Cold Fury

How history is rewritten.

Historians expressed their dismay to the Daily Caller on Sunday after the New York Times refused to comply to their request for corrections involving the controversial “1619 Project.”

The “1619 Project” is made up of multiple stories and poems about racism and slavery. It suggests America’s “true founding” was when the first slaves arrived in 1619, and it “aims to reframe the country’s history.” The project has already been implemented in some public schools around the country.

The NYT refused to issue any corrections, it announced Thursday, despite a letter written by five historians concerned about the project’s “misleading” and “factual errors.” Some of the historians that signed onto the original letter expressed frustration and concern to the Daily Caller at the NYT’s unwillingness to issue corrections.

In the letter to the editor, the historians cited specific examples of what they believe are factual errors and misleading commentary currently published in the project. One notable issue is the project’s depiction of the American Revolution.

“On the American Revolution, pivotal to any account of our history, the project asserts that the founders declared the colonies’ independence of Britain ‘in order to ensure slavery would continue,’” the historians’ letter to the editor reads. “This is not true. If supportable, the allegation would be astounding — yet every statement offered by the project to validate it is false.”

The publication argued that “historical understanding is not fixed” and that equality has still not been achieved for “black Americans” today.

Fine, then. Ship any Negro dissatisfied with his lot here off to Liberia then, with the non-negotiable injunction that they will never be allowed to, umm, darken these shores again. It was established specifically for the purpose, after all:

The biggest question facing the leaders of the United States in the early 19th century was what to do about slavery. Should it continue or should the U.S. abolish it? Could the country really be home to free black people and enslaved black people at the same time? And if the U.S. ended slavery, would freed men and women remain in the country or go somewhere else?

Many white people at this time thought the answer to that last question was to send free black Americans to Africa through “colonization.” Starting in 1816, the American Colonization Society—which counted future presidents James Monroe and Andrew Jackson among its members—sought to create a colony in Africa for this purpose. This was 50 years before the U.S. would abolish slavery. Over the next three decades, the society secured land in West Africa and shipped people to the colony, which became the nation of Liberia in 1847.

And lest you think the Great Emancipator himself couldn’t possibly have been down with such a skirting-on-scoundrelish sidestepping of the moral issues involved, better think again:

In 1846 when Lincoln was serving in congress the debate pro and against slavery was getting more important. Lincoln searched for a rational view of slavery in a free American society. He shared Henry Clay’s view on the principle of colonization to Liberia and believed that in time Southern slave holders would be willing to manumit their slaves if they were going back to Africa. Lincoln believed that colonization would find support in the north as they would not have to compete with free white labor. But Lincoln understood that distance and the cost of transportation was a deterrent. He did not support deportation by force like many other colonists.

In April 1862 slavery was abolished in Washington DC and congress approved $100,000 for re colonizing the newly freed slaves. Shortly after the Second Confiscation Act was issued. It supported the re colonization of those African Americans willing to leave the U.S. to Liberia or other territories in Central America. Congress approved a colonization fund of $500,000 in addition to the $100,000 approved earlier.

Mismanagement, corruption and administrative hurdles made Lincoln’s colonization project implausible. Lincoln abandoned the idea of colonization sometime in 1864 because he realized that it was an impractical plan and that the country would benefit from them joining the Union forces. African Americans joining the ranks of the U.S. Army and Navy during the Civil War persuaded Lincoln that these men were willing to fight for their freedom and that of the Union if only given the chance. His colonization plan would have never worked as freedmen did not consider Africa their homeland, they were born and raised in America.

The ante-bellum canonization of Lincoln tends to sorta obscure what a pragmatist he actually was. Elsewhere, Roger Kimball does a deep dive into the real motivation behind the NYT’s bullshit 1619 Project, which may not be quite what you expected:

It was to console its core readership that The New York Times undertook The 1619 Project in a special flood-the-zone issue of its Sunday magazine in August and then in a snazzy, graphics-heavy series of features on its website. For two years, the Times had invested heavily in the vaudeville entertainment called “Trump–Russia.” The spectacular failure of its leading man, Special Counsel Robert Mueller, to deliver a happy ending to that fiasco underscored the essential futility of the entire enterprise.

