Shoveling Out the Crap
Incredibly enough, the "1619 Project" is still being taught in the schools despite being debunked half a dozen times over. Obviously, there are some political forces keeping it in place. Just what forces, and who's behind them, and why, are open for speculation.
The basic idea is that the history of the US really began in 1619, when the first African slaves were imported into the New World colonies, and everything after that was based on slavery. So, the Revolution was fought to support slavery, the westward expansion was meant to extend slavery, and somehow the Civil War was meant to continue slavery. What's more, the laws and customs established to maintain slavery have continued to the present day in support of White Supremacy. In other words, the whole history of America is all about the oppression of Blacks by Whites. The original book, "The 1619 Project", is a collection of essays, poems, and short stories -- not actual historical research.
What real historians, and archeologists, have found is considerably different.
First off, slavery was a world-wide phenomenon since most ancient times. There was no racism about it -- Africans enslaved Africans, Asians enslaved Asians, Native Americans enslaved other Native Americans, and Europeans enslaved Europeans -- until about 4000 years ago, when Ancient Egyptians mastered the casting of bronze into weapons as well as tools, and were able to explore into the depths of Africa. There they met with local chieftains, who were quite willing to sell prisoners of war to Egyptian slave-traders. Thus began the Arab African slave-trade, which continues to this day.
Slavery in the Americas began 18,000 years ago, a few centuries after the first humans -- the Clovis Point people -- settled in. After increasing their numbers to the point of having different clans and different tribes, they began fighting small wars with each other. The losers of those wars were either killed, driven away, or enslaved by the winners, and the slaves were often traded between the tribes. As the Ice Age glaciers retreated, more settlers came from across the Pacific and added to the wars and trade. The pre-Colombus Indians had extensive trade routes which ran from Peru, at least, north up to Alaska and across the Bering Straits into Asia, and then beyond -- which is how traces of nicotine and cocaine came to be found in ancient Egyptian mummies, and, later, how an Algonquin woman wound up in the court of Genghis Khan.
The first African slaves arrived in the NewWorld in 1502, imported by the Conquistadors who found that the local Native American tribes didn't survive very well in captivity. In 1510 a Spanish Jesuit visited the Spanish colonies in central and South America, and was so appalled by the treatment of the natives that he went home to publish essays and pamphlets about it, which were later collectively called "The Black Legend" although they make little mention of Black slaves. Some of those slaves were occasionally traded to the Spanish city of St. Augustine in Florida, a trade port founded in 1565, but not in great numbers.
The first slaves brought in any numbers to North America were White -- "indentured servants", whose indenture could be extended according to circumstances-- beginning in 1607 with the founding of Jamestown. Irish prisoners of war were sold as slaves in the West Indies from 1625 until the early 19th century.
The earliest recorded opposition to slavery in America came from Roger Williams, who founded the colony of Rhode Island in 1636. He bought the land outright from the local Narragansett Indian tribes and based his settlement on the principles of complete religious tolerance, separation of church and state, equality of the races, illegality of slavery, and political democracy. This attracted large numbers of political and religious dissidents who soon made the colony flourish. Rhode Island's success inspired William Penn to found the colony of Pennsylvania on similar principles of religious toleration, which attracted Quaker, Lutheran, and especially Mennonite settlers. These immigrants believed in individualism, simplicity, hard work and prayer, the Golden Rule and toleration. In 1688 they formally declared that all races were essentially equal and that slavery was un-Christian. Their agreement with the settlers of Rhode Island formed the nucleus of the American abolitionist movement, which spread rapidly from there. Quakers brought the concept to England, and in 1787 MP William Wilberforce set up the Committee for the Abolition of the Slave Trade. Thus the concept of opposition to slavery itself began in America and spread to Britain, which took action against slavery all around the world.
As abolitionism spread, slave-holders developed racism as a holding action. After all, if the Declaration of Independence declared that "all men are created equal", then the only excuse for keeping slaves had to be that people who looked different and came from "uncivilized" country had to be something less than proper "men". This concept was already popular in Asia and the Arab countries, where it still persists to this day.
The presence of "civilized" Black freedmen in the American colonies tended to put the lie to that concept,, so slave-holding states tried to present barriers to the freeing of slaves and therefore the creation of troublesome freedmen. This did not sit well with those religious groups who held that Africans were the descendants of Adam and Eve, just like everyone else, and were therefore equal to anyone else.
On My 11, 1769 Thomas Jefferson joined the Virginia House of Burgesses. By custom, first-year members weren't allowed to propose legislation, so Jefferson had a friend propose for him a bill that would have allowed a slave-owner to free his slaves at his own discretion. Older burgesses denounced the author of this bill as an "Anti-christian, Anarchist, and possibly even a Republican" -- because the colony's charter included a requirement that Virginia buy slaves only from British slave-traders. Nonetheless, the Burgesses did propose a bill demanding equal standing for the American colonies in the British Parliament. Five days later, the royal governor dissolved the House of Burgesses. The members reconvened in a tavern and passed the resolution anyway. This is considered the first step in the American Revolution.
Through the rest of the 18th century and the first half of the 19th century, opposition to slavery grew in America, culminating in the Civil War and the Emancipation Proclamation. Meanwhile Britain, in its shameless imperialism, suppressed the African slave-trade in the rest of the world. Racism as a cultural artifact continued long after slavery had been (mostly) abolished, but in the Americas and western Europe it steadily eroded through the 19th and 20th centuries. During World War Two the allies got to see the exceptional performance of Black, Asian-American, Latino and Native American troops; that, combined with the racism and revealed atrocities of the Nazis, put "White Supremacy" in bad odor in the United States. By the 1990s "White Supremacy" was dying out, and various organizations that had made their fame -- and income -- on battling it were in danger of dying out themselves.
That was when various well-to-do Marxist intellectuals began fanning the flames of racism, claiming to find it in even harmless circumstances, inflating incidents of real racism wherever they could be found, in order to keep the specter of "White Supremacy" alive -- and themselves relevant, and well paid. Note the revelations about Black Lives Matter Inc.'s wealth and adventures in real-estate. This is where "The 1619 Project" came from, and why it's still defended by those who profit from it.
In fact it was not slavery but opposition to slavery which began in America and spread to the rest of the world from there. Both America and Britain paid a high cost -- in lost trade, in the cost of hunting slave-ships, in ruined land and lives -- to put an end to slavery. No other country has paid such a price for that cause. We have no reason to keep paying for the sins of long-dead ancestors.
--Leslie <;)))><
