's how he spends his childhood.
[01:01:08]  Most of them are.
[01:01:09]  Making him sympathetic, dude.
[01:01:10]  Yeah.
[01:01:11]  I mean, at this point, he's a kid, right?
[01:01:12]  He hasn't, he's not able to choose to, he hasn't, like, he hasn't done anything bad at this stage.
[01:01:17]  He's a child.
[01:01:19]  And most of what you get from his friends and family is a mix of a lot.
[01:01:22]  They will talk constantly about how handsome he is, right?
[01:01:25]  Which everybody does.
[01:01:26]  So I assume he actually was good looking, you know, for the time.
[01:01:30]  But they also would say he's like weirdly weighed down with duty for a boy so young.
[01:01:34]  Everyone notes, like it's peculiar how serious and dutiful he is.
[01:01:38]  And he's got, you know, a demanding childhood.
[01:01:41]  He would later describe himself in this period as my mother's outdoor agent and confidential messenger.
[01:01:46]  Now, one of the very rare anecdotes we do get of him as a child comes from that memoir.
[01:01:51]  Quote, the boy chanced during a vacation to find himself an invited guest in a house where these undesirable customs, I think they're talking about alcoholism, were kept up.
[01:02:00]  The host was a fascinating gentleman, possessed of all graces of mind and manner.
[01:02:03]  Yet while not dissipated, his mode of life was such as a shock to the sterner sense of morality of his youthful visitor.
[01:02:09]  Robert made no comment on what he saw, but his unspoken rebuke proved more efficacious than any words of reproach could have done.
[01:02:16]  The night before his departure, his host came to his bedside and in affecting language sought to excuse himself for the wild life into which he had fallen.
[01:02:23]  He offered his sorrow for the loss of those dearest to him as a reason for habits which he could not seek to defend.
[01:02:28]  And he impressively warned his young guests to beware of similar habits, advised him to persist in his commendable course of life, and earnestly promised that he would himself endeavor to reform, if but to render himself worthy of the respect and affection of so esteemable a character.
[01:02:44]  And this is kind of why the memoir says Lee is a teetotaler his whole life, right?
[01:02:48]  He's probably not very much inclined to abuse of alcohol or other narcotics because people do have access to other narcotics, right?
[01:02:55]  Opiate abuse is not uncommon in this period.
[01:02:57]  People are using nitrous oxide in this period of time, recreationally, which I like pre-revolutionary war, people are huffing Nash.
[01:03:06]  Fascinating shit.
[01:03:07]  Yeah.
[01:03:08]  And this, I think this, this seems to have an impact on him, right?
[01:03:11]  He's also, his mom is extremely religious.
[01:03:13]  She is, Mary Lee is the kind of religious that Christians in rural 1800s, Virginia, noted as being a little much, right?
[01:03:22]  So she is very serious about this.
[01:03:25]  Yeah.
[01:03:25]  And his other son, her other son, Smith Lee, recalled that she lectured them to, quote, repel every evil, by which she meant drugs and alcohol.
[01:03:33]  Yeah.
[01:03:33]  The Lee's are Episcopalian, which is like Catholicism with a worse set designer, right?
[01:03:38]  Yeah.
[01:03:39]  He was well educated for the day, and his mother hired him as a tutor hired him a tutor, telling him he'd regret it if he neglected to lay in a store of knowledge now while he was young, which is an odd way to look at an education, but not necessarily a bad one.
[01:03:52]  So there you go.
[01:03:53]  In 1823, Robert announced to his family that he wanted to attend West Point, which had become the nation's premier military academy.
[01:04:01]  His oldest brother was at Harvard, and his second oldest brother was a Navy man.
[01:04:05]  So it was surprising to his family that he chose to join the army and follow in his disgraced father's footsteps.
[01:04:10]  Again, joining the army is like doing the thing his dad did, and that does kind of like shock his mom a little bit because, like, he does not like his dad.
[01:04:19]  Yeah.
[01:04:20]  But yeah, so this is the thing he decides to do.
[01:04:23]  Anne enrolls him in a preparatory school to get a you have to get a West Point.
[01:04:28]  Now we think about it as like a school that teaches you how to be like a soldier in the general sense.
[01:04:33]  It's an engineering school in this point in time.
[01:04:35]  So she's, she has to get a serious math grounding, right?
[01:04:39]  In order to be able to compete at West Point.
[01:04:42]  Now, despite the fact that his mom puts in the effort to make sure he's able to get this grounding, she does not want him to go away to college.
[01:04:49]  She wails, How can I live without Robert?
[01:04:52]  He is both son and daughter to me, which says a lot about the family relationship, I think.
[01:04:57]  And he has siblings, right?
[01:04:59]  Yeah.
[01:04:59]  Yeah, he's got a daughter.
[01:05:00]  He's got a sister and he's got older brothers.
[01:05:03]  Now, gaining admissions to West Point would be the only time in Robert's life when the existence of his father is a positive.
[01:05:10]  And basically, and this is actually today, West Point still works this way, right?
[01:05:14]  That if you've got a family member who went or who was a successful officer in the military, you get their other officers and whatnot Whatnot, who knew them to write you letters of recommendation.
[01:05:24]  You know, like that's that's how people often get into West Point today.
[01:05:27]  Yeah, somebody in that admissions office saw that boy last name and was like, Oh, shit.
