Empire: World History - 159. The American Revolution: Building The New Rome (Ep 4)

Episode Date: June 12, 2024

The British have surrendered, they’ll be leaving soon. Now the Americans have a new and arguably harder task than before. They have to meld those 13 states, each with their own sense of independence and unique characteristics, into a country. Taking inspiration from Rome, the Enlightenment, and their own experience of British rule, the Founding Fathers created a republic that lasts until today. Listen as William and Anita are joined by Maya for the last of our episodes on the American Revolution. Twitter: @Empirepoduk Email: [e-mail] Goalhangerpodcasts.com Assistant Producer: Anouska Lewis Producer: Callum Hill Exec Producer: Neil Fearn Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

If you want access to bonus episodes reading lists for every series of Empire, a chat community. Discounts for all the books mentioned in the week's podcast, add free listening and a weekly newsletter, sign up to Empire Club at www.mpowerpoduk.com. And welcome to Empire with me, Anita Arnan. And me, William Terimple. And we are now in the final episode of our, well, may I say magnificent? I think it's magnificent because of Maya, but our magnificent, mini-series on the American Revolution with Maya Jassanoff. And it's a stirring story.

What it is, do you want to remind people where we are in case, you know, they've had a couple of days and walked a few dogs in between listening to these two episodes? A great deal of ironing. Yeah. So first of all, we had all our founding fathers. We looked at Washington, we looked at Franklin, we looked at Hamilton, and all the rest of them, before the revolution, keying us up for the outbreak of hostilities with the Boston Massacre, followed by the Boston Tea Party. we saw how the British overreacted to the Boston Tea Party, alienating many of their own supporters and driving many who had previously been loyalists into the arms of those who wanted to get rid of Britain

and particularly to get rid of the King. And so within two years, you have a Declaration of Independence, which is far stronger and far more radical than what even many of the most committed, Patriots had imagined two years earlier. Things are very, very surprising to many of the participants. No one expects that the Patriots will be able to defeat the British Army that, after all, has only 13 years before won a major World War in the Seven Year War. And in Washington, the Patriots get an extraordinary leader who continually uses the country and conducts a series of small-scale skirmishes and hit-and-run attacks, which breaks down the British Army. And eventually, after the Battle of Saratoga and then the siege of Yorktown, the French

come in and encircle the British at Yorktown. There is a surrender, huge numbers of British troops are left to evacuate, which brings us to where we are now. So what is this country, which has just been born by out? What does it look like? Presumably it's battle-scarred with... Nackered. Yeah, exhausted in debt with burnt down buildings and ravaged countryside.

Or is that not the situation? Tell me. I wondered for a minute if you were describing Britain. Obviously doesn't have the burnt down buildings or ravaged countryside, but it sure is the one in debt. You know, what's the United States? Well, it's a bunch of these entities now states. Their independence has been recognized by France, by Spain. It's governed loosely by this thing called the Articles of Confederation.

It has an army. It has a few significant figures who can claim the title of statesmen. And it has the beginnings, I think, of various kinds of, well, patriotic identity. But it also continues to be hugely varied. One of the things I've been talking about a lot. You know, you have areas that are in a plantation economy heavily tied to slavery. You have commercial ports. You have independent farmers.

I mean, just all kinds of differences, geographically, culturally, demographically, and more. What you also have in 1781 is a lot of British troops still stationed in the United States. And one of the things that I think people tend to overlook about the history of the American Revolution is that it actually took quite a long time from the Battle of Yorktown in October of 1781 to the evacuation of the British in November of 1783, fully two years later. The beast doesn't realize that it's had been cut off. It still thinks it's alive. Well, I'm not quite sure I'd put it that way, but I would say that it takes a long time to hash out the terms of peace. Why? Because you have to unravel a whole set of relationships. And this is really, in many ways, a precursor to what will happen, say, with the partition of India and Pakistan in 1947. That is to say, you know, the British are going to leave this place. But what are they going to leave it with? they have to get their people out and they have to get their resources out. And there has to be a lot of negotiation about what counts as British, what counts as American, et cetera. And all of that takes a lot of time being hashed out by a bunch of peace commissioners in Paris, including Benjamin Franklin

on the American side, including Richard Oswald on the British side, who's a business partner of one of the American Patriots, Henry Lawrence, and had been involved with him in slave trading in Sierra Leone. So, you know, there's all these sort of weird connections between these people. So there's a few things that they have to work out. One of the things that they have to work out is whose property counts as what. This is important when it comes to the question of the so-called black loyalists. Because, again, these are the enslaved people who had run to the British in exchange for promised freedom and whom the British gave freedom to quite poignantly in some ways in New York City toward the

