“The 1619 Project is a major initiative from The New York Times observing the 400th anniversary of the beginning of American slavery. It aims to reframe the country’s history, understanding 1619 as our true founding, and placing the consequences of slavery and the contributions of black Americans at the very center of the story we tell ourselves about who we are…Our democracy’s founding ideals were false when they were written. Black Americans have fought to make them true.”
You see, if not for slavery, the nation and its strength would not exist.
In leaked audio from an emergency townhall meeting with staff members, NYT executive editor Dean Baquet admitted the failure of his paper in pushing one narrative, the false Russian collusion story. Rather than just reporting the news, he announced the creation of another narrative.
“We built our newsroom to
cover one story, and we did it truly well. Now we have to regroup, and shift
resources and emphasis to take on a different story…this one is a story about
what it means to be an American in 2019. It is a story that…requires
imaginative use of all our muscles to write about race and class in a deeper
way than we have in years.”
1619’ers argue that slavery provided the capital for the industrial revolution, propelling the nation to its current exalted status. It is uncontroversial to say slavery was big business. Northern textile factories certainly benefitted. Between 1800 and 1860, “King Cotton” was the primary driver of the Antebellum South’s wealth. American exports accounted for 66% of the world’s cotton. However, in “Did Slavery Make America Richer?”, Vincent Geloso uses copious data to assert that slavery’s windfall has been greatly exaggerated. Almost no cotton was grown in the United States in 1787. Geloso claims that per capita growth was actually greater in the North between 1800 and 1860. Regardless, the whole argument is unnecessary. The error is the conflation of Southern wealth with the entire nation. What is true is that America could not have defeated the British without Southern colonies’ support. However, the Northern economy grew independently. Northern victory was not due solely to overwhelming manpower but industrial might. The agrarian South had few factories, 1/3 of the rail and an economy based on a singular cash crop. They simply couldn’t keep up with the endless supply of arms, ammunition and supplies the North turned out by the trainload.
360,000 dead and massive debt retarded Northern growth for a decade. While slavery created great wealth between the invention of the cotton gin (invented to make the lives of slaves easier, ironically) and 1859, the Civil War destroyed the South’s economy miring the entire region in deep poverty for nearly a century. Nearly all Southern banks were ruined. The hog population in South Carolina shrunk from 965,000 to 150,000. Cotton production would not recover until 1879. Most Southern capital was invested in slaves. It vanished instantly with the 13th Amendment.
America was a fledgling power in 1865. Our rise to superpower status was built on many things but not slavery. Did slaves make Cornelius Vanderbilt’s fortune in shipping and rail or build the Transcontinental railroad? Did slavery create Rockefeller’s enormous wealth or build the oil industry? Were slaves Carnegie’s steelworkers, J.P. Morgan’s bank tellers or Thomas Edison’s go-fers? Were slaves responsible for electrification, refrigeration or cars? No.
I am going to make another, somewhat disconnected argument in this piece as I build the series on the premise that the DNA of America was never uniquely corrupted. Our current greatness is not due to oppression, but the beauty and uniqueness of the American idea.
Some argue that American slavery was a special kind of violence against Africans. They argue that slavery was a more gentle affair across the Atlantic. Simply put, it was not. The section below is largely lifted verbatim from an excellent source. It is succinct and well-written and, well, why reinvent the wheel?
361,000 slaves were
imported into English speaking North America by 1808…From the time of the Arab
conquest of the Middle East in the seventh century, approximately 14 million
black slaves were imported into the area that extends from Morocco through Iran.
Why had the Middle East
not become overwhelmingly black and mulatto? One reason was extremely high
slave mortality. As the Encyclopedia of Islam notes, “The high mortality rate
which overtook these coloured men in Persia prevented them forming an important
element of the population.” I will provide two examples of this—one from North
Africa, the other from Iraq: “Of the Saharan salt mines it is said that no
slave lived for more than five years;” and “the black slave gangs that toiled
in the salt flats of Basra [Iraq] . . . numbering some tens of thousands . . .
were fed, we are told, on a few handfuls of flour, semolina, and dates.”
In addition, casual
mating was not permitted and marriage was discouraged. Consequently, of the
3,000 female slaves emancipated in Zanzibar in 1860, only five percent had ever
had a child. Many of the children born to slave women were murdered. In 1856,
the Anti-Slave Reporter observed that in Constantinople, the murder of the
babies of black slave women was practiced “as a matter of course and without
the least remorse.” As a result, in Constantinople, “it was commonplace for
Turkish gentlemen to have numerous [black] concubines, [but] it was rare to see
a mulatto.”
(Also)…many were castrated. Castration was lethal for the large majority
of slaves on whom it was inflicted, especially blacks. White eunuchs were
produced by merely cutting off their testicles, but blacks were subjected “to
the most radical form of castration . . . level with the abdomen . . . based on
the assumption that blacks had an ungovernable sexual appetite;” “every [black]
eunuch represented at the very least 200 Sudanese done to death;” and at the
beginning of the tenth century the caliph of Baghdad alone had 7,000 black
eunuchs.
In “No Property in Man”, Princeton historian Sean Wilentz sketches a picture of abolitionist founders defeating the enshrinement of slavery in the Constitution. The first draft, explicitly pro-slavery, was voted down 10-1. The final document’s compromises with slavery “were substantial” but Madison’s notes, published posthumously in 1840, detailed the abolitionists’ dogged resistance, sowing the seeds of abolition by future congresses. The mission failed. The fault, however, rests not with the Convention.
In a famous 4th of July speech in 1852, Frederick Douglass savaged America for the brutality of slavery. He also expressed great hope. The “eternal principles,” the “saving principles” in the Constitution, that “glorious document”, were real “and I defy the presentation of a single pro-slavery clause in it”. He later stated, “I base my sense of the certain overthrow of slavery, in part, upon the nature of the American Government, the Constitution, the tendencies of the age, and the character of the American people…. I know of no soil better adapted to the growth of reform than American soil. I know of no country where the conditions for affecting great changes in the settled order of things, for the development of right ideas of liberty and humanity, are more favorable than here in these United States.”
The old narrative of American greatness is under great challenge today. Perhaps it is time for honest reexamination but to do so requires honesty and facts. We should always strive towards a “more perfect union.” Yet, if a scarred runaway slave can see through such hypocrisy and brutality to believe in the founders’ promissory note of liberty, why can’t we do the same in 2019?
