Yes, we all know that slavery was a large part of our country's history but how much? By now, you all probably know that the NYT is launching a series of articles based on the premise that slavery was foundational to our country to the point that 1619, the first importation of 20 slaves was the real beginning of what we call the USA, not 1776. "Conservatives" such as Newt Gingrich are apoplectic about someone even presenting such a hypothesis.
Several years ago, a hypothesis was presented regarding climate change. It was proposed that perhaps variations in galactic cosmic rays caused variations in cloud nucleation and cloud cover which affected earth's temperature. The reaction of the climate change "establishment" wasn't "how dare you propose such heresy?" It was more like "Interesting, someone should pursue that". It was subsequently found, after study, not to be significant but it wasn't dismissed outright from the beginning.
Similarly, I'm looking forward to reading the "1619" articles. The biggie for me is how much slavery motivated the Revolution. Was it because England was moving toward abolition that the colonies sought independence? Were only the southern colonies so motivated? The northern states made a lot of money from it in transportation of slaves and textiles from slave-picked cotton. Anyway, even if I eventually don't completely agree, I'm sure to learn something.
When I first saw the date I was expecting it to be something about the Pilgrims. I too am interested in reading the articles. It seems like that slavery was a motivation for some, but not for others.
ReplyDelete"like" should be "likely" .
DeleteStanley, I suspect the reason you posted this has as much to do with the difference between the scientific method and Republican ideology as with the thesis itself. So be assured, the shot across Newt's bow was not lost on me and was, in fact, enjoyed here.
ReplyDeleteInterpretations of the Revolution have posited a number of original causes, from how people earn their living (Charles A. Beard) to power politics (Theodore Draper). Samuel Eliot Morison and Henry Steele Commager wrote as if the Revolution were the first draft of the New Deal, slavery and all. Jill LePore wrote the history of America as the struggle of slaves and women to achieve the "self-evident truth"of the Declaration of Independence. The argument that the Revolution was the war to make the New World safe for slavery will have similar result, in that it will illuminate some obscurities but also encourage simplifications that put too much salt in the soup.
When I was a lad getting my first taste of Scripture scholarship, I read a book (was it by Barnabas Ahern?) that read the Bible as a history of human freedom. When I enthusiastically told my spiritual adviser about my discovery, he answered to the effect that you can follow the thread of almost any abstraction -- truth, justice, solidarity, humility -- through the Bible and pronounce that that's what the book is "all about." History tends to be like that.
With that caveat, I am finding the stories illuminating.
They are running similar or the same stories in the WaPo. Today I read about Angela, who ended up in Jamestown, survived two famines, and then ??
ReplyDeleteI have spent a lot of time to no avail trying to find out what happened to Captain John Hartwell's (a many-great grandather) enslaved servant, Sukey. When the British were coming, Mrs. Hartwell ran to warn everyone, and Sukey lit out for the woods. She didn't come back for a few days, and claimed she was afraid of of the redcoats.
This never struck me as very plausible; why would anyone want to rattle around in the woods alone when it was crawling with soldiers on both sides?
I like to think Sukey was helping relatives get to the British, who were offering freedom and land in Canada to any slaves who would fight for their side, a promise the Brits made good on.
But it makes one wonder why Sukey didn't avail herself of the British offer, except maybe it was only extended to males who could be soldiers.
DeleteMaybe she joined them in Canada. Maybe she was too old. Who knows? The original story was concocted to feed the notion that enslaved people were craven and stupid. Which slaves could work to their advantage.
DeleteThere is a story in the special Times section titled Our democracy’s founding ideals were false when they were written. Black Americans have fought to make them true. Take that, Founders and Framers!
ReplyDeleteDavid Nickol: I stopped reading at that headline; it appeared the first day announcing the NYT series.
DeleteIn 1619 was there democracy anywhere? In 1619 the British were in charge of these here colonies. Slaves and the slave trade in the North American colonies as well as the Carribbean and South American colonies were under the British, Spanish, and Portuguese for 150 years, to say nothing of the Arab and African traders who sold other Africans.
We should admit our sins (which are many), but the New York Times effort to rewrite history is sad and pathetic.
I am reading Jill Lepore's "These Truths," and she doesn't flinch from the realities but she tells a far more nuanced story than this potted history.
Thanks for the link, David. The article was long but good. For the people who object to the series, can they say that the facts laid out aren't true?
DeleteI typed my reply before I saw Margaret's. Of course she is correct that other nations participated in the sin of slavery, and that democracy as we know it did not exist in 1619.
DeleteI guess the big question is, will the NYT series cause an examination of conscience and firm purpose of amendment, or will it just cause further denial and polarization?
DeleteWriting and/or rewriting history is a tricky business. Having passed up the Times series after that headline, I can't say facts are true or not. OR it is not the "facts" that shape the story so much as the interpretation...if there was not democracy in 1619, no one could have observed its rules...colonists, slavers, or slaves....Putting the horse of democracy before the cart of slavery and political structures in 1619.
DeleteJust read a review of (st.) Patrick who was enslaved by ??? sorry don't remember (Vikings?)...The review made it clear that slavery was ubiquitous back then and long after. The spoils of war included enslaving the losers. Lepore emphasizes both slavery and the struggle against slavery before the Constitution was written and after..before the Civil War and after....etc...Her point, or one of them: this has been a long struggle against one of the heinous customs of humankind.
Part of my continuing dismay at the decline of the NYTimes....
I have to say I liked the article. I didn't learn much in the way of facts that was new but I liked the thesis that the identity of black Americans was forged specifically in this country and reminds me their roots here go way further back than mine. The article actually energizes the patriotism of this Polish-American and gives me more hope than I've felt for a while in this Dark Age of Trump. If only more people, white and black, knew our history.
