The “1619 Project”, Six Years On

By Phillip W. Magness. Excerpt:

"Commentators from across the political spectrum have long looked to the American Founding not for its historical insights, but as a political weapon to be wielded in the present day. Unfortunately, politicized accounts of the Founding not only neglect historical accuracy, but also cultivate alternative political narratives about the past, often intentionally so.

This was the stated purpose of the New York Times’s 1619 Project. When it launched exactly 6 years ago today on August 14, 2019, the newspaper boldly declared that the Project “[aimed] to reframe the country’s history, understanding 1619 as our true founding” in the place of 1776 by constructing a new “national narrative” about a country allegedly founded on slavery. This line proved a bit too candid for the newspaper’s readers and immediately attracted backlash. The Times’s editors later stealth-edited it off their website to dampen the criticism, but the argument has remained a central theme of the 1619 Project ever since. Drawing upon this theme, 1619 Project creator Nikole Hannah-Jones doubled down on her political aims in the present day: a crusade against American capitalism, rooted in calls for income redistribution and a $13 trillion slavery reparations program.

Hannah-Jones framed her argument by attempting to recast the American Revolution as a struggle between an anti-slavery British Empire and pro-slavery Colonists in North America. She opened her case by declaring “that one of the primary reasons the Colonists decided to declare their independence from Britain was because they wanted to protect the institution of slavery.” The impetus for this separation allegedly arose from economics. “By 1776, Britain had grown deeply conflicted over its role in the barbaric institution,” she continued, with “growing calls to abolish the slave trade” coming from London. “This would have upended the economy of the colonies, in both the North and the South,” Hannah-Jones concluded. Indeed, it was the “wealth of slavery” and its “dizzying profits” that allegedly “empowered” the Americans to challenge the British Empire.

Slavery certainly intersected with the American Founding, just not as Hannah-Jones described. Instead, the institution cut across both sides of the conflict. The American Revolutionaries included several prominent anti-slavery men among their ranks, among them Benjamin Franklin, James Otis, and Thomas Paine. Drawing upon the philosophical principles of the Revolution and slavery’s contradictions with the same ideals, almost every northern colony abolished the institution by the end of the 18th century. So did the new state of Vermont, by constitutional decree in 1777, as well as the future states of the Midwest under the Northwest Ordinance of 1787.

It is true that the Founders also included slaveowners, among them leading figures such as George Washington and Thomas Jefferson. Yet both men spoke out against the slave trade by declaring it a barbarous imposition on the New World from the Old—a direct contradiction of Hannah-Jones’s claims. We can still examine the inconsistencies and hypocrisies over slavery in Washington and Jefferson’s lives, but there is no evidence that an economic defense of this hideous institution motivated them to the Revolutionary cause, as Hannah-Jones claimed. Indeed, Jefferson drafted a protest against Britain in 1774 that stated the exact opposite: “The abolition of domestic slavery is the great object of desire in those colonies, where it was unhappily introduced in their infant state.” That same year, Washington petitioned the Crown for “an entire Stop for ever put to such a wicked cruel and unnatural Trade” in slaves.

British forces split on the issue as well. Sir Guy Carleton, the British commander who led the withdrawal of the Crown’s forces from New York City in 1783, gave cover for more than 3,000 slaves by transporting them to freedom in Nova Scotia. One would be hard pressed to reconcile other British officials to Hannah-Jones’s narrative, though, and she tripped more than once while trying to do so. Attempting to salvage her narrative from criticism, she made a hero out of Lord Dunmore, the last Colonial governor of Virginia who, in November 1775, made a last-ditch effort to reclaim the colony for the Crown by offering freedom to the slaves of rebellious plantation owners in exchange for joining his militia. Hannah-Jones omitted the fact that Dunmore exempted loyalist slaveowners from his decree—as well as the fact that Dunmore himself owned a large plantation outside of the capital of Williamsburg. In a further complication to her original argument, Hannah-Jones attempted to claim that George Washington only converted to the Revolutionary cause after taking umbrage at Dunmore’s order. In reality, Washington was appointed commander of the Continental Army some five months earlier on June 15, 1775.

In a further complication to Hannah-Jones’s claims, the main anti-slavery voices in British Parliament, including Charles James Fox and Edmund Burke, sided with the rebellious American Colonists. After losing the war, Banastre Tarleton, Lord Cornwallis’s famous and feared cavalry commander, took a seat in Parliament as a leading pro-slavery voice and successfully blocked Fox’s bill to abolish the slave trade. History is complicated, and in her zeal to weaponize the past for her own political ends, Hannah-Jones missed basic facts that undermined her story."