end of the war as the peace negotiations are kind of coming to a close and it's clear that the British are going to leave. The British make a point of issuing certificates of freedom to the black people in New York City who had fought for them so that they will have this document that can help confirm their freedom to anybody who asks them. At that time, if you were a black person in the U.S., people were going to assume you were enslaved. So this certificate, it is really important. Anyway, in American eyes, of course, these enslaved individuals are actually property. And there's a striking moment when the then British commander, again, there's changes in the British command all the way through. But the man who's sort of tasked with unwinding the whole

operation is called Sir Guy Carlton. Sir Guy Carlton meets George Washington to have a conversation about, you know, how the British are going to evacuate and all of that. And Washington says to him, what about the property that you owe us, meaning the slaves? And Carlton says, I don't know what you're talking about. You know, the people that I found in New York who were free, they're embarked. They've gone off to Canada. They're free. You know, and Washington is just staggered.

And, you know, he may not know at that very moment that some of his own former slaves are on those British ships taking them away. So this is just one of many, many examples, but I think a really powerful one of the ways in which these two nations have to untangle themselves and also the ways in which the ideas undergirding their positions diverge. Other issues include whether the British will evacuate various forts that lie outside U.S. territory, but very much within a kind of U.S. sphere of interest. This is in the regions around, for example, the Great Lakes that had been the site of Pontiac's rebellion before the Revolutionary War. The issues include what will happen to the property of the

loyalists, that is, the American civilians who had, among other things, sought shelter within British lines of the occupied cities of Savannah, Charleston, and New York. This had become an issue even at the surrender in Yorktown, hasn't it? Article 10 of the surrender had said there will be no punishment of the loyalists who support Britain, and Washington refuses to sign it, and that article is taken out of the treaty? There's a lot of tension around this issue. The loyalists are worried about a few things. They're worried, first of all, about whether they're going to be physically safe. I mean, you know, are they going to actually be tried and hanged and whatever, you know, after the war? Second, they're worried about their property. Many places loyalist property had been confiscated by state

legislatures, even if it hadn't been formally confiscated, if you, obviously, if you leave your farm and you go as a refugee into a British held city, you have no idea what's going to happen to that farm that you left behind. And this is a feature of the negotiations that unfolds at Paris with a particular twist insofar as efforts to ensure that the loyalists would be protected and get their property back are promoted by some of the peace commissioners, but ultimately a somewhat more favorable version of an article regarding loyalists is overturned by none other than Benjamin Franklin, whose own son, William Franklin, had been the royal governor of New Jersey and had evacuated, I mean, had left the U.S. as a loyalist refugee and was settled

in Britain. The two were not friends, it's fair to say. They had a very troubled relationship. Yeah. And so, you know, people would later say, you know, that Franklin, out of sort of vindictiveness, basically prevented a more generous settlement for the loyalists. But it shows the complexity, isn't it? It shows the deep ties that bind these people and the degree to which, as you say, it is a civil war. Absolutely. Other things that have to be worked out are issues to do with borders. We talked already about how France and Spain want to get their own back.

And Spain will retake Florida. The British agreed to surrender it. So there's a long journey for some of the loyalist refugees who are evacuated with the British from South Carolina and the United. Georgia, where they go to Florida thinking that they can settle there, that it's still a British colony, only then to find out that Florida is going to be handed back to Spain. And if they want to stay, they have to swear loyalty to the King of Spain, who's Catholic, and that doesn't sit well with many of them. So there's just a lot of moving parts. And by the way, there's even still fighting between these militias who have been at each other's throats for a while. So it's a very unsettled time. You and your book have lots of examples. You have lots of examples. of loyalists suffering sort of mob violence at this point. Do you want to tell us a little of that?

I mean, some of that happens earlier during the conflict and before it, one had seen versions of this exercised as early as the Stamp Act violence, which is targeting specific individuals who are understood to be aligned with the British, the practice of taring and feathering, which is a really gruesome punishment. I mean, just a gruesome thing to do to somebody. Particularly if the tar is very hot. It leads you in hospital. Well, which by definition, it is. It has to be. Otherwise, I won't stick to you. Yeah. Yeah. So, no, it's an absolutely gruesome thing. So that sort of thing, you know, had been going on earlier. And it's because of that sort of thing that a lot of the loyalists are very anxious about what's going to happen to them in the independent United States. So you arrive via the evacuations of Savannah and Charleston, which Sir Guy Carlton is organizing, in New York City in the fall of 1783, where the largest number, you know, tens of thousands of British troops and loyalists are all consolidated. And

if you're a civilian in this situation, you really have to figure out what you're going to do. You know, the British end up mounting what I would consider to be one of the largest programs of state-sponsored refugee relief in British history at that, you know, up to that time by offering the loyalists free passage to another British colony, land grants in notably for the people from New York, Nova Scotia. some sort of basic supplies and provisions and so on of a sort that they had been doling out in different parts of the states before. And, before we leave that thought, could you give an example?

