The Hidden Stakes of the 1619 Controversy
The Hidden Stakes of the 1619 Controversy
Seeking to discredit those who wish to explain the persistence of racism, critics of the
New York Times’s 1619 Project insist the facts don’t support its proslavery reading of the American Revolution. But they obscure a longstanding debate within the field of U.S. history over that very issue—distorting the full case that can be made for it.
David Waldstreicher
Image:
National Museum of African American History and Culture
Last August the
New York Times Magazine released a special issue they called the
1619 Project, which uses the 400th anniversary of the arrival of “20 and odd” enslaved Africans in Virginia to recast the history of the United States as a story about slavery and its long afterlives. Stocked with good writing and armed with the latest scholarship, lead writer Nikole Hannah-Jones began with a frontal attack on the traditional notion of 1776 as the beginning of an American history of exceptional liberty. She ended her introduction with a soaring call to reconciliation and a new American identity. It was also impossible to miss the challenge that the project’s essays and poems posed to the conception of U.S. history as a tidy story of progress ever since the Revolution.
Though it rarely spills out into public view in quite the way it has recently, there is a longstanding debate within the academy over just how revolutionary the American Revolution really was.
The enthusiastic response to the 1619 Project exceeded even the expectations of the magazine. Tens of thousands of extra copies sold out immediately. Teachers announced plans to use the essays in schools, as the project’s designers had hoped. In response, rightwing magazines began to offer stinging rebukes. Some of the ruckus reprised debates about recent books on the antebellum South by historians such as Walter Johnson and Edward Baptist, who locate the roots of modern American capitalism within plantation slavery, setting the stage for the 1619 Project’s emphasis on disturbing continuities in the present.
Later, after this initial wave of critique,
the World Socialist Web Site published an essay calling the project “racialist” and went on to publish rebukes in interviews with four prominent historians—Gordon Wood, James Oakes, James McPherson, and Victoria Bynum—while Sean Wilentz
criticized the project in the
New York Review of Books in November. A backlash built momentum, culminating in December with a
letter from those five historians addressed to the
Times Magazine’s editor-in-chief, Jake Silverstein. The magazine’s publication of this letter, along a
response from Silverstein defending the project’s interpretations and the scholarship on which they were based, has triggered an ongoing roiling debate.
The letter writers had three main objections, all concerning passages in the project’s lead essay by Hannah-Jones—none of which concern the other line of controversy, especially among conservative commentators, about the relations between capitalism and slavery (coverage of the letter to the
Times has monopolized the most recent discussion, leading that theme to drop out of the conversation).
The first concerns her assertion that “one of the primary reasons the colonists decided to declare their independence from Britain was because they wanted to protect the institution of slavery” and that “we may never have revolted against Britain . . . if [the founders] had not believed that independence was required in order to ensure that slavery would continue.” The second concerns her depiction of Abraham Lincoln as not committed to black equality, and the third concerns her contention that across U.S. history, black people have “for the most part . . . fought alone” in their struggles for freedom.
These are perennial issues in the history of emancipation and civil rights. It is no coincidence, though, that the first claim, about the American Revolution, has proved the most controversial. This dispute reflects deep fault lines in the field of U.S. history over interpretations of the Revolution, particularly in terms of its relationship to slavery and the status of African Americans. Though it rarely spills out into public view in quite the way it has recently, there is a longstanding debate within the academy over just how revolutionary the American Revolution really was.
Some historians, espousing what we might call t
he establishment view, insist that it is anachronistic to see slavery as central to our understanding of the decades-long revolutionary period. According to this view, the Revolution was in fact fundamentally antislavery, since it led to what Bernard Bailyn called in his 1967 study
The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution a
“contagion of liberty” that made it possible for Americans to think critically about ending the institution. Such accounts emphasize that various Northern states restricted the slave trade and began to institute gradual emancipation during and after the Revolutionary war, and that enslaved people used the ideals of equality voiced during the Revolution to press their own case for freedom. Although a civil war was fought over what the government could and could not do about slavery, these historians say, Lincoln and other members of the Republican Party envisioned a path to emancipation under the Constitution and made it happen. 
According to the establishment view, the Revolution was in fact fundamentally antislavery, since it led to what Bernard Bailyn called a “contagion of liberty” that made it possible for Americans to think about ending the institution.
This is the accepted orthodoxy underwriting
the contention, made in the letter sent to the Times, that it is just wrong—as well as bad politics—to tell schoolchildren that some or many or even any American revolutionaries fought to defend their property in slaves from a powerful imperial government. 
