The Chris Voss Show - The Chris Voss Show Podcast – Liberty Is Sweet: The Hidden History of the American Revolution by Woody Holton

Episode Date: December 8, 2021

Liberty Is Sweet: The Hidden History of the American Revolution by Woody Holton A sweeping reassessment of the American Revolution, showing how the Founders were influenced by overlooked Americans—women, Native Americans, African Americans, and religious dissenters. Using more than a thousand eyewitness accounts, Liberty Is Sweet explores countless connections between the Patriots of 1776 and other Americans whose passion for freedom often brought them into conflict with the Founding Fathers. “It is all one story,” prizewinning historian Woody Holton writes. Holton describes the origins and crucial battles of the Revolution from Lexington and Concord to the British surrender at Yorktown, always focusing on marginalized Americans—enslaved Africans and African Americans, Native Americans, women, and dissenters—and on overlooked factors such as weather, North America’s unique geography, chance, misperception, attempts to manipulate public opinion, and (most of all) disease. Thousands of enslaved Americans exploited the chaos of war to obtain their own freedom, while others were given away as enlistment bounties to whites. Women provided material support for the troops, sewing clothes for soldiers and in some cases taking part in the fighting. Both sides courted native people and mimicked their tactics. Liberty Is Sweet gives us our most complete account of the American Revolution, from its origins on the frontiers and in the Atlantic ports to the creation of the Constitution. Offering surprises at every turn—for example, Holton makes a convincing case that Britain never had a chance of winning the war—this majestic history revivifies a story we thought we already knew.

You wanted the best. You've got the best podcast, the hottest podcast in the world. The Chris Voss Show, the preeminent podcast with guests so smart you may experience serious brain bleed. Get ready, get ready, strap yourself in. Keep your hands, arms and legs inside the vehicle at all times. Because you're about to go on a monster education roller coaster with your brain now here's your host chris voss hi folks it's voss here from thechrisvossshow.com thechrisvossshow.com hey we're coming here with another great podcast we certainly appreciate you guys tuning in thanks for being a part of the show. As always, to see the video version of this, you can go free for an unlimited time. You want to grab this deal, what's available, youtube.com, 4Chess, Chris Voss.

You can see all the wonderful things we're watching over there. Go to goodreads.com, 4Chess, Chris Voss. I think one of my giveaways from one of my books is still running over there. You can go over there and see everything we're reading, reviewing, all the cool stuff that some of the authors that come on the show are doing. Also go to all of our groups. There's so many of them, Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Instagram, TikTok, all those places the cool kids are going. We're just not on Snapchat yet. I don't know why. Maybe it's obvious. Why not? Anyway, guys, be sure to go over there and subscribe to all the channels and follow us

over there. So we're excited to announce my new book is coming out. It's called Beacons of Leadership, Inspiring Lessons of Success in Business and Innovation. It's going to be coming out on October 5th, 2021. And I'm really excited for you to get a chance to read this book. It's filled with a multitude of my insightful stories, lessons, my life, and experiences in leadership and character. I give you some of the secrets from my CEO Entrepreneur Toolbox that I use to scale my business success, innovate, and build a multitude of companies. I've been a CEO for, what is it, like 33, 35 years now. We talk about leadership, the importance of leadership, how to become a great leader, and how anyone can become a great leader as well. So you can pre-order the book right now wherever fine books are sold, but the best thing to do on getting a pre-order deal is to go to beaconsofleadership.com. That's

beaconsofleadership.com. On there, you can find several packages you can take advantage of in ordering the book. And for the same price of what you can get it from someplace else like Amazon, you can get all sorts of extra goodies that we've taken and given away. Different collectors, limited edition, custom made numbered book plates that are going to be autographed by me. There's all sorts of other goodies that you can get when you buy the book from beaconsofleadership.com. So be sure to go there, check it out or order the book wherever fine books are sold. Today we have an amazing author on the show. His new book just came out October 19th, 2021. The book is called Liberty is Sweet,

The Hidden History of the American Revolution. You may have heard of it. It's pretty cool. And it brought you to a democracy where we are today. And we're going to have Woody Holton, the author on the show today. He's going to be talking to us about the book and all the cool stuff that went into it. Woody is a PhD from Duke University. He's a Cosland professor or Mickausland professor of history at the University of South Carolina, where he teaches classes on African Americans, Native America, early American women, and the origins of the Constitution, Abigail Adams, and the era of the American Revolution. Welcome to the show, Woody. How are you? I'm good. I'm good, Chris. Thanks for having me on.

