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[Assistant] It required a smallish amount of initial capital to get started. But once you got going, you could make a pretty decent living as a small indigo farmer. And indigo wound up being a staple of the San Domingo economy.


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[Assistant] By the time of the revolution, it was solidly number three on the list of the big three crops.


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[Assistant] The other two were of course sugar and coffee, which became not just staples of the San Domingo economy, but they became staples of the world economy.


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[Assistant] By the 1780s, Saint-Domingue was producing a huge portion of Europe's sugar and fully 50% of its coffee. It was indeed exports from Saint-Domingue that transformed both from aristocratic luxuries to staples of the everyday diet.


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[Assistant] Now coffee arrived on the island much later, but sugar landed almost as soon as the French took over, and immediately it became the signature crop of the colony.


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[Assistant] Now getting a sugar plantation off the ground is incredibly expensive. You needed a ton of specialized equipment to actually extract the sugar from the cane, and then if you wanted to refine it, you needed even more specialized equipment.


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[Assistant] So getting into sugar was a rich man's game to begin with. And even then, it was going to put you into some serious debt before you harvested a single crop.


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[Assistant] This kind of outlay obviously lent itself to large plantations rather than tons of small freeholds.


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[Assistant] Most of the financing came from merchant houses in the French Atlantic port cities like Nantes and La Rochelle and Bordeaux.


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[Assistant] If your plantation turned out to be a success, then fortunes were there for the taking.


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[Assistant] But if for whatever reason you happen to face plant, the merchant houses took it over. And ultimately about half the sugar plantations in San Domingue were owned by these merchant houses and run by salaried administrators.


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[Assistant] Making a sugar plantation profitable required a ton of manual labor.


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[Assistant] And after the death of Louis XIV in 1713 and the end of his incessant wars against the rest of Europe, the French were able to plug into the African slave trade, mostly run by the Portuguese at this point.


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[Assistant] Indentured servants were completely abandoned in favor of Africans who were considered more suited for working in the climate.


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[Assistant] Some poor whites did try to emigrate to the colony, hoping to strike it rich somehow, but diseases and lack of capital doomed them all to an early pauper's grave.


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[Assistant] So as the colony grew, it was mostly a very small clique of white planters and administrators and a ton of slaves, which through the middle of the century were coming in at about ten to twenty thousand a year.


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[Assistant] While the slave population was up to nearly 80,000.


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[Assistant] Sugar needs flat land that is well irrigated to grow on. So the initial settlement boom was in the plains of the north. Now I made a map of the colony. Hey, you remember when I used to do that? So you can follow along with all this at home because it is important to understand the geography of the colony.


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[Assistant] The plains in the north were the first to be staked out as they were well run through by streams that made it ideal for raising sugar cane.


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[Assistant] The early sugar boom in the north led the port of Cap-Francais to become the most important city in the colony. It actually wound up as one of the most important cities in the western hemisphere.


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[Assistant] Usually referred to as Le Cap, which is what I'm mostly going to call it so I don't have to mangle Cap Francais all the time. By the time of the Revolution, the city had a population of nearly 20,000, so roughly the size of Boston on the eve of the American Revolution.


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[Assistant] Le Cap was the capital of the colony from the time it was founded in 1711 until the royal headquarters were transferred down to Port Prince in 1770 for reasons we'll talk about next week.


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[Assistant] As the lucrative sugar plantation surrounding La Cap made money hand over fist, the city rapidly grew and soon became known as the Paris of the Antilles.


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[Assistant] It was, in every way, a modern European city, with a regular gridwork street pattern, stone construction. It boasted a 1500 seat theater, cafes, philosophical societies, the works.


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[Assistant] It also became quite possibly the busiest port in the western hemisphere with ships constantly coming and going.


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[Assistant] The communication lag time between France and Saint-Domingue will become a running joke as the colony tries to keep up with the French Revolution.


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[Assistant] But though news often ran six weeks behind, the news did come in daily as ships departed France for Le Cap almost every day.


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[Assistant] Once all the best land in the north was taken, colonists started to move south into what will become the Western province.


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[Assistant] The largest city of the western province, Port-au-Prince, was founded in 1750, and it was a poor cousin of Le Cap, as were all the other quote unquote cities in the colony, which most of them were like glorified villages.


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[Assistant] There were two large plains that suited sugar production in the western province, though they were drier than the plains in the north and required concerted irrigation to make them work.


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[Assistant] The northern province and western province were separated by a steep mountain range that did not have a real road cut through it until Port-au-Prince was founded, so travel between the provinces was usually done entirely by water.


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[Assistant] South of the western province was the southern province, a thin east-west running peninsula of mountains that jutted out of the southwest side of Hispaniola.


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[Assistant] The western and southern provinces were likewise divided by sharp mountains. Haiti has some of the steepest and tallest mountains in the Caribbean. And that topography is going to be important as we watch the revolution unfold.


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[Assistant] The rougher terrain in the south made it less well suited to sugar and was thus the last province to be settled and ultimately the least populated of the three.


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[Assistant] The South, indeed, had a different character than the North, which was well connected to life back in Europe.


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[Assistant] International traders were probably willing to swing down to Port-au-Prince after arriving first in Le Cap, but after that, it was harder to convince them that it was worth it to keep on going.


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[Assistant] The main city of the southern province, Lakai, was actually on the other side of the peninsula. It was on the Caribbean sea side, not the Atlantic side.


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[Assistant] So the southern province tended to be a bit more independent minded than the western and northern provinces, and they looked to rival colonies in British Jamaica and Spanish Cuba not as rivals at all, but as trading partners, even though all of this was technically illegal.


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[Assistant] Contraband trade was a staple of the economy in the South.


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[Assistant] The next huge boost to the economy came when the coffee bean arrived.


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[Assistant] As the colony was hit with an influx of new colonists after the end of the Seven Years War, these guys discovered that they could grow coffee in the mountainous regions where sugar could not. So there was a major economic boom as coffee plantations sprang up everywhere.


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[Assistant] And because the coffee was not in competition with the sugar for land or resources or even buyers, it was just a pure addition to the profit side of the colony's ledger.


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[Assistant] Consumers back in Europe became addicted to both sugar and coffee, and collectively the sugar, coffee, and indigo plantations turned Saint-Domingue into the single most lucrative colony in the New World.


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[Assistant] I'd call it a gold mine, but by this point it was more lucrative than the Spanish gold mines.


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[Assistant] So, with a little history, geography, and economics under our belt.


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[Assistant] Let's move on to the three main groups who inhabited the colony and who will be the major players in the coming revolution. The whites, the free coloreds, and the slaves.


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[Assistant] So to start with the whites, they were actually divided into two informal groups, the grand blanc and the petit blanc.


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[Assistant] That is, the big whites and the small whites. And since a ton of my books just go ahead and call them the big whites and the small whites, I am going to too.


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[Assistant] The big whites were at the very top of the colonial pyramid.


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[Assistant] They represented a combination of the major planters and the principal traders and merchants in the colony.


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[Assistant] The leading planters were usually younger sons of nobility who had been looking for a way to establish an independent fortune for themselves often after a stint in the army.


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[Assistant] The Big White dominated colonial life. They owned practically everything and every one.


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[Assistant] But, there's one important thing to understand about the Big Whites. They were not really looking to make Sendomen their home.


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[Assistant] Their investments in the colony were about laying the groundwork for a fortune that would sustain them while they lived in France, where things were decent.


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[Assistant] Caribbean life was dangerous with its tropical diseases, monotonous with its never-changing seasons and oppressive heat,


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[Assistant] And boring, with only a few gambling dens and brothels to keep you entertained.


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[Assistant] The idea was to get out as soon as you possibly could.


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[Assistant] Of the main sugar plantations in the north, fully half were owned by absentee landlords who did their best to never come visit their estates in person.


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[Assistant] But that said, at any given time major landowners and traders did live in the colony and they were the dominant political and social force.


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[Assistant] The small whites, then, were all the other whites. And they were the men who actually ran the colony day in and day out.


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[Assistant] These could be the managers and stewards, agents of the absentee landlords, salaried employees of the merchant houses, and then on down in the urban areas you would find minor lawyers and notaries, various shop clerks and skilled artisans,


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[Assistant] Also thrown into this mix were the vagabonds that you always find in a colonial port city.


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[Assistant] None of them did any manual labor, or worked as a servant, because those jobs were exclusively done by slaves.


