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Stories from the Underground Railroad

Through family stories and historical records, Dr. Josh Stout discusses how abolitionists orchestrated the daring rescue of Jane Johnson and others, as confrontations between state and federal authorities eerily mirror today's developing constitutional battles.

Dr. Josh Stout, PhD

15 Feb 2025 — 32 min read

Choosing freedom

Please scroll down for links below the transcript. This is lightly edited AI generated transcript and there may be errors.

Dr. Josh Stout 0:03
All right. Picture a man. It's about maybe ten, 11:00 at night. New York docks, 1855, 170 years ago.

He's scared. He's climbing out of a boat. He's been hiding in. There are men on the docks looking for people like him. These are white men. These are slave hunters. They can pick up, really, any black man, any black woman, any black child and take them away. And then they have to prove that they aren't slaves. So there are other black people on the dock, but they're hiding. You can't see very many people who are like him in any way. It's all unfriendly faces as far as he's concerned. Any white person who turns him in will get a bounty.

There is nowhere to run. He's slinking along the docks.

Eric 1:01
And he's got the water at his back.

Dr. Josh Stout 1:03
Yeah, And a hand grabs his shoulder and turns around. And it's a black face, so he knows he's all right. That's Louis Napoleon. Louis Napoleon. Brings him back to the offices of the Tribune newspaper. It closed for the night. Takes him inside. And there's one of the editors at the table talking with the woman. They turn around.

The woman is Harriet Tubman. The man is my ancestor, Sidney Howard Gay. This isn't his story. But this is how I know about this story. So I'm going to be talking about that history today and some of my family connections to that. And we're going to talk about who Sydney Howard Gay was and then the much larger story of his role as a stationmaster on the Underground Railroad and what that meant.

Eric 2:11
Fascinating. Well, let's go.

Dr. Josh Stout 2:20
All right. Hi, Eric.

Eric 2:24
It's it's Friday, February 14th. Happy Valentine's Day, everyone.

Dr. Josh Stout 2:28
Happy Valentine's Day. All right. So.

Sydney Howard Gay was a one of the editors for the Tribune working with Horace Greeley. And he would work during the day and then he would work all night on an antislavery newspaper and working as a stationmaster on the Underground Railroad. So he basically never slept. And he wrote all this down. And so we actually have his papers and we have records of all of this.

Eric 2:58
When you say 'we' who is we?

Dr. Josh Stout 3:01
We? Humanity. The papers are at Columbia University, part of family history. I have some, you know, letters and things from him and stuff like that. But the main, the main history he wrote down is, is available to the public. It's online, it's digital, it's wonderful.

And so he would work with Harriet Tubman, who was, he called the general. And she was basically, you know, the field agents. And Louis Napoleon was working directly with him, also basically a field agent. He was the guy in the chair. So in the in the movies, there's the guy in the chair with the field agents actually doing all the work and all the scary stuff. And there's the guy sitting there on the headset telling them where to go and what to do. He was that guy. He might have been the first of those guys. Everyone else was trying to carry messages on by horseback. And he explained that if you use the telegraph, you could get messages faster than the slave catchers could. Could locate people they were hunting.

Eric 4:01
Well, we were in an era when that needed to be explained.

Dr. Josh Stout 4:04
It needed to be explained. He was in newspapers, so he understood how powerful the Telegraph could be for getting news from one place to the next. And no one else was living in that world. So he was cutting edge technology. You know, you could just send a telegraph and we'd get the information much faster.

Eric 4:20
That also, I bet, cost money.

Dr. Josh Stout 4:21
So. So his job was basically logistics. He was the guy in the chair. He made all the arrangements happen.

Eric 4:26
Just logistics, not money.

Dr. Josh Stout 4:29
He also did fundraising. He didn't have that much money, but he would he would go around and give talks and and do fundraising. And they also did trolling of people. So he and Horace Greeley, the the editor of the of the Tribune, which was a liberal paper Republican, which meant anti-slavery. And I would put on these things where there would be the equivalent of a Trump rally, a whole bunch of, you know, MAGA heads who hate slaves and hate black people who would get together and they would basically have these sort of mobs. And Greeley would say, Yeah, let's let's hold a debate. We'll get the best white spokesman you can find, and we'll have them talk to a former slave as we are abolitionists and we know some of those and we're going to hear them talk together. And the MAGA people are like, Yeah, yeah. We're going to say, you know, we can we can control the whole dialogue as we see Fox do all the time. You just shout over them. You have the mob on your side, you get it in your venue. It doesn't matter how smart the other person is, you're going to you're going to crush them. We know. We know how this works. And Horace Greeley is like, Yep, we'll do that. So Horace Greeley and Sidney Howard Gay go with a former slave to this this - MAGA rally basically - put him up there.