Thanks for coming. I certainly appreciate it. And congratulations on the new book. Yeah, yeah. 12 years. It's nice to finish. 12 years it took you to write this book? Holy crap. Yeah. Yeah. Well, I teach a lot, but I've had my kids grow up during those 12 years, but it's been a fun thing to do at the same time.

So give us your plugs. To find you on the interwebs. And get to know you better. Well hidden history is the part I'd stress. And for instance. Talking about the origins of the revolution. I realized having taught this for 30 years. Why did they rebel?

I was asking the wrong question. Because it was parliament that rebelled. The colonists. The free colonists at least. Were completely satisfied. I was asking the wrong question because it was Parliament that rebelled. The colonists, the free colonists at least, were completely satisfied with their relationship with the British Empire as of, say, 1762. It was Parliament that was dissatisfied, that wanted to levy taxes, that wanted to restrict their taking of land from Native Americans and so forth. So it's Parliament that tried to change things. And it was economists who just wanted to hang on to what they had. Yeah. It's always that government getting in the way.

So give us your websites where people can find you on the interweb, get to know you better. And then let's get into what motivates you. So I'm embarrassed to say I don't have a website, but I'm very active on Twitter. And I'm there. I'm Woody Holton USC, the university, the old USC, the classic, not the one in California. Woody Holton USC. And so, for instance, one thing I have there is a long running hashtag countdown to 1619. That was my endorsement in the way of the 1619 Project. And it was 76 quotes of white Americans

from the revolutionary era who were angry at the British for an alliance that they made with enslaved people. So if you go to my Twitter page, you'll find things like that. Oh, that's pretty interesting. Let's see. What motivated you to write this book?

You're just like, I really want to write something for 12 years or? Yes, exactly. So people would leave me alone. No, there are great histories of the revolution and their great history of when in the revolution are Native Americans, African Americans, but they tend to be really separate. And more recently, historians have had a chapter in the back on blacks and a chapter in the backs on indigenous people and so forth.

And my whole idea was to not have separate chapters, but to integrate them all into the same story. Because I think you can't understand why people like Thomas Jefferson and George Washington are immensely wealthy. John Hancock's the richest guy in Boston. Those aren't the kind of people who usually start revolutions. So why did they start revolutions? One thing you need to understand to why they did that involves Native Americans, because it was indigenous people who sided with the enemy, that is the French, in the previous war.

And the British government said, we don't want another war against the Indians. And so in 1763, the British government drew a line along the crest of the Appalachian Mountains saying to white settlers like Jefferson and Washington, who were more land speculators than settlers, you can't go west of this line because that's going to stop the Indians from going to war with us. And the line pissed the colonists off. But what even more pissed them off was to enforce the line. The British government put 10,000 peacekeeping troops in America, mostly along that border. And here's a line from modern politics that applies in this case. The British government essentially put a wall

on the Western border and thought it would be reasonable for the colonists to pay for it um and oh they pay for it too the stamp act if people know anything about the the american revolution they know no taxation without representation but my point is the first big tax the stamp act wouldn't have happened if there hadn't been for indigenous people because they attacking the colon attacking the the british colonies the british government's got to pay to put down those indian rebellions doesn't want any more rebellions and so they put these peacekeeping troops there and they go after the colonists to pay for it and that's taxation without representation wow man it's so interesting

how the history of this country is so steeped in racism. And everything they did to the Indians and the original lie of what was it, the shining city on the hill. And it's so insane. And a lot of it has been whitewashed and buried. Like you say, it's usually not put in some of the books. I do remember the Stamp Act, though, learning that in school. I guess I did learn something in school. Good for you. But see, I want your children and grandchildren when they learn about the Stamp Act to learn. And I'd go this far. If there had been no Native Americans, there would have been no Stamp Act because that's

