Russell Roberts's Blog, page 143
May 10, 2022
More from Bernard Bailyn on the American Revolutionaries and Slavery
As a follow-up to this earlier post, I here add more material from the late Bernard Bailyn’s monumental 1967 study, The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution – material that casts yet further doubt on the 1619 Project’s thesis that the, or at least a, chief purpose of the American revolution was to protect the institution of slavery from a feared British abolition. This passage is on page 237:
While Boston merchants in 1764 were still content to speak in a matter-of-fact way of the economics of the slave trade, James Otis, following out the idea that “by the law of nature” all men are “free born” concluded that by “all men” was meant all human beings “white or black,” and he launched forthwith a brief but characteristically fierce attack upon the whole institution of slavery.
Does it follow that ’tis right to enslave a man because he is black? Will short curled hair like wool – instead of Christian hair, as ’tis called by those whose hearts are as hard as the nether millstone – help the argument? Can any logical inference in favor of slavery be drawn from a flat nose, a long or a short face? Nothing better can be said in favor of a trade that is the most shocking violation of the law of nature, has a direct tendency to diminish the idea of the inestimable value of liberty, and makes every dealer in it a tyrant…
So corrupting is the evil, he concluded, that “those who every day barter away other men’s liberty will soon care little for their own”….
James Otis, of course, was a leading voice in Boston for American independence from Great Britain. And as Bailyn argues, Otis certainly does seem to have been staunchly opposed to slavery.
…..
Here’s more from Bailyn; what follows is on page 241 (footnote deleted):
As the crisis deepened and Americans elaborated their love of liberty and their hatred of slavery, the problem posed by the bondage tolerated in their midst became more and more difficult to evade…. Some found at least a partial excuse in pointing out, with Jefferson, that repeated attempts by certain colonies to ban the slave trade or tax it out of existence had met resounding vetoes in England, so that the good of the colonies and the rights of human nature had been sacrificed to “the immediate advantages of a few African corsairs.”
And now to page 245 of Bailyn:
By July of 1776 much had already been done to extend the reign of liberty to the enslaved Negroes. In Massachusetts, efforts had been made as early as 1767 to abolish the slave trade, and in 1771 and 1774 the legislature voted conclusively to do so but was rebuffed by the governor’s veto. In the same year the Continental Congress pledged itself to discontinue the slave trade everywhere, while Rhode Island, acknowledging that “those who are desirous of enjoying all the advantages of liberty themselves should be willing to extend personal liberty to others,” ruled that slaves imported into the colony would thereafter automatically become free. Connecticut did the same; Delaware prohibited importation; and Pennsylvania taxed the trade out of existence.
…..
It’s impossible to believe that the same British government that 1619 Project apologists insist was intent on ending slavery in North America would have obstructed efforts by American colonists to end or restrict the slave trade. This fact alone – the fact that officials of the British government obstructed efforts by some of the American colonists to end or diminish the slave trade – is alone practically sufficient to destroy the main thesis of the 1619 Project.
…………
Because the slave trade isn’t identical to slavery, one can assert that the motivation to ban the slave trade reflected no opposition to slavery as such but, instead, reflected the venal protectionist motives of those who thought of themselves as slave ‘owners.’ If the importation of slaves is prohibited, the market value of enslaved people already imprisoned in America by their so-called “owners” increases.
It’s almost certainly the case that such protectionism motivated some slave ‘owners’ who had no wish to see an end to slavery nevertheless to support abolishing or restricting the slave trade. But because at least some (and likely nearly all) of the express arguments – such as those of James Otis quoted above – in opposition to the slave trade described slavery as a moral outrage, it’s difficult to believe that most vocal opponents of the slave trade wished to protect slavery. If you wish to protect and prolong slavery, using moral arguments to publicly condemn the slave trade is a dangerous tactic. It’s difficult to believe that many, if any, friends of slavery as an institution would have publicly expressed opposition to the slave trade in terms at all similar to those quoted above from James Otis.
At any rate, it’s plausible to suppose that sincere opponents of slavery as an institution understood in the 1760s and 1770s that ending the slave trade then stood more of a chance than ending slavery. With this reality in mind, opponents of slavery as an institution are likely to have begun their efforts to abolish that vile institution by first attacking the slave trade – and doing so, as Otis did, using language that unmistakably condemns not only the slave trade but slavery itself.
