← Civics & Coffee: A History Podcast
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- [00:01]
A
Welcome to Civics and Coffee, a history podcast. The show all about United States history delivered to you in the time it takes to enjoy your morning cup of coffee. I'm your host, Alicia, a historian trained in United States history with a passion for telling both the known and unknown parts of America's past. So grab your coffee and get ready for some bite sized history. Welcome back everyone. I recently had a chance to sit down with Dr. Gautham Rao to discuss his book White Power, which is a page turning, engrossing legal analysis of the history of slave policing. The book offers a new interpretation of policing in the United States which helps contextualize our current moment. I hope you all enjoy the conversation. Hey everyone. Joining me today is Dr. Gautham Rao. He is a legal historian and an associate professor of history at American University in Washington D.C. he also serves as editor in chief of Law and History Review and is here to discuss his incredible new book, White Power Policing American slavery. Welcome, Dr. Rao.
- [01:12]
B
Thank you. Thank you for having me.
- [01:14]
A
Thank you so much. Let's dive in because I have so much to ask. We'll start with the easy question. How did you come to research American slave policing?
- [01:24]
B
So this project is a long time in the making. I started working on this in graduate school because I was really interested in the questions about the coexistence of this tradition of American individualism on the one hand, and then on the other hand, this sort of seemingly overwhelming state authority that was developing in the 20th century, really the events of 9, 11, the Patriot act and things like that were pretty important for me in thinking about, about studying law enforcement. But this wasn't my dissertation. I was doing this on the side, sort of another kind of project and always adding to it, always thinking about it. And it was only as I started really getting into it that I got into the question of compulsion. That is to say, when law enforcement doesn't have enough authority and needs more and they force people to do things. So in early America, this is quite a common phenomenon as it was in, in early modern England. But I started to notice that it was really connected to slavery, especially in the American South. And so by the time I had got around to really studying this in earnest, years had passed and it was already about 2008. Published an article about this. It was sort of a very legal doctrine kind of thing. But I started diving into it really about 15 years ago. And so, yeah, it took a long time. And one of the, one of the real incredible things about doing this book was that you got to appreciate you know, historians love to talk about historiography and the idea of how historians write history over time. And I got to experience this in real time because when I first started working on this back in 2001, it was really not a great deal. There was some good literature, but not anything like what we've seen in the last 15 years in terms of runaway slaves, fugitive slaves, slavery in the state, all sorts of brilliant stuff. And I couldn't have done this book without extraordinary work by so many great scholars.
- [03:25]
A
Yeah. So this is a legal history. And so one of the folks you talk about is Hugh Gwynne in the Hugh Gwynne case. So can you talk a little bit about that and how it exemplifies kind of the. The growing role of race in controlling the courts and legal venues.
- [03:41]
B
The Hugh Gwynne case arises out of a classic problem that historians have studied for a great deal of time about early America, which was a labor shortage. And so Gwyn was a man in search of help. And in early America, this took the form of coerced labor. And there were really two main forms of this. One was indentured servitude, and the other becomes enslavement. But this is the moment, really, in the mid 17th century, where Gwen in Maryland, in Virginia, excuse me, is trying to find a way to. To coerce more labor out of his servants. And what happens is that his servants, including a man named John Punch, all run away, probably to protest the bad conditions. We're not quite sure because the sourcing gear is pretty minimal, what's available to us. And going on court records from many years ago, which are pretty scarce in terms of detail. But what we do know is that Gwyn and a couple others run away to Maryland and take refuge there. So Hugh Gwyn goes to the court in Virginia and says, I lost these servants. They've run away. I'd like to wash my hands of this whole thing and get rid of them. And I think that had been a kind of common move, probably before this, where we're troublesome. Servants were just cut loose. But the court decides to make a stand here, this is a general court of Virginia, and says, no, we're not going to let you sell these servants. We're going to, in fact, pose the public authority, the authority of the colony to say, you have to go get them, and we're going to tell you to go find the governor of Maryland and get help to do this. And so the story in itself is significant because in my reading, it's one of the first instances where we see the runaway become a public concern. This isn't just about lost property or things like that. This is about a danger to the public good. And in this case, it's about endangering the whole labor system if we let these folks get away with this and just running away. And so that's kind of part one of the story. Is the court interposing the public power here, a real moment of transformation for the concept of the state and governing and public power devoted to slavery. Part two of the story is that Gwyn manages to recapture these servants and seems like the governor of Maryland or some sort of public force over there was helpful, and he brings them back to the court in Virginia. And now becomes. Now arises the second stunning part of the story, which is the court, as it normally did in cases like of runaways, imposes pretty draconian measures here, including branding on the face and whippings for the people who are apprehended. But one of the people apprehended this John Punch, who I mentioned before, gets a different punishment. And his punishment is to be a servant for life, which is a condition really akin to slavery. Now, what made John Punch different from the other people in the story was he was black. And so the white servants are sort of continued in the system of servitude, and the black servant is transformed into a servant for life or slave. So here, then, this case is so pivotal because it points to two transformative moments. One, the court deciding that runaways are going to be a public problem and interposing the power of the state. Number two, is racializing this and making the black man become the target of a greater punishment, which is essentially slavery.
