Confederate "Heritage" Month 2023, April 11: Major historians questioned some claims of the 1619 Project

After the New York Times first published The 1619 Project in 2019¹, five prominent historians publicly addressed what they considered problems in the work that called for correction: Victoria Bynum, James McPherson, James Oakes, Sean Wilentz, and Gordon Wood.²

The New York Times essentially brushed off most of their criticisms.³ Four of the five stated their concerns at some length in what the Washington Post’s Kaitie Mettler describes as “the World Socialist website, a fringe news publication founded upon the principles of Trotskyism.”⁴ But she notes that since a Wall Street Journal columnist discussed what they said, their criticisms had been “brought into the mainstream.” (What a relief!)

There is also a YouTube video⁵:

I’m going to address more of the historians’ criticisms in later posts. But here I’ll mention four of those from the WSWS feature more briefly.

Victoria Bynum talks in her interview about anti-slavery sentiment in the white South before the Civil War. That was obviously a minority opinion there. But it’s an important part of the story of the coming of the Civil War and the actual nature of white racism in the 19th century. In that connection, she mentions Newton Knight of the “Free State of Jones” (in Mississippi), Hinton Rowan Helper of South Carolina, slavery critics in the North Carolina “Quaker belt,” and Texas Unionists. She makes this general judgment on the 1619 Project: “It presents the origins of the United States entirely through the prism of racial conflict.” (The WSWS interview with James Oakes quotes him as making the exact same statement.) And she observes, “For white Southerners who’d fought against the Confederacy during the Civil War in hopes of achieving a democratic revolution, the Republican Party’s betrayal of Reconstruction was a bitter pill to swallow.“

James MacPherson, who has been crediting with establishing a broad new audience for “popular history” with his 1988 book Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era, says in criticism of the 1619 Project:

[T]he idea that racism is a permanent condition, well that’s just not true. And it also doesn’t account for the countervailing tendencies in American history as well. Because opposition to slavery, and opposition to racism, has also been an important theme in American history.

And he comments that he thinks “the ideology of the pro-slavery argument” fits George Frederickson’s concept of the slave South as a “herrenvolk democracy.”

He also provides this helpful summary:

The Civil War accomplished three things. First, it preserved the United States as one nation. Second, it abolished the institution of slavery. Those two were, in effect, permanent achievements. The United States is still a single nation. Slavery doesn’t exist anymore. The third thing the Civil War accomplished was a potential, and partial, transformation, in the status of the freed slaves, who with the 14th and 15th amendments achieved, on paper at least, civil and political equality. But the struggle ever since 1870, when the 15th amendment was ratified, has been how to transform this achievement on paper into real achievement in the society.

And he says of the Revolutionary period:

[T]he American Revolution was first and foremost a war for independence. But there was also a more social dimension to the American Revolution, and a movement toward greater democracy, though they didn’t like to use that term. And it coincided with, and partially caused, the abolition of slavery in half of the states, the northern states, as well as a manumission movement among Virginia slaveholders.

I’m going to discuss a separate long essay by James Oakes on the 1619 Project in a later post. Oakes in the wide-ranging WSWS interview discusses some of the arguments about capitalism and slavery that come up in it. He argues that Matthew Desmond’s contribution overstates the centrality of slavery to American capitalism as compared to the Industrial Revolution that was more centered in the free states, and that he fails to take into account some of the most substantial historical work on this subject, mentioning that of Jeanne Boydston, Christopher Clark, John Faragher, and Jonathan Prude, in particular. “Slavery made the slaveholders rich. But it made the South poor. And it didn’t make the North rich.“

He also is concerned about historical metaphors stressed in the 1619 Project like slavery as the Original Sin of the US, or the idea that “racism is built into the DNA of America,” calling them “really dangerous tropes” that are “not only ahistorical, they’re actually anti-historical. The function of those tropes is to deny change over time.”

Oakes makes this observation, which I had not previously encountered: “more Mississippians fought against the Confederacy than for it, when you add the blacks and the whites.”

Gordon Wood says he was surprised when he first saw The 1619 Project’s lead essay by Nikole Hannah-Jones:

She claims the British were on the warpath against the slave trade and slavery and that rebellion was the only hope for American slavery. This made the American Revolution out to be like the Civil War, where the South seceded to save and protect slavery, and that the Americans 70 years earlier revolted to protect their institution of slavery. I just couldn’t believe this. [my emphasis]

He also talks about the Somerset decision and Dunmore’s Proclamation, two matters discussed in earlier posts here this month that are key parts of the argument that the American Revolution was heavily motivated by pro-slavery sentiment. He argues that these are a thin basis on which to found “such an enormous argument.” And he recalls that most American leaders of the Revolutionary period thought slavery was a dying institution. That judgment proved to be wrong. But it doesn’t argue for staging an anti-colonial revolution against the most powerful country in the world at the time having defending a “dying” institution as one of its main motives.

1. Hannah-Jones, Nikole, et al (2019): The 1619 Project, New York Times Magazine 08/18/2019.

2. Mettler, Katie (2019): Five professors say the 1619 Project should be amended. ‘We disagree,’ says the New York Times. Washington Post 12/22/2019. <https://www.washingtonpost.com/history/2019/12/22/five-professors-say-project-should-be-amended-we-disagree-says-new-york-times/> (Accessed: 2023-31-03). > (Accessed: 2023-31-03).

3. We Respond to the Historians Who Critiqued The 1619 Project. New York Times 01/19/2021. <https://www.nytimes.com/2019/12/20/magazine/letter-to-the-editor-historians-critique-the-1619-project-and-we-respond.html> (Accessed: 2023-31-03).

4. The New York Times’ 1619 Project. WSWS.org. <https://www.wsws.org/en/topics/event/1619> (Accessed: 2023-31-03).

5. The Place of the Two American Revolutions in the Past, Present and Future. WSWS YouTube channel. <https://www.youtube.com/live/kIo0PLWFIxY> (Accessed: 2023-31-03).