Bonus Quotation of the Day…
… is from page 228 of the late Wesleyan University economic historian Stanley Lebergott’s indispensable 1984 book, The Americans: An Economic Record:
[A]nnual deaths in the entire United States from air and water pollution a century later about equaled New Orleans’ yellow fever deaths in 1853-1854.
DBx: History done well provides valuable perspective. And few scholars ever did economic history as well as did Stanley Lebergott.
…..
Pictured above is New Orleans’s Odd Fellow’s Rest cemetery, where many of the victims of that yellow-fever epidemic are buried. How many times over the years I’ve driven past this cemetery I cannot say beyond “countless.” I didn’t appreciate as a child and young man just how fortunate I am to have been born when and in what country I was born.
Quotation of the Day…
… is from page 188 of the 2000 Liberty Fund edition of Frederic William Maitland’s profound 1875 dissertation at Trinity College, Cambridge, A Historical Sketch of Liberty and Equality:
To me it seems that if we start with the comparison suggested by such phrases as “body politic” or “social organism” we are not within sight of that sort of knowledge that every old woman in a village has and has long had of the human body. She knows truths about the span of life, about the growth of children, about their teething, about gray hairs, old age and death, the like of which we do not know, and so far as I can see are not going to know about the parallel social phenomena, if any such parallel phenomena there be. In effect she judges from time to time that some child is not in a normal condition, though she does not use the word “normal.” She sends for the doctor, or, may be, living in Devonshire, she sends for the seventh son of a seventh son. No matter what she does, no matter how absurd may be the remedies that she tries, she knows that normally a baby’s body is not covered with scarlet blotches. Have we brought, are we likely to bring our inductive political science up to this high level?
DBx: Indeed.
Much bad social science has been done by anthropomorphizing collectives. This bad social science, in turn, spawns bad – and sometimes even calamitous – public policies.
May 9, 2022
No Serious Person Accepts Protectionism’s Implications
In my latest column for AIER I trace out some implications of protectionism in order to reveal that protectionism – insofar as this policy is intended to enrich the people of a country – is “illogical stupidity, pure and simple.” (As a policy of enriching the politically influential few at the larger cost of the many, protectionism is brilliantly effective.) A slice:
But what if a clever protectionist answers “yes” to the question about requiring those who ‘win’ from increased access to steel produced in Alabama to compensate those who ‘lose?’ This protectionist should then be presented with a second hypothetical scenario and question: “Suppose an entrepreneur creates an innovation that enables a given amount of inputs used in American steel mills to produce 50 percent more output than was possible before the innovation. Do you, Mr. Protectionist, believe that this entrepreneur, as a condition of being permitted to implement her innovation, should first agree to join with her customers in compensating the steel workers who would lose jobs as a result of this innovation?”
Very few protectionists would endorse conditioning implementation of such an innovation on a requirement that the ‘winners’ compensate the ‘losers.’ But of course from the perspective of workers who lose jobs in steel mills, nothing economically distinguishes Americans gaining greater access to steel as a result of technological innovation from Americans gaining greater access to steel as a result of lower barriers to trade. Both developments ‘destroy’ some jobs in American steel mills.
Let us, however, imagine that the protectionist with whom you’re arguing fancies himself to possess an intellect singularly adroit and wily. Determined not to get trapped by what he believes to be your market-fundamentalist, neoliberal, and ideology-blinded legerdemain, the protectionist agrees that, yes, implementation of any such innovation ought to be conditioned on the ‘winners’ compensating the ‘losers.’
After pointing out to your protectionist adversary that abandoning a policy of what the Mercatus Center’s Adam Thierer calls “permissionless innovation” would inflict significant economic harm on ordinary people, you have a third question to put to the protectionist. It’s this: “Do you believe that consumers should be forcibly prevented from acting on changes in their tastes and preferences until and unless they first compensate the ‘losers’?”
Your protectionist adversary looks at you quizzically. Sympathetically understanding that the protectionist’s mind is really neither very adroit nor wily when it comes to questions of economics, you elaborate: “Whenever consumers’ tastes change, some jobs are destroyed. For example, about 25 years ago many Americans became enamored with the Atkins diet. They lost much of their taste for high-carb foods and intensified their preferences for foods high in protein. As a result, many brewers and bakers lost jobs while many vintners, butchers, and ranchers enjoyed higher incomes. Should government have prevented Americans from reducing their purchases of beer, pasta, and donuts until and unless these Americans, along with vintners, butchers, and ranchers, agreed to compensate brewers and bakers?”
