SYMHC Classics: Frederic Tudor, the Ice King

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Speaker 1: Happy Saturday. Today is the birthday of Frederick Tutor, who was born on this day in seventeen eighty three, so we thought we would bring our episode on him back as Today's Saturday Classic. Tutor managed to convince the world that ice was a basic necessity and that transformed frozen New England pond water into something that he could sell all over the world. Back when this episode came out, weird from several listeners that they wished they'd known ahead of time that this ice was not exactly clean, which is going to come up towards the end of the episode, so now you know. Also, at some point in this episode we say ninety six when we mean eighteen twenty six. We're hoping the meaning is clear from context. Numbers of the things we most often flub. Yeah, somehow just turning any numbers into a nineteen happens astonishingly often in the studio. Uh. This episode came out August sixteen, not nineteen seventeen, but twenty seventeen, So enjoy. Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production of I Heart Radio Hello and welcomed the podcast. I'm Tracy V. Wilson and I'm Holly Frying. Most of the profiles of Frederick Tudor that are floating around the web some of his story like this. In the early nineteenth century, he noticed that one thing Massachusetts had a lot of in the wintertime was ice, and so he hatched a clever plan that in cold weather he would harvest that ice for really cheap, and then he would sell it all around the world when it was hot, single handedly turning ice into a commodity and becoming vastly wealthy in the process. Uh, as so often happens with our show, it is way more complicated than that, beginning with the fact that it was not even his idea in the first place. Like I I saw articles and a lot of I mean generalist publications, mainstream stuff, but all repeating the idea that this was his idea. But it wasn't. Uh. He also didn't do it alone. He had a lot of help from things like tax incentives and economic systems that ultimately skewed things in his financial favor. So we are going to look at that more complicated story than is often in the one page right up today. Yeah, he really doesn't. I mean I haven't had not read a lot about him, but he really does usually get lauded as like this really insightful idea man who took this one concept and ran with it, and wasn't he an entrepreneur And it's like, oh, yeah, apart from that, we're going to talk about some other issues. Yeah, uh so. Frederick Tudor was from a prominent Boston family. His father, William, had gone to Harvard, had studied law under John Adams, and had been in George Washington Continental Army during the Revolutionary War, including serving as its judge advocate, and after marrying Frederick's mother, Delia Jarvis, in seventeen seventy eight, he left the army to set up a law office, and he would also go on to serve in the Massachusetts legislature and as Secretary of the Commonwealth. William and Delia had six surviving children between seventeen seventy nine and seventeen ninety one, and Frederick was born on September fourth, sevree. Their family was comfortable, but it wasn't really until seventeen ninety six, when William's father died, that they became truly wealthy. William inherited in a state that was worth about forty thou dollars, which was a lot of money at the time. Uh I didn't try to translate them and to did it today's dollars, because that is always it's tricky, and it's there's never really a one to one way to do it. There's really not. It's really like throwing just the dartboard at some dollars lines and landing on something. It's it was a lot of money though, um And at that point he retired from law and became a gentleman of leisure. That's the dream. I mean, gentleman of leisure while also being in the state legislature and stuff. But he didn't work as a full time job anymore. And the Tutors were also an active part of Boston society, and Delia was so charming and charismatic that she was something of a local celebrity. Although the word would not be coined until eighteen sixty, the Tutor family was part of the Boston upper class known as the Boston Brahmins. Just co opting the word from the highest rank of the cast system in India. Yeah, to be clear, that word existed in India far longer than eighteen sixty, but it was in eighteen sixty that people started applying it to uh influential rich people in Boston. For the most part, Frederick's siblings started off following the paths that would have been expected of the children of such a family. His brother's William Jr. John, and Henry all went to Harvard, and his sisters Emma and Delia married a wealthy landowner and a prominent navy officer, respectively, although Delia didn't marry until the age of twenty six, and that marriage was rocky and ultimately ended at a messy divorce which could have been its own podcast, a lot of drama and possibly espionage. Nice uh. Frederick, though, was having none of his family's expectations. At thirteen, while his parents were on a European tour that they could finally afford to take, he left school and he apprenticed himself at a store. His brother William, who graduated from Harvard that same year, thought this was an absolute disgrace. Frederick, on the other hand, thought Harvard was for layabouts, something he would confirm for himself a few years later when he visited another brother there and found his roommate Washington Allston's art stuff all over the room. This is a side note. Washington Alston was an influential Romantic landscape painter. He's studied at the Royal Academy of Art, and Alston, Massachusetts, which is a neighborhood uh is named after him. I would not really call him a lay about from Frederick Tutor's