Posted on 10/28/2020 3:27:35 PM PDT by Kaslin
Call me the 1617 Project.
Yep, that’s the year my first ancestor born on these then-wild and woolly shores saw the light of day in the touch and go environment of the Jamestown Colony.
You’re not supposed to say things like this—but I am proud of Temperance Bailey Cocke. At the age of six, Temperance cheated death by hiding out at Jordan’s Journey, a settlement upriver from James Fort, while Powhatan engaged in a historic massacre. As a result, voila--here I am. Can’t thank you enough, Temperance, you brave gal, you!
On behalf of Temperance and other intrepid colonial souls, I’ve been privately seething about the New York Times’ infamous 1619 Project. It’s a crock and a libel. More than that, it is designed to make us hate our country. How can one serve a country one doesn’t love?
The 1619 Project, as I feel certain you know by now, had the ambitious goal of “reframing” American history and placing our “true founding” in 1619 with the arrival of a ship bringing the first slaves to America. The project goes further though to suggest that slavery alone shaped the United States and racism is in our DNA. The New York Times is eager to push this message on school children; selling a 1619 curriculum for classroom use. This may be the reason why Nikole Hannan-Jones, the guiding spirit behind 1619, has tried to give herself wiggle room, claiming, rather unconvincingly, that she was being “metaphorical” in speaking of 1619 our “true founding”.
Nevertheless, Hannah-Jones was onto something: 1619 really is crucial to the American Founding—just not in the way the 1619 Project imagines. While 1619 doesn't rival 1776 as the American Founding, 1619 is a seminal date in our history, because that was the year the Virginia House of Burgesses, which was the first elected assembly in the American colonies, first met in Jamestown. It serves as proof that instead of Lord of the flies, the small and imperiled Jamestown colony had a representative government that first met in a little Anglican church. Yes, slavery came in 1619, regrettably, but so did representative government. An honest 1619 Project would have acknowledged this. (By the way, Temperance’s husband, Richard Cocke, lawyer and planter, sat in the House of Burgesses.)
The Jamestown colonists came to build a new world and, not incidentally, prosper. Captain John Smith was the quintessential Jamestown colonist: colorful and politically incorrect (he is reputed to have beheaded an Ottoman Turk in his mercenary days) but essential: he hit upon the saving formula to rescue the colony in the “The Starving Time” by decreeing that those who did not work would not eat. He ended communal property holding. Very American.
The hatred of Jamestown, and indeed our entire history altogether, as most clearly displayed in The 1619 Project, partly grows out of Critical Race Theory (and bad scholarship, of course, as the respected historians who pointed out how fact-challenged it is, amply have demonstrated).
Critical Race Theory, which now dominates academia as certainly as the Scholastics did in medieval European universities, teaches us that we must despise the people who toughed it out in the wilderness and helped lay foundations for the most generous country in history. It is all the more insidious because, since we have remedied many (but not all) ramifications of slavery, it turns to “microaggressions”-- those tiny acts one does to insult another race or gender--a side glance, a double take, a seemingly innocuous question.
With microaggressions, there is no endgame—you can go on ferreting out more and more new grievances until the end of history. As a philosophy, CRT honors no objective reality other than the reality of “systemic racism.” It is barbarian and loveless and there’s no chance for redemption or forgiveness. It deprives us of our rightful heritage. After all, we are all, if we care to be, as Americans, sons and daughters of Jamestown and Plymouth, 1776 and 1789.
Every year, I go to a luncheon and raise a glass to the Jamestown colonists. I find myself in a cozy room with high ceilings and free-flowing wine. And as we make our toast, I always think, Jamestown was a damned miracle. It was never a sure thing. We shouldn’t even be here. But tough men and women gave us a future, and I love them for it.
A Bailey and an FFV. We’ve got to be cousins.
My ancestor Sarah Du Truiex was probably the first white child born in New York colony, 1624...
her Huguenot parents were Phillippe Du Truiex and Susanna Du Chesne who had arrived on the ship New Netherland from Holland the year before...
The group of immigrants on the ship all came from the Leiden Church and had been gathered together by Jesse De Forest another ancestor of mine...