Were your protectionist adversary to countenance such a use of government coercion, he would thereby expose himself as differing little from Stalin or Mao in his utter disdain for private spheres of action, combined with his utter faith in the godlike powers and authority of the state. But in reality the protectionist would surely avoid being so exposed. He would instead attempt to distinguish changes in consumer tastes and preferences from increased consumer access to imports.
But your knowledge of economics enables you to explain why each such attempted distinction fails. Although aware that the chances of your protectionist adversary admitting intellectual defeat range from slim to none, you nevertheless explain that because all jobs created in market economies ultimately depend upon choices freely made by consumers, all jobs lost in market economies are equally the result of choices freely made by consumers. Economically speaking, absolutely nothing distinguishes jobs lost to imports from jobs lost to innovation or to changes in consumers’ tastes.
A notable implication of this fact is that protectionism, at root, is an ideology opposed to consumers. It’s a doctrine that treats with contempt the desires of ordinary men and women peacefully to pursue prosperity and happiness as they so judge. Protectionism, consistently followed, strips each person of his or her freedom to make economic choices as it enslaves each person to existing, politically powerful producers. Under protectionism, the economy is a process not for satisfying maximum possible human wants but, instead, for subsidizing the performance of activities that are of value chiefly to the relatively few individuals who are subsidized to perform these activities and of no or little value to the vast majority of people who are compelled to pay these subsidies.
Some Covid Links
Some Americans refused to submit to these rituals, but their resistance only intensified solidarity among the faithful. The most zealous kept their masks on even after they were vaccinated, even when walking alone outdoors. The mask became their version of a MAGA hat or a fraternity brother’s ring; some have vowed to keep wearing theirs long after the pandemic. They’ve already called for permanent masking on airplanes, trains, and buses, and they’ll probably clamor for more school closures and lockdown measures during future flu seasons.
Facts alone will not be enough to change their minds. To undo the effects of the hazing, we need to ease their cognitive dissonance by showing that they’re not to blame for their decisions. The mental mistakes were not made by citizens who dutifully sacrificed for two years. They assumed that the Centers for Disease Control knew how to control disease and that scientists and public-health officials would provide sound scientific guidance about public health. Those were reasonable assumptions. They just turned out to be wrong.
…..
The Great Barrington scientists’ ideas about focused protection and natural immunity have been vindicated—unlike the counterclaims and unproven strategies promoted in the John Snow Memorandum—but these researchers were no match for their media-savvy opponents, as Stanford’s John Ioannidis recently concluded after analyzing the credentials of the two sides. By considering how often the scientists’ research had been cited in the scientific literature, he found that the signatories of the Great Barrington Declaration included just as many top-cited scientists as did the signatories of the John Snow Memorandum. But there were a few crucial differences: the Snow signatories had many more Twitter followers, and they received a lot more attention on Twitter than in the scientific community. They had the dubious distinction of scoring much higher on a scale called the Kardashian index, named after the celebrity Kim Kardashian, which measures the discrepancy between a scientist’s social-media footprint and the citation impact of the scientist’s research. Twitter enabled activist scientists to exert an outsize impact on the public debate over Covid strategies. The lockdowns and mask mandates came to be perceived as “the science,” parroted by the mainstream press and enforced by censors on social-media platforms.
…..
Those are the hard truths that Americans need to hear after two years of Covid hazing. It won’t be easy convincing them that they fell for a deception, but it can be done, as DeSantis demonstrated at a recent appearance in Florida when he urged a group of high school students on the podium to take off their masks. “We’ve got to stop with this Covid theater,” he said. “If you want to wear it, fine, but this is ridiculous.” As usual, the facts were distorted by the press, which pretended that by giving the students a choice, DeSantis was somehow guilty of “bullying”—as if these poor students hadn’t been bullied for two solid years into wearing masks that they didn’t need. Some students on the podium kept their masks on, looking like meek pledges during Hell Week, but a few were emboldened to uncover their faces and breathe fresh air. At least for the moment, they were free to wonder whether this ridiculous fraternity was worth staying in anymore.
