Part Two: X-Mas Special: The Heroes Who Ended The Slave Trade

In this episode we introduce two great heroes: freed slave and adventurer Olaudah Equiano, and crusading abolitionist lawyer Granville Sharp. Against the State by James Stout available for preorder here: https://www.akpress.org/against-the-state.html See omnystudio.com/listener https://omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:06Robert Evans?

  Welcome back to Behind the Bastards, a podcast where every year I buy Sophie a weapon.

• 0:11Speaker 01

  True.

• 0:11Robert Evans?

  It's also about bad people, except for this episode, well, this week, we're doing a reverse episode about some heroes, the people who ended the British slave trade and eventually the whole Atlantic slave trade. And, you know, they're good people. We haven't talked about them yet. We've only talked about bad people so far. Episode one was really a lot of bad stuff in one. And I do apologize for that on the Christmas week.

• 0:36Speaker 01

  Our guest today is, is big ship guy, James Stout.

• 0:41Robert Evans?

  Big boat man, James Stout. Captain James Stout. Seafarer.

• 0:46Speaker 01

  Yeah, Captain James Stout, Sir Captain James Stout.

• 0:51Speaker 02

  Not one of those things. Again, never been near a king. But yeah, I do like to go on a boat. I get very unwell, but I don't let that stop me.

• 0:59Robert Evans?

  No, I'm not. afflicted with seasickness. If I've learned one thing about the history of sailing, no one has ever let being sick stop them from getting on a boat. You can't. You can't. You gotta, you gotta power through it.

• 1:12Speaker 03

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• 1:17Speaker 04

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• 1:47Robert Evans?

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• 2:31Robert Evans?

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• 2:55Robert Evans?

  Speaking of powering through it, you know, we just got the horrible case of the Zorg and the mass murder that happened onboard it, and then a lawsuit by the Gregson Syndicate saying, "We should get money for those people we murdered." Which a British court ruled, yeah, you should. So that's where things ended in part one. In part two, some people are going to get mad about this. Now, there was no coverage of Gregson v. Gilbert at the time of the court case. It was legally a minor civil trial over an insurance dispute, and there was really no reason to believe that anyone aside from the parties involved were paying attention to what happened in court or cared about what had happened aboard the Zorg. But one anonymous person watched the proceedings that day, March 6th of 1783, and they were

• 3:39Robert Evans?

  horrified by what they saw, right? There's some theorizing in the book, The Zorg, about who this person might have been, but we don't really know. It was just someone was there that day who had a conscience and who viewed Africans as human beings, right? And a lot of stuff that happened, a lot of very important stuff, is going to result from the fact that one person with a conscience was there that day, right? Now, a little less than two weeks. After the judge in this case issued his ruling, this person published an anonymous letter in two major newspapers, The Morning Chronicle and The London Advertiser. The letter noted that the zorgs still had 420 gallons of water left when it put into port in Jamaica, and thus, as the underwriters argued, there was, quote, "no necessity for a conduct so shocking to humanity."

• 4:23Robert Evans?

  This is our only first-person account of the court proceedings, and the author of this anonymous letter claims that, quote, "the narrative seemed to make every person present shudder." He lamented that, "in spite of this, the jury voted in favor of the Gregson syndicate." The letter then takes a more philosophical turn, with the author wishing some man of feeling and genius would give poetical language to the last thoughts of one of the ten enslaved men who chose to kill themselves after seeing their little brothers and sisters hurled into the ocean, quote, "whose indignation made him voluntarily share death with his countrymen, rather than life with such unheard-of English barbarians." The letter then concludes with this paragraph. "It is certainly worthy of observation that our legislature can, every session,

• 5:05Robert Evans?

  find time to inquire into and regulate the manner of killing a partridge, that no abuse should be committed, and that he should be fairly shot, and yet it has never been thought proper to inquire into the matter of annually kidnapping above 50,000 poor wretches, who never injured us, by a set of the most cruel monsters that this country can send out." Pretty unsparing. Yeah. It's a good point, too. Yeah, yeah, he's making a good point.

• 5:32Speaker 01

  Do we ever, do we ever found out who wrote this, or does it stay anonymous?

• 5:36Robert Evans?

  Again, it's, we don't really know. The author, Siddharth Kara, has a theory as to who it is, but it's not like, it's, it's, we don't know. We simply don't know, and we never really will, to a point of certainty.

• 5:47Speaker 01

  I think it's cool that two newspapers printed it.

• 5:51Robert Evans?

  Yeah, yeah, it's good that they printed. Again, there's sentiment, there's abolitionist sentiment, there's people of like conscience and care who are informed and know how bad it is. They're just not really unified yet, right? There's, there's, you know, a small organization of like Quakers, but for the most part, most of the people who are like upset about slavery aren't together yet, right? And this, it's, it's over this case that they're going to get stitched together, right? So Letter finds an audience, but first mostly with England's small Quaker anti-slavery movement, but it doesn't cause an immediate broader uproar on its own. However, it succeeds in reaching the one person who it turns out most needed to hear it, a freedman named

• 6:32Robert Evans?

  Olaudah Equiano. And this guy is one of the coolest dudes I have ever heard of. This is a fucking Equiano is a fascinating man. Have you heard about this person, James?

• 6:42Speaker 02

  Yeah, I love to assign Equiano to my undergraduate courses.

• 6:46Robert Evans?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 6:47Speaker 02

  His book is fantastic.

• 6:49Robert Evans?

  He's got a book. Yeah. And you can find it online. It's free, right? We'll be quoting from it some here. Fascinating person. So Equiano had been born around 1745 in Ibo, part of modern day Nigeria, which was then part of the Kingdom of Benin. And although he claimed his village was only nominally controlled by the king, right? That like, yeah, we have a king, but he's not really a factor in daily life, which is probably accurate. As a young boy, he'd never heard of white men or Europeans or even the ocean. His father was a village elder and held a high position in local government. As a child, Olaudah seems to have had a keen eye for injustice. Because of his father's position, he spent a good deal of time watching court proceedings and later wrote that adultery for women was often punished by slavery or death. Quote, "The men, however, do not

• 7:33Robert Evans?

  preserve the same constancy to their wives, which they expect from them." So one thing you see about Olaudah is that he is, he is a thinker. This is not a man who just accepts like, oh yeah, adultery, you gotta kill the woman if she does that. He's a man who's like, but the guys are all cheating and nobody cares about that. It seems unfair.

• 7:49Speaker 02

  That seems wrong.

