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On August 14, 2019, New York Times journalist and Op-Ed columnist,
Nicole Hannah-Jones launched a large scale and ongoing project called
The 1619 Project in the New York Times Magazine. The stated aim was to
“reframe the country’s history by placing the consequences of slavery
and the contributions of black Americans at the very center of our
national narrative.” The project began with a 100-page spread of essays,
photos, poetry, and fiction marking what the magazine called the “400th
anniversary of the beginning of American slavery.”
The first essay--written by Hannah-Jones-- and others that followed it
contain both interpretive and factual claims. At the interpretive level
strong overarching claims are made. The central interpretive claim is
expressed by Hannah-Jones in opening essay of the initiative entitled
America Wasn't A Democracy Until Black Americans Made It One. She writes:
"Black Americans have...been, and continue to be,
foundational to the idea of American freedom. More than any other group
in this country’s history, we have served, generation after generation,
in an overlooked but vital role: It is we who have been the perfecters
of this democracy.
Through centuries of black resistance and protest, we have
helped the country live up to its founding ideals. And not only for
ourselves — black rights struggles paved the way for every other rights
struggle, including women’s and gay rights, immigrant and disability
rights.
Without the idealistic, strenuous and patriotic efforts of
black Americans, our democracy today would most likely look very
different — it might not be a democracy at all." -- source: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/08/14/magazine/black-history-american-democracy.html
I am not sure how such a sweeping causal claim can be established, nor
am I sure just what kind of empirical evidence might be marshaled to
support it. As Hannah-Jones says, it is an interpretive claim about
which reasonable people can disagree.
But interpretations must be interpretations OF putative facts or else
the theorist is merely interpreting other interpretations of other
interpretations of others, and so on
ad infinitum. Philosopher,
Robert Solomon, made the point well when responding to Nietzsche's
famous maxim, "There are no facts, only interpretations." Solomon
remarked, "This leaves Nietzsche with the rather embarrassing question,
"Interpretations of WHAT?" Those (including some postmodernists) who
succumb to such an excessive form of relativism implicitly reject
empiricism which leaves us with no clear standards to evaluate the
strength or weakness, truth or falsity of any statements, hypotheses or
theories. And, by the way, even the often-misread Foucault, the greatest influence on what has become of postmodernism, considered himself an empirical historian whose researches were supported with evidence. (see Colin Koopman's essay: Foucault's Critical Empiricism Today: pp. 107-8
https://pages.uoregon.edu/koopman/pub/2014fouc-now-vol_biopower_infopower-final.pdf
What, then, are some of the alleged FACTS marshaled by the 1619 project
to make the grand claims they advance appear plausible? There are a
few, and some of them disturbed major historians of American History
enough to cause them to write a letter to the Times requesting several
corrections of what they regard as mistakes and untruths. The
historians include such heavyweights as James McPherson, Gordon Wood,
Sean Wilentz and James Oakes. Several African American historians and
other scholars outside of the field of history, and positioned across the political spectrum, also critiqued the 1619
Project. Yale Marxist Political Scientist, Adolph Reed (who studies race
relations in the US), Columbia University's moderate center-left John McWhorter, and
the brilliant maverick historian Nell Irvin Painter (Histroy of White People, et al.) ,among others, have also criticized the
project as one that distorts history. Leaving aside the broad claim
regarding blacks as the ultimate cause of modern US democracy, these
scholars focused on more discrete and manageable issues amenable to
empirical inquiry. Some of the factual claims that the historians called
into question include the following:
A) Chattel Slavery based on a firm racial hierarchy began in 1619, according to Hannah-Jones and the 1619 Project
The problem is it's well known that the first 2 or 3 generations of
Africans in North America were indentured and were able to gain their
freedom and pursue wealth and liberty like other groups that were not
subject to a legal racial hierarchy (see Nell's article linked below and
