Behind the Bastards - Part Two: Robert E. Lee: A Lifetime of Failure

Feb. 15, 2024 - Behind the Bastards

01:28:47

Part Two: Robert E. Lee: A Lifetime of Failure

# west point wesley norris slavery arlington plantation confederacy george parks george washington parke custis john brown marble model mary custis mary norris nat turner rebellion robert e lee

Robert E. Lee's early life reveals a "Marble Model" whose perfectionism masked deep moral failures, particularly regarding slavery. As executor for his father-in-law George Washington Parke Custis, Lee delayed promised freedom to enslaved people by five years to pay debts, forcibly hiring them out and breaking families. When enslaved individuals like Wesley Norris fled, Lee ordered brutal whippings, allegedly personally lashing Mary Norris despite an overseer's refusal. This cruelty contrasts sharply with John Brown's abolitionism, exposing Lee not as a benevolent leader but as a cruel enforcer who ultimately chose to fight for the Confederacy, cementing a legacy defined by racial oppression rather than the gentility he projected. [Automatically generated summary]
[Read More]

Transcriber: nvidia/parakeet-tdt-0.6b-v2, sat-12l-sm, and large-v3-turbo

Large

Audio Only |

Scroll

Time	Text
Trust Your Girlfriends 00:02:09
	This is an iHeart podcast.
	Guaranteed human.
	When a group of women discover they've all dated the same prolific con artist, they take matters into their own hands.
	I vowed I will be his last target.
	He is not going to get away with this.
	He's going to get what he deserves.
	We always say that.
	Trust your girlfriends.
	Listen to the girlfriends.
	Trust me, babe.
	On the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
	I got you.
	I got you.
	I'm Laurie Siegel, and this is Mostly Human, a tech podcast through a human lens.
	This week, an interview with OpenAI CEO Sam Altman.
	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.
	An in-depth conversation with a man who's shaping our future.
	My highest order bit is to not destroy the world with AI.
	Listen to Mostly Human on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
	Hey, it's Nora Jones, and my podcast, Playing Along, is back with more of my favorite musicians.
	Check out my newest episode with Josh Groban.
	You related to the Phantom at that point.
	Yeah, I was definitely the Phantom in that.
	That's so funny.
	Shall we stay with me each night, each morning?
	Listen to Nora Jones is playing along on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
	Calls our media.
	What's inheriting wealth, my southern landed gentry?
	I don't know.
	I don't know.
	That's not a great, not a great intro.
	But anyway, Harry, Prop, welcome back.
	How are we feeling?
	Feeling good, man.
	Third cup of coffee.
	We're back in the game.
	Yeah.
	Ready to ride.
	Got some banana chips.
	Yeah.
	A little plantain.
	That'll make everybody forget my dog shit introduction for this.
Engineering Effective Officers 00:02:59
	Speaking of dog shit, you know what college is dog shit, prop.
	What college is dog shit?
	West Point.
	Man, just a whole pile of bedrock caca.
	I mean, I don't know.
	I don't know much about the actual objective.
	I'm sure it's a good question.
	Yeah, the only thing I know about West Point is like what's in the movies.
	Yes, yeah, exactly.
	Yeah.
	Yeah.
	Army college.
	It's a, you know, it's important to note, like, the reputation it has today is largely formed by, they call it the class the stars fell on.
	It was the West Point graduating class that had like Patton and Omar Bradley and I think Eisenhower, like all the all these guys who were like real big world dub-dub-dose fellas, like we're in the same class.
	Now, it's one of those things where like West Point today, it's the place where the U.S. military trains its most promising, or if you talk to enlisted men, its most frustrating officers, right?
	Yeah.
	In the early 1800s, when young Bobby Lee became a cadet, West Point was a lot smaller and like the country's not very old.
	So it doesn't have a huge, proud history.
	And it is extremely focused on one narrow sort of education, engineering, right?
	It is probably the best engineering school in the country.
	So when you think about West Point of Robert E. Lee's day, it's closer to MIT than the way we think about West Point now, right?
	And this makes a lot of sense if you understand 19th century warfare.
	Today, a huge amount of modern warfighting is like small unit tactics, right?
	How infantry clears buildings and like engages in firefights, does all this stuff, because with modern equipment and weaponry, all the different, the wide variety, everything from drones and rocket launchers to like standard small arms, there's a lot for small units to do.
	And a lot of shit revolves around that.
	So that's going to be a significant amount of training for any army officer.
	Back in this day, especially when Lee's in it, it's pretty much all smooth bores, right?
	So it's these muskets that they only really are very effective when you have a bunch of people all like marching and firing in unison.
	So there's not a lot for you to teach someone about like other than how to reload quickly, about like how to be a trooper in a formation beyond like marching and stuff.
	So if you want to teach people that way, point the gun that way.
	Yeah.
	If you're teaching people to be an officer, though, you want to teach them a lot about engineering and mathematics, about like the way in which things move, about physics.
	You want to be so that they can both know how artillery would work, where to position them, how to fire them, how to wield these blocks of men and have them like fire in ways that's going to be effective.
	Like that's all engineering is kind of the U.S. makes this decision pretty early on that like engineering is what's going to make our officers effective.
	And this is actually historically a good bet.
	You know, people, the Roman Empire, people talk a lot about, you know, every aspect but this, but like the reason Rome became an empire was not because its soldiers were like great individual fighters.
	It's because every soldier in the Roman legions was a combat engineer.
Politeness in Auschwitz 00:15:42
	Yeah.
	And like that's fucking useful.
	You know, they make roads and bridges.
	The scrub way to fight a war is stabbing another dude.
	The smart way to fight a war is building a wall around him and starving him to death.
	Yeah.
	A dude that a dude that gets to like a lake or a river and thinks, man, how are we going to get across that?
	And then he looks at a dude and he's like, we're going to build a bridge.
	We're going to build a fucking bridge across.
	Yeah, you just build a bridge?
	Like, yeah.
	Not just knocking down a tree and walking over the plate.
	No, we're going to build a bridge.
	And the U.S. at this point is an infant empire and it sees itself very much cut in the image of the old Roman Republic, which is another reason why all of these guys are engineers, right?
	So yeah, that's going to be the shit that like Lee does.
	He's going to Army nerd school and he does really well there.
	He's a great student.
	He's not the best in his class, but he's very close to it.
	He's also the most boring boy in the whole school.
	He didn't drink.
	He didn't gamble.
	He didn't like have fun.
	Oh, my God.
	He graduates second from his class and he's one of only six students in his graduating class that never receives a demerit.
	He gets the nickname the Marble Model as a result of that.
	Mr. Perfect Attendance.
	Yeah, exactly.
	Exactly.
	He gets an attendance award.
	And he gets called Marble Model a lot.
	And what they're saying there is that like, this is both like, yeah, it's kind of, he's kind of like exhausting and boring, but also like he is a good soldier.
	He's a reliable guy.
	So like people find him, like make fun of him a little bit, but he also is generally liked because you can trust Lee to do his job.
	Yeah, he's definitely a hall monitor, but if we were stuck outside, you want him with him because Nikki can follow directions and we'd be all right.
	Yes.
	And he's competent.
	He knows like how to do shit, right?
	Yeah.
	The mother of one of his peers found herself surprised that after meeting him, he was very human is what she describes.
	So that should give you some insight into how his classmates wrote home about him to their family.
	That's so funny.
	Yeah.
	Yo, he thought that.
	I didn't think he would breathe.
	Oh my gosh.
	How much shade is it when your homie's mama is like, wow, I don't know.
	I thought he was a little weird.
	Oh, it turns out like you're a regular kid.
	Yeah, he's a nice enough guy.
	I didn't expect that.
	Yeah, that's so funny.
	Yeah.
	Damn, your mom throwing shade.
	Later in life, one friend of the Lee family would state that she knew Robert's brother Smith Lee well, but she writes, quote, can anybody say they know his brother?
	I doubt it.
	He looks so cold and quiet and grand.
	And that's very common from people talking about Bobby Lee, right?
	He is perfectly polite.
	He has impeccable manners.
	He is the studious embodiment of southern gentility.
	And he plays his emotions so close to the chest that nobody, people don't really, everyone's kind of confused as like, is he just hiding his true self for polites or is there nothing inside of him, really?
	Yeah.
	Right.
	Like I know some, I know some street dudes like that.
	Like I have a friend who even his closest friends, like we've sat down like at a bar or something and been like, Yeah, I don't actually know him.
	And they're like, we've, we met in middle school.
	And they're like, I, I honestly are, I'm like, I'm not sure I know him.
	Yeah.
	Like just, they just keep, they play their cards close.
	You know, I've known this man 20 years and I can't say anything but that he's always on time.
	Like, yeah, that's, that's kind of how people talk about Robert E. Lee.
	Now, they also very frequently will call him hot.
	Uh, he is repeatedly described as being good looking.
	One family friend called him, on the whole, the handsomest young man I ever saw.
	He probably like, you know, he ain't, he ain't like like road worn because he don't drink.
	So he probably got that baby skin.
	You know what I'm saying?
	He's not doing drugs.
	So he ain't got no wrinkles.
	You feel me?
	He had all his stress when he was a child.
	He was like, I'm done with this stress.
	Yeah.
	He's the only man in the 1800s who ages like someone from the 21st century.
	It is noted that like he doesn't go gray until the Civil War.
	Now he got some stress.
	Now he's got some stress.
	Yeah.
	So when you read through different bits of the multiple books about Lee, as I have, you encounter repeatedly people talking about how hot he was.
	And it's sort of like how Kissinger's a sex symbol, and that's well known at the time.
	But then in modern days, because he's like this old goblin of a man, like you don't really realize it, it's surprising when you read it.
	And this paragraph from Smithsonian magazine summarizes the phenomenon of hot Lee well.
