A Terrible, Terrible Intimacy: Melvin Patrick Ely on Interracial Life in the Slaveholding South

00:00:31 Andrew Keen: Hello, everybody. Couple of weeks ago, we had one of America's most distinguished historians, Beverly Gage, on the show. She's won a Pulitzer Prize for her book on J Edgar Hoover. She has a new book out. It's called, This Land is Your Land. She took a road trip through American history, and we talked about her attempt to get beyond both pride and shame in American history. She actually began her journey in Virginia, where she notes in the book and in our conversation, the first six American presidents were born. And we're back to Virginia today trying to get, I think, beyond pride and shame with fascinating new book by another very distinguished American historian, Melvin Patrick Ely, who has a new book out. It's called A Terrible Intimacy, Interracial Life in the Slaveholding South. And Melvin is joining us from his home in Richmond, Virginia. Melvin, congratulations on the new book. I'm guessing this took you a long time. Would you describe it as a kind of labor of love, or is that rather patronizing?

00:01:49 Melvin Patrick Ely: It's a labor of love, and if love is, synonymous with fascination, It's a little bit difficult to apply the term love to a, history that is riven with a tragedy the way this one is. There's not a whole lot of joy in American slavery, and, that's what this book is about.

00:02:18 Andrew Keen: Coming back to, Beverly Gage's notion of getting beyond pride and shame, I mean, obviously, it goes without saying that the history of slavery in America is deeply shameful. But in a sense, is that what you're trying to do in this new book, which you get under the covers, so to speak, intimately, with what slavery was really like for both whites and blacks in a small, part of Virginia in Prince Edward County?

00:02:54 Melvin Patrick Ely: Well, I'm not trying to instill shame in anyone, but I certainly am trying to create a realistic picture of the way things were and what happened. And, of course, there's a lot of tragedy in that history. There's, a lot of sordidness. There's also in, many of the environments of the Old South, a good deal of, personal contact. So when I refer to intimacy in the title of the book, that's a good part of what I'm, referring to, the day to day interactions among black and white free and enslaved people who actually knew each other personally, in many cases, which gave rise to, closeness, and it also gave rise to, callousness.

00:03:48 Andrew Keen: Another historian we've had on the show, and I'm sure you're very familiar with his work, is Edward Ball. His book, Slaves in the Family, biography of the history of his family, one of the largest slaveholding families in America, where he went back to talk to many ex slaves, black Americans and white Americans descendants of the Balls. There is this, and don't need me to tell you this, Melvin, this white narrative that suggests that slavery wasn't that bad, that white people looked after blacks. They may have looked down on them, but they were respectful in their own way, and the system worked. Everybody was looked after a kind of functional patrimonialism. Is that narrative absurd?

00:04:37 Melvin Patrick Ely: That narrative is so radically incomplete that it can border on the absurd, at times. What I'm trying to show in the book among other things is that the popular, Southern white memory of there having been, personal contact and even personal regard between the enslavers and the enslaved is not devoid of truth, but it conceals a very great truth. And that is again that, there was so much callousness embroiled with the, personal relations. This was a society in which a person could have, a daily contact with a person of the other race, for years. And, yet, ultimately, that person, the black person was sold away from the white family of which he or she was supposedly a part and indeed away from, that black person's own, family. So this is the memory of this is a sort of paternal, benevolent, system, which I think, by the way, has been dying out in recent decades. I hope so. To the extent that survives, it is a, it's a misconception.

00:06:11 Andrew Keen: Viewers and listeners might be familiar with, your book Israel on the Appomattox — Apologies for the dreadful pronunciation, which won the Bancroft Prize of history's, his the historian's Pulitzer in many ways, a southern experiment in black freedom from the seventeen nineties through the civil war. Very different kind of book from this one in many ways. What was your craft here, Melvin? How did you go about trying to study as a historian what you call this terrible intimacy between blacks and whites in the Slaveholding South?

