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- [00:00]
Taylor
Hey everybody. This is Taylor from the Total Soccer show. And this episode is brought to you by Hotels.com the Summer of Soccer is right around the corner. And if you aren't using hotels.com to book the experience of a lifetime, it's worth asking why? As a member, you save up to 20% on hundreds of thousands of hotels around the world and earn rewards on every single stay. Which means the trips you're taking now help pay for the ones you're already dreaming about. So whether you're following your team across North America this summer or or planning a well earned escape after being glued to football for weeks on end, make sure you book on hotels.com and start earning rewards. Because when it comes to hotels, it's all in the name. Hotels.com on the 4th of July this
- [00:45]
Peter Franker
year, the United States is going to be treating the Founding Fathers like they are secular saints. But the truth behind the Declaration of Independence is far more explosive.
- [00:55]
Afwa Hash
Today we meet two of the most famous men in American history. First, the ultimate outsider and most unlikely star of a Broadway musical. Alexander Hamilton. A penniless orphaned immigrant from the Caribbean who survived a literal hurricane to build the world's most powerful financial machine.
- [01:15]
Peter Franker
And then, the man who became the face and the father of the nation, George Washington. He wasn't a philosopher, nor was he a genius writer. He was a silent, imposing unifier who knew exactly how to his power and when to give it up.
- [01:29]
Afwa Hash
From Hamilton's self destructive sex scandals to Washington's iron willed discipline, we're peeling back the marble to find who the men beneath really are.
- [01:40]
Peter Franker
Hello and welcome to a new episode of Legacy. I'm Peter Franker.
- [01:43]
Afwa Hash
I'm AFWA Hash.
- [01:45]
Peter Franker
And this is Legacy. The show that explores the lives, events and ideas that have shaped our world and asks whether they have the reputations that they truly deserve.
- [01:54]
Afwa Hash
This is the Founding Fathers, saints and sinners.
- [02:03]
Peter Franker
Thanks for joining us on Legacy today. To support the show, sign up to
- [02:07]
Afwa Hash
Legacy plus you can enjoy early access, fewer ads. Q. And as bonus content, like when we spoke with Professor Helen Thompson about the conflict in Iran or when we caught up with surgeons Dr. Minyan Gray and Dr. Isosa Omrob to go deeper into the world of facelifts or explore the legacy of the remote control or the legacy of the fish finger, sign up
- [02:28]
Peter Franker
at Legacy supportingcast fm. Okay, I thought Alexander Hamilton. We've been waiting for this one. I'm not throwing away my shots.
- [02:36]
Afwa Hash
I would have. I would have sung that line. My name is Alexander. My name is Alexander Hamilton. I'm not throwing away my shot. Go on, Peter, take it home.
- [02:45]
Peter Franker
Do you know what?
- [02:46]
Afwa Hash
We've seen Hamilton, right?
- [02:48]
Peter Franker
Not only have we seen it, we took our four lovely kids to it and we thought, okay, there's no way they're gonna enjoy it. So we told them a little bit about what the story was about. You know, musicals. It's a bit of an acquired taste. We sat there, the curtain came up, and all four of them were sitting on the edges of their seats. They didn't spit. I mean, they were. They were completely transfixed. So by the time we, we. We drove back home, back down to Oxford, we were playing the soundtrack on repeat. And they've all been to see it. I mean, literally 10 times. I mean, they absolutely loved it.
- [03:17]
Afwa Hash
Well, you must have gone earlier than me because when I went with my daughter to. She already knew all the words, as did every other young person in the audience. But I have to say, I went to see it with a friend who nearly walked out. He was so offended by it. So maybe, maybe we'll get to that. But it's not all celebratory. And I think it goes to the root of the legacy of these founding fathers that for some people, the idea of turning it into a hip hop musical is really, really problematic.
- [03:45]
Peter Franker
Yes, but if it's that or it's the kings and queens of England on a whiteboard in a classroom, you're told to write them down and memorize it. I promise, if you could bring history to life and make it fun and make it cool, and so everybody knows who Aaron Burr is, you've done a good job. Or George iii.
- [04:01]
Afwa Hash
But does that always involve sanitizing it somewhat? Well, let's see, because we're going to talk about the true story of Alexander Hamilton. And he was actually born in the Caribbean island of Nevis, which I visited. Have you ever been to Nevis?
- [04:13]
Peter Franker
No, I haven't. Nevis. Let me know. Let me when you go. Coming next time. And we can do a live recording.