	His hair was ebbing and abundant, as his doting biographer Douglas Freeman puts it, with a wave that a woman might have envied, a robust black mustache, a strong full mouth and chin, unobscured by any beard, and dark mercurial brows.
	He was not one to hide his looks under a bushel.
	His heart, on the other hand, the heart he kept locked away, as Stephen Vincent Binet proclaimed in John Brown's body from all the picklocks of biographers.
	Yes.
	Such a horny way to describe this man.
	He was just so hot.
	He was mysterious.
	He was so mysterious.
	You don't know what's going on.
	Putting it on a little strong.
	And a boy.
	And a boy got a baby face.
	Like I said, it wasn't hidden by a beard.
	And that helps.
	You know what I'm saying?
	Why you looking around, everybody else look like silverback gorillas.
	He out here with a baby face, you know?
	Yeah.
	So when he finally does marry, and he doesn't like flirt or pursue anybody, at least not on record.
	He is very chaste.
	He marries right after graduation, a woman named Mary Custis.
	They had been sweetheart, not even sweethearts, they had known each other basically their whole lives since childhood.
	I don't know if he was really in love with her the whole time or if it was more that he was in love with her family legacy because she is the great granddaughter of Martha Washington.
	So she's descended from or related to George Washington, right?
	And Lee, again, George Washington is like the guy he idealizes, particularly compared to his shameful father, right?
	His father is like the warning sign.
	Washington is the model he wants to follow.
	And so you get the feeling part of why he marries Mary Custis is like he wants that Washington legacy to be a part of him, right?
	Maybe to wipe away some of his father's shame.
	Yeah.
	In the 1969 lost cause history book, Meet Robert E. Lee, it rather humorously stated, Robert E. Lee was the last great man of old Virginia.
	In many ways, he was closer to his hero, George Washington, than he was to the men of his own time.
	In literal, because he basically wants to George Washington, right?
	Like, that's what's going on here.
	Yeah, yeah, like, I'm going to change my legacy.
	Like, I don't want the legacy to be all no money.
	You know what I'm saying?
	Broke ass Lee.
	Exactly.
	I'm with this nigga.
	Yeah.
	Exactly.
	So they had known each other since they, yeah, since they were kids.
	One thing I'll say for him: they're like the same age.
	They're born the same year, which is pretty good for high society marriages of this period.
	So congratulations, Robert E. Lee.
	You get the coveted behind the bastards, not a pedophile award.
	That's great.
	Yeah, yeah, yeah.
	That's a proud honor.
	Very rarely handed out.
	We are mailing your last descendant a gold medallion with the words, I don't diddle kids written on it.
	So let's go.
	You know, congratulations.
	Congratulations.
	That's a real honor for the family.
	Yeah.
	Yeah.
	So that's that's big.
	That's big.
	It's huge.
	That's really big, man, because there's a lot of, listen, there's a lot of things we can say about you, and we will, but you do like them your own age.
	Yeah, not a child molester.
	So good for you, Robert.
	Yes.
	So the Custis family were significantly wealthier than the Lee's.
	And Mary's father is understandably, he never really trusts Robert E. Lee in his whole life.
	Not because Lee does anything wrong, but because of how bad his father was, which not necessarily an irresponsible decision, right?
	Yeah, no, I get it.
	Now, that said, George Washington Park Custis, Mary's dad, is also a huge piece of shit.
	For one thing, he owns some 200 enslaved people.
	And he's like Thomas Jefferson.
	He's one of these guys who is vocally anti-slavery while owning a bunch of people.
	And like Thomas Jefferson, he has children with a lot of his slave people, right?
	Yeah, this is rape, right?
	Like that's the only way to look at this.
	Alan Guelzo writes, the elder Custis, burdened with his own private guilt over slavery, had been, quote, an easygoing master, requiring little of his slaves, especially because it was rumored that over the years he had fathered 15 of them.
	Good God.
	Here's the thing, man.
	Look, I don't know if there's anything I hate more besides like just the institution of slavery, but the defense that like, but he was like a nice one, though.
	Yeah.
	Like he was kind of nice to his, like, I don't know if I don't know if anything makes me want to like flip a table more than that answer.
	Yeah, I think, you know, it's, it's worth understanding the difference between quote unquote nice and mean slave owners for understanding the lives of slaves, but not for making a moral decision about those slave owners.
	It's actually very similar to like when you read Holocaust memoirs from survivors of Auschwitz, they will talk about like, well, these guys, these members, this particular member of the SS was polite to us.
	He treated me relative, and I was able to get stuff out of him to help.
	I was able to get food or whatnot out of him.
	Yeah.
	That doesn't mean that guy was, he was still a concentration guy.
	I don't understand.
	Yeah.
	Okay.
	You know, I appreciate you pulling the fly out of the rat poison you're about to feed me.
	I appreciate that.
	Yeah.
	It's worth understanding because, again, if you want to understand the lives of these enslaved people, sure, if you're if you're with a guy like this who is like less like violent and and shitty, then like you can maybe work a better, get more freedom, get more personal liberty.
	But like that does not reflect still very much on the slave.
	Still very much.
	I might have got a little head, but I wasn't cheating.
	You know, which is like in one of the upcoming hood politics episodes, like we're talking about the international court for justice.
	And like, that's like B.B. Netanyahu's like argument to where it's like, well, I don't know if it's like genocide genocide, you know, or it's like, maybe it's not like air quotes genocide.
	Like, you know, it's just a little bit ahead.
	You know, I wasn't really cheating.
	It's like, fam.
	It's only genocide if it comes from the genocide region of France.
	Otherwise, it's just a sparkling massacre.
	Right.
	Exactly.
	Yeah.
	Exactly.
	Yeah.
	So, yeah.
	I was like, well, you know what, though?
	But we didn't really like beat our slaves.
	Yeah.
	So it's a little different.
	Yeah.
	No, I'm good.
	Yeah.
	These people.
	Yeah.
	So he is eventually kind of is won over by Robert E. Lee, although never entirely.
	Lee takes an absence, a brief absence from his time as a lieutenant to have his honeymoon.
	And then he's sent to Hampton Roads, which is a port on the Virginia coast.
	And it had a bunch of fortifications, but they looked like shit.
	And he's going to like renovate the fortifications.
	On his honeymoon?
	No, right after, right?
	Oh, I was like, I was hoping that this train of thought wasn't going to lead to his like sexual prowess.
	No, no.
	But nothing about that.
	I assume he was bad at sex.
	Hallelujah.
	Yeah.
	Thank you, Jesus.
	He spends the first four years of his career like reinforcing these fortifications at Hampton Roads.
	And the only interesting thing that happens in that period is that there's an insurrection by enslaved Americans in Southampton.
	This is the Nat Turner Rebellion, right?
	Let's go.
	He's over there then?
	No, he's not involved in it, but it happens near enough.
	And it's relevant because he, again, doesn't do anything in this.
	Yeah.
	But he writes about it to his mother-in-law.
	And the single paragraph we get of him writing about Nat Turner's rebellion is one of the bleakest and most infuriating things I've ever read.
	And I'm going to read this to you now, Prop.
	It is ascertained that they use their religious assemblies, which ought to have been devoted to better purposes, for forming and maturing their plans and that their preachers were the leading men.
	And first off, I'll say, I don't know, just remembering the Old Testament, I feel like slaves using their religious services to plan rebellion is actually very biblical.
	I was like, I don't know, man.
	Like, if you're actually reading the book, that's pretty on par.
	That's like that happens a couple times.
	He continues, a man belonging to a Mrs. Whitehead and one of their preachers was the chief under the title of Major Nelson.
	And his first act was to kill his mistress, five children, and one grandchild.
	However, there are many instances of their defending their masters.
	And one poor fellow from the inconsiderate and almost unwarrantable haste of the whites was sadly rewarded.
	He belonged to a Mr. Blunt, and himself and two others, assisted by his master and his son, nobly fought with them against 20 of the blacks.
	After beating them off and running in great haste after horses for them to escape on, a party of whites suddenly came up and thinking the horses were for other purposes, shot him dead.
	So he's talking about here that some of the enslaved black people fought alongside their white masters against this slave uprising.
	And he's like, and then they got killed by white people who just like shot first and asked questions later because they were spooked in killing every black person they saw, which you would think might cause a man to consider like the overall evil of the system that he lived in.
	But Lee does not.
	Lee does not.
	Yeah, no, it's just because gravity works the way gravity works.
	So like, I get it.
	Yeah.
	I, as a funny side note, in junior high, I left LA, went to a middle school in the suburbs in the Inland Empire.
	And then my parents split and I went back to LA.
	But anyway, but in middle school, I was in the burbs.
	Like, and it was probably the most like concentrated amount of white people I've ever seen in my life.
	Like, you know, and, and, and I'm saying this, like, like strictly from a like anthropological perspective, like not even a, not even a statement on its culture.
	Cause I just, I just wasn't familiar with white culture at the time.
	You know what I'm saying?
	Like, I just didn't, it just wasn't my world.
	I just knew I went to this, to this middle school and we had to do a historical persons report.
	Yeah.
	I did it on Nat Turner.
	Oh, shit.
	And at no point did it cross my mind that this world of white people would have an issue of that.
	Like I just, I never thought about it.
	Now as an adult, I'm like, dude, I can imagine like I'm putting myself in like poor old, you know, Ms. Dorst, my, my seventh grade history teacher.
	I walk in with this, with this book report on Nat Turner and she looking at me at like. one of seven black people in a 50 mile radius.
	And I walk in with this report on a slave rebellion.
	How she, I just wonder what was going through her head at the time that everybody else is doing book reports on normal stuff, but I did it on Nat Turner.