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[Assistant] Out in the rural areas, all the small whites worked on the plantations. If a plantation was absentee-owned, the hierarchy basically looked like this. A hired procurer lived in the nearest city and had power of attorney over the estate. The procurer would hire a manager to actually live out on the plantation and run the operation.


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[Assistant] Below the managers were overseers, who actually monitored the activities of the slaves, and these overseers were usually drawn from the ranks of the urban poor, or from the ranks of newer rivals, who had no other prospects.


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[Assistant] Even more so than the big white owners. All the managers wanted to do was make enough money to get the hell out of there, and they had very few scruples about how they were going to achieve that goal.


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[Assistant] With little actual oversight, they outright stole from their employers, stole from their slaves, put slaves to work on personal projects, and were free to abuse any slave who dared challenge them.


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[Assistant] The managers would be prime targets for the machetes during the initial rebellion.


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[Assistant] Above and between the big whites and the small whites was a little group of royal administrators, all native French, all there to do their jobs, make some money, and get out.


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[Assistant] At the top of the royal administrative hierarchy was the royal governor.


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[Assistant] A soldier whose principal occupation was the defense of the colony. He had at his disposal two regiments of regular soldiers and control over the local militias.


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[Assistant] But the governor also had a wide, and often self-proclaimed and self-serving, jurisdiction over judicial and administrative affairs.


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[Assistant] Technically though, this was all the purview of the second man in the administrative hierarchy, the Intendant, who was the head civilian and whose portfolio included justice and finance.


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[Assistant] Beneath these two were about 500 salaried bureaucrats who represented the will and power of the king in the colony.


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[Assistant] And as we will see next week, these royal officials were often at loggerheads with the big whites who resented these bureaucrats coming in and bossing them around.


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[Assistant] So, that covers the white population. And on the eve of the revolution, they numbered about 30,000.


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[Assistant] Since 99% of the men who sought their fortunes in Saint-Domingue were, duh, men, the colony was soon populated with a significant number of free-coloreds.


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[Assistant] Now you will see them sometimes referred to as the mulattoes, but no one today calls them that because A, it's a slur, and B, as we'll see next week, it's technically inaccurate according to the handbook everybody started using to determine racial status.


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[Assistant] The Free Colors were the product of the unions of white men and black women, and then the subsequent interrelationships between everyone over the years.


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[Assistant] Now, oddly enough, race prejudice was not particularly strong for most of the history of the colony, and there was nothing abnormal about a white man taking a black mistress or a black wife. Indeed, according to the law, if a white man married a black slave woman, she and her children automatically became free.


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[Assistant] But aside from the, dare I call them, positive relationships, where a white master married a black slave, raised colored children, and lived happily ever after, there was also a ton of just straight up rape.


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[Assistant] And if one of these sexual assaults happened to produce a child, many of the fathers were happy to keep both the mothers and even their own children in slavery if it suited them.


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[Assistant] But over time, more and more free colored children grew up and became free colored adults, and then they intermarried with each other, or with other whites or other blacks to produce more free colored children, and soon there was a whole free colored community.


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[Assistant] By the time of the revolution, this community was just under 30,000, so almost as large as the white population.


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[Assistant] And according to all French law, there was nothing about race itself that barred you from enjoying normal rights.


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[Assistant] They could do anything any free Frenchman could. They could marry, enter into contracts, live wherever they wanted, get educated, inherit property, bequeath property, without limit or restriction.


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[Assistant] The wealthiest of the free colors were not as rich as the big whites, but they did amass considerable wealth and property over the years, including of course slaves to work on their estates.


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[Assistant] Slavery was an economic condition at this point. It was not a racial condition. And even men who had themselves been freed later owned slaves.


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[Assistant] Newly arrived white men were all too happy to marry free colored women because they were often very well connected and came with property that would immediately vault the newcomer into the property classes.


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[Assistant] As we will see next week, however, after the end of the Seven Years War in 1763, French colonial policy would change and create a legal category of non-white, and we'll talk about why they did this and what the consequences were for everyone.


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[Assistant] On the eve of the Haitian Revolution, there were more than 500,000 slaves in Saint-Domingue.


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[Assistant] By way of contrast, the ratio of free to slave in the American South on the eve of the American Revolution was just a bit under 50-50. One slave per free inhabitant. In San Domingue, this ratio was 10 to 1. So this was not a society that had slaves, this was a slave society.


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[Assistant] Once slave imports to the French side of Hispaniola got going in earnest after 1713, about 10 to 20,000 slaves were brought in annually.


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[Assistant] Then those slaves would be transported to the new world where the new slaves would be sold and the product of existing slaves would be loaded back up and taken to Europe to sell for a huge profit.


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[Assistant] The usual process of enslavement began with either direct European raids into the interior of West Central Africa, or with tribes selling other tribes to the whites, often enemies defeated in various tribal conflicts.


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[Assistant] These new slaves would then be marched to the coast, sold to European traders, and packed into the holds of ships with about three by five feet allotted to each human being for the long voyage across the Atlantic.


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[Assistant] The hold of a slave ship is one of the most nightmarish things you can imagine. Just putrid, sick, suffocating, the dead piling up around you as you have no room to move or to breathe, about 15% of the Africans would die en route. The rest would emerge malnourished, weak, and traumatized.


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[Assistant] The slave ships would then stop off at various ports of call to sell the men and women to eager colonial buyers.


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[Assistant] In San Domingue, this usually took place in Le Cap, and upon being purchased, the slave would be branded and let off to whatever fate awaited them.


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[Assistant] Because the value of the individual slave was nothing compared to the profits being made from his or her work.


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[Assistant] Over the course of the 1700s, roughly 675,000 slaves were imported into Saint-Domingue and combined with contraband, off-the-books imports from the British or the Dutch,


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[Assistant] That number might have hit a full million, or about 10% of the total trade in African slaves in the whole sorry history of the business.


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[Assistant] The rate picked up markedly after the end of the American War of Independence, which freed up the New World economy and its trade routes.


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[Assistant] The mortality rate of the slaves coupled with the huge influx of new slaves meant that on the eve of the revolution, 70% of the slaves and fully two thirds of the colonies population had been born in Africa.


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[Assistant] When a new slave arrived at his or her plantation, they found themselves in an alien world.


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[Assistant] For one thing, the enslaved Africans represented an array of tribes who spoke a variety of language, practiced their own customs, and were just different people.


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[Assistant] If history had reversed itself, and it was Africans who enslaved Europeans and not the other way around, this was basically some new English slave being thrown into a plantation with some Germans, a few Italians, Russians, and Norwegians, all white, but all different from each other.


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[Assistant] And that's to say nothing of the men and women born into slavery, who already spoke Creole, the mix of French and African that was the lingua franca of the colony.


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[Assistant] The new arrivals were just thrust into this alien world and some of them might have been chiefs or respected leaders back home and being reduced to slavery was an intolerable affront to their dignity. They actively resented their condition and they were likely to resist or just commit suicide after a few years.


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[Assistant] The treatment of slaves was allegedly governed by the Code Noir, which had been promulgated in 1685, and that applied to slaves and owners in all French colonies.


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[Assistant] Slaves were legally human property, but they did have some basic protections.


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[Assistant] The owner was supposed to provide adequate provisions, two new sets of clothes per year and educate them in Christianity.


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[Assistant] There was also a provision allowing for a slave to appeal to royal authorities in cases of mistreatment, but you can imagine how many slaves were told about that clause.


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[Assistant] In practice though, the code noir was just ignored.


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[Assistant] For example, owners found it much less expensive to give the slaves small pots of land to work for themselves to produce enough food to sustain themselves rather than pay for provisions.


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[Assistant] Thus, any period of rest or day off for the slaves were not for rest at all, but rather for working your own plot.


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[Assistant] But these plots did provide a small way for slaves to make a little money, because they would often take some of their produce down to the Sunday markets to sell.


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[Assistant] All with the master's permission, of course, because one of the best ways to keep a slave docile is to hold out the hope that they might one day be able to buy their freedom.


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[Assistant] Which was something that happened just enough to hold that hope out there.


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[Assistant] So to take your average sugar plantation, the able-bodied men, that is not counting children, old men, if they existed, and the recent arrivals, worked in the fields.


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[Assistant] This meant digging canals, tilling the soil, planting the sugar cane, and then harvesting it.


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[Assistant] Week in and week out until you dropped dead.


