On this most political of American holidays a bit of politics from The New Criterion, June 1, 2024 (with a nod to Frederick Douglass in the headline):
On The 1619 Project & the Declaration of Independence
The editors and journalists at The New York Times are fixing to celebrate the Fourth of July in a few days. One has to wonder why.
After all, the newspaper of record has declared, through its sponsorship of The 1619 Project, that July 4 is a bogus holiday and that the Declaration of Independence was (and is) a fraud. The real birth of the country occurred not on July 4, 1776, with the separation from Great Britain, the Times says, but in 1619 when the first slaves arrived on American shores. While most Americans will celebrate the nation’s independence on July 4, there appears to be little reason for the Times to do so.
In 2019, The New York Times Magazine devoted an entire issue to The 1619 Project, organized and edited by Nikole Hannah-Jones and published to commemorate the four hundredth anniversary of these slaves’ arrival. The essays included in that issue asserted several controversial propositions. For example: the American Revolution was fought mainly to defend the institution of slavery; slavery was the original source of American wealth and the cornerstone for the development of American capitalism; and, for these reasons, the “real” founding of the United States occurred in 1619, not 1776. The project was quickly packaged into a book, a television series, and a history curriculum for high-school students. Ms. Hannah-Jones received a Pulitzer Prize for her introductory essay and her work in organizing the project. In cooperation with the Times, she continues to promote the project.
The 1619 Project has come in for withering criticism from distinguished historians who maintain that many of its claims are false or wildly exaggerated. In a letter to the Times in 2019, Gordon Wood, James McPherson, and several other renowned historians specified many errors in the essays and asked the Times to consider correcting some of the project’s more specious claims. They pinpointed the dubious assertion that the American Revolution had been fought to maintain the institution of slavery, and they suggested that the Times seemed to be promoting leftist ideology over historical accuracy. Other historians noted another obvious truth the Times ignored: it was the spread of capitalism, along with ideals about free labor and individual rights, that spurred the anti-slavery movement and eventually doomed slaveholding. These ideals were inscribed in the Declaration of Independence, which served as a banner for critics of slavery. If the words of the Declaration are true, then it follows that slavery must be wrong.
In fact, The 1619 Project says little about the Declaration of Independence and the Revolution that was not also expressed by supporters of slavery in the antebellum era. In a bizarre way, Ms. Hannah-Jones and her colleagues have been repeating arguments originally advanced to defend slavery.
In the slavery debates during the 1840s and 1850s, many Southerners pointed out (much like Ms. Hannah-Jones) that the authors of the Declaration could not have meant what they said because Thomas Jefferson and other signers owned slaves at the time. Senator John C. Calhoun went further when he declared that there was “not a word of truth” in the claim that “all men are created equal.” A colleague of his said that this “self-evident truth” was in fact a “self-evident lie,” much in keeping with the claims of The 1619 Project. The Supreme Court, repackaging these claims, held in the Dred Scott decision (1857) that the words of the Declaration were not meant to apply to blacks—another contention advanced by The 1619 Project. Others argued that the principles announced in the Declaration were never meant to have universal application, but rather served only to justify the separation of the American colonies from Great Britain. This idea reappears in The 1619 Projectin order to “reconstruct” the American Revolution as an event carried out to protect economic interests (including slavery) rather than a noble campaign to advance the causes of liberty, equality, and representative government. This in turn leads back to the central idea of The 1619 Project—that the “real” founding of the United States occurred in 1619, not 1776.
The authors of The 1619 Project try to weasel out of the implications of their claims by asserting that the words of the Declaration were not true at the time they were written or for generations afterwards but are being “made true” today in various campaigns for civil rights and equality. The argument is false. The ideals of the Declaration of Independence are being “made true” today, as they have been in the past, because they in fact are true—they were equally true in 1776, 1857 and 1861, in 1964 when the Civil Rights Act was passed, and are true today. They are being “made” true because they are true. And if they were false in the past, then neither The New York Times nor Ms. Hannah-Jones possess the power to make them true.
Abraham Lincoln refuted the attacks on the Declaration better than anyone in the years leading up to the Civil War. His words apply with equal force to the misrepresentations by The 1619 Project. The ideals expressed in the Declaration, that “notable instrument,” he said, set forth the basic principles of a free society. Lincoln declared in response to the Dred Scott decision and in his debates with Senator Stephen Douglas in 1858 that the authors of the Declaration
meant to set up a standard maxim for free society which should be familiar to all: constantly looked to, constantly labored for, and even, though never perfectly attained, constantly approximated, and thereby constantly spreading and deepening its influence and augmenting the happiness and value of life to all people, of all colors, everywhere.The words intended, as he said, to set up liberty as a standard to apply to all people at all times, such that it might be continually realized in practice as circumstances change....
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And from Jstor Daily, :
“What to the Slave is The Fourth of July?”: Annotated
On July 5, 1852, Frederick Douglass gave a Fourth of July speech that became his most famous public oration....
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