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Disputed 1619 project was CORRECT, Slavery WAS key to US Revolution; Gerald Horne proved in 2014
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Who Replied?From the Editor’s Desk: 1619 and All That
From the Editor’s Desk: 1619 and All That
The American Historical Review, Volume 125, Issue 1, February 2020, Pages xv–xxi, From the Editor’s Desk: 1619 and All That
Published:
03 February 2020
On Thanksgiving Day, I trekked up the highest hill in Brooklyn, the peak of which happens to be the site of a Civil War memorial in Green-Wood Cemetery. Two things struck me about the inscription on the Civil War Soldiers’ Monument, which was erected in 1869. The first was that an astounding 148,000 residents of New York City (17 percent of the city’s 1860 population) served in the Union’s military forces during the Civil War. The second was the statement that they did so to defend the Union and preserve the Constitution. The inscription contains not a word about slavery or emancipation, let alone black military service.
I really did not want to devote this column to the recent dispute between the New York Times and the handful of prominent historians who have offered sharp criticism of that publication’s purportedly revisionist narrative of the American story—the 1619 Project—that puts racism and the struggle for black liberation at the core of the national experience. But of course, it was all anyone asked me about at the AHA’s Annual Meeting during the first week of January, so I feel I must.
By now, most historians are familiar with the basic contours of this public scuffle between journalists and members of our profession. In mid-August, with much fanfare, the New York Times Magazine devoted an entire issue to the 1619 Project. Spearheaded by journalist Nikole Hannah-Jones, the project is designed, in Timeseditor Jake Silverstein’s words, to impart the idea that “the country’s true birth date, the moment that its defining contradictions first came into the world,” was not 1776, but rather “late August of 1619,” when the first enslaved Africans arrived on the shore of what would eventually become the Commonwealth of Virginia. Naturally—and entirely appropriately—this was as much a media event as a considered historiographic intervention. The “reframing” of the country’s “origins” was a rhetorical move, one that impressed upon a wider public an interpretive framework that many historians probably already accept—namely, that slavery and racism lie at the root of “nearly everything that has truly made America exceptional.” The aim, Silverstein observed, was to “place the consequences of slavery and the contributions of black Americans at the very center of the story we tell ourselves about who we are as a country.”1 If some historians might quibble with this or that specific conclusion drawn from such an approach, the overall reorientation strikes me as laudable, if unexceptional.
In fact, many scholars initially greeted 1619 with excitement and effusive praise. In part, I suspect that this was because the basic impulse behind the collection of eighteen articles and many additional short essays—by journalists, historians, sociologists, poets, legal scholars, English professors, artists, playwrights, and novelists—reflects how many, if not most, American historians already teach about that past in the undergraduate classroom. Speaking for myself, for three decades now I have emphasized in my U.S. survey class that the African American experience must be considered central to every aspect of American history. You cannot understand anything about the latter, I inform my students, unless you incorporate the former into the narrative. Yes, that includes the Revolution and the founding of the nation. It includes, obviously, the reason the first republic and its Constitution, so revered, lasted about as long as the USSR, a mere seventy-four years, before dissolving into the bloodiest conflict of the nineteenth century. For my part, I always considered this a pretty weak foundation on which to erect unconditional veneration. As Eric Foner argues in his newest book, The Second Founding, the creation of the new republic and a transformed Constitution after the Civil War were inseparable from the black freedom struggle.2 Foner’s argument is elegantly made, but I have long assumed that the case he makes was a given among nearly all American historians. The contours of the twentieth century’s modern political economy, constructed by the New Deal (and the reaction against it), have long required an understanding of the enduring legacy of white supremacy and the subsequent struggle to destroy (or reconfigure) the racial order. Again, these strike me as unremarkable points among historians today; the 1619 Project merely seeks to consolidate these arguments and invites a wider audience to reckon with them. And it does so in the tradition of the time-honored, and sometimes uncritical, practice of recognizing significant anniversary dates, for better or for worse. This year we will get the Pilgrims, which should bring its own media spectacle.3