00:06:58 Melvin Patrick Ely: Yes. Those two books, for all their differences, were both researched in the same way, namely that I sat down for, days and weeks on end over a period of years in the county records of, in this case, Prince Edward County for both books, which are held in the Virginia, in the Library of Virginia, here in Richmond. And what we're talking about here is something like 75 cartons of, papers that were generated, in the case of my books, between the end of the seventeen hundreds and the civil war. And these are papers that include, all manner of, records. There are, court cases, with testimony, which is what A Terrible Intimacy is based on. There are, lawsuits, in which, parties to the suits submitted all kinds of records, personal letters, farm and plantation records of mercantile stores, who bought what from whom. The county, court was also the governing body of the county. So you get, records of, what the courthouse looked like in which the court trials, took place that I described in A Terrible Intimacy. The gallows, the building of the gallows in which one of the characters in my book, was hanged is, chronicled there because the carpenter submitted a bill to the County. So what is involved here is going through literally tens of thousands of documents looking for, needles in a very big haystack. The needles being nuggets of, revelatory, information about the way the society really, operated and then taking all of those needles if you want, and organizing them, topically in a way that allows you to describe day to day life in this society.

00:09:14 Andrew Keen: It's meticulous and patient, Melvin. How long did this project take you?

00:09:21 Melvin Patrick Ely: Well, for the two books, I think I spent five or six entire, summers, six days a week, eight hours a day, and then, other times in between. And then the collating of the information was at least as time consuming as that. And then, the writing, I'm not a fast writer as my editors will tell you. So that's another period of many months. I've been working on this off and on for the last thirty years. Not continually, but, off and on.

00:09:54 Andrew Keen: Yeah. It's certainly a passionate project. What I mean, you teach history. Your day job is teaching history of William and Mary American history, so this is a period you're all too familiar with. What most surprised you about this book in terms of the assumptions, the biases, the hopes that you had coming to this? Were you hoping in a way that the whites weren't quite as evil as most people assume? Were you hoping that black Americans, black slaves were better treated? What did you come to this project with, and how did it shape, change, challenge your assumptions?

00:10:36 Melvin Patrick Ely: Well, I certainly didn't come to the project with either of the assumptions that you just posited. I have no interest whatever in, if you will, restoring the honor of—

00:10:48 Andrew Keen: I didn't mean it in those terms.

00:10:50 Melvin Patrick Ely: No, you didn't mean it that way, but you'd be surprised, I still have people who will, approach me and say, oh, you do the history of slavery. You know, my, ancestors owned slaves, but, they were very kind to them. Yeah.

00:11:05 Andrew Keen: And that's — not Edward Ball's own narrative, but that's the kind of narrative you get out of some of the members of the Ball family of South Carolina. Yeah. So sorry. Go ahead.

00:11:18 Melvin Patrick Ely: No — so I think I would say more broadly that I don't come to my work with the idea of debunking anything or reinforcing any narrative or overturning anything. People have said of my work, oh, he overturned this. I never came to this work with the idea of overturning. I came with the idea that I would like to discover by going, meticulously through the, sort of nitty gritty records, what was going on. Of course, my operative assumption is that slavery was terrible, but let's find out terrible in exactly what ways. I assumed that, not every, white person in the South, had exactly the same mentality as every other white person. Let's find out whether that's right, and let's find out what those mentalities were. To what degree was it possible to, behave humanely in a system like this? And to what degree did the system itself render that, in the end impossible? I came to this with curiosity, informed by the conviction that this whole matter of race and the whole history of slavery are absolutely fundamental to the American character even today. And, therefore, it's, imperative to try to understand them.

00:12:48 Andrew Keen: I wanna get to what you came out in terms of those curiosities. What about this issue of slavery and race? I mean, slavery has always existed as an institution in human history, sometimes been racialized, not always. And certainly in the American context, it was radically racialized. In your study, of Prince Edward County, was slavery always, so to speak, racialized?

00:13:27 Melvin Patrick Ely: Yes. In Virginia as in other parts of the, American South, by, the late sixteen hundreds or even by the mid sixteen hundreds, slavery is becoming racialized. By the seventeen hundreds, only black people — people of color — could be enslaved. No white person was enslaved, and virtually all, of black people were enslaved. Now there is such a thing as black people who were free, and that's what my previous book Israel on the Appomattox is really about, that free black, community. But, slavery very definitely, racialized in The United States and yet not in the way we sometimes think. Everybody talks about the one drop rule, in this country, as a definition of who was, black. But in the period of slavery in the nineteenth century in Virginia, you could actually have, up to, one quarter, black ancestry and be, considered white. So back then, they were defining some people into the white race, whereas after emancipation, their preoccupation becomes defining people outside of the white race. All of that is a little bit of a curiosity because the basic answer to your very basic question is, yes, slavery was quite thoroughly racialized. The, main, asterisk to that being that there was in fact this population of black people who were free. In the eighteen fifties, something like, one out of 10 black, Virginians or Virginians of color was, in fact, a free person. And that's a story in and of itself.