perspective. Lazy. Yeah. So, Frederick's whole argument in leaving school was that this apprenticeship was going to afford him a much better education, but he didn't stick with it for very long, and with his parents still out of the country, he went to the family's country estate of Rockwood, which is northeast of Boston. In spite of this whole argument about Harvard being for idlers, he spent the next few years somewhat lazily. He did do some work on the farm at Rockwood, but not particularly strenuously, and more of it was about experimenting with agricultural techniques than about putting a serious effort into making it productive. He also hunted, an read and dabbled in various investments. In eighteen o one, when he was seventeen, Frederick accompanied his brother John on a trip to Cuba. John had been advised to go recover someplace warm following a serious knee injury, and since Frederick's business deals had included trading molasses and cigars out of Havana, the tutors already had some contacts there. But John's condition didn't improve, and soon they were back in the United States. They crossed paths with their mother and brother William near Philadelphia, which is where John died on January eighteen o two, and by that point Frederick and William had already gone back home. Back in Boston, Frederick started working in the offices of Major William B. Sullivan. He wasn't exactly working for the major. It was more like Sullivan's office was his home base, where he took no salary and invested in whatever seemed like it might turn a profit. Still not with any pecular dedication, and once he turned twenty one, Frederick's father set him up with a business of his own, where at first he kept doing the same basic thing, investing and trading in various odds and ends. Frederick finally found something to take seriously in the summer of eighteen oh five, noting after his sister Emma's wedding to Robert Hallowell Gardner. The family was at a party at Rockwood, enjoying drinks that were chilled with ice that had been cut from their pond the previous winter and then stored in the ice house for the summer. Frederick's brother William casually remarked that people in the West Indies would probably love such a luxury. This was not a serious statement at all. The very idea was absurd. Cutting ice in the winter and storing it in an ice house for the summer was common for New England. Families of means and societies with access to ice have been storing it for later use since antiquity. But loading ice onto a ship and said ending it thousands of miles away and to the tropics was a ludicrous idea. Not only did it seem like the ice would just melt on the way, but pirates, privateers, and the navies of multiple nations that were variously at war with each other all had chips in the waters in the Caribbean. The islands themselves were also seeing their share of unrest. Slave uprisings were an ongoing occurrence, and recent years had seen the Second Maroon War in Jamaica, as well as the Haitian Revolution, but Frederick Tutor latched onto his brother's offhand, not serious comment as his next big venture, along with claiming that it was his own idea. Later on, his insistence that he and not William, had thought up the whole thing would lead to a severe falling out with Robert Gardner, who basically told the truth when somebody asked him about it. Frederick never forgave him, even though Robert and William June Year both insisted that it just didn't matter who had thought of it first, since Frederick was the person who actually made it happen. And we're going to get into the details of how Frederick started to build an ice business, but first we're gonna pause for a moment and have a little sponsor break. On August one, eighteen oh five, Frederick Tudor began documenting his ideas for exporting ice in a newly purchased journal that he would later dubbed the Ice House Diary. Even though he refused to acknowledge that the idea had first been his brother williams He pulled William into the scheme along with their cousin James Savage. Frederick and James Or each twenty one at the time, and William was twenty six. Frederick sent William and James to the Caribbean to set up business relationships, oversee the building of ice houses, and generally just handled the to be an end of the business. This included talking to the government on each island and trying to get an exclusive license to distribute. It was deeply important to Frederick that he not only have the right to sell the ice, but that he also have a monopoly on it. They began in the French territory of Martinique. Once William and James arrived there, they did secure an exclusive license to sell ice as planned. They also noted a couple of good locations for ice houses and compiled a list of prominent people who should get a free sample once the ice actually got there. But not long at all after they arrived, James got yellow fever. He spent weeks recovering, during which time William went on ahead to other islands to try to make similar arrangements there. Frederick followed behind them, departing for Martinique on February eighteen o six. He couldn't find anyone willing to ship the ice, so he'd bought a brig called the Favorite for four thousands, seven dred fifty dollars, and he modified it with a wooden ceiling to separate the ice in the hold from the hot upper deck. When Frederick arrived on March five, his cargo of ice, which had been insulated with wood shavings, was surprisingly intact, but he was not pleased at all with the arrangements that William and James had made. Since they had marked some sites for an ice house, but they had not actually built one, there was nowhere to unload the product, so Frederick had to get permission to sell it directly off of the ship, and even though he did sell some ice, the