This was something that Dean Baquet, Executive Editor of the Times, grasped instantly. Last summer, he huddled with his staff in a town-hall-style meeting—the proceedings of which were promptly leaked—and acknowledged a sad truth: “We built our newsroom to cover one story” (the now-debunked story that Donald Trump had “colluded” with Russia to steal the 2016 election). The story didn’t pan out. “Now we have to regroup,” Baquet told the assembled troops, “and shift resources and emphasis to take on a different story.” What story? Henceforth, or at least “for the next two years”—the remainder of Trump’s first term—the Times was going all in on “race, and other divisions.” Robert Mueller couldn’t get Trump. Maybe the Times could by writing about race in a “thoughtful,” i.e., obsessive and one-sided, way—“something,” Baquet added “we haven’t done in a large way in a long time.”

So there you have it. “That, to me,” Baquet concluded, “is the vision for coverage. You all are going to have to help us shape that vision. But I think that’s what we’re going to have to do for the rest of the next two years.” Et voilà, The 1619 Project.

The idea, propounded by The 1619 Project, that the American Revolution was fomented in order to protect slavery is simply ridiculous. On the contrary, “it is the northern states in 1776 that are the world’s leaders in the antislavery cause…The Revolution unleashed antislavery sentiments that led to the first abolition movements in the history of the world.” The 1619 Project pretends that the British were great crusaders in the campaign against slavery. But Wood points out, first, that the “British don’t get around to freeing the slaves in the West Indies until 1833,” and, second, that “if the Revolution hadn’t occurred,” they “might never have done so then, because all of the southern colonies would have been opposed. So supposing the Americans hadn’t broken away, there would have been a larger number of slaveholders in the greater British world who might have been able to prolong slavery longer than 1833.”

The truth is that in 1776, the American Founders, Southerners as much as Northerners, believed that slavery was on its way out. They were wrong about the timing of that, but the fact remains, as Wood notes, that the Constitution (Article I, Section 9) set an end date on the importation of slaves and that “most Americans were confident that the despicable transatlantic slave trade was definitely going to end in 1808.”

At least some Southerners saw the writing on the wall as late as 1861, too; despite its several protections and accomodations of the “peculiar institution,” the CSA’s own Constitution included a proscription on the foreign slave trade:

Article I Section 9(1)
The importation of negroes of the African race from any foreign country, other than the slaveholding States or Territories of the United States of America, is hereby forbidden; and Congress is required to pass such laws as shall effectually prevent the same.[14]

The CSA, rightly or wrongly, had to juggle the institution of slavery as it existed, the perceived property rights of those who owned slaves, and the issues of State’s Rights and Federalism with the coming end to slavery that was foreseen as inevitable by some, denied as impossible by others. In the end, it was a complex conflict whose weight couldn’t be brought into balance on any scales available at the time. Maybe the South just didn’t have enough time to get the thing done gradually and peaceably. Or maybe all the time in the world wouldn’t have sufficed. We’ll never know.

This we do know: far from the grotesque portrait of a slavery-dependent, uniquely-racist nightmare the lying scum of the NYT seeks to imprint on the minds of American schoolkids, America’s true distinction lies in how quickly in its history it came to grips with slavery—and how much blood, horror, and pain the young nation was willing to endure to be rid of it. You will also note that chattel slavery still thrives to this day in many countries, most of them Moslem states, an inconvenient truth that the despicable NYT swine and their wholly scurrilous 1619 Project will never, ever bring up, and hopes nobody else will mention. Indeed, I very much doubt that the overwhelming majority of the dimwitted subnormals contributing to the NYT’s dishonest attempt at smearing and humiliating an entire nation are even aware of it at all.

But it isn’t about slavery anyway, not really. Back to Kimball for the clumsily-concealed home truth:

For (1619 Project contributor) Hannah-Jones, what is wanted is an expression that simultaneously justifies the endless whining of black radicals about how victimized they are because of things that happened a few centuries ago while also stressing the perpetually renewable guilt (like the liver of Prometheus) of whites, all whites, those living today even more than those actually involved in the African slave trade in the seventeenth, eighteenth, or nineteenth centuries. For the Times, it fits in with what Power Line’s Paul Mirengoff called its “irresistible urge to delegitimize America.” That is the ultimate aim of The 1619 Project: to deliver another blow in the campaign to besmirch and diminish the political and moral achievement that is the United States of America. It is as despicable as it is mendacious.

It surely is. They really ought to be thanked for such diligent effort, and I mean properly.