Eric 6:01
Do you know where it was? When this was?

Dr. Josh Stout 6:02
This is in Lower Manhattan, this is this is, you know, 1850s.

Eric 6:07
Okay. 1850s, Lower Manhattan. All right.

Dr. Josh Stout 6:09
Yeah. So most of what I'm setting is happening during a single year, 1855. So 170 years ago, this is the anniversary and I'm talking about my grandmother's grandfather. And so this is personal history for me as well. You know, I heard some of these stories firsthand from someone who had them firsthand. I've also gone and done research. So anyway, they're going up in front of this MAGA crowd. Stand back, former slave is talking. And, you know, basically he straightens up and it's it's it's Frederick Douglass. And so he's the one of the greatest orators of all time. And he blows them away. The crowd is just slack jawed. And they they were probably slack jawed to start with, but they don't know what to say. He's you know, he's making he's making classical references and biblical references and he's talking philosophy and he's just blowing them away. And they can't say anything for 5 minutes, for 10 minutes and 15 minutes in shout, start and the crowd's getting restless. And they're like, We've been had.

Eric 7:18
Hey! This guy's smart!

Dr. Josh Stout 7:19
Yeah, exactly.

Eric 7:21
He's got something to say - wait a second!

Dr. Josh Stout 7:22
Wait a second. And so that's when they - Sidney and Horace Greeley rush him off stage and into a stagecoach. That as again, the guy in the chair has arranged. And they rush away from there before the crowd can get them. They had it all planned from the beginning.

Eric 7:41
They knew. They knew this would be the point that would be reached and they would have to get away.

Dr. Josh Stout 7:46
They were there to make a point. They were there to put something in the news the next day. And they were they were there, too, to to basically troll that whole crowd. And they knew it was going to end that.

Eric 7:56
What year was this again?

Dr. Josh Stout 7:57
1855.

Eric 7:58
So this was trolling in 1855.

Dr. Josh Stout 8:00
This is trolling in 1855. Yeah. And you know, no one no one, no one saw it coming and they, they, they made a clean getaway.

Eric 8:07
And is there a record of this?

Dr. Josh Stout 8:10
There's a record that this speech exists. We have a record of speeches like that. I don't think we have that particular one. All right. But yeah, interesting. So this is the kind of stuff they were doing. Horace Greeley is is is way more famous. You know, he's the one who said, go west, young man. But they were they were working together. He was the owner of the paper. And so he was allowing he was allowing Sidney Howard Gay to use the offices and the printing house area as stations on the Underground Railroad as safe houses, essentially.

Eric 8:41
Plausible deniability for him because he wasn't doing it.

Dr. Josh Stout 8:43
And there's you know, family stories of if they couldn't get the people out before the start of the work day, they had to get people out. And you know, going up to upstate New York, which is where Frederick Douglass was.

Eric 9:01
Wait - they were actually using the offices themselves as a way station for escaping slaves? [At night.] At night, At night night. Yeah. And then during the day, people would come into the offices of the newspaper and not know that people had spent the night there.

Dr. Josh Stout 9:15
Right. And so they'd be, they'd be then on their way to upstate New York and for Frederick Douglass had a, a way station I upstate New York and they were sort of in a friendly competition who can get more people out. And so it was this whole thing moving up to up to Canada.

Eric 9:31
So you're literally working day and night.

Dr. Josh Stout 9:33
So, yeah, he was literally working day and night.

Eric 9:35
This is a life's devotion.

Dr. Josh Stout 9:36
Yeah, yeah, yeah. And there were, there were times when they couldn't get people out and so he would actually be hiding them in his office during the day. And there's like a family story of my great great grandmother coming in and saying hello and he's like, there's people hiding over there.

Eric 9:58
It's like an Anne Frank story.

Dr. Josh Stout 9:59
Yeah. And we have the stories of from those families as well, because he kept records of everyone. And so some of the historians were able to track down the people he'd helped and they're like, Yeah, we have family stories of hiding in the office.

