Racism in American History: The Case of Thomas Jefferson

My last post discussed the 1619 Project which places race and racism at the center of all American history, but in the process commits serious factual errors. One reader remarked that debunking bad history isn't enough; that there is an overdue reckoning with racism in US history even if the 1619 Project misses the mark on many important points of fact. I agree. And I agree that debunking ideologically driven history is no substitute for thoughtful engagement with the poison of racism -- past and present. As statues of such founders as George Washington and Thomas Jefferson are being toppled and/or vandalized, it's important to ask whether or not, as 1619 Project would have it, our country was founded in the service of white supremacy. Was all the  talk of universal, "inalienable" rights in the Declaration of Independence and other founding documents empty rhetoric? If not, how can we square racist words and policies on the part of many founders with the lofty ideals we find in Jefferson, Thomas Paine or Benjamin Rush, among others?

There was a time when our history was taught in a way that left no room for an honest discussion of the moral transgressions (or "sins" ) of many founders. Jefferson, for example, was only discussed as a liberty-loving hero in text books. But as Joseph Ellis (author of Founding Brothers) says, he  was a "dedicated racist."Ellis suggests (in a book called American Dialogue) that we try to understand this "American Sphinx" rather than reflexively praise or condemn him depending on personal feelings.  He was not simply a "dedicated racist" but also-- esp in his younger years-- a vocal anti-slavery advocate.

He argued several times against slavery. As a young lawyer he also defended a slave who sued for freedom pro bono  and made an eloquent speech. He went beyond legal technicalities, and argued from his natural rights perspective saying: "We assert that under the law of nature all men are born free, and every one comes into this world with a right to his own person."


Again, in 1774, in a pamphlet entitled A Summary View of the Rights of British America, Jefferson-- in a section that listed grievances against King George III's mistreatment of the colonists-- wrote these astonishing words:


"[H]is Majesty has rejected laws of the most salutary tendency. The abolition of domestic slavery is the great object of desire in these colonies where it was unhappily introduced in their infant state. But prervious to the infranchisement of the slaves we already have, it is ncessary to exclude all further importations from Africa. Yet our repeated attempts to effect this by prohibition and by imposing duties which might amount to a prohibition, have been hitherto defeated by his majesty's negative: thus preferring the immediate advantages of a few British corsairs to the lasting interests of the American states *and to the rights of human nature* deeply wounded by this infamous practice." (The Portable Thomas  Jefferson: pp. 14-15)

It is worth noting that this indignant passage is predicated on the fiction that American colonists in Virginia were prepared to end slavery. Nobody took issue with Jefferson for making the claim, but it is clear in retrospect that Jefferson was a) leveling not a legal but distinctly MORAL charge against the King, and that b) in doing so he falsely spoke for the population of Virginia. Perhaps because it was inconsequential (nobody was about to act on it), nobody took Jefferson to task for being presumptive.  But equally conspicuous is the high and abstract, universal idealism to which Jefferson gives expression. He did so again when writing his unedited draft of the Declaration of Independence where the original list of grievances includes this:

"[The King has] waged cruel war against human nature itself, violating the sacred rights of life and  liberty in the persons of a distant people who never offended him, captivating and carrying them into slavery in another hemisphere, or to incur miserable death in their transportation hither....Determined to keep open a market where MEN [sic] should be bought and sold, he has prostituted his negative for suppressing every legislative attempt to prohibit or to restrain this execrable commerce." (ibid)

Again, Jefferson (knowingly or not) is playing fast and loose with the facts by suggesting that the King foisted the institution of slavery on an unwilling and morally resistant group of colonists.  Jefferson's relationship to the truth was sometimes strangely deficient. Some historians note that he wrote these and other passages with a kind of philosophical passion and moral urgency that seems to have been sincere. But at the next moment he would command his slaves, or sell them to pay debts off. Worst of all, of course, was his long affair with Sally Hemmings. 

So while he was our most compelling and eloquent spokesperson for natural rights,  he also recorded feelings of fear and guilt.

