Part One: The Raid on Harpers Ferry Succeeded, Actually

Margaret talks with Bridget Todd about the five Black men who joined John Brown to spark the civil war.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
Cool Zone Media.

Speaker 2 (00:05):
Hello, and welcome to Cool People who did Cool Stuff,
your weekly reminder that when there's bad things, there's good things,
and then sometimes bad things happen to the good things,
but then good things come out of the bad things
that happen to the good things that were in response
to the bad things. I'm your host, Margaret Kiljoy, and
with me today is Bridget Tod.

Speaker 3 (00:22):
Hi. How are you, hey, Margaret. I'm so excited to
be back.

Speaker 2 (00:26):
I know it's nice to have you. And wait now,
I don't remember what the last I usually try and
remember and look up with the last episode because you've
been on a bunch.

Speaker 3 (00:33):
Yeah, was it Wendy Carlos?

Speaker 2 (00:35):
Oh shit, it might have been that one?

Speaker 3 (00:37):
Was it might have been Wendy Carlos.

Speaker 2 (00:39):
Yeah, people should go back and listen to me talk
about the trans woman who invented electronic music. Bridgetod is
the host of There Are No Girls on the Internet,
which is an untrue title. I've been meaning to tell
you this.

Speaker 4 (00:53):
Yes, oh god, the title is like I mean, first
of all, it's a mouthful. If you ever have to
name a podcast having a long title, just give it
some thought. If that's really what you want to do.
I know, I guess cool people who I mean, you know.

Speaker 2 (01:05):
Yeah, yeah, yeah, no, yeah, it's I think it's worth it.
It just means that every time you go anywhere, people
get your title slightly wrong. People are like, I'm adage
fan of cool people who did cool things, and you're like, sure,
good enough. I don't correct people. What do people get
your your's a mouthful? What do people say instead?

Speaker 3 (01:27):
Oh?

Speaker 4 (01:27):
Sometimes it's like girls on the internet, which feels like
vaguely pornographic, like.

Speaker 2 (01:34):
Whatever I type that?

Speaker 4 (01:35):
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Generally it's some combination of
correct ish words in not correct order. But yeah, I
don't correct them either. I actually love hearing the incorrect
podcast titles.

Speaker 3 (01:49):
Keep them coming.

Speaker 2 (01:50):
I know me too. And I'm also like, I don't know,
I'm glad that people listen. I wouldn't remember the name
of my own podcast. Like we even had a long fight,
not fight, we had a long discussion. I don't think
anyone actually took any strong positions whether we were going
to call it cool people did cool things or cool
people who did cool stuff.

Speaker 4 (02:08):
Is there a functional difference between the things and the stuff,
the stuff and the things Sophie do you remember why
we ended up with stuff.

Speaker 1 (02:17):
I think it just sounded better.

Speaker 2 (02:20):
I think you're right. Also, people who listen every week
might notice, is that Sophie and it is our producer.
Sophie's here. Hi Sophie, Hi.

Speaker 3 (02:29):
Magpie, Hi be Hi Sophie Sophie.

Speaker 4 (02:33):
Speaking of podcast titles, I was interviewing Molly Konger about
Weird Little Guys and I asked, where did that title
come from? And she said, oh, that was a Sophie
a Sophie production right there.

Speaker 1 (02:45):
Not exactly, She's very nice to say that, but it's
something she said in a meeting, and I wrote it
down on my like creepy notepad of like that could
be a podcast title. And then when we decided to
do a weekly podcast with her, I was like, lardy
have the title. So it was her idea. Originally, I

(03:06):
want to make sure she credits herself as well.

Speaker 2 (03:08):
Which is a podcast that people should go listen to absolutely, but.

Speaker 3 (03:15):
Nope.

Speaker 2 (03:15):
I was trying to come up with a segway, but
I don't have one. Okay, So lately I have been
burning through my short list of topics that I've wanted
to cover since the very beginning of this show. I
had like maybe ten things that I set out being like, I,
however long the show goes, I need to make sure
to cover these at some point. And in earlier this week,

(03:36):
I went to a little national park. I accidentally, I
mean on purpose. I totally went on purpose when on
the day that everyone had protests at the national parks,
I went to a national park called Harper's Ferry in
West Virginia and I got like every book there. It
was amazing. I went up and was like, here's all
the books, and the person behind the counter was like interesting.

(03:57):
This week we are talking about the raid on Harper's
Ferry of eighteen fifty nine that not only presaged the
coming Civil War but essentially sparked it. I know the
answer to this because I asked you earlier. But have
you ever been to Harper's Ferry.

Speaker 4 (04:11):
I have been to Harper's Ferry many times. I love
Harper's Ferry.

Speaker 2 (04:16):
It's so beautiful there. When I was a little kid,
it was just like the place to go get taffy.
And also there's something that happened during the Civil War there,
you know.

Speaker 4 (04:24):
Yeah, when I went there with my parents, it was
the place where they have you know those like historical
markers of like historical thing happened here. And I have
many many memories of my dad being like I'm going
to go read this time to find out what happened here,
and we're like, Dad, let's go like that, Like that's
the space that Harper's Ferry occupied when I was young.

Speaker 2 (04:44):
Yeah, yeah, totally. It is a very beautiful place with
some historical markers, and now it's a place that I
like just like go and cry because I think that
the people who fought there are wonderful people. But the
most famous of those people is not who we're talking
about today. Ooh, John Brown is the most famous Harper's

(05:09):
Fairy adjacent person, right, Yes, I think people hold on
to him because he's the best white guy in American history, accurate,
especially at a time when like decent white men were
like real thin on the ground.

Speaker 3 (05:25):
You know.

Speaker 4 (05:25):
Yeah, not a ton of them back then, not really
a lot today either, really.

Speaker 2 (05:29):
No, yeah, fair enough, And so people should go and
learn from John Brown's example if you're a you know,
a white man living today, that is a thing to
go read about, you know. But John Brown has been
covered a fair amount, But like I like him but
he's been covered a lot, including in an excellent series
of Christmas special episodes on Behind the Bastards. So you

(05:52):
can listen to a Cool Zone Media special all about
John Brown this week. I want to talk about the
other Raiders because twenty two people participated in the raid
on Harper's Ferry, and even that's not true. Twenty two
people set out to participate on the raid on Harper's Ferry,
an unknown of additional enslaved people joined them. I've read

(06:15):
fifteen and I've read fifty, but I want to talk
about these other raiders, and in particular, I want to
talk about the five Black Raiders who set out with
the intention of joining in this raid. Have you heard
much about this story besides the just the John brown Er.

Speaker 4 (06:32):
I have to admit I have not, Like I definitely
John Brown is the name that looms large when I
think about Harper's Ferry, So I'm excited to learn more.