	And now as an adult, I'm like, I would have loved that if I went to this suburban school and this little boy walk in with a report on Nat Turner.
	And I just no concept that anyone else would view this as any different than I and my family view it.
	I'm like, what are you talking about?
Judging Historical Figures 00:10:38
	This guy's a hero.
	It's one of those things, obviously, like, you know, what Lee says there is not wrong.
	Like the like children were killed during the uprising.
	And my stance on this, it's similar to how I feel about the killing of the czar and his family.
	Children never deserve to be murdered.
	That is not their fault.
	The children of slave owners and czars are not guilty, but I put the blame for their deaths on the adult slave owners and the adult czar and his wife, not on the enslaved people who felt like they had no other option.
	Yes.
	Right.
	Yeah.
	You have institutionally put your children in danger by allowing and upholding this institution that will invariably, like you said, cause a person to respond the way they have.
	Yeah.
	And it's, you know, we can talk more like the czar's situation is obviously more complicated.
	There is some blame you can give to some of the other people in that, but like in the case of Nat Turner, what else?
	What else was this?
	I mean, what was the other option?
	Yeah.
	So after this, Lee is sent to work in D.C., which enables him to live in Arlington for the first time.
	This is basically the first time in his pre-war adult life that he spends any time at this Arlington, this like plantation that he gets, you know, with his wife is like, this is a huge part of the Lee myth that this is, this was what in his bones, this was his home.
	Like this, he, he had such a deep connection.
	He barely spends any fucking time there.
	In Arlington, right?
	Yeah, in Arlington.
	Like basically this period of time where he's working in DC is one of the only times in his adult life where he spends significant periods of time at Arlington.
	Now, this is handy.
	He spends some time like commuting to work in D.C. by carriage.
	It's helpful because he's close while his mom is sick.
	She probably has tuberculosis because that's what kills everybody in the olden days.
	Lee reverts to being her caretaker.
	He mixes her medicine.
	He's a dedicated, good boy, right?
	Yeah.
	The story is somewhat less heartwarming when you learn that Anne spends her last days revising her will in which she gives away several human beings, including children.
	Her daughter, also named Anne, inherited, quote, my maidservant, Charlotte, and her child, along with Kaziah, William, and Betsy, along with my set of white tea china, my wardrobe, two of my best tablecloths, and one half of my family napkins and wearing apparel.
	So again.
	All in the same sentence.
	Yeah.
	Yeah.
	Children.
	All in the same sentence.
	Adults and a China set, all the same type of thing to them.
	On the same level.
	Yeah.
	Also, I think Virginia as a West Coaster, you know, and my mom's from D.C.
	So like I viewed like Virginia is like, it honestly feels like two different states.
	And I'm not meaning like Virginia and West Virginia.
	I mean Virginia itself, because there's the Virginia that's basically just southern Washington, D.C.
	And then there's the Virginia that had plantations.
	Like, and it's, it still like shakes my brain because I'm like, I still see Virginia as East Coast rather than southern.
	Because yeah, when you say like Alexandria, Richmond, I'm like, Ronald Reagan's airport is in Virginia.
	It's, it's interesting because like you get a lot of, there's people will argue very strenuously that like, yeah, Virginia is part of the South, but Texas really isn't.
	You know, it's, it's its own thing or it's part of the West.
	And like there's actually some validity behind that, like culturally, historically, but like, I think they are both part of the South.
	Virginia is now like certainly like has like elements of, I don't know, it's, it's weird.
	Like it's not worth getting into right now.
	Yeah, I guess, I guess my question would be like, uh, because it was, I was leading to a question, I think, but like, so obviously if he works in DC, he's in the more, and we're still talking about a slave state, but he's in one that's more closer to city life rather than agricultural now.
	Yeah.
	Yeah, yeah, yeah.
	And he's, he's, he's kind of commuting from this semi- this agricultural plantation into D.C. Because Arlington is kind of in the heights above DC.
	Like one of the reasons that like the union will go after it early in the Civil War is you can shell DC from Arlington.
	So he's not far away.
	No, it's pretty close.
	Yeah.
	Now, the Lee boys aren't named as being given any enslaved people.
	It's not in the will, but they actually seem to have inherited some.
	It's just not, I guess for whatever reason, she didn't think it was worth writing in the will.
	Biographer Alan Guelzo has noted that the Lee boys definitely inherited who he describes as, quote, one unitemized slave family.
	I don't know if they were like kind of cheating so that they didn't have to pay as much inheritance tax.
	It's weird.
	Like, I don't know why they wouldn't have enlisted.
	But in 1835, Robert E. Lee wrote that he owned Mrs. Sally Diggs, Mrs. Nancy Ruffin, and her three illegitimate pledges.
	No men are named, which is undoubtedly evidence that a family was forcibly broken up.
	I guess it's possible the men died early, right?
	That's not, given the time, not impossible, but it seems likely that families were broken up as a result of this inheritance, which happens a lot.
	In 1835, Lee is sent to St. Louis on a mission to literally defy God.
	For years, it had been clear that the Mississippi River was shifting.
	And so there's all this like port infrastructure in St. Louis that will be useless if the river shifts to be over in Illinois.
	So Lee has to do basically the equivalent of spritzing the Mississippi's nose with water until it learns not to like risk the future economic viability of Missouri.
	Yeah, that's funny.
	Really thumbing your nose in God's eye.
	Mr. Southern Genteel.
	Yeah.
	Episcopal.
	So I have mentioned that one of my sources for these episodes is General Lee, a biography by Fitzhugh Lee.
	Now, this is not a good source in that it is not a reputable, unbiased historic account of Lee, but it is a good source in that it was written in like 1896 by his family.
	And because of the area it's in, it includes some fucked up shit that I think would have been edited out by like a lost cause pop historian today, but that you do get when you read through this draft.
	And while churning through much of this otherwise interminable book, I found another letter Lee sent back to one of his cousins where he comments on a local rumor by using a casual racial slur.
	We live in a credulous country where people stick at nothing from a C word story to a sea serpent.
	And, you know, the C word is like, it's a, it's a slang term for black people using like talking about like raccoons, right?
	Yeah, that's the, yeah, yeah.
	I'm bringing this up because this is like the use of a slur in a letter, considering Robert E. Lee's actual crimes on the lower list of horrible things he did.
	For sure.
	I'm bringing this up because casual and lost cause histories of the man love to emphasize how much he hated slavery, called it a moral evil, and would have been willing to free his own slaves to keep the union together.
	He did express variants of those sentiments, but he also regularly expressed very casual, hateful racism like this, right?
	It is all over his letters.
	It is undeniable.
	And I think that ugliness is important to get out.
	It's not just that he was willing to fight for slavery.
	He fully bought into the racial hierarchy and the casual distaste and hatred, even for black people that was.
	The reality of like it to put yourself in the time to understand that like they saw this as like this is settled science in the same way that we understand that the earth revolves around the sun.
	That is settled science.
	That is how it works.
	So race science for them is like, no, this is, it's settled.
	This is the science.
	We are biologically superior.
	So like, what do you, it's settled.
	Like, what are we arguing about?
	You know what I'm saying?
	I think that that, that element, when you're talking about this, like, okay, so I remember in like some of my um formal uh like theological training, they talked about like this, this dude, Jonathan Edwards, like Jonathan Edwards, the guy, Jonathan Edwards, like the sinners in the hands of angry God, like this, yeah, yeah, yeah, you know, big, hugely influential American, hugely influential, like, you know, Protestant preacher.
	And during this time of the institution of slavery, like he was quoted to saying, like, if the savages and the Africans, knowing exactly what I mean by that, yeah, are in fact made in the image of God, like image bearers, as in that's what we, what we believe humans are, you're made in the image of God.
	Yeah.
	Then we should be giving them the gospel.
	Yeah.
	And then, but then he says, I'm just not sure they're humans.
	Like, and you know what I'm saying?
	Like, this is y'all preacher.
	This is y'all.
	This is y'all dude.
	That's what I'm trying to say.
	Like a person who is.
	And that, yeah, like a leader, a pillar of the faith.
	It is like it is, he's because his brain is challenging science.
	I think they're humans.
	And I, I, I think this is where we get into when we talk about the morality of like, well, you can't judge people from the past by modern standards.
	Yeah.
	You can't judge people from the past for being raised with racist beliefs.
	You can judge them for how they act on them.
	I think that's useful because like you cannot blame a man for like being raised in a bigoted society and keeping a hold of some degree of those beliefs, but you can judge him on the degree to which he changes and overcomes some of it.
	Right.
	Yes.
	Like it's, you know, I have older relatives who like will never be comfortable with homosexuality because of the time they were raised in, but came around to the belief that like, yes, they should be allowed to marry.
	There shouldn't be legal prescriptions against them.
	That's wrong.
	And like, yes, yeah, you were born in like the 30s, right?
	Like, that's about as much as I can hope for, right?
	And I think that that's kind of how you have to judge people, right?
	Like, yes, you inherit some bad stuff, but like, what do you actually do when you have the ability to make decisions?
	And where do you go in your life?
	And like, Lee never questions any of this and he never changes, you know?
	He is a marble man and marble does not grow, you know?
	Good one.
	Yeah.
	Yeah.
	Speaking of growing, you know, who does grow and change over time?
	The sponsors of the show.
Inherited Bad Stuff 00:02:46
	10-10 shots fired.
	City hall building.
	A silver .40 caliber handgun was recovered at the scene.
	From iHeart Podcasts and Best Case Studios, this is Rorschach: murder at City Hall.
	How could this have happened in City Hall?
	Somebody tell me that!
	Jeffrey Hood did.
	July 2003.
	Councilman James E. Davis arrives at New York City Hall with a guest.
	Both men are carrying concealed weapons.
	And in less than 30 minutes, both of them will be dead.
	Everybody in the chamber deducts a shocking public murder.