• 7:50Robert Evans?

  Yeah, he's a, he's a, an empathetic and intelligent man. He was aware of slavery from a very young age. You had to be in the part of Africa he lived because there are slave slavers running rampant. He later wrote about stout mahogany colored men from the southwest who traveled through town to trade firearms, gunpowder and other goods. Quote, "They always carry slaves through our land, but the strictest account is exacted of their manner of procuring them before they are suffered to pass. Sometimes indeed, we sold slaves to them, but they were only prisoners of war or such among us as had been convicted of kidnapping or adultery or some other crimes which we esteemed heinous." Now, these are his recollections of how he thought that, how he justified things as a small child, right?

• 8:33Robert Evans?

  This is not how he feels about the matter as an adult. And in fact, he cut, it makes, he has a clear in his autobiography that his belief that like, well, these guys, you know, they're not allowed to just take slaves willy nilly, right? You know, we make sure that they, that they're not, that's not accurate, right? That's the thing he learns unfortunately not long later in his childhood, right? And he does note at the time that like, well, you know, my dad told me that, yeah, it's okay. We always make sure that, you know, they're not just grabbing people off the street at random, you know, when they come through. But he knows like, they always carry these big empty sacks with them. I wonder what those are for. Geez. Right? For Christmas stuff, I assume. Yeah, he's a child, so he doesn't really see that as a warning sign until it was too late.

• 9:18Robert Evans?

  Now, there is like, there is some basic knowledge that they are in danger because he writes that during the day when the grown people leave town to work the fields, the kids would assemble to play and at least one kid at any given time would have to stand watch, would like climb up a tree to watch for kidnappers who quote, "sometimes took those opportunities of our parents' absence to attack and carry off as many as they could seize." So first off, you get a really good glimpse in Equiano's book as to like what the slave trade has done to daily life in like these small villages in this part of Africa where it's like, yeah, the kids just know that you always have to be aware that like kidnappers might come and steal all of you. Yeah, yeah. That's a real danger.

• 10:01Robert Evans?

  Yeah, like they're not making it up this time. No. He writes, quote, "One day, as I was watching at the top of a tree in our yard, I saw one of those people come into the yard of our next neighbor, but one to kidnap, there being so many stout young people in it. Immediately on this, I gave the alarm of the rogue, and he was surrounded by the stoutest of them, who entangled him with cords that he could not escape till some of the grown people came and secured him." So this is, you know, a positive end, and this is his first direct encounter with slavers, but it's not going to be his last. Not long after this, he and his sister are minding the house while their parents are away. Two men and a woman jump over the walls, steal them both, cover their mouths, and sprint off with them into the woods. For the next few days, they're taken through the woods, bound and gagged during the day.

• 10:45Robert Evans?

  He wrote that "the only comfort we had was in being in each other's arms all that night and bathing each other with our tears." And this single comfort was not to last long. Quote, "The next day proved of a greater sorrow than I had yet experienced, for my sister and I were then separated while we lay clasped in each other's arms. It was in vain that we besought them not to part us. She was torn from me and immediately carried away, while I was left in a state of distraction not to be described. I cried and grieved continually, and for several days I did not eat anything but what they forced into my mouth."

• 11:17Robert Evans?

  So-

• 11:18Speaker 01

  Horrific.

• 11:19Robert Evans?

  It's pretty bad, yeah. He's taken first to a village several days away, while he is purchased by a local chieftain. And that's the thing, he's not, this is not like a, often you're taken straight to the coast where you're sold, you're now a slave and you will be sold around. Like, a lot of these people do just stay in Africa, right? And maybe get free or maybe don't. But he is a slave to local Africans for a while, right? His first owner is a local chieftain who treats him really well, and he thinks has adopted him into the family, right? He works as a blacksmith assistant, he spends the next month gaining their trust, and his plan is, "I want to escape," right? It's like, "I'm gonna get their trust so I can make an escape attempt." This doesn't pan out, though, and he's ultimately bought

• 11:59Robert Evans?

  and sold several times. He learns three languages as he journeys across Africa, and he ends up in a coastal village where he is sold onto a slave ship. Now, up to this point, he always emphasizes, and it's kind of a weird part of the book, but he's really emphatic, "I was always treated well. People were not mean." I mean, what they're doing, selling, separating from his sister, selling her, but they're not cruel, they're not yelling at him, they're not treating him as a subhuman, right? They're just doing this awful thing to him. Um, and as an 11 year old, it's really weird for him because they're being so nice while they do this awful thing like it's kind of a head fuck, right? Um, and yeah, he generally enjoys good food and is, is, you know, kept relatively healthy this whole time, right?

• 12:41Robert Evans?

  And this ends as soon as he's sold onto a slaving vessel, right? Uh, quote, "I was soon put down under the decks and there I received such a salutation in my nostrils as I had never experienced in my life, so that with the loathsomeness of the stench and crying together, I became so sick and low that I was not able to eat, nor had I the least desire to taste anything. I now wished for the last friend, death, to relieve me. But soon, to my grief, two of the white men offered me eatables, and on my refusing to eat, one of them held me fast by the hands and laid me across, I think, the windlass, and tied my feet, while the other flogged me severely. I had never experienced anything of this kind before, and although not being used to water, I naturally feared that element the first time I saw it. Yet nevertheless, could I have got over the nettings? I would have jumped over the side, but I could not.

• 13:26Robert Evans?

  And besides, the crew used to watch us very closely, who are not chained down on the decks, lest we should leap into the water. And I have seen some of these poor African prisoners most severely cut for attempting to do so, and hourly whipped for not eating."

• 13:40Robert Evans?

  Now he is again 11 as this is happening to him. Um, this is about 1756 when he's transported first to the West Indies, where he witnesses the auctioning of slaves to plantation owners, but he's not sold himself because he's really sick, like he's just not worth anything in the eyes of these people because he's, it seems like he's dying. So the Dutch take him back onboard the slave ship and take him to America and he gets better enough during that time that he's sold to a Virginia plantation owner. Um, he gets kind of within this horrible situation, one of the better jobs you can get where he's working as a house slave. So he's able to kind of, he's not laboring in the field, is able to recover his strength more effectively, right? Cause he's, it's less physically nightmarish work.

• 14:23Robert Evans?

  Um, and he gets better enough and he's, he's just proved to be very intelligent too. So he's, he's got a lot of value to him and he's sold again to the captain of a British merchant vessel named Henry Pascal.

• 14:34Robert Evans?

