By Rich Lowry
Monday, October 07, 2019
I wrote a piece a couple of weeks ago about the long
history of slavery around the world, since the “1619 Project” pointedly
ignored this history.
My argument was that, no matter how horrific slavery was on
these shores, it’s a mistake to say that we were exceptional because of
slavery.
I was struck by a tweet in response by Nikole
Hannah-Jones, the lead essayist of the 1619 edition of the New York Times
magazine, who first said I had conceded that America wasn’t exceptional:
What’s amazing about this piece on
what “they” supposedly won’t tell you about slavery is it basically makes my
argument — America was not exceptional as we’re taught. It was just one of many
nations for which slavery was foundational to society. So, thanks, @NRO. 🤷🏽♀️
https://twitter.com/NRO/status/1169744525578911744
…
Then, in literally the next tweet in her thread, she said
those other societies didn’t have our ideals. One would think that would make
those ideals, rather than slavery, rather obviously a key source of our
exceptionalism. But she concludes the opposite:
But also, how many of these other
slave nations were founded on the individual rights of humankind, on the
premise that all men were created equal, that they would lead a government of
the people, for the people, by the people. THIS is what makes American slavery
exceptional.
With these tweets, she covers all her bases: What we had
in common with other societies, namely, slavery, means we weren’t exceptional.
And what made us distinct from other societies, namely our ideals, was about
slavery, too.
As in the old story about the turtle holding the world on
its back, it is slavery all the way down.
There are all sorts of things you can reasonably say
about the juxtaposition of our ideals and slavery — that our founders were
conflicted and hypocritical; that our ideals were incompletely realized and
would remain so for a very long time, stretching deep into the 20th century;
that our compromise with slavery significantly vitiated the force of our
founding principles.
But to portray the American experiment as all about
slavery is perverse. The influence of this twisted view appears in the
distortions, both subtle and blatant, in the 1619 essay by Hannah-Jones.
It’s worth delving into these in some detail. They reveal
what makes the 1619 project not just an effort to shine a light on a terrible
part of our past but a much more ambitious, ideologically driven attempt to
redefine our history.
There is much truth in the Hannah-Jones essay, and much
to learn from it. One of her central points, that African Americans have been
great American freedom fighters and are more American in this sense — and in
their tenure in America — than many European Americans, is profoundly true, and
movingly expressed.
Yet if you are advancing what purports to be a more
accurate history, you shouldn’t distort the record and elide inconvenient
facts.
Obviously, nothing in what follows is meant to diminish
the evil of slavery or our national sin in defending and tolerating it for so
long. It’s important, though, to know how the signature essay in the Times
venture seeks to hide the ball.
Leaving Out Unwelcome
Facts about Slavery
Hannah-Jones’s account of American slavery is justly
excoriating but is careful to leave out anything that might even slightly
complicate her story or might prove discomfiting to the Left.
“They were,” Hannah-Jones writes of the first slaves
brought to colonial America, “among the 12.5 million Africans who would be
kidnapped from their homes and brought in chains across the Atlantic Ocean.”
She doesn’t say who kidnapped them. She refers later to “people stolen from
western and central Africa.” Again, she doesn’t say who first stole these
people so they could be sent across the Atlantic in chains.
Why not? Like it or not, it was Africans who captured
other Africans, and marched them to the coast to be sold to European slavers. African
slavery existed before Europeans showed up, and it persisted after they left.
This, of course, doesn’t make the Middle Passage, so excruciatingly awful it’s
difficult to even read about, any better. But it cuts against the impression
that she wants to leave that slavery was a uniquely European, and especially
American, phenomenon.
Indeed, you might get the idea from reading her essay
that colonial Americans were the ones who came up with the idea of racialized
slavery. Sadly, it had a long history before Thomas Jefferson showed up on the
scene.
As far back as the mid-15th century, papal bulls granted
Portugal the right to enslave sub-Saharan Africans — infidels in West Africa
could be reduced to “perpetual slavery.” “Taken together,” James Sweet writes
in a paper on the topic, these papal bulls “signaled to the rest of Christian
Europe that the enslavement of sub-Saharan Africans was acceptable and
encouraged.” Across the Iberian Peninsula, he notes, the word “Negro” basically
came to mean “slave,” and this term and meaning were picked up by northern
Europeans.