00:15:19 Andrew Keen: Maybe a story for another book. And what about, in terms of this particular study of Prince Edward County, Virginia, Melvin, what about people of mixed race? How many were there in the community that you studied and what was their status?

00:15:40 Melvin Patrick Ely: Well, it's impossible to put a number on that, but, it's well known that, a great many people in The United States who were called, black or Negro or people of color back then, just as is the case today, have also white ancestry, white and African ancestry and sometimes native American ancestry. So there was every, skin complexion, known to humankind, including in the slave quarters. You could find people who were, who to you or me would be considered white, all the way up to someone who, looked, like, an African and everything in between.

00:16:31 Andrew Keen: We are speaking, with, Melvin Patrick Ely, one of, America's most distinguished historians, the author of a major new work, A Terrible Intimacy, a book about how blacks and whites lived together in the Slaveholding South. I'm gonna take a short break, and then we'll be back. And I wanna talk more specifically about, what Melvin learned from this study. So be back in a second. Don't go away, anyone. This is not a commercial break. That's because we don't have commercials on this show. I'm not gonna waste your time trying to sell you inane products. However, I do have pretty good deal for you. I'm writing a book about The United States. It's due out in 2028. And if you become a paid subscriber on my keen on America substack, you'll not only get very cool notes and photographs and videos from this project, but I'll also send you a personalized signed copy of the book when it comes out in 2028. So go to keenon.substack.com and become a paid subscriber. That's keenon.substack.com. And now back to our conversation. We're speaking with Melvin Patrick Ely, the author of A Terrible Intimacy, major new work about interracial life in the Slaveholding South. Melvin, what was interracial life like? How would you generalize about it?

00:18:24 Melvin Patrick Ely: I would have trouble generalizing because it depended upon the, personalities of the individuals involved, and it depend it depended on the situation in which they found themselves. I'll give you a concrete example. I have a chapter. The first chapter in my book is, about an enslaved man named Tom. I should say that each chapter of my book is based on one, criminal trial, for which we have, testimony. And, in this particular trial, Tom, this enslaved man and by the way, I'm calling him by his first name because his surname is not recorded as is usually the case with enslaved people. He's on trial for having, killed his, white overseer, with a blow to the head, with a, the handle of a hoe. It turns out from the testimony, and we have testimony from, white people, including the family of the dead overseer, who, by the way, are also his employers; and testimony from other enslaved people on this farm that on the day that this death occurred, in the morning of that day, Tom and, the overseer, Richard Foster, had sat down and consumed together as much as a quart of whiskey. And then, later in the day, as if by some magical, terrible mood change has taken place, they get into a fight about a stupid, verbal, exchange. The, overseer, takes a whack or two or three at, Tom. Tom fights back. They, scramble for, bigger and better weapons. They hit each other over the head, and the white man dies. So, let's start with the fact that in a single day, you have these guys drinking together as if they were buddies, and then fighting literally, to the death. And then the rest of the story is about, what happens in, Tom's trial. But the sort of headline here is the closeness and the callousness and the bitterness and the, viciousness that I find, strewn through the history of slavery are all concentrated in one day in the life of, these two men, and actually more than one day, because I trace the relationship over a period of weeks climaxing in this, fight to the death.

00:21:18 Andrew Keen: And what it's a fascinating story. What did you learn from it about the mentality of this ability to, on the one hand, drink together, on the other hand, fight, and one kills the other? I mean, I'm guessing that could have happened, but black on black or white on white too.