- [04:19]
Afwa Hash
Yeah, yeah, that would be good. Nevis is actually really important in the history of Brit plantation colonialism and slavery because it was one of the first places where this new plantation economy of sugar was really pioneered. It's also where Nelson's wife came from. She was from the Nisbet Plantation, which is an important plantation on Nevis. So lots of actually big colonial figures have connections to Nevis, even though most British people probably haven't heard of it today. Well, now it's part of a nation, together with St. Kitts and in the Commonwealth, it was part of the British Empire. And Hamilton's born there around 1755. We don't know the exact year of his birth, which in itself says a lot about how fragmentary his early life was.
- [05:00]
Peter Franker
Yeah. His parents are not married, which carries significant social stigma in the 18th century. And his father, James Hamilton, eventually disappears altogether, abandoning the family when Alexander is still a child. His mother, Rachel Fawcett, dies in 1768. So he's probably 10, give or take. She probably dies of fever and leaves him effectively orphaned. And it's catastrophic, both personally and financially. But it tells you aphwa that Hamilton, you wouldn't put money on him to be someone who's going to play such a key role in history.
- [05:32]
Afwa Hash
No, but you can also see how the precarity of his early years make him somebody who's kind of going to make or break. You know, there's no real middle ground. There's no easy life for him. If he's going to go, he's going to have to go big. And he has this kind of lifelong fear of insecurity, weakness or dependency that must stem from the trauma of his childhood. So he starts working his way up. He goes to St. Croix, which is now part of the US Virgin Islands, and he works for a trading firm called Beekman and Kruger, which is one of the major mercantile houses. And it's not a sheltered apprenticeship. This is right at the epicenter of the very brutal and notoriously profitable sugar economy of the Caribbean. And this is one of the most violent regions in the world, both because of the violence that's being inflicted on enslaved people, and also because of the battles, the wars, the power grabs, which are taking place among colonial powers like France and Britain, Spain at the time, for control of these incredibly lucrative islands.
- [06:31]
Peter Franker
And Hamilton, he's a great learner. You know, he's constantly watching what's going on around him and works out how to do things. So he starts to rise. He handles the accounts, he tracks cargoes, he manages correspondence. He deals directly with merchants, with captains, with plantation owners. He sees firsthand how global commerce works. So credit, debt, insurance, shipping, speculation, what happens when people can't pay what they owe, and the movement of commodities around the Atlantic. So he's living in a society that is extraordinarily brutal, where slavery is endemic, where enslaved Africans massively outnumber white people on the island, but the wealth is transferring into the hands of a very small number of people. So these help, I think, explain Hamilton's life and his perspectives throughout the whole of his career. Because unlike like Jefferson, who's romanticizing, having read all the classical texts about an agrarian republic of independent farmers, Hamilton instinctively understands the power of commerce and of finance and of international trade.
- [07:36]
Afwa Hash
He's seen it operating firsthand in this Atlantic economy, and he knows that it requires energy, ambition and strong institutions. Credit systems, financial transfers. He's seeing how wealth and power actually function. And as a result, he distrusts political romanticism and he hates disorder. He understands that you need a strong government, a cohesive national banking and financial system, and that the flows of money, credit and commerce are crucial to making a republic work in real life. So this real lived experience, none of the sheltered sitting, reading Latin and Greek while your slaves toil outside and you imagine the kind of enlightenment brought to life, this is the opposite, like ground level, the sweat, the toil, the violence and the money involved to build a nation. And I think that's one of the things that makes him brilliant, but also problematic in a way, because there's no excuse for Hamilton that he didn't know how this worked. He totally knew he got it. And he wanted to position himself as the architect of a nation that would replicate these power systems only for its own communal needs, the communal needs of those leading it, not those who are
- [08:49]
Peter Franker
enslaved, obviously, but he's also got something special. So after a hurricane strikes Saint Croix in 1772, he writes about in a way that catches people's attention because it's brilliantly written and astonishes readers with its sophistication. So local patrons raise money to send him to North America for education. And he arrives in New York just as tensions with Britain are starting to intensify. But Hamilton there remains an outsider, just as he has been at home. He's Caribbean born, he's socially insecure, or as you mentioned, he's ambitious almost to the point of aggression. But he, through hard work, intellect, energy and just sheer force of character, starts to climb up the greasy pole. So he studies at King's College, later Columbia University. And because he's so clever, the fact that he's able to read situations well really serves in his favour. So he's quite a small man. He's not very. He's not physically imposing, but he's super intense and he's very driven. He's also, by the way, got quite a sharp tongue, Afro. He's very self confident, but he, he's happy to pick fights with people he thinks are more stupid than he is, which is a lot of people.
