America's Greatest Grifter? The Odd Story of Appleton Oaksmith: Presumed Slave Trader, Confederate Spy, and Voting Rights Activist

Our American Stories

iHeartPodcasts

Society & Culture, Documentary

4.3 • 737 Ratings

🗓️ 19 May 2025

⏱️ 30 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

On this episode of Our American Stories, they say the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree— but Appleton Oaksmith landed on another planet. His mother was a feminist who knew top abolitionists; his father, a cartoonist admired across party lines. Appleton? He was hunted internationally for presumed slave trading and a failed kidnapping in Cuba that may have threatened Lincoln’s reelection. Yet he later fought for Black voting rights. Jonathan W. White, author of Shipwrecked, shares the story—courtesy of the U.S. National Archives.

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0:00.0	You're listening to an I-Heart podcast.
0:05.6	Why is a soap opera Western like Yellowstone so wildly successful?
0:10.6	The American West with Dan Flores is the latest show from the Meat Eater Podcast Network.
0:16.1	So join me starting Tuesday, May 6th, where we'll delve into stories of the West and come to
0:22.1	understand how it helps inform the ways in which we experience the region today.
0:28.3	Listen to the American West with Dan Flores on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever
0:33.6	you get your podcasts.
0:35.3	In 2020, a group of young women found themselves in an AI-fueled nightmare.
0:41.1	Someone was posting photos.
0:43.4	It was just me naked.
0:44.8	Well, not me, but me with someone else's body part.
0:48.5	This is Levittown, a new podcast from IHeart Podcasts, Bloomberg and Collidercope,
0:53.6	about the rise of deepfate pornography
0:55.3	and the battle to stop it. Listen to Levittown on Bloomberg's Big Take podcast. Find it on the IHeart
1:01.6	Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Clayton English. I'm Greg Glead.
1:07.3	And this is season two of the War on Drugs by now. Last year, a lot of the problems of the drug war this year, a lot of the biggest names in music and sports.
1:16.9	This is kind of starts that it a little bit, man.
1:19.1	We met them at their homes.
1:20.5	We met them at their recording studios.
1:22.8	Stories matter, and it brings a face to them.
1:24.8	It makes it real.
1:25.6	It really does.
	...

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