  Pascal, who gives him his European name, Gustavus Vassa. And sometimes you'll see him and he would go by Vassa periodically throughout his life as well as Aquiano, right? But yeah, Pascal gives him this name and takes him to England. And for a while, things seemed to be going really well. He's taught about Christianity. He makes like a friend with a local boy who's about his age, like a white boy. And they're actually very good friends. The kid dies like two years later. But like he's adamant that like, no, this kid was like really, we were very close. He helps him learn English. And because he's so smart, Aquiano attracts wealthy British patrons. These like two, I think, older ladies pay for him to go to school. And so he's obviously kind of thinking, I've lucked out.

• 15:18Robert Evans?

  I might just kind of get out of the whole slavery thing and be like, English, right? Like, maybe that's my future because Pascal's seems to be treating him well. He's got these local ladies who are like paying for, you know, he seems to have fallen into a good situation. And then out of nowhere, Pascal takes him back to sea, right? And so they spend some time on voyages together and he's still kind of being treated more like a servant. They're engaged in like pirates attacks several times, like he helps defend the ship in several desperate battles. They travel the oceans of the world and Alouda says that at this time, he feels a growing loyalty and affection for Pascal, who he believes has been so kind to him because he plans to free him one day, right?

• 16:03Robert Evans?

  So he, he's really like as loyal to this dude as he can because he thinks that like, I found a good one, right? Unfortunately, he has not. That is not the case.

• 16:17Robert Evans?

  In an article for documenting the American South on Aquiano, Jen Williamson summarizes, "He is shocked at an abrupt betrayal during a layover in England when Pascal has him roughly seized and forced into a barge. Pascal sells Aquiano to Captain James Duran, the captain of a ship bound for the West Indies. Dazed by his sudden change in fortunes, Aquiano argues with Captain Duran that Pascal could not sell him to me, nor to anyone else. I have served him many years and he has taken all my wages and prize money. I have been baptized and by the laws of the land, no man has a right to sell me." After Duran tells Aquiano he talks too much English and threatens to subdue him, Aquiano begins service under a new master, for he is too well convinced of his power over me to doubt what he said. Right? She was like, but like, I did all the stuff I'm supposed to do. I feel like I'm

• 17:01Robert Evans?

  English now. And he's like, if you keep talking English, I'm gonna beat the shit out of you. Right? Like, that's what happens here.

• 17:06Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 17:08Robert Evans?

  So he's taken back to the West Indies. He endures the nightmare trip down the Middle Passage a second time, which is just an unthinkable hell to have to do twice. He writes of seeing white members of the crew gratify their brutal passion with females not 10 years old on the journey.

• 17:26Speaker 01

  Oh.

• 17:26Robert Evans?

  Right? In other words, they're just raping any thing female that is on the boat. Right? They don't care about age, you know, like, that's the kind of men who are doing this, right?

• 17:37Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 17:38Robert Evans?

  Once he arrives in the Caribbean, he is horrified that he will be sold to a plantation and into a life of, quote, bondage, misery, stripes, and chains. But here again, he meets with this crazy good luck with it's this weird situation where he's in like the like this horror, the worst, least lucky situation he could be in. But within that situation, he has crazy luck. Like, I don't know how else to describe it. Because

• 18:01Speaker 02

  It's like 1 in 10 million, right? Like, this happened to millions and millions of people. One of them had this unique set of circumstances and was uniquely intelligent to be able to

• 18:10Robert Evans?

  Yes.

• 18:10Speaker 02

  to take advantage of it in the way that he was.

• 18:12Robert Evans?

  Right.

• 18:13Speaker 02

  Take advantage is the wrong word, but like

• 18:15Robert Evans?

  Well, yeah, but like, like even people who would have been as smart, but maybe aren't good with languages, probably wouldn't have had the success he has, right? That's a separate kind of thing. Like, he's just a bunch of shit happens.

• 18:25Speaker 02

  And he's a good writer.

• 18:27Robert Evans?

  He is a really good writer. Yeah.

• 18:28Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 18:29Robert Evans?

  Maybe not. I don't know about this point, but yeah. Yeah.

• 18:31Speaker 02

  No, but there's not much shit from that period that I can assign in whole to undergraduates in 2025 and have them be like, wow, that's fucked up. Like, it makes people feel things still centuries later. Yeah.

• 18:41Robert Evans?

  It's really powerful. Yeah, I do really recommend reading it because, among other things, it's just, there's a lot. I mean, the early portions of the book are just a lot about life in that part of Africa at the time that you're not gonna run into a lot of firsthand accounts of.

• 18:54Speaker 02

  No, it's interesting.

• 18:56Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

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• 19:29Robert Evans?

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• 20:28Robert Evans?

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• 20:39Robert Evans?

  So again, within this horrible situation, he gets crazy lucky again, because the next person to buy him is a Quaker. And again, a lot of Quakers are anti-slavery. This guy, Robert King, clearly isn't totally against slavery, but he's also still a Quaker, right? And he's like a merchant or something. I don't know exactly what he's there to do. But he sees, he at once recognizes, wow, this kid is smart as hell. And he already speaks a ton of languages. There's a lot I can have him do. So King starts having Equiano work a bunch of different jobs and he starts like basically assigning him out to like subcontract him with other guys. And some of these guys are like fairly decent and are like, hey, what if we hired you to do extra side work and pay you personally for it?

• 21:23Robert Evans?

  And King is like, yeah, you know, I have no problem with you making money on the side, right? Why not? Yeah. And so these guys like both teach him how to, you know, train him up and help him like learn these different trades and he's able to make side money. And so he takes this side money and he starts buying and selling goods with the money that he makes, right? And basically turning his salary into even more money. And he does well enough at this that in 1766, when he's about 21, he's able to buy his freedom and he does. Robert King allows him to do this, which he didn't have to do. So again, he's, he got into like the luckiest part of a bad situation he could be. And yeah, he's able to, he becomes a free man. He's free after this point. So he spends the next several years taking work on merchant ships because that's what

• 22:08Robert Evans?

  he knows how to do. And he travels around the world. In 1773, he becomes one of the first Africans to visit the Arctic. Equiano wrote and corresponded widely and generally he's like an adventurer. This guy lives an amazing life. Like he's one of the most incredible people who ever lived. Now, the whole time though, is his life is going well, right? He remains troubled with the inhuman institution of slavery that had robbed him of his childhood and his family, you know? He knows this is still going on. He's still angry about it. And so he starts meeting during the times when he's back in London, he starts meeting with and befriending some of the small number of Englishmen who oppose the institution of slavery. And after reading that op ed, he comes across this article about what's happened on the