Eric 10:14
I'm sure that would be a family story that would last for generations.

Dr. Josh Stout 10:17
Exactly. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So this is while it's distant, it's also direct. And these, these are, these are things that we have direct connections to.

Eric 10:25
Is this we're headed? Anyway, that's premature...

Dr. Josh Stout 10:28
Yeah. Well this is some of why I'm telling this story is like we are, we are in troubled times and you know, the slave catchers are coming and we need to figure out what we're doing. But that's a separate issue. Yeah. So I didn't really want to tell Sydney Howard Gay story. I just sort of wanted to introduce this, you know, man, I'm tremendously proud to be related to as a way of getting into this story and say, I do have this direct connection, but the story that I think we really need to hear is the story of Jane Johnson.

I have a hard time remembering her name. It's so sort of normal. But Jane Johnson is a very important figure. If you Google her, you're going to find some person selling Bibles. It's not her.

Eric 11:20
Okay?

Dr. Josh Stout 11:21
But she she helped America understand what was going on with people trying to escape slavery. She was a slave. Her her eldest son had been basically sold down the river. She thought she would never see him again. She had two younger sons and her slaver. I've decided I like that word better than master. They were masters in no way. Her slaver was taking her north because he had just been appointed the sort of, I don't know, consular general or something like that to Nicaragua. And so he had to go north, get the papers, and then he was going down to Nicaragua and he was bringing his slaves with him. And so he was bringing her and her two boys together, boys, you know, he thought might make it harder for her to escape. You know, it's difficult to travel with children. And so they were, to a certain extent, hostages. And the idea was to not let them out of his sight and keep them locked up. In some accounts, they were confined on the on the boat. And another account, they were confined in a you know, in a nearby hotel, but locked in and I think Jane Johnson managed to get a message to one of the black porters, you know, So there were there were people working everywhere who she could trust. And that was part of how this clandestine network worked, was getting messages to spread and he got it to there was something called the Vigilance Committee. It sounds very right wing and vigilante. But at that point, these were people who were literally vigilant, waiting for the word. When someone was trying to escape, they were going to set things up.

Eric 13:17
Wow. The Vigilance Committee was a group of people waiting to hear of slaves wanting to escape.

Dr. Josh Stout 13:23
Yes, exactly. And so Williamson was a man working for the Vigilance Committee. And he...

Eric 13:32
I'm sorry, that must be an immensely - that must have been an immensely dangerous and terrifying thing because I'm sure there were slaves you couldn't trust. And putting out a message like that could, if it fell into the wrong hands, would have terrible consequences.

Dr. Josh Stout 13:49
Yeah, yeah, yeah. So he hears about this, he telegraph office. Sidney Howard Gaye. Sidney Howard Gaye telegraphs to a man called Simms, [CORRECTION: not Simms - William Still] who is also a station master on the Underground Railroad. Still had been from a family of slaves that had gotten out, and he had dedicated his life not to helping people escape, but to documenting it all so that families could reunite. Because one of the biggest problems was families were getting split up, and when they would eventually escape, they had a hard time finding each other. So he documented everyone he was helping and he documented the whole process. And so it's really interesting to see some of the documentation my relative had and matching up with the documents he had. It was he was really dedicated to like finding all the people and keeping it. And so these are now families that exist 170 years later who are able to trace their family history back because he has these records. And so he was he was doing multiple jobs, not just being a station master, but also understanding his role as keeping the information coming and so on. The station Masters were in many way like, you know, CIA handlers, they have agents out there bringing information to them, and then they're collating that information and processing it a way that gives them more power than just, you know, just people talking directly to each other.

Eric 15:17
But but also, they had this this magical power of - you're talking about this this Jane Johnson got a message out. And all of those messages happened that in that one night.

Dr. Josh Stout 15:28
In that one night, yet all she had to do was whisper to a porter.

Eric 15:32
Which to most people in that day and age was inconceivable.

Dr. Josh Stout 15:37
Was inconceivable. Yeah, exactly. So they're using cutting edge technology today.

Eric 15:41
They had a real technological advantage. It's like Wakanda or something.

Dr. Josh Stout 15:42
They really did well. No, it was cool. So this, this is, this is how they were working. And so Simms [CORRECTION: not Simms, William Still] goes down on the docks and they're trying to take Jane Johnson back up onto the boat and they're going to take her away and she's with her two children. And the slaver is there, Wheeler, and Still says, "Do you want to be free?" And Jane Johnson says, "Yeah, I want to be free." "Then come with me."

