Nikole Hannah-Jones gets American history backwards.
Nikole Hannah-Jones gets American history backwards.
I n the latest issue of National Review, we take a deeper look at The New York Times Magazine 1619 Project and the history of American slavery. An additional word is in order on how the book version of the 1619 Project (released in November 2021) digs in on the most controversial claim by its lead author, Nikole Hannah-Jones.
To recap ground that will be familiar to readers who have followed the 1619 Project and its issues with the truth: Hannah-Jones now-infamously claimed of the American Revolution that “one of the primary reasons the colonists decided to declare their independence from Britain was because they wanted to protect the institution of slavery.” Hannah-Jones, who is not a historian, wrote this despite being warned in advance by the historian who reviewed the essay that it was insupportable. She has dug in ever since, even after the Times had to massage the language of that sentence with a “clarification” that it dared not call a correction. Why, other than being personally disinclined to give an inch to good-faith criticism, has Hannah-Jones remained unshakably devoted to indicting the American Revolution and the founding principles set forth in the Declaration of Independence? Because attacking the American Founding is central to her narrative aims.
If you expected the book version to present a more thoughtful approach, think again. Relying on left-wing University of South Carolina history professor Woody Holton, Hannah-Jones now frames the influence of the November 1775 Dunmore Proclamation — by which Lord Dunmore, the royal governor of Virginia, sought to free Virginia slaves and incite them against rebellious colonists — in this way:
Dunmore’s proclamation infuriated white Virginians, making revolutionaries out of them. “All over Virginia, observers noted, the governor’s freedom offer turned neutrals and even loyalists into patriots,” writes the historian Woody Holton in Forced Founders . . .
At first, founders such as Jefferson, Washington, John Hancock, and John Adams had constituted “restorers and not reformers,” Holton told me. “There is a huge difference between being angry and joining a protest and wanting to declare independence. Two events in 1775 turn the rebellion into a revolution. For men like John Adams, it was the battles of Lexington and Concord. For men like Washington, Jefferson, and Madison, the Dunmore Proclamation ignited the turn to independence.”
Now, wars are rarely caused overnight by a single event, and revolutions and civil wars in particular usually follow a long train of radicalizing events that push people further onto one side or the other. That includes events that happen well after the war is under way, as the combatants do things that draw more neutrals off the sidelines, sway people to switch sides, or turn lukewarm rebels into revolutionaries. If you start by asking how you might scrounge up some support for this event as a cause, rather than starting with the outcome and asking what events were the main drivers of the Revolution and the Declaration, there are all sorts of events that you could identify as pushing some people further down the path to war and independence. The Dunmore Proclamation was one of those: It was deeply unpopular in Virginia, which undoubtedly helped radicalize more Virginians and more southerners for independence.
But that is a far cry from being a primary cause of the Revolution or independence, especially given that it was a wartime measure that nobody had contemplated before the war began. Britain was in no way an abolitionist power in 1775; slavery was legal in all its colonies until 1833, and Caribbean slavery was the most profitable corner of the emerging British Empire. The leading abolitionist power in the world in 1775 was . . . nobody, because nobody thought in those terms before the American Revolution. American antislavery activists — passing bans on slavery in the 1777 Vermont constitution and in legislation in Pennsylvania in 1780 — essentially invented abolitionism as a political force.
As detailed by Tom Mackaman of the World Socialist Website, which has done yeoman work debunking the 1619 Project, Professor Holton fared badly in attempting to defend his thesis about the centrality of the Dunmore Proclamation in an October 2021 debate with Brown University professor Gordon Wood, the nation’s preeminent living scholar of the American Revolution. A sampling:
[Holton] began by conceding to Wood that New England was already in a state of revolution well before the Dunmore Proclamation. Then he readily allowed that the Revolution was set in motion after the issuance of the Coercive Acts in 1774 . . .
Holton then tried to move his claim further south, to the most important colony, Virginia. That is where the Dunmore Proclamation had its real effect, he said, because it so enraged slave owners. Wood did not deny that Lord Dunmore angered slave owners, but he pointed out that imperial authority had already begun to disintegrate in 1774, that Dunmore issued his proclamation from a British vessel in the Chesapeake, where he had been forced to flee, and that Virginia was the colony most united behind the revolution and with the fewest loyalists.