Speaker 2 (06:42):
Yeah, and it's like one of these things where it's
like I understand why people were doing the like big
man of history stuff, but it's not interesting to me.
Like he's great. I really am not trying to put
this man down, but like there were other people who
fought and died and sometimes survived who were part of this,
And uh, yeah, I don't know, so I want to

(07:03):
talk about them. The shortest version of this story is
that during the first half of the nineteenth century, US
politics were growing more and more tense over the issue
of slavery. It helps that the century kicked off with
Haiti proving that you can, in fact, just grab a
bunch of pikes and guns and then kill all the
people who claim to own other people, which scared the

(07:26):
piss out of America. Like I didn't, I didn't know
as much about how Haiti influenced American politics until it
started reading history books for a living. Rebellions were popping
off everywhere, and even in the halls of power, people
were discussing the issue more and more. Abolitionist tensions were
reaching a boiling point when in eighteen fifty nine, nineteen

(07:50):
abolitionists stormed the federal armory in Harper's Ferry. I said
twenty two earlier, But that's because three of them stayed
back at the farmhouse to guard all the guns that
they were going to give to enslave people if the
whole thing worked out. So nineteen of them stormed the
Federal Armory in Harper's Ferry, West Virginia now regular Virginia
at the time, with the intention of seizing arms, freeing slaves,

(08:13):
and starting a generalized rebellion as well as an independent
black nation right here in Appalachia. And that was another
part that like never really got explained to me. Like
maybe maybe whenever I keeping like, I didn't learn about
this in school. Maybe I was just asleep. I don't know,
but I don't remember learning that they were going to
start an independent black nation in Appalachia, that was the

(08:34):
purpose of this raid.

Speaker 3 (08:36):
No, I definitely didn't learn that either.

Speaker 4 (08:39):
I went I went to school in like the former
capital of the Confederacy. So I have come as an
adult to realize all the different ways that specifically the
Civil War curriculum was taught to me. Is like so
messed up. But no, I did not learn about this either, Margaret.

Speaker 3 (08:55):
I know.

Speaker 2 (08:56):
I even like, when I think back about I don't
remember whether school taught me that slavery was the cause
of the Civil War, not because I remember being told, Oh,
people say that, but it's really states rights, you know.

Speaker 5 (09:09):
Yeah.

Speaker 4 (09:09):
I So I grew I went to school in Richmond,
right outside of Richmond, Virginia, and we explicitly did not
learn that slavery had anything to do with the Civil War.
It's all states rights, yeah, like it. And it's so
funny because like I'll look at my like cousins, like
their history books and the way that they go out
of their way to be like, well, you know, sure

(09:31):
slavery was bad, but like it's it's yeah. So I
didn't learn it that way either, Yeah, And it's it's
kind of wild how like some of these talking points
haven't changed since the end of the Civil War, like
this idea that like slavery was bad, but enslave people.

Speaker 5 (09:48):
Were kind of happy.

Speaker 1 (09:50):
You know.

Speaker 3 (09:50):
It's really well.

Speaker 5 (09:52):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (09:54):
And so most people claim that the raid on Harper's
Ferry did not work. It was an abject failure. To
be certain, it was a military failure. Only one of
the raiders who actually went to Harper's Ferry, a black
man named Osborne Pierce Anderson, survived the raid. John Brown

(10:14):
himself was hanged. They had ordered a thousand pikes to
be handed out to a thousand enslaved people, and only
about twenty to fifty ended up handed out. They did
not themselves. These raiders personally wage war on the slave states,
successfully as they intended. But my argument here is an
argument that I think modern historians tend to just actually

(10:37):
agree on now, is that they succeeded. The raid on
Harper's Ferry was the spark that ignited the Civil War,
the end of chattel slavery. It didn't pan out like
the raiders had planned, but it happened, and they used
their own deaths to spark the war. And the thing
that I didn't realize until doing more research on this now,

(10:59):
that was k kind of their plan b all along.
Like their goal was to have a raid and arm
everyone and go and create this independent black nation. But
they were like very consciously. Okay, I feel weird saying
the majority of the raiders were white, because it's not true.
The majority of the people who marched there were white,

(11:20):
but the majority of the people who fought were black.
But the reason that the majority of the people who
march there were white is that they were like, we
think that if a bunch of white people die, it
will cause northern white people to actually grow the fuck
up and do something about this.

Speaker 4 (11:37):
Wow, I mean I get that as a strategy. I
totally get that as a strategy.

Speaker 2 (11:42):
Yeah, and what a what a wild one one of
the wild. Like like the Raiders had planned, the enslaved
people of the South had a hand or millions of
hands in their own liberation. As I've covered before on
the show, the General Strike conducted by enslaved people in
the South was the most successful labor action in US history.

(12:03):
They grinded the Confederate economy into dust while black and
white gorillas waged a civil war within the Civil War.
And this doesn't even mention yet the one hundred and
eighty thousand black soldiers who fought in the Union Army
or the thirty six thousand of them who died, and
the Union Army when it marched into the Civil War,
it marched with a song on their lips. And the

(12:25):
song was John Brown's Body, which states John Brown's body
lies a moldering in the grave, but his soul is
marching on. To me, this was the people marching into
the South to end slavery. Was his soul marching on
like a for me a kind of literal sense. And

(12:48):
so my argument is that the Raiders fought, died, and
then won. And I think there are many such cases
of this throughout history. One of the reasons that I
think so much about this. Okay, So I went, oh,
I'm not going to go off script. I'm just gonna
read my script because I'm going to say what I
was going to say. The raid itself was fought and

(13:09):
over within a couple of days, about thirty six hours
in eighteen fifty nine, but the battle over its story
is still being fought. I live not terribly far from
Harper's Ferry, and I grew up going there as a kid.
I went a couple years back and I saw a
private tour guide giving a talk. He said, basically, oh, well,
the raid was ill advised. No matter how good his intentions.

(13:32):
John Brown was basically just this white guy who is
disconnected from what the black enslave people here actually wanted.
You know, they didn't want someone coming in to liberate
them at gunpoint, and I wanted to scream in retrospect,
I kind of wish I had, but I had my
dog with me, and I didn't want to go to
jail because this is the talking point that even like

(13:57):
sympathetic people have started to believe. And when I say
started immediately this was an active media campaign right away
to disconnect John Brown from a racially integrated abolitionist movement
that he was an integral part of. I got really
angry about this stuff.

Speaker 4 (14:15):
Why do you think that attitude person or like, how
have that attitude managed to persist today that you're hearing
it from a tour guide in a park.

Speaker 2 (14:24):
I have a lot of thoughts about it. So I
think he wasn't an official tour guide because I actually
went back and I think the actual National Park the
information that the National Park Service is presenting is actually
fairly accurate for now. If you're listening to this next year,
it might be not anymore. They'll just be like John Brown,
a trader who just went and died, and all black
people hated him. But I think there's a couple reasons.

