Who is Behind the 1619 Project?

Third Reich Minister of Propaganda Joseph Goebbels once said, “If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it.” The 1619 Project tells many doozies, but the biggest lie that the New York Times propagates, in this radical and anti-American document, is that the Revolutionary War was fought because of a desire to maintain slavery, which they thought the British were about to abolish.

The lie makes your head explode in its sheer audacity. Thomas Paine’s Common Sense is the pamphlet that circulated for months before the war, generating discussions at taverns and other public venues, and yet there’s nary a word within its pages about slavery. Instead, Paine’s work focused on galvanizing the colonies to break free from England and create an independent republic, a system of self-government, that was not monarchical and that recognized the rights of the individual.

The other document that lays out the reasons for the Revolutionary War is of course the Declaration of Independence. Twenty-seven reasons are given for the need to break from the tyranny of England. Taxation without representation, a hierarchical system that favored British soldiers and gave them unfair rights over the citizens of the colonies, an inability to respond to the needs of its colonial subjects, and other complaints are given as reasons for the need for war. Again, the desire to maintain slavery is not among those complaints listed.

I have copies of letters written by my family in 1783 to their relatives in Ireland (Ulster). The war had cut off their communications and with the end of the Revolution, they were filling them in on how they had fared during the war. These family members lived in North Carolina, in the region of the State where a slave based plantation economy existed. They were part of that economy.

They told their Irish (Scots Irish) relations that they believed that slavery was wrong and would, in time, come to an end. The dilemma, they believed, was that no one could imagine a way to do it. All of the wealth in the coastal regions of the South was tied up in the slave economy. Tobacco, rice, indigo, and sugar (cotton only became important after the invention of the cotton gin) were labor intensive crops and they were cash crops, in great demand in Europe. Freeing their slaves was viewed as impossible without some mechanism to compensate slave holders who had invested everything they owned into that economy. The rest of the population were also dependent on the slave economy, so this social disease had no known cure.

My view is that excepting the invention of the cotton gin, the whole thing would have collapsed of its own weight after the British banned the slave trade. But, cotton kept it alive and expanded the system from the coastal plains into the uplands of the South where slavery had never taken hold. When that happened, a civil war was inevitible. A national tragedy came to pass.

The 1619 Project is fiction, but an entire generation will come to believe it as truth.

One of Thomas Jefferson's charges against King George III was about his refusal to allow Virginia to end the slave trade. The Continental Congress removed that item because it looked hypocritical since they weren't calling for an end to slavery.

One of the most zealous advocates of independence, long before almost anyone else, was Samuel Adams of Massachusetts, a non-slaveowner.

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