00:21:38 Melvin Patrick Ely: Yes. It this kind of thing happens. It's not, unusual, that it happens. This particular story is complicated by the fact that, Richard Foster, the overseer, is employed by his own sister and brother-in-law. And he, Richard Foster believes, it turns out rightly, that, his, the inheritance that he expected from his father, a pretty rich one, has gone instead to his sister and brother-in-law, and he, Richard, is relegated to this lowly role of an overseer. So and he's also an alcoholic. So, all of Richard Foster's bitterness, he can't really take it out on his sister and brother-in-law. He depends on them for his livelihood. So he ends up taking it out on, the enslaved people among whom he lives, or at least he does that when he's drunk — and he's drunk a lot of the time. So there's, a way in which the, nastiness and the infighting within this white family, suck in this, innocent, black man named, Tom. And there's this fight that takes place, in which Richard Foster is really not angry at Tom. He's angry at his brother-in-law, but slavery puts Foster, the overseer, in the position where the one big fat potential target for all of his wrath, is the enslaved people over whom he has control. And that's why this fight takes place, and that's why Tom kills Richard Foster in an act of self defense, which in that society at that time was not an adequate defense. The fact that, he was that Tom was protecting himself does not result in acquittal at his trial and could not have resulted in one.

00:23:44 Andrew Keen: I wanna come back to, that example in a second. But what does it tell us about the legal system? I know you suggest and you introduced us in the book to some white lawyers who, again, were a little more complicated than some of us would assume, perhaps beyond, again, pride and shame. What does the legal the American legal system as you note, it was a little more complicated than some people might think. What does it tell us about life in the Slaveholding South, given that if America does have a religion, either in the North or the South, it's the law?

00:24:28 Melvin Patrick Ely: The legal system in the South, as you say, was to our eyes, quite odd. First, let's say that most infractions committed by enslaved people, it took place on, the given plantation or farm. The slave owner, dealt with it on his own and, the door of the courthouse was, wasn't darkened by any of them. Nobody resorted to the court. But there are exceptions. And, some of those exceptions are chronicled in this book. As I say, the book is based on six court cases. So if an enslaved person, was charged with a crime in court, there would be a full fledged trial. I have trials here that went on for two, three, four days. Defense attorney invariably under the law would be, appointed, and, for the black defendant, the enslaved defendant, the owner of that enslaved person, would be required and sometimes quite willingly paid the attorney's fee for the defense. Now once you get in the courtroom, once the trial begins, you have, gross unfairness, juxtaposed with a certain kind of due process. The unfairness, consists in the fact that, for example, a black defendant, even if he or she was free, — no black person, enslaved or free could testify against a white defendant. So that means if a white person attacked you and you were black, you couldn't testify against them in court. But black people did testify a lot as long as it wasn't, against, a defendant. A black, witness could contradict white witnesses. A black, witness could, impugn the, character of white, a white person, even a wealthy white slaveholder. And you see that happening in the trials that, I, present in, A Terrible Intimacy. So you got this, again, it's a strange combination of a racially skewed system, under which, criminal procedure takes place with a certain amount of due process.

00:26:53 Andrew Keen: Very different kind of book from yours is Isabel Wilkerson's Caste. I'm sure you're familiar with it. She compares the slave system in The United States and the race system in The United States with Nazi Germany and also with the caste system in India. I know you're not much of a generalizer. You're a very careful, meticulous historian, Melvin. But in terms of this new book, A Terrible Intimacy, what does it tell us about books? I don't want you to necessarily critique or support what, Wilkerson is saying in her book. But what does it tell us about attempts to generalize American the American racial caste system? Is it possible, or is it just so unique that doesn't compare to anywhere, South Africa, India, Nazi Germany?

00:27:51 Melvin Patrick Ely: Well, I think there are, many useful comparisons that can be made. And if somebody wants to write a book that's comparative in nature, then, he or she is also gonna bring to bear, all kinds of contrasts. If you have two cases, let's say two societies, The United States and South Africa, what's interesting there is the fact that there are similarities. The most obvious being that, both historically were white supremacist societies. And, there are very great differences as well. And it's the juxtaposition of the similarities and the contrasts, that make an approach like that, interesting. So I'm all for comparative history. Although what I'm doing what I myself am doing is I'm homing in on a particular, county in this case, a community you might say, in order to do the deep dive. I'm not doing, I'm not covering a vast landscape. I'm doing the deep dive, the day to day life, literally one day after another. And this is in my research. That's what I'm doing. And then, distilling out of that, the everyday, existence. And by everyday, I certainly don't mean, mundane or, monotonous because this everyday existence is certainly punctuated by, very dramatic, events. Yeah.

