H.W. Brands

speaker

313 appearances 1 recordings 1 series first heard May 2026 last heard 12 May

H.W. Brands’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Open Book with Anthony Scaramucci · NYT Bestselling Historian: Why George Washington Was the Greatest Leader Who Ever Lived — H. W. Brands · 12 May 2026 podcast

That's what the labor force consisted of.

And if you had decided

that, okay, this is immoral and I gotta end it.

And you decided you're gonna turn your back, you're gonna free all your slaves, and you would have nothing to do with the institution of slavery, then the political institutions of Virginia would have nothing to do with you.

You would have been seen as an eccentric,

as a crazy person, a person who could not be trusted.

And so you can't have the one without the other.

And that's simply a function of the times.

Now, Washington himself, as far as I can tell, as a young man, in particular before the American Declaration of Independence, because this is a critical moment, thought very little about slavery as a moral question.

This is just the way the world worked.

The world has good stuff in it.

The world has bad stuff in it.

We get sick.

We die.

There are wars.

There are plagues.

There's all this stuff.

Slavery is on the negative side.

But Washington and many others would have seen it as a necessary evil.

We can't run the economy of Virginia without slaves.

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