Ian Williams reports that “China’s zero-Covid horror show is inspiring Taiwan to open up.” A slice:
China is a lonely exception, and Shanghai’s ordeal has been closely watched in Taiwan, where TV shows and newspapers have followed the traumatic stories of Taiwanese living in China’s largest city, barricaded in their homes and struggling to secure food and medical supplies amid a harsh and brutally enforced lockdown.
el gato malo decries the on-going Covid hysteria in Puerto Rico.
Caught in the froth of their moral indignation, the finger pointers never doubt that they hold the correct, “unselfish” world view. They don’t consider that the pandemic strategy they endorse, which requires everyone to dance in lockstep around a single threat, may cause downstream suffering to a large swath of the human family—like the estimated 50 million extra people plunged into extreme poverty by 2030. They dismiss the mental-health impact of social isolation and business closures as a “necessary sacrifice,” pooh-pooh the ethical arguments for bodily autonomy, and reduce the profound ramifications of canceling the human face to “just a piece of cloth.”
Robert Dingwall is correct: “Sweden’s WHO figures must radically change the terms of the Covid inquiry.” Here’s his conclusion:
Sweden shows that there was another path not taken, that could have brought this country through the pandemic in far better shape, socially and economically. The inquiry [in the U.K.] must not be diverted into the minutiae of arguments about whether we should have locked down a week or two weeks earlier. It must be free to examine the whole strategy – in particular, why robust social science evidence on managing emergencies, and its contribution to pandemic planning since the early 2000s, was abandoned so precipitately.
Public health weaponized empathy. There is no way young people could rebel since they believed it meant hurting grandma.
It was easier for the boomers. For them, rebellion meant no draft & not killing people with whom they had no personal beef. Empathy favored rebellion.
Olivia Thunder tweets: (HT Jay Bhattacharya)
On the Collapse of Prudence
“Whatever the state of sound judgment in our society before the pandemic, (it is clear) that the requirements of wise judgment have been egregiously flouted at every level of society since the pandemic erupted.”
Jay Bhattacharya, Sunetra Gupta, and Martin Kulldorff discuss their great document, the Great Barrington Declaration. Here’s a slice from the remarks of Prof. Gupta:
By October 2020, we had witnessed the huge damage Lockdowns had already caused in the Global South. This schedule of uncertainty was actually inverted by those who wished to protect themselves using lockdowns as a measure, those who had the luxury of being able to endure lockdown. On each of these three points, this was inverted. What we were most uncertain about–whether these measures worked–they treated as if absolutely settled. That there was no doubt whatsoever that these lockdowns would work to suppress infection, even though they didn’t even have a clear strategy of what that was. The zero COVID people acted as if there was absolutely full certainty that these measures would eradicate the disease, even though that was pretty unlikely.
Quotation of the Day…
… is from Abigail Adams’s letter of November 27th, 1775, to her husband, John Adams – a letter quoted on page 101 of David McCullough’s 2001 John Adams:
I am more and more convinced that Man is a dangerous creature, and that power whether vested in many or a few is ever grasping, and like the grave cries give, give.
May 8, 2022
Bernard Bailyn’s History and the “1619 Project”
Although I’m sure that more than one historian who devoted time to exposing the fallacies that infect the “1619 Project” mentioned the following passages from Bernard Bailyn’s monumental 1967 book, The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution, I offer these passages here at Café Hayek.
On page 232 Bailyn observes that
No one had set out to question the institution of chattel slavery, but by 1776 it had come under severe attack by writers following out the logic of Revolutionary thought.
It’s possible, of course, that the American revolutionaries adopted the language of liberty simply as a ruse to cover a despicable obsession with protecting slavery in North America from what they believed to be imminent abolition imposed by the British government. But these revolutionaries were intelligent men and women. Surely if their main goal was to protect slavery they would have couched their case for independence instead in language less at obvious odds with the holding of slaves. Surely the revolutionaries, were one of their chief goals the avoidance of abolition, would have realized what Bailyn above describes – namely, that the logic of Revolutionary thought, as these revolutionaries chose to express it, would sow additional, rather than kill looming, seeds of abolition in America.
I quote now from page 235 of Bailyn:
The identification between the cause of the colonies and the cause of the Negroes bound in chattel slavery – an identification built into the very language of politics – became inescapable.
It was not grasped by all at once, nor did it become effective evenly through the colonies. But gradually the contradiction between the proclaimed principles of freedom and the facts of life in America became generally recognized.