Ira Berlin's classic, Generations of Captivity: 2004). Laws that
spelled out the racial basis for permanent and hereditary slavery
emerged only towards the end of the 17th century. They did not exist for
most of the 17th century in the North American colonies. Professor
Nell Irvin Painter wrote an article on the subject in the Guardian which
discusses the matter in some depth.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2019/aug/14/slavery-in-america-1619-first-ships-jamestown
The reason this factual error matters so much to the historians here is
that the 1619 Project infers from the arrival of slaves in 1619 that
this was the "true founding" of our country rather than 1776. For it is
"slavery and its consequences" that are "central" determinants of US
history, culture and political structure. So despite the usual date
given for the founding of the US ( 1776 because of the Declaration of
Independence or 1787 when the Constitution was written) Hannah-Jones
and her colleagues at the Times claim that the "true founding" occurred
as soon as the first slaves set foot on North American soil. (This
thoughtful article published in The Atlantic Magazine discusses some of
problems and implications of changing the date of the founding in this
way:
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/01/inclusive-case-1776-not-1619/604435/
This reframing of the date of the "true founding" of America is part of
a larger argument and factual claim about the nature of the American
Revolution and the celebrated documents of the Revolutionary period,
including the Declaration of Independence, The Constitution and books
and pamphlets like Thomas Paine's Common Sense. Namely,
B) Hannah-Jones and the 1619 Project claim that the American
Revolution and Declaration of Independence were not really motivated by
the high ideals discussed in the writings of the founders, but rather
the war and the founding documents themselves were actually responses
to colonists' fears that Britain was going to abolish slavery in the
1770s and 80s. It is for this reason that the founding fathers produced
the idealistic but "false" (phony) documents we revere in the US (the
Declaration, Constitution etc.). Basically, all of that is just a
pretext, say the 1619 team, for the real reason which was to thwart the
alleged British plan to end slavery in the 1770s and repel the Brits
This was a major point of contention for all of the scholars who asked
the Times to retract all such claims. Regarding Hannah-Jones’ claim
that, “In London, there were growing calls to abolish the slave trade,”
Prof. Wilentz said, “The Americans were the ones who were trying to
close the slave trade. They had tried throughout the 1760s and 1770s
repeatedly,” adding that for Britain, abolition would have been
“economic suicide.” (see:
https://www.dailyprincetonian.com/article/2020/02/u-professors-send-letter-requesting-corrections-to-1619-project
Indeed the British did not abolish the slave trade until 1807, and
slavery itself in the West Indies was not abolished until the 1833, as
Prof. McPherson pointed out. At the time of the Revolution, they were
as dependent on the slave trade and slavery itself as were American
planters in the south.
In response to these points made in a letter to the Times, the NYT Magazine Editor-in-Chief, Jake Silverstein cited an obscure legal decision, the 1772 Somerset decision, in which
the British high court ruled, “chattel slavery was not supported by
English common law." Wilentz correctly stated that the case made no
difference because it applied only in England, not the colonies.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Somerset_v_Stewart
McPherson concurred, saying, “And from there, the author of the
introductory article [in the 1619 Project] extrapolates that the British
represented a threat to the survival of slavery in the American
colonies.” He was also careful to tread gently saying that he
"applaud(s) the larger work of the 1619 Project in bringing attention to
the centrality of slavery in American history," and that the requested
corrections are “matters of verifiable fact.”
"I think the purpose is a good one, which is to alert people who are
interested in American history to the importance of slavery, of race and
racism, in shaping important aspects of American history,” McPherson
said. ( Source: Daily Princetonian
https://www.dailyprincetonian.com/article/2020/02/u-professors-send-letter-requesting-corrections-to-1619-project
However, he added that the NY Times has a reputation to protect, and
advised that making the suggested corrections would help the paper to
maintain a reputation for accuracy on the historical facts.
