The 1619 Project isn’t mostly about helping Americans understand the role of slavery in our history. It’s mostly about convincing Americans that ‘America’ and ‘slavery’ are synonyms.

The project’s central purpose is not simply to educate Americans about the history of labor accounting from plantation to data visualization, or an account of the history of brutal sugar cultivation, but to give a specific narrative about what America is.

The project’s summary makes the aim quite clear: “[The 1619 Project] aims to reframe the country’s history, understanding 1619 as our true founding, and placing the consequences of slavery and the contributions of black Americans at the very center of the story we tell ourselves about who we are.”

Considered this way, the 1619 Project looks very different. It isn’t mostly about helping Americans understand the role played by plantation agriculture in American history. It’s mostly about convincing Americans that “America” and “slavery” are essentially synonyms.

It’s mostly about trying to tell readers they should feel sort of, kind of, at least a little bit bad about being American, because, didn’t you hear? As several articles say explicitly, America, in its basic DNA, is not a liberal democracy, constitutional republic, or federation. It’s a slave society.
No matter that historians mostly consider the 1619 date a red herring. Enslaved people were working in English Bermuda in 1616. Spanish colonies and forts in today’s Florida, Georgia, and South Carolina had enslaved Africans throughout the mid-to-late 1500s: in fact, a slave rebellion in 1526 helped end the Spanish attempt at settling South Carolina.

The 1619 Project’s narratives seem to miss a significant part of the legacy of slavery.

Furthermore, a serious accounting for slavery has to wrestle with the experience of Native Americans and Hawaiian islanders, and especially the status of their ancestral lands and sovereign rights. More broadly, to wrestle adequately with the painful historical reality of America’s “labor freedom,” we have to be able to talk about less-than-free Asian migrant workers in California and Hawaii, as well as the indenturehood of the Scots-Irish and subsequent Appalachian poverty.

Finally, it’s worth exploring the specialness of American slavery. The New York Times is an American publication, so it makes sense to explore the American experience. But a wider-angle lens can help us understand that experience.

Those early slaves in 1619 that The New York Times focuses on arrived on the San Juan Bautista. If that name doesn’t sound English, that’s because it isn’t. It was a Portuguese ship en route to Spanish Mexico. Off the coast of Mexico, it was attacked and captured by English pirates masquerading as Dutch. They sold their enslaved human cargo at Jamestown.

But when we explain the role played by slavery, we have to recognize that slavery is no more “native” to the American experience than, well, anything. We stole the first slaves from Portugal. Slavery struggled to “take off” in much of the South because managing a plantation is extremely technical and complicated, and many Americans were not good at it. It was an influx of experienced human traffickers, slave-torturers, and large-scale agribusiness experts from Haiti and other Caribbean colonies in the 1700s that gave much of the Deep South enough “expertise” in the abuse of humanity to develop a thriving slave economy.the history of slavery is not one of some evil creativity unique to Americans. We emulated models of slavery pioneered elsewhere. We “improved” on it, of course; the American zeal for “efficiency” drove escalating brutality (although Anglo cotton plantations never reached the perigee of inhumanity achieved by the Francophone sugar plantations of Haiti and Louisiana).

This story of slavery as something somehow “foreign” to many Americans will read as a bit much to many enthusiasts of the 1619 Project. If Americans were so unhappy with slavery, why didn’t they abolish it?

My answer is simple: we did. At the risk of historical absurdity, it must be noted that when Georgia was founded in 1732, slavery was banned, making it the first place in the Western hemisphere to ban slavery. But alas, the appeal of plantation wealth was too great, and by 1752 the King George II (the father of the George we rebelled against) had taken over Georgia as a royal colony, and instituted slavery.
Thus, in 1775, there was no free soil anywhere in the Western hemisphere. Slavery was a universal law.

But then something changed. Revolutionary agitation led to war in 1776, and by 1777, Vermont’s de facto secession from New York and New Hampshire created the first modern polity in the western hemisphere to forbid the keeping of slaves. In 1777, war with Britain was barely begun.

Vermont was hardly secure. But in their opening salvo to a watching world, Vermonters made clear what they thought America was about: liberty for all mankind. In 1780, still amidst the guns of war, Massachusetts’ constitution rendered enslavement legally unenforceable, and the judiciary soon abolished it.
Americans were early adopters of abolition. We were the first to establish formally abolitionist constitutions and states, the second to ban the trade in slaves, and middle-of-the-pack in achieving uniform abolition of slavery.

What Defines Us Isn’t Our Worst Moments

The American story is not a story of a country defined by slavery, but a country defined by trying to figure out what it means to live with liberty and self-government.