- [09:56]
Afwa Hash
John Adams calls him the bastard brat of a scotch peddler with excessive ambition. If he had been in Britain, I think he would have been called a Creole. You know, that was the name given to white people born in the Caribbean. And the reason that they had that name was because even if they were white and therefore belonged in the kind of whiteness of high society distrusted, it was like this proximity to blackness of having been born in the Caribbean somehow tainted them even if their blood wasn't tainted. And he's got that outsider status as a result. And I think when you have that outsider status you can try really hard to assimilate or you can double down and. And Hamilton doubles down. He is this kind of different guy, you know, he's not bound by the same strictures of manner and decorum as somebody who's been educate and socialise in this rarefied British elite idea of the Virginia plantocracy. He is like, gives as good as he gets, he's plucky, he is very quick to use his tongue and his body to kind of see off rivals or adversaries. And he seeks frontline combat during the war because he feels more comfortable with that than he does with the kind of administrative backseat that will maybe provide useful blueprints going forward, but would deny him his moment in the limelight, the glory he seeks.
- [11:22]
Peter Franker
I mean he loves being in uniform and under intense fire. He advances right with almost theatrical determination. So it's not just that he's driven by patriotism. He kind of almost seems desperate to others to, to want recognition, he wants to be included. He's looking for a place. And that ambition frightens some of his contemporaries because they think it's limitless, but also because he's got a sharp tongue and he calls John Adams emotionally unstable. He goes after people. People also start to be wondering about what exactly it is that he wants. And critics say that he secretly admires the monarchy, that he wants to create an American aristocracy that's modeled on the British system. And those kinds of things stand to mark Hamilton's card of being someone that people are slightly mistrustful of, however brilliant he is, because he also has this self destructive streak of being seemingly incapable of restraint. I mean the most spectacular example of that comes much later in his career in 1797 during the so called Reynolds affairs, when Hamilton publishes a 95 page pamphlet confessing to adultery in order to disprove accusations of financial corruption. And most politicians I think and their PR handlers today would advise you either not say anything or to just Deny them. But Hamilton goes for total public exposure because he thinks that these accusations are so bad it's the only way he could do it. That that scandal really damages his reputation, but it also reveals the incredible intensity of his. He's proud, he's impulsive, and sometimes he's his own worst enemy.
- [13:01]
Afwa Hash
I think it's no surprise that he and John Adams come up against each other because they're literal opposites. You know, we talked about John Adams as not being the softest, cuddliest, friendliest guy to have around, but everybody respects his integrity and that he believes in the bigger cause. Hamilton is driven by ego. He wants glory. He likes to be in the limelight. He wants to be recognized. He wants to that affirmation. And he's definitely ambitious. But people are a little suspicious of his ambition because they're not sure whether it's actually he really cares about the cause or whether he really just wants things glory for himself. And nothing that happens in his life really disproves that suspicion for people around him. But that's not to say he doesn't play a really important role in the revolution. So like many of the founding fathers, he starts out from position also. He hasn't grown up in the American colonies, but he's grown up in the colonies. He still hopes that reconciliation with Britain might be possible. And he too, reacts badly to the arbitrary parliamentary authority of the 1760s and 70s. Remember, he's still in his teens. During the Stamp Tax and all of these events that are radicalizing people, he begins publishing these powerful pamphlets defending colonial resistance and attacking British policy. What's different about him from many of the other revolutionaries is that he, because of his experience in the Caribbean, as we were saying, he knows that there cannot be chaos. He understands what mob violence looks like. He's been living quite close to us, a very precarious society. Think about these slave colonies in the Caribbean where the enslaved massively outnumber white colonizers. You know, if there is any breakdown in order, you get Haiti, you get rebellion, because you are keeping people in conditions that are completely unsustainable unless you use an iron fist. So he understands that you need order, you need authority, you need strong government. And he's very distrustful of anything that speaks of political instability. So he's not anti democracy, but he's not happy with the idea of overly enthusiastic democracy. It's got to be contained because he's a realist.
- [15:10]
Peter Franker
So, look, we talked about it before that in the Fantasy Dream Team for your revolution, you need somebody dull. You also need somebody who's young and who's an outsider. And Hamilton brings energy, he brings youth, he brings the fact that he's not from money, he's not from the Caribbean. In fact, he's not even a. He's not even fully white, you know, so the fact he's an outsider, self made, he's an immigrant, he's someone who's got ambiguous views held about him for all sorts of different reasons. Half the charges and criticism Hamilton are going to be racially inspired in the first place. But Hamilton brings with him dynamism, creativity, thought, competence. He's able to organize things, he's able to get army units together, he's able to lead them. So even before independence is declared, Hamilton is the kind of representation, the individual, about what an American should look like. They should be ambitious, they should be pushy, they should be a bit blunt, they should be willing to break a few things, they should have an ego and they should be proud. But they need to have energy above all. So Hamilton is one of my favorites, not just because of the musical and fantastic music, but because Hamilton speaks to something that is very different. He's bringing something very unique to the package of all the Founding Fathers. And what's interesting about him is he's very unlike them. And I think that's the reason why he is so important. When we come back for the break, we're going to have a look at the daddy of them all, the most important of the Founding Fathers, George Washington.