Of course, this doesn’t make racialized slavery any less
heinous, but it does provide a sense of how, when it comes to slavery, colonial
America was hardly an island unto itself.
Hannah-Jones says that at the time of the American
Revolution, “one-fifth of the population within the 13 colonies struggled under
a brutal system of slavery unlike anything that had existed in the world
before.”
Perhaps she means implicitly to include the rest of the
Americas in this condemnation, because everywhere else in the Americas —
Brazil, Cuba, the West Indies, etc. — had a broadly similar system of slavery.
Of course, if she wanted to be clear about this, she could have simply said it.
Peter Kolchin makes the point in his history, American
Slavery, 1619–1877: “The Southern United States represented the
northernmost outpost of this plantation system, which reached its apogee of
organizational development on the large sugar estates of Jamaica, Saint
Domingue (later called Haiti), Cuba, and other Caribbean colonies.”
It’s not to deny the brutality of slavery in colonial
America to note what would seem to most observers the even more hideously
inhumane nature of slavery in, say, Brazil and the Caribbean islands, where
slaves were literally worked to death and had to be constantly replenished by
new imports.
“Brazil and the Caribbean,” Kolchin notes, “were
graveyards for Africans and their descendants; Jamaica, for example, imported a
total of more than three-quarters of a million Africans, but at the time of
emancipation in 1834, its slave population stood at only 311,000.”
Hannah-Jones would probably say to all of this, “There
you go denying American exceptionalism, again.” No, the point is, counter to
her and other critics of the American Founding, that it wasn’t slavery that set
us apart. Both Brazil and the United States had slavery; only one of them had
the Constitution and Declaration of Independence.
Smearing the
Revolution
According to Hannah-Jones, “conveniently left out of our
founding mythology is the fact that one of the primary reasons the colonists
decided to declare their independence from Britain was because they wanted to
protect the institution of slavery.”
This is preposterous. It isn’t left out of our “founding
mythology” because it’s inconvenient, but because it’s untrue.
The reference here presumably is to the colonial upset
over the 1773 Somerset decision in England. As historian Alan Taylor
explains in his recent book American Revolutions, an American slaveowner
took his slave to England and then tried to send him on to Jamaica. The slave,
James Somerset, petitioned for his freedom. A British court rule that slavery
wasn’t supported under the “natural law” and required an enactment of “positive
law”; with no such law existing in Britain, Somerset was a free man. The
colonists feared the consequence, but there is nothing in the writings of the
revolutionaries to suggest that this episode ranked anywhere close in
importance to their other discontents.
Moreover, the turbulence around the Somerset
decision was complicated. “The ruling,” Taylor writes, “coincided with an
imperial veto of Virginia’s latest attempt to discourage further slave
imports.” It was the combination of Somerset and this veto that
exercised Virginians. “The empire seemed implicitly,” Taylor continues, “to
stir up slave discontent while preventing colonies from restricting the
threatening growth of their numbers.”
The point is worth emphasizing, by the way, that it was royal
policy at this time to oppose any colonial efforts to crimp the slave
trade. King George III urged the royal governor of Virginia, “upon pain of the
highest displeasure, to assent to no law by which the importation of slaves
should be in any respect prohibited or obstructed.”
As it happens, the logic of the Somerset decision
— in the absence of a positive enactment, the natural state is freedom —
eventually proved enormously useful to abolitionists. “In the United States,”
James Oakes writes in Freedom National, “Somerset became a
benchmark for all subsequent efforts to end slavery by political means.”
If Hannah-Jones had delved into Somerset at all,
she almost certainly would have avoided any of this material on grounds that
it’s not damning enough to colonial America.
Distorting the
Constitution
Understandably, Hannah-Jones spends a lot of time on the
compromises related to slavery at the Constitutional Convention. “The
Constitution,” she writes, “protected the ‘property’ of those who enslaved black
people.”
This is shamefully dishonest. With the quote marks around
“property,” she effaces, 250 years later, the work of the Founders who
specifically insisted on excluding that word in any reference to slavery.
The Constitution refers to slaves not as property, but as
“persons held in service,” a subtle distinction although one with profound
implications.
As James Oakes recounts, during the deliberations, Roger
Sherman opposed a tax on slave imports “because it implied that they were property.”
