The New York Times published a series of essays and articles in August 2019, on the presumed 400th anniversary of the beginning of American slavery in August 1619. The goal of ‘The 1619 Project’ is to “reframe American history by considering what it would mean to regard 1619 as our nation’s birth year”, by “placing the consequences of slavery and the contributions of black Americans at the very center of our national narrative”. The purpose of this article is to analyze and evaluate this “reframing” carried out by this The New York Times’ project.
NYT: “August 2019 . . . the 400th anniversary of the beginning of American slavery.”
MMM: In 1619, English pirates attacked a Portuguese colonial ship headed for new Spain with captured Africans onboard. The pirates kidnapped about 60 of the African prisoners. On August 20, 1619, these ships docked at Point Comfort in the new British colony of Jamestown, Virginia. Here, they traded 20 of their African prisoners for food and supplies. This date pinpoints the birth of the United States of America as supposed by The New York Times. Scholars note the 20 new arrivals at Point Comfort were originally sold as indentured servants, not slaves. Some even went on to obtain their freedom. Under the law of the time, children born to servant mothers in the colonies were born free, not into servitude. According to various sources, the law of lifetime enslavement did not appear until the late 1600s and early 1700s. It is also important to note that at the time, fewer white indentured servants were being sent from England, which increased African indentured servants’ chances to be in service for life.
NYT: “Though people of African descent – free and enslaved – were present in North America as early as the 1500s, the sale of the “20 and odd” African people set the course for what would become slavery in the United States.”
MMM: Why didn’t The New York Times argue that 1526 was the year of our nation’s birth? In 1526, enslaved Africans were included in a Spanish expedition to establish an outpost in present-day South Carolina. These slaves revolted, escaping, making it impossible for the mission to be carried out. Or why not 1565? In 1565, the Spanish brought slaves from Africa to what is now St. Augustine, Florida - the first European settlement in what would become the continental U.S. The English naval officer Sir Francis Drake reportedly commanded “scores” of Africans when he arrived at Roanoke in 1586. Long before the 20 slaves landed at Jamestown in 1619, Africans were forced to take the long, arduous journey to North America and endure forced labor.
The birth of the United States is July 4th, 1776, when the colonies united to serve notice to Great Britain that it had become “necessary for one People to dissolve the Political Bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the Powers of the Earth, the separate and equal Station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God entitle them, a decent Respect to the Opinions of Mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the Separation.”
NYT: The Three-Fifths Clause “reinforced the brutal system of slavery”.
MMM: This clause is often misinterpreted to mean that blacks as individuals were considered three-fifths of a person, or three-fifths of a U.S. citizen. In actuality, the three-fifths clause declared that a state’s slave population would be considered three-fifths of its entire white population. Excluding slaves as a whole was not the goal of the Northern nor Southern sides of the debate when the clause was added in 1787. Southern delegates wanted to count their entire slave population, to gain more seats in Congress and therefore more influence in decisions. The Northerners, opposed to slavery, sought to count only free people, black and white, to reduce the political power of slaveowners and prevent them from advancing their agenda. This compromise protected the interests of slaves, as well as freedmen, advancing the goal of ending slavery once and for all.
NYT: “Neither Jefferson nor most of the founders intended to abolish slavery”, so they ultimately removed it from the Declaration of Independence.
MMM: All references to slavery were removed to preserve unity among the colonies. Delegates from southern states requested these references be removed, and the remaining colonies had virtually no choice but to agree. The Founding Fathers knew that further conflict with England would ensue, and if independence were not supported by all colonies, the goal would be much harder to achieve. How could a group of colonies outlaw such a major issue before even gaining independence? Many of the founders publicly supported gradual abolition. Thomas Jefferson himself, though a slaveowner his entire life, said, “Indeed I tremble for my country when reflect that God is just: that his justice cannot sleep for ever . . . a revolution of the wheel of fortune, an exchange of situation, is among possible events: that it may become probable by supernatural interference!” Jefferson’s words “all men are created equal” were included to establish American values and ideals, and ultimately inspire a future generation to end slavery and discrimination. Martin Luther King, Jr. knew this, as he said in his famous “I Have a Dream” speech: “When the architects of our republic wrote the magnificent words of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence, they were signing a promissory note to which every American was to fall heir. This note was a promise that all men, yes, black men as well as white men, would be guaranteed the unalienable rights of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.”
NYT: “. . . one of the primary reasons some of the colonists decided to declare their independence from Britain was because they wanted to protect the institution of slavery.”