- [07:28]
A
Yeah. And to continue on this thread of racializing the idea of slavery and kind of legalizing it, you discussed the concept of legalized and deputized whiteness. So can you expand on this and how race was weaponized under the guise of protecting public safety?
- [07:49]
B
The central problem that was arising for enslavers in early America, which is what was that, unlike in Barbados or other place in the West Indies, where it's a fairly small surface area to cover with white authority, the problem in North America, in the colonies, North British speaking, North. North American colonies, is that these are huge swathes of land, and a master supervision simply is not going to be sufficient over those. Those large extents. There's a paradox here, right, which is that the bigger the plan, so to speak, and other kind of forms of the geography here, but the larger the property, the greater Potential for profit, the need for more slave labor or servant labor. Yes, all that is true. But then the property, the greater the dilution of the master's supervision capabilities. And so it's inevitable then that you're going to end up with enslaved people in public spaces. So how can the enslavers now deal with this? They've already acknowledged through the case of John Ponch and Huguin, that this is gonna be a public issue now, that the government power is gonna be used to address this problem. But there just aren't enough officers to deal with this today. We're used to SWAT teams and gigantic police forces. The New York Police Department famously has overseas officers, for instance. This is a very different universe that these enslavers are inhabiting. And the decision is made early on in the 17th century to take a different approach than trying to blanket authority through office holders. And that approach is then to transform every white person into a de facto and sometimes de jure office holder. So what does that mean? It means when an enslaved person is in public, any white person under these laws is deputized to act as a police agent. So they can question, why are you here? Do you have permission to be here? Let me see that permission. Let me interrogate you and, and make sure you're not lying, that you have forged this, this permission. And if they believe that the permission is forged or that the enslaved person does not have permission, or that someone who says they're free is actually enslaved, then this white person has public authority. They're acting on behalf of the government to detain, arrest and incarcerate this person. So whether that is in their own property, that was pretty common. Sometimes there was a private jail that they could use, but in other moments, the public jail. They would take these captives to a public jail. And so, you know, when I say deputizing whiteness, I don't mean this in a figurative sense or in a kind of abstract way. This was the law, and it made every white person essentially a police agent at the time.
- [10:59]
A
Yeah, well, and, and I think you talk about how much of the legal framework enacted was kind of done under this claim of establishing, quote, unquote, law and order, but you actually highlight how there was another motivation at play, which was fear. So can you kind of talk about this and how we see it memorialized in, in various iterations of slave based laws?