	I screamed, get down, get down.
	Those are shots.
	Those are shots.
	Get down.
	A charismatic politician.
	You know, he just bent the rules all the time.
	I still have a weapon.
	And I could shoot you.
	And an outsider with a secret.
	He alleged you.
	A victim of flat down.
	That may or may not have been political.
	That may have been about sex.
	Listen to Rorschach, murder at City Hall on the iHeartRadio app.
	Apple Podcasts are wherever you get your podcasts.
	There's two golden rules that any man should live by.
	Rule one, never mess with a country girl.
	You play stupid games, you get stupid prizes.
	And rule two, never mess with her friends either.
	We always say, trust your girlfriends.
	I'm Anna Sinfield, and in this new season of The Girlfriends...
	Oh my God, this is the same man.
	A group of women discover they've all dated the same prolific con artist.
	I felt like I got hit by a truck.
	I thought, how could this happen to me?
	The cops didn't seem to care.
	So they take matters into their own hands.
	I said, oh, hell no.
	I vowed I will be his last target.
	He's going to get what he deserves.
	Listen to the girlfriends.
	Trust me, babe.
	On the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
	Hey, I'm Nora Jones, and I love playing music with people so much that my podcast called Playing Along is back.
	I sit down with musicians from all musical styles to play songs together in an intimate setting.
	Every episode's a little different, but it all involves music and conversation with some of my favorite musicians.
	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.
	And this season, I've sat down with Alessia Cara, Sarah McLaughlin, John Legend, and more.
	Check out my new episode with Josh Grobin.
Music and Conversation 00:15:28
	You related to the Phantom at that point.
	Yeah, I was definitely the Phantom in that.
	That's so funny.
	Share each day with me each night, each morning.
	Say you love me.
	You know I.
	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.
	Bazam!
	We're back.
	South Building.
	Bazam.
	I really like it.
	You've never been able to do that.
	That's it.
	That's my new catchphrase.
	I like it.
	Let's go with it.
	Bazam.
	Bazam.
	Bazam, bro.
	Bazam is like really like, it fits you.
	Very suiting.
	Yeah.
	Thank you.
	So Lee's going to complain constantly about money throughout his life.
	You don't make good money as an officer.
	He's always like, should I retire my commission and try to make a living some other way?
	I don't think he would have been good at that, but he thinks about it a lot.
	He's not ever really happy, right?
	And in any of his situations.
	His ambitions kind of outweigh most of what he's able to accomplish.
	And, you know, he's away from home all the time.
	He does not seem to have a strong desire to be around his family or to help him, like his wife, raise their children.
	So he is like an absent dad, you know?
	Most of his letters are him like giving Mary advice on raising children based on probably not much actual knowledge about how to raise kids.
	Or you weren't raised.
	Number one, you weren't raised.
	And then number two, you're not raising your own kids.
	Yeah.
	And this is not, you know, military families today, you're going to deal with like your parent who's in the military potentially being away for long periods of time on deployment.
	That is a reality still.
	But usually, if they're not in a combat posting, families move around with their family members.
	That's less of a thing here in part because of like, it's just not practical, you know, with travel and the dangers of it being what they are at this time.
	In 1846, the Mexican-American War breaks out.
	And this is going to be Lee's big defining moment as a man.
	This is the conflict where most of the major military leaders in the U.S. Civil War will get their first combat experience.
	Lee at this point is an artillery officer and he becomes a part of General Winfield Scott's inner circle.
	Winfield Scott is the commander of U.S. forces in this war.
	Lee is really good at this job.
	And it's important to note he is really good at being an officer in charge of artillery.
	He is not commanding armies.
	That is not ever a thing he's going to be great at.
	He is managing sections of guns and the men who fire them.
	And a big part of his job is the army's marching.
	They're like, okay, we're going to try to bring them into battle here.
	And his job is analyzing the maps, scouting on horseback and whatnot, figuring out where is the best place to put our cannons so that they'll have good fields of fire to hit the enemy, you know?
	And he's really good at this job.
	One of his first moments in the sun comes during the Battle of Cerro Gordo, where he leads a detachment of cannons through thick brush, bushwhacking their way into a position where they can fire down on the Mexican left flank and surprise the enemy.
	This gets him promoted to major, and his further exploits in the war earn him significant press attention.
	He becomes a war hero back home.
	Not the biggest of the war, but one of the larger U.S. war heroes to like the U.S. population.
	The most spectacular moment of his career comes when he crosses with just a handful of men a lava field at night to get reinforcements for an upcoming action.
	General Scott describes this as the greatest feat of physical and moral courage performed by any individual in my knowledge pending the campaign.
	A lava field?
	Yeah, like dried lava, I think.
	Oh, I was like, where?
	No, not hot lava.
	Yeah.
	Also, I don't see where there's moral courage involved in that, but certainly physical courage.
	It's, yeah, this is.
	Unless it's lava.
	Yeah.
	Yeah.
	Unless it's lava.
	I will say this earns Lee our slightly less coveted, pretty good at the Mexican-American War medal, which due to a printing error is also a gold medal that reads, I don't diddle kids.
	Okay, got it.
	Sorry, sorry about that, guys.
	Both of them wound up being the same medal, but yeah.
	But you know what, though?
	Like he's in rarefied air here for bastards, man.
	Yeah, that's right.
	Two medals.
	Two medals.
	So Lee ends the war as a brevet colonel and is one of the most widely praised officers in the U.S. Army.
	After this point, there's buzz around the man, which does him less good than you might guess because he's going to spend the next stage of his career furious that he's not moving up faster to new ranks and better commands.
	Part of the reason for this is that the U.S., we don't really have a military in the modern sense.
	We have a tiny regular military.
	We have a lot of state militias, which are pretty useless.
	And we have a very small regular military.
	So there's not a lot of spots for officers.
	And you can't move up until someone above you like quits or dies, right?
	So he's kind of frustrated that he's not really like getting, he feels like he's stuck in place, right?
	He's constantly wondering about quitting.
	In 1852, he gets a promotion.
	He's made commandant of West Point, which he's not really excited about.
	He describes it as a snake pit, I think, due to its internal politics.
	His son Custis attends while he runs West Point and graduates first in his class.
	I'm sure there's no.
	Oh, he ran West Point for a while.
	Yeah, he runs it.
	He's the commandant of West Point for 30 years.
	Oh, that's what Commandant means.
	Sorry, I was just saying.
	Yeah, he's the boss.
	He's the boss.
	You know what that meant?
	It's like being the dean, I think.
	Yeah.
	Yeah.
	There's a fun.
	Maybe you could do like an animal house style movie about like whatever the bad fraternity is, and old Dean Robert E. Lee getting angry at him for drinking.
	Yeah, we could make that work.
	So on the whole, his tenure there is as boring as most of the man's life and is primarily of interest because his long association with the academy is going to cause a lot of shit today, right?
	Like there's a bunch of debate over like, and actually, this is interesting.
	One of the books that is a source for this is me and Robert E. Lee, and it's written by a former U.S. Army officer who taught at West Point and who they were trying to decide, should we have a memorial for Confederate troops?
	And specifically, they wanted to put it in a building that's named after a Union officer whose personal stance was like, these people should never be part of the country again.
	Fuck them.
	They're traitors, right?
	So this guy, the guy who writes the book, is like arguing basically to his colleagues, we should not honor Confederate veterans at West Point.
	They were traitors.
	They killed U.S. soldiers.
	Why are we honoring them?
	And you know, like, these men are fucking traitors.
	Yeah.
	And he loses the fight.
	They decide to move ahead with the memorial until a, I'm not sure who it is, but it is a high-ranking black officer who's a graduate of West Point.
	I don't actually know.
	It might have been Powell.
	I don't know.
	But someone leaks it to this high-ranking black officer who's an alumni of West Point that like they're about to put in a Confederate memorial.
	And he is like, the fuck you are.
	You are.
	Absolutely not.
	And they have to like scrap the idea, which is good.
	He's like, absolutely not.
	No, what are you talking about?
	Yeah.
	So by the late 1850s, Lee is stationed in Texas, but he's back in Arlington with some regularity.
	He gets to see his family from time to time.
	And this accelerates after his father-in-law dies in 1857.
	Now, the Custis family at this point, somewhere between, I've heard 42 adults, I think is what Guelzo's biography says.
	Most sources will say there were almost 200 of them.
	I don't, a lot.
	He's got a lot of people that he's holding on Arlington, right?
	When he dies.
	Most of them are doing some amount of farming, right?
	But according to white people who were friends and relatives of the Custis family at the time, the enslaved people there didn't work hard enough, right?
	They're all bitching about that.
	Yeah.
	Now, old George Washington Park, who is Robert E. Lee's wife's father, allegedly tells one friend in 1853 of his enslaved people, they have their comfortable homes, their families around them, and nothing to do but consult their own pleasure.
	One of Robert's cousins complained to him that the enslaved people on Arlington were, quote, fonder of play than work.
	Which, like, you people are landed gentry.
	You don't do shit but play.
	You'll give me that.
	Like, I don't know.
	What are you talking about?
	You can't say anything about my work ethic.
	Yeah.
	You ever pulled something out of the ground, man?
	I'm going to guess not.
	Yeah.
	You catch the vapors.
	Yeah.
	Now, we shouldn't, obviously, as we've said, we shouldn't take that seriously that these guys were not working hard.
	But it is true that the Custis properties are not profitable, right?
	By the time he dies and Mary inherits them, they are not making money.
	And this is a problem because like Mary's dad somewhat hilariously decides that the last thing he's going to do in life is going to be to fuck Robert E. Lee over.
	And I, this kind of, he's a bad person, but I like this.
	What's he really hates Lee's dad for like being so irresponsible?
	Yeah.