- [16:40]
Taylor
Hey, everybody, this is Taylor from the Total Soccer show and this episode is brought to you by Hotels.com the summer of soccer is right around the corner. And if you aren't using hotels.com to book the experience of a lifetime, it's worth asking why? As a member, you save up to 20% on hundreds of thousands of hotels around the world and earn rewards on every single stay. Which means the trips you're taking now help pay for the ones you're already dreaming about. So whether you're following your team across North America this summer or planning a well earned escape after being glued to football for weeks on end, make sure you book on hotels.com and start earning rewards. Because when it comes to hotels, it's all in the name.
- [17:20]
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- [18:40]
Peter Franker
So George Washington, Afwa, by the time of the Revolution, is probably the most respected, imposing figure in the colonies. Tell us a bit about Washington.
- [18:48]
Afwa Hash
Washington is born into a world that is profoundly shaped by land ownership, hierarchy and slavery. He is much closer to the archetype of the Founding Father as having come from Virginia plantation society. He is born in February 1732 at Pope's Creek in Virginia, a colony that's at the time dominated by this plantocracy of very wealthy tobacco planters who see themselves unequivocally as English gentlemen. And Washington's family is prosperous, but they're not the top tier of the Virginia elite. They own several plantations, dozens of enslaved people. By any measure, they are privileged landowning enslavers, but they haven't inherited the immense fortunes of other families in Washington. And this matters because in hierarchies your specific status within the hierarchy is keenly felt. And Washington grew up intensely conscious of status, reputation, social advancement, and, you know, anyone who studied the English upper class, or if you even read the work of Austin or listen to our series on Austin, which I recommend, you know, it's those who are closer, closest to the top who are most keenly aware of their position within the elite. And that is completely Washington's experience. And his father, Augustine Washington, dies when he's only 11, which is also a formative experience for him.
- [20:09]
Peter Franker
PETER and then Washington is a bit sensitive about the fact that he doesn't get sent to England for his schooling, unlike his elder half brothers. That's something that he sort of carries a chip on his shoulder. Not that he hasn't been to England, but he hasn't been properly schooled in the same way, and he doesn't attend university and he's very aware that some of the other founding fathers we've spoken about, Thomas Jefferson, John Adams and others, are always dropping allusions to classical literature and history that he, you know, it's not that he can't follow them, but he hasn't read them in so much detail. But Washington is proud that he's a man who's learned through practical experience, right through self discipline and relentless attention to detail. So he trains as a teenager, as a surveyor, which is quite demanding. A physically difficult professional on the colonial frontier. From the age of 16, he spends long periods crossing forests and rivers and unsettled territories in West Virginia, looking for opportunities and trying to guess what the future is going to look like. Surveying isn't glamorous, but it teaches him very valuable skills like how to measure land, how to negotiate, and of course, the sort of tough things about endurance and resilience and familiarity with frontier conditions that, as it happens, is going to be play quite an important role too. But also it introduces him to land speculation, and that's one of the great engines of wealth creation in 18th century America. Clearing forests, working out how to invest in farmsteads and how to make them profitable is important. And Washington quickly realizes that expanding westwards represents enormous opportunities. So throughout his life, he remains interested in acquiring land for himself and for expanding his estate holdings. And one of the most important influences on young Washington is his half brother Lawrence, who served in the British military and names the family estate Mount Vernon just outside Washington after Admiral Edward Vernon of the Royal Navy. And through Lawrence, George Washington enters the orbit of Virginia's powerful families. Have you been to Mount Vernon, Afro?
- [22:06]
Afwa Hash
I haven't been to Mount Vernon, actually. I know, it's like a museum, right? You can go and tour and learn the history.
- [22:12]
Peter Franker
Yeah. So I had a very happy summer in Washington in the mid-90s, where my research department was based at Dumbarton Oaks. And we used to go out to Mount Vernon on weekends. And it's kind of, it's amazing, beautiful, ancient 18th century estate. that time, they were going through the challenges of how do you reflect slave owning in a way that would be historically accurate and also meaningful without sort of being honest? And so there were lots of discussions at the time with the curating team there about what? How do you tell the story of basically a modern day saint without making it all sound too bad and too thorny? And, you know, those things, it's not, they have to be done sensitive, they have to be done accurately. But there were real discussions at the Time about how do you explain someone without making them sound like they're. They're either the devil or an archangel? And navigating that wasn't easy. Washington was, by the way, was very interested in these kind of ideas about how do you present yourself and how do you behave. That was one of his kind of preoccupations.