people who bought it, some of whom had never seen anything frozen, didn't really know what to do with it. In a letter to Robert Gardner, Frederick wrote, quote, their methods of keeping it are laughable. To be sure, one carries it through the street to his house in the sun noonday, puts it in a plate before his door, and then complains that il font. Another puts it in a tub of water. A third, by way of climax, puts his insult. He did eventually print up some handbills to give people instructions about what to do. But his instructions on the handbills wouldn't have been all that helpful. They were basically like rapid in a blanket. Well, and I like how he's there's like a conceit to the whole thing, right, the idiot. Don't you know what to do with ice? No, we've never seen it before. Frederick lost between three thousand and four thousand dollars on this first attempt, and he placed all of the blame on William and James. Did not matter to him that James had been critically ill for weeks, he hadn't been able to even leave his lodgings for a long time, or that William had secured an exclusive import license in multiple other Caribbean nations. Even as Frederick was sailing home, William was on the way to Europe to try to get a general license from the nations of Britain and France to selling their Caribbean colonies so he would not have to negotiate with every single island individually. None of that compared to the fact that they didn't build an ice house, so Frederick had nowhere to put the ice. He he put all the blame on his brother and cousin. Frederick tried again in eighteen o seven, this time having ice houses ready before the ice arrived and tinkering with his methods of insulating and securing the cargo. He was more successful this time than in eighteen o six, but he couldn't try again in eighteen o eight because of the Napoleonic Wars. The Embargo Act of eighteen o seven, drafted in response to the wars, closed all US ports to export shipping. The United States is basically trying to stay out of the wars themselves, while also retaliating against the fact that their ships were being harassed in transit. So with exports completely closed off, Frederick had to spend a couple of years biding his time at Rockwood, trying to make ends meet, and experimenting with different ice house designs and different methods of insulating them in the cargo, taking really meticulous measurements of how these different designs and insulators affected how quickly the ice melted. Times were hard for most of the tutors around this time. Because Frederick's father also lost most of his money on a failed land speculation, he wasn't able to repair his finances before his death in eighteen nineteen. The Embargo Act of eighteen o seven was repealed in eighteen o nine, and by eighteen ten Frederick was ready to try again, though he had to borrow money to finance the trip. The eighteen ten voyage was his most profitable to that point, and he secured a six year agreement giving him exclusive control of the Cuban ice market. But when he tried to build on this success in eighteen eleven, things once again became shaky. Frederick's first shipment of ice to to make us sank Off Port Royal, and an agent managing his operation in Havana swindled him, turning over only a thousand dollars of what was supposed to be a nine thousand dollar profit. With these things combined, he lost almost all of his eighteen eleven profits and consequently was arrested and sent to Debtors prison on March nine of eighteen twelve. Once he got out of prison, the United States and Britain went to war in the War of eighteen twelve, once again disrupting exports from the United States and putting yet another stop to Frederick's ice business. At this point, the threat of going back to prison loomed. Frederick's first shipment of ice after the war left Boston on November one, eighteen fifteen, and Frederick himself was on the boat, having been quote pursued by sheriffs to the very wharf. Slowly but surely, his ice business started to grow over the next few years, and Boston had a number of advantages as the location of his headquarters. These advantages became more important as business got bigger. Numerous ponds in the area provided the product for pretty cheap, including Fresh Pond, Spy Pond, Jamaica Pond, and even Walden Pond, where he would go on to bother Henry David Thorreau by harvesting ice there in the nature of the shipping trade through Boston also meant that once he had proved it could be done, he could move his product at a lower cost. Ships sailing to the Tropics from Boston to retrieve goods such as sugar, we're often empty, with holds full of rocks his ballast. Frederick filled these otherwise empty ships with ice, replacing rocks with sellable cargo, and the ship's owners glad it was no longer a wasted trip gave him a discount. The fact that he was mostly using things like wood shavings and sawdust, which were waste by products of the lumber industry, also meant like even the things that he was using to keep keep things frozen in transit that was free or cheap. Also in eighteen six team he built an ice house in Charleston, South Carolina. When he started selling his ice from there, an ice house in Savannah, Georgia soon followed, and as the business grew. In addition to securing licenses and building ice houses, Frederick was selling people the idea that they needed ice. One of his eighteen nineteen diary entries describes how he would start with the bars. Here's a quote. It became necessary to establish with one of the most conspicuous bar keepers a jar and give him his ice for a year. The object is to make the whole population use cold drinks instead of warm or tepid, and it will be affected in the course of three years. A single conspicuous bar keeper having one of the jars and