	And then when he dies, they found out he's been just as bad.
	They're in horrible debt.
	The property's not making any money.
	He like completely shat the bed on his finances.
	And in his will, he gives Arlington the property to his oldest grandson, right?
	Which is Mary's, Mary and Roberts, one of their kids.
	Yeah.
	Mary gets rights to reside at Arlington until she dies, but it is no longer their property.
	His other valuable properties go to their other kids, and Robert E. Lee gets basically nothing.
	Like he gets cut out of the will.
	But old Custis still makes him the executor of the will.
	So his job is to hand out money to Custis's grandkids.
	Now that's Eddie.
	Oh, he's such a bitch.
	Hey, man.
	Hey, man.
	I just want to say, hey, man, look, thank you for taking care of my daughter.
	You've given me the most beautiful grandchildren.
	So here's what I'm going to do for you.
	I want you to be the one, because this is how much you mean to me.
	I want you to be the one to tell everybody what they're getting.
	Here's the paper.
	And it's more fucked up than that.
	He flipping through this shit like, where my name at?
	Yeah.
	Each of the grandkids is supposed to get $10,000, right?
	But he doesn't have any money.
	And so in his will, he's like, here's some properties.
	Sell the.
	I'm not willing these properties to anyone.
	Robert, sell them and use that to pay my grandkids $10,000 each.
	But Custis is bad at everything.
	So he doesn't actually know.
	He wildly overvalues these properties.
	He doesn't get nearly enough money.
	So Robert E. Lee, because he's this like big honor guy, is like, well, I can't just tell his grandkids that their grandfather was dog shit with money and is fucking them.
	I have to find a way to get them each $10,000.
	And the only way to do that is to force enslaved people to work for money, right?
	Because obviously Robert E. Lee doesn't know how to make money, you know?
	He doesn't have any skills other than army shit.
	Yeah.
	So Lee had spent his whole life.
	Part of why he is so obsessed with like paying, you know, executing this will that should not be his responsibility is that he is still smarting about his deadbeat dad.
	And the fact that his father-in-law is proven in death to have been another richocratic fail son doesn't diminish Lee's personal obsession with executing the will and returning the Custis family plantation to profitability.
	This becomes his obsession.
	And the problem comes in that we've just noted Custis, you know, his father-in-law is kind of soft-hearted.
	That's what people say at the time towards the slaves.
	So he tells them all, when I die, you're free, right?
	So that's a problem because Lee has no ability to make up this money without the family slaves.
	Right.
	And this is, again, goes back to Custis being such a piece of shit.
	He is a deadbeat.
	So he promises, I think, in part because like a lot of these are his kids or his people that he considers his lovers.
	Obviously, that's not what's going on.
	Yeah, yeah, yeah.
	And he just feels bad.
	So he has to tell him, like, when I die, you'll be free.
	You'll keep living this sweet life and then you'll be free when I do.
	It's fine.
	Don't worry about it.
	I'm really a good guy.
	You can trust me.
	But he's a liar, right?
	He does not say, you are all free as soon as I die.
	He directs that they be freed within five years of his death, right?
	But he tells them, you're free when I die.
	Yeah.
	Which is still true.
	Kind of.
	But what this means is that Lee is going to be like, all right, well, I've got five years to make as much money out of these people as I can before they're before they're free.
	Right.
	Yeah.
	Yeah, this causes a conflict because they were expecting to be free right away and they considered themselves free.
	Moreover, part of the issue here is, again, their life at Arlington is more comfortable than most enslaved people's lives, right?
	They are not being like worked as hard or as brutally as is common in the area, right?
	And I don't give any sort of credit to Custis for this, but this is going to be relevant because Lee decides we don't need all of these people at Arlington to get it profitable.
	So I'm going to hire them out to other owners, right?
	Contract them out to make money to pay Custis's grandkids.
	I'm going to force them to labor.
	I'm going to break up their families, force them to live away from their children and wives for five years so that I can give our shiftless grandkids some money, right?
	Wow.
	That is fucked up.
	Yeah.
	It's, yeah, you sell the, you sell the brand for parts.
	Yeah.
	And it's like, it's, it's, it's, you can make more money if I sell you for parts rather than try to work.
	It's still, yeah.
	And this is how he writes about them.
	Among them is Ruben, a great rogue and rascal who I must get rid of someway, right?
	Like these guys are just such a problem.
	They don't want to work.
	I'm just going to have to sell them to somebody who'll beat the hell out of them, you know, for five years so that I can, you know, make up the cash.
	So one of the things that's really horrible about this is Custis had let families stay together in Arlington, right?
	So after years of being used to, well, at least we have our families, right?
	Lee just breaks.
	He doesn't give a fuck, right?
	Now, several of these people, when he hires them off, flee their new positions and return to Alexandria.
	It causes this like whole, because he's got to like discipline them now.
	It's this whole thing.
	And it causes a stir even within Virginia because within the gentry, their understanding too is that like, yeah, Custis wanted these people freed on his deathbed and Lee is still working them.
	So even a lot of white people are kind of disapproving of this, right?
	Like this is kind of a violation of a promise that had been made.
	And the soft disapproval of his fellow citizens was met with a burning rage by the enslaved workers at Arlington.
	And I'm going to quote from an article on the website American Heritage Here.
	Believing they were entitled to their freedom and alarmed at the way Lee was breaking up their families by hiring the able-bodied far from Arlington, the slaves banded together and tried to overpower him physically, shouting that they were as free as he was.
Rage of the Enslaved 00:08:59
	Angered by the slave's defiance, Lee resorted to increasingly harsh measures to maintain control.
	And the first harsh measure he resorts to is forcing the men who'd attacked him into what are described as slave pens in the city of Arlington.
	He locks them up in the city away from their families, and then he leases them off again.
	And this takes us to the reality of the Marble Man.
	Beneath his layers of politesse and this genteel southern social obligation, he is as brutal a slave master as any as soon as his financial goals are threatened, right?
	That's what it is to him.
	It's as simple as that.
	You started fucking with my money.
	Yeah, exactly.
	Now you really know what I think of you.
	Now the nice guy's gone.
	Yeah.
	Now, Alan Guelzo, who knows Lee better than me, describes Lee's reaction based on years of letters to family and friends as one of confusion as to like why these people are angry that he's forcing them to work and be away from their families.
	Quote, Lee could not comprehend why the demands he was making did not earn the understanding, even the cooperation of the Arlington slaves, but they didn't.
	And his frustration at their obstinacy boiled over in the spring of 1859 when three of the Arlington slaves, Wesley Norris, his sister Mary Norris, and their cousin George Parks, determined to run away.
	They made it as far as Westminster, Maryland, only a few miles from the free state border of Pennsylvania, when they were stopped and imprisoned.
	Two weeks later, they were shipped back to Arlington, where Lee had to pay the costs for their rendition.
	His fabled self-control teetling unsteadily, Lee demanded of the three why they ran away.
	Because they replied, frankly, we considered ourselves free.
	Now, that's a baller response.
	Yeah, because it's like There's such an insidiousness in the sense that, like, like, fam this ain't your plantation, number one.
	And number two, who you married in?
	That's not even your father.
	Like, yeah.
	And the dude that we, who actually owned us, which we gonna set aside for a second, that that's a sentence that just came out of my mouth.
	Yeah.
	Has already freed us.
	What is you talking?
	Like, you're not, you're not in charge.
	Who are you?
	Bro, who is this?
	Like, that, like, that would be even more insidious of like, you, you have no authority here.
	Yeah.
	What are you talking about?
	Yes.
	Yeah.
	You are, you are ruining our lives.
	Yes.
	So an old man who was a piece of shit will seem better to his grandkids who are also shiftless, lazy pieces of shit.
	It's such an unfair situation.
	I like, I can't, I have, I understand so much more now that like, like privilege just makes you brittle.
	Like, I feel like that's just the best, because I'm like, what a brittle soul.
	Yeah.
	That like, why is this infuriating?
	They're not yours.
	Yeah.
	Like these, they're not yours.
	Yeah.
	And it gets worse because, and this is really what reveals the actual man behind the marble, right?
	One of these fugitive enslaved people later recalled, quote, he then told us he would teach us a lesson we would never forget.
	And he has all both men stripped to the waist and he orders his overseer to lash them each 50 times.
	Mary Norris, the only woman of the group, he orders to be lashed 20 times.
	Now, that's horrible without context, right?
	Yes.
	But I want to lend some.
	Whipping is a, obviously, very common punishment on many plantations, somewhere between 30 and 40 was normal for an infraction, right?
	So 50 is a big punishment.
	And you can tell how big it is by, so Lee, there's a white overseer whose job is to manage the enslaved people at Arlington, right?
	And Lee says, I want you to whip these men 50 times each.
	I want you to whip Mary 20 times.
	And the overseer says, no, he's like, I can't do it.
	Like, that's fucked up, man.
	I'm not going to do it.
	Wow.
	So, again, and this guy's part of his job is whipping enslaved people.
	And he's like, no, this is fucked up.
	Like, that's bad.
	When that guy won't do it, right?
	That's bad.
	So Lee has to hire and find a local cop, the guy who would capture the escapees and is like, will you beat them for me?
	Right.
	That is how Lee claims this goes.
	Now, that may not have been exactly how it goes.
	It may be a lot worse than that.
	More recent lost cause books love to emphasize Lee's distaste for slavery.
	And he says a lot of stuff about how he doesn't like slavery.
	But older texts from the middle of last century, including stuff written by his family, makes it clear that his dislike of slavery was what it revealed about his own inherent cruelty and moral cowardice.
	The 1969 book, Meet Robert E. Lee, stated, Lee knew slavery was wrong.
	He said it was bad for the slave and worse for the man who owned him.
	And that's not true.