I mean, you and I, for example, have written about some of the loyalists who at this point make their way via England to India, Sir David Octorlone, a Scott born in Boston who spends the rest of his life in India, William Linnaeus Gardner, godson of the botanist Linnaeus, on the banks of the Hudson, a loyalist who ends up dying on the banks of the Ganges, haven't been a mercenary fighting for the Marathas in a variety of unorthodox wars in northern India. Give us a few of those sort of stories. So all of this kind of comes to a head when you're in New York City in 1783, and all of these civilians have to figure out what to do.

And there's an incredible scene when Washington is coming in to take control of the city, and he's marching in from the north and at the south. end, you know, like where Wall Street is, the British are leaving on the ships and they're sort of pulling out just as the Americans are coming in. And these ships go fanning out, you know, and in effect, if you trace where the loyalists go, you get a map of the expanding British Empire. So to take some examples from New York State, there's a family called the Robinson family who are pretty wealthy landowners of the Hudson Valley. And the patriarch of the family, Beverly Robinson, is an acquaintance of George Washington. And he is kind of on the fence for a while at the beginning

of the conflict. He doesn't want to have to take sides if he can avoid it, which is, by the way, a position many, many people have. But he ultimately decides he's going to be loyal. And he and his sons all end up in British military service one way or another. And in the years ahead, they end up all over the place. You know, one of them is in Gibraltar, a bunch of them are in Canada, some of them end up in India. You know, they just go everywhere. It's only the, really, the wealthiest, best-connected loyalists who move to Britain and find a comfortable home for themselves there. It's an expensive country, among other things. One of them, though, is Benedict Arnold, and he'll be there and he'll be sort of, you know, continuing to be a somewhat cantankerous fellow

for the rest of his life. But he works really hard to make sure that his own sons end up well provided for, and how does he do that, he places two of them in the East India company. And two of Benedict Arnold's sons end up going off to India, which is the coming place, even as the U.S. as the Golan place, India is the coming place. They go off to India, where they will end up, you know, serving the East India Company, settling with Indian women, having in at least one case a family with an Indian woman. And for all I know, there are descendants of Benedict Arnold in India today, perhaps in more numbers than there are in the U.S. Bloody hell! Just a minute. Mind blown. Okay, just let that happen for a second. Wow. Would it also

be true to say, or is there too much of a stretch, that losing America hardens the attitude of Britain towards India, that you know what, we've seen what it's like to have this place slip through our fingers, we're not going to make the same mistakes again? Do they suddenly change or revise the way in which they're going to interact with Indians in India? I think the big change with the loss of the colonies is that the focal point, as it were, of British imperial attention is India, and more than that, that the nature of the empire itself ceases to be as fundamentally colonial, by which I mean white colonial settlements. Now, that remains a big part of the empire. Australia is the immediate site in which that happens right after the loss of America in 1788. But India,

which is already, of course, economically, vastly more significant than many other places for the British Empire, will be the capital, as it were, of British imperial attention henceforth. It's a second center of empire in many ways, with its own huge military and much more besides. And the fundamental difference in India,

well, there are so many, I hesitate to say the fundamental, but one is that India is never a site of British colonial settlement. There's a relatively small number of British people, but there are millions of Hindu-Muslim Sikh and other Indian subjects. And the British crown, therefore, becomes a monarchy that is promising subjecthood or something, something, to huge numbers of people who are not English-speaking, who are not white, who are not Christian. And I think that really changes the bargain, as it were, around what the British monarchy and the British Empire is promising. the point in America for the colonists who broke out into the United States was that they understood themselves to be exactly like the British subjects.