selling steadily his liquors all cold without an increase in price, render it absolutely necessary that the others come to it or lose their customers. They are compelled to do what they could in no other way be induced to undertake. Ice really had been considered a luxury until this point, but Frederick's whole model relied on it being thought of as a basic necessity and on tepid or warm beverages being considered undrinkable. He remarked that he knew his business in Charleston was successful once he saw enslaved people with cold drinks. We should note here that although slavery was effectively abolished in Massachusetts the year that Frederick was born, his business, which he created from scratch, was built on selling ice to slave states and to Caribbean and eventually South American colonies and nations whose economies relied heavily on enslaved labor. For example, the Emancipation Proclamation was issued the year before he died, and Britain and France both abolished slavery in their colonies during his lifetime, but this was long after he started trading with some of those colonies. Slavery wasn't abolished in Cuba or Brazil until long after his death. And Tracy did the research on this one, and she didn't find evidence that he had directly enslaved anyone, although there is a troubling account of an agent from India bringing him a quote servant as a gift. But it's incredibly likely that at least some of the people unloading ice at Southern and Caribbean ports and working for the year round agents and ice housekeepers living there were enslaved, and a lot of Frederick's customers would have been buying his ice with profits that came from slave labor. It's a good example of how industries in the United States were complicit in slavery, even when founded and run from states where slavery had long been abolished. Some of the things he was investing in before he started this ice business similarly were being produced using enslaved labor. Like his his molasses trades. Molasses was made from sugar that was farmed on plantations that used enslave labor. I found it frustrating that zero of the accounts that I looked at about both Frederick Tudor and the ice trade in general really got into the fact that he created an industry selling stuff to enslavers like that is where the money was coming from. So to get back to his basic story. Although he was selling lots of ice in the eighteen teens, he was not breaking even because he still had so many debts to pay, and we will talk about how he finally started to break even briefly after another quick sponsor break. Even though Frederick's brother, William was really a lot more interested in being a writer, he published several books in his lifetime. He was one of the co founders of the Boston Atheneum, which is a membership library that still exists to Boston. William borrowed money to join Frederick's ice house business in eighteen twenty. He was the person who managed the introduction of Frederick's ice into New Orleans, which would become his biggest market in the Deep South. In eighteen twenty one, Frederick finally managed to get ahead of his debts and it seemed as though the ice business would just grow from there. But that year Frederick had a nervous collapse. He had been working himself to exhaustion trying to make the ice business lucrative enough to pay off his debts. Everything was compounded by his generally weak health and the fact that he'd had both yellow fever and malaria along with other ailments while he was in the tropics. He did recover, though, and by ninety six the ice business had gotten so big that he brought on Nathaniel J. Wyath to supervise and direct the harvesting side of it. Wyath introduced several improvements, including a horse drawn ice cutter that he had invented the prior year. Previously, ice had been cut by hand, which meant that the blocks were uneven, they were harder to insulate, and they were prone to shifting in transit. But Wyatt's cutter scored the ice in a perfect checkerboard, which allowed crews to cut the blocks into very regular, tightly stackable blocks that left very little space for air or for shifting, and also let them fill the holds a lot more full. In January of eighty nine, Wyath also suggested a method of making the blocks thicker, basically cutting a sheet of ice, sliding it under solid ice to make a double layer, and then cutting around the stack to allow it to float while refreezing. This let them make blocks of ice up to twenty inches thick, when previously they had considered themselves lucky for a naturally frozen layer of nine to twelve inches, so he was starting to do financially really well. And then two events massively changed Frederick's life. In eighteen thirty three, when he was forty nine, he started making massive investments into coffee futures, and he also met Euphemia Fenno, who was aged nineteen. Tutor was immediately smitten with her and they were quickly engaged, but he kept it in the wedding secret from his family, who he was increasingly estranged from. There was a lot of drama and pettiness in the Tutor family. His if if you read accounts that that get into his family dynamics, um, it's really his his brother in law, Robert Halliwell Gardner, that comes off the best of all of them. Um. So by this point he was not really getting along and he did not tell the him that he was getting married. But they got married on January eighteen thirty four, and they would go on to have six children. The coffee speculation, on the other hand, would not be nearly so productive. Coffee prices collapsed and he lost about two hundred and fifty thousand dollars of his investors money. He convinced his creditors to allow him to continue his ice business unhindered, committing to pay at least the interest back every year and estimating that it would