	But also, I don't want to, I don't want to disregard one of the meanings of that, right?
	I disregard, like, obviously it's worse for the slave.
	Yeah.
	But what he's saying there, when he says it's worse for the man who owns him, he is thinking about the evil in himself that he had to see because of what he does to these people, right?
	The New York Tribune publishes an article about Lee's battery of his enslaved people, right?
	It is so bad that it makes the fucking news.
	And that article claims that Lee himself stripped Mary Norris and lashed her 39 times in a fit of rage.
	And crucially, Lee writes about this news article.
	He is aware of it.
	He never denies the allegation or lodges any protest against the paper.
	Never.
	So it does kind of seem like what happens and why he's like, it's so bad for the slave owner is he loses his control, this like, this granite reserve that he is so proud of, and he strips and beats a woman bloody.
	And he lives with that.
	That's the only thing really inside of him.
	This man who is such a mystery, everybody, that venal cruelty, the same kind of cruelty that exists in his father, that's the core of Robert E. Lee.
	And you get to see it here.
	Yeah.
	You're tiddling on something that I feel like obviously doing, you know, post-mortem psychology is never good.
	However, that point of like that type of hate and prejudice, how it destroys the person inside of him is one of those grotesque things that like is not talked about enough in discussing the pretzel that these people had to put themselves in to know that if you are calling yourself the civilized one,
	to know what you're doing to, I'm going to, I'm going to, I'm going to stoop down to say in your brain, you still don't, you're still saying these people are subhuman.
	Yeah.
	But still, even if they're subhuman, the things you are doing to this creature that's alive, you know, is you, there's no way, like the, again, the mental gymnastics you have to do to be able to look yourself in the face and justify that has got to be haunting.
	Yeah.
	Because news flash, you just as human as I am.
	You know what I'm saying?
	And so I think that that statement is not acknowledged enough.
	And rather than face what you think is unthinkable and preposterous and accept the fact that like I am participating in a deep evil and do the work to change, you double down.
	Yeah.
	I also wonder if part of what's happening here is that, you know, there's this always these claims that like, well, this is a divine racial hierarchy.
	And really black people don't even want to be free.
	They're happier this way.
	And you can't keep telling yourself that lie when you see someone in a very intelligent and dignified way say, I am a free man.
	And as a result, you like when that kind of shatters that myth in your head, all that's left is violence, right?
	That's it.
	Which puts a lie to the fact that this is a divinely ordained system.
	I do think that's part of like, part of why there's this rage and shame over it for him.
	I do think, yeah.
	I'm sorry.
	One more thing.
	I do think, like you said, like that lie that you're telling yourself, part of me is like, why I, again, rarely give, like, I give historical context.
	I understand that like humans in a time, but like I rarely give any quarters to a, to the argument that like, well, this is just what we did at the time.
	I'm like, nah, you knew.
	Y'all know what y'all doing.
	Yeah.
	Yeah.
	This is that moment for me.
	Yes.
	And the moment that it is for all of us is ads.
Lies About Systems 00:02:33
	10-10 shots fired, City Hall building.
	A silver .40 caliber handgun was recovered at the scene.
	From iHeart Podcasts and Best Case Studios, this is Rorschach, murder at City Hall.
	How could this have happened in City Hall?
	Somebody tell me that, Jeffrey, who did it?
	July 2003, Councilman James E. Davis arrives at New York City Hall with a guest.
	Both men are carrying concealed weapons.
	And in less than 30 minutes, both of them will be dead.
	Everybody in the chambers docks.
	A shocking public murder.
	I scream, get down, get down.
	Those are shots.
	Those are shots.
	A charismatic politician.
	You know, you just bent the rules all the time, man.
	I still have a weapon and I could shoot you.
	And an outsider with a secret.
	He alleged he was a victim of flat down.
	That may or may not have been political.
	That may have been about sex.
	Listen to Rorschach, Murder at City Hall on the iHeartRadio app.
	Apple Podcasts are wherever you get your podcasts.
	There's two golden rules that any man should live by.
	Rule one, never mess with a country girl.
	You play stupid games, you get stupid prizes.
	And rule two, never mess with her friends either.
	We always say that, trust your girlfriends.
	I'm Anna Sinfield, and in this new season of The Girlfriends...
	Oh my God, this is the same man.
	A group of women discover they've all dated the same prolific con artist.
	I felt like I got hit by a truck.
	I thought, how could this happen to me?
	The cops didn't seem to care.
	So they take matters into their own hands.
	I said, oh, hell no.
	I vowed I will be his last target.
	He's going to get what he deserves.
	Listen to the girlfriends.
	Trust me, babe.
	On the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
	I'm Laurie Siegel, and on Mostly Human, I go beyond the headlines with the people building our future.
	This week, an interview with one of the most influential figures in Silicon Valley, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman.
	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.
	From power to parenthood.
AI Creator Responsibility 00:15:13
	Kids, teenagers, I think they will need a lot of guardrails around AI.
	This is such a powerful and such a new thing.
	From addiction to acceleration.
	The world we live in is a competitive world, and I don't think that's going to stop, 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.
	And it's a multiplayer game.
	What does the man who has extraordinary influence over our lives have to say about the weight of that responsibility?
	Find out on Mostly Human.
	My highest order bit is to not destroy the world with AI.
	Listen to Mostly Human on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
	All right, we're back.
	So I want to stay with this moment, this beating, a little longer, because this is a moment that the people who want to paint a picture of Lee as a moral paragon have to grapple with.
	And they usually have to find some way to like minimize it, right?
	Yeah.
	And this goes on to this day.
	I want to read you a quote from an absolutely shameful Dallas Morning News article.
	And part of why this is fucking shameful, by the way, the Dallas Morning News has a proud pedigree.
	One of the things they did during the second Ku Klux Klan was like have journalists basically tail people to Klan members, take down like license plates and shit like that, and publish lists of the members of town who were in the KKK.
	Like that was some based shit in the day.
	And this is the crap they're doing now.
	This is from a 2017 article entitled, Robert E. Lee is the Uniter America Has Been Looking For.
	Okay, wait, Yeah.
	2017.
	Okay.
	This makes me wish this was like a visual podcast.
	Oh, it's so you could have seen my face just then.
	Yeah.
	We'll refer back to this article a couple of times later, but it is shameful shit.
	And I want to read a quote from it now.
	This is published in the wake of Charlottesville, right?
	So they're like, how do we get Americans back together?
	Okay.
	In the wake of Charlotte's Dallas.
	Yeah.
	In Dallas.
	City of Hate.
	Yeah.
	Yes.
	Lee himself, Virginia aristocrat as he was, was no slave taskmaster.
	He was a soldier of the United States.
	Just before the war, he received in trust from his late father-in-law's estate 196 slaves designated under terms of the will for emancipation, which objective, despite the distractions of command, Lee faithfully achieved at the end of 1862.
	A New York newspaper report from the same time period accusing Lee of stripping and personally beating a woman runaway slave deserved the same credence as might a tale of Barack Obama's endowing the Richard B. Spencer chair of Confederate history at Yale.
	Fake news.
	Like, what?
	Why are you calling it fake news?
	Is there any evidence that it's fake?
	Oh, no, there's not.
	He was aware of it and didn't argue against it, didn't say shit against it.
	And in fact, ordered those slaves objectively, we know this.
	Yes.
	No doubt about it.
	Ordered them beaten brutally in order to make money for his grandkids.
	Not a slave taskmaster, my fucking ass.
	Like the amount of things that were within the two first two sentences that were factually verifiably false, the first two things out your mouth.
	Yeah.
	That's a vile thing to say.
	Again, maybe we should consider bringing back stoning for certain things.
	Come on, fam.
	Thank you.
	And what's the basis?
	Like, this deserves this whole, like, what's the why bring this up?
	Yeah, but how is this helping Charlottesville?
	Like, tell me, tell me your math.
	What's the calculus?
	His article is that in the wake of the Civil War, Lee was a really big uniter.
	He wanted everyone to move on to get past this ugly chapter and that we shouldn't tear down his statue.
	We should celebrate him as a guy who preached unity.
	I don't know.
	What else did he do?
	Yeah.
	And like, where your editor at when your first sentence says he was a soldier of the United States, he was not.
	No, no, he was a traitor.
	He was on the other side.
	I don't understand what, like, what?
	Yeah.
	There's this meme that goes around, and it's like anarchists in every other period of American history, and they're like burning an American flag.
	And then it's anarchists from 1861 to 65.
	You're like, you've got like the Union flag.
	You're doing in a blue uniform saluting.
	Like, that is, I do not consider Lee's fucking like he is not a uniter of the America I want to be a part of.
	I want to be a part of the America that fucking lit the South on fire to end that system, right?
	Yes.
	That's that's that's where I want to be.
	That was like, all right, this is some bullshit.
	We're done.
	Yeah.
	We're done.
	Okay.
	Yeah.
	So the next chapter of Lee's career and life was to involve a man who was his opposite in every way and whose very existence was dedicated towards dissolving the foundations of Robert E. Lee's existence.
	His name was John Brown, and I think we are all broadly aware of what he did.
	Yeah.
	Yeah.
	To provide a quick summary, John Brown was a professional militant abolitionist.
	He had fought bloody battles in Kansas to free enslaved people, and he was basically a living boogeyman to pro-slavery types.
	From October 16th to 18th, 1859, he and a band of hand-picked guerrillas launched a raid on Harper's Ferry to try and secure weapons from the garrison there that they could use to arm enslaved people and launch a rebellion that would carve out an independent fortress of freedom lodged right in the heart of the old South.
	It did not work.
	Not a successful operation, unfortunately, but a noble attempt.
	I mean, in the long run, it helps start the war that ends slavery.
	So I won't call it a failure.
	It's just like not immediately tactically successful, right?