So why the hostile, if somewhat belated, reaction? Here I admit to being perplexed—hence my initial hesitation to wade into the debate. The initial caveats came from an unlikely precinct, at least for a mainstream public intellectual knock-down, drag-out. In early September, the website of the International Committee of the Fourth International (ICFI) fired a broadside at the Times, denouncing the 1619 Project as “a politically motivated falsification of history” designed, in their view, to bolster the Democratic Party’s alignment with “identity politics” at the expense of any serious engagement with class inequality. This attack came not from the expected quarters of the right, which one imagines would find offensive and unpatriotic the denigration of the American promise as irredeemably racist, but from the Trotskyist left. As good Marxists, the adherents of the Fourth International denounced the project for its “idealism,” that is to say, its tendency to reduce historical causation to “a supra-historical emotional impulse.” By mischaracterizing anti-black racism as an irreducible element built into the “DNA” of the nation and its white citizens, the Trotskyists declared, the 1619 Project is ahistorical and “irrationalist.” This idealist fallacy requires that racism “must persist independently of any change in political or economic conditions,” naturally the very thing that any materialist historian would want to attend to. “The invocation of white racism,” they proclaim, “takes the place of any concrete examination of the economic, political and social history of the country.” Perhaps even worse, “the 1619 Project says nothing about the event that had the greatest impact on the social condition of African-Americans—the Russian Revolution of 1917.”4 (Well, OK, I was with them up to that point.) In some ways, the debate merely reprises one fought out nearly half a century ago: Which came first, racism or slavery? Who is right, Winthrop Jordan or Edmund Morgan?5
But that, it turns out, was merely the opening salvo. In October and November, the ICFI began to post a series of interviews with historians about the 1619 Project on its “World Socialist Web Site,” including (as of January 11) Victoria Bynum (October 30), James McPherson (November 14), James Oakes (November 18), Gordon Wood (November 28), Dolores Janiewski (December 23), and Richard Carwardine (December 31).6 As many critics hastened to note, all of these historians are white. In principle, of course, that should do nothing to invalidate their views. Nevertheless, it was a peculiar choice on the part of the Trotskyist left, since there are undoubtedly African American historians—Marxist and non-Marxist alike—sympathetic to their views. Barbara Fields comes immediately to mind, as she has often made similarly critical appraisals of idealist fallacies about the history of “race” and racism.7
If these scholars all concern themselves in one way or another with historical dilemmas of race and class, they hardly are cut from the same cloth. Bynum, best known for her attention to glimmers of anti-slavery sentiment among southern whites, some of which was driven by class grievances, doesn’t always take the Trotskyists’ bait. For example, she points out that “we cannot assume that individual [southern] Unionists were anti-slavery,” even if they “at the very least connected slavery to their own economic plight in the Civil War era.” Similarly, McPherson, the dean of Civil War historians, acknowledges in his interview that initially most Union Army soldiers fought to “revenge an attack on the flag.” (As the Green-Wood memorial indicates, that’s how many chose to remember it as well.) Still, McPherson complains that the 1619 Project consists of “a very unbalanced, one-sided account, which lack context and perspective on the complexity of slavery.” Yet it is safe to say that he would not sign on to the Marxist version of the Civil War preferred by the ICFI—“the greatest expropriation of private property in world history, not equaled until the Russian Revolution in 1917.”8
McPherson insists in his interview that “opposition to slavery, and opposition to racism, has also been an important theme in American history.” Sure, but it wouldn’t be difficult to find a dozen historians who could say, with confidence, yes, but on balance, slavery and racism themselves have probably been just as, if not more, important. In his interview, Oakes, one of the most sophisticated historians of the rise of the nineteenth-century Republican Party and its complex place within an emergent anti-slavery coalition, offers a bracing critique of the recent literature on slavery and capitalism, scholarship that underpins sociologist Matthew Desmond’s contribution to 1619. But other than gamely defending Lincoln against the charge of racism, Oakes doesn’t really direct much fire at the 1619 Project in particular. For his part, Wood (described by the Trotskyists as “the leading historian of the American Revolution”) seems affronted mostly by the failure of the 1619 Project to solicit his advice, and appears offended by the suggestion that the Revolutionary generation might have had some interest in protecting slavery. Yet, oddly enough, even he seems to endorse what has become one of the project’s most controversial assertions—that “[Lord] Dunmore’s proclamation in 1775, which promised the slaves freedom if they joined the Crown’s cause, provoked many hesitant Virginia planters to become patriots.” Those are Wood’s words, and they are part of his wide-ranging and fascinating discussion of the place of anti-slavery and pro-slavery sentiment in the Revolutionary era and the Revolutionary Atlantic World more generally.