James Madison took Sherman’s side, elaborating in his notes from the
convention, that he believed it “wrong to admit in the Constitution the idea
that there could be property in men.” He added, “Slaves are not like
merchandise, consumed, &c.”
Sean Wilentz explains in his appropriately titled book, No
Property in Men, that “the convention took care to ensure that while the
Constitution would accept slavery where it already existed, it would not
validate slavery in national law; that is, the Constitution would tolerate
slavery without authorizing it.”
“After 1815,” he continues, “as antislavery agitation
became much more formidable, the distinction — and, specifically, the framers’
exclusion of property in man — became the constitutional basis for the politics
that in time led to slavery’s destruction.”
Consider a passage in the argument of John Quincy Adams
before the Supreme Court in the famous Amistad case in 1841:
The Constitution of the United
States recognizes the slaves, held within some of the States of the Union, only
in their capacity of persons — persons held to labor or service in a State
under the laws thereof — persons constituting elements of representation in the
popular branch of the National Legislature — persons, the migration or importation
of whom should not be prohibited by Congress prior to the year 1808. The
Constitution no where recognizes them as property. The words slave and slavery
are studiously excluded from the Constitution. Circumlocutions are the
fig-leaves under which these parts of the body politic are decently concealed.
Slaves, therefore, in the Constitution of the United States are recognized only
as persons, enjoying rights and held to the performance of duties.
Hannah-Jones, in effect, implies a counterfactual history
in which the Constitution explicitly recognized “property” in men.
Misrepresenting the
Founding Era
In her rendering, Hannah-Jones skips from America’s
independence to the “hardening of the racial caste system.” She thus excises
the liberalization of the slave regime that attended the Revolution, because
it, too, is inconvenient to her narrative.
This liberalization wasn’t a minor phenomenon. It was a
key element of the revolutionary period, driven by the obvious tension between
the Founders’ ringing calls for liberty — and their worry that the British
wanted to reduce them to “slaves” — and the slave system itself.
Kolchin writes:
The Revolutionary era witnessed the
first major challenge to American slavery. Almost overnight, it seemed, an
institution that had long been taken for granted came under intense scrutiny
and debate: critics questioned its efficacy and morality, proponents rushed to
its defense, and thousands of slaves took advantage of wartime turmoil to flee
their bondage. Tangible results of this challenge included the abolition of
slavery in the North, a sharp increase in the number of free blacks in the
upper South, and the ending of the African slave trade.
Vermont began a gradual abolition in 1777, with
Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, Connecticut, New York, and New Jersey following
suit between 1780 and 1804. How can any remotely honest account of America and
slavery leave these acts out, and not even mention them in a clause or
parenthetically? Sean Wilentz calls it, “to that point, the largest
emancipation in modern history and the crucial departure from which all later
antislavery activity would follow.”
If you think this is a crucial part of the story of the
Revolution and American slavery, you clearly aren’t suited to write for or edit
the New York Times’ 1619 project.
Kolchin recounts other elements of this liberalizing
tendency: In 1776, the second Continental Congress passed a resolution opposing
slave imports, and around this time several states banned them; Virginia,
Maryland, and Delaware loosened restrictions on manumission; and Congress in
1784 came within one vote of prohibiting slavery in the Western territories.
“It appeared for a while,” Kolchin writes, “as if the very survival of slavery
in the new nation was threatened.”
Of course, it wouldn’t be. There was backsliding in the
South that grew worse over time. In the antebellum period, a more aggressive,
positive defense of slavery arose and an accompanying tightening of slave laws,
both of which foreshadowed the Civil War.
The secession of the South spoke, indeed, of a distinctly
American element in the story of modern slavery, as Kolchin notes:
Nowhere else did the defense of
slavery turn into a veritable pro-slavery crusade, as it did in the United
States; nowhere else did slave owners refuse to accept emancipation and go to
war to preserve their interests. In their hour of crisis, masters elsewhere
grumbled, groused and dragged their heels, but ultimately they reluctantly went
along with decisions taken by central governments to convert to free labor. In
the Southern United States, slaveholders determined that they would rather
fight than switch.
This proved the ultimate undoing of slavery, exactly
because an anti-slavery North, the predicates of which Hannah-Jones elides or
distorts, was prepared to resist.