- [11:23]
B
Fear is probably the single thread that cuts through the whole book. White fear of blackness, and particularly of black men and the possibilities of black collective action. I think these are Some of the central fears that we see really pushing the development of an entire legal system and police practices in early America. And I argue kind of persisting, but after. So what are the fears in particular? Above all, there's a fear that the ubiquitous runaway enslaved person, you know, this was a common condition to plantations, to urban slavery, to all conditions of enslaved people where people ran away, just. It was just a constant thing. So then what happens if a person who runs away decides that they want to take their resistance or self emancipation or whatever you want to call it, to a different level? What if they arm themselves? What if they seek revenge for the admittedly horrific things that have been done to them in the name simply of masters right under the law? This becomes the driving fear of slave rebellion that we see at the heart of a lot of these laws. As I point out in the book, I think that in some cases the enslavers had good reason to be afraid, given what we see from extraordinarily sophisticated military operations launched by people like Nat Turner. But even before that, the Stoner Rebellion and German coast rebellion, Louisiana. These are swift and powerful acts that, that bring the society that. That houses these folks into great panic. And so there is some reason for this, for white fear in these cases. The Haitian Revolution is by far the most important single example. It doesn't happen in the. But it is close enough where we see this fear of what the historian Michael Schopner calls the contagion of liberty and the idea that it would be transmitted to the United States and that black freedom and black republicanism would catch fire among enslaved people. And so with each rebellion that comes to fruition, we see laws becoming more draconian exhortations among the white population to tighten up the way they are being vigilant among their own slaves, among others, and things of this nature. So, you know, this is, this is a story in the American context that I think has been told before. What I was trying to add here was that the connection between the rebellions, which are, which are profoundly important on their own, but in terms of the approach to policing enslaved people, there's a kind of cause effect thing that we see here. We could also think of this outside of the US context. And, you know, here I draw on the work of the historian, scholar Vincent Brown, who has understood slave rebellions as part of a. As battles in a long war against white authority. And I think that's a really good way of thinking about it. And in this case, part of the warfare being waged by the white enslavers is the development of these institutions and legal methods that I'm trying to document in the books.
- [14:52]
A
Yeah, well, and one of the legal cases that you talk about is the Supreme Court decision in Prigg versus Pennsylvania. So can you talk a little bit about that and kind of how it remade the legal landscape?
- [15:05]
B
There's probably an argument to be made here that Prigg is the case that is the Rubicon here towards civil war. So the short version of the story in Prague is that you have enslaved people living nearby to free areas. So Virginia and Maryland, close to Pennsylvania or more free areas. You know, there's been very good studies suggesting that discussion of free states is in itself kind of misleading, certainly more free than what was occurring in Maryland and Virginia in the 1840s. And so we had a woman named Margaret Morgan who had a family who. And they're not. She's not enslaved at that point, but had been part of a family that was. And they. They leave to go to. They leave Maryland to go to Pennsylvania. But a kind of familial change in ownership of the. The family that had been. That had owned insulated people in the Morgan family. They tried to then retake Morgan and her progeny as. As enslaved people. This leads to a man named Edward Prigg, who's a slave catcher, operating a raid into Pennsylvania, kidnapping Morgan and her husband, bringing them and kid children, bringing them back forcibly to. To Maryland. The husband eventually is freed before the full renditioning. But the question here becomes then, what is the status of Morgan? Does Prigg have a right to do this and does essentially what. What status of possibly runaways in free states? That's part of. The. Part of the big issue here. The court ends up having to deal with the case under the interpretation of the Fugitive slave law of 1793, which was, you know, at the time seen as a patch for the big holes in the fugitive slave clause of the Constitution. You know, that was supposed to give slaveholders the right to go and seize slaves and free states, but there's no real protocol. So this law of 1793, they were supposed to fix it. Again, very sloppily written, left a lot of holes. And so some of that stuff was being litigated in the case. And it could have been a much simpler decision that just adjudicated the matter at hand, but it ends up being this big issue about. About the nature of the Fugitive Slave Law and therefore the nature of the Constitution. The person who writes the opinion in the case, and there's no majority opinion this is one of these weird legal opinions which everyone had something to say about it. But Joseph Story, who is considered one of the great legal