• 22:53Robert Evans?

  zorg. He's sick with horror and fury at what has happened. I mean, it's just an awful thing and he has personal experience with being on those boats. So it's much, he knows much better how awful it is than an average person reading it and he wants to do something. However, he's also a practical guy. He knows that even a freed black man has zero political power and influence in England at the time. So if he's going to have an impact on the situation, he's going to have to be cunning about it. One of Equiano's friends is a writer and a lawyer who's also like an early abolitionist named Granville Sharp. And Sharp is going to be the second of our heroes for this episode. One of the coolest dudes to ever live, really like just an actual great man. Born in Durham

• 23:35Robert Evans?

  in 1735, Granville was the middle-ish child of 14. Five of his eight older brothers survived early childhood, which means his parents were better than average. His family was working class, and as a youth, he was apprentice to the owner of a fabric store. However, he turned out to be one of those kids who's just like irrepressibly smart, right? Like, he is not gonna work at the fabric store, you know? Yeah. In Granville, this expresses itself. He is this, he's a debate kid. He's the good kind of debate kid, but he has this pathological need to debate with his peers. To the extent he is so committed to this, that he makes a Jewish friend, and they start having like good-natured arguments about religion. And because he wants to argue better with his Jewish friend, he learns Hebrew and becomes a fluent speaker of Hebrew in order

• 24:20Robert Evans?

  to argue about like the Torah with his Jewish friend. Yeah, that's perfect, actually. Yeah. When he makes a friend who's a member of a weird Greek Christian sect, he learns Greek for the same reason. Like, again, like Equiano, he's one of these guys who just picks up languages. He's just crazy smart. Yeah. Yeah. In 1757, he gets a job as a clerk in the ordinance office, which, so far as I can tell, is like a mid-level bureaucratic position. This leaves him with ample free time, which he spends idly studying the law and presumably learning more languages in order to argue with his friends. One of his older brothers is a doctor who, and you get the feeling this is like a family of good people, because his older brother, the doctor, runs a free clinic out of his house for the poor of London, right? Damn, yeah.

• 25:05Robert Evans?

  And Granville periodically will just like show up to hang out with him and his patients and like talk. There's not TV at the time. What else are you gonna do? Right? Yeah. No podcasts. It's supposed to be dark times. Right. Yeah. So Granville shows up one day in 1765, the year before Equiano buys his freedom, and he happens to meet a black enslaved person named Jonathan Strong. Strong had been taken from Barbados to London by his owner, slave trader David Lyle. He was 15 or 16 when Lyle has him baptized. Now, religion is confusing at the best of times, and Strong, like many enslaved people, misunderstood the purpose of baptism and was under the impression that now that this was done, he was a free person because he had been baptized, right?

• 25:50Robert Evans?

  You can't hold a Christian as a slave, right? That'd be fucked up.

• 25:55Robert Evans?

  Pretty weird. Pretty weird. And so he tells Lyle, well, like, I'm free now, right? And Lyle, being a slave owner and trader, doesn't have a great control over his anger and just immediately pistol whips this adolescent boy nearly to death. He beats him so badly with the butt of a handgun that Strong goes temporarily blind and can barely walk upright. So he, and you get the feeling he just loses his temper and beats this kid nearly to death because he's immediately like, oh shit, I killed him. And he just tosses him out onto the street like a piece of trash. He's like, well, he's not worth anything anymore. Bye. So somehow this dying boy manages to like crawl or find help and he gets to Granville's brother's free clinic where his immediate injuries are treated, but it's clear he needs

• 26:40Robert Evans?

  more treatment. And it just happens to be on a day that like Granville Sharp is there with his brother. And so he and his brother take Jonathan to a nearby hospital and pool their money to pay for him to stay there for four months and recover. And when he's released, because they're just treating him like a freedman at this point, they find him paying work with a Quaker pharmacist they knew. So they, they get this guy to the hospital. He heals, he recovers pretty well, and they find him a job and he starts living a life, right? Like he's an independent, free person making money. For a year and change, things are pretty good for Strong. But then in 1767, his former owner, Lyle, sees Jonathan on the street and is like, he's alive and healthy? And he gets really fucking angry.

• 27:25Robert Evans?

  How dare that boy have the temerity to survive my beating and not hand himself back over to me? He stole himself, basically. He stole himself. Yeah. So Lyle doesn't want to deal with Strong anymore, but he works, he says like, "Hey, I own this guy and he's really healthy. You just gotta go get him if you give me 30 pounds." So he like sells this guy and then he hires slave catchers to abduct Strong out of his new life. Yeah. So Real stand up guy. Great dude. Months of conflict. Granville Sharp, who has been studying the law is like, "You can't do this. He's a free man now. You can't make him leave. You can't take him to another foreign country, right? Like, you can't do that." So there's a conflict

• 28:09Robert Evans?

  follows. There's like, this goes on for a while before like the court case actually resolves. And at one point during the proceedings, Lyle challenges Sharp to a duel and Sharp's like, "No, let's settle this in court," basically. At another point, lawyers that Granville consulted warned him that English law saw slaves as property, even once they were taken onto English soil. And Sharp has a law, a moment of horror where he's like, "There's no way the laws of my beloved England are this bad." So he spends the next like two years making himself an expert in the law and fighting this case, fighting Lyle and the man Lyle had sold Strong to, James Kerr. And he eventually wins. Strong's legal defense wins. This is a significant case in like British like legal history. And it's the

• 28:54Robert Evans?

  kind of thing where they win Strong's freedom, but they don't get a ruling that alters English law in respect to the rights of enslaved people, right? Yeah. So it's good because Strong doesn't have to be sold into slavery again. But it also doesn't like, it doesn't go any further, right? And Sharp is disappointed by this. And because by this point, after a couple, two years of fighting this case and immersing himself in the law, Granville Sharp has become, in Siddharth Kara's words, "The first British person to devote his life to the extirpation of slavery." And his influence actually goes beyond that, though. It's wild how influential this motherfucking dude is. One of Sharp's

• 29:34Robert Evans?

  overseas friends is an American of some notoriety named Benjamin Franklin. And in his off time, Sharp had a habit when he wasn't fighting slavery, he would write essays that were often published as pamphlets or tracts. And he sends one of these pamphlets to his buddy Benjamin Franklin, which lays out Sharp's argument that Americans shouldn't be taxed if they don't have parliamentary representation.