00:29:25 Andrew Keen: You got a very nice review in the New York Times. And one of the comments was that, you adopted you talk about this day to day analysis that, you adopted what the reviewer called an unorthodox format. Historians typically process their research behind the scenes and serve up a relatively smooth narrative using citations or summaries of evidence. By contrast, Ely gives us an X-ray view into how he works. You kind of, reading your book is rather like watching how the sausage is made. Is that fair, Melvin? You didn't want it to make it too processed.

00:30:05 Melvin Patrick Ely: Yeah. I didn't wanna process things in the sense of winnowing things out. But what I do is I present the testimony, and these are trials where the testimony is substantial, but it's not voluminous, overwhelming or anything of that sort. So I'll present a bit of testimony and then I'll talk about it. And by talk, I mean, write a few paragraphs about it in the book in, what I think is a pretty conversational tone as if the reader and I are sitting there together looking at the record, reading through it and, saying, oh, okay. What does that mean? Or why did she say that? Or what might the relationship be between this witness and the person, he's testifying about? So we walk through together, the reader and I, these six cases. And at the end of each one of them, we think through what does it mean? What kind of a society, is this? So what kind of a relationship was this? What do we learn that confirms what we already know? What do we learn that's surprising? Sometimes, it's very surprising.

00:31:29 Andrew Keen: Yeah. It sounds like you give space to the reader. This is such a morally complicated subject and so many different kinds of landmines. You stand back at least. You provide the evidence for the reader. You've talked about two men fighting. What was life like for women? Of course, we're all familiar with the stories of Monticello and the white men who kept black women, for sexual purposes. Was there a big difference between life for men and women in, particularly for, black women in the Slaveholding South, or is gender not really that important?

00:32:16 Melvin Patrick Ely: No. It's important because in any environment in which, men, supervise women or have, some substantive control over women, there's gonna be exploitation. And there's no, situation that I can think of that is more oppressive, or few situations where the control is more complete than in chattel slavery. So we think we know. I mean, most people would say, well, yeah, sexual exploitation of enslaved women was commonplace. And I would confirm that. And again, it's appalling, but it's not surprising. Where things get, interesting is, where that template, it doesn't quite, hold. I've got a case in the book, for example, where a white man who owns a dozen enslaved people himself, falls in love with, a black woman who's owned by somebody else, and he can conducts a fairly furtive, I guess you would say, a furtive affair, with her. Although he becomes more and more, open about it over time. And over a period of a couple years, he's giving her gifts. He gives her an expensive music box. He refers to her when speaking to another white man as his sweetheart. They have as, I ultimately find out. And I don't want to issue any spoilers here, but let's just say that the relationship between these two goes on for quite some time and it has some, surprising results. And the only reason we know about this is because, the white man involved in the relationship, at one point shot and stabbed an enslaved black man, I think perhaps out of, in some kind of conflict over the woman. And for that reason, because the man that he, stabbed and shot belonged to another man, he, the white, perpetrator is brought to trial. And you get all kinds of testimony that, ends up revealing what the nature of the relationship between him and this, black woman was. And of course, because slavery exists and because this crime took place, the two of them are broken up. The white man is ultimately acquitted, but he pretty much has to leave town and, that's the end of this relationship. So you're living in a society in which any kind of normal relationship, between a white and an enslaved person, even if there was genuine affection there, cannot unfold in any kind of normal way.

00:35:32 Andrew Keen: Yeah. It's astonishing. I mean, your book is about a small county, Prince Edward County, but the stories you tell are all too human stories, which must have existed in many other communities as well. You mentioned earlier, Melvin, that, the anger of the white man against the black man who killed him was more to do with how he was or how he sensed he was exploited by his own family. What about when it came to white women and their attitude to blacks? Given that white women didn't have the same rights as white men, obviously, they weren't slaves, but, they certainly didn't have the same political or economic rights. Yeah. Did you have any evidence in this book of the way in which perhaps white women may have taken out their anger, their sense of injustice on blacks or perhaps, sympathize with them given the self evident nature of their exploitation?