To be equal. Yeah, to be like white people in the British Isles. And they discovered that no, they didn't have the same sort of representation. And going forward, the British government, parliament, crown sort of leans into that and says, no, you guys are not going to be exactly the same. But if you're loyal to us, we will give you various things, include some semblance of religious tolerance, include some versions of accountability, which generally take the form of, in some places, local legislatures and the right to petition the king, which remains a very important right and in a constitutional monarchy. It also comes with authority and with strings attached,

you know, armies being stationed there, you know, the right to raise revenue in different ways. You know, that will all be very much part and parcel of the empire going forward. Yeah. So, I mean, in that deal, you're never going to get Indians that, you know, for example, doing what sparked the Boston massacre, that we object to having a garrison in our city? Because that's just understood. That's what happens. Well, you do have it. You do have that.

I think the Amritsar massacre is an example of that. I mean, that is to say the Indians are protesting martial rule. But let's just say the valence is different. I mean, the idea that we are equally British, I think, is not one that you see in quite the same way. I do want to add, it doesn't ever go away entirely. And Canada is the real mirror to the United States in many ways, not least because large numbers of Americans go to Canada, first, in the wave of loyalists who evacuate immediately and are so numerous that they really populate Nova Scotia a great deal, which it's then divided into two.

The province of New Brunswick takes shape at that time. But second, in the immediate aftermath of the revolution in the next couple decades, there's a huge migration of what are called late loyalists, that is to say, migrants to the colonies or people of the United States who see the promise of cheap land and lower taxes in Canada and what's now Ontario and are perfectly prepared to swear loyalty to the king if that's what they end up getting over there instead of in the Great Lakes region. One of the ironies, of course, is that Cornwallis, who we last saw hired after his surrender at Yorktown, is hired by the government and the East Indy Company as Governor General of the British Dominians in India.

And what the lesson he takes from it is that he sees that the threat comes not from the Indian equivalent of the Native Americans, in other words, the Muslims, Hindus, and Sikhs, but from the white settlers who are there either as white colonists or as in many cases as Anglo-Indians. And there are cities like Calcutta, which have very large Anglo-Indians. populations. And Comwallis passes a series of laws to make sure that those guys never rise up high enough to be a threat to the British Empire. So important laws that he passes at this point forbid, for example, the children of East India Company officials who are born in India from

entering East India Company service except as bandsmen or at a very, very low level as clerks, or running the post offices. There's also a very important law that he forbids the buying of private property by many British officials. There are exceptions like those who plant indigo who are allowed to buy land for commercial purposes for indigo plantations. But by and large, it means that for the whole of British rule in India, the British do not own land. And that when, therefore, they finish their service at the end of 20 or 30 years, they retire back to Tumberidge Wells. They retire back to, or possibly to Australia. And therefore, in 1947, the British leave India very quickly with very few roots in the soil, unlike, say, the Piednoir in Algeria,

who fight to the end to retain their place in Algeria and have to be removed with great difficulty in much bloodshed. So in a sense, what happens here, you could argue, eases the eventual dissolution of the British in India and allows them to leave with almost no bloodshed among the white civilian population, but of course there is 1.5 million that die in partition. Well, look, let's take a break at this point. And when we come back from the break, we've looked at the sort of the pebble that's been dropped and the ripples that reach out to the rest of the empire. But what they're hell does America do next? So join us after the break, and we'll talk about that. Welcome back. So just before the break, we were talking about the

impact that the loss of America has on the British Empire, the British psyche, and most immediately on places like the East India Company. And I love, Amaya, the work that you've done on loyalists and how they settle in Canada and back in Great Britain. It's fascinating, absolutely fascinating stuff. Benedict Arnold, he has brown grandchildren. Let me just repeat that brain explosion that happened before the break. Can we talk about America? Because America is born, you know, it's great. The party is fantastic. The hangover must have hurt like hell, because now they've got to make a country. So how do you even start going about making a country when you have been actually riven by, as you've said, numerous times, civil war. You know,

you've got to rebuild and give a cohesive identity to a new country. How do they do that? The key thing that they have to do is create some sort of governing structure, which is going to be crucial for this. They've been governed by the Articles of Confederation, which don't have a lot of flexibility to them. It's a very unwieldy instrument. And they set to work trying to draft a constitution, which will work for the United States as a whole. This will come to fruition in 1787, but not only do they have to write the constitution, they have to persuade people to get behind it. And this is the object of the documents known as the Federalist Papers, in which John Jay, James Madison, and others will play such a huge role. They have to figure out finances,

which Alexander Hamilton, of course, is quite significant in doing. They have to come up with all of these governing institutions just to make the place work, you know, legally, administratively, financially. Then there's the whole question of sort of some kind of shared culture. And this is its own big project, which we can see taking shape right away in the creation of national heroes and symbols, George Washington being really the first and greatest of them. the Patriots draw extensively on the imagery of the Romans. Not long after the British evacuate, they sail off from New York City, Washington marches down.