where the money was going to was to pay for those peacekeeping troops on the frontier. Wow. And so was that before after the Boston Harbor thing? Boston Tea Party was on December 16th, 1773. And by the way, it's also a Native American story because I bet you did learn in elementary school that the guys who poured the tea into the harbor dressed up like Indians. Yeah, they were trying to put off that they were, yeah. Actually, the textbooks say they were trying to disguise themselves as Indians. That, they were trying to put off that they were, yeah. Actually, the textbooks say they were trying to disguise themselves as Indians. That's not true. They did blacken their faces, as anybody doing a crime might do. But the real reason that they portrayed themselves as Indians

and stuck feathers in their hats and all that was that for them, Native Americans represented perfect freedom. And so that's one of the wonderful ironies of the revolution, or you could say horrific irony, is that at the same time that they're swiping Indians' land, as you talked about, they're also admiring the Indians as the symbols of freedom. And in fact, in cartoons in Britain, both pro-American cartoons and anti-American cartoons,

their stand-in for the Americans, the allegory for America, was almost always an Indian. Really? Yeah, that stood for America. And there was a lot, there's a noble savage myth that runs alongside the savage myth that I'm sorry, very sorry to say that our Declaration of Independence, it says a lot of beautiful things, but it also talks about the merciless Indian savages whose known rule of warfare is the indiscriminate butchering of women and children. I don't know the details of that part, but the money phrases, the merciless Indian savages.

And so they are really part of the story in all kinds of ways, both as protecting their homelands and also as these representatives of freedom of concern. I think it was, we had an author on the show that talked about, I think it was Andrew Jackson. Wasn't he the crazy one? A lot of them were crazy, but he was a crazy Indian hater. Yeah. And he had the, they called it the mountaintop. And he even gave the speech, I think from the floor of the Congress where he was like,

it was something about the mountaintop and had to do with basically a eminent domain that white people thought they had. And Indians were lesser human beings or not even human beings. And therefore, it gave them reason to just kill and plunder and take whatever they want with their land. It was really extraordinary. Some of the just the horrific stuff that we did in the history of this country and what motivated this, the creation of this country. Yes. But I'm also going to give you a yes, but on that, Chris, because for me, the more that's certainly true. But the more exciting, because not so well known aspect of this is that all of these groups, we haven't talked much about enslaved people.

One in five residents of the 13 colonies that rebelled were enslaved. And we're now starting to talk about places like Monticello and Mount Vernon, not as plantations, but as what they were for the majority of the people who lived on them, slave labor camps. But my point is not that's certainly valid. But my point is to see that they were not just victims. They weren't, they, African-Americans, Native Americans, we talk about women, are not just speed bumps, but they're actually affecting things. So can I give you another example?

Sure, yes, please. So there was a guy, the Declaration of Independence, July 4, 1776. Here's a bar bet question. Who was the first person to quote that phrase, all men are created equal? And the answer is Lemuel Haynes, who was a black man serving in George Washington's Continental Army. In 1776, he wrote an anti-slavery pamphlet, and he was looking for an epigraph. I don't know if you use epigraphs in your books. I don't. A quote at the start to set the mood. And he was looking for a good phrase, and that's when the Declaration of Independence came out. He says, oh, this is perfect. And he thereby became the first person to quote the Declaration of Independence. And here's why that's important. Hardly anybody else was quoting that part of the Declaration. They saw the Declaration of Independence, to use a loaded term, as a

secession ordinance. It's really a foreign policy document saying that these 13 nations from New Hampshire down to Georgia, which have been part of the British Empire, are now going to break off that alliance and form their own alliance with each other. It was justifying the right of 13 nations to break off from their bigger nation of Britain, foreign policy. What Lemuel Haynes did was start a process that shifted the focus of the Declaration from secession document to universal declaration of human rights. And in fact, the vast majority of the people who quoted the Declaration of Independence for the rest of the 18th century were abolitionists, people fighting slavery, whether they were African-American like Lemuel Haynes, or many

people have heard of Benjamin Banneker, who also quoted it, but also quoted not the secession phrases like the whites were doing, but quoted created equal. And also white abolitionists did that as well. And later we get women's rights activists. They quote created equal and they transformed this document, which Lincoln said if they hadn't done this, this would have been wadding on the field. Just because they, okay, they got their independence, so who needs the document? It was anti-slavery people, black and white, women's rights activists, male and female, who transformed the Declaration into this universal Declaration of Human Rights.

