Historical illiteracy about slavery

 Legal Insurrection:

Washington Post columnist George Will understandably is not most Republicans’ cup of tea considering his abandonment of the party, which started well before his hatred for Donald Trump became a thing.

But he wrote a column last week that deliciously ripped apart the “1619 Project” and the New York Times’ amplification of it, in the process enraging “woke” leftists who didn’t appreciate the inconvenient truths he told about the project’s creator Nikole Hannah-Jones’ flagrant rewriting of history.

In it, Will examined the central component of Nikole Hannah-Jones’ deeply flawed argument: That the basis for the American Revolution was to preserve slavery. That claim and many others she made have been discredited by scholars and historians alike, but because the New York Times published it and because she received so many seemingly prestigious accolades from the usual corners (including a Pulitizer prize) as a result, the “hate America” contingent of the Democratic party latched on to it as “further proof” that America was “systemically racist” from the start.

Because this myth persists, and because tenets of it in concert with CRT are being taught as subject matter on college campuses and in some public school classrooms as part of a larger plan by so-called progressives to radically transform America into something it’s not, Will decided to tackle the claim as well:

[Claim:] The war was supposedly ignited by a November 1775 British offer of freedom to Blacks who fled slavery and joined British forces. Well.

That offer came after increasingly volcanic American reactions to various British provocations: After the 1765 Stamp Act. After the 1770 Boston Massacre. After the 1773 Boston Tea Party. After the 1774 Coercive Acts (including closure of Boston’s port) and other events of “The Long Year of Revolution” (the subtitle of Mary Beth Norton’s “1774”). And after, in 1775, the April 19 battles of Lexington and Concord, the June 17 battle of Bunker Hill and George Washington on July 3 assuming command of the Continental Army.

Writing history is not like doing physics. But event A cannot have caused event B if B began before A.

Will also referenced comments by Gordon S. Wood, who he described as “today’s foremost scholar of America’s Founding.” At a recent speaking engagement, Wood suggested that “the New York Times has the history completely backwards,” pointing out that when the war started, Britain “was not threatening to abolish slavery in its empire” and that colonists in the north were forming abolition movements in 1776....

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Will concluded his piece by noting that the New York Times’ claim that American exceptionalism stems in large part from slavery and racism proves that “the 1619 Project’s historical illiteracy is not innocent ignorance.” At its core, Will correctly concluded that the purpose behind the project was to “service … progressivism’s agenda,” not to correct any alleged historical inaccuracies.

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Slavery was an impediment to increased production and prosperity.   All the incentives for increased production were negative.  The slave rarely benefited from working harder to accomplish more.  It was not until slavery was eliminated that farming took off with the industrial revolution creating farm implements that vastly increased production.