Taken as a whole, the interviews are of enormous interest, but more for what they have to say about these scholars’ own interpretations of key aspects of American history than as a full-on attack on the 1619 Project. Reading closely, one sees the interviewed historians trying to avoid saying what the Trotskyists would like them to say, offering a far more nuanced view of the past. This certainly entails dissent from some of the specific claims of 1619, but it hardly requires them to embrace fully the Trotskyist alternative, which I suspect at least several of them would be reluctant to do. Frankly, I wish the AHR had published these interviews, and I hope they get wide circulation. Not for the critique of the 1619 Project itself, but because collectively they insist on the significance of historical context, the careful weighing of evidence, the necessity of understanding change over time, and the potential dangers of reductionism. I would urge anyone to read them.
I have focused on the interviews with Bynum, McPherson, Oakes, and Wood because these four scholars became the protagonists in the subsequent, and far less enlightening, act of the drama. On December 20, the New York Times Magazinepublished a letter to the editor circulated by Princeton’s Sean Wilentz and signed by these four interviewees, “to express [their] strong reservations about important aspects of The 1619 Project.”9 In particular, the letter objected to “the factual errors in the project and the closed process behind it.” This was followed by a spirited rebuttal from Times editor Jake Silverstein, and then rapidly spiraling coverage in the Atlantic, the Washington Post, and elsewhere, including follow-ups on the WSWS. More than a few people have asked me if perhaps the Times didn’t invite the historians’ letter, as it has certainly put a second wind in the 1619 Project’s media sails. No doubt, the Trotskyists who lit the match that started this fire—with whom I confess I am often intellectually sympathetic—achieved Internet traffic beyond their wildest dreams, and more press than they have enjoyed since they opposed American entry into World War II.
The letter itself is, it must be said, signed by a motley crew. If it was the Trotskyists who brought these folks under the same banner, they have managed to give a whole new meaning to “Popular Front.” The animus of the Fourth International types seems clear—in placing race at the center of history, 1619 elides the central role of class and class conflict in the history of settler colonialism, continental dispossession, and rapacious capitalism. But that is probably not the same hill that Wilentz and the gang of four are planting their flag on. So what gives?
What is odd about the letter is that it implies that the singular problem with the 1619 Project is that journalists are practicing history without a license. Reading only the WSWS interviews and the subsequent historians’ letter, one might be surprised to learn that several well-respected historians actually contributed material directly to the Times project: Anne Bailey, Kevin Kruse, Khalil Gibran Muhammad, Tiya Miles, and Mary Elliott (who curated a special supplementary Times “broadsheet” for the 1619 Project organized around objects in the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture). So clearly it is not that the editors at the Times shut out the voices of historians; it seems that they consulted with the wronghistorians. Given the qualifications of the scholars who did work on the project, that is a most unfortunate impression to convey.
The letter writers do not just object to errors they claim to have identified; they call for the Times to issue corrections. What, in fact, might these look like? The primary offender seems to be Nikole Hannah-Jones, in her sweeping essay that frames the entire project. Again, one could read the critics and miss the fact that the 1619 Project includes dozens of elements beyond Hannah-Jones’s opening essay. Many others may—or may not—contain errors, but Hannah-Jones’s essay has been singled out as representative of the whole. Particularly objectionable, the historians insist, is her assertion 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.” As the letter bluntly points out, “This is not true.” Admittedly, at a minimum, her formulation seriously overstates the anti-slavery bona fides of the British Empire at the time, not to mention the universality of pro-slavery views in the colonies. Fair enough. So, then, what would suffice in its stead? “One of the primary reasons the colonists decided to declare their independence”? How about “some of the Patriots fought for independence in the knowledge that it would secure their investments in slavery”? Presumably at least some of the letter writers would find the following counter-formulation no less objectionable: “there were many reasons the colonists decided to declare their independence, but the preservation of slavery was not among them.” While Hannah-Jones may be guilty of overstatement, this is more a matter of emphasis than it is of a correct or incorrect interpretation.