Wow, that's pretty amazing because there's a lot of people who talk about how in the Declaration of Independence or I'm thinking of the Constitution when all men are created in equal honor. They give the power to land. This is something that I'd like to talk about, which is the incredible gap between the principles and the people. So I think we must, all of us, black, white, anything, must love what Jefferson wrote, all men are created equal, especially after Elizabeth Cady Stanton revised it for the Seneca Falls Declaration in 1848, all men and women are created equal. So we love the writings, but you have to hate the guy because when he wrote those words, he owned, well, over the course of his lifetime, he owned 600 people. And unlike some of the other founders, Jefferson constantly made it clear that he knew that slavery was a tremendous evil. And his fellow delegates in Congress knew that, too.

One way is that they refer to slaves a lot in their, and in fact, in their sort of capstone grievance, but they never used the word. And they were more likely to refer to African-Americans. Of course, that term didn't exist, but they were most likely to say Negroes or blacks or slaves. None of those three words is in either the Declaration or the Constitution, but they are in the records we have of the conversations that led to those documents. And, oh yeah, what are we going to do about the blacks this? What are we going to do about the Negroes that? What are we going to do about the slaves this other thing? But then when they wrote

the document, they wrote around those terms because they didn't want to advertise the fact, here we are proclaiming freedom in the Declaration and establishing a government in the Constitution that would have the Three-Fifths Clause, that would have the Fugitive Slave Act, and so forth. They didn't want to acknowledge that a whole lot of it was about keeping enslaved people enslaved. So did they foresee that, because I know there was a lot of arguments at that time going on about slavery and anti-slavery. So did they foresee that maybe when they wrote it, they're just like, there might come a day in the future that everyone will be

equal. We're still waiting for that time, but sadly, but maybe they foresaw the future. They certainly were really good at foreseeing the future in that document. What they foresaw is a great question. And someone else who was involved in that question earlier than you were was Abraham Lincoln. That definitely was earlier. Both during the Lincoln-Douglas debates and during the Gettysburg Address, he made this extraordinary claim that Jefferson, although a slaveholder, was sincere in his opposition to slavery, but knew that it wasn't realistic to persuade other people or even himself to be against slavery, but that Jefferson had this theoretical opposition to slavery. So

he put all men are created equal in the document. He snuck it in there, according to Lincoln. I would describe it as a time bomb. It's not going to blow up right away, but it's there. And at some point it will be activated and it will result in freedom. And in fact, it did. It took a civil war to do it and massive agitation on the part of slaves and their white supporters. Quakers in particular were big anti-slavery people. It took a lot to do it.

But I think this is the spiritual side of Lincoln in thinking that Jefferson deliberately put it there as a sort of a ticking time bomb that would eventually blow up and start to make freedom more universal. But it's a cool – Between that and the Madison Papers, it's extraordinary the foresight they put into it. Just recently, I think it was Madison, or the argument was, does the voting held by the federal government, is the voting held by the states? And we just barely dodged an authoritarian overthrow of our government because Madison put the, put the voting with the States and they couldn't override it at a federal

level that saved this, this democracy and that and a couple of people actually police who risked their lives on January 6th. That is true too. And sadly that was a rehearsal warmup. So we're probably, we've got more to go. If you study,

I'm sure studying history and fascism and authoritarianism between the revolution the russian revolution the was at the beer hall of nazi germany or up a creek but seriously though the not like that wasn't serious either but the fact that the states had the control there was no really the of the election and the voting systems and to my understanding madison put that in there on purpose because he foresaw the future of someone at a federal level seizing power and taking control,

which is now being rechanged in different GOP states. But at least at that level, at least there's still semblance of states that aren't insane. But yeah, it was interesting, like I say, how much foresight they had to see 250 years in the future, roughly.

Well, Madison wanted to go even further. He was actually disappointed with the Constitution as written because the biggest thing he was – well, two things he was disappointed about. One, he was from a very populous state. Virginia was the most populous. And so he wanted the Senate, like the House of Representatives, to be apportioned according to population. And so it would be interesting to think about that now, that California would have 10 senators and Wyoming would have one. If that were the case, a lot of legislation I'm sensing that you and I both support would have passed because the right now there are senators who represent more sheep than people. And meanwhile, those two California senators are each representing however many people they have.