(14:48):
I think that people immediately people painted him as a
zealot and then ignored everyone else who fought right. It
was just him and he was crazy. He had to
be crazy in order to do what he did. So
for racist white Southerners it was a way to be like, oh, well,
obviously that's the wrong way to make change. But I
think vaguely less racist white Northerners. It was kind of

(15:11):
the same thing. It was kind of a way to
get yourself off the hook, to be like, oh well,
it wouldn't really have work to take militant action against slavery.
So it's okay that all I did was hold up
a ping pong paddle that says we don't like fascism
or whatever.

Speaker 1 (15:29):
You know.

Speaker 2 (15:31):
Because after the raid, the Southern media presented John Brown
as evil and as a threat to all humanity. Eventually,
the basic moral rightness of his cause couldn't really be
argued right, and in order to reach that, seven hundred
and fifty thousand people had to die. But the conservative position,

(15:52):
I'm back on script saying the same things I just said,
sorry about that. The conservative position switched quickly to claim
that he was a zalot and crazy. His followers were
misguided or crazy too, and they wanted to deny that
he was a well connected and well loved abolitionist too,
as part of an international movement to end shadow slavery
in the US. He also was a bit of a zelot.

(16:13):
I think it might take a bit of a zelot.
And when I read about the rest of his followers,
I think they kind of were too.

Speaker 4 (16:21):
They're nice though, Yeah, I mean, it doesn't surprise me
that this kind of action would take a bit of
a zelo it to organize, I.

Speaker 2 (16:31):
Know, especially especially once they found out what the real
plan was. They were like, wait, our plan is to
just go there and try and win. We're just gonna
twenty one of us are just gonna take over the South.

Speaker 5 (16:45):
Yeah, yeah, you gotta a.

Speaker 4 (16:48):
Zelot might be the type of person that would go
along with that plan.

Speaker 2 (16:51):
Yeah, totally. But you know, it doesn't take much as
ellotry going along with Wow, taking advantage of the excellent
that are offered by all of our sponsors, which absolutely
would later claim to have been on the right side
of any given large thing in history. Allegedly, here's our.

Speaker 5 (17:12):
Ads and we're back.

Speaker 2 (17:23):
So it is true that Frederick Douglas, the most famous abolitionist,
a man who had self emancipated from slavery, turned John
Brown down when he was invited to the raid, but
one of Frederick Douglas's close friends, who was at the
same meeting, agreed to join. Harriet Tubman, perhaps the single

(17:45):
most impressive badass the US has ever produced. Like, honestly,
I'm like I bring her up like here and there
in other episodes, but mostly because it's just like I'm
just slowly collecting books and I'm just I don't know. Anyway,
she was amazing.

Speaker 3 (17:57):
She's the coolest fun fact.

Speaker 4 (17:59):
She's like, I'm an avid outdoors woman, and whenever people
are like, oh, black women hiking, I'm like, oh, Harriet
Tubman was like, people don't think of her this way,
but avid outdoors woman, you know, Like that's true. Yeah,
I really I really own her as my like black
woman outdoors woman, you know, idol.

Speaker 2 (18:19):
Honestly, there's a lot to be said there about like
people who were using the outdoors in real interesting ways
during the first half of the nineteenth century.

Speaker 5 (18:28):
Like, oh, yes, that's cool.

Speaker 3 (18:31):
I'm so.

Speaker 4 (18:32):
I mean something told me that that might be a
spirit that we have to embrace at some point in
the future.

Speaker 3 (18:40):
I'll put it that way.

Speaker 2 (18:41):
It's fair enough. Yeah, Honestly, one of the people involved
in this story is going to die because he can't
hike far enough.

Speaker 5 (18:47):
Uh there you go.

Speaker 2 (18:49):
So uh so Harriet Tubman wasn't on the raid because
she was sick when the when it was planned, so
she didn't make it, but she proved contacts for it,
She raised funds, and she recruited soldiers. And there's so
much focus on John Brown himself and his psychology that
I think that disconnects him from the vibrant movement he

(19:10):
was part of, right, because not everyone involved in that
movement was like a zalot, but he was still part
of that movement, if any, he was kind of the
wing nut fringe of it, and that movement that he
was part of did in the end and through bloodshed
and legal chattel slavery in the United States. There were
twenty two people who were part of the raid. Nineteen
of them marched on Harper's ferry. John Brown was one

(19:32):
of them. And we're going to talk about some of
the other ones. But first context, those are the other
instead of ads. That's the other thing I cut to context.

Speaker 1 (19:44):
We should like play the Jaws theme song whenever you
say context.

Speaker 5 (19:51):
We absolutely should.

Speaker 2 (19:54):
The South was always internally divided on the issue of slavery,
as we've talked about before on this show. Of course,
four point five million people living there had a particularly
personal reason to be opposed to the institution of slavery.
There was a free black population, and as there were
a few white people arguing against it as well. For
about three years, from eighteen twenty nine to eighteen thirty two,

(20:16):
debates raged in Virginia about slavery. And I think this
was happening elsewhere, but like I read about it in
Virginia because the western half of the state, which is
now West Virginia or Greater Virginia. Actually people have told
me I shouldn't call it Greater Virginia, I should call
it Best Virginia. And that makes sense.

Speaker 5 (20:32):
West Virginia Best Virginia it is.

Speaker 2 (20:35):
And whenever people are like, why do you call it
Best Virginia, I'm like, hello, I would like to introduce
you to why West Virginia exists. It's because they did
not want to fight for the Confederacy. On the other hand,
the tables have turned politically a little bit, but I'm
still holding out that people will anyway whatever. So just
don't look at a modern voting map of the country,

(20:55):
and we can still hold the by the Best Virginia.
So the western half of the state was mountainous and poor.
Most people there didn't own other people, and they were
firmly in favor of abolition. Overall. Quakers throughout the state too,
fought for abolition as well as free black people and
enslaved black people, and some of the Quakers were also black.
Just to be clear, in eighteen thirty one, Nat Turner's

(21:20):
rebellion in Virginia. We've covered this a bit on the
show before. This also scared the shit out of everyone.
All the slavers were like, oh fuck a black man
named Nat Turner and a bunch of other people were
like fuck this, and they started killing white slavers and
the white slavers families. This scared the shit out of

(21:40):
the legal institutions of the South. Laws started getting passed
everywhere in the Slave states restricting the rights of free
black people even further, like laws where black people weren't
even allowed to preach anymore. Church services were banned for
black people after dark because preachers were doing a lot
of the itinerant. Preachers were going around and being like, oh, yeah,
this is what the Bible says. Also, the way to

(22:04):
the swamp is this way, and that's a good place
to be.

Speaker 5 (22:06):
Free.