00:36:34 Melvin Patrick Ely: Well, both of those things happened. The, taking out one's anger and frustrations on, enslaved black people, happened a lot, I would say, and, both male and female white people would do that. And one example of that is that if, a white person got angry enough at an enslaved black person, they, would threaten to sell them to some worse place or to sell them away from their family. Indeed, they would proceed to do that fairly frequently, so, parents away from children and the like. So, you find that. On the other hand, in the example I gave you about the death of the overseer, slave owning woman, the woman who employed the overseer and owned the enslaved man who killed him, actually seemed to care more for the enslaved man than she did for her own brother, the overseer. The, black man had, it turns out, given, the white, woman advice on the running of the farm, advice that she seems to have accepted, and she testifying at trial basically depicts, what the black man did as an act of self defense against her brother. Here her brother lies dead, and she's essentially taking the part of the, enslaved black man who did that. Now I would be the last to claim that's a typical case. But what we're talking about here is what the range of human relationships, the range of human actions can be. Because if you wanna define the essence of a society, what does define mean? In the Latin, define means to draw the boundary around the thing. So what I'm looking at is, typical, what is typical, and also at what can happen on the outer edges. And you put all that together and you have a picture of what can happen in this society, generally. So in terms of women's, attitudes, it depends on the woman's personality. It depends on the concrete situation. It depends on contingency. You know, what comes up that day, and what kind of, response does it elicit?

00:39:10 Andrew Keen: Your book is about this terrible intimacy between, blacks and whites in the Slaveholding South. Given this intimacy, Melvin, how much did, black Americans, black slaves attempt to, shall we say, ape white cultural religious practices? What did you learn on that front in terms of the development of the black family, of monogamy? My pronunciation these days is terrible. And, of course, the adoption of Christianity.

00:39:49 Melvin Patrick Ely: Well, let's take Christianity. Let's zero in on that. There is a, stereotype. And if you read the autobiography of Malcolm X, you can see him quoting, Elijah Muhammad, founder of the Nation of Islam saying, Christianity was foisted on, enslaved black people by white people as a device to make them docile, to preach, to turn the other cheek, to preach, submission to masters, to, white people, it was just a big plot to subjugate black people. Now there's some truth to that. That was certainly done, and there was preaching of that kind that went on. But what that neglects is the, development of Afro Christianity, the development of a form of Christianity among black people, that, expressed their worldview, their, ideas of their aspirations, their ideals of justice. This isn't original with me. I mean, there are other historians who've written much better about this. But if you look at black Christianity, the figure of Moses looms very large. And what did Moses do? He led his people out of, slavery. Nat Turner, the famous slave, rebel was, a Baptist preacher. So the idea of, black people, aping anything or slavishly, imitating, anything. These are, really obscenity. I mean, look at the vocabulary here. To say that about anybody would be, insulting. And to say it about the, enslaved population would be, historically inaccurate as well. Now at the same time, it won't do to say, that, the oppression of black people under slavery didn't take a toll, that it didn't do damage. Today, we tend towards a cliche that says that resistance was constant. That, a narrative of, unremitting oppression met by dauntless resistance. Well, I'll tell you, unremitting oppression does grind people down. So, the burdens of slavery did crush some people. They did elicit, outright, armed rebellion from others. And, between those two extremes, there's all manner of response. But I would say that, black culture is what most historians say it was. It was a rich, semiautonomous culture. And yet I do insist in both of my recent, more recent books, that there's all kinds of cross fertilization that goes on there. Black in the rural South, black and white people attended the same churches. And, their speech, I've documented, was very similar. So to some degree, it's possible to talk about a shared, culture, their understanding of nature, the way they told time, the way they, marked or didn't mark the calendar. Much of this is shared between the two races. And may I just add one thing, and that is in my book, I'm looking at a County, Prince Edward, where most of the slave holdings were small, where, on most, farms where, there were any slaves at all, fewer than 20 people. And, at least half the enslaved people in the South lived on places like that. Places where the number of enslaved people was small enough to where there was contact with, the white enslavers and with white neighbors who had no slaves at all on a daily basis. And that's the, venue of the, terrible intimacy that I'm writing about here.