"I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just; that his justice cannot sleep forever....The Almighty has no attribute which can take sides with us." (Ellis: p.25)

Yet he also wrote:

Nothing is more firmly written in the book of fate than that these people [African Americans] are to be free; nor is it less certain that the two races -- equally free-- cannot live in the same government. Nature, habit, opinion has drawn *indelible* distinctions between them"  (ibid)

He went on to explain that if slaves were to be freed without being expatriated, the effects on whites would be heaviest of all, since by virtue of having "negro blood" they would "contaminate" whites and generate "an inferior American race" (p. 26 Ellis) He concludes:

"When freed they must be removed beyond the reach of mixture."

Various scholars wrote Jefferson agreeing that slaves should be freed, but parting ways with him on what they saw-- even then -- as crackpot race science.  David Ramsay wrote:

"I think you have depresssed the negroes too low. I believe all mankind to be originally the same and diversified by accidental circumstances." (Ellis: 26)

Jefferson's friend, Dr. Benjamin Rush, wrote:

"The unhappy sons of Africa, in spite of the degrading influence of slavery, are in no wise inferior to the more fortunate inhabitants of Europe and America."

But  Jefferson was adamant about the inherent inferiority of any person with"African blood." Any racial "mixture" would, he thought,  result in biological degradation of whites, or as he put it, "mongrelization."

What makes all of this truly surreal is the fact that Jefferson had been fathering children with Sally Hemmings all the while. Did he really look at these children and see "mongrels" and "inferior beings?" If so, how could he bear the cognitive dissonance? Was his relationship to these children (whom he agreed to free as adults in an agreement with Sally Hemmings) bereft of love or affection? If he was so scared of mixed race children, why was he fathering them?

     Portraits of Sally Hemmings and Thomas Jefferson

So, this appears to be an example of our most moralistic egalitarian defender of all human rights including those of African slaves. Yet he was one of the more severe racists. How does that work? How can one compartmentalize to that degree?

Similarly, Enlightenment philosophers who espoused universal rights including Kant, Hume and later figures like Hegel held that Africans were a separate and inferior race. Such beliefs were common. But they didn't father "mulattoes" as far as I know.  Even prototypical civil rights architect, socialist and feminist, John Stuart Mill couldn't bring himself to believe that Britain's Indian subjects were capable of ruling themselves. All his work on liberty in politics simply didn't apply!

But again, Jefferson offers a rare glimpse into a living contradiction, an instantiation of the "American Paradox" of a nation of slaves conceived in liberty. I agree with Ellis who suggests that it is not by attacking Jefferson, but meditating deeply on these staggering contradictions and trying to understand them, that only in that attempt will we possibly be able to move beyond these historic and social scars. Tearing down statues of our most idealistic founding fathers-- Confederates is a different issue--  only deprives us of the opportunity to try to see beyond the "all good or all bad" theory of  flawed, but brilliant patriots of the 18th century. We may not be able to ever make rational sense of it; but a different kind of understanding which can accommodate the contradictions and moral ambiguity of some of the founders like Jefferson is, I hope, possible. It's also important to remember that many others (like Benjamin Rush, Rufus King et al.) were unambiguously against slavery and did not hold to theories of race-based hierarchies and crackpot science. 

Too many of us expect history to "make sense," or to reveal a rational trajectory. But history is not  inherently rational or moral. It certainly isn't a narrative ending in a moral to the story from which we elide any inconvenient facts that do not support our desired outcome, but rather an intricate interplay across human experiences and contradictions. Like great literature, we learn most from history when we can find ourselves mirrored in the struggles, successes and failures of those who came before. Should we expect "heroes" and "villains" in earlier times when we are acutely aware of the inconsistencies, contradictions and failings of not only ourselves but those who are the "leading lights" of politics and culture in our own era?

Then let's return to the "American Sphinx," as Ellis calls Thomas Jefferson. It has become common to see him as being not only a racist but a proponent  of white supremacy-- essentially no different from the likes of John Calhoun or Jefferson Davis and the other leaders of the Confederacy. I don't think this gets things right.

Rather, I agree with Sean Wilentz who argues in his book, The Politicians and the Egalitarians,  that Jefferson played a decisive role in setting up our egalitarian national tradition as seen in The Declaration of Independence and other important texts of the era. Yet, as we've seen, Jefferson's actions do not consistently conform to his lofty ideals, to say the least. What can we say? He pressed for abolition in several proposals such  as the Northwest Ordinance (which could have prevented the Westward spread of slavery with just one more vote!) In later years, he spoke less and less about the issue. As the years pass, we get from his voluminous writings mostly vague hopes about slavery evaporating away somehow.  Eventually, for the most part, he avoided the topic.

