America, Misremembered
Editor's Note
Every regime rests on a founding story. Ours told of a people created equal, endowed with reason and the capacity for self-government. The 1619 Project offered a rival myth: that America was conceived in bondage, not liberty; defined by racism, not redemption. This story seeks to dissolve the moral confidence of a free people and to recast the American experiment as an unending crime. It is one front in our cold civil war, in which the old faith in the nation’s goodness contends with a new ideology that sees America as irredeemable.
In this essay, historian Wilfred McClay reminds us that to surrender the truth of the founding is to surrender the grounds of self-government itself. The fight over 1619 is not about history alone. It is about whether the American regime still believes it deserves to endure.
It’s been more than six years since The New York Times launched a sneak attack on America’s historical sensibilities with the publication of “The 1619 Project.” That document asserted that the true American founding was not the revolutionary Declaration of 1776, whose 250th anniversary we are about to celebrate, nor was it the drafting and adoption of the United States Constitution roughly a decade later.
Instead, the Project asserted, the founding of America had come much earlier, with the arrival in August 1619 of twenty or so enslaved Africans in the British colonial settlement at Jamestown, a location that would eventually become part of the United States. This act, the Project claimed, was the true beginning of America — laying a foundation of oppression and anti-black racism that would determine what the nation would eventually become. From 1619 on, these things have been ingrained in the cultural DNA of the American polity. It was not clear what, if anything, could undo this aspect of our national character. Thus saith “The 1619 Project.”
This audacious effort at wholesale historical redefinition encountered heavy weather almost from the start, with eminent historians taking issue with key assertions the Project made—most notably, that the American Revolution was supported by colonists who feared that the British intended to abolish slavery and sought to forestall such an eventuality by overthrowing British rule.
Most of these objections to the Project have never been answered adequately and, in many cases, have not been answered at all. Instead, The Times has motored on, relying on its cultural power and a mighty cargo of chutzpah to sustain the Project, even as hundreds of American schools continue to use the free materials distributed through the Pulitzer Foundation to indoctrinate students in the Project’s falsehoods and misrepresentations.
Even the revelation by intrepid researcher Philip Magness that The Times’ website for the Project had been surreptitiously altered to remove some of the more egregious inaccuracies — a hanging offense in any responsible journalistic organization — went unanswered. Nor has the problem been taken up in any responsible or organized way by the historical profession, despite the fact that the most telling objections to the Project’s inaccuracies have come from scholars who are indisputably leading lights of the field.
Instead, the American Historical Association has busied itself with worries that the celebration of the 250th anniversary of the nation’s birth is shaping up to be insufficiently “apologetic,” and with the proposal that July 4, 2026, should be declared a national Day of Atonement.
So where do things stand now? They stand much as they do in the world of cable news: You pick the station you watch to get the reality you want confirmed. That the Project has been discredited even by scholars sympathetic to its aims — but unwilling to excuse its disregard for scholarly standards — seems to matter little in many quarters, least of all to the MSNBC viewers of the world. The situation is polarized between those who believe the Project to be a complete fraud and those who do not care whether or not it is.
The pity is that this is a problem The Times could actually have addressed.
Most of my college students come to class without any larger context for their understanding of American slavery. They compare the realities of American life against an abstract and unhistorical standard of perfection and find them wanting. Moreover, they believe that slavery is uniquely American and uniquely Southern, and that freedom and prosperity are the default condition of the human race.
They’re shocked when they’re told that slavery has existed all over the world — in most cultures and most time periods of human history — and that it has, in fact, been more the rule than the exception. They don’t know that the Greeks, the Romans, the Vikings, the Byzantines, and the Ethiopians all embraced slavery. They are shocked to learn that American slavery was exponentially more humane than that of, say, Brazil, and that the American portion of the slaves imported from Africa was only about 4 to 5 percent of the total number brought to the Western Hemisphere.
They’re shocked to learn about the role of Islam in the propagation of slavery. They are shocked to learn that, although slavery is illegal everywhere in the world, it still exists openly today in countries such as Mauritania — and that our vaunted agencies of international governance do little to nothing about it. The International Labor Organization estimates that there are 50 million enslaved persons in the world today.
Could the 1619 Project have brought these facts to light? Could it have given us a better-informed perspective on the uniqueness of the liberty, prosperity, and order that we enjoy, and the obstacles in our own history that we have managed to overcome to get where we are? Might it have pointed out that the United States did not create slavery, did not create racism or racial prejudice — that these things are as old as human history and are the default position of human nature, absent some strong countervailing moral force? That the United States, while having a history touched by these evils and while having participated in them, is also a country with a larger history of which it can be proud— a history of seeking to overcome such things?
Yes, it could have. And it still could, even at this late date, if it chose to. But instead, The Times chose to link the commemoration of 1619 — a project that in itself was potentially worthy and important — with a highly questionable journalistic stunt.
There was a better way. The year 2019 could have been a signal moment for the entire nation to reflect on the long trajectory of Africans’ rich and multifarious influence on American life. It was an opportunity for the whole nation to grasp what W.E.B. Du Bois pointed out over a hundred years ago in a chapter of his 1903 book The Souls of Black Folk, entitled “The Sorrow Songs,” a moving examination of the songs we have come to call “spirituals.” There Du Bois addresses himself to the larger African role in the formation of the American character: “Your country?” he cries. “How came it yours? Before the Pilgrims landed we were here.”
It would startle a great many Americans, of all races, to be apprised of that fact. But if we take 1619 as the beginning of the African influence upon America — that is, upon the land that would become the United States of America a century and a half later — then that influence antedates the arrival of the Mayflower, the signing of the Mayflower Compact, the creation of Plymouth Plantation, and so much else that we associate with the beginnings of America. And yet… before all of this, “we were here.” Or to put it differently, the history of Africans in America cannot be thought of as a sidebar to the general history of America. Men and women of African descent have been a part of things all along.
Or as Du Bois concluded:
Our song, our toil, our cheer, and warning have been given to this nation in blood-brotherhood. Are not these gifts worth the giving? Is not this work and striving? Would America have been America without her Negro people?
A good question, to which the answer ought to be obvious. Had The Times made different choices, then and now, about how we are to regard the year 1619, it might be more obvious to many more Americans — of all races.