- [23:13]
Afwa Hash
Well, as somebody who was adjacent to the top of the elite, but not really from it, he kind of navigated that world. And actually through his brother who we just mentioned served in the British military and named the estate Mount Vernon, through Lawrence, he got access to the upper echelons of the elite. And being there, he was still a little aware of his slight outsider status. So he study their manners and codes and their obsession with reputation, and he cultivated those traits. He actually wrote down long lists of behavior rules as a young man, rules of civility and decent behavior. So he was self teaching the restraint, the dignity, the self control to behave as a gentleman from the kind of upper echelons of the elite. And that's one side of his influence. On the other side, he's in this slave economy. He is in a world where the labor is unfree. It is enslaved black people working tobacco plantations that is generating all of the wealth, the status that they enjoy. And by adulthood, Washington personally owns a large number of enslaved people and manages complex plantation operations. And so because he's a hands on guy, you know, he's not Jefferson with his kind of soft hands, reading his Virgil, he is actually out there. He understands slavery. It's not just a moral issue, but it is the economic and social fabric of the world. And he is living like many other Virginia planters, with the debt pressures, the fluctuating tobacco prices. He understands that enslaved labour is absolutely crucial to his survival, let alone his wealth and prestige. And that's something that plays out in his character in ways that we will see going through this series.
- [24:53]
Peter Franker
PETER and then he's very active in the 1750s when he serves in the army and he gets personally quite close to being killed. So two horses get shot underneath him, bullets tear through his coats without hitting him. That would have been a very different United States had Washington not made it. But he becomes well known for being composed under fire and those early experiences fighting in Ohio Valley and so on and so forth. They also shape his character too. They teach him about discipline and about caution, about leadership, about the importance of authority. And in fact, they create a long held admiration for the discipline of empire and the British Empire, in particular about military professionalism. For Example. And so in some ways, you couldn't think of someone less likely to lead a revolution. He's someone who believes that he should behave as a gentleman. He understands that there's more to life than just being a gentleman farmer. But there's an order that gets reinforced by good rules, by good training, that the army is an important, important product of good governance. He himself is a product of that same system, too. So he's a slave owning Virginian gentleman who wants advancement, land and status within the British world. And that's one of the reasons why his break with Britain, in fact, carries such symbolic importance later. But he's not a philosopher, he's not a writer. His influence is about his stature, his reputation, his experience and his personal authority.
- [26:21]
Afwa Hash
And the turning point for his stature in particular and his status in society is really when he marries his wife, Martha Dandridge Custis, who's one of the richest widows in Virginia. And her first marriage has left her with an enormous estate, tens of thousands of acres of land, well over a thousand enslaved people. So through his marriage to Martha, Washington gains control, although not outright ownership, of vast wealth. And overnight, his social position is transformed. He's now at the top of Virginia high society, and he is not content even with that. He wants to aggressively expand his land holdings even from there, because he has understood from an early age that land is the foundation of wealth. The more land you have, the more enslaved people can work it, the more status and political influence you can achieve. And because of his experience as a surveyor, he knows how to find land, how to scout land, how to value land. So he's got this combination of this kind of frontier expertise, this insight of how high society works, how you convert land and wealth into prestige and status, and of the backdrop of enslavement and how you need to keep this social order going in order to maintain your personal wealth. Those are important ingredients for him, Peter,
- [27:46]
Peter Franker
because he's got this hands on experience, he manages his land incredibly carefully and incredibly well. So, for example, at Mount Vernon, unlike, you know, other absentee plants who are busy, you know, dancing and reading and thinking about freedom, he obsesses over management accounts he's worried about and pays attention to crop yields. He personally takes an interest in the tools that are being used and how to pick the right ones and the best ones, how to improve them. He's interested in livestock and in labor systems. He's constantly experimenting with ways to improve profitability. And so when tobacco prices are fluctuating, he diversifies into wheat production or into Fisheries or into milling. So he's an entrepreneur. He's a sort of live wire who's constantly thinking. So he's building a sort of conglomerate of complex business systems. And his letters, they're not always that exciting to read because they're writing about drainage systems and about crop rotation or about market prices and transport routes. So he's approaching this with discipline. So he's quite cautious. He's interested in the bottom line. But he also recognizes that a break with Britain can potentially produce some opportunities for more power and more wealth. But also, things can all go up in smoke, because if you have an emerging civil war that comes as a result of it, he might lose everything, too. But that Washington, by the 1770s, is the kind of coming man where he's got the full arsenal of what everybody wants. So he's wealthy, he gets his hands dirty, he's got a military track record, he's got a physical bearing. He's quite a tall man. And so he gets appointed in 1775, in June, as the commander in chief of the Continental army, which is essentially the American colonies combined. And it's as much a political decision as a military one.
