What is the 1619 Project?
The 1619 Project is a long-form journalism project developed by Nikole Hannah-Jones, writers from The New York Times, and The New York Times Magazine. Its premise is that the central and defining feature of American history and culture is racism. [1, 2] It is a comrade-in-arms to Critical Race Theory.
Quoting from the preface to the 100-page collection of articles indicates the magnitude of its (incredulous) claims. Fasten your seat belt.
“It [1619] is not a year that most Americans know as a notable date in our country’s history. Those who do are at most a tiny fraction of those who can tell you that 1776 is the year of our nation’s birth. What if, however, we were to tell you that this fact, which is taught in our schools and unanimously celebrated every Fourth of July, is wrong, and that the country’s true birth date, the moment that its defining contradictions first came into the world, was in late August of 1619? Though the exact date has been lost to history (it has come to be observed on Aug. 20), that was when a ship arrived at Point Comfort in the British colony of Virginia, bearing a cargo of 20 to 30 enslaved Africans. Their arrival inaugurated a barbaric system of chattel slavery that would last for the next 250 years. This is sometimes referred to as the country’s original sin, but it is more than that: It is the country’s very origin.
“Out of slavery — and the anti-black racism it required — grew nearly everything that has truly made America exceptional: its economic might, its industrial power, its electoral system, diet and popular music, the inequities of its public health and education, its astonishing penchant for violence, its income inequality, the example it sets for the world as a land of freedom and equality, its slang, its legal system and the endemic racial fears and hatreds that continue to plague it to this day. The seeds of all that were planted long before our official birth date, in 1776, when the men known as our founders formally declared independence from Britain.
“The goal of The 1619 Project, a major initiative from The New York Times that this issue of the magazine inaugurates, is to reframe American history by considering what it would mean to regard 1619 as our nation’s birth year. Doing so requires us to place the consequences of slavery and the contributions of black Americans at the very center of the story we tell ourselves about who we are as a country.” [3]
Whew!
There are many reasoning flaws and factual errors in this project. It entered a new phase of historical assessment when the paper published a scathing criticism by five well-known historians of the American Revolution and Civil War eras. The group included previous critics James McPherson, Gordon Wood, Victoria Bynum, and James Oakes, and Sean Wilentz. [4] Some of their comments are extracted below in the next section.
Was the American Revolution fought to preserve slavery?
One of the most hotly contested claims of the 1619 Project appears in its introductory essay by Nikole Hannah-Jones, who writes “one of the primary reasons the colonists decided to declare their independence from Britain was because they wanted to protect the institution of slavery.”
It is unrealistic to speculate that Britain would have imposed emancipation in the American colonies had the war for independence gone the other way. Britain’s own pathway to abolition in its remaining colonies entailed a half-century battle in the late 1700s and early 1800s against intense parliamentary resistance.
Even simply securing a prohibition on the slave trade by Britain took decades, with the passage of the Slave Trace Act of 1807. This was expanded by the Slave Abolition Act of 1833, both acts decades after 1776. This claim also ignores the rationale behind the Declaration of Independence. In his well-researched book (described in my post) America’s Revolutionary Mind, the author identifies and analyzes the modes of reasoning, the patterns of thought, and the new moral and political principles that served American Revolutionaries first in their intellectual battle with Great Britain before 1776 and then in their attempt to create new Revolutionary societies after 1776. He also describes the context of the founding of America. Preserving slavery was not among the rationale of the founders.
Although they had significantly smaller slave populations than the southern states, several other northern states used the occasion of independence to move against the institution. Five of the new states abolished slavery by 1799. In other words, the cause of emancipation was aided, rather than impaired, by the American Revolution.
Even though the American Revolution was fraught with complexities that cut across the political dimensions of all sides, the 1619 Project’s claim that America’s independence was to preserve slavery is totally wrong.
Was slavery responsible for America’s economic growth and the emergence of America’s capitalism?
Another major claim is that slavery drove America’s economic growth and the emergence of American capitalism. These claims are in Matthey Desmond’s 1619 Project contribution. The main thrust of his article holds that slavery was the primary driver of American economic growth in the 19th century, and that it infused its brutality into American capitalism today.
His thesis is overtly ideological and overtly anti-capitalist, initially indicated by the pejorative title of his article, “In order to understand the brutality of American capitalism you have to start on the plantation.”
His arguments are riddled with factual errors, some of which are described below. [5]
Desmond invokes the imagery of a modern corporation where “everything is tracked, recorded, and analyzed, via vertical reporting systems, double-entry record-keeping, and precise quantification,” then asserts that “many of these techniques that we now take for granted were developed by and for large plantations.”
Desmond ascribes the beginning of modern accounting practices such as double-entry record-keeping and depreciation that are used by modern corporations to “the gnatty fields of Georgia and Alabama, to the cotton houses and slave auction blocks.”
“When an accountant depreciates an asset to save on taxes or when a midlevel manager spends an afternoon filling in rows and columns on an Excel spreadsheet,” he continues, “they are repeating business procedures whose roots twist back to slave-labor camps.” By direct implication, modern capitalism carries that same moral stain with it.
