Tim Barton

Uh, and so this has been a labor of love really for the entire time.

My dad's been doing this for the entire time I've been with them, but

And we focused on this probably for eight or nine months hard, trying to get all the stories lined up and writing and getting it ready to come out this summer.

surprised even you that you're going through and you're like people have got to know about this guy yeah so some of the stories some of the guys we already had a general understanding of but then when you do a deeper dive you're like this guy's even more impressive than we realized and glenn we talk about it all the time like it blows up all of the narratives we think um right like you know john witherspoon who was the president of what became princeton university trained more founding fathers than any other individual we know that he was a pastor but when you start looking into the fact oh

So he was a Presbyterian revivalist preacher from Scotland, and you start sending some of his background, you're like, this was far more of a fired up Christian pastor than even maybe a general service understanding would give you.

You look at guys, stories that might be more surprising that actually, one of the ones that got me, William Whipple, a signer of the Declaration, his father was a merchant trader and so had lots of trade ships, which is not surprising, and his family actually engaged, one of the things they did was engage in the slave trade.

And of like the hundred something voyages he took, it was like 12 or 13 voyages that had, they transported slaves.

So it's not the majority of what they did, but he grew up in a family that literally they were slave traders.

And he becomes a guy who his father gives him a slave.

He goes to fight in the American Revolution.

He signs a declaration.

He becomes then a soldier in the revolution.

He took the slave his dad gave him, but he's an abolitionist.

And he's like, this is dumb.

And at one point he was talking that,

The individual that was a slave is known as Prince Whipple.

Now, Prince was not an uncommon term for a lot of slaves back then.

And the last name was often the last name of whoever the slave master was.

But he tells Prince, he says, Prince, we must be men of courage and stand our ground.

And Prince tells William, he says, I would be a lot more courageous and I'd stand my ground a lot better if I had freedom.