	Yeah.
	And Robert E. Lee is the man who commands the U.S. military forces sent in to quell the uprising and kill or capture John Brown.
	This they did.
	And while the job is odious, Lee is like, he handles this in like a competent way, right?
	He's not particularly brutal.
	He does the job, you know?
	That's the kind of guy he is.
	Brown is wounded when the army storms his position.
	And this excerpt from the book, Clouds of Glory by Michael Corda, describes the first interaction between Lee and Brown.
	Lee had him carried to the office of the paymaster of the armory, where Brown soon recovered enough strength to hold what would now be called a celebrity press conference, combined with some of the attributes of a royal audience.
	Lee courteously offered to clear the room of visitors if their presence annoyed or pained Brown, who, though in considerable pain, replied that he was glad to make himself and his motives clearly understood.
	Now, one of the funnest sides of the John Brown story is that all of the men involved in capturing him are like, can't help how impressed they are with him.
	They're like, yeah, I was going to say, they're like, this nigga is hard.
	They really like him.
	They all think he's insane, but they're like, this man is incredibly physically courageous.
	He is well-spoken.
	He knows exactly what he's doing.
	Right.
	He gives a three-hour press conference after being stabbed through the kidney.
	The governor of Virginia, who's there in the aftermath, calls John Brown the gamest man I ever saw.
	Like, motherfucker's down.
	You know, like, you gotta give him credit.
	Like, nah, he's, yeah, he's staying on business over there, dog.
	Yeah.
	I think you have to, because like he is, he doesn't even break composure when his son is killed in the fight.
	And I think it's because Brown, there is not a doubt in his mind that God is real.
	There is not a doubt in his mind that heaven is real.
	And there's not a doubt in his mind that the only thing that matters is fighting to end slavery.
	And if his son died to do that, my kid's going to be fine.
	And so am I. Exactly.
	Right.
	Yeah.
	Like, we're going, we're going to paradise.
	We did what we were supposed to do.
	And you know you're right.
	Yeah.
	Like, like, and and it's very rare in the world in the in time memoriam can someone definitively be like, yeah, no, we're right.
	Yeah.
	Absolutely declared.
	We are absolutely right.
	Yeah.
	Yeah.
	Now, Lee is present for the whole conversation that ensued between Brown, Senator Mason, Lee's man, Jeb Stewart, and the governor.
	Quote, when Senator Mason asked him how he could justify his acts, Brown replied, I think, my friend, you are guilty of a great wrong against God and humanity.
	I say it without wishing to be offensive, and it would be perfectly right in anyone to interfere with you so far as to free those you willfully and wickedly hold this in bondage.
	I do not say this insultingly.
	Like, no offense, but like you are, you are willingly participating in the greatest evil of our time.
	Respectfully.
	Anything anyone does stop you is justified.
	Yes.
	Look, respectfully, like respectfully, no shade, like respectfully, you're the fucking devil.
	Yeah.
	And you're doing the work of Satan.
	Yeah.
	Respectfully.
	Yeah.
	Yeah.
	I mean nothing impolite here, but nobody will damn you for your actions.
	No disrespect, but you work for some.
	Yeah.
	It's cool.
	When Mason, because Mason's like, did you pay these men who fought with you?
	Did you have to like, are they mercenaries?
	Brown replies, no, like, fuck that.
	And Jeb Stewart remarks on this, the wages of sin is death.
	And Brown turns to him and says, I would not have made such a remark to you if you had been a prisoner and wounded in my hands.
	Dang.
	Like, such a, such a G. For his part, Lee, again, he has this kind of basic respect for Brown's personal courage, but he thinks he's insane.
	He thinks because the plot was so doomed to failure, it means the abolitionist was either a fanatic or a madman.
	And, you know, Brown is both a fanatic.
	If being a madman means acting in ways that are completely inconsistent with logic of your culture, he is crazy.
	But I think he's the kind of crazy that was necessary, right?
	Good crazy.
	The abolitionists who weren't madmen lived comfortably in the North and would like tut-tut to their friends when they read articles about Lee stripping and whipping young enslaved women, right?
	John Brown picked up a rifle.
	Yeah, they shake your head just like, God, it's so terrible what they're doing over there.
	Yeah.
	He's like, is it?
	Yeah.
	But we on our way.
	And that's why you get from Harriet Tubman and like being like, yeah, he was the fucking best.
	Yeah, he was the coolest dude.
	Yeah, everybody co-signed him.
	Everybody co-signed him.
	Like, nah, he was, nah, he was a writer.
	Yeah.
	Yeah.
	One of my favorites, I think it was Huey P. Newton, who was like, the only white man we might have led into the Black Panthers was John Brown.
	Yeah.
	Maybe him.
	He's like, nah, but fuck all of y'all.
	That dude's dope.
	I kind of like that dude.
	Yeah, man.
	Obviously, a dope part of the history is just like these like rays of light in the middle of just chaos.
	But like, I think, you know, situated culturally, it's like anytime I'm ever talking about this time in the world, like, obviously because it's so personal to me, but like, I always want to like remind people that we are still talking about the enslavement, a chattel, a type of scourge that hadn't been, we hadn't seen before on the planet, like how remarkably evil this is.
	And at the same time, that those that were disgusted by it are just as normal as we are now about the things that we're disgusted by.
	That will, if there was a social media, they would tweet about it.
	They would follow hashtags.
	They would do all those things too.
	But, and then, and then be looking to the government to be like, why aren't y'all doing something about it?
	So it reminds me, I think of like, my brain goes to like the Dred Scott case where like, I don't need to teach you of this, but like, the, for the, for the listener who clearly is the other 80,000 people that are, we're talking to right now, is this idea of like, you have the Missouri compromise, which was like, for every free state, there's a slave state.
	If you're going to get a new one in the union, you got to get a new one on this side too.
	Like, this was their way of trying to like placate before we actually went to war.
	So a dude, so a dude gets free.
	He like escapes his plantation, goes north, you know, signs up to be a citizen in a northern state and is living his life.
	Right.
	And now he's like, I'm in a free state.
	This is, that's what y'all said.
	This is what y'all said y'all was going to do.
	I'm a free man.
	I got up here.
	I'm good.
	And then the slave hunter goes and finds him and attempts to bring him back to his plantation to enslave him again.
	And he's like, wait, hold up.
	Like looking at this, all y'all states' rights people, looking at the state, like, fam, you're, why are you letting this other state, that other state is usurping your authority?
	You're saying that I'm a free man, like I'm a citizen here.
	Why are you letting them do that?
	Goes all the way to Supreme Court.
	The Supreme Court's like, ah, yeah, you're right.
	Like, you still kind of belong to your plantation.
	And it's like, yeah.
	So at this point, you're like, well, I can't trust the Supreme Court to do anything about this shit.
	You know what I'm saying?
	Because clearly, when it was a choice between two states, right?
	You chose the rights of the slave state.
	So to me, I'm like, you could be nice.
	Like you said, you could be nice and like Tis Tisk, like, you know, what's going on?
	Or you could be like John Brown.
	It's like, fuck this.
	I can't trust y'all to do any of this shit.
	So we just, it's getting down.
	Yeah.
	Yeah.
	And it's, I, I, I want to, you know, when we talk about like the particular evil of slavery in the Americas, um, I think a really good point to look back on is slavery in the Roman Empire.
	Rome was a slave embodiment.
	Yeah, they're heavily slave-ass slave.
	And they worked generations to death in mines.
	And yet, if you get freed, there was no lingering shame.
	There was no caste system.
	Your kid, you got most of the rights of a citizen, and your kids were just normal citizens.
	And that is why, despite you might have generations of specific people get enslaved, once they got free, there was no lingering stigma.
	There was no lingering apart.
	Like, yeah, you were like, the Romans were just like, no, slavery is a political condition.
	We beat you in a war.
	We get to enslave a bunch of you.
	Right.
	But once you're, you're still people.
	We don't think you're less human.
	We just won, you know?
	Like, I don't own your kids.
	Yeah.
	I mean, you often did own their kids, but like what your kid, if your kids get free, they're not lower quality people.
	We don't, we don't think there's a racial hierarchy.
	We just won a war.
	And so we're going to be shit to you, right?
	Which is like, that's still a bad thing, but it is so different from how it worked here.
	Yeah.
	So Lee had been sent on special duty to crush John Brown's uprising.
	And after it gets done, he goes back home to keep on fucking his father-in-law's finances.
	But he gets sent back to Harper's Ferry a few days later to defend it from, there's this like, it's kind of like these fears you had in 2020 that like Antifa's starting fires.
	Like he's got hundreds of allies.
Slavery as Politics 00:08:21
	They're hiding in the woods.
	They're going to come free him.
	Lee is like not a dummy.
	He knows that, nah, that's probably not going to happen, but he does his job.
	He manages a defense.
	They execute John Brown and Lee soon returns to his command down in Texas.
	He does not seem to have considered the incident to have been hugely significant at the time, but of course it would have an enormous impact on the rest of his life.
	In the days and weeks after the execution, Brown became a hero to abolitionists across the North and a demon, the physical embodiment with growing Southern unease at the political fight over slavery.
	Guelzo's book contains a good summary of headlines in the wake of the raid.
	The Southern people have heretofore disregarded the ravings of Northern fanatics because they believed that such madness to be merely of pecuniary speculation, wailed the Richmond Inquirer.
	But Harper's Ferry shows that the northern people mean more than words.
	How long will it be, the inquirer asked, before the abolition abolition fanatics of Cincinnati may seize Newport in Kentucky?
	For the moment, the aid of the federal government was near Harper's Ferry and was in hands faithful to the Constitution.
	But another year may place that in the hands of our assailants and urge on and strengthen the hands that murder our families and pillage our property.
	So they start freaking out about this.
	Yeah.
