Episode Details

In this episode, we explore from ancient mounds to imprisoned governors. If you go and stand on the grounds right across the Mississippi River from present -day St. Louis, and you just look out at the landscape, you won't actually see skyscrapers. You'll see a mound of dirt. Right, a massive mound of dirt. Exactly. And it's roughly the same height from its base as the Great Pyramid of Giza. which is just wild to think about. It really is. And realizing that this structure has just been sitting there for a thousand years, it completely shatters the timeline most of us have in our heads about how urbanization actually happened in North America. Yeah, we tend to default to a very neat... linear progression. We assume it started with just empty wilderness and then European pioneers arrived and, you know, finally they built the industrial cities. But that mound of earth, it proves the story is far more complicated, far was heavily settled by pro -slavery Southerners, how on earth did a governor convince them to block slavery? That makes no political sense. Was it just a sudden awakening of moral righteousness? No, not exactly. It was a brilliant piece of political framing based entirely on economic self -interest. Oh really? Yeah. Coles didn't just argue the morality of abolition. He warned the everyday working class farmers that if slavery were legalized, wealthy southern plantation owners would move in, buy up all the premium farmland, and utilize free slave labor. So the average farmer would be completely priced out of the market and unable to compete. That is fascinating. So when the 1823 referendum showed 60 % of voters opposing slavery, they were largely protecting their own livelihoods. Exactly. And that economic motivation explains the ideological whiplash you see throughout Illinois's early history. A perfect example is State Senator John