Silverstein (the Editor-in-Chief at NYT Magazine) also referred to the Dunmore Proclamation of 1775,
which offered freedom to slaves who fled to the British army. McPherson
responded by explaining that the revolution had already been fought for
eight months when the proclamation was made. He stated that:
“It applied only to the slaves of those who had already
committed themselves to the war against the British,” McPherson
explained. “If you stayed on the British side you could keep your
slaves, so in fact the opposite was true. Those people who supported the
revolution were doing so in spite of the threat that their support for
the revolution posed to slavery, exactly the opposite of the argument
that the motive was to preserve slavery.” (ibid)
In response to the NYT's claim that Britain was moving toward abolition
at the time, McPherson pointed out that the situation was nearly the
reverse. While there was almost no interest in abolishing slavery in the
1770s in Britain, many northerners had already been trying to end the
institution of slavery. He states:
“One of the impulses that grew out of the revolution was the
abolition of slavery by more than half of the states that became part
of the United States, starting with Massachusetts and Vermont."
Prof. Wilentz adds:
"The Americans were the ones who were trying to close the slave trade.
They had tried throughout the 1760s and 1770s repeatedly,"...and for the
British to close the slave trade at that time would have amounted to
economic suicide.”
He continues:
"There was not a rising clamor around slavery, that’s for
sure, and the English government showed absolutely no interest in
getting rid of slavery at all, as of 1776. So the idea that American
slaveholders were shaking in their boots because of an abolitionist or
anti-slavery British government is ludicrous.”
There were several other issues of factual accuracy taken up by the
historians. I won't cover all of them here, but rather mention them
briefly so that the scale of the debate can be appreciated. The 1619
Project claims that the Constitution "was a pro-slavery document" while
the historians pointed to heated debates involving passionate positions
for and against slavery, which resulted in the unfortunate 3/5th
compromise. Wilentz and McPherson point out that the constitution
tolerated but did not sanction
slavery, and that the notes of Madison at the Constitutional Convention
and other germane documents from the period paint a very different
picture from that of Hannah-Jones and the 1619 Project.
There were also disagreements about the sincerity of Abraham Lincoln's
emancipation proclamation. Here we're on less solid ground, as
"sincerity" is not empirically observable directly, but inferred by
behaviors and words. The historians pointed out that Frederick Douglas
acknowledged Lincoln's definitive role in emancipating the slaves during
a war. Douglas said that this was, in his view, the only way
emancipation could have happened. (see:
https://dp.la/primary-source-sets/frederick-douglass-and-abraham-lincoln/sources/104 )
This doesn't deny the centrality of resistance on the part of enslaved
blacks. Rather the emancipation proclamation and later Amendments,
backed by a military defeat of the South helped blacks to resist their
former masters and begin to redefine their place in US history during
Radical Reconstruction (1865-1877) before the rise of the Klan and the
ominous Black Codes that led the way to Jim Crow.
The last issue I'll mention involves the rather odd claim made by
Hannah-Jones and the 1619 Project that slavery is the cause of modern
capitalism as we have it today. I'll leave the reader to chew on that
one. I don't find it very convincing, and indeed would tend to trace US
modern capitalism back to northern interests as articulated by Alexander
Hamilton and not southern slaveocracy. Indeed there is a virtual consensus on that view, and little evidence of the revisionist claim regarding slaveocracy as the germ of what would become US (and ultimately global) capitalism. So these are some of the factual issues under
contention.
THEORETICAL CONCERNS: INTERPRETATIONS WITHOUT FACTS?
