Samuel Adams and the “1619 Project”

(Don Boudreaux)

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The thorough debunking of the New York Times’s fictional-masquerading-as-factual account of America’s founding, the “1619 Project,” began – and succeeded in the judgment of all persons capable of reasoning – long before my recent posts here on this ‘project.’ Nevertheless, my reporting my encounters with evidence contrary to this ‘project’ might be worth a few peppercorns.

On page 133 of David McCullough’s 2001 John Adams, readers learn that “[w]hen Samuel Adams and his wife were presented with a slave girl as a gift in 1765, they had immediately set her free.” (J.L. Bell reports that the historical record is unclear if the emancipation was, in fact, completed immediately. Bell further suggests that the girl, Surry, continued to live with the Adamses, but not as a slave. Bell seems to have no doubt that Sam Adams never acted as a slave ‘owner,’ and – beyond the formalities of paperwork and legal proceedings – quite correctly never believed himself to one.)

Although there’s some question of just when Sam Adams became committed to the cause of American independence, he obviously came to support this cause by early July 1776, as he signed the Declaration of Independence. The anti-slavery Sam Adams’s embrace of the cause of independence is, therefore, yet one more piece of evidence that’s terribly inconsistent with the assertion that the American Revolution was largely meant to protect in North America the institution of slavery.

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Later this afternoon I’m likely to enjoy a Samuel Adams lager!