Similarly, the letter declares “misleading” Hannah-Jones’s emphasis on Lincoln’s 1862 advocacy of colonization, as the movement to encourage blacks to “self-deport” was called, to the exclusion of any examples of his commitment to racial equality. This, too, is a matter of emphasis and nuance, neglecting evidence that Lincoln ultimately favored some (limited) form of black citizenship. It would have been nice if Hannah-Jones had balanced colonization against some of that countervailing evidence, but many fine historians will find her general case against Lincoln persuasive. Surely, as Frederick Douglass himself pointed out during his 1876 oration on the anniversary of Lincoln’s assassination, colonization was only one among many examples that Lincoln “shared the prejudices of his white fellow-countrymen against the Negro” and that the Great Emancipator “was pre-eminently the white man’s President, entirely devoted to the welfare of white men.”10 I only point this out because it is usually the critics of the 1619 Project who like to present Douglass as the avatar of faith in constitutional liberty and racial equality. Here, in 1876, he sounds a good bit more like Hannah-Jones—or vice versa.
A third “error” asserted in the letter is Hannah-Jones’s blanket statement that “for the most part” (an important qualifier) black Americans have fought their freedom struggles “alone,” which the historians charge is “distorted.” But let’s face it—one can argue with this view, or else propose that such struggles may have succeeded only when they were interracial, but Hannah-Jones does have a point. It is hard to deny that interracial struggles for racial justice and full equality have been the exception in the American past far more than the rule. Should Silverstein or Hannah-Jones issue a correction along the lines of “white Americans have often joined forces with blacks to advance struggles against racism”? In some very general sense, that is true; but many historians (including me) would regard such a view itself as a serious distortion of the past. One might also quote her following sentence: “Yet we never fought only for ourselves.” I take that as an inspirational way of acknowledging the indispensable African American contribution to liberty, rather than “a displacement of historical understanding by ideology,” as the letter writers charge.
Three examples of disputable errors, or perhaps overstatements, in a single essay. Even if bolstered by what the letter refers to as “verifiable fact,” that’s not much on which to rest a dismissal of the entire project. The signatories to the letter seem especially perturbed at the massive effort to inject “an authoritative account that bears the imprimatur and credibility of The New York Times” into America’s K-12 classrooms, fearing that this may lead to a deformation of U.S. history. But even a cursory glance at the curricular materials provided by the project suggests otherwise. The lesson plans accompanying Hannah-Jones’s essay, for example, emphasize the role played by the black freedom struggle in advancing democracy and liberty in America. The focus is less on the role of blacks as perpetual victims of persistent white racism than on the fact that all Americans are beneficiaries of their ceaseless fight for racial justice. To the degree that the curriculum might perpetuate the primary error identified by the historians—the misconstrual of the American Revolution as a pro-slavery insurrection—it rests on this question: “What evidence can you see for how ‘some might argue that this nation was founded not as a democracy but as a slavocracy’?”11 A reasonable prompt, and only one among many in the curriculum accompanying the project.