	But at least for a while, life goes on.
	One of the last duties Lee is going to execute for the U.S. Army before the Civil War starts is a very mild insurgency against a Mexican man named Juan Cortina.
	Juan was a former Mexican Army officer who owned a ranch near Brownsville.
	He had properties on both sides of the Rio Grande.
	And as settlers are coming in and displacing Mexicans who had lived there often for generations, a lot of these settlers are like conmen, right?
	They're basically cooking up fake legal documents to claim they own this property and like forcing families off.
	It's really fucked up.
	Cortina calls these guys flocks of vampires, and he is entirely accurate in that.
	In July 1859, Cortina acts to stop an American police officer from arresting a Mexican man.
	He winds up shooting the sheriff, evading a posse, and then forming his own band of insurgents and returning to Brownsville with a list of white lawyers to kill.
	And he gets five of them.
	He's fucking cool.
	This guy's dope.
	He then flees back to Mexico, and this blows up into a series of raids, right?
	And Lee is sent to stop him.
	And they, they kind of have a back and forth because every time he'll cross the Rio Grande, Lee is not allowed to follow across the Rio Grande into Mexican territory.
	And Cortina winds up like eventually, Lee never catches him.
	Cortina winds up like France tries to take over Mexico and they install a Habsburg emperor.
	So he has to deal with that, right?
	It doesn't end well, but it ends the Cortina problem for the U.S.
	And for his part, Lee writes to his family about Cortina and says, you know, I am a great advocate of people staying at home and minding their own affairs.
	Were you?
	Were you, Robert E. Lee?
	Really?
	Yeah, I don't think that's true.
	I don't think so.
	That's true.
	I think that that man just outsmarted you.
	Yeah, absolutely.
	Yeah.
	That is hilarious.
	Yeah.
	That dude was like running up.
	Look, he ran up into America.
	It was like, oh, can't catch me.
	Fun guy.
	So back in Texas, Lee encountered a rising tide of secessionist sentiment from the Texans around him.
	Their hostility to the federal government and even to U.S. Army troops was palpable.
	The situation grew worse by the day, and Lee found himself sort of in a peculiar and alienated mindset.
	If you want to imagine what the kind of man Lee was would be doing today in 2024, it's helpful to know that he was his era's equivalent of a centrist, at least in terms of how he expressed his beliefs.
	I don't think he was in his heart really a centrist.
	He was much more, he was a dedicated slave owner, but in terms of how he talked about things, that is how he liked to portray himself.
	Michael Corda describes this well.
	He was appalled at Southerners' talk about the renewal of the slave trade, to which he was opposed on every ground.
	And his experience of dealing with his father-in-law's slaves had further soured his view of slavery as an institution.
	He regarded secession as revolution, dismissed it as silly, and could anticipate no greater calamity for our country than a dissolution of our union.
	Now, it's tempting to look at the decisions he makes later and just say, well, he was lying about that.
	He was pretending he didn't care about secession and slavery, but we know that he really did care about slavery enough to fight for it.
	I think that that's not entirely the right way to look at it, right?
	You have to understand, counter to a lot of casual history you hear, that Robert E. Lee did not particularly identify as a Southerner, right?
	Part of why he doesn't want a Civil War is that he doesn't really consider himself.
	He considers himself, he's a cosmopolitan guy.
	He's an American in general.
	And this goes totally against the lost cause stuff, right?
	The popular narrative is he hates the idea of secession, but he loves Virginias too much.
	He just can't.
	He just can't fight against it.
	It's his heart.
	It's the entirety of his being.
	It's not.
	Lee spends very little of his adult life in Virginia, let alone Arlington.
	He lives in the North for considerable periods of time and then out in the West, in Mexico and in Texas.
	He is a citizen of the United States, and throughout most of his life, his letters give very little sign of a man who holds specific affection for Virginia.
	In fact, he puts a lot of time and effort into avoiding being at home.
	This is in spite of the fact that his army career seems to have petered out, right?
	He's like, I'm not going to get promoted as much as I want.
	I should quit.
	I'm old enough to retire.
	I should do something else with my life.
	And he refuses to do so, despite complaining about it.
	He refuses to go and enjoy life back in his supposedly beloved Arlington.
	And I'm going to read a really telling quote from Robert E. Lee Alife here.
	He could have taken the course of resignation from the army, but that would only land him back at Arlington.
	And even as he received letters from Annie extolling the trees and hills at Arlington, he gently pushed away at any suggestion that he might return there for good.
	I do not think my presence would add anything to their appearance, he replied, in a peculiar mix of pity and self-regret.
	It is better that I am away.
	When Annie pressed the suggestion again in August, he calmly but firmly told her that it would be far easier if you will come out here.
	I will endeavor to make you as comfortable as possible.
	I have a nice little pony on which you can accompany me in my evening rides and a commodious traveling wagon that can carry you wherever I go.
	I have a nice little pony.
	Yeah.
	I love it.
	Yeah.
	Yeah.
	He sounds like a dude that like, he just wants to go back to brunch.
	Yeah.
	He's just like, can we just brunch?
	He's got to Arlington.
	Yeah.
	And he like in Virginia get on my nerves.
	Like, y'all, what you, y'all just get on my nerves.
	But like, yeah.
	He's literally like, I'll send you an Uber comfort.
	Yeah.
	Yeah.
	You come here.
	I'll send you an Uber.
	I'll pay for it.
	I'll send you an Uber.
	I think, but I want to use that, that line because that was some high-level shade.
	She's talking about how beautiful the trees are.
	And he's like, well, I ain't going to make them any more beautiful.
	I mean, hilarious.
	Yeah.
	I want to continue the last bit of that quote.
	There was no point in his returning to Arlington.
	He was and always would be a stranger there.
	You know, I am much in the way of everybody, and my tastes and pursuits did not coincide with the rest of the household and certainly not with the Arlington slaves.
	Now, I hope everybody is happier.
	Now, that doesn't strike me as a man who loves his home so much, he'd break his oath and turn traitor to defend it in a cause he otherwise abhorred, right?
	Yeah.
	No, so exactly.
	He's like, really, y'all get on my nerves.
	That's the, like, that is a, that is, I, people truly contain multitudes.
	And, but the idea that he was just like, really, I didn't, I don't even, I'm not even from Virginia.
	I don't really like y'all.
	Uh, I just got stationed here.
	Texas got better weather.
	You know what I'm saying?
	I can get a taco down here.
	Why don't you just come down here?
	Yeah.
	Like, we chilling, man.
	Like, that's hilarious to me.
	I ain't gonna make the trees no more beautiful if they already don't need me to make them beautiful.
	You just said, that's hilarious.
	Arlington's not really my place.
After The Revolution 00:03:53
	Yeah.
	Yeah.
	That is.
	Anyway, we're going to talk more about why Lee decides to fight for the Confederacy and how he makes that decision.
	That's going to be a big part of part three.
	And then we will deal with the myth and the fact of Bobby Lee as a great general.
	But prop, for right now, we're going to deal with the myth and the fact of you as a podcaster and musician.
	Where can people find you?
	Man, prophhiphop.com is my everything.
	It's music.
	I got some new music out.
	We got music going along with the podcast.
	Last song was called Let Me Holly Edge Player.
	And yeah, Hood Politics will prop season three up and running.
	There's so much going down.
	We've like really like, like I said last time, kicked it into like fourth gear, you know, putting together like a bunch of different series.
	There's the You Wasn't Outside series that's following the Israel and Gaza situation.
	Then we got series following the election.
	It's a good time, man, and as good as it can be.
	But yeah, Hood Politics will prop every Wednesday.
	Get ready for the Wednesday drop.
	You know what I'm saying?
	And I got a book called Terraform.
	It's a poetry book.
	There's music to go along with that too.
	And I'm very happy to be here.
	Yeah.
	I also have a book.
	It's called After the Revolution.
	Check it out.
	You can order it wherever books are sold.
	Or you can just Google AK Press After the Revolution and buy it directly from Zip Publisher.
	That is the episode.
	Come back next week when we will conclude the exciting story of Bobby Lee.
	I like that you're calling him Bobby.
	Yeah, the rough draft title, the working title for this episode was Bobby Lee, The Guarantee, and then Prentice of Failure.
	The greatest second place trophy of all time.
	Yeah.
	All right, everybody.
	Behind the Bastards is a production of CoolZone Media.
	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.
	When a group of women discover they've all dated the same prolific con artist, they take matters into their own hands.
	I vowed I will be his last target.
	He is not going to get away with this.
	He's going to get what he deserves.
	We always say that, trust your girlfriends.
	Listen to the girlfriends.
	Trust me, babe, on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
	I'm Laurie Siegel, and this is Mostly Human, a tech podcast through a human lens.
	This week, an interview with OpenAI CEO Sam Altman.
	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.
	An in-depth conversation with a man who's shaping our future.
	My highest order bit is to not destroy the world with AI.
	Listen to Mostly Human on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
	Hey, it's Nora Jones, and my podcast, Playing Along, is back with more of my favorite musicians.
	Check out my newest episode with Josh Grobin.
	You related to the Phantom at that point.
	Yeah, I was definitely the Phantom in that.
	That's so funny.
	Share each day with me each night, each morning.
	Listen to Nora Jones's Playing Along on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
	This is an iHeart podcast.
	Guaranteed human.

Chapters

00:00:00 Trust Your Girlfriends
00:02:09 Engineering Effective Officers
00:05:08 Politeness in Auschwitz
00:20:51 Judging Historical Figures
00:31:30 Inherited Bad Stuff
00:34:16 Music and Conversation
00:49:45 Rage of the Enslaved
00:58:44 Lies About Systems
01:01:18 AI Creator Responsibility
01:16:31 Slavery as Politics
01:24:53 After The Revolution