minds of the early republic, writes the opinion that that's going to matter the most. And he comes down with a fairly stunning opinion which is that he rules as unconstitutional Pennsylvania's law, which was known as a personal liberty law that tried to put as many obstacles in the way of fugitive slave recaptures in Pennsylvania. And Story says, you can't do that. Federal fugitive slave law is a federal law and so that needs to be honored. A state can't interfere. Okay, that part was fairly predictable. The next part was not in which stories said, also the issue of fugitive slaves in so called free states is an exclusively federal one. So the state of Pennsylvania can't do anything about this. The state of New York or Massachusetts, no state can have anything to do with this. This is federal in its enforcement. So therefore this meant that in theory, now enslavers who are trying to, to seize runaways, fugitives in northern and midwestern states would need to use the federal government and the federal government only to get aid. They could no longer turn to the northern states. This is a real problem in the south because the federal courts in the early republic were few and oftentimes had only one marshal or a deputy marshal. So we're talking about a couple different courts in Pennsylvania. There's fill in, there's, there's Pittsburgh in a state that's enormous. So how are they supposed to get the force they need to do what they want to do? And again, that, that word force, you know, I've used that to describe the central problem of runaways. And in early America here we see it looming again in this case. So it leads directly to the Fugitive slave law of 1850 where part of the Compromise of 1850. But in the law, one of the main goals for the southerners was to create more force. And we end up back where we started in some ways with the idea of white deputization. So enslavers are now given authority under federal law to cross state lines and act as their own law enforcers. To enforce their rights, yes, but also to seize another human being to rendition them, deport them, if you will, across state lines and bring them back to their, their place of supposed, supposed captivity. And this is, this is just an enormous grant of authority to the slaveholding South. There is no other property right in early America which has given anything close to this sort of level of policing authority attached to it. And you know, is A sort of transformative moment, really, where we see in my reading of it, the attempt here is to transform federal law into something closer to what enslavers have in the south with their runaway laws, white deputization, and things like this. Ironically, it's the Chief Justice, Roger Vitani, who of course, you know, soon to be of infamy in the Dred Scott case. But in this case, he's no less infamous in my view, because what he proposes is to say, well, we would have no problem in the Prague decision. He says, we'd have no problem with runaways and fugitives if all the northern states just created the white deputization system we have in the South. Why not just do that? Of course, thumbing his nose at the rising tide of anti slavery and abolitionism and forth. And then he gets what he wants to some extent with the Fugitive slave law of 1850. And so, you know, this is in the same way that you have scholars like Matthew Karp, who studied enslaver power in terms of diplomacy and imperialism, and Kevin Waite has looked at California as another example of enslaver power here. But this is a moment of incredible, incredible grant of new authority to enslavers who are viewing now the continent as theirs. So a really pivotal moment, I think, towards the. The Civil War.
- [21:40]
A
Yeah, it was definitely a critical moment for. For me, as I was reading through the book, I had not heard of that decision. And so for me, it really leapt through. Through the page. And it was a fascinating telling. And I think you did a really great job kind of breaking it down for the reader of why it was such a kind of a game changer for the country and how it evolved.
- [22:06]
B
So can I. One more thing on this to take your compliment and say thank you so much, because in terms of writing this book in particular, one of the real challenges for me was trying to write for a broader audience. Trying to. Because I think this is a story that I wanted more people to be able to see than just, you know, the kind of scholars that I'm in dialogue with. But, you know, these legal matters are so complicated and so technical. And so a case like Prig, where, you know, you could get to the minutiae of it and spend hours just discussing that, to be able to convey the overall importance while not losing anything. Right. It's a real challenge. So I think there's a little bit extra burden on legal history sometimes because you can't ignore the technical stuff, but you have to make it understandable.
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A
Yeah, it was very accessible for what it's worth.
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B
Thank you.
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A
Another kind of technical, very easily to get into the weeds legal doctrine that you get into is the posse comitatus doctrine. And I think you do again, a very lovely job in trying to make it accessible. But you also talk about kind of the class tensions and how that influences the evolution of the posse comitatus doctrine. So I'm, I'm wondering if you'd talk a little bit about how that evolves.