He and his officers get together in a tavern which still exists on the southern tip of Manhattan, the Francis Tavern. And a group of his officers form an organization, which they call the Society of the Cincinnati, likening George Washington to the general Cincinnatus of Roman history. Oh my God. Really? That's just only just slotted into place in my brain. Wow. Okay. I often wondered why, you know, Senate, you know, instead of, you know, upper house or, you know, all right, you don't want to have a House of Lords or House of Commons,

but Senate is such a Roman identification. They're very into the Roman mix of military prowess and republicanism. They're very excited about that. Washington is their Cincinnati. They will call him out of retirement, as it were, after the war, to become the first president in a Cincinnati's kind of way. And I do think that the personalities of some of these figures is important. I don't buy into the great man theory of history particularly, but I think we do have to note that this cadre of Americans at the helm of the new nation, were relatively, partly because I think they were relatively united in their educations and

their outlook and so on, were able to sort of turn themselves into a kind of national leadership. So if we look at the revolutionary era, an era of civil war, and we see there as being kind of tensions between patriots and loyalists, maybe Republicans and people less excited about republicanism, we can see those differences sort of move into the period of the early American Republic as the beginnings of political party differences. You have a faction in America who leans much more heavily toward alliances with Britain and toward more compatibility with Britain, smoother trade relations, etc. I guess that would be Adams Hamilton, that kind of camp, is that the only way we're going to exist. After the peace treaties assigned, our relations with

Britain on a fairly even kill. There's no sense of horror and hatred. Well, they do write sort of treaties to each other and say, you know, bygones, bygones, let's just start again. You know, there doesn't seem to be that animosity. So there's a couple of things to say here. One is that the British make good terms with the Americans. That is to say the British are not particularly vindictive in the treaty. Obviously, they can't be. I mean, that is they're on the losing side. But they make terms with the Americans, which are seen by some hardliners in Britain as being too concessionary toward the Americans, vice versa, I should add, that there are also some Americans who are far more anti-British. But that opposition really comes to a head around the time of what's called the J Treaty in 1794,

named for John Jay, it's American negotiator, which establishes favorable trade relationships, basically between Britain and the U.S. and is fiercely opposed by the anti-British faction. the bigger context for this is, I think, twofold. It is that, in the first instance, very few people believe that the United States is going to stay united. This is, as everybody knows, a group of states that have been cobbled together where there's huge differences. And differences in interest, potentially. You know, if you live in South Carolina, you care a lot more about your trade relationships with, say, Barbados or Britain, than you do with, you know, the cod fisheries of the North Atlantic.

And if you live in Massachusetts, you care a lot more about a set of ways of managing your political culture or something like that. You run things differently. You have your town meetings, that sort of thing.

Then you care about, say, slavery, which increasingly you really don't like it all. So there's a lot of differences and people assume, the Spanish assume, the French assume, the British assume, that this is all going to fall apart and that therefore the best thing you can do

is be ready to swoop in and grab the piece of it that you can when it falls apart. Yeah, I mean, just be there. Just don't, you know, don't alienate them so much that when it does all crumble, you don't have any friends. But you just started by saying, you know, there are some who are very still well disposed to having some kind of relationship that you cannot exist without Britain.

And that would be, again, to repeat, probably Washington, definitely Adams, definitely Hamilton. And then on the other side, you have those who ally themselves completely with France and therefore are anti-British. And Jefferson, I guess, Madison, they would count themselves. those who have nothing but deep suspicion of the British and find anything, including the J presentation as treachery, because, you know, why on earth are we kissing the bottom of those people who've oppressed us for so many years? So almost what I find completely fascinating is that

right on the birth of the nation, you have the birth of two political schools of thought, which kind of almost remain to this day, the Jeffersonian side, which is very much we don't have centralized control because we're not replacing one king with another in the form of a president who has all the powers that the king once had, and the other saying, actually, my God, we've got to hold this together. And the only way we can hold this together is by some kind of centralized power structure in the form and the person of the president. So it's, to me, amazing that those first cries of a new country come in two voices right from the get-go. I mean, I think that's remarkable. The other piece of this I want to cite is the question of the West.

