August 21, 2019
By Timothy Sandefur
The New York Times is getting attention for a series of articles called “The 1619 Project,” which argues that that slavery is the source of “nearly everything that has truly made America exceptional.” Some of the articles are excellent—Khalil Gibran Muhammad’s piece on the Louisiana sugar industry, for example—and the series accomplishes a worthy goal in that many Americans are, alas, largely ignorant about slavery, and even more so about what came after: its virtual reinstitution in the decades after the Civil War.
Yet as I contend in an article
on Reason.com today—and in a conversation
I had this morning with radio hosts Jack Armstrong and Joe Getty—the series
makes a profound error in claiming that the United States itself is premised
upon slavery; that the authors of the Declaration of Independence didn’t
actually mean “all men” when they said “all men are created equal,” but only
meant white men; and that the
Constitution protected slavery, and that the United States was, in the words of
one Times writer, “founded…as a
slavocracy.” These things are utterly false.
In fact, the nation’s founders recognized the evil of slavery and said
repeatedly that it could not be reconciled with their principles. It was the
generation that followed who, in the 1830s, manufactured the myth that the America
was founded as a whites-only nation. People like John C. Calhoun, Stephen
Douglas, and Roger Taney, advanced this idea, in disregard of the facts—and
they were challenged every step of the way by leaders such as John Quincy
Adams, Abraham Lincoln, Charles Sumner, and Frederick Douglass.
John Quincy Adams is a pivotal figure in this story. He knew all of the
founders personally, and became the intellectual godfather of the antislavery
movement. In February 1842, when his outspoken hostility to slavery led to a battle
on the floor of the House of Representatives, Adams had a few words
to say on the subject:
Mr. A…went at some length into the history of his past life, his
intercourse and friendship with, and the confidence he had enjoyed of
Washington, Jefferson, Madison, and Monroe…. In all the intercourse he had had
with these men, from Washington down to Monroe, never, in the course of his
life, was there a question between them and him on the subject of slavery. He
knew that they all abhorred slavery, and he could prove it, if it was denied
now, from the testimony of Jefferson, of Madison, and of Washington themselves.
There was not an Abolitionist of the wildest character in the Northern States
but might find in the writings of Jefferson, at the time of the Declaration of
Independence, and during his whole life down to this very last year, a
justification for everything they say on the subject of slavery, and a
description of the horrors of slavery greater than he had the power to express.
Adams was not a minor figure; not only had he been president, but he
became the mentor to a generation of antislavery leaders that included Sumner,
Joshua Giddings, and William Seward. Yet their work goes unmentioned in the Times articles.
Thus when Taney claimed in the Dred
Scott case that it was a matter of historical fact that the founding fathers
meant America to be forever a white nation, with blacks either enslaved or
deported, he asserted what was factually untrue—and his arguments were
systematically demolished by Lincoln
and Douglass.
The founders deserved blame for not doing more to eradicate slavery, said Douglass,
but the notion that they were white supremacists was “a slander upon their
memory.” It meant that they “were the veriest imposters that ever practiced on
mankind.” But that was simply not true.
Adams, Lincoln, Douglass, and their allies sought to vindicate the
founders against the white supremacist spin doctors of the 1830s—yet their
efforts are never mentioned in the Times articles.
It’s astonishing, shameful, and dangerous, that the Times agrees with Roger Taney. Thank goodness that Americans—both
before the Civil War and after—have proven wiser.
You can read my article here
and listen to the Armstrong and Getty discussion here.
Timothy Sandefur
is the Vice President for Litigation at the Goldwater Institute.