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[Assistant] And in case you're wondering, yes, cutting and harvesting sugarcane with a machete is awful. The plants are very sharp, you get covered in little nicks and cuts, and then the sweat gets into the cuts, and if you're exhausted and just stop working for a minute, you get whipped or beaten. I mean, this is pure misery. This is real slavery.


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[Assistant] Once the cane was cut, it had to be immediately fed into mills to squeeze the juice out, because if the cane sat out, the juice would turn starchy and lose its all-important sweetness.


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[Assistant] So during the harvest season, which ran from December to July,


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[Assistant] The mills would be run practically 24 hours a day by rotating teams, and this is usually what the women did.


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[Assistant] The combination of overwork and lack of sleep would inevitably lead to accidents, and if even a little part of your hand got caught in the mill, it was liable to just suck your whole arm right off, and mutilated slaves were a common sight on every plantation.


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[Assistant] After the juice was pressed it had to be boiled for hours and stirred constantly.


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[Assistant] Don't fall in or get hit with any boiling hot sugar, or again, it's death and mutilation.


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[Assistant] Then this hot liquid would be poured into a mold to harden for shipping back to Europe, where it would net the owner a fortune, leaving behind it of course a trail of mutilated and dead bodies.


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[Assistant] Now the plantation itself, as we've already discussed, was run by a manager and his hired white overseers, but the actual running of the plantation was done by drivers, slaves themselves who actually ran the work gangs.


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[Assistant] They were the ones who got the slaves up, put them to work, made sure they stayed working, they controlled the whip and dealt out all punishments.


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[Assistant] Almost always creole slaves, that is slaves born in the colony, they were given perks and special status because good drivers were the difference between a successful plantation and a failing one.


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[Assistant] But though these drivers basically worked for the whites, they were also the leaders inside the slave communities, and when the revolt came in 1791, they were the principal leaders of that revolt.


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[Assistant] So the sugar plantations used up most of the island's slaves. But if you got lucky, you might get sent off to a coffee plantation where the work was merely monotonous rather than fatal.


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[Assistant] Coffee plantations were also usually smaller and far less likely to be owned by absentee owners, which usually meant conditions were better.


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[Assistant] About 80% of the rural slaves worked out in the field, with the other 20% working in the households, performing every duty a house required. Cooks, maids, butlers, nurses, or performing skill jobs, like coachmen, barrel builders, sugar production assistants, which required a great deal of training.


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[Assistant] This led to a natural house slave-field slave dynamic, with the better treated house slaves tending to identify with their masters rather than the field slaves.


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[Assistant] But as with the drivers, the house-field distinction was by no means rigid, and many of the principal leaders of the revolt, and the men who would one day rule the island, came from the ranks of these privileged slaves.


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[Assistant] Toussaint Louverture was a coachman, and the future Emperor Henri Christophe was a waiter.


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[Assistant] These privileged slaves were the men who would overthrow their masters.


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[Assistant] Okay, so now that we've got some good background material to work with, we'll be able to turn to the complex interrelationship between and within these groups.


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[Assistant] And next week, we will pick up the thread of colonial history at about 1763 with the end of the Seven Years War, which brought major changes to French colonial policy. And by the time of the Revolution,


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[Assistant] Everyone will be at everyone else's throats over everything.


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[Assistant] And when the year of revolt comes in 1791, it is not just the slaves who will rise up.


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[Assistant] Everybody is going to go into revolt against everybody else.


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[Assistant] This week's episode is brought to you by Hillsdale College.


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[Assistant] If you're like most listeners, you listen to this podcast because you know you can learn valuable lessons from history. One of the most unique characters in history was a man who led his country through incredible peril in a time when the fate of the modern world as we know it hung in the balance. And yet, this man inspired his countrymen to endure a conflict like few others.


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[Assistant] Our friends at Hillsdale College would like to invite you to learn more about the incredible life of this fascinating man, one of the greatest leaders and statesmen of our time, Winston Churchill.


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[Assistant] You can get exclusive access to this new free online course studying the life of Churchill by going to hillsdale.edu slash revolutions and signing up today.


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[Assistant] Almost a million people have taken Hillsdale's renowned courses like Constitution 101 and American Heritage, and as a history fan, you won't want to miss this one.


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[Assistant] Get exclusive access to Hillsdale College's new course on Winston Churchill right now. Go to hillsdale.edu slash revolutions and sign up today.


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[Assistant] After arresting and deporting Toussaint Louverture from Saint-Domingue in June 1802, the young French General Charles Leclerc was kind of surprised to discover the expulsion of General Toussaint did not immediately spark a mass uprising.


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[Assistant] The cultivators in the fields had long ago grown disenchanted with Governor for Life Tucson, and his senior officers more or less engaged in a conspiracy to sit on their hands and do nothing, while their old leader and patron was shipped off.


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[Assistant] But this was about the only piece of good news Leclerc could point to for the rest of his short life. Because from here on out, his attempt to reassert French control over Saint-Domingue was going to be a running disaster.


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[Assistant] Now some of these disasters would be of his own making, some would be beyond his control, but they would all combine to make the Leclerc expedition one of the all-time great debacles in French history.


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[Assistant] But obviously, Leclerc did not know how bad it was going to get, and he had some hope that the worst was in fact behind him.


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[Assistant] The 75-odd-day campaign he had waged between mid-February 1802 and the end of April had been hard and bloody, costing him somewhere between 6 and 9,000 men.


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[Assistant] But the fighting was now over, and it was time to settle into peaceful administration.


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[Assistant] And to help him run the colony, Leclerc had with him two senior partners.


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[Assistant] Possibly reflecting the three-man style consulate that governed France, Bonaparte had envisioned a similar three-man system for Saint-Domingue.


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[Assistant] Leclerc would of course be the captain general in charge of all military matters, but he would be joined by an administrative prefect who would be in charge of the civilian government and a grand judge who would run the legal system. I won't trouble you with their names because they're not gonna last long once the yellow fever sets in. The first problem these guys faced was the problem.


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[Assistant] How to balance the rights asserted by the free black population with the need to keep them all doing plantation work.


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[Assistant] Now Leclerc started out displaying some generous leniency, and he was in fact taken aback by how draconian Toussaint's final labor code was, and he said, it is so strict that I would never dare to propose one like this given the current situation.


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[Assistant] So after the ceasefire in May, Leclerc promulgated a new code, and while it was modeled on Toussaint, it was not as harsh, and in particular sought to curb the abuse of cultivators by the soldiers.


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[Assistant] But the big question on everybody's mind was, are the French going to reimpose slavery?


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[Assistant] Now as we'll see in a moment, it's clear that re-imposing slavery was Bonaparte's preference for the colony.


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[Assistant] But he also seems to have recognized that trying to re-enslave the blacks right away would backfire.


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[Assistant] Not only is there no evidence that Leclerc departed France with orders to reimpose slavery, but Leclerc himself was an idealistic young man who was on record supporting emancipation.


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[Assistant] But that said, getting the blacks to work was imperative, because as it turned out, the colony was in much worse shape than Bonaparte or Leclerc had expected.


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[Assistant] As we discussed two episodes back, the first console recognized that the expedition would not be able to feed itself.


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[Assistant] But he did not realize that it would also not be able to pay for itself.


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[Assistant] So Bonaparte had sent Leclerc off with almost no hard cash. The general theory being that when Leclerc got to the colony, he would be able to use the mountains of coffee and sugar to get cash that would help him buy more supplies and pay his men.


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[Assistant] But despite Toussaint Louverture's best efforts, the Saint-Domingue economy had not come close to recovering from ten years of revolution. And on top of that, the two most recent conflicts, the War of Knives and then Leclerc's own campaigns, represented a major step backward.


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[Assistant] Cities across the colony, including La Cap itself, were now burned out husks. Plantations everywhere had been destroyed by advancing and retreating armies over the past two years. Put bluntly, San Domingue was not producing what Leclerc needed it to produce to pay for all the other stuff that he needed.


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[Assistant] This lack of hard cash was then compounded by his bad relationship with the United States, from whom he needed to buy supplies.


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[Assistant] Forcing merchants to take French debt notes as payment was considered little better than theft by the Americans, who then went home and complained.


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[Assistant] This stirred up a little media firestorm in cities in New England and the mid-Atlantic, and American public opinion turned sharply against the French.


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[Assistant] But it wasn't just public opinion that Leclerc had to contend with, nor were his own mistakes the sole cause of his problems.


