The 1619 Project

The 1619 Project is an effort by the New York Times and associated historians to emphasize in education the role of slavery in the social, cultural and economic development of the United States. This has proven to be somewhat controversial, as this article in The Atlantic points out.

The long American intellectual hangover brought about by the peculiar institution, its ultimate rejection and its continuing societal influence is a daily feature of life across the fruited plain. One can't page through a newspaper or spend more than a few moments in other media without being reminded in no uncertain terms of white guilt in the commodification of blacks and their plight after their supposed attainment of liberty. 

No one, at least for public consumption, defends slavery today. Nonetheless, its residue, since the practice involved generally easily identifiable black Africans, seems to have persisted today in a negative regard for the descendants of slaves that is evident most of all in their economic status. The majority of blacks don't seem to have realized the American dream of financial success.

The ideas behind the 1619 Project, that date being selected because that's when the first slaves arrived on the continent, include their contribution to the nascent American economy as being crucial to the success of the country and that servitude was the impetus for the War Between the States.

It's accepted as a given that a shortage of labor existed in the colonies prior to the American Revolution and that compensation for this labor made slavery an attractive choice for southern agricultural pursuits. During their formative years, the colonies, which included the Dutch in the mid-Atlantic area, were a part of a nearly global explosion of ocean transportation driven by improvements in ship design and construction, new navigation techniques, exploration that included detailed maps, and demand for products found at other ends of the earth. The crews that manned these ships were exposed to dangers and living conditions unimaginable today. Square-rigger sailors reefed sails at night in torrential storms, walking out on pitching spars over seas where losing one's grip meant death by drowning in minutes with no hope of rescue. This was for low pay and terrible food. Press gangs circulated in European seaports to gather in drunken sailors to man both navy and merchant ships. Herman Melville accurately described life on the ocean in his books, one of which, White Jacket, led to congressional action on discipline in the US Navy. In other words, working the land was an attractive alternative to sailing the seven seas.

Yet, even so, southern planters bought expensive African slaves to work their tobacco and cotton farms. The reality is that these slaves were looked at in the same light as horses and oxen. They were valuable assets, property, that could be bought and sold, as were farm animals. Their breeding and use added to the profitability of an agricultural enterprise. This was a feature of agriculture for millennia and remains so today in some places. It was hardly unique to southern North America.

The 1619 Project stipulates that opposition to slavery was the primary impetus to the War Between the States. This is by no means universally accepted as fact. The 17th century was an era of exceptional turmoil in Europe and beyond. The Reformation, beginning with Luther's posting of his 95 theses on the door of Castle Church in Wittenburg, Saxony, on October 31, 1517, upset the religious and cultural order of Europe, and the rest of the world, in ways that are still being felt today. 

English Tudor King Henry VIII took advantage of the Reformation to establish the Church of England, his method to secure an heir to the throne when Pope Clement VII refused to go along with his proposed annulment of his marriage to Catherine of Aragon. Later, beginning in the early 17th century, Puritanism became a major force in anti-Catholic activity in England. Much of the immigration from the UK to North America was made up of Puritans disgusted with what they felt was the licentious behavior of Stuart England. They established their capital in the Massachusetts Bay Colony and were willing participants in the War of the Three Kingdoms, Oliver Cromwell's subjugation of the Stuarts and their Cavalier allies. The reality is that the American Revolution was another, later episode in that war. New England, and particularly Puritan Boston, was the center of revolutionary thought and activity, although some southern colonialists could see the advantages of breaking with the UK and were willing to take the risk of opposing the British crown across the Atlantic, especially with the assistance of French and Polish adventurers.

During the pre-revolutionary era the New England Puritans were pretty much left to their own devices by the UK crown. They were less occupied in defying the British, embroiled in their own problems on the continent, particularly with the Dutch, than they were with the native Americans that surrounded them. Already decimated by European diseases for which they had no immunity, the remaining fragment of the native population was still a problem for the Puritans. Despite some efforts at education and religious indoctrination, the Puritans carried on Cromwell's policy of death and destruction in their relations with the original inhabitants. KIng Phillip's War from 1675 to 1678 was an especially gruesome episode. This became the standard operating procedure for the expansion of the new republic to the Pacific Coast and beyond. "Manifest Destiny", became the rationale for the technologically superior post-Puritan march across the continent, just as it had for Cromwell's conquest of the Irish.

Abolitionist sentiment in the ante-bellum years also radiated from New England, with  reinforcement from British figures like William Wilberforce. Although slavery was a contentious issue at that time there were many other factors involved as well. The principle issue was not existing slavery but its extension to new states, states that were being carved out of territory that once belonged to the native Americans, now considered as vermin. The War Between the States could be called the last engagement of the War of the Three Kingdoms. It could also be said that a major impetus to the War Between the States was Preston Brooks' caning of neo-Puritan Massachusetts senator Charles Sumner on the senate floor in 1856, as recounted here. The North's victory, ultimately resulting in the death of over 600,000 men and destruction of millions of dollars in property, led to freedom and citizenship for blacks who had been slaves. Some of these newly-freed slaves, the Buffalo Soldiers, were organized into military units set up to wage war against the natives. In the end the natives, once owner-occupants of a continent, were shuffled off to the most remote, inhospitable parts of that continent, the areas least desired by the European invaders, to make their way as best they could. They did not become legal US citizens until the 1920's. Even today the US government reserves the right to determine if a group of native Americans can refer to itself as a tribe and be treated as one. The Pamunkey tribe, that once signed a treaty with the British crown in 1646 and one of whose members was the famous Pocahontas, wasn't accepted as a tribe by the federal government until 2015. 

If there is any new focus needed on American history it should primarily be on that of the native Americans. African-Americans today include elected officials like the president of the country, successful businessmen, influential and popular entertainers and respected sports heroes. Native Americans occupy none of those niches.