And the slaver tries to hit them with his cane and two porters on the boat grab his arms so he can't. Three others help take her away. So this is a network of black people working together to stop the slaver with a white man who's basically an attorney and a black man who's running the station.

Eric 16:58
Remind me, where are we - where is this taking place?

Dr. Josh Stout 17:00
We are now in Philadelphia. And so, okay, back it up a little bit. They were going up to Philadelphia to get these papers. And there were some there were some problems with the way the law was working. Pennsylvania was a free state. If you stepped foot in Pennsylvania, you were free. But in the early, you know, let's say 1790 or so, Philadelphia been the capital. And so they had to have an allowance to allow slavers to bring their property. Yeah. And not have it taken away instantly. So in Philadelphia, there was sort of a waiver for people to temporarily be able to do this.

Eric 17:42
So there was this waiver in Philly to bring your slaves and have them still be your property, and then you can leave with them again? [Yes.] Just don't go anywhere else in the state.

Dr. Josh Stout 17:52
Yeah. So Jane Johnson said, no, I'm not a slave. I'm a free woman and I'm standing in Pennsylvania and I don't want to go back. And so they hustled her away.

Eric 18:03
And of course, if they had been in the South, they could have just been shot. Yeah, but that wasn't in the South. That was still in the north. And so because of this, they could lay their hands, as black people, on a on a wealthy white person?

Dr. Josh Stout 18:22
Well, it didn't go all that well. So Williamson, who is this this white sort of an attorney said, okay, you guys run. So Still took her and ran and he turned around and said, Hi, I'm surrendering to the authorities.

Eric 18:46
A white guy said.

Dr. Josh Stout 18:47
Yes, and they arrested him and the and the five porters for robbery. Yeah, four for, you know, assault and robbery.

Eric 18:56
The porters were arrested.

Dr. Josh Stout 18:57
Oh, they were arrested at this point.

Eric 18:59
They were freemen. [Yes.] Who had jobs and probably responsibilities. Yeah. And now, because of their involvement in this, they were arrested.

Dr. Josh Stout 19:05
Yeah. And Stil is away. Gotten away with, with, with, with Jane Jane Johnson. And they're not telling Williamson where they've gone which was part of the plan from the beginning. Compartmentalization of knowledge. There aren't really spy societies in the U.S., but this is how people were figuring out how to do this kind of stuff. They're like, We don't tell you what's going on, so you can't give it up.

Eric 19:27
You can't even give it up.

Dr. Josh Stout 19:28
You can't give it up. Well. Williamson had had issues with a federal judge in the past over some of the same issues because he was always arguing slavery cases. And so the the federal judge is like, we're throwing the book at you, we're going to get you we wrote a writ of habeas corpus. You must produce Jane Johnson, and we're going get you for contempt of court if you don't turn her in. He's like, Can't do it. Don't know where she is, nothing I can do. So they threw him in jail.

Eric 19:56
What about those porters?

Dr. Josh Stout 19:57
They threw them in jail, too. Everyone went to jail for 90 days or actually Wheeler went for 90 days. I can't remember what. The porter's hadn't been tried yet, so they were in - okay - difference between jail and prison, but whatever. Yeah. Anyway, he.

Eric 20:11
They were held for longer, I'm sure.

Dr. Josh Stout 20:12
Well, they were all being held for the same amount of time because they're all in jail at the moment. Right.

So the federal judge hates Williamson and wants to get him and is setting up a court hearing where he's being tried for theft. And Jane Johnson with a friendly judge writes a affidavit saying, I was not stolen, I was a free woman because I was standing in Pennsylvania and I declared I wanted to be here. And so therefore, I could not have been property, so I can't have been stolen. And that gets turned into the federal judge who says this means nothing. This is gibberish. This is a legal document with no standing.

You have to produce your witness. And so he had the courthouse surrounded with federal marshals. So there was no way Jane Johnson could get in there. And slaveholders everywhere, plus a rowdy MAGA type crowd all around the courthouse.

At the same time, the Pennsylvania has the Pennsylvania court system working for them and they have state troopers and they have an organized machine whose job it is to say, no, we're following Pennsylvania law and she's a free woman.