Misrepresenting
Lincoln
Which brings us to Abraham Lincoln.
Hannah-Jones treats at some length Lincoln’s notorious
August 1862 meeting with prominent free blacks in the White House. In keeping
with his longtime support for colonization, the president lectured them on the
need for blacks to remove themselves from the country. “Your race suffer very
greatly, many of them, by living among us, while ours suffer from your
presence,” he said. “In a word, we suffer on each side.” He noted that Congress
had appropriated funding to transport blacks to a colony.
All true enough, but consider, once again, what
Hannah-Jones leaves out. She mentions that Lincoln was considering issuing the
Emancipation Proclamation at this time, but she ignores the plausible
interpretation of various Lincoln scholars that the meeting was a
public-relations feint, meant to soften political opposition in the Union to
Emancipation.
As Oakes relates, Lincoln was high-handed and uninterested
in the views of his guests, a contrast to his respectful treatment of other
black leaders; he put a heavy emphasis in the meeting on the gap between the
races when, usually, he belittled racial differences; he invited a reporter to
record the proceedings, a departure from his usual practice, to ensure that his
comments appeared instantly in the newspapers.
Colonization was a common way for opponents of slavery to
try to make their views more palatable to prejudiced public opinion. It would
have been better, of course, if this hadn’t been necessary. But abolitionists
and other opponents of slavery were trying to make gains in 19th-century
America as it existed. Lincoln continued to pursue colonization until a small
experiment failed miserably. Sometime in 1864, he dropped the idea and by the
end of the war he was talking about limited black suffrage.
As for his dealings with black leaders, it does him a
profound disservice to neglect his relationship with Frederick Douglass.
In August 1864, in their second meeting together at the
White House, Lincoln worried that he might lose his reelection and that
Democrats would negotiate a peace that kept blacks enslaved in the South.
Convinced that blacks, once freed, couldn’t be re-enslaved, he asked Douglass
to find a way to further spread the word of Emancipation in the South and get
as many slaves to Union lines as possible.
After Lincoln’s Second Inaugural, Douglass joined the
procession to visit the president at a reception at the White House, even though
a black man had never been part of such a gathering. Detained at the gate, he
asked an acquaintance to tell Lincoln he was there. Swiftly admitted, Lincoln
told the crowd, “Here comes my friend Douglass” and insisted on hearing
Douglass’s opinion of his speech: “Mr. Lincoln, that was a sacred effort.”
In a eulogy of Lincoln that Douglass delivered at the
Cooper Institute, he described Lincoln as “emphatically the black man’s
President. He was the first of the long line to show any respect to the rights
of the black man, or to acknowledge that he had any rights the white man ought
to respect.”
There was agreement on this, by the way, from the other
side of the divide in the North. A Copperhead attack on Lincoln the year before
had put it in almost exactly the same terms:
When did we ever have a President
that made so much of the negro, or was ever willing to take him into his
private and social circles as Abraham Lincoln does?—Mr. Lincoln is emphatically
the black man’s President and the white man’s curse. What act has the President
ever done in his official capacity, trace it out to its legitimate ends, that
has been beneficial to the country, or to the white man? Not one, and we defy
contradiction!
Hannah-Jones, apparently, begs to differ.
* * *
To reiterate, none of this is to deny America’s
considerable sins. The reality of our shortcomings is
bad enough that no one focusing on slavery or racial discrimination should feel
compelled to distort the record. The lines of Samuel Huntington are apt: “Critics
say that America is a lie because its reality falls so short of its ideals.
They are wrong. America is not a lie; it is a disappointment. But it can be a
disappointment only because it is also a hope.”
This gets at the
crux of the matter. The American past has had its share of both hypocrisy and
nobility. Truthfulness demands that we acknowledge both. Americans were
hypocrites in extolling liberty and grounding our national identity to a
significant extent in it, while at the same tolerating or even embracing
slavery. But, over time, the principles and rhetoric of freedom proved powerful
tools against slavery.
The stakes in getting this right are large. If they
succeed in making America only about the hypocrisy, the architects of the 1619
Project will deny the country’s nobility to the rising generation. They will
have made America, in Huntington’s terms, a lie pure and simple, and enshrined
their own hostile, mythologized account of our history.
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