- [29:31]
Afwa Hash
Yeah. Even at the beginning of the War of Independence, Washington has kind of hoped that there could be a reconciliation with Britain and that there could be a new arrangement in which everyone is happy. And he's gradually realizing that this is not going to work. And that is really driven by witnessing how imperial policy is actually threatening the autonomy and prosperity and future expansion of the elite planter class of which he's now firmly a member. He is witnessing firsthand that these policies coming from Britain are harming the hard work that he is doing to increase his wealth, his holdings. And that is what slowly starts to drive him to realize that this is a battle that has to be fought to the end. And so he is perfectly equipped, though, to be this commander in chief because of his experience in the Seven Years War fighting with Britain, that now he is turning those expertise against Britain. And one major source of frustration for him was what was happening with Western land. After the Seven Years War, Britain issued the Royal Proclamation of 1763 restricting settlement west of the Appalachian Mountains in an attempt to stabilize relations with indigenous people. Remember, Britain at this time is not anywhere near as ambitious for its American colonies as the colonists are. As we said earlier, its focus is really on the Caribbean. That's its most valuable colonial possession. It doesn't want to create new conflicts that it would have to spend money managing in the Americas. And so it is trying to restrain the colonists from that kind of outward expansion. Of course, people like George Washington are hardwired to want constant further expansion, constant greater accumulation of wealth, constant further rising in their possessions and social status. And so to tell someone like Washington that they have to stay put with the lot that they've got already, much as it is already wealthy and powerful, was very, very triggering for men like him.
- [31:33]
Peter Franker
And he's not that worried about liberty and freedoms. He's not that worried about taxation or representation. But what he is worried and in fact becomes convinced about is that Britain's economic system is rigged to favor metropolitan interests in, you know, in the colonies too, but at the expense of people like him. So the crisis, as it starts to brew, is something that he is not thinking in terms of independence, but of having to use his elbows to make sure that his wealth and status are not being compromised. So he dislikes mob politics. Unlike people like Samuel Adams, he's not particularly ideological inflammatory. But he starts to attend the Continental Congress and start to align himself with the resistance, still not just hoping that reconciliation will be possible. But I think like all the founding fathers, assuming that there will be. But that all then goes wrong in 1775, when fighting starts at Lexington and at Concord, where things then change fundamentally. So Washington arrives at the second Continental Congress in military uniform, which signifies solidarity with Massachusetts and his readiness for war. So when he's appointed commander in chief of the Continental army, as we mentioned, partly because of his military experience, but also because he's a wealthy slave owning planter, what Washington decides to do next is pivotal because people are looking to him for inspiration and for leadership. What battles can be won and how can you win them? So he initially, like the other or many other founding fathers, claims that he's defending traditional English values rather than creating a new republic. But he very quickly gets radicalised. So when the British declare that the colonies are in rebellion, German mercenaries get hard to suppress the resistance. And Washington recognizes that compromise is impossible.
- [33:24]
Afwa Hash
Yeah, there's this sense that had Washington not got involved, this could have stayed a New England rebellion. But his involvement, this very imposing, very competent commander in chief, his rocking up in military uniform, this is transforming events now from a kind of New England uprising into a much bigger movement that affects the whole continent, all of these colonies. And there's a sense that the British are not behaving in an honorable way, which only makes things worse, so that they hire German mercenaries. That's considered very offensive by people like Washington. They also start offering enslaved people freedom if they join the British side. Now that is to the planter class, to people like Jefferson and Washington, I mean, that's a lightning rod. It's just beyond the pale. And actually one of Washington's own former enslaved people goes and joins one of the black regiments to fight against the colonists. So they have started to lose all respect for Britain at this point and the battle lines are drawn.
- [34:26]
Peter Franker
So that's our magnificent founding seven fathers that we've covered one by one. When we kind of come back, we're going to talk about them all as a group because history treats them sometimes as though they all saw eye to eye. But as it turns out, they didn't.