Eric 21:45
Okay, wait. So who's surrounding the courthouse? The the.

Dr. Josh Stout 21:48
Federal marshals.

Eric 21:49
So there were literally federal marshals up against state troopers. Troopers? Yeah. And we're talking 1855.

Dr. Josh Stout 21:59
Yeah. And everyone's armed.

Eric 22:01
Wow. Okay. Yeah, it's beginning. I mean, with what's happening. I mean, I have to interject right now that, like, what's happening right now in New York State where they've literally asked for a doctor to be extradited. I mean, this is sounding too close to being... anyway. Go on.

Dr. Josh Stout 22:16
Yeah. Anyway, so so again, Sydney Howard Gaye is doing all the logistics. And so he he arranges for her to leave New York City where she'd gotten away to take a train down to Pennsylvania, get on a little, you know, cab or you know, whatever little horse thing, pull up to the courthouse as one of several veiled abolitionist women who are going to be witnesses at the at the trial, because a lot of people are trying to get in there. And so there's lots of them. Both sides are being represented. And in the the you know, the crowd in the courthouse. And so these abolitionist women who are all veiled are going in with the state troopers, sort of pushing their way through the crowd to get them into the courthouse...

Dramatic like made for TV moment. They're like, you know, you have to produce your witness. And so Jane Johnson flips back the veil and she's there to testify that she was a free woman and she was not stolen. And the judge, according to like his own description of the what had been going on, cannot convict Williamson because he hadn't stolen her. Right. She was a free woman. And the law said this. And so even though he's a federal judge, he's like, well, I have to follow the law. But now his trap had been set. Jane, Jane Johnson was in the courthouse. So she.

Eric 23:42
Had to get out.

Dr. Josh Stout 23:42
And she had to get out. So it's surrounded by federal marshals and state troopers. The federal marshals are going to arrest her. And the slave hunters are going to take her away. But the the state troopers just basically formed a phalanx around her and literally ran out of the courthouse with her right into a stagecoach that, again, had been prearranged. The stagecoach went around the block. He jumped. She jumped into another stagecoach, which then went as fast as they could to a train. So the first stage stagecoach, if anyone was trying to follow it on horseback, got away without her in it. The second one dropped her at a train and then went away so that anyone trying to follow them were following stagecoaches. And she was on a train. Again, all set up from New York City by Sidney Howard Gay, the man in the chair.

Williamson was let go. Wheeler was not given any compensation because he did not have any property to be compensated for because she was a free woman.

The the abolitionist movement helped get her a boarding house where she helped escape slaves in Boston. And so she became, you know, her own sort of stop on the Underground Railroad.

Eric 25:02
What happened to the porters?

Dr. Josh Stout 25:04
Okay. So the porters, three of them were freed because they they hadn't done anything. They just helped a free woman walk down a gangplank.

Eric 25:13
Okay.

Dr. Josh Stout 25:14
Two of them had actually held. Right. And they they got a $10 fine and nine days and the abolitionist paid the fine and they had to spend a week in jail.

So, yeah, they did get punished, but it wasn't bad. And it an end. The whole thing sort of is as close as you can get to a happy ending with these things. My my relative, had a nervous breakdown, but he, he kept going for a little bit longer. But you can't live that way without sleep, you know. So he he he went two years.

Eric 25:48
I mean, it was a happy ending except for the fact that slavery existed for another decade.

Dr. Josh Stout 25:51
Oh, and there is a civil war coming. Yeah. No, there's a civil war coming. And this is, this is all like. But in this one particular story, this was not just a happy ending, but this was written about at the time and became a something that was helping unify the country and see that the the feds could come at you with armed marshals and they could tell you what to do in your state. And even if you didn't believe in what they were doing and...

Eric 26:21
Well, that's surely sounds familiar. In fact, it does not just familiar. I mean, this is literally what we're facing in New York State today.

Dr. Josh Stout 26:29
Right. And so this is this is the kind of stuff that was starting, you know, armed insurrection. This would start, you know, with with John Brown. This was this was really starting. People were angry and this helped fanned those flames because they.

Eric 26:42
I'm getting shivers because we're going to need something like that.

Dr. Josh Stout 26:45
Well, I don't want a civil war, but we need we need to see what's happening. And, you know, it it was done in a way that involved modern technology and communication and reporters and attorneys and the court systems and federal marshals versus state troopers.