MMM: Institutionalized slavery had no role in declaring independence from Britain. Many American colonists disagreed with the British system, and were physically and figuratively too distant from England to provide feedback to Parliament. Protests and rallies to change border and taxation policy resulted in martial law in Massachusetts and the prohibition of trade to and with the colonies. These colonists sought to build a world without the tyranny of the British king, officials, and soldiers. As Thomas Paine wrote in Common Sense, “For all men being originally equals, no one by birth could have the right to set up his own family in perpetual preference to all others forever.” If this applied to kings and subjects, could it not apply to slaves and slaveowners?
‘The 1619 Project’ essay that made this claim was edited to include the word “some (colonists)”. Please refer to the Declaration of Independence for more specific reasons why the colonists sought independence.
NYT: President Lincoln “was forced to reconsider his opposition to allowing black Americans to fight for their own liberation” in the Civil War, and “opposed black equality”. Lincoln “believed that free black people were a ‘troublesome presence’ incompatible with a democracy intended only for white people. . . ‘Free them, and make them politically and socially our equals?’ he had said four years earlier. ‘My own feelings will not admit of this’.”
MMM: A federal law established in 1792 banned black men from bearing arms for the United States Army, though they fought in the War of 1812 and the Spanish-American War. Lincoln hesitated to change this law, fearing border states would secede and join the Confederacy. Eventually, he permitted black troops to serve in the U.S. military via the Emancipation Proclamation in 1863. ‘The 1619 Project’ also misquotes Lincoln’s speech in Ottawa, Illinois in 1858, before he was elected President. In this speech, Lincoln declared that both sides, North and South, were equally responsible for slavery, before exploring ideas of emancipation, wondering if freeing slaves could stop their subjugation. “There is no reason in the world why the negro is not entitled to all the natural rights enumerated in the Declaration of Independence . . .” Lincoln said in the same speech the Times quoted, “. . . the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. I hold that he is as much entitled to these as the white man.”
NYT: During Reconstruction, one of the black freedmen’s “biggest achievement[s] was the establishment of that most democratic of American institutions: the public school.”
MMM: The first public school in the United States was established in Boston, Massachusetts in 1635. However, following the Civil War, African Americans in the South did make alliances with Republican governments to achieve political changes, including rewriting state constitutions to guarantee free public education to black and white students alike.
NYT: In 1877, President Rutherford B. Hayes, “in order to secure a compromise with the Southern Democrats that would grant him the presidency in a contested election, agreed to pull federal troops from the South. With the troops gone . . . systemic white suppression of black life was so severe that . . . democracy would not return to the South for nearly a century.”
MMM: The Compromise of 1877 allowed Democrat governors to take over the states of Florida, Louisiana, and South Carolina. For nearly a century after, Democrat governors continued to run Florida. Up until the 1970s, South Carolina was governed by Democrats as well. The first Republican governor since 1877 took office in Louisiana in the 1980s. The “systemic white suppression of black life” was not entirely the fault of the Republicans, nor Republican President Hayes, for withdrawing the troops. These blue governments should have been able to protect and defend their citizens, regardless of color, culture, or creed.
NYT: “Out of slavery grew everything that has made America exceptional.”
MMM: Yes, slaves did build the US Capitol building and The White House, as well as the plantations of various Founding Fathers. However, slavery was not central to the United States’ economy until around the early 1800s, when the demand for cotton increasingly grew with the invention of the cotton gin. The Industrial Revolution would not have been possible without the hard work of American slaves, and nor would the United States’ prosperity from its textile industry. During the Civil War, the South was entirely devastated. Contributions slaveholding states previously made to the nation’s economy would be impossible to make again for a long time. The postwar United States picked itself back up, blacks, whites, immigrants, and many others working together to build a new nation, implementing their own “diet” and “music” into a diverse American culture. “Economic might” and “industrial power” have been cut down and built up over and over again since the 13th Amendment. The American “electoral system” and “legal system” have been fluid over time to allow for different groups of Americans to grow, contribute, and be an active part of their country. There is always room for reform – and those who pick themselves up, as the United States did after the Civil War, can make reforms happen.
The New York Times has published free classroom activities, guides and curriculums based on ‘The 1619 Project’. The fact checks above indicate how dangerous this project is to our education system and the teaching of the truth to our nation’s students. School districts in Chicago, IL, Buffalo, NY, and Washington, D.C. have decided to incorporate ‘The 1619 Project’ into their curriculums this coming school year.
Sources:
Abraham Lincoln
Jamestown
Three-Fifths Clause
‘The 1619 Project’
Declaration of Independence
Compromise of 1877
Other
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