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Jefferson's character may have been enigmatic, but what about his legacy? In what way did he influence later politicians -- e.g. Confederates vs. Republicans in the lead-up to the Civil War? Or pro-slavery and anti-slavery activists and organizations?  Well, in 1850s, the pro-Slavery Southern Democrats de-emphasized the Declaration of Independence as a foundational text in order to read the Constitution as a"pro-Slavery" document. Though slaves aren't mentioned explicitly, Southern Democrats cited the 3/5th compromise and the 10th Amendment to argue that the slave system was protected as a right left to the individual states. All men, they insisted, are NOT "created equal," in Jefferson's pivotal egalitarian phrase. Whites were meant to govern blacks. Slavery was not something about which one should "tremble before God" in fear of Divine Justice, as Jefferson had said. Instead, slavery was itself God-sanctioned, and as American as apple pie. If later Southerners tried to hide these beliefs and motives for secession, the truth of the matter is easy to locate in all the secession documents and statements of the Confederate states  https://avalon.law.yale.edu/subject_menus/csapage.asp. In 1860 and1861 there was no attempt to hide the fact that they argued that the Constitution was a pro-slavery document, and in order to support this reading conveniently ignored the most famous section of the Declaration of 1776 which reads:

"We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness."

However, the very first Declaration of Secession (South Carolina, 1860)  quoted selectively from the  Declaration of 1776 in support of the right of individual states to decide the issue of slavery, the government of the United States notwithstanding. They wrote that due to a struggle with the British Empire for independence:

[S]elf-government ensued, which resulted, on the 4th of July, 1776, in a Declaration, by the Colonies, "that they are, and of right ought to be, FREE AND INDEPENDENT STATES; and that, as free and independent States, they have full power to levy war, conclude peace, contract alliances, establish commerce, and to do all other acts and things which independent States may of right do."(sic) https://avalon.law.yale.edu/19th_century/csa_scarsec.asp

The other state declarations of secession (which came in 1861) similarly omit the foundational 2nd paragraph which establishes the equality and natural rights of all persons. They had to explicitly reject  Jeffersonian egalitarianism to perpetuate the "peculiar institution" of slavery, which is inherently anti-egalitarian.  So  Jefferson's legacy is NOT similar to that of Calhoun, for whom slavery is a "positive good." It is not the same as the legacies of Jefferson Davis, Robert E Lee and other notable Confederates who advanced a pro-slavery reading of our founding texts. His words and (some of the deeds that matched them) have been, and continue to be indispensable to egalitarians in the US, and Human Rights activists elsewhere. Those who  struggle for human rights always return to the natural rights framework, and the Jeffersonian language that so passionately expresses it. This is his most important legacy, despite his personal issues with racism. The second paragraph of the Declaration of 1776 has so influenced subsequent human rights documents and instruments as to be called "The Immortal Declaration." (see Jack Greene's 1976 book, All Men Are Created Equal https://books.google.com/books/about/All_Men_are_Created_Equal.html?id=LiAJAQAAIAAJ )

At the time of its writing, nobody could have anticipated the significance Jefferson's words in the Declaration would assume subsequently.  There were other documents and pamphlets that invoked natural rights and equality. Only in the 1890s did Jefferson's Republican Party begin to cite it as authoritative text. For as it turned out, the Constitution and Bill of Rights failed to specifically mention universal natural rights. As Pauline Maier, writes:

[I]n the 1790s -- when neither the original Constitution nor the Constitution as amended acknowledged the existence of the people's "inherent natural rights"-- the Declaration of Independence was first rescued from the obscurity into which it had so quickly sunk.... Members of the Jeffersonian Republican Party of the 1790s were the first to describe the Declaration of Independence as a "deathless instrument" and attribute its timeless elegance to their leader "the immortal Jefferson."...It was above all the second paragraph, with its declaration of human equality and rights, that they emphasized. Those words [were] reminiscent of the French Delcaration of theRights of Man, [which] fit the Republicans' affection for revolutionary France."  (The Strange History of "All Men Are Created Equal"p. 881-2 https://scholarlycommons.law.wlu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1547&context=wlulr )