• 30:00Speaker 02

  This dude's like at the center of the entire of global history.

• 30:03Robert Evans?

  It's fucking amazing. Like, yeah, just writing a lot of letters and absolutely changing the course of human history.

• 30:10Speaker 02

  Yeah. Eighteenth century.

• 30:12Robert Evans?

  He's like a really smart Forrest Gump. Yeah.

• 30:14Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah, yeah. Forrest Gump had done a whole lot of very more impressive stuff.

• 30:18Robert Evans?

  Yeah. Um, yeah, it's just, I, I, I didn't know much, anything at all really about Granville Sharp until I started this and like, yeah, we should probably talk more about this guy.

• 30:28Speaker 02

  Yes, dude probably should be on money or something.

• 30:30Robert Evans?

  Yeah. Yeah. Put this fucker on the 20 pound note.

• 30:34Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah. We got some people who already shouldn't be on money. Uh, we could probably switch them out. Yeah, they'll be fine. It's like those people. I'm sure you, I mean, Robert, you and I have experiences together. When, when you are working in conflict zones, sometimes you will, the, often the people who you work with are the, the most remarkable people. Like they, they speak several languages and they, and like.

• 30:57Robert Evans?

  Yeah. You taught yourself, yourself Chinese because you were bored after learning English.

• 31:03Speaker 02

  Yeah, exactly. And, yeah, like your grasp of our culture and politics and the way we talk is perfect.

• 31:11Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 31:12Speaker 02

  And you're, you're the same in five other languages and you can argue about domestic issues in the US with me. With a great degree of intelligence than many American people.

• 31:21Robert Evans?

  Yeah. And, and, and who have like devoted their life in between like the stuff they're doing with you to like rescuing other people and like helping to provide like emergency medical care or get food to different, like, yeah, yeah.

• 31:33Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah. You'll find out that, yeah, on Sundays they rescue puppies from fucking burning buildings and like it just fits perfectly with who that person is.

• 31:42Robert Evans?

  I'm so tired after my work week. I just sit on the couch in the weekend.

• 31:45Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. How do I become more like you?

• 31:49Robert Evans?

  Yeah. Um, yeah. Granville Sharp is one of those like, well, fuck, I'm not getting enough done, guys, right? And Equiano is too, to be honest. They're both like, Jesus Christ. Like, I wouldn't believe you if you were in a story. Um, so Sharp's primary focus in the years after the strong case was in expanding his studies as a lawyer so he could make an unimpeachable legal case for banning slavery. In 1769, he publishes a tract titled "A Representation of the Injustice and Dangerous Tendency of Tolerating Slavery or of Admitting the Least Claim of Private Property in the Persons of Men in England." He wasn't good at titling. He was good at a lot of stuff, but not titles. This became one of the first popular arguments against the system of slavery in England,

• 32:32Robert Evans?

  not just arguing that it was immoral, but that it was foreign to the spirit and intention of British law and cultural values, right? That's a key part of his argument, is that like, "This isn't really English, right? Like, we shouldn't, based on the things we say about our shared values, this is not a natural thing for us to be doing, right? Why are we so committed to this? Is it just venal profit?" It is.

• 32:53Speaker 02

  Yeah. Yeah. I wonder if there's a modern analogy for that, Robert?

• 32:56Robert Evans?

  What's interesting here, though, is that Sharp is not just wish casting a legal argument, right? His extensive study of the law had found precedent as far back as 1569 for the assertion that slavery was not legal on British soil. Now, I'm not going to go into detail about centuries-old British, like, court rulings and rulings of, like, kings and shit, but there are cases from the 1600s to the 1700s that back up this argument. And one thing that was definitely true is that no law was ever passed in England to make it legal to own Africans. That's never, there's never, like, a law that just says you can do this. People just start doing it, and they're like, "Well, this is property." Yeah.

• 33:34Speaker 02

  It's happening now.

• 33:35Robert Evans?

  Yeah. The best pro-slavery advocates could do is point out a 1729 legal opinion in which an attorney general had argued that the legal status of a slave didn't change just because they set foot in England, right? Which is something, but it's not the same as, like, there being a law saying you could do this.

• 33:50Speaker 02

  Yeah, right. You can't point to it as, like, the slavery act.

• 33:53Robert Evans?

  Yeah, exactly.

• 33:54Speaker 02

  Even, like, when we go back in American history, like, when we're looking for, like, when chattel slavery begins, you can see cases where there are, like, indentured servants, right? And as a form of punishment, that their terms of service are extended, but then it appears that the black people's terms of service are not extended, presumably because they are assumed to be in servitude for their entire life by nature of who they are, right? But, like, we can't point to a, "This is when they decided it was going to be like that, and those were the rules."

• 34:28Robert Evans?

  Right, right. Yep. So Granville comes into the 1770s, well armed to argue that slavery is not really legal. Uh, next, per Mike Kay's piece for antislavery.org, "In 1772, Sharp defended James Somerset, a slave who had escaped and been recaptured. This proved to be a crucial test case, as Sharp argued that slavery itself was unlawful in Britain. Lord Mansfield, the chief justice and presiding judge, was reluctant to reach a conclusion on whether the right to property outweighed the right to freedom, and tried to persuade the parties to settle out of court. When this failed, he attempted to word his decision so that he freed Somerset without setting a precedent. Despite Mansfield's efforts, most observers, including other judges, thought that the effect of the judgment was to free slaves that were brought to Britain, and that this provided a legal avenue for many slaves to

• 35:12Robert Evans?

  obtain their freedom." So, this is the kind of the case where Mansfield is doing everything he can for this not to have any wider effect, but all people here is that like, "Well, this guy got freed, right?" Yeah, just try it some more. Yeah, yeah. I feel like this makes me free, right? So, "Large numbers of enslaved people in England start fleeing their masters in an errant belief that slavery had ended on the island. Many abolitionists, who misunderstood the ruling, celebrated it as a sign of the fundamental justice and equality of English law. Judge Mansfield had to issue a note that the case was only really relevant to a specific niche situation, which caused Ben Franklin to joke that English abolitionists were celebrating the majesty of their legal system for its virtue in, quote, 'setting

• 35:56Robert Evans?

