(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)
***********
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
No comments:
Post a Comment