[01:05:30]  Did you head chopper?
[01:05:33]  Oh, I love the way he cut people's heads off.
[01:05:35]  Oh, dog, you remember that dude?
[01:05:36]  Dog, that boy crazy.
[01:05:37]  Yeah, we gotta let his son.
[01:05:38]  Yeah, he'd be cool.
[01:05:39]  Yeah, now, obviously, I actually don't think in this, like, this is a degree of nepotism, but given how much shit his dad put him through, I don't think it's unfair to like try to get something out of this relationship.
[01:05:51]  Yeah, but it is interesting.
[01:05:53]  In his memoir, they his biographers try to pretend this didn't happen.
[01:05:57]  They write the line, no one knew better than he that in a republic and in a great wall, a man's ancestry could not help him, but that place and promotion depended on individual merit, which, like, now he does get into West Point because of who his dad is.
[01:06:11]  But yeah, that's that's less on him and more on the start of the lost cause myth.
[01:06:16]  Like, he was completely self-made.
[01:06:18]  Well, not entirely.
[01:06:20]  I don't know, man.

=== Political Spectrum Primer Wrap (05:15) ===

[01:06:21]  Yeah.
[01:06:21]  These people ever are.
[01:06:22]  And prop, that's going to be part one for us.
[01:06:26]  Okay.
[01:06:26]  Again, not a lot of bastardry on Lee's side today.
[01:06:30]  Part two, a lot of bastardy from Robert E. Lee.
[01:06:33]  So don't worry.
[01:06:34]  We're getting into it.
[01:06:35]  This one hung a lot on his dad.
[01:06:37]  Yeah.
[01:06:38]  Glorious.
[01:06:39]  Yeah.
[01:06:41]  Did dad sound like he just sound like you know a Chuck from down the street.
[01:06:45]  Just yeah.
[01:06:48]  Just messy.
[01:06:49]  Like he is such a modern kind of scum dagger.
[01:06:52]  Yes.
[01:06:53]  Pretty funny.
[01:06:54]  Yes, exactly.
[01:06:55]  It's so there's it is so modern.
[01:06:58]  Yeah.
[01:06:58]  Like he's selling you VCRs that ain't his.
[01:07:02]  Oh my God.
[01:07:03]  This man would absolutely try to sell you steaks out of the back of a van.
[01:07:07]  Right.
[01:07:10]  Oh, so funny, dude.
[01:07:11]  Bobby Lee.
[01:07:13]  Bobby Lee.
[01:07:14]  So, Jason, Prop, you got me pluggables too plugged.
[01:07:19]  Do you have a podcast, maybe?
[01:07:21]  I do.
[01:07:22]  I have a podcast that's, yeah, man, that's kind of going to be your like your primer for the shit show that is like our political spectrum right now.
[01:07:34]  Hood politics with prop, man.
[01:07:36]  New season, we got music with it.
[01:07:39]  And yeah, man, it's like this year is no shortage of incredible things to talk about that can feel all over the place.
[01:07:47]  So we like really upped our game as far as like research, development.
[01:07:52]  Like, yeah, we really, we really put a foot on our gas this year with Hood Politics with Prop.
[01:07:55]  So like, please tap in with me.
[01:07:56]  Yeah.
[01:07:58]  Yeah.
[01:07:58]  Put your foot on the gas with prop and do a, uh, I forgot the name of that movie where the two women drive off, drive off the cliff together, but it's like Thelma and Louise.
[01:08:09]  Yeah.
[01:08:09]  Yeah.
[01:08:09]  Let's all do the podcast of that movie.
[01:08:12]  Why did you not know that?
[01:08:14]  I don't remember most names to pull.
[01:08:17]  I would plug Terraform, but like I'm out of money, so there's no more coffee left.
[01:08:22]  So like, I still got to buy more coffee first.
[01:08:25]  So like, but you could buy like hoodies there.
[01:08:27]  Like I got murdered.
[01:08:29]  So prop can buy coffee.
[01:08:30]  You could also plug Terraform the book.
[01:08:33]  Oh, yeah, which came from a book.
[01:08:35]  Yeah, Terraform, the poetry book.
[01:08:37]  I forgot.
[01:08:38]  Speaking of things that don't make you money, I put together a book called Terraform, Building a Livable World.
[01:08:44]  I think sort of, this is a rambling plug, but it's a plug for our network completely.
[01:08:50]  Like, I think one of the things that is unique about, and I mean, if you listen to this show, you probably already know, but like what's unique about our sort of collective of shows is it's equal parts, how the world is awful, and also the beauty of how it could be and people actually trying to make it better.
[01:09:10]  So it's like, it's both, you know what I'm saying?
[01:09:12]  So like Terraform is that too.
[01:09:14]  It's like, man, it's building a livable world.
[01:09:16]  And I think that's what like what we all share in our network.
[01:09:18]  Absolutely.
[01:09:20]  Well, that is going to do it for us for part one.
[01:09:22]  Check back in later this week where we will have part two of the Bobby Lee story.
[01:09:29]  So, until next time, I love some credit.
[01:09:34]  I love a minority of you, but if you assume you're in that, then maybe it'll make your day better.
[01:09:44]  Behind the Bastards is a production of CoolZone Media.
[01:09:47]  For more from CoolZone Media, visit our website, coolzonemedia.com, or check us out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
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