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[Assistant] The one really big problem was that ever since President Jefferson's first conversation with the French envoy in the summer of 1801, when he said, yeah, we'll supply you and starve out General Tucson,


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[Assistant] Very troubling news had come in from the American ambassador in London.


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[Assistant] The French and Spanish have signed a secret treaty to retrocede the Louisiana territory.


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[Assistant] So whatever that expedition in San Domingue is up to, it's part of a much bigger plan than simply reclaiming some little sugar island.


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[Assistant] The Louisiana territory and access to the Mississippi River were already a huge deal for the American government. The cotton explosion in the south was just getting underway, pushing American planters west.


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[Assistant] The Spanish controlling access to the Mississippi River was bad enough. The French Republic under Napoleon Bonaparte controlling it? That was something else completely.


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[Assistant] So instead of receiving support from the United States as they expected, General Leclerc's agents ran into carefully worded proclamations of neutrality.


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[Assistant] Leclerc dispatched an agent to Philadelphia to float a bond and try to raise some hard cash, and this agent found nothing but hostile refusals to invest.


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[Assistant] Possibly. This was because word had gone round that it wasn't necessarily in America's best interest to be supporting this expedition.


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[Assistant] Failing to raise money in the private sector, these agents then turned to the Jefferson administration and asked point blank for a loan, to which Secretary of State James Madison said, no.


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[Assistant] Madison wouldn't even commit to stopping American merchants from trading with any rebels in San Domingue, saying only that the merchants wouldn't be protected by the American Navy.


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[Assistant] Privately, both Jefferson and Madison were now happy to let the Leclerc expedition turn into a Caribbean quagmire to forestall whatever other dreams for the Western Hemisphere First Consul Bonaparte may be harboring.


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[Assistant] But money and economics and even international politics were about to become the least of General Leclerc's worries.


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[Assistant] Because in April 1802, just as the initial French campaigns were winding down,


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[Assistant] The mosquitoes started to swarm and the worst yellow fever epidemic on record hit San Domingue.


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[Assistant] Now disease was expected and had been allegedly accounted for, but the yellow fever epidemic of 1802 came on so fast and was so destructive that it would wreck everything Bonaparte and Leclerc had planned.


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[Assistant] There were two big reasons the epidemic got out of hand so quickly.


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[Assistant] First and most obvious, between the soldiers and sailors and their various attendants and families.


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[Assistant] Somewhere just shy of 40,000 people had arrived in the colony from Europe, every one of them susceptible to contracting the disease.


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[Assistant] Second, though, is that with so much of the urban and municipal infrastructure of the colony devastated, what meager medical accommodations the colony had were totally inadequate. Sanitation was nonexistent. There was no treatment. Hospitals were just places you went to die. And boy, how did they start to die.


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[Assistant] On May the 8th, 1802, that is the day after the peace was worked out with Toussaint and the other Creole generals, Leclerc wrote back to Bonaparte reporting on the situation.


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[Assistant] Of the 20,000 soldiers he had come over with, he already was down to just 12,000. Now most of those were casualties of the recent campaigns, but Yellow Fever was really starting to take its toll.


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[Assistant] LeClaire estimated that 200 to 250 men were contracting the disease every day with no end in sight.


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[Assistant] Hoping that he had accomplished enough of his mission to be relieved, LeClair then asked to be allowed to return home.


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[Assistant] No doubt praying that he would be replaced before the yellow fever got to him too.


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[Assistant] Those who contracted the disease followed a predictable clockwork pattern. They would get sick, they would get worse, and then they would die.


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[Assistant] And any new arrivals in San Domingue were now walking into a cloud of death and disease.


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[Assistant] Through the summer of 1802, men would arrive, step foot on shore, and be dead a week later.


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[Assistant] Both naval and merchant ships would arrive in La Cap or Port-au-Prince or wherever, and immediately everybody on board would just die.


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[Assistant] A ship from Bordeaux saw 40 of 48 passengers die within days of arriving.


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[Assistant] Every single person on a Swedish merchant ship died except for one cabin boy. The empty ship was then put up for auction.


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[Assistant] The Navy fared no better. And one of the criticisms of Leclerc is that he just let the ships sit anchored in the harbor, where their crews died along with everyone else, instead of sending them out to sail around until the plague had gone dormant for the winter.


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[Assistant] By the end of summer, ships of the line that had crew compliments of 400 were now being manned by skeleton crews of just 150, with many of those local coloreds and blacks pressed into service.


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[Assistant] In short order, the grand judge and the administrative prefect and their entire families were dead.


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[Assistant] When the senior military staff of the expedition was utterly devastated. In total.


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[Assistant] 27 high-ranking French generals died either in combat or of yellow fever during the Leclerc Expedition, which apparently makes it the single deadliest campaign for French generals for the entire run of the Napoleonic Wars.


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[Assistant] The officers who had once eagerly signed up for the campaign were now begging to go home. And there was no single assignment more coveted than to be a courier put in charge of Leclerc's dispatches back to Bonaparte.


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[Assistant] Getting out of the colony was now every man's top priority.


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[Assistant] And just to jump ahead a little bit, by the end of the year of the 40,000 or so who arrived in February, somewhere on the order of 20 to 25,000 would be dead by the end of the year.


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[Assistant] But even with the disease running rampant, Leclerc wanted to keep pushing forward with his plans. And his next step was disarming the population of Saint-Domingue.


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[Assistant] Between the 30,000 guns Sontenacs and the Third Commission had come over with, the munitions left behind by the British when they withdrew, and then the additional 30,000 guns Tucson had bought from the Americans between 1800 and 1801, it's estimated there were something like 100,000 guns floating around out in the colony.


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[Assistant] So once it became clear that the deportation of Tucson wasn't going to spark a mass revolt, Leclerc ordered his officers to begin the process of disarmament.


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[Assistant] And taking the lead in this process would be none other than General Dessaline who turned his fierce attention on any cultivator who thought they could defy the order to hand over their weapons.


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[Assistant] Dessaline was a black supremacist. Yes, he was.


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[Assistant] But as he's shown in his willingness to crush cultivators under his heel, racial solidarity was not an end unto itself.


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[Assistant] He was so ruthless in his methods that Leclerc soon nicknamed him the Butcher of the Blacks and had very little reason to doubt Dessalines loyalty to the French.


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[Assistant] Running parallel to disarmament was Leclerc's plan to reorganize the military forces under his command.


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[Assistant] On one side, he had the soldiers who would come over with him from France. And on the other, he had all these black and colored colonial units. Leclerc wanted to integrate these two forces.


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[Assistant] Now the standard method of military integration, though, was a lot like any merger between two companies, where the employees of one of the two companies are clearly being favored.


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[Assistant] As units were combined, entire black companies were simply slated to be disbanded. Drop off your weapons and go home.


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[Assistant] Now since these men had a lot riding on their status as soldiers, rather than cultivators, they were not happy about this one bit.


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[Assistant] So many went home, but they did not drop off their guns.


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[Assistant] Black and colored officers meanwhile might be retained, but with far less authority.


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[Assistant] Generals and colonels who had grown accustomed to autonomy now answered directly to white officers who hung right over their shoulders.


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[Assistant] Desolene, for example, was kept in a state of constant supervision.


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[Assistant] Lower level officers, captains and lieutenants found themselves little better than common soldiers now.


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[Assistant] And they too might simply find themselves unceremoniously dismissed from service one day. So anger and resentment was not confined to the men dismissed. It festered in the ranks of those who remained, both because of the indignities they now labored under, and the knowledge that their unit might be the next to be disbanded.


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[Assistant] Now probably what Leclerc should have done is put off any reorganization plan until winter, when the yellow fever had passed and he could properly assess what was actually left of his own strength. But this is hindsight talking.


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[Assistant] And when he got going with reorganization in June, he did not know that the yellow fever was going to be as bad as it was.


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[Assistant] Was going to fatally undermine his authority over the black and colored population.


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[Assistant] First Consul Bonaparte, who was about to become First Consul for life Bonaparte by the by, induced his compliant tribunate to repeal one of the most revolutionary decrees of the French Revolution.


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[Assistant] The Law of February the 4th, 1794, which outlawed slavery everywhere in the French Empire.


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[Assistant] But this was just the du jour confirmation of what had already become de facto consulate policy.


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[Assistant] Bonaparte had already made it clear in Article 91 of the Constitution that the colonies would be governed by special laws.


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[Assistant] And he had in fact already applied this mentality to the slavery issue.