Yet even as the undeniable incompatibility between the slavery and the revolutionaries’ language of liberty grew more prominent and advertised, the revolutionaries do not seem to have trimmed their language of liberty. Many of them (especially from southern colonies) undoubtedly attempt to explain away the evident inconsistency, likely – and ironically – with legerdemain and fallacy-filled cunning comparable to the attempts by supporters of the 1619 Project to explain away its inconsistency with the historical record.
The revolutionaries’ embrace of bourgeois liberalism, although in many cases in terrible tension with their support of slavery, seems to have been genuine enough that they did not abandon it even as accusations of hypocrisy became more frequent and biting.
……..
Some other interesting facts reported by Bailyn include this one found on page 236 [bracket original to Bailyn]:
Few even of the more enlightened Virginians were willing to declare, as Jefferson did in the instructions he wrote for his colony’s delegation to the first Continental Congress, that “the rights of human nature [are] deeply wounded by this infamous practice” and that “the abolition of domestic slavery is the great object of desire in those colonies where it was unhappily introduced in their infant state.”
Of note in this quotation immediately above is not that few enlightened Virginians argued as Jefferson did; that’s hardly surprising. Instead what’s of note is that Jefferson argued as Jefferson did. Even more relevant is the fact that Jefferson’s words were part of his instructions to Virginia’s delegation to the first Continental Congress.
It’s easy – yet nevertheless valid – to point out Jefferson’s hypocrisy. What’s not easy is to reconcile these instructions of Jefferson to Virginia’s Continental Congress delegation with the assertion that a chief motive for the American Revolution was to preserve chattel slavery in North America.
……..
There are a few more passages from Bailyn’s book that are relevant in light of the absurd thesis of the 1619 Project. I’ll share these passages in a later post.
Offending a Defender of the Laughable “1619 Project”
Here’s a letter to a college student who has “become persuaded of the 1619 Project’s veracity”:
Mr. K__:
Thanks for sharing the tweet, with which you agree, from a “1619 Project” defender. This person, responding to this recent post of mine, thinks that John and Abigail Adams’s hostility to slavery does nothing to discredit the 1619 Project’s thesis that a major motive for the American revolution was the protection of slavery.
Of course, it’s true that the conclusion that the revolution was not meant to protect slavery does not logically follow from the fact that Adams and some other revolutionaries opposed slavery. Yet it’s equally true that the conclusion that the revolution was meant to protect slavery does not logically follow from the fact that some revolutionaries supported that vile institution.
The determining factors must be empirical realities. One such significant empirical reality was the subject of my blog post, namely, that among the revolutionaries who opposed slavery were John Adams and his influential wife.
Adams was not just any random revolutionary. He was a leader of – arguably, the single most fervent champion in Congress in 1775-1776 for – the cause of American independence. It was Adams who, with Richard Henry Lee, in May of 1776 proposed a resolution for the colonies to become self-governing. This resolution was quickly adopted unanimously by the Second Continental Congress. And it was Adams who alone drafted the radical Preamble to this Resolution – a document that David McCullough describes as having “put aside any possibility of reconciliation and all but declared the colonies immediately independent.”*
If the revolution was meant to protect slavery, it’s nearly impossible to explain why Adams and other anti-slavery New Englanders, such as Roger Sherman and Robert Treat Paine, along with anti-slavery revolutionaries from mid-Atlantic colonies, such as Pennsylvania’s Benjamin Rush, would have risked their lives and fortunes by signing the Declaration of Independence. Also nearly impossible to explain is the fervor for the revolutionary cause exhibited by men and women who opposed slavery yet, while not signers of the Declaration, played prominent roles in furthering the cause of independence – persons such as Abigail Adams, Samuel Adams, the Marquis de Lafayette, Thomas Paine, William Prescott, and Mercy Otis Warren.
Also relevant is participation in the revolutionary cause by notable persons who never held humans in bondage. Why would men such as Paul Revere, Henry Knox, John Paul Jones, and Nathan Hale have risked so much to protect an institution that was of no obvious benefit to them?