Speaker 2 (22:08):
Progress is never linear. Free black people started having more
of their voting rights taken away, including in the North.
Now I didn't even realize this. I had just assumed
free black people couldn't vote in the South, but it
turns out at various times they could. It's very easy
to fall into the sort of like linear things you

(22:29):
just slowly chip away at oppression, yeah, you know, but
it turns out sometimes you start chipping away at a
depression and then they're like, how about twice as much oppression.

Speaker 3 (22:39):
Yeah.

Speaker 4 (22:39):
It's a good reminder that these things are not always
like so binary or yes, it's easy to think of
them as switch flip as opposed to like, oh, it
was a chip away and then this, you know.

Speaker 3 (22:50):
It's a good reminder.

Speaker 2 (22:52):
Yeah. And it also it's like worth understanding how like
I mean, even the I mean, obviously, the Civil War
was in many ways terrible. It was the bloodiest thing
that's happened in the US besides the destruction of the
indigenous population here. But like it ended legal chattel slavery
in the United States, and it came from the right
wing reaction to people helping people become more free. It

(23:16):
came from the right wing being like, fine, more oppression
and then people are like, nope, we've had enough of it.
You know. But before all of that, as free black
people are having more of their rights taken away. In Virginia,
people were like, what are we going to do with
all these free black people? It's scary, We're scared. We
are terrible and cowardly people. I think that's what they said.

(23:37):
One of the answers was send them back to Africa.
Both slave owners and white Quaker abolitionists agreed send free
black people back to Africa. And obviously there was a okay,
so the slavers really liked this argument, but so did
some like there were black abolitionists argument for this as well,
like we're gonna I think even some of the people

(23:58):
involved in Harper's Ferry's raid were on both sides of
this particular issue. But a man named Henry Wise, who
would later become the governor who signed the death warrants
for all the Harper's Faery raiders, he was really in
favor of this. He said to the Virginia Colonization Society
of eighteen thirty eight, quote, Africa gave to Virginia a

(24:20):
savage and a slave. Virginia gives back to Africa a
citizen and a Christian.

Speaker 3 (24:25):
Wow.

Speaker 4 (24:26):
Wow, it's so bad, thanks guys, Yeah, wow, so bad?
Oh God, I mean I've actually I've heard like that
argument from like some black radicals really did feel like
black people should up and leave the United States and

(24:49):
go back to the continent, like uh, totally. But then
hearing that, it's like, yeah, this was not an argument
you know, grounded in self determination and respect?

Speaker 3 (24:59):
What help woult it that way?

Speaker 5 (25:01):
Yeah? Yeah it was.

Speaker 2 (25:04):
And for some people it was like yeah, for some
people it was like, oh, we can get the fuck
out of here. We never wanted to be here in
the first place, right, And then other people were like, no,
we're here now, like you can't just fucking get rid
of us like that, you know.

Speaker 4 (25:17):
Yeah, I mean that's I mean, like y'all brought us here, y'all,
y'all are all ride like.

Speaker 5 (25:22):
Yeah, totally.

Speaker 2 (25:24):
Yeah. And this deepening racism that was happening in the South,
which is a weird thing to say because in my mind,
I'm like, you're it's already a horror movie set, you know,
it led a lot of free people to migrate north.
The deepening racism of the North led a lot of
free people to migrate even further north to Canada. A

(25:49):
lot of people, at least a lot of people relevant
to today's story. When they went to the north, if
they didn't go all the way to Canada, they made
their way to Ohio. In particular, they found their way
to a little college town in Ohio that was trying
in its way to be the most anti racist place
in the country. And this was to me, this is

(26:09):
a twist. I don't know if other people are going
to find as much of a twist. The most anti
racist place in the United States in the eighteen thirties,
forties and fifties Oberlin, Ohio.

Speaker 4 (26:20):
Oh my god, that actually totally tracks with me. I
had no idea where you were going. Oberlin is a surprise.
But now that I'm thinking about it, like, yeah, I've
known so many Oberlin college grads.

Speaker 3 (26:32):
I've had two.

Speaker 4 (26:33):
I've had two as roommates, by the way, terrible roommates
and they don't make brave roommates, but we love them anyway.

Speaker 5 (26:39):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (26:39):
I was literally about to say the same thing bridge
not me personally, but a friend of mine had an
Oberlin roommate, and wow, yeah, by you guys. If you're
if you're if you're an Oberlin roommate, work on your reputation.

Speaker 3 (27:00):
Thank you. Yeah, that's a good advice holer not so good.

Speaker 2 (27:06):
I once drove the only time I've ever been to Oberlin.
It was to help my friend drop out of Oberlin
to join the environmental direct action movement, which is actually
a fitting thing that parallels to a lot of John
Brown's raiders. It turns out a lot of them went
to college at Oberlin for like a year.

Speaker 3 (27:23):
Interesting before dropping out.

Speaker 5 (27:25):
Yeah then.

Speaker 2 (27:27):
Starting an insurrection.

Speaker 4 (27:29):
Yeah, Like this Oberlin business is not radical enough for me.

Speaker 5 (27:32):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (27:34):
So I did not see Oberlin College as showing up
as one of the cool people in this week's episodes.
But here we are in eighteen thirty three. I'm not
like a big college person. I mean, it's fine, Hey,
I recognize its importance. Oberlin College was founded in eighteen
thirty three specifically to be a Christian college teaching good

(27:56):
Christian values like the abolition of slavery. By eighteen thirty five,
with a slim majority vote of the trustees, they started
letting in black students. It was like literally a one
person majority, and one of the trustees who voted and
therefore could have been the deciding vote, was John Brown's
dear father, a Tanner named Owen Brown. This makes Oberlin

(28:20):
College one of the first colleges in the US to
let black students in, and it's the first to formally
say we allow black students in.

Speaker 3 (28:28):
Wow.

Speaker 2 (28:29):
The first historically black university didn't actually open until two
years later, the Cheney University in Pennsylvania in eighteen thirty seven.
Oberlin then also became the first gender integrated college in
the US. So they kind of came at the gate
real fucking strong.

Speaker 3 (28:48):
Oh Oberlin, who knew.

Speaker 5 (28:50):
I know, I know Oberlin.

Speaker 2 (28:53):
The town became a hotbed of abolitionism. Black families would
move to the area. It became an important stop on
the under ground railroad. The local public schools were racially integrated,
and there was a Liberty school at night for fugitives
to learn how to read and write. The town refused
to celebrate the Fourth of July because that celebrated a

(29:13):
document that excluded black people. Awesome. Instead, their official celebration
was August first, after the eighteen thirty four abolition of
slavery in Jamaica.

Speaker 3 (29:25):
Awesome.