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[Assistant] A French colony way off in the Indian Ocean had successfully resisted emancipation, and when Bonaparte came to power, he said, that's fine, you can keep your slaves, I have no problem with that.


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[Assistant] Well now that the law of February the 4th had been repealed, he made this even more explicit by saying that slavery could continue in any French colony where it had not yet been abolished.


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[Assistant] In the Caribbean, this specifically meant Martinique.


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[Assistant] Now we haven't talked about this because we've had plenty to talk about, but Martinique had been captured by the British in 1794, and so emancipation had never come to the island.


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[Assistant] But the recent Treaty of Amiens stipulated that the British would now hand the colony back to France and so the slaves of Martinique, who had never been freed, would now never be freed.


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[Assistant] Bonaparte followed this up with an order allowing France and allied merchants to once again partake of the slave trade.


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[Assistant] And then he followed this up with a law in July 1802 that forbade any black or colored from entering the Metropole, that is all of France, without explicit permission.


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[Assistant] But what would prove even more troubling than the unbroken continuation of slavery in Martinique or the racist laws being passed back in France?


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[Assistant] Were events in nearby Guadalupe, where emancipation had gone into effect.


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[Assistant] As a side project to the massive Leclerc expedition, Bonaparte had sent a smaller force to Guadalupe to ensure the Metropole's authority there, and since there were not as many slaves, nor had Guadalupe been wracked by revolt on the scale of Saint-Domingue,


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[Assistant] The commander of the expedition had orders to reimpose slavery in all but name.


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[Assistant] And this is beyond even Toussaint Louverture's Orwellian freedom is slavery.


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[Assistant] The commander stripped free blacks of all civil rights, denied them the right to move around, and cancelled all wages or profit sharing that may have been implemented since 1794.


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[Assistant] And this actually did spark a violent rebellion on the island.


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[Assistant] One that ended dramatically with cornered rebels holed up on a plantation blowing themselves up rather than accepting re-enslavement.


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[Assistant] But for our purposes here, the important thing was that at an early stage of this fight, the French arrested and deported 1,200 black foremen from Guadalupe.


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[Assistant] And at some point in July 1802, French naval vessels holding many of these prisoners paid a call to Le Cap.


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[Assistant] And while bobbing in the harbor, a number of the captured Guadalupe foremen managed to escape. When they told their story to the locals in San Domingue,


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[Assistant] Word spread through the colony faster than fire through a cane field. Guadalupe was being re-enslaved. And we are next.


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[Assistant] This chilling news led Blacks all over the colony to resist anything Leclerc and his officers were trying to do. Which really ticked off Leclerc.


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[Assistant] All of a sudden there arrived the decree that legalizes the colonial slave trade along with letters from merchants in Nantes and Le Havre asking if they can sell blacks here.


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[Assistant] Worse still, the general in command of Guadalupe has just issued an order reestablishing slavery.


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[Assistant] With the situation now more dangerous than ever, Leclerc asked in this letter, and almost all of his subsequent letters, to be relieved of his command. Requests that would never be granted.


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[Assistant] So though all the senior black and colored military officers and all the soldiers under their command had submitted to French authority, that did not mean that everyone under arms had submitted.


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[Assistant] As I mentioned back in episode 4.9, there were all over San Domingue.


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[Assistant] Independent, unaligned communities of blacks who rejected slavery, the labor coats, plantation work, military service, everything.


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[Assistant] These communities had not reconciled themselves to Andre Rigo or Toussaint Louverture when they had been in charge, and they sure as hell were not going to reconcile themselves to Leclerc.


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[Assistant] So after the regular army defected to the French, these communities continued to wage guerilla campaigns from their mountain bases of the interior.


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[Assistant] And these guys were everywhere, in the north, the west, and the south provinces.


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[Assistant] These communities fought a lonely campaign for independence, until the word from Guadalupe hit.


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[Assistant] At which point they became the fighting gorilla wing of a much larger, but massively decentralized resistance movement.


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[Assistant] Down in the South Province especially, black workers in both the cities and the fields started to organize.


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[Assistant] Their leaders were not grand admirals or governors general, but butchers and fishermen, random foremen and cultivators. Certainly as many women as men.


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[Assistant] The old leadership may have abandoned them, but they were determined to die before returning to slavery.


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[Assistant] Now resistance could be as low level as the old slave strategies of work slowdown, sabotage, and theft.


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[Assistant] But in both Jeremie and Lacan, out on the edge of the southern peninsula.


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[Assistant] Coordinated efforts aimed at assassination, destruction of property and probably more soon develop.


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[Assistant] Because their places were simply taken by a new cohort of resistance leaders.


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[Assistant] The summer of 1802 soon turned into one of those classic occupation dynamics where the French had to continually up their level of repression, which only sparked even greater and wider determination to resist.


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[Assistant] The woman who today might not want to get involved would tomorrow start plotting to slit your throat after you summarily arrest and execute her son on some flimsy pretext.


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[Assistant] On August the 25th, LeClaire wrote back to Bonaparte, acknowledging the problem.


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[Assistant] It is quite simple to arrest them all on the same day, but I am using these generals to stop the revolts that are still breaking out, and in some districts are taking on an alarming appearance.


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[Assistant] It is not enough to have deported Tucson. There are 2,000 leaders here who need deporting. And frankly, every day there were 2,000 more.


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[Assistant] With resistance brewing, fallout from the military reorganization started to become a major problem.


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[Assistant] Through July and August, discharged soldiers started merging with the guerilla bands and the civilian resistance bringing with them arms, supplies, to say nothing of their military experience and training.


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[Assistant] And then a principal object of the resistance became getting soldiers still in service to desert their posts and come over to the rebels. And they did. Every day they did.


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[Assistant] Sometimes it was just one soldier walking away from his post, or maybe a small group leaving together.


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[Assistant] Other times it would be whole units deserting together. They'd go out on patrol and just never come back. Or even scarier for the white soldiers, blacks would suddenly turn on them in the middle of a fight.


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[Assistant] They'd all be fighting some guerilla band together and suddenly the black soldiers would turn and start firing on the whites, who had minutes before been their quote unquote comrades.


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[Assistant] Meanwhile, the senior black and colored officers had grown thoroughly disenchanted with the French.


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[Assistant] Word that they were now barred from the metropole, that coloreds were forbidden to use the title citizen, that the slave trade had been reactivated? It all spelled their inevitable doom.


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[Assistant] In August, one of Tucson's most loyal generals, a guy named Charles Belair, officially Tucson's nephew, but possibly his illegitimate son,


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[Assistant] ...had already turned, and along with his wife Santee, secretly coordinating and aiding the rebels of the West Province from his position as a general in the French army.


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[Assistant] Shortly thereafter though, he took to the mountains and declared himself an insurrection.


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[Assistant] But the other generals were not ready to go that far just yet, and General Dessalines took the lead in tracking down the rebellious Belaire and Santee.


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[Assistant] With the colony slipping out of his control, Leclerc's letters back to Bonaparte showed the general slowly descending into a fog of despair, paranoia, and anger. These letters had two constant refrains.


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[Assistant] You have to send me more troops, and you have to send me home.


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[Assistant] Perhaps thinking it unseemly for a man to beg for reinforcements while also begging to leave, Bonaparte continued to send more men, but not approve Leclerc's request to be relieved of his command.


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[Assistant] Between July and October 1802, the first consul would send 10,000 more men.


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[Assistant] But with the depressing reports about yellow fever in hand, the first consul was no longer willing to send his best men.


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[Assistant] And instead started using brigades of foreign auxiliaries from countries now under French domination. Mostly Swiss and Germans, but most famously, Polish battalions.


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[Assistant] Because you can't do early modern revolutionary history without the polls showing up somewhere.


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[Assistant] So the first Polish legion of 2500 arrived in early September 1802, after being told that the French were carrying on the struggle for freedom and equality in the New World. But then on arrival, the Poles discovered that this had all been a lie.


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[Assistant] And that clearly the French were fighting to impose slavery, not abolish it.


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[Assistant] After suffering from a heavy dose of disillusionment, combined with yellow fever and death in combat conditions they were not prepared for,


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[Assistant] Who, it was obvious, were the ones actually fighting for freedom and equality.


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[Assistant] And it was just before the polls arrived in early September that we get our first piece of really hard evidence that the French were actually fighting for re-enslavement.