There are now 60 million. It is a very undemocratic setup. And he didn't want that. He had a dog in the fight because he happened to come from the California of 1787, which was Virginia. The other thing he wanted, it's amazing to imagine it now, he wanted the federal government to have a veto over state laws. And I'm not sure I'm even for that. There'd be times when that was good, when the federal government was finally ready for the Voting Rights Act and the Civil Rights Act, I sure would like for it to have been able to intervene when states like mine, South Carolina, denied African-Americans the right to vote. On the other hand, we can imagine there's strong sentiment that these fascists that you mentioned may control our government, our House and Senate, two short years

from now. And then you don't want them vetoing, for instance, California passing high fuel emission standards and things like that. So all of those things cut different ways depending on in different periods of time. And when you look at the history of America, the states being able to have power and determine what they want to do, you can disagree or agree with certain principles. Where certain laws get passed, the legalization of marijuana is slowly spreading across the nation. The same thing happened with gay marriage. There's probably a lot of other different legal things that finally SCOTUS steps in and goes, I can't remember if Roe versus Wade went down that way.

But it's really amazing how much foresight they had into it. So why did you name the title of the book, Liberty is Sweet? I was thinking of the book, is sweet i was thinking of the the book dude where's my car where he goes dude what's my to to say and he goes sweet he goes what's it say and he says sweet so why did you name the book well that's why no i did it as a little deception i wanted people to think that liberty is sweet referred to was a quote from a speech by Patrick Henry. He's the guy who said, give me liberty or give me death or somebody like that. John Adams or Ben Franklin or whatever. What it actually is from, though, is a letter written to George Washington when he was commander in chief of the Continental Army. And it's from the man who was running his slave labor camp,

Mount Vernon, in the winter of 1775, 1776, saying, and he actually was his cousin running it. He says, George, we got a problem because you're for the revolution and I'm for the revolution, but the governor of Virginia is loyal to the crown and he's assembling his own army. And he, his name was Governor Dunmore, he's issued an emancipation proclamation. And he did on November 15th, 1775, very similar to the one that Lincoln issued four score and seven years later in 1862. And so this is the British offering freedom to black Virginians, not to blacks who are owned by loyalists like Governor Dunmore, who had slaves and kept them. But if you're owned by George Washington or Jefferson or any of the other patriots, and if you run away and if you can get to Governor Dunmore, he's going to put a musket in your hands and he's going to free you for fighting for your king. And so a lot of people were already talking about running. Quite a few people would run from Mount Vernon. Thousands nationwide of African-Americans ran to the British and got free

that way. So when Lund Washington wrote George Washington, that winner saying, he said, oh, a lot of your slaves and even some of your servants are talking about running away. Liberty is sweet. So the point is that liberty is sweet for Jefferson and Franklin and Hancock as they rebel against the British, but liberty is also sweet for enslaved people as they run away from Jefferson and Washington and the other enslaving sons of liberty i love the details on this because i just got the i don't know why but i i you get in is at least when i went to school i'm not sure they get taught history anymore but when i went to school they gave you this flowery version of it yeah a bunch of people are against taxes and they did this thing and they're like yeah screw the british eh because

they're i don't know they got bad teeth or something i don't know and uh and they're just like yeah we really like tea a lot and so yeah we're just gonna go start a revolution and then the beatles wrote a song about it and that was it reality so much more interesting than this cardboard yeah i got that version in elementary school as well. And I think they're actually doing much better in high school now. I talked to a lot of high school teachers on Twitter, and they're doing some pretty cool stuff. They use Howard Zinn's book, People's History of the United States. This leads to something that I want to make sure that your listeners know about, which is there is a massive effort going on to suppress this more nuanced and

open-ended view of the revolution because many people in Congress, including the former president when he was in power, who really want to go back to the hero-worshiping version, and C, history is a form of indoctrinating kids. For me, history is not a series of dates. It's a series of debates. That is, the best high school teachers, and I think you can do this at younger levels, are getting their kids into debates. So you mentioned the Boston Tea Party. We could talk about the Boston Massacre three years earlier. Were those troops justified in firing into the crowd? I get my students to do a mock trial. And it's interesting, the jury ends up voting that they were. Just be that I have more mainstream type students. The crowd was throwing rocks at them.