- [34:41]
Taylor
Hey everybody, this is Taylor from the Total Soccer show. And this episode is brought to you by Hotels.com the summer of soccer is right around the corner. And if you aren't using hotels.com to book the experience of a lifetime, it's worth asking why? As a member, you save up to 20% on hundreds of thousands of hotels around the world and earn rewards on every single stay. Which means the trips you're taking now help pay for the ones you're already dreaming about. So whether you're following your team across North America this summer or planning a well earned escape after being glued to football for weeks on end, make sure you book on hotels.com and start earning rewards. Because when it comes to hotels, it's all in the name. Hotels.com.
- [35:28]
Peter Franker
One of the amazing things about the Founding fathers up to 1776 is not that they agreed with each other, but that the fact that they managed to cooperate at all. They came from different colonies, different generations, different social worlds and often profoundly different temperaments. Some were wealthy slave owning planters, other were self made men, some were lawyers, some were even outsiders from the Caribbean. And several disliked themselves intensely.
- [35:54]
Afwa Hash
And almost none of them fully trusted all the others, which I think is also important. And I think that's had a lasting legacy for the American constitutional arrangement because they were having to create a framework not just that would hold these United States together, but would get them all to stay together around a table. It was almost if you could get them all in alignment, you could kind of do anything. And it's also important to understand, I think at this stage they didn't see themselves as Americans. Like American wasn't a thing yet, right? Peter? There were Native Americans who had been inhabiting that land for millennia. There were enslaved Africans who'd been kidnapped and brought there from the African continent and whose children were also enslaved. And then you have These white men who are essentially British colonists, who still, until they just fought this violent war against the British, saw themselves and were proud to see themselves on the whole as British. So this is also a new identity being formed in real time.
- [36:54]
Peter Franker
And you've got different loyalties here. Some to their colonies, some to their families, some to their region, some to their class. You know, John Adams, unmistakably a Massachusetts man, argumentative, intellectual, suspicious. George Washington and Thomas Jefferson, belonging to Virginia's slave owning planter elite. Alexander Hamilton, we talked about this Caribbean born, socially insecure, and Franklin, older than most by decades, and already famous. But, you know, the fact that these people are able to cooperate with each other is, I think, very interesting. I mean, they had grudging respect. So, for example, John Adams was keen that Thomas Jefferson drafted the Declaration of Independence because he said about him that you're a Virginian and a Virginian ought to appear at the head of this business. So there was kind of, there's class anxiety even within these groups. And so it's not just based on skill and merit and who's in the right place. It's about how this disparate bunch of people are able to balance each other out.
- [37:51]
Afwa Hash
Washington stood apart from the others, I would say, because he wasn't an intellectual and he had this reputation as a military leader. The victory in this War of Independence, or as the Americans call it, Revolutionary War, was so associated with him and he really went through it. You know, there was this months long period where he and his units were stranded with almost no food in the cold. You know, it was a sense of having overcome something that only having God on their side could have seen them through. And that gave him a gravitas. I think in a world full of these like political movers and shakers, all this suspicion and volatility, he wasn't getting involved. He rose above that and his in reputation as well as in physical and kind of energetic stature. So his role wasn't really to be in the fray, arguing over the Federalist Papers, the terms of the Constitution, or the wording of the Declaration of Independence. He rose above it. And I wonder if that's one of the reasons that he, till today, stands out.
- [38:53]
Peter Franker
PETER well, you need a dull one, you need an outsider, and you need somebody practical who's not got their head in the clouds. And, you know, I think that the sum of the parts is the key actually to all of this. So John Adams quickly realizes that appointing Washington commander in chief would bind Virginia to the revolutionary cause. It's not just about Washington and his skill, it's about who he would bring with him. But all those rivalries and tensions are beneath the surface, everywhere you look. So John Adams could be vain and cognitive and incredibly thin skinned. Franklin found him really over argumentative and annoying. Jefferson thought he was exhausting but brilliant. And Adams in turn distrusted Franklin, the fact he was so charming and so successful. So all of these tensions are everywhere. You could look at it. And they all had disagreements also about Britain itself. They weren't sure whether they wanted reform, whether they wanted representation, whether Britain was a sort of short term problem that could be fought to the negotiating table and therefore what would you demand in return, or whether this would be the birth of a new nation. But one thing that is, I think, interesting is that they all felt that they were in it together. So I think one of the most revealing anecdotes about the Founding Fathers as a group comes during the discussions and debates about independence in 1776, when Benjamin Franklin reportedly jokes, after the Declaration gets signed, we must all hang together, or assuredly we shall all hang separately. And I think that that captures the danger and the fragility of the coalition. You know, if Britain crushed the rebellion, many of these signatories, they really risked losing everything, including their lives.