take about six years to pay off. The sale of ice to India is what ultimately allowed him to pay off this debt. He had already planned to expand into India with a couple of business partners even before he realized how bad his financial situation was because of this whole coffee situation. In spite of the fact that it was a four month, fourteen thousand mile that's twenty two kilometer journey to India that involved crossing the equator twice, it turned out to be his most lucrative destination by far. I feel like if he had just invested in coffee after I had been born, he would have been fine. Yes, sure, I mean I have a many many cups a day habits, so I could have kept him afloat. Thanks to the British East India Company, India was home to a lot of British people and Anglo Indians, and among this population it was incredibly fashionable to complain about how hot it was and to describe the Indian subcontinent as the most punishingly miserable hot place on earth, and although the British had adopted a number of local methods for dealing with the heat, including using saltpeter infused water to chill bottles of wine, many of these ways of coping were very time and labor intensive. A lot of more affluent households actually had a person whose job it was to use this saltpeter infused water to cool things and like that. Since job was as important as the cook uh, it took a lot of work um. But in addition to dedicating people to chilling stuff, India also did have its own sources of ice. One was ice brought in from around the Himalayas to further south in the subcontinent, and the other was a novel way of manufacturing it. People would cut pits into the ground and then fill the pits with straw and then place shallow earthenware dishes onto them, filled with a couple of inches of water. As the water seeped through the earthenware vessels, that acted as an evaporative cooler, which let the water freeze even if the air temperature wasn't quite to the freezing point. Yet. That's some cool science at work right, But this method didn't yield much ice, and some of it was more like slush, So the British population was incredibly eager for a steady supply of tons of ice at a time. The British population of Kolkata raised money for ice houses under the understanding that some of the ice stored there would be reserved for medical use in years when the ice harvest was poor or ships were lost in transit. The ice in India was strictly rationed and you had to have a doctor's note to get more. This isn't actually the first doctor's note that there is an important role in the story. When William was trying to negotiate a license with the British government to sell in the British colonies, they thought that this idea was so far fetched that it must just be a front for smuggling. So he had to get a note from a doctor explaining how ice could be beneficial in in Caribbean colonies. So tutors first ice delivery to India arrived in Kolkata on September six, eight thirty three, and intense British demand for it made it an immediate success. It was not just the demand for ice that made the Anglo British market so lucrative. The British East India Company's terms were very favorable for Frederick Tudor. He got a lot of exemptions and and incentives that made India more profitable than any other market, and so soon he was expanding into other Indian cities as well. In eighteen thirty four, Frederick also began shipping ice Tarrio, and this was coincidentally where his brother William had died. William had left the business after being appointed to US consul in Peru in eighteen twenty four, and he was appointed charge a fair for Brazil in eighteen seven. He died there of an infection on March ninth, eighteen thirty Although Frederick dabbled in plenty of other side investments and side businesses over the course of his life, nothing was ever nearly as successful as the ice trade, and he was doing so much business through exports that he was nearly unaffected by the Panic of eighteen thirty seven or by the start of the Civil War, completely stopping his shipping to southern ports, and that, as a side note, led to some of the development of artificial refrigeration technologies as the South had come to rely on these ice exports that they could no longer get because they were at war with the North and they needed their ice. Tea we love it in the South. Uh Tutor paid off the last of his coffee debts in eighteen forty nine. He was sixty five at the time. It had actually taken him fourteen years to do it, during which time he paid about fourteen thousand dollars worth of interest. He continued to be heavily involved in the ice trade until very late in his life, and eventually a lot of the New England ice harvesting moved north into Maine. The harvesting season was longer, and the ice could be harvested directly from the Qunebec River and then loaded directly onto a ship, rather than having to transport it from all these ponds over land to the harbor in Boston. Also, the ice in Massachusetts towards the end of his life was becoming a lot dirtier as the land around the ponds was more developed and as the horses used to draw the ice plows left their waist behind. By eighteen fifty six, ice companies in New England were sending one hundred fifty thousand tons of ice to forty three nations, and similar businesses had sprung up in other cold weather parts of the country as well. Although Frederick had continually sought monopolies and did occasionally managed to secure them, they didn't generally last for long. Competition with other ice exporters increased over the course of his life, especially when Italian traders, who were much closer to India than Boston was, began transporting alpine ice, and as New York began to overtake Boston in terms of overall shipping, much of the ice trade had