DeleteKatherine: "I guess the big question is, will the NYT series cause an examination of conscience and firm purpose of amendment, or will it just cause further denial and polarization?"
DeleteIf we're lucky it could do both. The problem of bending history at this fraught moment of racialized arguments is that it sets all sides behind their barricades.
Nell Painter's "The History of White People" is also a very good overview of the way ideas about race and ethnicity evolved in Western civilization.
ReplyDeleteWhat I find dismaying is that the church came late to the recognition of slavery as an "intrinsic evil". And Protestants were in the lead in the abolition movement. There were Catholic saints who spoke out against slavery earlier, but it did not become a teaching until late in the game.
ReplyDeleteNo mention of reparations to blacks yet in the articles I've read. But here's talk of reparations from an entirely different quarter. Poland is asking for $777B in reparations from Deutschland for destroying the country in WWII. The germans are saying the Polish government agreed to forego any further compensation in 1953. But the poles reply it was a commie government under pressure from Moscow. And the beat goes on.
ReplyDeletehttps://www.thesun.co.uk/news/9762722/poland-demands-germany-ww2-777-billion-compo-hitler-destroying-country/
What bugs me about reparations is that the people who were directly harmed by slavery or Nazi-ism or whatever, are dead. And so are the ones who did it.
DeletePart of the reparations arguments for slavery of African-Americans rests on the continuing inequality and lack of equity because of discrimination, Jim Crow laws, and legal barriers that followed Emancipation.
DeleteRe: Reparations: General sympathy for the argument that it was not only slavery that damaged their prospects for equality, but what followed doesn't produce an obvious remedy.
Thanks David for the link to the article.
ReplyDeleteHaving read the article, I see it as a new mythology to replace an old mythology. Neither of them probably has much relationship to history if history is defined as the complexities of what happened empirically.
As an” exodus” mythology for Black Americans I found it very appealing. However I suspect I was supposed to identify with the “Egyptians=White Americans” of the new mythology. That did not happen.
I don’t identify with the WASPS who founded this country. My ancestors came from Germany, Poland, and Lithuania. They were not slave holders; they came after the civil war. They came both to escape their homelands and to seek a better life here.
The only strong identity that survives is my Catholic identity. That is neither an ethnic nor a racial identity. I could relate far more with an Asian, African, or Latin American Catholic than I would with German or Lithuanian Protestants.
The idea that Black American identity began here rather than in Africa could also be applied to my American Catholic identity. It began with the marriage of my Polish grandfather to my Lithuanian grandmother (both Catholic) and then the marriage of my German mother to my dad (again both Catholic). The Polish, Lithuanians and Germans did not necessarily get along. All those ethnic identities disappeared in my parent’s generation. We were all American Catholics; the grandparents in fact became absorbed into that identity as they focused upon their grandchildren.
Francis, The Joy of the Gospel, says this about the common good and peace in society. “Yet becoming a people demands something more. It is an ongoing process in which every new generation must take part: a slow and arduous effort calling for a desire for integration and a willingness to achieve this through the growth of a peaceful and multifaceted culture of encounter.”
We need an American mythology which reflects the reality that in each generation we have been challenged to deepen our American identity, to become a better people, and that many ethnicities have contributed to the process.
Thanks Jack for the Francis quote. On target.
DeleteAll of Section III The Common Good and Peace of Society from CHAPTER FOUR which contains his Four Principles:
Delete1)time is greater than space,
2) unity prevails over conflict,
3)realities are more important than ideas,
4) the whole is greater than the part
provide an interesting framework for thinking about these issues.
Many thanks for that link, Jack!
DeleteNow the 1619 project is blaming racism for traffic jams. This would be seem to be a heavy lift and a long reach -- except that Michael Harrington happened to notice it way back in 1960 when it wasn't yet a fully accomplished fact. (The Other America)
ReplyDeletehttps://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/08/14/magazine/traffic-atlanta-segregation.html?action=click&module=Editors%20Picks&pgtype=Homepage
https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2019/8/25/1879981/-The-1619-Project-The-good-the-bad-and-the-ugly-racist-responses?detail=emaildkre
ReplyDeleteOver at National Review, Phillip Magness traces the 1619 series to a revisionist-history trend of which he doesn't think very highly. He positions the series as a new variation on the "King Cotton" theme that was put forth by Confederate apologists before and during the Civil War, and which he believes has been thoroughly debunked.
ReplyDeletehttps://www.nationalreview.com/2019/08/1619-project-new-york-times-king-cotton-thesis/
"[D]espite its historical untenability, the economic reasoning behind King Cotton has undergone a surprising — perhaps unwitting — rehabilitation through a modern genre of scholarly works known as the new history of capitalism (NHC). While NHC historians reject the pro-slavery thrust of Wigfall and Hammond’s bluster, they recast slave-produced cotton as “not just as an integral part of American capitalism, but . . . its very essence,” to quote Harvard’s Sven Beckert. Cornell historian Ed Baptist goes even further, describing slavery as the indispensable causal driver behind America’s wealth today. Cotton production, he contends, was “absolutely necessary” for the Western world to break the “10,000-year Malthusian cycle of agriculture.”
"And this same NHC literature provides the scholarly foundation of the ballyhooed New York Times’ 1619 Project — specifically, its foray into the economics of slavery. Guided by this rehabilitated version of King Cotton, Princeton sociologist Matthew Desmond enlists the horrors of the plantation system to launch a blistering attack on modern American capitalism."
Editorial: 'The 1619 Project' is landmark truth telling
ReplyDeleteAug 28, 2019
by NCR Editorial Staff
https://www.ncronline.org/news/opinion/editorial-1619-project-landmark-truth