00:44:07 Andrew Keen: And what about this? The narrative, both of whites and blacks, in terms of this American experiment. We're coming up to the two hundred and fiftieth anniversary of the republic. What did you learn, or what can one learn from your book, A Terrible Intimacy, about how blacks and whites in the interracial South, Slaveholding South, how they differed in terms of their collective their sense of their collective narratives of how they ended up in this country?

00:44:40 Melvin Patrick Ely: Yeah. The narrative of how they ended up in this country, I don't have a lot of evidence on, but I'll give you, another example. And that is the related question of how humane or inhumane, slavery is or was. I've got a case in the book, a chapter in the book, that has to do with an enslaved man who killed his master. And, when he goes on trial, the testimony of black and white alike, reveal that the master had been, exceptionally, cruel. He had, beaten this man with sticks, broken sticks over his head, gouged his eyes with sticks, whipped him, chained him to the floor, pulled, sound teeth out of his mouth with pliers. Just everything you can imagine and some things that you can't imagine. And, the question, arises, how is this behavior viewed by black and white? Well, of course, the enslaved black people were utterly appalled by it and, it struck fear into them because they could be the next to whom this was done. The white community, many of them testify at the trial of the black man who, committed the homicide. And what you see there is, a fair amount of consternation. I mean, most of the white witnesses either try to gloss over the treatment of this enslaved guy or they say, well, it was kinda harsh. And then some say it was barbaric. The term barbarous is actually used. So you've got a range of feeling among whites as to what is permissible in the, control of enslaved people, but that range is finite. There is no white person who comes forward and says, well, beating a slave with a stick, must never be done. Nobody says that. Now if you do it to the point where you nearly blind the man or nearly kill the man, yeah, some people come forward and complain about that. But excuse me. But nobody ever said anything about this while that master was still alive doing this stuff. It's only after he's safely in the grave that anybody comes forward and say, oh, yeah. He was a barbarous master. And that's the problem with the system. The system, makes economic gain dependent upon the continued, control as property, of human beings. And when you have a system like that, there's gotta be in humanity all over the place.

00:47:30 Andrew Keen: Yeah. And, of course, that's the tragic truth about your new book, A Terrible Intimacy. Finally, Melvin, I know you're a very careful, meticulous historian, so you're a little, uncomfortable sometimes making vast generalizations. But everybody thinks about these kind of books in terms of their message today. Your book is about Virginia. One could go to Charlottesville, for example. I think it's about an hour from Richmond, where the Unite the Right rally, a kind of neo-Nazi Klan-like rally happened not many years ago. You can also go to Monticello, and look at Thomas Jefferson's slave plantation and have very strong feelings about that one way or the other. What does your book tell us about that sort of thing? You've already noted one of the incidents in your book of the angry white man who took out his violent anger on a black, even if his anger was actually directed against whites. Are there generalizations we can make about America in the twenty twenties given what some people at least see as the return of, very violent racial prejudices of one kind or another, particularly of whites against blacks?

00:48:56 Melvin Patrick Ely: We have, as white and black people in this country, a lot of shared history, and, I think that's not sufficiently recognized. We also have, within that shared history of a history of exploitation, a tragic history that we pay lip service to. I mean, there's not too many people who will come out today and, give a full throated, defense of slavery. You showed the picture of the neo Nazis and so forth. And, of course they might say something like that. But we congratulate ourselves today that we're beyond all that. And I don't think that we're beyond it because I think that the togetherness, the fact that we're all part of a common society here, needs to be emphasized. And at the same time, the fact that there is a, history of several 100 years of, exploitation and strife needs not to be, glossed over. It all needs to be considered, in our two hundred and fiftieth anniversary and, every other year of our existence.

00:50:22 Andrew Keen: Well, there you have it. We're trying as Americans broadly to get beyond pride and shame, to look a little bit more carefully, meticulously at America's complicated tragic racial history, A Terrible Intimacy, Interracial Life in the Slaveholding South. It's a very important new book, and I really wanna thank, Melvin Patrick Ely both for the book and for appearing on the show. Thank you so much, Melvin, and congratulations on the book. It's already got, great reviews all over the place. I think it's another enormously important contribution to, making sense of the early nineteenth century in America. Thank you so much.

00:51:03 Melvin Patrick Ely: Thanks, Andrew. Privilege talking with you.