Actually, Jefferson often consulted with Gen. Lafayette, who wrote The Declaration of the Rights of Man in July 1789. Jefferson was living in Paris as the US Minister to France at the time of the French Revolution, and he influenced Republican leaders during this early phase of the Revolution. Indeed Lafayette asked for Jefferson's "observations" on the the document before submitting it to the National Assembly. It is the Declaration of Independence and The Declaration of  Rights of Man that serve as the basis for later instruments of human rights, especially the UN Charter of Human Rights which has been invoked by oppressed peoples of many nations. In the 1780s, reflecting on the Declaration of Independence and ongoing revolutions in Holland and France, Jefferson predicted: "this ball of liberty...will roll around the globe." Despite his racism, he was the most eloquent and influential of early American egalitarians.

Abolitionist, William Lloyd Garrison, wrote The Declaration of Sentiments of the American Anti-Slavery Convention in 1833. He cites the "immortal declaration" while insisting that to make the principle of equality true in practice, all slaves in the US must be freed immediately. 

 "More than fifty-seven years have elapsed, since a band of patriots convened in this place, to devise measures for the deliverance of this country from a foreign yoke. The corner-stone upon which they founded the Temple of Freedom was broadly this—'that all men are created equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights; that among these are life, LIBERTY, and the pursuit of happiness.' At the sound of their trumpet-call, three millions of people rose up as from the sleep of death, and rushed to the strife of blood; deeming it more glorious to die instantly as freemen, than desirable to live one hour as slaves. They were few in number—poor in resources; but the honest conviction that Truth, Justice and Right were on their side, made them invincible.   We have met together for the achievement of an enterprise, without which that of our fathers is incomplete....  Their grievances, great as they were, were trifling in comparison with the wrongs  and sufferings of those for whom we plead. Our fathers were never slaves—never bought and sold like cattle —never shut out from the light of knowledge and religion—never subjected to the lash of brutal taskmaster." (Selections from the Writings of W.L Garrison: pp. 67-8: http://utc.iath.virginia.edu/abolitn/abeswlgct.html )

 

Frederick Douglass also invoked the principle in stirring words, while holding it up to Americans as an unrealized ideal-- indeed a measure of hypocrisy and moral failure. In his famous speech on Independence Day of 1852, "What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July?" Douglas said:

"The signers of the Declaration of Independence were brave men. They were great men too-- great enough to give fame to a great age. It does not often happen to a nation to raise, at one time, such a number of truly great men. The point from which I am compelled to view them [i.e. as a slave] is not, certainly, the most favorable; and yet I cannot contemplate their great deeds with less than admiration. They were statesmen, patriots and heroes, and for the good they did, and the principles they contended for, I will unite with you to honor their memory....Their statesmanship looked beyond the passing moment, and stretched away in strength into the distant future. They seized upon eternal principles, and set a glorious example in their defense. Mark them!"

He then indicts the nation for its failure to apply their principles to the millions of slaves in whose name he is speaking:

 "Fellow citizens, pardon me, allow me to ask, why am I called upon to speak here today? Are the great principles of political freedom and of natural justice, embodied in that Declaration of Independence extended to us?....[S]uch is not the state of the case...I am not included within the pale of this glorious anniversary! Your high independence only reveals the immeasurable distance between us...The sunlight that brought life and healing to you, has brought stripes and death to me. This Fourth of July is yours, not mine. You may rejoice; I must mourn. To drag a man in fetters into the grand illuminated temple of liberty, and call upon him to join you in joyous anthems, were inhuman mockery and sacrilegious irony. Do you mean, citizens, to mock me by asking me to speak today?....The existence of slavery in this country brands your republicanism as a sham, your humanity as a base pretence, and your Christianity as a lie. It saps the foundation of religion; it makes your name a hissing, and a bye-word to a mocking earth. It is the antagonistic force in your government, the only thing that seriously disturbs and endangers you Union."