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[Assistant] At the end of August, Leclerc responded to a coded message from the head of the naval ministry by saying quote,


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[Assistant] But after the innumerable proclamations that I have issued here, assuring the blacks of their freedom, I do not want to have to contradict myself.


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[Assistant] Assure the first console, however, that my successor will find everything in place.


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[Assistant] And from the context of this letter, it's clear that the government order he referred to was slavery.


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[Assistant] But events were now moving very quickly, and Leclerc's mind was racing.


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[Assistant] No longer a cavalier idealist, Leclerc was now an aggressive paranoid. He refused to leave his residence in Le Cap and allowed almost no one to enter, hopefully quarantining himself from the plague that swirled all around him.


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[Assistant] Seeing black and colored rebels everywhere, colonial soldiers deserting to the enemy and his own men dying like flies.


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[Assistant] LeClaire's promise to quote, have everything in place.


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[Assistant] Was uh, about to take very sinister overtones.


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[Assistant] Leclerc now believed that to impose French rule, he had, quote, nothing left but terror. And so terror is what he ordered.


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[Assistant] Men and women captured under arms had always been executed. But by the end of summer, the killing became indiscriminate.


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[Assistant] At the end of August, 60 men were hanged in a single day in Le Cap. In early September, the prisons of Le Cay were emptied, with as many as 350 men and women killed in one mass execution.


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[Assistant] With plantation foreman now identified as likely resistance ringleaders, it basically became a crime to be a foreman.


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[Assistant] And arrests and executions were quick and devoid of any legality.


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[Assistant] French units simply went out on patrol, rounded up anybody who might be a resistance member, which at this point was anyone,


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[Assistant] And hanged, shot, or crucified them as a lesson to the others.


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[Assistant] But the only lesson the blacks seemed to learn was we have to resist these French bastards at all costs.


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[Assistant] But the guys who got the worst of it were the black and colored soldiers who remained loyal to the French.


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[Assistant] The men who had stayed behind when their comrades deserted were not rewarded for their loyalty.


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[Assistant] But punished for their imaginary future crimes.


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[Assistant] Either because the French officers thought they would inevitably desert or believing that some had stayed behind on purpose to undermine the military from within.


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[Assistant] Arrests and executions of the men who refused to desert the French became a daily occurrence in September and October, which only of course increased the number of desertions.


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[Assistant] The black and colored officers, meanwhile, were all themselves on the verge of deserting.


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[Assistant] Dessaline by this point was no longer destroying the weapons he was seizing, he was stockpiling them for later. Or oftentimes just making a show of disarming civilians, and then sending their guns back as soon as the white officers weren't looking. But it was not just the black generals like Dessaline.


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[Assistant] Alexander Petion, who had come over with the expedition and fought valiantly at the vicious siege of Creta-Pirro in April, was now ready to bolt.


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[Assistant] Leclerc's turn to terror, coupled with the news that he was banned from returning to France because of the color of his skin, left Pétion ready to switch sides as soon as it would have the most impact.


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[Assistant] But there was still some internal maneuvering to contend with, and so while Dessaline, for example, prepared to make his own break, he continued to hunt General Belair and his wife Santee,


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[Assistant] Eventually he tracked them down, had them arrested, and then forwarded them on to the French for execution in early October.


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[Assistant] And Dessaline took the opportunity to eliminate a strong rival from the equation before the War of Independence got going in earnest.


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[Assistant] In mid-October though, the time had come for everyone to bolt.


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[Assistant] The yellow fever epidemic was finally starting to slack.


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[Assistant] The white forces were now at their weakest, and from here on out would only get stronger.


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[Assistant] General Petion, and another guy named General Clairvaux, who had been one of Tucson's top colored officers, had been put in charge of Le Cap's outer defenses.


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[Assistant] Specifically, the fortifications where once Santanax and Palvarell had fallen back to at the Battle of Le Cap.


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[Assistant] There, they made contact with the same guy that Sontanax and Paul Verrel had made contact with, Micaiah. Micaiah was still out there running the rebels of the North Plain, and Petian and Clairvaux and Micaiah


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[Assistant] Put together a plan for a joint assault on LeCap.


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[Assistant] This mixed force of regular army and Micaiah's guerrillas struck on October the 13th.


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[Assistant] And before the Frenchman Manning Le Cap's inner line knew what was happening, a hoard of black and colored soldiers were upon them.


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[Assistant] This attack finally brought Leclerc out of hiding, and he personally rushed to the walls to lead the defense.


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[Assistant] In all likelihood, he probably did not think he was going to make it out of this alive.


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[Assistant] But Leclerc and his men somehow held the line, and when morning dawned, Lecap had not fallen.


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[Assistant] But though this attack failed, it was the signal that it was time for everyone to pick sides once and for all.


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[Assistant] Kristoff defected on October the 16th and attacked Portipi. Dessaline, who probably knew what Petion was about to do, turned on his superiors, and on October the 24th, attacked Gonaïve.


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[Assistant] And with the atrocities committed by the whites, you can bet that no quarter was offered to anyone who fell into the hands of the rebels.


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[Assistant] The generals made their move not a moment too soon.


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[Assistant] Because by this point Leclerc had snapped completely.


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[Assistant] On October the 7th, just days before Petian's attack on Le Cap,


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[Assistant] You must destroy all the blacks of the mountains, men and women, and keep only children under 12 years old. Destroy half those of the plane.


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[Assistant] And not leave in the colony a single man of color who is worn an epaulette.


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[Assistant] Otherwise, the colony will never be quiet. And at the beginning of each year, especially after murderous seasons like this one, you will have a civil war that will comprise the possession of the country.


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[Assistant] If you wish to be the master of San Domingue, you must send me 12,000 men without wasting a single day.


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[Assistant] Seeing nothing but an island of men and women who would never accept French rule.


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[Assistant] LeClaire was now advocating a program of nothing less than genocide.


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[Assistant] Basically, his plan was to wipe out the entire population of Saint-Domingue so that they could start over with new slaves from Africa. And it would appear that Leclerc was not joking.


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[Assistant] After the attack on Le Cap, he issued a general arrest order for every black and colored soldier still under French authority.


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[Assistant] The thousand or so black men of the Le Cap garrison, unfortunate enough to have remained loyal to the French, were rounded up and marched onto ships waiting in the harbor.


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[Assistant] These thousand men were drowned one by one in the Lekap Harbor.


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[Assistant] Their bodies washing ashore over the course of the next week. And as had happened in the Von Day.


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[Assistant] Mass drowning soon became the quickest and most cost effective method of execution.


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[Assistant] And one white officer who was sickened by the slaughter estimated that something like 4,000 men and women were drowned across the colony over October and November, 1802.


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[Assistant] This would mark the beginning of a cycle of horrific atrocities and counter atrocities committed by both sides in the War of Independence that can now be said to have officially begun with the defection of the generals in October. But though Leclerc set it in motion,


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[Assistant] He would not live long enough to do anything, but set it in motion.


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[Assistant] Very possibly as a result of the contact he had had with the troops during the battle to defend Le Cap.


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[Assistant] General Leclerc came down with a fever on October the 22nd.


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[Assistant] Almost exactly a year after marrying into the Bonaparte family and being put in charge of this all-important mission, LeClaire died at the age of 30.


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[Assistant] But as I just said, LeClaire's death was an end to nothing but his own life.


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[Assistant] Next week, the War of Independence will be waged in brutal earnest as both sides sought to terrorize and murder the other into submission.


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[Assistant] General Dessaline will emerge as the commander in chief of the Creole rebels, and with him would come the final death of Toussaint Louverture's dream for tricolor harmony.


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[Assistant] There could be no peace, no liberty, no independence for the blacks and colors of San Domingue.


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[Assistant] Welcome everybody to Frenemies, we're back again and this is the Halloween extravaganza.


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[Assistant] The fourth week running culminated in us dressing as each other.


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[Assistant] But I gotta say, I'm really enjoying having these big juicy knockers.


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[Assistant] Well it kind of doesn't really. It's more like a shirt. But I guess you were kind of naked when you wore it. Yeah. Yeah.


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[Assistant] What? You weren't up. You were always here at 11.30. Dr. Drew, he's by the way, Dr. Drew is with us today.


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[Assistant] I was sitting here ready. Who told you I gotta play?


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[Assistant] Dr. Drew After Dark on Your Mom's House. He also has a daily stream show on YouTube and pretty much everywhere. Uhm, he today is gonna be our marriage counselor, our couples therapy counselor, because as you guys know, we've been through a lot of drama, there's been lots of fights.