In stark contrast to the difficulty of explaining why persons opposed to slavery would have participated in a cause meant to protect that institution, it’s not at all difficult to explain why Americans who supported, or who did not oppose, slavery joined the revolutionary cause. This explanation is rooted in the reality that the benefits to Americans of independence from Britain were general rather than tied to the practice of chattel slavery. What these benefits were believed to be can be found in the writings, not only of slaveholders such as Jefferson, but of ardent opponents of slavery such as Adams and Thomas Paine.
A final thought: If the war of independence was indeed fought to maintain slavery in the United States, it’s surprising that some prominent victorious revolutionaries who cannot be confidently said to have been anti-slavery in 1776 became anti-slavery after their victory. Yet in 1787 Benjamin Franklin became president of the Philadelphia Society for the Relief of Free Negroes Unlawfully Held in Bondage – an abolitionist group formed by Quakers – while another Declaration signer, the Virginian George Wythe, who died in 1806, grew increasingly opposed to slavery and emancipated his slaves before he died. These actions, of course, don’t prove the claim that the revolution was not fought to protect slavery, but they certainly lend much credence to this claim.
There’s no denying that many American revolutionaries owned slaves. Nor can it be denied that this hypocrisy is a deep, ugly stain on American history. But this reality does not mean that a major purpose of the revolution was to perpetuate slavery. The evidence against the 1619 Project’s thesis is simply too overwhelming for that thesis to be treated as anything other than, as George Will describes it, “malicious” and “historically illiterate.” It is, at best, a jejune piece of woke propaganda that no serious thinker takes seriously. And so nor should you.
Sincerely,
Donald J. Boudreaux
Professor of Economics
and
Martha and Nelson Getchell Chair for the Study of Free Market Capitalism at the Mercatus Center
George Mason University
Fairfax, VA 22030
* David McCullough, John Adams (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2001), page 108.
Quotation of the Day…
… is from page 191 of F.A. Hayek’s 1939 University of Chicago monograph, “Freedom and the Economic System,” as it is reprinted as chapter nine of the 1997 collection, edited by Bruce Caldwell, Socialism and War:
More and more people are being driven by their indignation about the suppression of political and intellectual freedom in some countries to join the very forces which make the ultimate suppression of their own freedom inevitable. It would mean that many of the most active and sincere advocates of intellectual freedom are in effect its worst enemies, much more dangerous than its avowed opponents….
DBx: Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose.
…..
Hayek was born 123 years ago on this date.
May 7, 2022
Yet More Evidence Against the “1619 Project”
The New York Times’s “1619 Project” has been thoroughly, repeatedly, unambiguously, and fully debunked. This ‘Project’ is cheap and childish fiction masquerading as history. It now serves as an intellectual litmus test: Anyone who subscribes to, or apologies for, its thesis that the American revolutionaries’ purpose was to maintain slavery is someone who is either intellectually incompetent or intellectually dishonest. No other options are plausible.
Nevertheless, I offer here yet another piece of what is unnecessary but what is also nevertheless interesting – namely, evidence against the “1619 Project.” It’s a bit of evidence that I don’t recall seeing (although I perhaps missed some others’ presentation of it).
This evidence appears on pages 103 and 104 of David McCullough’s 2001 John Adams. I quote at length from McCullough’s telling of John Adams’s time in Philadelphia for the Continental Congresses. Adams, of course, was an early and uncompromising champion of American independence – a cause for which his wife, Abigail, was equally enthusiastic.
She [Abigail Adams] was particularly curious about the Virginians, wondering if, as slaveholders, they had the necessary commitment to the cause of freedom. “I have,” she wrote, “sometimes been ready to think that the passion for liberty cannot be equally strong in the breasts of those who have been accustomed to deprive their fellow creatures of theirs.” What she felt about those in Massachusetts who owned slaves, including her own father, she did not say, but she need not have – John knew her mind on the subject. Writing to him during the First Congress, she had been unmistakably clear: “I wish most sincerely there was not a slave in the province. It always seemed a most iniquitous scheme to me – [to] fight ourselves for what we are daily robbing and plundering from those who have as good a right to freedom as we have.”
It had been two weeks now since she had seen the British fleet sail out of Boston, and she viewed the approach of spring very differently than she had only a month before. Her world had been transformed. She was experiencing an uncommon “gaiety de coeur,” she wrote. “I think the sun shines brighter, the birds sing more melodiously.” She longed to hear word of independence declared.
The heartfelt opposition of Abigail and John Adams to slavery is alone enough to cast serious doubt on the “1619 Project.”
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