Speaker 2 (29:26):
Yeah, Like, and if you're currently Oberlin, get back to
your roots. And a disproportionate number of the Raiders came
from Oberlin or like lived there or went to school
there for a year or so. Some of them said
that they went to Oberlin, but there's no record of

(29:46):
them going to the college. They might have like audited classes,
or they might have just been like patting their resume
a little bit, you know.

Speaker 4 (29:52):
Is it like a status thing to have gone to
Oberlin and like, oh, I went to Oberlin, don't fact check.

Speaker 2 (29:57):
That, I think So we'll start with a raider named
John Anthony Copeland. John Anthony Copeland was born in eighteen
thirty four in North Carolina. It is worth understanding how
just fucking nonsensical and confusing slavery was at the time.
Having a race based slavery chattel system doesn't make sense

(30:20):
obviously morally is one of the worst things that's ever
happened in the history of the world. But it doesn't work.
There's gonna be a bunch of cases like this that
are gonna be confusing as shit. John's father, John Copeland's
father had been born enslaved by his own father, but
was then freed on the death of his father owner
when he was eight, and then became a carpenter working

(30:42):
in Raleigh, North Carolina. Copeland was the oldest of eight children.
When North Carolina removed the vote for free people of
color in eighteen thirty five, his family was like, Nah,
fuck this, We're getting out of here. This doesn't seem safe,
and so they moved to Ohio. It wasn't eat. They
needed letters of recommendation from white people to say that

(31:04):
they weren't evil, subversives or whatever in order to be
traveling freely. And they made their way to Ohio with
lots of letters of recommendation. Folks from the underground Railroad
helps them get It's one of things I also didn't realize.
Undergroundrailroad also helped with a trip like helped free people,
and also abolitionists move constantly helps them. Once they were

(31:26):
in Ohio to settle an Oberlin, where Copeland grew up.
He learned carpentry and joinery from his father, and eventually
he went for one year to Oberlin. I think he's
the one that we actually have record of going to Oberlin.
He was a diehard abolitionist. He would attend meetings at
the Liberty School and he realized his purpose in life

(31:47):
was to abolish slavery, to free the four and a
half million people in bondage in the country. He started
speaking out about slavery everywhere he went. He also spoke
regularly about how sometimes individual revolutionaries must die for the
revolution to succeed. So like again, not just a bunch
of deluded people who got led to their deaths by
John Brown. Ohio at the time was pondering in secession.

(32:11):
And this is the like we all kind of got
taught states rights or the reason for the Civil War.
Ohio was really concerned about some states rights. They hated
the South. They didn't want to be in the same
country as the South. The eighteen fifties was full of
offenses to the North, like the eighteen fifty Fugitive Slave
Act that meant the North was suddenly expected to return

(32:34):
fugitives back to slavers in the South, and it became
a federal offense to help people hide from people who
were going to put them in cages. Then there was
the dread Scott decision of the Supreme Court in eighteen
fifty seven, which declared that black people couldn't be citizens,
among a whole mass of other wild racist shit. It
was like, if you go to the Wikipedia page for

(32:56):
the dread Scott decision, I was like trying to track
down some other parts of it, and it was like
widely considered the worst decision the Supreme Court has ever
made in the United States. Ohio looked at all this
shit and was like, are you fucking kidding me? We
have to let slavers come here and capture people? No, no,
fuck this. Local legislations started passing resolutions like we condemn

(33:21):
this act. I want to read the actual language of one,
because it goes hard. Heart'sgrave, Ohio is worth quoting. They
agreed to quote hold the Fugitive Slave Law in utter
contempt as being no law, and pledge ourselves to despise
the conduct of the makers of it for their utter
destitution of principle, and that they would quote sooner than

(33:45):
submit to such odious laws, we will see the Union dissolved.
Sooner than see slavery perpetual, we would see war, and
sooner than be slaves, we will fight.

Speaker 3 (33:58):
Awesome. I'm glad you read that because it does go hard.

Speaker 2 (34:02):
Yeah, Like at the end, I decided the title probably
will be something more shortened to the point, but it
absolutely for a long time was sooner than see slavery perpetual,
we would see war.

Speaker 4 (34:14):
And you know what's wild to me is that when
you drive through certain parts of Ohio when you see
massive Confederate flags, I'm always like, what are you doing?

Speaker 3 (34:23):
Like, I know, what are you doing?

Speaker 2 (34:25):
I know the Ohio River was like the sacred line
of freedom. Like yeah, and in West Virginia you see
the same and you're like, do you know why you're
in West Virginia?

Speaker 3 (34:36):
Yes? It boggles my mind.

Speaker 4 (34:39):
And I feel like these states have such rad histories
that I feel like it's like flinging this like very
cool legacy of why your state exists or something that
was foundational to your state in its space.

Speaker 3 (34:52):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (34:53):
Absolutely. So the idea of sanctuary cities goes back a
really long way, and I hope the modern sanctuary cities,
which are more and more needed right now, I hope
that they go as hard and care as much as
Heartsgrove Ohio.

Speaker 1 (35:09):
Yeah, be better than Ohio.

Speaker 5 (35:12):
Yeah, sorry, Ohio.

Speaker 3 (35:15):
That's a slogan, be better than Ohio.

Speaker 2 (35:18):
And then the back says, it's a higher bar than
you think. That's so funny, so Oberlin itself. In eighteen
forty one, two people who were on the run from
slavery got caught in Oberlin, and they were taken to
the jail. So a crowd of five hundred people white

(35:39):
and black, brought guns, clubs, and rocks to try to
fight back the cops to break the people out and
free them. They failed during the day, but as best
as I can tell, and this is I read literally
a two hundred year old newspaper article about this. Of
like my understanding of it is slightly imperfect. It might
be a different incident. I believe this is the same

(36:00):
an incident. At night, they came back a smaller crowd.
The newspaper called them fanatical abolitionist anarchists, armed with axes
and saws. They broke the two fugitives out and freed them.
And then in eighteen fifty eight, an even more famous
version of something similar happened in Oberlin. And it's more

(36:21):
famous because it is considered one of the things that
sparked the Civil War, like the bubbles you could see
simmering in the pot, you know. And this one involves
our man John Copeland as well as another raider that
we're going to talk about in a second. In eighteen
fifty six, an eighteen year old named John Price escaped
slavery in Kentucky, and he crossed the river into Ohio

(36:44):
and to what he hoped would be his freedom. He
made it to Oberlin and he lived as a fugitive
for two years before he was caught. Basically, someone like
set him up because they knew that even though would
have been legal to come capture him, they kind of
couldn't in the town because people wouldn't let them. So
someone was like, oh, we got a job for you.
It's right outside of town. Don't you want a job?