Eric 27:02
Single thing that's being attacked and...

Dr. Josh Stout 27:05
Exactly.

Eric 27:05
...torn down right now.

Dr. Josh Stout 27:07
Exactly. Exactly, exactly.

So, yeah, Sydney, Howard Gaye was able to keep this up for about two years, and so he'd been writing everything down that he was doing then in the family history, he, you know, sort of had a nervous collapse, as they say. And he stopped writing stuff down. But he was still very much in the abolition movement. And there's there's records of that, but we don't really know what was happening past that time.

Eric 27:37
But this is what it's going to take. This is going to take people devoting their lives to this. It's going to take people giving their lives for this.

Dr. Josh Stout 27:44
Yeah. It's yeah, I mean. The real ending of this period was when the Civil War started. In the early days of the Civil War, rich New Yorkers were paying poor Irish people, poor Irish men, to go fight for them and often die in the Civil War. And so Irish people were being both drafted and paid. So both conscription and being paid to go fight. And they were dying in large numbers and they were then coming back from these battles and, you know, not okay. And so the the, the very large Irish, Irish immigrant population tried to secede, have Manhattan secede from the rest of the nation. And they were they were they were they were killing black people. There were lynching, there were lynch mobs.

Eric 28:45
When was this?

Dr. Josh Stout 28:46
This is this is at the beginning of the Civil War, I think right after the Battle of Antietam. [CORRECTION: Right after the Battle of Gettysburg.]

Eric 28:51
And 1865? 1866?.

Dr. Josh Stout 28:54
I'm terrible at that date. I didn't look that one up. But yeah, but yeah, you were decades later.

Eric 28:58
Talking about a were were a decade or a decade and a half or two decades later then.

Dr. Josh Stout 29:03
So we started 1855, but this is still Sidney Howard Gaye. He's still living in New York. He's still working for the same paper.

Eric 29:10
So you're talking about Irish people, doing, like, wanting Manhattan to secede?

Dr. Josh Stout 29:15
Yes, yes.

Eric 29:17
And in battle with black people?

Dr. Josh Stout 29:19
Well, murdering black people and in battle with the rest of the city, they're burning things. They're they're they're in battle with the police there. The no one knows what's going to happen.

Eric 29:29
This is before the Irish became the police?

Dr. Josh Stout 29:31
This is before the Irish. They were kind of the police as well. But the police are backing off the ones who are probably Irish. And there's there's there's definitely that feeling. There's there is the feeling of a lot of rich white people, some of whom are pro-slavery. And but the majority of the rich white people are abolitionists and against slavery and the and the poor Irish people who are up in arms about that. And the police are like, we're backing off.

Eric 30:01
But you're saying that this was during the Civil War when the Irish were basically being paid and used as cannon fodder.

Dr. Josh Stout 30:07
Yes. Yes.

Eric 30:09
And then there was an uprising over this during the Civil War.

Dr. Josh Stout 30:12
Yeah. Yeah. Down in Lower Manhattan and in Staten Island.

Eric 30:16
Well that's something I never learned in school.

Dr. Josh Stout 30:17
And so my great great grandfather was in the newspaper offices. Horace Greeley fled and he's like, you guys hang out here in the newspaper offices. And he there's two different stories. And one of them he stacked muskets against the wall, loaded muskets that were, you know, ready to fire so he could just fire one after the next after the other. Another one of the stories is that they had these wooden troughs and Bugs Bunny style bombs. The round ones with a fuse coming out the top, and they were going to roll them down the troughs at the people outside when the mob gathered. And it's not impossible that both of these things were in the plans. And so they were preparing for the end. As this mob is gathering around.

Eric 31:00
Around where? Around.

Dr. Josh Stout 31:01
We're in lower Manhattan, some somewhere around down Wall Street somewhere. And meanwhile, his wife, who lives in Staten Island. So this is back in a weird time in history where a a you know, assistant editor at a newspaper would be relatively fabulously wealthy compared to, say, the Irish population.

Eric 31:24
Well, you've got to be literate and you have to have a lot of privilege.

Dr. Josh Stout 31:26
So he's got essentially a small mansion on Staten Island with a bunch of Irish servants, and his wife is there basically alone with their kids. And they're like looking at the Irish servants and they don't know what to do. And they're they're, they're, they're finding like, you know, the one non Irish person that they know how to work with. And like, you go bury the silver and the mobs are coming to burn down all of the Republicans, i.e. abolitionists, i.e. pro black people's mansions. The Irish mobs are gathering and these are trained people. These are soldiers on leave from the battles during the Civil War, and they're marching. And so she can hear the sound of the marching feet on the those the wooden sort of streets along the coast.