  free a single Negro.'" Right? Where he's like, "Okay, guys, like, it's good, but like, maybe calm down a little bit, you know?" Yeah, pipe down. Yeah, this is, this is one guy. There's still a lot of guys. Still a net negative. Now, this, this judge, the Earl of Mansfield, is a really interesting guy, because not only is he the judge in the Somerset case, he's going to be the judge in the Zorg case. Now, this isn't weird, because he's one of the most significant figures in the whole history of English law. He's the judge for a lot of big cases at the time, right? But he's a particularly interesting guy to rule on cases like this, because he has no child of his own, but he's raising his illegitimate niece, Dido Bell, as his daughter, and she

• 36:39Robert Evans?

  is a black woman of mixed race, right? So, he is simultaneously repeatedly being like, "Enslaved people are property, and my ruling should not be seen to free anyone," and is also clearly capable of understanding that they're human beings, because he is raising a black woman, right? And there's all, there are a couple of moments where, because he's never talks in a way that's very sympathetic to this, but there's a couple of rulings where it's like, well, maybe this is where his sympathy moved him a little bit. Not to give him much credit because I don't think he's a very nice guy, but it's a really, he's a really interesting judge to be trying in this case, right? Now, and again, he is not considered a friendly judge. Sharp considers him a deeply hostile

• 37:23Robert Evans?

  judge, in fact. And in the Zorg case, Mansfield has no trouble ruling that enslaved Africans are property. Anyway, by the time we hit 1783, Sharp is well established as the guy to talk to if you're trying to defend or create rights for enslaved people in England, right? And so it's not hard to see why our friend Olaudah Equiano would like Granville Sharp, right? Seems like a pretty natural friendship. Yeah. And so, once Equiano reads that article about the Zorg case, he does the 1700s equivalent of pasting a link to a news article in the group chat, and he like sends a copy to his friend Granville Sharp. Granville writes in his diary, Gustavus Vassa called on me with an account of 130 Negroes being thrown alive into the sea from onboard an English slave ship.

• 38:07Robert Evans?

  And this is the start of a process that is going to, like, terminate in the creation of the first mass movement against slavery in British history, right? Like, this, this is the inciting incident, is Equiano sending this letter to Granville Sharp. So Sharp hits the ground running. He starts meeting with the lawyers who'd represented the insurers in that case and is like, hey, I think we can file an action against the Gregson Syndicate and request a new trial. And I think we can win that new trial. Because we didn't, we didn't really have a full trial last time. If we really make a thing of this, we can make them go through discovery. And we can look at the logbooks and the other documentation kept by the crew of the Zorg, right? And we can see, did they really need to kill those people? You know?

• 38:53Robert Evans?

  Yeah. He also starts barraging influential figures in the country with letters, demanding the Admiralty Court charge the crewmen of the Zorg with murder. He's going to do this the rest of his life. It never works, but he does keep trying, right?

• 39:06Robert Evans?

  Most of his efforts don't bear fruit, but he succeeds in getting a hearing over a motion to set a new trial. And this hearing is scheduled for May 21st, 1783, less than two months after the first trial. Gregson v. Gilbert, which is the, the hearing, is not going to be a tiny, largely ignored case. It's going to be a major court thing with exacting notes taken on court proceedings and a huge amount of media attention covering every twist and turn. Sharp is not technically the lawyer here, but he's basically acting as an advisor to the defense counsel, which consisted of three lawyers. The most important of these was a fellow named Samuel Haywood. And Haywood's a really interesting person. He was born in Liverpool in the 1750s. He went to Cambridge. And he comes from like

• 39:51Robert Evans?

  a very rich family, right? I mean, he goes to Cambridge, right? And he's rich because his dad, Benjamin, is a slave merchant in Liverpool. And his younger brother, also Benjamin, Benjamin Arthur, is a slave merchant in Liverpool. And over like, the years they'd been doing this, something like 130 different slave voyages had been financed and operated by the Haywood family, right? They transported, at least according to Siddharth Kara, they had transported something like 42,000 enslaved people, like, over the course of their time in this industry. And in fact, the Haywoods had invested in at least one slave ship with William Gregson, with like, the Gregson Syndicate, right? Oh, wow. Yeah. So, this is a kid whose money and whose child, like, schooling and stuff is paid

• 40:36Robert Evans?

  for by slave money, and he's an abolitionist by now. He fundamentally objects to the slave trade, right? And so, he just, he, like, when he's representing the underwriters in this case, he's probably pissing off his family. So, it was just very interesting to me that, like, this is a kid from slave money who's like, nah, this is bad. Nah, bro. Just, if, if anyone ever says people who grew up in that culture couldn't know it was wrong, like... Yeah.

• 41:00Speaker 02

  Yeah, here's a dude. This guy.

• 41:02Robert Evans?

  Here's a dude.

• 41:05Robert Evans?

  I mean, I don't know that if he was like a committed full-on abolitionist, because a lot of these guys were just anti the slave trade and thought that that was the like the middle passage and stuff with the triangle trade was the worst part of it. But that's still a better than not being against that, right? It's a step.

• 41:18Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 41:19Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 41:20Speaker 02

  And it's an unusual position still and a brave one to assert at that time.

• 41:23Robert Evans?

  Right, right. If you're this kid.

• 41:25Speaker 02

  Especially when your whole family are slave traders.

• 41:26Robert Evans?

  Yeah. Yeah. So from the jump, there are some uncomfortable tensions behind the scenes in this case. The insurers and their counsel benefited from Granville Sharp's lobbying and legal mind, but they're not on the same side precisely. The insurers are slavery profiteers. They don't want the trade to end. They don't want abolition.

• 41:43Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 41:44Robert Evans?

  They're making money off of it, right? They just don't want to pay money in this case. Sharp is on board with them because he also doesn't want Gregson to get a bunch of money for killing these people or for his people killing these people. But he also sees this case fundamentally as a way to set further precedence on the road to ending the slave trade, right? He is thinking about this from the jump, that that I am doing this because it's a step to something better. Now Judge Mansfield tries to deny that possibility from the outset of the trial, insisting that this case is purely regarding the insurance policy on the zong or the zorg. Mansfield insists the case of the slaves was the same as if horses had been thrown overboard. And for the most part, the actual arguments in the case do not rely on enslaved Africans having more rights than a horse, right? That is kind of what's going on here.

• 42:30Robert Evans?

  The central legal question is not was it bad that they killed these people? It's did these people have to die? Because disasters that the zorg's crew were not in control of had caused a situation where it was impossible to keep them alive, right? Is this a situation where there was no other option, where people were going to die one way or the other and they were trying to save a portion of the of the crew in the cargo?

• 42:52Speaker 02

  Right.

