Thomas Jefferson, Breaking Bad

Shades of Walter White in his meth lab: 

[Jefferson] launched the nailery in 1794 and supervised it personally for three years. "I now employ a dozen little boys from 10. to 16. years of age, overlooking all the details of their business myself." He said he spent half the day counting and measuring nails. In the morning he weighed and distributed nail rod to each nailer; at the end of the day he weighed the finished product and noted how much rod had been wasted.

Henry Wiencek details Thomas Jefferson's nail-making operation at Monticello in the latest issue of Smithsonian. The article is an excerpt from Wiencek's new book, Master of the Mountain: Thomas Jefferson and His Slaves. In part, Wiencek writes, the nailery appealed to Jefferson as a way determine the aptitudes and skills of his young male slaves.  

The nailery "particularly suited me," he wrote, "because it would employ a parcel of boys who would otherwise be idle." Equally important, it served as a training and testing ground. All the nail boys got extra food; those who did well received a new suit of clothes, and they could also expect to graduate, as it were, to training as artisans rather than going "in the ground" as common field slaves.

Some nail boys rose in the plantation hierarchy to become house servants, blacksmiths, carpenters or coopers. Wormley Hughes, a slave who became head gardener, started in the nailery, as did Burwell Colbert, who rose to become the mansion's butler and Jefferson's personal attendant. Isaac Granger, the son of an enslaved Monticello foreman, Great George Granger, was the most productive nailer, with a profit averaging 80 cents a day over the first six months of 1796, when he was 20; he fashioned half a ton of nails during those six months. The work was tedious in the extreme. Confined for long hours in the hot, smoky workshop, the boys hammered out 5,000 to 10,000 nails a day, producing a gross income of $2,000 in 1796. Jefferson's competition for the nailery was the state penitentiary.

Stop and read that last sentence again. It contains the entire history of the South, or maybe the country.  

Jefferson was also juiced by his new-found cash flow:   

Just months after the factory began operation, [Jefferson] wrote that "a nailery which I have established with my own negro boys now provides completely for the maintenance of my family." Two months of labor by the nail boys paid the entire annual grocery bill for the white family. He wrote to a Richmond merchant, "My groceries come to between 4. and 500. Dollars a year, taken and paid for quarterly. The best resource of quarterly paiment in my power is Nails, of which I make enough every fortnight [emphasis added] to pay a quarter's bill."

There's a lot more, just in the excerpt. None of it gets any better. All men are created equal. But Jefferson, like Walter White, was in the empire business. 

Earl Brewer, Mississippi governor 1912-16 and progressive badass. #portrait

The picture was shot by Milton McFarland Painter Sr., an amateur photographer who lived in the Delta. It was likely made while Brewer was governor, but the picture carries no exact date.

As governor Brewer did a variety of early-20th century progressivey type things, such as creating a Bureau of Vital Statistics, regulating bank interest rates and strengthening child labor laws.

He appears to have been at least somewhat progressive on race, especially for someone who's daddy was a plantation overseer and a captain in the Confederate army. After his term as governor, Brewer returned to his law practice. In 1936 he argued and won a case before the U.S. Supreme Court on behalf of three black Mississippi men who had been convicted of murder solely on the basis of their confessions. The three men had confessed -- after being brutally whipped.

The Supreme Court threw out the convictions, ruling that a confession "extracted by police violence cannot be entered as evidence and violates the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment." (Wikipedia)

The case is seen as one of several key rulings establising the rights of the accused leading to Miranda in 1966.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brown_v._Mississippi

http://www.csamerican.com/sc.asp?k=163

As for the badass part, I mean, c'mon, just look at him.