Jesse was on another ship, the Pigeon, and died in Dutch Guinea...
Theres a monument to Jesse in Battery Park...I wonder how long it will remain standing...
Bump
After all the blather is emoted, the fact of the matter is,
the United States of America would not be making the
decisions about how the inhabitants of the New World
would live for another nearly 16 decades.
England and her government leaders controlled how this
land was governed back then. They brought in slaves.
They set up the methods and rules governing ownership.
Our Forefathers wouldn’t impact those laws for 160 years.
Is there anyone alive today that set up rules 160 years
ago today, that govern our current populace? Well,
when the current nation was founded, those humans weren’t
capable of it either.
Our Forefathers met and abolished the rules that governed
this land. They drafted, discussed, argued, changed, and
modified them even more, and then ratified them, colony
by colony.
The Founding Documents prescribed that all Men were
created equal. It was an impossibility to force the
end of slavery on slave owners at our founding.’
Instead our Founders laid the groundwork for the concept
of equality. After the nation was established, a time
came when other things as well as slavery was fought over
and Slavery was abolished. It happened, in accordance with
our Founding Documents. Our Founding Fathers made it so!
The 1619 Nineteen Project is a lie, a slander against the
nation of the United States of America. Not only that
the slander has been extended beyond the nation, to each
White individual within it’s borders today.
What, your ancestors never owned slaves? You’ve always
tried to treat every human being decently, according to
their actions. What, you’re saying you aren’t a racist?
Well oh yes you are. That fact you don’t think so
proves how big a racist you are down deep inside!
Anyone buying into this should be given a choice of where
they would like to move to, since they certainly aren’t
going to be content here, by choice. If they can’t think
of a place, our government should make a choice for them.
I’d be in favor of spotting them a healthy sum of money
to start a new life with.
They have been a net loss here their entire adult lives.
Let them go establish their “perfect nation” so the rest
of us loyal citizens can get on with our lives.
And good riddance.
Had the Indians succeeded in wiping out Jamestown in 1622, some other European power might have stepped in to fill the vacuum. Spain had sent explorers into the region that became the Carolinas in the sixteenth century, and the Dutch, French and even the Swedes and Danes were starting to move into the New World.
The only system racism that I can think of, i.e., racism that's legally a part of the system, goes by the fancy name of Affirmative Action. And by the way, you'll never end discrimination by discriminating.
Charlotte Hayes’ Town hall piece is a classic: refutes the stupid 1619 Project and provides a great historical background on what “really happened.”. Congrats, Charlotte!!
New Netherland was ruled by the. Dutch The English did not run the colony until 1664. Jesse’s son Isaac De Forest was one of the Burgers who signed the surrender to the three English warships in the Hudson River.
You made a good point here. I had read somewhere else a while back that if the European settlers hadn’t come and taken the land away from the Indians somebody else was inevitably bound to. This was much too rich a continent once it was discovered to ever be allowed to just stay in the hands of Aborigines.
This! Well said, D1!
“he hit upon the saving formula to rescue the colony in the “The Starving Time” by decreeing that those who did not work would not eat.”
I presume that didn’t include babies or the very elderly. Maybe the formula was that families that did not work did not eat.
Indentured servants presented a problem because you had to pay their transportation, room and board, and you had to teach them the tricks of your trade. After a few years, they were free of any debt and could become your chief competition.
“..Yes, slavery came in 1619,..”
By WHO? “Americans”? Nope. The USA was still over a century away from existing.
Yet the haters all blame the USA for all slavery..
My McGinnis family from Ulster, in Ireland were indentured servants to the Livingston Plantation south of Rennselear in 1720...
Trump removed it from the federal government. Local governments and schools still need to remove it.
Thanks for the mention.
Thank you.
Nice...
William Parker, Jamestown circa 1616, is my ancestor.
Some time last summer I heard Glenn Beck and Larry Schweikert saying that Jamestown is the source of all that is evil in American history.
That America shouldn’t begin with Jamestown, that it should “start” with the Pilgrims in 1620 instead of the evil ancestors of those of us who claim Jamestown.
That Beck-Schweikert revisionist history is enough to warm the hearts of antifa.
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