• 42:52Robert Evans?

  Or was this a case where the people operating the ship had fucked up constantly and unnecessarily murdered a bunch of people and were now trying to get insurance money to cover up the fact that they fucked up, right? Which of these is what happened here, right? And to be clear, if you approach the case of the Zorg from just that standpoint, ignoring the crime against humanity, the Gregson Syndicate and its employees are in the wrong, right? Because they did fuck up repeatedly and horribly, you know? You do not have to be like morally against slavery to be like, well, but like you guys didn't know what the fuck you were doing. You just threw them over, but you had 400 gallons of water on the boat. Right. Uh, you know who else has a lot of water?

• 43:37Robert Evans?

  Hmm. I can make you guess. Yeah, this podcast is sponsored entirely by the pistachio farmers of Central California. Jesus Christ. Yeah, pistachios. We've got enough water, probably. Yeah, fuck the Colorado River. Yeah. Actually, it's doing OK right now. Happy for it. At an all time high, which means climate change is solved. Oh, good. I'm glad I've been worried about that. Yep, we did it.

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• 44:38Robert Evans?

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• 45:38Robert Evans?

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• 45:49Robert Evans?

  And we're back. So diligent cross-examination, you know, early in court proceedings here, comes across a bunch of examples of the crew of the Zorg fucking up hideously, right? It finds out, because they're talking to Stubbs, and they're talking to that, to his first mate. And Stubbs admits, like, a bunch of shit he shouldn't on the stand, including that, like, wait, wait, you guys, you guys sailed past other islands that had water, but didn't, because you were, like, worried that they might have been taken by, like, an enemy who would take your boat, but you didn't know, and you just went past the islands that were full of water? And then he admits that, like, "Well, we thought we had enough water when we passed those islands, but then we looked inside and realized

• 46:33Robert Evans?

  that the water barrels weren't as full as we thought." It's like, you didn't check on your water?

• 46:39Robert Evans?

  You didn't check to see if you had enough water?

• 46:43Speaker 02

  Seems like a pretty important thing to check.

• 46:45Robert Evans?

  Yeah. Likewise, the lawyers point out that the Gregson Syndicate had a responsibility to hire a competent captain. Not only was Collingswood not that, but when he got sick, he passed on command to a demonstrably incompetent man when a skilled sailor and navigator was locked in his room, forbidden from doing his job. It was not the sea's fault or the underwriter's responsibility if the Syndicate hired a captain who couldn't, and this is a line from the court case, "Tell Hispaniola from Jamaica."

• 47:16Robert Evans?

  We'll burn on the dead guy.

• 47:18Speaker 02

  Good, in the 18th century.

• 47:20Robert Evans?

  Mm-hmm. Now, much of the case came down to the fact that further interrogation of the ship's stores and the actual documentation of their journey showed that when they landed in Jamaica, they had days of water left. And if they'd been close to running out, there were, again, multiple islands they could have gone to to get their water within a day or so. In addition to that, on the stand, Stubbs revealed that it had rained several times near the end of the journey, and he'd failed to have the crew collect rainwater.

• 47:50Speaker 02

  Stubbs really continues to fucking ruin everything he does.

• 47:54Robert Evans?

  Should we get water? No, let's just kill some more guys.

• 47:57Speaker 02

  Yeah, that's fine.

• 47:58Robert Evans?

  Sorry, kill some more women and children. Yeah.

• 48:03Robert Evans?

  So this case, which had been rushed through the first time, on second viewing, seemed much more disturbing, even to skeptics like Mansfield. The dark question that hovered over the whole proceeding was this: If not out of necessity, why would Stubbs and the crew have thrown 130 people overboard? And the answer that people kept thinking was probably the obvious one is this: After a too-long journey on a slave ship crammed with twice its maximum occupancy, without enough food, or enough water, and disease endemic, many of the enslaved people on board were too sick and visibly ailing to fetch much of a price at auction. So if you just kill them, the insured value is higher than what they would sell for.

• 48:47Speaker 02

  Geez.

• 48:48Robert Evans?

  We don't know that that's what was going on.

• 48:50Speaker 02

  Right.

• 48:50Robert Evans?

  But this is what people start talking about, and it's not an unreasonable proposition.

• 48:56Speaker 02

  Yeah, no, it's not.

• 48:56Robert Evans?

  Pretty ghastly.

• 48:57Speaker 02

  It lines up. Yeah.

• 48:59Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 48:59Speaker 02

  But everything else they've done is ghastly.

• 49:02Robert Evans?

  Right. And this changes the thinking of a lot of people like Mansfield, who are not abolitionists, but who are like, oh shit, but if like, if we establish this precedent, people might just start murdering ships full of enslaved people to just get the insurance money. And that seems like a nightmare. Like, that's even bad to me, and I kinda suck ass, you know?

• 49:22Robert Evans?

  So this fact is shaking even to guys like Judge Manfield. And he ruled, quote, "To be sure, what Mr. Haywood has observed is a very material circumstance. So many Negroes thrown overboard after the rain came without any account of how they came to do it. It is so uncommon a case. I think upon the ground of reexamination, it ought to go to a new trial." And he grants a motion for retrial. Now, this is never to be. There's not a second trial because William Grigson, head of the slaving syndicate, decides that a second trial is not going to go well, right? And it's just going to waste money. So let's just cut our losses and return to operating the slave trade at a massive, massive level. His insurers celebrate their victory.

• 50:03Robert Evans?

  But you could be forgiven for seeing that at this point, the case is like an overall like mixed bag or even a wash for the cause of abolitionism, right? Because, you know, the people who won are still involved in the slaving industry. No one has attained any additional rights. No one's ruled that enslaved people are human beings. They're still the same as cargo, right? How is this? You could see someone, especially like a political radical at the time, being like, "This is the worst kind of incrementalism. You've achieved nothing." Right? You can see how someone might think that. That is not the case. And in fact, part of why I think this story is important is it illustrates how critical small and seemingly pyrrhic victories can be in pursuit of sweeping social change.

• 50:47Robert Evans?