moved there. Frederick Tutor died on February six, eighteen sixty four, at the age of a be and he was by then vastly wealthy, both from the actual profits of the ice trade, but also really importantly from the land value of all this property that he had bought decades before to build ice houses on. His widow ran the business after his death, changing her name to Fenmo Tutor in eighteen sixty seven. Possibly don't actually know her motivations for sure, but the speculation is so that correspondence in the ice trade would assume that she was a man She also in the continuing Pile of things that make make of wonder whether Frederick was that much fun to be around. She went through and annotated all of his journals from the early years of their marriage, often saying things happen in a very different way than we're written down in the journals, and alleging that he had been sharing quote the marriage privileges with the woman he had lived on and off with since eighty four. I don't know who that woman was or slash may have been. Since this is an allegation, right, we have nothing but Venmo Tutor's word at that point um and during the window of time when Tutor was the ice King, though the ice trade was changing the world, the first home refrigerators were powered by huge blocks of ice, hence the name ice box. They didn't just help people save money by keeping their food longer without spoiling, though, they also improved public health. Without the ability to keep food cold, pathogens multiplied in warmer weather, leading to acute diarrhea known as summer complaint, which could be fatal. Aside from that, just as examples, hospitals use ice to cool patients who had high fevers. Fishing vessels were able to stay at sea longer because they could keep their catches on ice, and perishable foods could be shipped much farther away, so this changed the tie of food that people were able to eat. Tropical fruits could also be shipped much farther packed an ice that had first been shipped to the tropics to pick it up. The British Royal Navy even used ice to cool their gun turrets. And of course, the advent of artificial refrigeration and ice making once again changed everything. Mechanical refrigerators were in development by the eighteen seventies, and home refrigerators were becoming ubiquitous by the nineteen twenties. Once manufactured ice became a possibility, most folks stopped wanting to use frozen pond water that could potentially have horse poop in it. Of Course, the ice trade, much as was the case with butter versus margarine, the ice trade, tried to make a a lot of arguments about how artificial ice was bad and chemical. You should want this naturally fresh pond water that horses have been pooping in and on for decades. I mean, we still right. There are variations of that that are not so much legal arguments as marketing schemes, right, Like you want this water fresh from a stream, not one that's been processed. Uh. I don't think anybody's making the case for horse poop water. So one of his descendants donated all of his papers and all the family papers to Baker Library at Harvard Business School, and I kind of want to go down there and pour through them and try to figure out, like, did he think about what he was doing regarding establishing a business that for so long was almost exclusively trading to people that were making all their money off of slavery, Like he has to have known about slavery being wrong, especially since he was literally harvesting ice from where Henry David Throw was hanging out the row was a staunch abolitionist. But I couldn't find any anybody that had looked into that at all. Most of the sources are really candid about the fact that he was selling to you know, you know, British colonial India, which has its own set of issues and human rights concerns and all of that. But I didn't find any anyone really looking into the part where he created a trade that was so reliant on slavery. For so long, I would be willing to wager. And this is a bet that can probably never be proven out unless we somehow managed to reanimate long decease people. I would bet he didn't even really think about it. That is my sad suspicion. I suspect he was like, I just want to sell my ice. I don't care to I'm not going back to prison, ma'am. I do know that there is a letter that's in some way related to slavery and to the Movement for Abolition Abolition that's listed in the finding guide of the Tutor Family papers at Harvard, But I like, I don't know what that letter is is about. I feel like it's We have gotten comments before on social media about how like the money related to slavery was all the Southern money, and that's so false. And to me, this is a really good example of how a northern industry could really be heavily connected to slavery, even if it wasn't using enslaved labor or directly enslaving anyone um a lot of the as I was like, I really, I don't know. I should not have been astonished, but I was. And as I was looking around trying to figure out if there was anything that anybody had really you put together about this, and I kept finding articles where the only reference to slavery at all was the caption of a photo of some ice being unloaded by enslaved people in a Caribbean port, and I was like, well, this is my unsatisfactory experience of the week. Uh in in an episode I chose because I thought it was going to be more fun than talking about eugenics. Nothing's ever fun in history. That's what we learned from heay so much for joining us on this Saturday. Since this episode is out of the archive, if you heard an email address or Facebook U r L or something similar over the course of the show, that could be obsolete now. Our current email address is History Podcast at I heart radio dot com. 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