- [40:28]
Afwa Hash
What Britain did was provide these people who under almost any other circumstances would not have been able to agree and work together with a formidable enough enemy that they were united. You know, and that was the thing. It was this union in outrage, the injustice, the way the patronizing tone, the betrayal of Britain's actions that allowed them to come together and form not just a successful war strategy, but then an ideology. And it was all founded in this conviction that Britain did not understand America. It didn't understand the American experience, it didn't understand the American reality, didn't understand the American ideology. And almost that they were the true inheritors of Enlightenment values in ways that Britain were failing. And I think that's important for seeing the confidence underpinning these men, because on one level, it's the audacity, you know, these kind of ragtag men in a colony creating a new nation, breaking away from their colonial overlord. You know, we recognize that from more modern independence movements, the level of confidence it takes to believe that you can overturn decades or centuries of colonial rule and create something new. And the more fractious the group is, the harder it is to do that. But Britain helped them by making itself quite an unambiguous adversary in this episode of history.
- [41:47]
Peter Franker
And of course, I Think no coincidence that, you know, we mentioned Brexit a couple of times in these Founding Fathers episodes. I think it's no coincidence that some of the Brexiteers, I think, use the United States as a model, which is, look what happened to the US Afterwards. Rather than being crushed and falling off the side of the earth, the moment of Declaration of Independence and liberation was the moment in which a new empire, the seeds of a new empire were being born. And I think we're still waiting, it's fair to say, 10 years on from the Brexit vote for another British Empire to be born out of the ashes. And again, some of these being flagged and go through the Founding Fathers. Land availability, labor availability, the ability to kind of keep growing.
- [42:25]
Afwa Hash
But I think that's crucial. I think that is crucial that the American Dream was based on enslavement and that they were able to have this bold vision because they had free labor, they had this limitless pot, they had land they could grab, regard it as just empathy for the taking, ignoring the claims of indigenous people. They had black people's bodies they regarded as inhuman that they could just exploit. And so that gives you the opportunity to create whatever you like. You know, privilege isn't even the word. And I think for anyone to look at that and think we could do that, either you have to aspire to that same level of oppressing others, or you have to be as dishonest as the Founding Fathers were about what the foundation of your democracy is. And you know, that is the problem. And I think we see that play out in real time. Brexit, it might sound like an amazing idea of getting back control and sovereignty and being in charge of your own destiny. But it ignores the realities of labor, immigration, who actually does the work, who provides the economic engine. And I think one of the big legacies the Founding Fathers gave us is this model of intellectual dishonesty that you separate the glorious ideas from the physical labor, economic realities of how you build it. And then through doing that, you encourage others to these equally unrealistic aspirations. And one of the things that we. I think we can say with confidence is that the legacy of that dishonesty is still playing itself out. It's the reason why Mount Vernon are still having arguments about how you talk about George Washington, that Thomas Jefferson's estate are still regarded as incredibly controversial, to mention Sally Hemings, you know, and despite the fact that these things are matters of fact, and it's a metaphor for the whole of America, which is desperately still trying to believe in its ideals as the land of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, while being confronted in an unwelcome way, as far as many Americans are concerned with the reality that they created a very unequal and unfair society, and that that has not gone away.
- [44:31]
Peter Franker
So look, those are the seven Founding Fathers. We've got so much more to talk about in this series on us250, so join us next time on Legacy, where we're going to be talking about whose stories have not been told and deserved to be put back into their place. And then we've got a whole series of other episodes that we're going to be looking at. The Declaration of Independence, the consequences and the legacies today. Thank you for listening to Legacy.
- [44:54]
Afwa Hash
To dive deeper and to support the show, sign up to Legacy. You'll get to enjoy bonus episodes, early access, fewer ads, Q&As and more. Go to Legacy Supportingcast FM.
- [45:05]
Peter Franker
And don't forget, you can watch all of our episodes on Spotify and YouTube too. And for everything else, including our substacks and update on Tik Tok and Instagram, just check out the show notes or search Legacy Podcast I'm Peter frankopone.
- [45:17]
Afwa Hash
I'm Afwa Hash and we'll see you on the next episode of Legacy.
- [45:37]
Peter Franker
Hi, this is Ben Green from the Athletic fc. The podcast you're about to listen to is brought to you by Hotels.com as a Hotels.com member, you save up to 20% on hundreds of thousands of hotels and earn rewards on every single stay. Which means the trips you're taking now help pay for the ones you're already dreaming about. And unlike some other other places, there are no blackout dates. So when you want to travel, your rewards are ready to go. So the next time you're planning a work trip or a getaway, make sure to book it at hotels.com and start earning rewards. Hotels.com, it's all in the name.