Hannah-Jones wrote that defending slavery was a primary motivation for independence in 1776, but the pushback from Wood and Wilentz was far more absolute.
This was not surprising to academics who have followed the work of these historians. Wilentz argues in his latest book, No Property in Man: Slavery and Antislavery at the Nation’s Founding (2018), that the Constitution was antislavery in its essence and most of its subsequent workings, and has repeatedly gone out of his way to attack those who emphasize the proslavery politics of Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, and Andrew Jackson.
And for his part, Wood, a student of Bailyn, called talk of slavery and the Constitution in Staughton Lynd’s pathbreaking work “anachronistic” in his 1969 book
The Creation of the American Republic and has never let up.
According to his view, the founders belonged to a “premodern” society and didn’t talk or think about slavery or black people. In response to Silverstein’s response, he wrote, “I don’t know of any colonist who said that they wanted independence in order to preserve their slaves. No colonist expressed alarm that the mother country was out to abolish slavery in 1776.”
On the other side of this debate is a growing number of scholars—Woody Holton, Annette Gordon-Reed, Michael McDonnell, Gerald Horne, and myself, among others—who question the establishment view of the Revolution and the founders. These historians, most of them younger than Wood or Wilentz, see a multi-sided struggle in an American Revolution that was about colonizing and winning power and authority
. They see slavery as more than a peripheral matter. They do not take for granted that the story is primarily one of uncovering the motives and beliefs of the founders. Their work has considerably undercut the glass-half-full version of the narrative, which sees the end of slavery as a long-term consequence of American idealism and independence.
In ambitious works that explore the “unknown” revolutions that contributed to the independence movement, for example, books such as Gary Nash’s
The Unknown American Revolution (2005) and Alan Taylor’s
American Revolutions: A Continental History, 1750–1804 (2016) have challenged Wood’s sunnier version of events. In their hands the story loses some of its traditional romance but gains a deeper sense of realism. Other scholars, such as Robert Parkinson in his book
The Common Cause: Creating Race and Nation in the American Revolution (2016), have shown just how concerned the revolutionaries were, in both the North and the South, with slaves as an internal enemy. Perhaps most important of all,
newer histories show how Africans and their children themselves forced the issue onto the agenda of the revolutionaries and the empires competing for dominion, especially in wartime. If we were talking about any other revolution or civil war, we wouldn’t be surprised that enslaved people fought on both sides, depending on which side seemed more likely to improve their condition.
The resistance to this new scholarship by the deans of the establishment bears some similarities to the denunciations leveled at Charles Beard and the Progressive historians a hundred years ago.
The resistance to this new scholarship by the deans of the establishment bears some similarities to the denunciations leveled at Charles Beard and the Progressive historians a hundred years ago when they began to develop the argument that perhaps the Constitution benefited the wealthy more than it helped ordinary (white) people.
The newspaper editor—and later corrupt twenty-ninth president—Warren Harding heaped shame on Beard for desecrating the image of the Revolution. A few years later he started using the term “founding fathers” in his stump speeches. This time around
, historians who emphasize slavery and reaction, including the reaction against antislavery, are accused by the doyens of U.S. history (and now a few of their somewhat younger successors, such as Wilentz) of being ideological purveyors of identity politics 
—as if Pulitzer and Bancroft prize–winning scholars such as Holton, Gordon-Reed, and Taylor are not, in fact, extending and enriching the field.
The split between these two camps is hinted at in Adam Serwer’s fine
recap of the 1619 Project controversy for
The Atlantic, “The Fight over the 1619 Project Is Not About the Facts,” published in late December as the debate was still heating up. Serwer writes:
The clash between the Times authors and their historian critics represents a fundamental disagreement over the trajectory of American society. Was America founded as a slavocracy, and are current racial inequities the natural outgrowth of that? Or was America conceived in liberty, a nation haltingly redeeming itself through its founding principles?
What Serwer misses is that this is not simply a clash between the
Times authors and a group of historians: it is also a pre-existing argument between historians themselves. (
Wilentz, in his subsequent reply to Serwer in The Atlantic this week, tries to perform a magician’s act and render invisible the very existence of that debate, much as he ignores the scholarship when he is not mischaracterizing its substance.) The arguments made by the 1619 Project are largely based on the work of scholars such as Horne, Holton, Taylor, myself, and others (indeed, Hannah-Jones and Silverstein have acknowledged as much). By bringing the critical ideas of these scholars to a wide audience, the 1619 Project essentially drew back the curtain on a vital debate within the field of U.S. history. By responding with such force, critics of the project have helped define the contours of this debate. It is an important one for us to have, in part because this is an argument that goes all the way back to the founding itself.