(37:06):
And as soon as he left, they was alone on
the highway. They nab him and they're like, Oberlin isn't
a safe place to hold this guy. So we're going
to go to Wellington, Ohio, which is right nearby. But
two Oberlin students saw him go by in the buggy
and they gathered a posse of between two hundred and
six hundred people white and black, surrounded the hotel that

(37:29):
was holding him. Price was up in the attic. They
started trying to negotiate. They were like, I mean, their
negotiation point was like we're armed and we're not leaving,
you know.

Speaker 3 (37:40):
But a solid negotiation tactic, I know.

Speaker 2 (37:44):
As Frederick Douglas says, and I quote all the time.
Power concedes nothing without a demand. And Copeland was there
in the crowd. He had a handgun and he shouted
that he would shoot any damn rascal who interfered with
their plan to direct him. In one of the coolest
things that college kids have ever done, a bunch of

(38:07):
white Oberlin College students ran in through the front door
of the hotel, distracting the guards while Copeland and some
other folks climbed up the balcony at the back of
the hotel. People tried to stop them, so they shot
guns towards them, and then the people stopped trying to
stop them.

Speaker 3 (38:24):
Wow.

Speaker 2 (38:25):
I think these were warning.

Speaker 1 (38:26):
Shots when you were like, when you were like one
of the cool I was like, I was like, that's
a high bar. College kids do cool things all the time.

Speaker 5 (38:34):
Yeah, yeah, no, yeah, no, it's true. And uh.

Speaker 2 (38:38):
They stormed the attic and rescued Price. There's this story
about like the guy who was keeping them out was
holding this rope that would hold the door shut. I
think it was like one of those old doors where
it's just literally a rope that's the handle, you know,
and he's holding it, but there's a hole in the wall,
and so one of the college kids just punches the
guy in the head through the wall, and so the
guy drops the rope. They storm in and they rescue

(39:01):
John Price. Speaking of prices, Our prices are great.

Speaker 5 (39:07):
No why more stuff? No way?

Speaker 2 (39:13):
Oh wow, here's the mats.

Speaker 3 (39:23):
And they're back.

Speaker 2 (39:26):
So they get John Price out and they smuggle him
out to the home of the guy who like later
went on to become the third president of Oberlin College.
Like the entire town was in on this, and then someone,
most likely Copeland, took John Price and escorted him up
to Canada and to freedom. A ton of people involved

(39:46):
in the rescuer arrested around like thirty six or something
like that. But Copeland himself, even though a warrant went
out for him, was not arrested because he was probably
he disappeared and he was probably in the middle of
escorting him Price up to Canada. The prosecution of these
rescuers is a big fucking deal in the history of
the abolitionist movement. No one wanted to convict them, like

(40:10):
in Ohio, right, but they like felt like they had
to because the law and stuff, you know. The Ohio
Supreme Court upheld the Fugitive Slave Act, and ten thousand
people rallied in Cleveland on the But have you considered that?
Fuck that law though, and therefore fucked the Supreme Court.
The courts trying the rescuers were pretty lenient. People got

(40:32):
a few months in jail basically, I think, actually I
think like two people got actual sentences. Everyone else was
just like held in jail for a while and then
released it. But the jailers were sympathetic to their cause,
and so they made a newspaper while they were in jail.
And because they just were given access to the jail's printing.

Speaker 4 (40:51):
Press, they've got a jail zine.

Speaker 2 (40:54):
They have a jail zine. The rescuers made a jail
zine called The Rescuer Ah great, Yeah, and they like
sold it outside to raise money for the abolitionist movement.

Speaker 3 (41:04):
And shit.

Speaker 2 (41:05):
As for John Price himself, no one ever wrote down
where he was ever. Again. I hope that he lived
a long, happy and free life, and frankly, I have
no reason to suspect he didn't. The abolitionist movement knew
how to take care of people. Another Oberlin man, a
friend of Copeland's, Lewis Sheridan Leary. He was also born

(41:30):
in North Carolina on March seventeenth, eighteen thirty five. His
father was a fairly well to do free saddle maker
who was part Irish, Croatan, Indian and Black. His mixed
race mother was born in the French West Indies. Their
family was wealthy and owned slaves, but would also regularly
give their enslaved people enough money to buy themselves their

(41:52):
freedom and then help set them up. And I am
unsure whether they freed everyone they bought or not. I
read some sources that were like, oh, yeah, they just
freed everyone, and other ones were like, uh, they kind
of did it sometimes, you know. Leary was raised to
about as much wealth and privilege as was available to
free black people in the South, which was not that much.

(42:15):
In a lot of ways. He had a reputation for
being hot headed and rash, but also I believe, moral
and brave. He left North Carolina in eighteen fifty seven
when he was twenty two years old, on the advice
of his father. The reason his father advised him to
leave North Carolina was this is the only version of

(42:35):
the story, but there's no whatever. There's no specific evidence
of this besides oral tradition, but I have no reason
to doubt it. One day, Leary is walking down the
street and he sees a slaver whipping a guy, so
he grabs the guy's whip and starts whipping the slaver instead,
at which point his dad was like, you should get
the fuck out of the South because they were going

(42:56):
to kill him. He got the fuck out of the South.
He went to Oberlin. He started working as a saddle
maker too. He fell in love with an abolitionist woman
named Mary Simpson Patterson, who was the first black woman
to attend Oberlin College. They got married and had a
daughter named Lewis and Mary Simpson Patterson. Her grandson by

(43:19):
a different father is Langston Hughes.

Speaker 3 (43:21):
Oh my god.

Speaker 5 (43:23):
Yeah, Like, there's so.

Speaker 2 (43:26):
Many people alive in this time, what are the fucking odds? Yeah,
the couple did a bunch of underground railroad work together.
Leary at least, I have no reason to believe his
wife wasn't. But it isn't written into history because why
would anyone write that down, even though she went on
to do more work than he was able to, because
she survived and he dies. Anyway, they were part of

(43:47):
the Price Rescue, the one at the Hotel. Leary, who
had Irish heritage, liked quoting poems by an Irish nationalist,
William Smith O'Brien, who was part of the Young Ireland
movement that I've talked about sometimes on this show. Specifically,
Leary liked to quote the following lines, whether on the
Scaffold high or in the battles Van, the fittest place

(44:11):
for a man to die is where he dies for man.
So yeah, when when John Brown came through Oberlin looking
for recruits, both Copeland and Leary volunteered. Leary told John Brown,
I am ready to die. I only ask that when
I have given my life to free others, my own

(44:31):
wife and dear little daughter shall never know want. And
that's what happened. He dies and the abolitionist movement takes
care of his family.