- [23:25]
B
So posse comitatus is a phrase, Latin phrase that means power of the county. And this goes back to early modern England really is where we start to see it. And it's a, it's a way to give a sheriff or magistrate kind of more physical power authority when they need it to catch, you know, lawbreakers. That's the basic idea. And you know, typically speaking a sheriff can say, you know, I'm in need of more authority. I deputize so and so person under, under the English law, the posse comitatus is a, a compulsory thing. So you can't say, oh, I choose not to do this. No, you had to do it. And you could, you know, theoretically be fined if you didn't do it or face other penalties. So this is the basic apparatus, legal apparatus that, that is very common to any office holder really who has peace or police powers. So even coroners, justices of peace in early America, they are able to draw on this, this concept of the posse comitatus. We know it, this, this whole thing kind of through the popularized, you know, film genre of the western, right, where we, the posse is, is organized to catch a lawbreaker. And, and I think, you know, it was, it was quite widespread in different, different contexts. It ends up becoming both a kind of a metaphorical but also institutional foundation for the way enslaved people in public spaces are facing the police authority of the white population in early America through the Civil War. And so the idea there is that there is not only a, a kind of moral right to do, be part of the posse, but also a legal duty and obligation to be part of this. When you're called upon, you must do it. So the slave patrol, the idea of a slave patrol ends up being really the best manifestation of the concept of the posse comitatus in that you have counties throughout the south becomes very common by the, you know, couple decades after the American Revolution where county governance will have a patrol made up of taxpayers. The language here is extraordinarily gendered and ableist in which the statutory language is usually something like all able bodied white men or who are expected to be part of this, and they can't say no, they will face a fine. Occasionally you can you find a law where people could pay a substitute to be part of it, but for the most part, it was supposed to be compulsory. The question of class tension ends up becoming a significant one by the 1840s and 1850s, because the way slavery works as a kind of capitalistic enterprise is that throughout the south you start to see much more stratified practices and quasi oligarchical government in places like South Carolina. But the short version is that very few number of extraordinarily wealthy and powerful enslavers own the majority of enslaved people. And thinking about then the idea of a posse comitatus or slave patrol, where the majority who are not part of this 1%, if you will, I'm using that term figuratively. I don't know what the percentage of wealthy slavers, but the idea that a normal person or a poor person would be forced to labor for the public good, that is ultimately serving some wealthy enslaver, this does cause significant class tensions by the time of the Civil War. So scholars like Carrie Lee Merritt have done incredible work to document the class fissures in the antebellum period that really become quite pressing during the Civil War. And in terms of Confederate conscription, you know, why would a person with no slaves in the south fight for on behalf of wealthy enslavers? This becomes a powerful question. We see huge rates of desertion in the south during the Confederacy during the war. So all of that, the dynamic is really sort of being generated by the demands of public policing of enslaved people in the earlier period.
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A
Yeah, and I'm gonna skip ahead. We're gonna jump over the Civil War here because you also assert that the presence of white supremacist paramilitaries after the war kind of demonstrates that they were losing the monopoly on public order. So can you expand on this and how it influenced their response?
- [28:23]
B
So post Appomattox surrender, the Confederacy from that period really up until the winter of 1868 ends up being this extremely decisive moment for the fate of emancipation and what will become the Reconstruction amendments eventually. Because the question is, what is to be done with the ex Confederacy, the defeated white supremacists and others who are part of the Confederacy. There's a driving force among congressional Republicans, the so called radical Republicans, to ensure that the flames of the Confederacy can never flicker again. To occupy and re educate, so to speak, to ensure that the acknowledgement of black freedom is now a reality. The more center centrist approach is to say, well, haven't people suffered enough? Let's restore government and restore the civilian rule of law that isn't military based throughout the South. In this back and forth and the haze of that moment, what happens is that ex Confederates, both informally, locally, but then eventually through more centralized groups like the White League and the kkk, attempt to reconstitute the spirit and practices of the slave policing system of centuries past now outside the law, because there's no longer a legal foundation for this right. You can no longer say, well, skin color is going to be the decisive factor in whether someone has any rights at all. That's no longer on the table. It comes down again to how much force is available to coerce the defeated Confederacy. And you know, scholars like Greg Downs have shown that there just wasn't enough military force or military will or political will to be everywhere at all times and to be able to enforce the, the legal doctrine of equality in any sort of significant way. The same would go for the Freedmen's Bureau, right. Extraordinarily well intentioned, but just doesn't have the resources and eventually Congress lacks the will to support it, to do things. So what happens in the vacuum then is that white supremacists, many of whom are completely unreconstructed, start to rebuild the bonds of policing that had occurred through the law prior to 1865, but now are doing it outside of statute books and legislatures and doing it on their own. So I look a bit at the Klan and some clan units, their constitutions, and you know, they're really striving to uphold what they see as the rule of law for themselves. It's illegitimate, it's technically vigilantism because they're doing it on their own. It's not the formal state system, but they're trying to operate it as as close as possible to a kind of policing method. So there's a fame famous legal thinker named Ernst Frankl who came up with the idea of a dual state. The idea that you can have a rule of law that is sort of proper on the books, but then in practice ends up being something almost the opposite, or at least very different. And we see that here it's dual, maybe quadruple, who knows, maybe many more iterations here of 14th Amendment and the Reconstruction Amendments, giving us new measures of abolition and freedom coexisting among the rising tide of white supremacist paramilitary violence, which is creating a different order on the ground that is anything but equality. And Freedom. And so again, you know, I keep using the word force. That, that is a running theme throughout the book here, where you have the doctrine of freedom and up against the reality of white supremacist force.