He then answers disdainfully the titular question of the speech:

"What, to the American slave, is your 4th of July? I answer; a day that reveals to him, more than all other days in the year, the gross injustice and cruelty to which he is the constant victim. To him, your celebration is a sham; your boasted liberty, an unholy license; your national greatness, swelling vanity; your sounds of rejoicing are empty and heartless; your denunciations of tyrants, brass-fronted impudence; your shouts of liberty and equality, hollow mockery... a thin veil to cover up crimes which would disgrace a nation of savages!"  (Frederick Douglass: Selected Speeches and Writings, ed. Philip S Foner, available online here: https://liberalarts.utexas.edu/coretexts/_files/resources/texts/c/1852%20Douglass%20July%204.pdf )

I quote from this speech extensively in order to point to the nature of the American paradox of liberty and slavery. Douglass affirms the greatness of of the signers of the Declaration, and the "eternal principles"  which they "seized" setting a "glorious example" for all posterity. Simultaneously, he reviles the nation 75 years later, for violating the true meaning of the very Declaration he has been asked to praise in speech. This, I think, has long been the pattern of those who effectively protest for human and civil rights. They don't say, "your tradition and morality is rotten" but rather "your understanding and practice of your own tradition and morality is rotten, and can only be rectified by recognizing my humanity and civil rights." America's ideal culture is the most valuable resource for those who would improve its real one.

Contrast that with those slavers and southerners who ultimately seceded from the union. In order to justify their secession they went out of their way to ridicule the "immortal declaration." John Randolph said that the idea that all are "created equal" was a "pernicious falsehood," citing obvious inequalities like the different mental and physical abilities of children and adults. John Calhoun (in)famously said that "there was not a word of truth" in the idea that all men are created equal." He held that the "natural state of  Man" and the state into which "he is born, lives and dies" is one of "subjection to authority," and therefore a state of inequality.

It fell to Lincoln, the "Great Emancipator," to convert Jeffersonian egalitarianism, and the "immortal declaration" into a moral and political tool that would justify not just emancipation, but the Civil Rights Amendments (13th,14th and 15th) which, though he didn't live to see them,  redeemed it  legally thus changing the US Constitution. While Southerners scorned the idea of equality and universal rights, and Stephen Douglas argued that the Declaration was meant only for whites, Lincoln referred to Jeffersonian principles and quotations regularly, and insisted that they be taken at face value. He said:

"They [the founders] did not mean to say all were equal in color, size, intellect, moral developments, or social capacity...They defined...in what respects they did consider all men created equal... Men are equal in having certain inalienable rights, among which are life liberty and the pursuit of happiness. This they said, and this [they] meant.  (Maier: p. 885)

Lincoln claimed in an 1861 Address,  that he "never had a feeling politically that did not spring from the sentiments embodied in the Declaration of Independence." He stated that the assertion that "All Men Are Created Equal"  was "the great fundamental principle upon which our free institutions rest." It was, he said, "the father of all moral principle."(ibid) During the War, Lincoln  invited  Frederick Douglass to the White House on 3 occasions (the first time an African American entered that building not as a worker or slave, but as a sought after advisor and guest). By  the third and last meeting, Douglass had come to appreciate the importance of the egalitarian tradition as appropriated by Lincoln and the Radical Republicans (see Wilentz: 2016)  For under Lincoln these moral and political principles bore fruit for enslaved Americans rather than mocking them. Freed blacks after the Emancipation Proclamation were eager to become part of America, to enjoy liberty and pursue happiness.  The Civil War amendments had woven these ideals into the fabric of the US Constitution; and for a time, during Reconstruction, some 2,000 black Americans held public office, from the local level all the way up to the U.S. Senate.  They set up black colleges, small businesses, and tried to obtain promised land on which to put down viable roots. Tragically, all of this was met with the furious backlash that was Jim Crow and  Lynch Law, and so justice was deferred until the Civil Rights era of the 1950s and 60s. And much remains to be done now.