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[Assistant] And I thought it would be good to have fresh eyes, professional eyes, to go over our history of friendship together and kind of help mediate our feelings, right?


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[Assistant] Okay, so, you know what's funny? We were talking before you arrived that uhm, we wanna do personality tests.


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[Assistant] It's just, it's in my face, right? So I'm trying to just get it out of my face.


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[Assistant] You are super upset that I come on here and look better than you every single time.


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[Assistant] I like, I like when I'm doing the costume, I like to go all out. And I have a theory, Dr. Drew, that part of the reason we've been fighting is because you're upset that every week we come out here, I look way better than you. And by the way, all the comments say, Ethan,


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[Assistant] Okay, here's what I wanna do before we get stuck too much on this. Let's go through the chronology of our relationship, okay? We first were interacted when I made a video. Here, Ian, pull up, uh, the thumbnail, first of all.


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[Assistant] I made a video called Instagram vs Reality, which is


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[Assistant] You know on Instagram people put on these makeup and Photoshop and filter and they look so much different than, than how they look in real life. And so here was the thumbnail of Trisha. I put her in the thumbnail.


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[Assistant] And then, here, before we talk about it, pull up, pull up the time stamp, uh, the next time stamp, and we can watch that together.


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[Assistant] I will say that when you- the fact that you po- you- now that I know you, you are very upfront about how you look without makeup and the whole process of being quote unquote beautiful and all that. And so,


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[Assistant] There are a lot of people who I think are deserving of the criticism because the whole theory of the video was like, there's these mo- I'm getting to a point.


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[Assistant] So the point that I got wrong when talking about you is that you are very upfront about how you look without all that and so I was wrong about that. Trisha, Trisha, this is Ethan offering an apology.


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[Assistant] Well, I was wrong about you. I think some of the people there are deserving of that criticism, but now that I know you, I don't think that you are a person who should- So yea, I do apologize because I do think that that's not who you are because you're very forthcoming about that issue. Well, thank you.


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[Assistant] That looks like, but like she's so, it's so photoshopped.


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[Assistant] So uhm, I feel like it wasn't that offensive.


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[Assistant] But I do feel like it's hurtful to young girls to see, like, a fat ass like that and be like, why don't, why doesn't my body look like that? Dr. Drew, fix this.


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[Assistant] Well, Tana, I said she looked like a Twinkie, but she was wearing a yellow swimsuit. You wanna pull up the Tana comment, Ian? We can, we can just close the case on that one. Drew, you can tell me if I need to apologize or not on this one. I'll let you decide.


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[Assistant] Well, with you, I generally am always right. Oh my gosh. Thank you. I mean, you know what I mean? And by the way, I'm generally in favor-


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[Assistant] Now let me ask you this, if the joke is funny, does it warrant the comment? Like, she looks like a Twinkie. Pretty funny observation. Agree or disagree?


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[Assistant] Well, if I did say you washed up on the ocean, that was the one I felt bad about, I guess, is that I thought maybe it was mean.


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[Assistant] So the next big fight we had was, uh, when Trisha made a video announcing that she is a transgender female to male. Now I, now before I even talked about this, she got a lot of flack from everybody on the internet. It was dog-piling on Trisha.


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[Assistant] Saying like, that she's, uh, basically the criticism was that you're-


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[Assistant] Uhm, using trans issues to basically get attention for yourself in the makeup.


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[Assistant] Now previously, just to give context, you've also made videos coming out as a... What other... You made videos coming out as like a cheese puff or some shit? What was that?


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[Assistant] So people didn't take her thing seriously.


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[Assistant] It just hurt that it did. Okay. But you can't really come out as a chicken nugget.


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[Assistant] Interesting. It's a lot to take in. Ethan, you okay? It's a lot to take in as she's dressed as me.


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[Assistant] There's a lot to cover, but okay, first of all, if we go, we fast forward to uhm, let me go there.


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[Assistant] The walkout. So basically, there's a few key moments. I think the main one is when we go, go ahead and show Dr. Drew when we start talking, when she says that I'm a pill addict, start from here. Is that true? It's not true. Okay.


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[Assistant] Actually, I'll give you the context. We were here, and please, don't interrupt me.


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[Assistant] So go back, but what happened was that we're sitting back here hanging out off camera and I mentioned to her that back, you know, 10 years ago when I was living in Israel and had a day and I was like in a dead-end office job for five years that I was taking pill, like, uh, painkillers. That was 10 years ago. I'm not currently taking- How much? How much?


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[Assistant] For you. Oh that, that, that, that he had like a bruise on his arm? No, that she came out with the pill stuff.


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[Assistant] I do have, I do have a lot of empathy and sympathy for like the fact that sometimes you lose control and you get really emotional and you do and say things that you regret. I do want to add that this


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[Assistant] The whole event came after they or her and her boyfriend got into a fight and she already made a video about him accusing him of flirting with underage girls, which she's since retracted.


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[Assistant] Well, no, we had a really bad blowout a few episodes ago where I think you were starting to disassociate and you left.


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[Assistant] In replacement of hugging you. Well no, seeing you like this, I mean, it gives me a lot of insight.


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[Assistant] Let Ethan talk, let Ethan talk, it's all good. No, I feel bad and I feel like I didn't un-


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[Assistant] It's hard- I feel like people misun- misperceive you and misunderstand you. I think people think that you're not self aware or that you're just like this wrecking ball and that-


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[Assistant] You kind of are just like this emotionless creature that just smashes everything up and you don't think twice about it. But it's clear to me now that you are very aware of how you can be hurtful and mess things up and that it does hurt you. And I understand about how I said, you know, at that time was maybe just hitting


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[Assistant] Was hitting too hard and was just too mean and it was something that you are, you know, painfully aware of.


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[Assistant] You're doing all that stuff. I think that's great.


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[Assistant] You know, the, the, the problems that you have, that you're working on, and that we all understand, and uhm, is it not inappropriate for me to worry about my brother-in-law being in a relationship with her?


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[Assistant] Moses is nodding, yes. Who is? Yea, he's, he's co-signing.


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[Assistant] I never said I didn't approve. What happened was that he wanted to have to own this. Okay, we did a show on the podcast called The Bachelor, which we've done before, where we set up somebody, and we have content, you know The Bachelor. So Trisha was The Bachelorette.


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[Assistant] They started dating, and Moses at first was saying he was just doing it for the show. He thought it would be entertaining for the show, okay? This has all been said, so I don't think I'm hurting anyone.


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[Assistant] Well anyway, so anyway, they started posting these pics, this happened over the course of a few weeks, and every time we saw, we see Moses a lot, it's my wife's brother, and he says, oh it's nothing, it's nothing, we're just hanging out, yada yada yada, and uhm, this lash is all in my eye.


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[Assistant] And so, we didn't know what was happening. And it's not that I disapproved, it's just that we were having the show with Trisha and Sing Moses all the time, and they were being deceptive to us, and maybe they felt like they didn't want to be judged by us and all that, and I get it.


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[Assistant] But that was the reason why I never said I disapproved. I just thought it was weird that you guys were like sneaking around and not telling us what was going on and lying to us.


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[Assistant] I have, I have always and actively said that I approve, I don't have a problem, I just don't like the deception.


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[Assistant] He says they're doing just fine in response to does he believe in theory? Interesting. Maybe a little Al-Anon for Moses. What did you say? Maybe a little Al-Anon. What do you think?


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[Assistant] You know, despite everything, I've always wished the best for you, and I really do love you as a friend.


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[Assistant] I feel like we have amazing chemistry and I see the goodness in you and I know that like, you're always fighting to bring that out more than like, when you get upset or you do this and that and the stuff you regret. Like, that doesn't- I don't ever see that as who you are. I know who you are and I love that person as a friend of mine.


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[Assistant] Trisha gets a lot of shit on the internet from a lot of people, and I think that it's important


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[Assistant] For more people to see you like this because I think that people really, I think it's a really good insight into you as a vulnerable, real feeling, emotional person and not just like the wrecking ball that people think you are. People just think you're a mess and that you just, you know, are destructive and this and you just do everything for attention.


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[Assistant] I mean it's part of your brand, but I do think it's important to see that you're more than that.


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[Assistant] I actually, I totally agree with you on that one. The amount of shit you got for that was fucked up because whether you actually have that or not, I mean, who knows? I mean, you, you, you, you could say better, but it's hard, I know it's hard, difficult sometimes to diagnose specific mental disorders, but like the amount of shit people gave you was so messed up, especially considering it's like, I think we're gonna all agree that you're trying to define some kind of issue that you have.