None of this is to defend unconditionally what appears in the 1619 Project. Historians would be justified to complain that the Times presents as a radical reorientation an interpretation that differs little from a long-term, if still incomplete, trend to move African American history to the center of the American narrative. I share my colleagues’ frustration that journalists occasionally draw on years of our unacknowledged research to publish under the banner of “Extra, extra, never been told before!” Reasonable interpretive disagreements can stem from the bad habit some journalists have of substituting dramatic overstatement for historical analysis, and there is no shame in pointing these out. The treatment of American slavery in isolation from the presence of the so-called “peculiar institution” in the larger Atlantic World is out of step with current historiography. The project’s emphasis on continuity (especially in economic history), rather than change, deserves to be challenged. And, as the Trotskyists point out, Marxists may find the substitution of “race” for class relations disconcerting. But singling out errors in one essay does not suffice to dismiss the project in its entirety. So far, the critiques by historians have paid little or no attention to the section based on the NMAAHC material. I have yet to see mention of Khalil Muhammad’s essay on sugar, Tiya Miles’s reflections on the entangled histories of Wall Street and enslavement, or Kevin Kruse’s account of the racist origins of urban sprawl. Essays on music, public health, mass incarceration, and more seem to go unmentioned either by the Trotskyists or in the historians’ letter. To my knowledge, no specific, detailed analysis of the proposed K-12 curriculum accompanying the 1619 Project has yet been offered by teachers or scholars of history-teaching. I find these lacunae puzzling and ultimately inadequate to the vigor of the objections.
Let me return to the monument on the hill in Brooklyn. As a visitor gazes down on the towers of Wall Street, the Statue of Liberty, and New York’s upper harbor, contemplating the glorious history of the struggle for freedom that still frames the public national narrative for most Americans, she would be forgiven for thinking that African Americans were not a part of the story. Even a memorial commemorating the single moment in U.S. history most undeniably entangled with slavery and race neglects the place of African Americans in that narrative. To find that, a visitor to Green-Wood would have to trudge back down the hill to the neglected “Colored Lots,” which are confined to the southwest corner of the cemetery.12 I fear this remains closer to the rule than the exception in the national memorial culture. That deserves to change, and it would be a shame if historians stood in the way of such a transformation.
The letter writers do not just object to errors they claim to have identified; they call for the Times to issue corrections. What, in fact, might these look like? The primary offender seems to be Nikole Hannah-Jones, in her sweeping essay that frames the entire project. Again, one could read the critics and miss the fact that the 1619 Project includes dozens of elements beyond Hannah-Jones’s opening essay. Many others may—or may not—contain errors, but Hannah-Jones’s essay has been singled out as representative of the whole. Particularly objectionable, the historians insist, is her assertion 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.” As the letter bluntly points out, “This is not true.” Admittedly, at a minimum, her formulation seriously overstates the anti-slavery bona fides of the British Empire at the time, not to mention the universality of pro-slavery views in the colonies. Fair enough. So, then, what would suffice in its stead? “One of the primary reasons the colonists decided to declare their independence”? How about “some of the Patriots fought for independence in the knowledge that it would secure their investments in slavery”? Presumably at least some of the letter writers would find the following counter-formulation no less objectionable: “there were many reasons the colonists decided to declare their independence, but the preservation of slavery was not among them.” While Hannah-Jones may be guilty of overstatement, this is more a matter of emphasis than it is of a correct or incorrect interpretation.
Similarly, the letter declares “misleading” Hannah-Jones’s emphasis on Lincoln’s 1862 advocacy of colonization, as the movement to encourage blacks to “self-deport” was called, to the exclusion of any examples of his commitment to racial equality. This, too, is a matter of emphasis and nuance, neglecting evidence that Lincoln ultimately favored some (limited) form of black citizenship. It would have been nice if Hannah-Jones had balanced colonization against some of that countervailing evidence, but many fine historians will find her general case against Lincoln persuasive. Surely, as Frederick Douglass himself pointed out during his 1876 oration on the anniversary of Lincoln’s assassination, colonization was only one among many examples that Lincoln “shared the prejudices of his white fellow-countrymen against the Negro” and that the Great Emancipator “was pre-eminently the white man’s President, entirely devoted to the welfare of white men.”10 I only point this out because it is usually the critics of the 1619 Project who like to present Douglass as the avatar of faith in constitutional liberty and racial equality. Here, in 1876, he sounds a good bit more like Hannah-Jones—or vice versa.