Frederick Douglass wrote in his 1865 eulogy for Lincoln that he “was emphatically the black man’s President: the first to show any respect to their rights as men.” In a later speech toward the end of reconstruction, he honored Lincoln as the great emancipator, but added that he was ultimately the white man's president.  Referring to Lincoln's Jeffersonian egalitarianism and its limits for blacks, he explained 

“While Abraham Lincoln saved for you [i.e. whites] a country, he delivered us from a bondage, according to Jefferson, one hour of which was worse than ages of the oppression your fathers rose in rebellion to oppose." (fr. Speech at Freedman's Monument, 1876 https://edan.si.edu/transcription/pdf_files/12955.pdf

So while understanding that Lincoln's first priority was to save the country, and only secondarily to "deliver [slaves] from bondage," he came to see this not as a flaw or failing on Lincoln's part, but a recognition of his responsibility to the preservation of the Union as a president, and his partial understanding of the plight of blacks in America given his circumstances and background. He continued:

"When, therefore, it shall be asked what we [African Americans] have to do with the memory of Abraham Lincoln, the answer is ready, full, and complete. Though he loved Caesar less than Rome, though the Union was more to him than our freedom or our future, under his wise and beneficent rule we saw ourselves gradually lifted from the depths of slavery to the heights of liberty and manhood; under his wise and beneficent rule, and by measures approved and vigorously pressed by him, we saw that the handwriting of ages, in the form of prejudice and proscription, was rapidly fading away from the face of our whole country; under his rule, and in due time, about as soon, after all, as the country could tolerate the strange spectacle, we saw our brave sons and brothers laying off the rags of bondage, and being clothed all over in the blue uniforms of the soldiers of the United States...[W]e saw the internal slave trade which so long disgraced the nation, abolished, and slavery abolished in the District of Columbia; under his rule we saw...the first slave-trader hanged like any other pirate or murderer...we saw the Confederate States, based upon the idea that our race must be slaves, and slaves forever, battered to pieces and scattered to the four winds; under his rule, and in the fullness of time, we saw Abraham Lincoln, after giving the slaveholders three months' grace in which to save their hateful slave system, penning the immortal paper...making slavery forever impossible in the United States. Though we waited long, we saw all this and more." (ibid)

Of course Douglass knew that as important as all of this was, the Klu Klux Klan and "Judge Lynch" were by this time (1876) already well on the rise. In later years he would see the full scale of the terror, reading Ida B. Wells' harrowing reports on the systematic slaughter of innocent blacks, as the Northern politicians lost interest in Reconstruction, or worse, became complicit once more in a country mired in White Supremacy. But he never lost faith in the moral and political principles that he had seen converted into living truths for a time. These were the principles that largely go back to egalitarians like Thomas Jefferson, despite Jefferson's sickening racism as detailed above. Justice in an ideal world comes in a neat, rational package, implemented by pure beings free of taint or confusion. The real world is one in which the basest and noblest traits and social forces become intertwined in strange and often tragic ways. We have a good, if imperfect, legacy to build on; and a lot more building remains to be done. But those who would search for a pure legacy or future may come up empty handed.

Some activists and groups (like the 1619 Program, which I discussed in the last post) replace a complex and harrowing legacy with clear-cut and self-righteous myths that are, at times,  no less distorted than the older white supremacist ideologies that used to pass muster for history in the early to mid 20th century in some quarters.  I hope we can transcend the pious self-certainties of both extremes, and learn to accept the complexity, moral ambiguity and irrationality of the actual record of slavery and race-based oppression that thr historian, Edmund S. Morgan, aptly called "An American Paradox" https://www.jstor.org/stable/1888384?seq=1 

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References/Related Readings:

-Joseph Ellis: 

American Sphinx: The Character of  Thomas Jefferson -- Vintage Edition: 1998

                                American Dialogue: The Founders and Us: Alfred A.  Knopf, NY; 2018

-Thomas Jefferson  (ed. Merrill D. Peterson): The Portable Thomas Jefferson: Penguin Books; 1975

-Pauline Maier:  The Strange History of "All Men Are Created Equal"  https://scholarlycommons.law.wlu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1547&context=wlulr

-Sean Wilentz: The Politicians and the Egalitarians: The Hidden History of American Politics:  W.W.

Norton& Company, NY; 2016

The 1619 Project Rewrites American History:

(Note: This was originally posted on the History Community Website, and can be read along with the discussion it generated there: https://www.tapatalk.com/groups/thehistorycommunity/the-1619-project-responsible-revisionism-or-factua-t367.html   Btw, it was written prior to the companion piece on Thomas Jefferson and the history of American racism, though it appears the other way round on Disqus. Should work either way, though)

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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 interpreting 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