It's the same kind of arguments that you could talk about with Black Lives Matter protests or this guy in Wisconsin who got off after murdering two people at that protest in Kenosha. The same issues came up in the Boston Massacre. There is a huge war going on about the Revolutionary War and how to teach it. Should we teach it as worship these men like Washington and Jefferson, or should we teach it as a bunch of debates? Who was right about the Boston Massacre and who was right about slavery? And was it possible to even consider abolishing slavery and so forth? And, of course, I'm into teaching the debates. And I think this is brilliant.

I think we tried to get the author of the 1619 Project or whoever's the author of that book. We invited them to come on the show through the publisher. So hopefully they send them to us. But to me, it's much more interesting because the nuances of it, all the people that were involved in the motivations and everything else are just, tell a better story and give a better depth. And actually it's just better history. It's more interesting i when i look back on it now my history was just whitewashed with a bunch of white i know all the white men that were involved i know there's a lady who made the flag i think that's about the only time a lady comes into it and black people really aren't a part of it i'm just astounded you know the black person was a person who said all men were created equal and he didn't like him but he was the first one to quote it and

he's really shifted the spotlight he and other anti-slavery people shifted the spotlight, turned the Declaration of Independence from secession document into what it is today. crucial role because we have 12 years from 1763 to 1774 where parliament is dissatisfied, trying to change things. But the colonists are fighting not at first with bullets, but the big thing they did was boycott Britain. And that Biden was saying to Russia, if you invade Ukraine again, we're going to economically boycott you like nothing you've ever seen. He probably knows that was a very powerful instrument of the American Revolution in the early years. That is, the British put a tax on tea, we boycott tea. The British put a tax on other things, and we boycott. At one point, the colonists were basically importing nothing from Britain. And my point is that none of that would have worked if only dudes had done it, because majority of the tea, which sign an agreement not to drink tea. And it's

the revolution is politicizing women, even if they don't want to be there. We're getting politically involved. Once they start boycotting British cloth, you need women to spin the thread and then weave that thread into cloth to replace the cloth that they used to import. So women are really crucial to the to what the colonists are doing. And then once the war gets started, I have a student who pointed this out to me. It's such an amazing point that laundresses saved lives. Every army in that period had lots of women with it. There's a couple of ones that stand out because they dressed as men

and disguised themselves as men to enlist as soldiers, but much more numerous were the women who came along. They were wives or they just needed work and the small rations they could get from the army. But here's my point. The lowliest job in the army for women was laundress but if you're washing clothes you're killing lice and lice are the biggest spreaders of typhus oh really then inoculated the army against smallpox the biggest killer was typhus so so i don't know it's a bumper sticker laundress says save lives wow everybody or is uh everybody it takes a village i don't know yes yeah well these army camps were absolutely for traveling villages wow i love this to me this is more richer history i would have loved to have heard about this when i was taught in school because when they taught in

school you just yeah they got drunk one day and we're like yeah let's start war with england and now our nation so there you go and you're just like oh the cliff notes version but no i i like this deeper more richer thing because you always knew it had to be there i didn't really give it much thought because i don't know i'm busy to me it's just more interesting history and i've learned so much by a lot of the authors we on the show that have talked about this era and all the eras through american history and you learn just it's a rich tapestry of a multitude of all variants of people from all walks of life and and and it's not a monolith of white people it's not a monolith of male people it's it's and we're just like yeah the the one thing I took away from our history was no one really cared about slavery until Abraham Lincoln came along.

Right, right. And for books like yours, that's not true. One thing I also learned from history is that one of the real things that helped end history was the invention of automation and the cotton gin. And I was like, what? And they're like, yeah, once that thing came around, they nearly didn't, they were able to, they didn't really need slaves anymore because the automation like, Holy crap. Yeah. But it's actually the opposite of that. The cotton entrenched slavery because it made it more economical.