So these houses are all along the the edge of Staten Island with the kind of marshes with these these boardwalks going through the marshes. And so to get from house to house, you go along these boardwalks and they can hear the people marching on the boardwalk. And my great great grandmother turns to her, her maids and says, what are we going to do? How is this going to go? Because there's more of you than me, and there is a mob coming with torches and guns. Weapons. Yeah, Yeah. And they're like, We are terrified. Let's go. And so they they flee and they, they, they, they run to the neighbors houses.

Eric 32:58
So rather than assuming that they were against her, she turned to them and said, how is this going to go? How is this to go?

Dr. Josh Stout 33:03
How do you want this to move? Yeah, exactly. And but, you know, they'd already buried the silver and they're escaping with the maids and it starts raining and the mob goes home.

Eric 33:13
I was going to say that's the best thing that could have happened.

Dr. Josh Stout 33:15
The best thing that could have happened. The federal troops get called in in Manhattan. And the the the the mobs that are burning down lower Manhattan get surrounded by the federal troops. But they then basically hide and they get shot at. And then the federal troops are then hunting for wounded members of the mob to arrest. But because some of them are soldiers or many of them are soldiers, and there's been many battles where a lot of people are wounded, they then hide in the hospitals as as wounded people from these battles. And there's like three days of martial law. Manhattan is closed down by the National Guard and then, you know, Lincoln called in the National Guard to end the whole thing. And then then, you know, the battle's been put down and order is restored and it, you know, goes back to it. But, yeah, Lincoln almost lost Manhattan to the to the Irish mobs, I guess.

Eric 34:11
I guess when you when you weigh this against, you know, The Civil War, it gets lost.

Dr. Josh Stout 34:15
Rght. Yeah. It's just a blip.

Dr. Josh Stout 34:21
It makes me think of, you know.

Eric 34:22
This is amazing - Lower Manhattan was burning?

Dr. Josh Stout 34:24
Lower Manhattan was burning. Staten Island was about to burn. There was three days of of curfew, martial law, troops on the streets. You know, it was it was a crazy, crazy moment.

Eric 34:36
But you're saying that this was primarily sparked because wealthy New Yorkers were sending Irish people to go die in their place.

Dr. Josh Stout 34:48
And generally, they were pro black people and the Irish were generally anti-black people. So they were on two sides of almost like the immigrant debate right now.

Eric 34:58
As in as in you're going to bring these these people from the south who were going to come take our jobs.

Dr. Josh Stout 35:02
Take our jobs, and you're sending us to die in fight for you to do this. So you are a corrupt elite sending us to die for these people we don't like anyway.

Eric 35:13
And how did that go for them? It didn't go very well.

Dr. Josh Stout 35:16
Well, a lot of them got shot by the the National Guard that Lincoln called out because he's not going to put up with this. But but they could have taken Manhattan and they had deals. The British might well have called it a free port and the British Navy could have sailed in. Any of this could have happened. It was all being set up.

Eric 35:35
Until Lincoln decided...

Dr. Josh Stout 35:37
Crushed it.

Eric 35:38
I'm going to devote some troops.

Dr. Josh Stout 35:39
Yeah. Yeah. So a lot of this is is stories about like local power versus state power versus national power. And there is there's so many different levels of this. And you can in sometimes in Philadelphia, the state won out and in other times in Manhattan, the feds went out. And in both those cases, that was good. But, you know, now we're seeing things where it could go the other way. And I definitely worry.

Eric 36:04
I mean, literally, Louisiana has signed an extradition order for a doctor in New York state, who prescribed abortion pills to a patient in Louisiana, and they want this doctor extradited. And And the governor of New York State is like, that's never going to happen. And this is this now...

Dr. Josh Stout 36:25
Is what we're talking about. Exactly.

Eric 36:26
And how do we move forward from this?

Dr. Josh Stout 36:28
And we have a mayor of New York saying that ICE can go, as he said, into the prisons and take people out. Yeah, this is this is exactly the stuff that's going on.

Eric 36:36
And the only reason he did that is because he now has the the these charges that have been not done away with but have been withheld so that he can participate in their political maneuvers.