So you've got, for example, your Francophiles and your Anglophiles duking it out. You have your people who prefer a strong central executive to your people who prefer a state's rights. And you also have your people who are leaning west as opposed to your people who are leaning east, if you will. And one of the things that Jefferson particularly does when he's president is to promote this idea of the United States as what he calls an empire for liberty. Nowadays we think about the Republic, the United States, as being intrinsically anti-imperial, but is not at all how people understood it at the time. Empires were what big states were. It was a thing to aspire to be. The United States and its founders aspired to be imperial rulers. And one of the ways they would do that would be to expand westward. And westward expansion, the ability to grab land, the ability to kill the Indians to

find more space for slavery. You know, these were all very driving purposes for many Americans in the early Republic. And ultimately, you know, this is what goes into the purchase of the Louisiana territory from Napoleon. Ultimately, this is one of the Casus Belli for the War of 1812 against Britain. And I mentioned a minute ago that there's another big context we have to put this in, and that is the context of the French Revolution and the Haitian revolution and what will, of course, going into the 19th century be all of the Republican revolutions in Latin America. And this is a sense that the world order is sort of turning on, you know, away from absolutist monarchy, but is maybe becoming quite congenial to certain kinds

of sort of Republican democratic empires, if you will. And I would argue that that, that Britain represents a flavor of it. It's not Republican and it's not Democratic, but it is in its own view, constitutional. And the United States, which sees itself obviously as Republican and Democratic, but of course in practice is not insofar as it has slavery and excludes all sorts of people, but definitely sees itself as imperial. So it's a fascinating period of history,

but I think it's one that well deserves our attention today because when we nowadays, I think, sort of draw very clean lines between what we consider to be imperial and not imperial, between what we consider to be subtler colonial and what we consider not to be, what we consider to be indigenous. You know, we just want to sort of put all these things together to realize that, you know,

that even the United States is sort of all of these things at once. Maya, you've talked about the different cleavages, the Anglifas and the Francophiles and so on. Are the cleavages between those who are very strongly imperial in the New America, or are they all very strongly imperial? Do they all think that they're going to? to be moving westwards and conquering over the appellations and breaking into new territories. There are definitely differences of opinion about how all of this should happen. A critical

one is whether slavery is going to expand or not, which is, of course, ultimately one of the key provocation, really, for the civil war. There's questions about what should happen to Indians and notoriously Andrew Jackson, who's just a complete bloodthirsty Indian killer, basically, has no compunctions about pursuing an ethnic cleansing of genocide against Indians, which is not universally held. Though it becomes a, he's president. He's on one of our banknotes, you know. But no, I mean, you know, there's political division in America.

There are different visions for things. But I guess what I want to say is that the concept of the United States as an empire in the sense of having a kind of geopolitical footprint, this is something that a lot of people get behind. And I would say is really dominant in the political consciousness of the early republic. Now, I mean, it's such a complicated thing to look upon. I mean, there's no tidy bow, but there is one little bow I'd like to tie at the end of this episode, which is, you know, the two founders or battlers for two different scores of thought,

who are these two best friends who end up being the second and then third president of the United States, John Adams and Thomas Jefferson. They, I mean, they break hideously, ideologically, and their friendship cleaves, and there is so much sort of muck that is raked between them. Mainly, I think it's fair to say Jefferson kicking muck at Adams. But they maintain a friendship after they're both out of office, and they maintain a communication where they actually talk about this. What are we?

What did we fight for? What does America mean? Why did we do all this? What should we be? What is life, love? I mean, there's a collection of extraordinary letters that part. between them. And what I find, and if this is a neat little bow, forgive me and may sound tweet, but it's the truth. 50 years after the Declaration of Independence, the 4th of July, both men

die on the same day, having communicated with each other. On the 4th of July itself. On the 4th of July, having held each other close and described each other as my soulmate and best friend and having this dialogue right until the end of their lives. And I don't know whether this is true or not. But it is Jefferson who dies first. And we're talking about hours apart. And the last words that supposedly John Adams says on his deathbed are Thomas Jefferson, at least Jefferson survives. I don't know what you take from this, but these are extraordinary men that we've spent time with, whether you like or love what they did, created and thought. But it's a pretty fine full stop to this particular episode. Maya, I don't know how we thank you.

I mean, honestly, four episodes and a massive. You're your absolute hero. Thank you so much. We're very, very grateful. All we can do is to send everybody to buy your book, which I cannot recommend highly enough. Maya Jasnov's Liberty's Exiles, on which these last four episodes have been loosely based, Liberty's Exiles, the loss of America and the remaking of the British Empire is available in paperback from HarperCollins. So till we meet again, it's goodbye from me, Anita Arndon.

And goodbye from me, William Durunpool.