What, what the cotton gin done is, is pull the seeds out of the kind of cotton that you can grow off the coast. Before then, cotton was grown almost exclusively on the coast, but complicated reasons. The cotton gin allows you to grow it anywhere. And he didn't know it. Eli Whitney, the guy that did it, invented the cotton gin, was from Connecticut. He wasn't necessarily for slavery, but he inadvertently did more to spread and continue Than anybody through that invention because it made it much more economical to grow inland cotton. And it's the reason that we continued having slavery for

30 years longer than the British did. They had enslaved people growing sugar, but we had primarily by the 19th century slaves were growing cotton and it was incredibly profitable. The southern slaveholders wouldn't give it up, but neither would a lot of northern industrialists because century slaves were growing cotton and it was incredibly profitable and this and the southern

slaveholders wouldn't give it up but neither would a lot of northern industrialists because the industrial revolution in america is cotton mills where they're taking that slave-grown cotton manufacturing it into cloth which goes back to be worn by slaves so the northern manufacturers they needed the slaves as much as the slaveholders did. A, as suppliers, and B, as a market. They talked about the Whig Party, but it's really true of the whole American economy

as an alliance of the loom, that is the power looms, water-powered looms making cloth in the north. It's an alliance of the loom and the lash, that is the whip that keeps those slaves working jesus oh it's a strainer how the whole circle of economy goes on there and the horrors of it what are some other things you want to tease out on the book and and some you did

not all the people involved in the revolution we should mention too, especially since we're dealing with COVID. A friend of mine named Elizabeth Finn wrote an amazing book called Pox Americana. But pox was spelled with an O in that case because she made the case that George, one of the, the most valuable thing that George Washington did as commander in chief was change his mind regarding vaccination or they called it inoculation at the time. So smallpox was the biggest killer. And there was a way to never have any chance of getting smallpox. And that was called inoculation. And what they did was take the pus or the scabs from somebody who had smallpox and you haven't had smallpox. They make a little cut in your arm and they put some of those scabs in there and seal it up and give you smallpox. But if you get it in this way, you have a one in 100 chance of dying versus if you get it in the natural way, you have a one in 10 or one in five chance of

dying. Inoculation was the thing to do. And the doctors urged Washington, you've got to inoculate the troops against smallpox. And he kept putting it off and putting it off because he was afraid it's going to immobilize the army. It was a complicated process. The soldiers got sick while they were being inoculated. And I can't just stop the war because the British are going to keep going. Most of the British soldiers had already had smallpox, so they had lifetime immunity. So he kept saying no, but he kept losing. He lost thousands of soldiers. He lost probably more soldiers to smallpox than to bullets. Only 7,000 American soldiers were shot dead during the Revolutionary War. That's fewer than in three days at Gettysburg. But smallpox was wiping them out, as were other

diseases. And so he eventually came around to the idea of inoculating the army against smallpox, according to Elizabeth Thin. And I think she makes a very persuasive case, that's really what saved the Continental Army. Wow, that's quite extraordinary. There's just so much nuance to the history, and it's a lot more funner to think about all these different things that tied in and that moved it. Anything more you want to touch on before we go out? I don't think we've covered it all.

I've really appreciated talking to you about it. Yeah, it's really interesting. So give us your plugs so people can find you on the interwebs uh where wherever the only place i am unfortunately is twitter uh but i'm active there so so send me a tweet and i'll reply it's woody holton usc and the book it's called i know most people are listening but i'll hold it up for the people watching it's called liberty is sweet and picture just looks like a guy on his, on the feet, on the, on his, on the ground, capturing two guys with horses. But that guy standing on the ground, he has a secret. And so I'll put that out. Look at, go look at the Amazon or whatever,

and see if you can figure out what that guy's secret is. And it'll help you understand really what the whole book is about. All right. Awesome. Awesome. Thanks for coming on the show, Woody. We certainly appreciate it. Thanks for being here. Alright, Chris. Thank you. Take care. Thank you. And to my audience, thanks for tuning in. Go to youtube.com, Forge as Chris Voss. Hit the bell notification. Go to goodreads.com, Forge as Chris Voss. And all our groups

on Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter. Liberty is sweet. The Hidden History of the American Revolution just came out October 19th, 2021. Check it out. Learn your history. Learn everything that went on in history. Don't stick your head in the sand like some of the stuff we're seeing right now.

You want to learn what's going on and educate yourself so that you're smarter, not dumber. Anyway, guys, thanks for tuning in. Be good to each other, and we'll see you guys next time. So we're excited to announce my new book is coming out. It's called Beacons of Leadership, Inspiring Lessons of Success in Business and Innovation. It's going to be coming out on October 5th, 2021. And I'm really excited for you to get a chance to read this book. It's filled with a multitude of my insightful stories, lessons, my life, and experiences in leadership and character.

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