Dr. Josh Stout 36:47
Oh, yeah. He's definitely not getting a pardon.

Eric 36:49
No, he would have gotten a pardon already if he was going to get a pardon.

Dr. Josh Stout 36:51
Right. And then then the leash would be gone. Yeah. Yeah.

Eric 36:55
He has a leash. And this is what you're talking about. This is the interplay of federal power, State, local power and all the politics they're in. But, yeah, this is this is playing out in an intensely dangerous way.

Dr. Josh Stout 37:10
Absolutely.

Eric 37:11
You know, right now, those of us in New York. But for the I mean, this is a clarion call to, you know, states attorneys general across the country and the way business is going to be to conducted from now on. I don't want our way out to eat people's lives, both, you know, mentally and physically, like what you describe required require individuals giving themselves up and then an entire civil war like, yeah.

Dr. Josh Stout 37:37
Yeah, no, I mean, it was what we had done to ourselves as a country and it was a reckoning that was a long time coming. But yeah, it, I mean there was even, there were arguments within like the Liberals at the time so that Horace Greeley, you know, the, the, the go go west young man kind of so he he sees the, the, the, the frontier is limitless and not any inhabited at the time and like go, go, go and you know live there He he thought that, you know, we can take our society and move into a brave new world and free the slaves and everything will be great. Whereas Sydney, Howard Gay and Frederick Douglass thought that we lived in a fundamentally corrupted society where our own politics was unfixable in its current state, and the Constitution needed to be amended. And the, you know, Horace Greeley seemed to have won out in that debate. And I, I love incremental change for the good, and that is as long as it keeps moving forward. But because we didn't fix things at that time. I think that some of the problems we have with what's happening right now, people who, you know, ignore the Constitution.

Eric 38:50
Well, I mean, I honestly. Yes, people are now ignoring the Constitution because it took it took, you know, how many years? It took 100 in 100 or so years. How many years since this since the Civil War, 1865.

Dr. Josh Stout 39:03
134 years.

Eric 39:05
For us to realize that, oh, you know, if we just don't do what the law says that we don't have to do what the law says.

Dr. Josh Stout 39:10
Well, no, no, this isn't the first time it's happened many times. So, you know, Brown versus Board of Education, you know, Johnson had to call in federal troops. Yes. And, you know, that's what made him say, you know, we've lost the South for a generation. He had it off by like another generation.

Eric 39:25
Well, again, where I was going with this is that we didn't fully prosecute the Civil war like this is what this is still about right now today.

Dr. Josh Stout 39:33
Again, a record, a reckoning that was a long time coming and we didn't finish it because it's at its absolute evilest poison, most poisonous root is, the racism that legitimized slavery. We got rid of the slavery and we didn't de-legitimize racism. We made it even more scientific. It moved into the mainstream for the next, you know, almost hundred years and you know it. And that's a lot of what MAGA is bringing back. And they you know, they used the whole anti-diversity push is basically a way of saying any black person is incompetent because they were a diversity hire.

Eric 40:15
It's bigger than that. Anybody who's not white.

Dr. Josh Stout 40:18
Well, I mean yes. Anyone who's not white. Yeah.

Eric 40:20
It's so much bigger than that. Yeah. Yeah. I mean I, I think that the only way out of this is going to be finding different kinds of community. You know, I, I can't leave the conversation here because it's.

Dr. Josh Stout 40:39
No, I mean, it takes, it takes concerted effort over a long time. And, you know, we did end slavery and a lot of people suffered to make that happen. But, you know, that wasn't a thing that happened. And, you know, we can move forward as a country. It might take amending the Constitution.

Eric 40:54
Doesn't feel like we're moving forward now.

Dr. Josh Stout 40:56
No, not at this particular moment. We're at one of those times, like 1855, where, you know, they can just take people off the streets. And this has been made legal. And even if the states don't want it, there's nothing we can do about it. But we will keep moving forward.

Eric 41:13
We can call our representatives vigilance committees. Yeah, well, I mean, I mean, I think I think that part of what you were talking about is what happened before is kind of, you know, we're going to have to find ways to do that again.

Dr. Josh Stout 41:27
Yeah, we need to use technology. We need to use social media.

Eric 41:30
I've never heard of vigilance committees and we need to find ways to use the technology in smarter ways and get past this.