Speaker 4 (44:43):
Well, it's like you were just saying that part of
the movement was taking care of each other, and I
don't know, I find such power in that, especially now
that like, our strength really does lie in our ability
to care for each other totally and even to care
for people who aren't, Like it's not just care for
the frontline soldiers right, like price to anyone's knowledge. I mean,

(45:06):
he might probably changed his name in and went off
to do other stuff, but like, they didn't help him
escape slavery so that he could join Danaris Targarian's army
of enslaved people to go attack something. You know, they
freedom because he needed to be free. And yeah, a
lot of enslaved people, formally enslaved people fight militantly for abolitionism,
but no one's telling them that they have to. And

(45:28):
if you just want to get out, they'll help you
get out. I just I really like that.

Speaker 2 (45:33):
I really There's a lot of bad stuff in American history,
and the abolitionist movement is one of the coolest things
that's ever happened.

Speaker 3 (45:39):
Yeah, he absolutely should be learning a lot from it today.

Speaker 2 (45:42):
Yeah, absolutely, especially the way that they like work together
across intersectional politics. And it's not a coincidence that the
first college to formally let black people in also was
the first college to let women in, you know, and
let black women in. And I don't know it just
I can really, I don't know. I went to Harper's
Ferry and cried a lot, decided to write this episode.

(46:06):
The pair raised up the money to get train tickets
east and they headed off towards the farmhouse in Maryland,
five miles from Harper's Ferry, where the conspirators were building
their army. Okay, those are those two. Now we're going
to cut to another one of them. This is the
one who I was like, literally saw in the John
Brown Museum that reading about it made me cry, and

(46:26):
I was like, I just now, I'm just telling you, ever,
how often I cry whatever. I read history for a reason,
it was this man's story was the reason that I
decided to do this episode.

Speaker 1 (46:36):
Crying can be good. It reduces stress.

Speaker 2 (46:40):
That's true. There was a man named Dangerfield Nuby, and
Dangerfield is a good name. Just gonna get that out there.

Speaker 3 (46:47):
Dangerfield Newby is like a very good name.

Speaker 2 (46:50):
Yeah. Absolutely, there is going to be someone who has
a better name than him in all of this, and
it's someone who picked his own name. But we'll get
to that later.

Speaker 3 (46:58):
Oh I can't wait.

Speaker 2 (46:59):
Oh that might he can be a clifhanger for Wednesday.
I think he might not even show up to a Wednesday.
But Dangerfield Nuby was forty four and he was the
oldest of the raiders after John Brown. John Brown did
his thing when he was fifty nine, so never feel
too old. John Brown was fifty nine when he started
the Civil War. Dangerfield Nuby was born in eighteen twenty

(47:21):
in Virginia. He was the oldest son of eleven kids.
His father was a white man named Henry Nuby. This
is the complicated ass one that I'm just like, what
the fuck is? Obviously, this is just like whatever. His
father was a white man named Henry Nuby. His mother
was Henry's enslaved common law wife, but not enslaved by Henry. Elsie.

(47:43):
His wife was actually owned by an eccentric slaver named
John Fox, who did shit like let Elsie live with
someone else. Just be like, I don't know whatever, you
can go live with your husband. Okay, this isn't entirely benevolent.
All of Henry and Elsie's kids are immediately John Fox's property,

(48:04):
and there's all this stuff. People are like, John Fox
did free a fuck ton of he actually he freed
to everyone when he died, but he freed a fuck
ton of people while he was alive. But I kind of
have this bar where I'm like, if you don't just
immediately free everyone you own I kind of, I don't
know whatever. But Dangerfield was owned by his mother's owner,
John Fox. So this kid, well, he's not a kid.

(48:26):
He grows up and he gets leased out as a blacksmith.
While he's enslaved in Virginia, he gets married to a
woman named Harriet, who was owned by yet another man,
and together the pair of them had probably seven kids.
His brother described Dangerfield as a quiet man, upright, quick tempered,

(48:48):
and devoted to his family. In eighteen fifty eight, his
father took him and some of his siblings and moved
to Ohio with John Fox's blessing. This means that they
were freed. Ohio wasn't fucking around with that. If you
set up residency in Ohio, you are formally freed. At
this point, the Ohio Supreme Court had decided in eighteen

(49:11):
fifty six that's setting up residency in Ohio freed you.
They wrote that the chains of slavery had to be
broken and quote crumble to dust when he who has
warned them obtained the liberty from his oppressor and has
afforded the opportunity of placing his feet upon our shore,
go Ohio. I know they know, so He's thirty six

(49:33):
years old when his dad frees him by moving him
to Ohio. Like fucking if it wasn't just like a
nightmare land of horror, it would be comical, how fucking Anyway,
Dangerfield had a problem. His wife wasn't free. I suspect

(49:53):
this story might have influenced the plot of Django Unchained,
but I'm not sure it might have. This kind of
story might have happened a lot.

Speaker 3 (50:00):
I was literally just thinking the same thing.

Speaker 2 (50:02):
Yeah, because Dangerfield dedicated the rest of his life to
trying to free his family. For years, he did this
by working his ass off and saving every cent he
could to buy Harriet and his kids. But the slaver
who owned her kept doing shit like and the historical
record isn't certain here either taking his money and not

(50:23):
freeing his wife or upping the price at the last minute.
All the while, rather than go to a safe place
like Oberlin, he stayed along the Ohio River and helped
shepherd people to safety working the underground railroad. This is
how he met John Brown, who offered him a different
way to free his family, Force of Arms. The last

(50:46):
letter he ever got from his wife Harriet read quote
it is said, master is in want of money. If so,
I know not what time he may sell me, and
then all my bright hopes of the future are blasted.
For there has been one bright hope to cheer me
in all my troubles, that is to be with you.
For if I thought I should never see you, this
earth would have no charms for me. Do all you

(51:08):
can for me, which I have no doubt you will.
I want to see you so much.

Speaker 3 (51:13):
Like that's a beautiful letter.

Speaker 2 (51:15):
It's I know, oh, I know. Basically like she was
worried that she would end up like sold down the
river to Louisiana, where conditions were worse, and in fact
that is what happens. I don't know. There might be
more information in more of the books than what I
got to about what happens to her after. But fortunately

(51:37):
her husband starts a civil war which ends up ending slavery.
So if she made it through a couple more years,
so yeah, he's in. And then there's Osborne Anderson. Osborne
Anderson was born on July twenty seventh, eighteen thirty, to
a free black mixed race family in West Fallowfield, Pennsylvania,

(51:58):
which is a bit west of Philly fun fact.

Speaker 1 (52:01):
When you said Osborne Anderson, my dog with excellent hearings,
ears went up.

Speaker 2 (52:08):
She was like me, She was like, hello, this is
who Anderson's named after. Probably I don't remember who Anderson's
actually named after.

Speaker 1 (52:17):
She's named after Andy Anderson from him How to Lose
a guy in ten Days.

Speaker 4 (52:21):
Oh okay, similar, very similar, similar, similar journeys.

Speaker 2 (52:26):
Yeah, I'm gonna I'm gonna start calling Anderson Osborne Anderson.