While almost all the issues above center around empirical matters,
Hannah-Jones and 1619 Project dismisses the whole matter as a
not-uncommon difference of "historical interpretation." She writes:
"Historians disagree all the time, but to go to this depth
of demanding a correction, is taking this disagreement of
interpretations to a realm outside of what I would consider normative
historiography." (Daily Princetonian)
But while interpretations can't be directly refuted or confirmed, the
question in historiography arises... WHAT are these interpretations
interpret
ing if not the facts, the historical data as best we
can establish it? And if we are interpreting events not in evidence
(e.g. the taking up of arms against the British just to perpetuate
slavery which they supposedly threatened) then are the interpretations
therefore invalidated? Sticking with this example, it's either true or
not true that Americans fought the British to perpetuate slavery or
it's false. There is no good evidence for such a shared motive
underlying the Revolution. Thus the
interpretation is one operating on a
bad hypothesis rather than a
factual premise. This is rather like
interpreting a decree or law that never existed. How can one "interpret"
a
casus belli that never existed?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Casus_belli
How can we build a theory of blacks as purveyors of democracy, and
whites as faux liberal advocates for liberty and equality, if it turns
out that the revolutionaries were
not fighting to maintain a slave
society? The interpretive schema of black exceptionalism in a world of
whites who were not *really* committed to freedom and equality requires
that whites were mostly interested in keeping black slaves down and
depriving them of all meaningful life-chances. It requires that the
descriptor, "white men," refers to a monolithic set of beliefs and
commitments; that those founders who despised slave society (e.g. Rufus
King who bought slaves in order to set them free) were merely
exceptions that proved the rule of a toxic and all-pervading racism in
the US. But we know that a genuine desire to end slavery was found in
several Northern States, and that these men argued vehemently with those
advocating for an American future based largely on the racist slave
system. We know that the anti-slavery politicians came to believe that
if slavery could be contained, confined to the south, and if westward
expansion could proceed without the extension of slavery (like the
Northwest Territory which did not permit slaves), then slavery would
most likely fizzle out. ( This was a bit too rosy, and nobody foresaw,
Eli Whitney's cotton gin and the enormous profits his invention brought
with the help of slave labor for which demand increased dramatically).
But right at the time of the American Revolution and immediately after
it the first abolition societies emerged, and states/polities including
Pennsylvania, Massachusetts, Rhode Island and Vermont passed
anti-slavery laws.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abolition ... he_country
Many founders in the North such as Benjamin Rush, Ben Franklin, Thomas
Paine, Moses Brown, Rufus King and others began to work to put an end
to the the "peculiar institution." However, unforeseen historical
contingencies (esp. the rise of "King Cotton" following Eli Whitney's
invention of the Cotton Gin) made slave labor more valuable to Southern
plantation owners. But contrary to the position of the 1619 Project
there was no monolithic "consensus position" shared by a supposedly
monolithic, white supremacist population that cut across states and
regions in the US and its nascent territories which began to inch
westward at the time.
Without getting into the fine details of historiography, it is at least
worth pointing out that the 1619 Project's interpretation of the US as a
total society bent on perpetuating slavery indefinitely depends on
assertions of fact that are taken to be true by the proponents, even
though the evidence contradicts the premise of a unitary and
trans-regional society intent on not only maintaining but spreading
slavery as the country expanded to the west. While historical evidence
is often partial and subject to revision, the evidence cited by the
professors that signed the letter to the NY Times, is extremely well
supported. Objectivity is at best an ideal, and we need not be naive
about that and claim that historical interpretation can be based on
rock solid and incontrovertible evidence. It isn't. BUT this is not to
say that historians should countenance
ad hoc hypotheses about
such things as the motives of revolutionaries, or the meaning of
documents like the constitution in the absence of ANY clear evidence.
One may advance interpretations of historical data that is at least
supported by
some degree of probable evidence. But shooting from the hip, as it were, is something else altogether.
Perhaps I am being unfair here. Do you think that's what is happening in
the 1619 Project amounts to evidence-free interpretation and
unsupported hypotheses? Is it largely based on assumptions of a
political and moral kind, or is there legitimate historical methodology
being used to argue their case ? Is the exceptionalist claim that
black Americans led the way to US Democracy, and that they fought their
battles with almost no help from whites including Lincoln, the Union
Army, the Reconstruction era Amendments, Abolitionists and Radical
Republicans plausible? Should such history become part of secondary
school curriculum as is now happening?
References/Related Reading:
James McPherson: Battle Cry of Freedom
Sean Wilentz: No Property In Man https://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog.php ... 0674972223
Ira Berlin: Generations of Captivity https://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog.php ... 0674016248
Nell Irvin Painter: Creating Black Americans: African American History and its Meanings to the Present
https://global.oup.com/ushe/product/cre ... us&lang=en&
The Daily Princetonian: U. Professors send letter requesting corrections to 1619 Project: https://www.dailyprincetonian.com/artic ... 19-project