- [32:32]
A
So there is so much that readers can take away from this book. But what do you hope readers take away?
- [32:39]
B
I think, you know, there's a couple different registers that I, that I hope come through here. So a purely historical level. One of the things I was most astounded with in doing the research and especially some of the reading about how people understand American slavery is that the story has been largely told as one of evil enslavers doing what they're going to do. And what I wanted people to hopefully see is that they couldn't have done what they did. They couldn't secede and build the Confederacy, for instance, without a vision of the law and the rule of law. It wasn't a exception to the rule of law, it was their rule of law. And so, you know, to think normatively about the present, you know, it's wholly possible for, you know, popular majorities who perhaps ill intentioned towards minority groups or others to seize the rule of law and dictate what it is and to act entirely legitimately within those bounds to create essentially a police state. And I think that is, I think one important lesson here when I think in those terms. The other though, and I think to me the most striking part of the story is that, you know, for all the many hundreds laws of laws passed, the number of white supremacists who deputized themselves and acted in the name of the law, ultimately their state was a failure. And their vision of the law and practices of law enforcement were a failure because of the extraordinary story of black activism, resistance and education that we see throughout this time period. And it's sort of a real pitfall of writing a book about a system of law and about the white enslavers whose system it was that I wish I could spend more time telling those stories, more in more detail and more poignancy than I'm able to in the book. Try, I try where I can. But ultimately, you know, that's such a crucial factor because it's ubiquitous and it's persistent. At no point in the story that I tell does is white supremacy anything close to hegemonic. It's always shot through with the elements that are going to lead to more white fear, more white panic. And so in as much as this is a story about, you know, rule of law, which, which is dangerous it's also one about claims for freedom and self emancipation, self ownership, which are extraordinarily inspiring, I think.
- [35:26]
A
And where should people go when they've finished your book and they want to learn more about you and the work that you do?
- [35:32]
B
People can check out my website, which is Gothamround.com which has a kind of overview of what I'm up to. I'm active on Instagram, my handle is for my professional stuff. You can, you can search me out if you want for if you're interested in food. I'm a kind of avid cook, so love to post that kind of stuff. And I'm on Blue sky at at Galtham Rao where I try to post about history as much as I can, but oftentimes my love of soccer will peek through and push my post in
- [36:07]
A
that direction, which apparently there's a lot of debate about your love of soccer clubs.
- [36:12]
B
From what I've gathered, I do get, I do get teased by my students a fair amount that make bad decisions. Yes.
- [36:21]
A
And we have only touched the surface of this fantastic book. So before I let you go, is there anything that we haven't covered that you really want to make sure future readers know?
- [36:32]
B
So one thing that I'm fascinated by in the book, which I realize now I only scratch the surface, is the Civil War period where we see the Confederacy face this incredible problem where they have to depend on able bodied white men, as the law says, for policing slaves. But those same able bodied white men are the ones who are supposed to serve in the military. So what happens then when you pull all those so called police agents into the ranks of the army and so it causes this generalized panic and so it leads to the conditions of possibility of enslaved people running away en masse to the north, which they do and really push from inside the Confederacy its own demise. And it's led me one of the reasons I found this so fascinating. It led me to rethink the Confederacy now into its own book project. And that's the next thing I'm getting into is a legal and constitutional history of the Confederacy as a state that was built on the promise of white freedom, which ends up being because of slavery, ends up being much closer to an autocratic and oligarchic state. So I found that part extremely fascinating and has led me into the next thing already.
- [37:56]
A
Well, that sounds incredibly fascinating and I hope it doesn't take you 15 years to get that book out selfishly. Well, to the listeners out there, be sure to grab a copy of White Power. It is an insightful page turning legal history that helps contextualize our current moment in surprising ways. Thank you Dr. Rao.
- [38:18]
B
Thank you so much.
- [38:20]
A
My thanks again to Dr. Rao for spending his time with me. If you have any interest in legal history, Black Resistance, or want a deeper understanding of the evolution of policing, consider grabbing a copy of White Power wherever fine books are sold or through my shop@bookshop.org thanks peeps. I'll see you next time. Thanks for sitting down with me as I explored this chapter of American history. If you liked what you heard, be sure to subscribe and share with your friends. I look forward to our next cup of coffee together.