Speaker 1 (52:30):
Both my dogs are named after fictional movie characters because
you can't really name anybody after a real a real person,
because you.

Speaker 2 (52:39):
Know history and finding out that they're terrible people in
the end.

Speaker 3 (52:44):
Correct.

Speaker 1 (52:45):
Yeah, well Anderson, he does good, wonderful. We might need
to change her name origin story.

Speaker 2 (52:52):
Yeah, just just multiple name origins. There you go. Osborne
Anderson grew up deep and Quaker territory, so deeply abolitionist area.
Public schools there were integrated, and he got an education.
Most sources I say I've read say he went to
Oberlin College, which would have been a nice tie in
for the story. This is the guy who probably didn't
actually go to Oberlin College. I actually think that this

(53:15):
is going to be our tends to exaggerate guy of
the story.

Speaker 4 (53:21):
Tends to exaggerate his association with Oberlin College.

Speaker 2 (53:24):
Yeah, and some other stuff too, but like he's still
so cool that like and none of the things that
he's like, I don't know whatever. Anyway, he didn't necessarily
go to Oberlin.

Speaker 5 (53:34):
He might have.

Speaker 2 (53:35):
He was family friends with another free black family, the Shads,
specifically a woman named Mary Ann Shadd who is around
seven years older than Anderson. She was a school teacher until,
like thousands of other people, she was like, fuck America
and got the fuck to Canada. In eighteen fifty one,
she moved to the sort of center of Black Canada,
a naval town called Chatham, which is east of Detroit,

(53:59):
where she set up a school, and in eighteen fifty
three she became the first woman in Canada to publish
a newspaper, also the first black woman in North America
at all to publish a newspaper. She started a newspaper
called The Provincial Freeman with the motto self reliance is
the true road to independence. She and her contributors argued

(54:22):
fiercely against begging white folks for funds. She traveled as
a public speaker, something that women didn't really do at
the time, let alone a black woman, but she did
often write and publish under the name Mas Carrie carry
as her married name. She married a guy. He wasn't
important enough to include the story. She married a guy.
He died right away, but she kept his name to

(54:43):
avoid gender discrimination. She went by Maas Then her childhood
friend Osborne Anderson, moved himself to Chatham somewhere along the way.
He worked as a farmer for a bit that wasn't
really his thing, and so we started working for the
provincial Freeman, first as a sales agent, then as a
printer and a contry and he wrote extensively, and he

(55:03):
wrote against the send Black People to Africa movement as
one of his main things that he wrote. There was
kind of two competing, like I was saying we were
talking about earlier, but in Chatham there was like a
It was hotly contested between these two positions of like
do we go back to Africa do we stay in
North America? And since this was in Canada, where so
many black abolitionists lived and where the underground railroad often

(55:26):
took people, Chatham became the logical place for folks to
get together and figure out, So how exactly do we
destroy that slave empire to our south? And since that
was a good place to go do good plotting, John
Brown went there. He'd cemented his reputation a few years
prior in Kansas. But what happened in Kansas? In Chatham,

(55:51):
in Harper's Ferry? And what about the man with the
amazing name? We'll talk about them on Wednesday.

Speaker 3 (55:58):
Wow, I can't wait to hear this name.

Speaker 2 (56:01):
It's so good. It's multiple good names. He has so
many good names.

Speaker 1 (56:06):
I really, Rory, Rory, who edits the podcast, I really
need us to start thinking about putting in like music
sound effects for Magpie. She needs a cliffhanger music sound
effects so badly.

Speaker 2 (56:22):
And what about the man with the amazing name? We'll
talk about them on Wednesday.

Speaker 1 (56:34):
She needs a context sound effects so badly.

Speaker 4 (56:38):
Context context, context, context, context context.

Speaker 3 (56:43):
There it is there, it is. I feel use that.

Speaker 1 (56:47):
She simply deserves it. And Rory, I know you can,
I know you can. Rory also edits a weird little Guys,
so he is extremely talented at doing sound design music,
so we could add it in here. Magpie, you deserve it.

Speaker 2 (57:05):
Hell yeah, let's do it. Thank you, Rory. Even though
we didn't shout you out this episode, I forgot everyone's
to say.

Speaker 3 (57:11):
Hi to Rory.

Speaker 2 (57:12):
Hi, Rory, Hi, Hi Roy. And our theme music was
written for us by own woman, bridge Is Todd. How
can people find you on the internet where you probably
aren't because there are no girls on the internet.

Speaker 4 (57:23):
Well, surprise, surprise, I actually do show up on the internet.
You can find me at Blue Sky, where I am
Bridget Todd. I think that's right. I'm not used to
calling out my Blue Sky. Let me just double check
that that is accurate.

Speaker 3 (57:37):
I hear you on that.

Speaker 2 (57:38):
And you don't want to be like dot BSk dot
as what are you.

Speaker 4 (57:42):
Supposed to say? Are you supposed to say? Like your
name dot like b Scott like you can. You'll figure
it out. Yeah, you'll figure it out. You can listen
to my podcast. There are no girls on the internet.
On iHeartRadio, yeah.

Speaker 3 (57:55):
All the things.

Speaker 2 (57:57):
Hell yeah, I have a Kickstarter going. You probably have
heard me say that before, but that's what I talk
about when I have one that's going on YELP. The
third book in the Danielle Kaine series, The Immortal Choiral,
holds every voice speaking of naming things very long things
that then get mixed up. Is being kickstarted right now.
We've already as of this recording done two and a

(58:17):
half times our goal. But if we get enough money,
everyone involved in publishing is going to get tattoos from it.
That's one of our stretch goals. So I don't know,
maybe you'll like it. And also one of the cheapest
thing is for fifteen dollars you get three audio books,
which is the entire series, so hard to beat and

(58:38):
what bargain. I know, we decided where this like small
collective publisher, and it's really hard. Book prices haven't gone
up yet to match the fact that paper prices have
gone up, and so as an independent press, it's really
hard for us to have competitive print book prices. And
so what we decided is that our digital content is
going to be kind of as cheap as we can
get away with because we have to pay so much

(59:00):
for print, which is our print books are still affordable,
they're just not as affordable as we wish they were.
Because we're a bunch of punks anyway, uh and listen
to weird little guys and take care of each other
because the world is a nightmare world. But it's not
always because we can take care of each other.

Speaker 1 (59:17):
This is true.

Speaker 2 (59:19):
Okay, Bye, I see you Wednesday.

Speaker 1 (59:26):
Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff is a production of
cool Zone Media and more.

Speaker 3 (59:30):
Podcasts from cool Zone Media.

Speaker 2 (59:32):
Visit our website

Speaker 1 (59:33):
Coolzonemedia dot com, or check us out on the iHeartRadio app,
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.