No Past, No Future

The progressive education system’s increasingly negative portrayal of American history is embodied in The New York Times’ 1619 Project, which has been incorporated into curricula across the country. The project attempts to make the arrival of the first African slaves into the American colonies the foundational date of the American republic. According to The 1619 Project, “Out of slavery — and the anti-Black racism it required — grew nearly everything that has truly made America exceptional.”

Shortly after The 1619 Project was published, a group of distinguished historians — the majority of whom are left-leaning — wrote a public letter condemning it. The historians wrote that they were “dismayed at some of the factual errors in the project and the closed process” behind its production. “These errors, which concern major events, cannot be described as interpretation or ‘framing.’ They are matters of verifiable fact, which are the foundation of both honest scholarship and honest journalism. They suggest a displacement of historical understanding by ideology. Dismissal of objections on racial grounds — that they are the objections of only ‘white historians’ — has affirmed that displacement.”

Related reading: “The Madness of Crowds: Gender Race and Identity” – Douglas Murray

Britannica’s article on “The Founding Fathers and Slavery” notes that “many of the Founding Fathers acknowledged that slavery violated the core American Revolutionary ideal of liberty” and “exhibited considerable aversion to slavery during the era of the Articles of Confederation.” The aversion to slavery held by many Founders, however, was overridden by “their simultaneous commitment to private property rights, principles of limited government, and intersectional harmony,” which prompted them to compromise with southern states to make sure that all the sacrifices of the Revolution were not lost over the issue.

In his initial draft of the Declaration of Independence, Thomas Jefferson condemned the slave trade, penning a 168-word passage condemning the practice as an evil imposed on the colonies by England.

“From the day of the declaration of independence,” wrote John Quincy Adams, the “wise rulers of the land” counseled “to repair the injustice” of slavery, not perpetuate it. “Universal emancipation was the lesson which they had urged upon their contemporaries, and held forth as transcendent and irremissible [sic] duties to their children of the present age.”

Abraham Lincoln explained in depth how many of the Founders opposed slavery in principle and attempted to ensure its demise in their approach to the founding documents and law. James McPherson summarizes Lincoln’s explanation: “They adopted a Declaration of Independence that pronounced all men created equal. They enacted the Northwest Ordinance of 1787 banning slavery from the vast Northwest Territory. To be sure, many of the founders owned slaves. But they asserted their hostility to slavery in principle while tolerating it temporarily (as they hoped) in practice. That was why they did not mention the words ‘slave’ or ‘slavery’ in the Constitution, but referred only to ‘persons held to service.’ ‘Thus, the thing is hid away, in the constitution,’ said Lincoln, ‘just as an afflicted man hides away a wen or a cancer, which he dares not cut out at once, lest he bleed to death; with the promise, nevertheless, that the cutting may begin at the end of a given time.’ The first step was to prevent the spread of this cancer, which the fathers took with the Northwest Ordinance, the prohibition of the African slave trade in 1807, and the Missouri Compromise restriction of 1820. The second was to begin a process of gradual emancipation, which the generation of the fathers had accomplished in the states north of Maryland.”

The rewriting of American history to define it by slavery and racism requires ignoring historical facts. “The myth that America was premised on slavery took off in the 1830s, not the 1770s,” Cato Institute scholar Timothy Sandefur explains. “That was when John C. Calhoun, Alexander Stephens, George Fitzhugh, and others offered a new vision of America — one that either disregarded the facts of history to portray the founders as white supremacists, or denounced them for not being so. Relatively moderate figures such as Illinois Sen. Stephen Douglas twisted the language of the Declaration to say that the phrase ‘all men are created equal’ actually meant only white men. Abraham Lincoln effectively refuted that in his debates with Douglas.”

The view that America was founded on slavery and largely defined by racism is promulgated in The New York Times’ 1619 Project. Lead author Nikole Hannah-Jones falsely claimed in her opening essay 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." After she was awarded the Pulitzer for essay, despite historians debunking its premise, The National Association of Scholars penned an open letter signed by 21 scholars calling on the Pulitzer Prize Board to rescind the award because of the essay’s fatal factual errors and the Times’ failure to properly acknowledge revisions.

Related video: “What’s Wrong With The 1619 Project?” – Wilfred Reilly

The left-wing view of America suggests that it is an inherently racist country that cannot overcome the original sin of slavery. Yet America has become the most successful multi-racial country in history, and the only white majority country to elect a black President, twice. Two million black Africans have come to America as legal immigrants in the last 50 years, and they have become one of the most successful groups in the country.

Black Americans have heroically fought for their rights, often against great odds. Joining them in the fight for racial equality over the decades has been a vast number of white people. For example, the U.S. Senate that passed the landmark Civil Rights Act in 1964 contained 98 whites and two men of color, both Asians.

In their open letter exposing significant errors in The 1619 Project, a group of distinguished historians cite the famous endorsement of the U.S. Constitution by Frederick Douglass and highlight Abraham Lincoln’s attempts to promote racial equality, writing: “The project criticizes Abraham Lincoln’s views on racial equality but ignores his conviction that the Declaration of Independence proclaimed universal equality, for blacks as well as whites, a view he upheld repeatedly against powerful white supremacists who opposed him. The project also ignores Lincoln’s agreement with Frederick Douglass that the Constitution was, in Douglass’s words, ‘a GLORIOUS LIBERTY DOCUMENT.’ Instead, the project asserts that the United States was founded on racial slavery, an argument rejected by a majority of abolitionists and proclaimed by champions of slavery like John C. Calhoun.”