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[Assistant] Can I ask you a question? Yea. When you make a video like that or the trans reader or whatever,


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[Assistant] So is it possibly that you, you can accept negative attention when it's not something that really represents you, but when it's about something you're trying to be honest about, then that's really upsetting when you get that negative attention.


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[Assistant] Are you, are you literally curious? Can she tell the difference between negative and positive attention? You're just curious. That's the root of your problems is that.


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[Assistant] You seek attention and sometimes you don't care if it's- or maybe you can't distinguish if it's good or bad or if it's gonna result in good or bad attention.


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[Assistant] Well, I don't know, but I'm just saying you keep having these issues where you get-


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[Assistant] There's one more thing I want to, uh, address before we wrap it up here. I know you're on a deadline. Yeah. Pull up this clip here, uh.


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[Assistant] From our latest episode, I believe this was our very last episode.


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[Assistant] Yeah. Okay, pull up this clip from our last episode.


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[Assistant] You, wow. I was just like, wow. You know, that seems like a low blow, what you did.


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[Assistant] It's fine. No, I, I don't, I'm not trying to look cute. It's literally, the hair is the worst part. Uhm.


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[Assistant] Well the good news is though, that I'm here now, if you have something to say.


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[Assistant] Jeffree Star or, well, she's sitting here so it's awkward. Don't answer that. Don't answer that actually. I'm a professional.


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[Assistant] I feel like we're ending this show on a better note than we've probably done.


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[Assistant] The world famous Dr. Drew, you can find him on Dr. Drew After Dark, on your mom's house podcast, as well as Dr. Drew YouTube channel, where he does a daily show, check him out, he's a genius.


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[Assistant] It's everywhere, god damn it, just google Dr. Drew. He is everywhere. I'd love to have Dr. Drew come back and administer some personality tests to us. This is really fun. But one thing at a time.


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[Assistant] Alright, well thank you guys everyone for joining. This is our final, uh, Halloween episode. Yep. So have a happy Halloween everybody.


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[Assistant] I think as before, I just always knew, like, it was in and out, like, it's just like, oh, I'm never gonna see these people again, and it's like, you know what I mean?


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[Assistant] People do say that, they think it's like weird, like I like fetishize or obsess over Jews, but I just love them. They're so interesting.


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[Assistant] Traditions, you know, like let's fast in September.


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[Assistant] You guys have it, like the new year is coming up, right? So like this weekend's a new year and it's like who just decides that? Like it's so interesting.


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[Assistant] The new year is January 1st, but Jews are like, mm, September 16th, 19th.


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[Assistant] Yeah, like even when they had sex, my mom would like say he kept the shirt on. Yeah, but he's not fat. He's very like in shape. He like walks eight miles a day.


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[Assistant] I don't think they want to know about Circumplice Peanuts like the first episode, like I feel like it's the intro, like, hey I'm trash, like, this is my life.


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[Assistant] Mmhm. Yeah. We're gonna be buying a house together, so it's a success.


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[Assistant] Cause we like definitely were like the first two weeks of quarantine just attached at the hip for sure. And then he had a traumatic event at his house. So then he just like, I'm like, we should just stay here forever. And that's what happened.


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[Assistant] We've had like two like, well, it's not really breakups, but we've had like two ish, like times where we like stop talking to each other, but we come back to each other, so.


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[Assistant] Yeah, because in the thing, you literally, we watched it together and I was like, oh my, you're like, oh yeah, he said, you said he was applying as a goof and I was like, is that true? You applied as a joke?


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[Assistant] Because that whole episode, like, you just were like, oh, like, I think he's embarrassed that he likes her, like, it was supposed to be a joke, like, it was all the stuff where I was thinking, like, oh, is he, like, playing me? Like, you know what I mean? So you ruined it. At the beginning.


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[Assistant] Uhm, yeaah, first of all, TikToks are good, but I get more insulted when they say that we're the inverted version of you and Hila.


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[Assistant] Of course. I mean we already like, he already is like, we have to have a wedding in Israel too. Like we already talked about.


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[Assistant] Ten, and you like carry it, and then you have to get security and all that stuff like that. I'm like, well let's just go there, if they're gonna just give us money.


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[Assistant] Oh well, this is a point of contention which I'm glad he's not in the room because he refuses to post me on his Instagram because his mom looks at his stories.


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[Assistant] If people have a judgmental family like you, like I can tell already by his sister and his brother-in-law that I was like, oh, I get it.


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[Assistant] Yes, my family, he's met all my family already. My dad, my mom, my sister, like he's met everybody and so they love him. We have family game nights every Sunday, so.


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[Assistant] No, I mean he definitely had, the people he used to talk to are psychos, they're psychopaths that are just like uber fans of, because we weren't dating right away, like that's the thing that's a little unfair, like you were like, what are you guys, and like we didn't know, you can't just say like we're dating after like a week of meetings.


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[Assistant] Yeah, but it was definitely just like hooking up at the beginning for sure. Like as I was doing sex tapes with like, you know, all these people and stuff. Like, so it wasn't like officially official official until like recently, like a couple months, like a month or two ago.


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[Assistant] He'll come with me to the COVID test cause I get COVID every week. So I was like, come with me to my COVID test cause I know you guys are really like crazy about it, which I get. So we'll do COVID. COVID and STDs together.


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[Assistant] You post nude on the internet, I see your ass all the time on my timeline, and I send it to Moses, I'm like, what the fuck is this? Like, if you don't like my vagina on your timeline, why can you post your ass on my timeline?


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[Assistant] I wouldn't wanna fuck anyone else, like, you know, that's when I know I'm making love with somebody. Like, if I'm obsessed with somebody. Like, normally, like,


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[Assistant] Well, there was just like a little issue like a couple months ago before we were dating and I was just like, uhm, I just need to know for my own.


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[Assistant] And they're like weird obsessed fans and it's fine, whatever, we nipped it in the bud.


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[Assistant] Uhm, yeaah, I mean I have a uterus still, so like I can still get like IVF or something.


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[Assistant] Uh, it like damaged my like tubes, so I had those HSG tests, which is like scarring in my tubes, and so like it's, you can get them like scraped off, I guess, like the little like scarring of the tubes, but like it still goes through, there was still some fluid that goes through, so like semen does still go through, but I mean I used to have like unprotected socks like every day, six times a day, and I never got pregnant for like years, so I don't know.


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[Assistant] It's one-of-a-kind pink, uhm, crocodile. Uhm, shout-out Prairie Porter, so it's 100% authentic. It's like, uh, she's a handler for Birkins specifically, so she authenticates it.


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[Assistant] Definitely ugly. I was gonna do a video being like, I regret this. Can I touch it? Yeah, I guess, yeah. You have clean hands. Your hands are clean. Your hands are nice.


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[Assistant] No, that's not true. People will definitely know, like, if you're into bags. Like, if you're like, a different star. Because they know pink croc- first off, crocodile berkins, so hard anyways. Like, green, they're always gonna be like, 65,000 minimum.


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[Assistant] As of 2020, I don't know what year you're watching this, but 2020 there, uhm, that's the minimum. But this is pink, so it's like extra.


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[Assistant] It's not cute, like, it should have been cuter, it should have been pinker.


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[Assistant] Yeah, it's like also like a warranty or something like that, so. Yeah, I have another one coming. That one's like $55.


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[Assistant] Chris Farley, Elvis, Marilyn, Anna.


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[Assistant] Just existing, but I think in general, if I die young, it'll be more iconic. Think about, there's, not to put that out there because I really don't want to die, but-


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[Assistant] Okay, I don't think so, because anything I've ever spoken out I've gotten.


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[Assistant] I'm scared to mention it, but anyways, my point is I probably will die young, I've accepted this fate, and I just spend and live and eat. And it's not eating that kills me, so bring on the Korean fried cheese, you know?


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[Assistant] Cause we'll order, we'll order like five meals for dinner, like from like Lala's, we'll have like empanadas, steak.


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[Assistant] We'll get two pastas, gnocchi and now this like marinara pasta, mashed potatoes on the side.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Right. Okay, but the difference is, is if she's asking like, why are you so fat?


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Moses is very appreciative of my body. I'm like, I'm so fat, I'm sorry. He goes, no, it turns me on so much, your body turns me on.