  First off, while there's no second trial, the fact that a retrial was granted means that slave merchants had been given a warning. You can't just kill people and claim their insurance money on them, right? And then, as Siddharth Kara writes in The Zorg, "Even if just for a moment, the Africans who lay at the bottom of the ocean thousands away were seen as people, not property." And Kara's arguing that this causes kind of a perceptual shift in a lot of people, who can't help as they're hearing how horrible what this is, sympathize with these people, who are still legally just property, and that that's an important shift. But the larger victory in the case was that it had started the process of gathering together and galvanizing great legal minds, writers, and agitators towards pursuing an end to

• 51:32Robert Evans?

  the slave trade in an organized fashion, right? And that's what we're going to talk about in part three. But I should conclude today by saying a little about our main villains for these episodes, William Gregson and Robert Stubbs. During the first case, Stubbs had high hopes of getting a job with the syndicate and perhaps even support to regain his lost gold by helping Gregson make good on the slaves that they'd killed. When this failed, he gets cut loose. Now Stubbs never makes it back to Africa. He scrapes together a meager living for the next few years and he dies aged 60 in 1787. In his will, he gave his son George all my wearing apparel, which wasn't much use to the boy who never made it back from Africa and died there earlier that same year, aged 19.

• 52:16Robert Evans?

  Oh, Stubbsy! One more at the end, one more real piece of shit move.

• 52:21Speaker 02

  Yeah, lift his kid his clothes, his old man clothes.

• 52:27Robert Evans?

  He literally, because he doesn't give his kids any money. I don't think he has much, but he's like, "I already paid to raise them. Why would I give them money?"

• 52:33Speaker 02

  Paid to ship that one kid off to Africa.

• 52:37Robert Evans?

  Jesus, what a piece of shit.

• 52:39Speaker 02

  Yeah, what a turd. Yeah, find his grave and piss on it if you're in the region.

• 52:44Robert Evans?

  Yeah, if you can find it, pee on it. William Gregson unfortunately lives until 1800 when he dies aged 79 after having financed more than 150 slave voyages that tore nearly 60,000 Africans from their homes. Roughly 16% of these people died en route. Gregson died wealthy and respected, having never been called to account for his crimes against humanity, which is a bummer.

• 53:06Speaker 02

  Yeah, that sucks.

• 53:07Robert Evans?

  I'm sure his descendants aren't still rich today.

• 53:10Speaker 02

  I'm not sure that's something you can be so sure of, Robert. I think there's a good chance they might be.

• 53:17Robert Evans?

  No, the moral arc of the universe bends towards justice, James.

• 53:21Speaker 02

  Ah, yeah, but it moves slowly is the problem.

• 53:24Robert Evans?

  It moves real fucking slow.

• 53:27Speaker 02

  A little bit too slowly sometimes. Be good if someone gave it a bit of a giddy up, you know?

• 53:31Robert Evans?

  And it's less of an arc and more of like one of those needles they have on like a seismograph, so it's just like jumping back and forth pretty often.

• 53:39Speaker 02

  Sure doesn't seem to be bending in a good direction recently.

• 53:43Robert Evans?

  Yeah, I don't know, man. But yeah, that's the story.

• 53:48Speaker 01

  Oh, stubsy, man.

• 53:52Robert Evans?

  Stubsy, yeah.

• 53:53Speaker 02

  At least he died reasonably young. Like, he could have made it to 100, like, the other dude, and I can't imagine what.

• 53:58Speaker 01

  I don't know, 60 in 1787?

• 54:01Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, he lived longer than poor little George.

• 54:04Robert Evans?

  That's right, he lives longer than his son.

• 54:06Speaker 02

  Yeah, what a fucking turd. Yeah. Who presumably doesn't even know who's died, because he gives that few shits.

• 54:14Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 54:15Robert Evans?

  Yep.

• 54:15Speaker 01

  Like, here, have some old shirts, kid.

• 54:19Speaker 02

  My old man death clothes.

• 54:21Speaker 01

  Wow.

• 54:21Speaker 02

  That I wore as I fucked up again and again over a series of fuck-ups that lasted my entire life.

• 54:26Speaker 01

  Well, I'm glad that guy is dead.

• 54:28Speaker 02

  Mm-hmm, we all are, I think.

• 54:30Speaker 01

  Yeah. James, do you want to plug your book real quick?

• 54:33Speaker 02

  Yeah, you won't encounter any, any stubsy-type characters, but there's some heroes in here, I think, some people who have done some really remarkable things.

• 54:40Robert Evans?

  Uh, yeah.

• 54:41Speaker 02

  I wrote this about anarchists at war. It's called Against the State. You can preorder it from AK Press. Uh, you can hear about some people trying to build a better world, uh, less incrementally than this, uh, in many cases, kind of, uh, with, with a bit more, I guess, uh, kinetic means. Uh, but nonetheless, I think, like, there's some stories and things that we can learn in our much less violent lives, uh, from these people and the way they organize and, and the way that they have gone about things. And I hope people read it and enjoy it. You can buy it from AK Press.

• 55:14Speaker 01

  Preorder link will be in the episode description.

• 55:17Robert Evans?

  You can and should, yeah.

• 55:18Speaker 02

  Yeah, you should, yeah. Don't buy it from Jeff Bezos. He's not as bad as some of the people on here, but not a great dude.

• 55:24Robert Evans?

  Not a great dude. And yeah, you know, until next time, folks, well, which will be like tomorrow, but just in general, I guess, as you look at how fucked up things are, remember that things change pretty quickly and, uh, things, evils that seem entrenched and impossible to fight generally aren't, and that even victories that seem pyrrhic or meaningless can lead to much greater things, just by virtue of the fact that through the act of fighting, people are brought together who become capable of fighting more effectively even greater injustices. So, keep fighting. And again, piss on that guy's grave if you find it.

• 56:04Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 56:05Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 56:09Speaker 07

  Behind the Bastards is a production of Cool Zone Media. For more from Cool Zone Media, visit our website, coolzonemedia.com, or check us out on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Behind the Bastards is now available on YouTube. New episodes every Wednesday and Friday. Subscribe to our channel, youtube.com/behindthebastards.

• 56:34Robert Evans?

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• 58:04Speaker 10

  This episode is sponsored by BetterHelp. You know those little promises you make to your future self? Tomorrow, I'll put my phone away earlier, or stop rehearsing arguments in the shower. Tomorrow, I'll stop saying yes to everything, or stop overthinking that conversation. Most of us aren't trying to become completely different people. We're just hoping to feel a little better every day. That's what's great about BetterHelp. With them, better is personal. It's matching with a therapist who gets you and having someone in your corner. Better doesn't have to come from major victories. It can be from the small habits you create and how you honor your needs on a daily basis. So many of us are great at prioritizing even the smallest things for our loved ones. But what about ourselves?

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• 59:10Speaker 03

  This is an iHeart Podcast. Guaranteed human.