There are immediate problems with Desmond’s historical narrative. The history of double-entry bookkeeping and business measurement predates plantation slavery by several centuries, with origins that are directly traceable to the banking families of late medieval Italy. Desmond seems not to understand the accounting function of depreciation, which arose mainly in the railroad industry as a mechanism for distributing the distortive effects of large replacement purchases on machinery that underwent constant wear and tear.
In addition to these business practice genealogy errors, there are misrepresented statistical claims.
One is the fact that during the 60 years leading up to the Civil War, the daily amount of cotton picked per enslaved worker increased 2.3 percent a year (compounded). That means that in 1862, the average enslaved fieldworker picked 400 percent more cotton than his or her counterpart did in 1801.
The underlying statistic is nominally accurate insofar as American cotton production grew almost fourfold between 1800 and the Civil War. But Desmond seeks to convey that “capitalist” business practices allowed plantation masters to forcibly extract the maximum amount of productivity from their enslaved workforce to such a degree that it causally drove the rapid expansion of the American cotton industry in the early 19th century. Cotton output, he contends, arose directly from a symbiotic convergence of capitalism and the whip.
Other authors do not attribute this production increase to a devil’s bargain between double-entry bookkeeping and systematized beatings of the slaves. Instead, they present clear evidence of a very different explanation. American planters improved their crop through biological innovation, such as creating hybrid seed strains that yielded more cotton, were easier to pick, and were more resistant to disease.
Technological changes revolutionized southern cotton production in the 60 years preceding the Civil War. The amount of cotton a typical slave picked per day increased about 2.3 percent per year due, primarily, to the introduction and perfection of superior cotton varieties.
Other essays in the 1619 Project addressing economic topics have similar flaws. Take, for example, Mehrsa Baradaran’s short piece, “Cotton and the Global Market,” in which she states:
“Textile merchants needed to purchase cotton in advance of their own production, which meant that farmers needed a way to sell goods they had not yet grown; this led to the invention of futures contracts and, arguably, the commodities markets still in use today.”
But, like double-entry bookkeeping, futures contracts emerged long before the importation of slavery to the Americas. Such contracts were used, for instance, in medieval wool markets. A formal futures exchange was established in Japan in the late 1600s for rice markets
As far as America is concerned, the first “time contract” was written on March 13, 1851, three years after the Chicago Board of Trade was established, and it concerned corn—not cotton.
Futures contracts were overwhelmingly concerned with wheat, corn, barley, rye, and oat crops—not cotton.
That cotton planters in the American South used futures contracts, asset depreciation, and double-entry bookkeeping is not disputed. The problem is the assertion that such devices emerged as a result of slavery given clear evidence to the contrary.
More faulty methodology
Saying that the antebellum American economy was highly dependent upon cotton is an instance of faulty methodology. Desmond relies on data from a book by Baptist.
In a key passage in his book The Half Has Never Been Told [6] Baptist purports to add up the total value of economic activity that derived from cotton production, which at $77 million made up about 5 percent of the estimated gross domestic product (GDP) of the United States in 1836. Baptist then committed a fundamental accounting error. He proceeded to double and even triple count intermediate transactions involved in cotton production — things like land purchases for plantations, tools used for cotton production, transportation, insurance, and credit instruments used in each. Eventually that $77 million became $600 million in Baptist’s accounting, or almost half of the entire antebellum economy of the United States.
There’s a crucial problem with Baptist’s approach. The calculation of GDP, the main formulation of national accounts and a representation of the dollar amount of economic activity in a country in a given year, only incorporates the value of final goods and services produced. The rationale for doing so comes from accounting, as the price of the final good already incorporates intermediate transactions that go into its production and distribution. Baptist’s numbers are not only wrong — they reflect a basic unfamiliarity with the meaning and definition of GDP.
Instructional material for schools
A curriculum’s foundational texts shape the instructional material to which teachers and their students are exposed. One purpose of instructional material is to help students develop critical reasoning skills so that they can learn how to assess the validity of what they are reading. In the case of the 1619 Project’s approach to capitalism, the instructional material is not only burdened by foundation texts that, as noted, embody significant errors; materials used to facilitate the instruction of students—whether lessons, video instruction, or activities designed to extend student engagements—appear driven by a desire to promote particular ideological outlooks rather than helping students to develop their critical reasoning and grow in appreciation of the intricacies of historical truth.
Conclusion
In summary, The 1619 Project is riddled with factual errors and reasoning flaws, and should not be used as an authoritative source, whether on its own or as a basis for instructional purposes.
References
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_1619_Project
- https://libertyscholar.org/the-1619-project/
- https://archive.org/details/1619project
- https://www.aier.org/article/fact-checking-the-1619-project-and-its-critics/
- https://www.aier.org/article/the-case-for-retracting-matthew-desmonds-1619-project-essay/
- Edward E. Baptist, The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism (New York: Basic Books, 2016), p. 113
Photo Credits
- 1619 Project: Unknown Author licensed under CC BY-SA
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As you are probably aware, many discussions on this topic are sometimes unfriendly and contain logical fallacies. If you decide to leave a comment, or even outside of this post, if you decide to have a discussion, public or private, you might find it helpful to follow the suggestions on my post How to have a successful discussion.