A third “error” asserted in the letter is Hannah-Jones’s blanket statement that “for the most part” (an important qualifier) black Americans have fought their freedom struggles “alone,” which the historians charge is “distorted.” But let’s face it—one can argue with this view, or else propose that such struggles may have succeeded only when they were interracial, but Hannah-Jones does have a point. It is hard to deny that interracial struggles for racial justice and full equality have been the exception in the American past far more than the rule. Should Silverstein or Hannah-Jones issue a correction along the lines of “white Americans have often joined forces with blacks to advance struggles against racism”? In some very general sense, that is true; but many historians (including me) would regard such a view itself as a serious distortion of the past. One might also quote her following sentence: “Yet we never fought only for ourselves.” I take that as an inspirational way of acknowledging the indispensable African American contribution to liberty, rather than “a displacement of historical understanding by ideology,” as the letter writers charge.
Three examples of disputable errors, or perhaps overstatements, in a single essay. Even if bolstered by what the letter refers to as “verifiable fact,” that’s not much on which to rest a dismissal of the entire project. The signatories to the letter seem especially perturbed at the massive effort to inject “an authoritative account that bears the imprimatur and credibility of The New York Times” into America’s K-12 classrooms, fearing that this may lead to a deformation of U.S. history. But even a cursory glance at the curricular materials provided by the project suggests otherwise. The lesson plans accompanying Hannah-Jones’s essay, for example, emphasize the role played by the black freedom struggle in advancing democracy and liberty in America. The focus is less on the role of blacks as perpetual victims of persistent white racism than on the fact that all Americans are beneficiaries of their ceaseless fight for racial justice. To the degree that the curriculum might perpetuate the primary error identified by the historians—the misconstrual of the American Revolution as a pro-slavery insurrection—it rests on this question: “What evidence can you see for how ‘some might argue that this nation was founded not as a democracy but as a slavocracy’?”11 A reasonable prompt, and only one among many in the curriculum accompanying the project.
None of this is to defend unconditionally what appears in the 1619 Project. Historians would be justified to complain that the Times presents as a radical reorientation an interpretation that differs little from a long-term, if still incomplete, trend to move African American history to the center of the American narrative. I share my colleagues’ frustration that journalists occasionally draw on years of our unacknowledged research to publish under the banner of “Extra, extra, never been told before!” Reasonable interpretive disagreements can stem from the bad habit some journalists have of substituting dramatic overstatement for historical analysis, and there is no shame in pointing these out. The treatment of American slavery in isolation from the presence of the so-called “peculiar institution” in the larger Atlantic World is out of step with current historiography. The project’s emphasis on continuity (especially in economic history), rather than change, deserves to be challenged. And, as the Trotskyists point out, Marxists may find the substitution of “race” for class relations disconcerting. But singling out errors in one essay does not suffice to dismiss the project in its entirety. So far, the critiques by historians have paid little or no attention to the section based on the NMAAHC material. I have yet to see mention of Khalil Muhammad’s essay on sugar, Tiya Miles’s reflections on the entangled histories of Wall Street and enslavement, or Kevin Kruse’s account of the racist origins of urban sprawl. Essays on music, public health, mass incarceration, and more seem to go unmentioned either by the Trotskyists or in the historians’ letter. To my knowledge, no specific, detailed analysis of the proposed K-12 curriculum accompanying the 1619 Project has yet been offered by teachers or scholars of history-teaching. I find these lacunae puzzling and ultimately inadequate to the vigor of the objections.
Let me return to the monument on the hill in Brooklyn. As a visitor gazes down on the towers of Wall Street, the Statue of Liberty, and New York’s upper harbor, contemplating the glorious history of the struggle for freedom that still frames the public national narrative for most Americans, she would be forgiven for thinking that African Americans were not a part of the story. Even a memorial commemorating the single moment in U.S. history most undeniably entangled with slavery and race neglects the place of African Americans in that narrative. To find that, a visitor to Green-Wood would have to trudge back down the hill to the neglected “Colored Lots,” which are confined to the southwest corner of the cemetery.12 I fear this remains closer to the rule than the exception in the national memorial culture. That deserves to change, and it would be a shame if historians stood in the way of such a transformation.