The leftist corruption of history

Lipton Matthews:

Nikole-Hannah Jones, the famed conceptualizer of The New York Times’s 1619 Project, is one of the most protected and vaunted leftist personalities in America today. Such is the fascination with her venture that Oprah Winfrey plans to turn her ideas into a series of films and televised programs.

Telling the story of the American people is always a laudable goal. But we must counter attempts to indoctrinate citizens into believing that America is a distinctly callous nation.

The 1619 Project’s fabrications commit a horrific injustice on American history. The project perpetuates dangerous myths about the country’s founding, and by painting its roots as structurally racist and oppressive, it stokes racial tensions.

Yet despite the project’s myriad erroneous claims, they have been widely accepted and even celebrated. This must be countered. So, here are some of the most egregious myths this project foists on the country, along with corrections.

Myth 1: The Revolution Was Fought to Uphold Slavery

On the contrary, objections to slavery featured prominently in colonial America. James Otis, a leading critic of British rule, wrote, “The Colonists are by the law of nature free born, as indeed all men are, white or black.”

Quite early in colonial America, the congregation of Quakers in Germantown, Pennsylvania produced a 1688 document explicitly condemning slavery. By the end of the American Revolution, many Quakers were no longer slave owners. According to William M. Wiecek, an emeritus professor of history and law at Syracuse University, anti-slavery attitudes were prevalent throughout the Revolutionary Era:

Samuel Hopkins in the leading anti-slavery tract of the Revolution, ‘A Dialogue concerning the Slavery of Africans (1776),’ summed up the argument to date and anticipated later themes of American abolition when he equated the moral evils of slavery itself with that of the slave trade…and called on the Continental Congress to abolish slavery throughout the United States.

Furthermore, Historian Leslie Harris strongly rejects the assertion that the revolution was launched to defend slavery. Indeed, he argues it was the opposite:

Far from being fought to preserve slavery, the Revolutionary War became a primary disrupter of slavery in the North American Colonies. Lord Dunmore’s Proclamation, a British military strategy designed to unsettle the Southern Colonies by inviting enslaved people to flee to British lines, propelled hundreds of enslaved people off plantations and turned some Southerners to the patriot side. It also led most of the 13 Colonies to arm and employ free and enslaved black people, with the promise of freedom to those who served in their armies. While neither side fully kept its promises, thousands of enslaved people were freed as a result of these policies.

Myth 2: Slavery Made America Rich

Economist Deirdre McCloskey has convincingly explained that it isn’t slavery that explains modern American economic growth rates, but innovation. Modern research has also corroborated Southern intellectual Hinton Rowan Helper’s criticisms of slavery for halting progress by delaying economic development and industrialization in the South.
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There is much more.

Slavery was actually a regressive form of labor.  All the incentives to increase productivity were negative.  The real growth in the production of agriculture came after slavery as machinery was invented to make the process more productive. It was the absence of slavery in the Union areas which made the forces against the Confederacy better armed and stronger.

The 1619 project is just an attempt to slander the nation by the leftist.