In response, Holton retreated still further south, claiming that the real bulwark for slavery in the colonies was in Georgia and South Carolina . . .
Nobody thinks that Dunmore was agitating against slavery before Virginia erupted in open rebellion against his authority and that of the British Crown he represented. His action was a result, not a cause, of the Revolution.
The backwards chronology becomes particularly obvious when you consider how Holton and Hannah-Jones frame the theory of the Dunmore Proclamation as central to the Revolution: “For men like Washington, Jefferson, and Madison, the Dunmore Proclamation ignited the turn to independence.”
Now, there is no such thing as “men like Washington” — there was only one George Washington, and there was nobody in the colonies like him. But let’s look again at Washington’s timeline. The Dunmore Proclamation was issued in November 1775. Did that turn George Washington into a revolutionary? On July 3, 1775, in Cambridge Massachusetts, Washington assumed command of the Continental Army. He was immediately employed in besieging the British troops occupying Boston, two weeks after the Battle of Bunker Hill.
In other words, four months before the Dunmore Proclamation, George Washington was not merely considering joining a war against Britain; he was already its commander in chief. This was, as Washington well knew, treason against the Crown, for which he could and likely would have been hanged. By October 1775, Washington was signing off on an American invasion of Quebec. For the Dunmore Proclamation to have turned Washington into a revolutionary, he would have needed a time machine.
Moreover, Washington was not alone in his journey from Virginia to Massachusetts. By the summer 1775, companies of Virginia riflemen were arriving in camp to join the army, along with those from elsewhere in the colonies. Daniel Morgan’s company of backwoodsmen marched 600 miles in three weeks, 30 miles a day in the blazing summer heat, to join up. They knew nothing of the Dunmore Proclamation, which was months in the future. Morgan’s men were authorized by Virginia’s leaders, who had voted in June 1775 to send two companies north to Boston. He would end up marching all the way to the gates of Quebec.
Virginia’s legislators had been building to that step for months. In March 1775, the Second Virginia Convention met in Richmond — away from the state capital in Williamsburg, where Dunmore sat, to avoid royal scrutiny and pressure. The convention was a who’s who of the leading men of Virginia; Washington was in the room, as was Thomas Jefferson. On its fourth day, March 23, Patrick Henry rose in St. John’s Church to speak on the crucial question: Would Virginia raise a militia against royal authority?
Henry’s speech was not transcribed, and was only reconstructed decades later with a certain amount of hindsight on the part of the attendees, although everyone present remembered his immortal closing line. Henry damned the king as a tyrant, and, as the reconstructed text suggests, argued that war was already upon the colonists:
Are fleets and armies necessary to a work of love and reconciliation? Have we shown ourselves so unwilling to be reconciled, that force must be called in to win back our love? Let us not deceive ourselves, sir. These are the implements of war and subjugation; the last arguments to which kings resort. I ask, gentlemen, sir, what means this martial array, if its purpose be not to force us to submission? Can gentlemen assign any other possible motive for it? Has Great Britain any enemy, in this quarter of the world, to call for all this accumulation of navies and armies? No, sir, she has none. They are meant for us; they can be meant for no other. They are sent over to bind and rivet upon us those chains which the British ministry have been so long forging . . .
If we were base enough to desire it, it is now too late to retire from the contest. There is no retreat but in submission and slavery! Our chains are forged! Their clanking may be heard on the plains of Boston! The war is inevitable and let it come! I repeat it, sir, let it come.
It is in vain, sir, to extenuate the matter. Gentlemen may cry, Peace, Peace but there is no peace. The war is actually begun! The next gale that sweeps from the north will bring to our ears the clash of resounding arms! Our brethren are already in the field! Why stand we here idle? What is it that gentlemen wish? What would they have? Is life so dear, or peace so sweet, as to be purchased at the price of chains and slavery? Forbid it, Almighty God! I know not what course others may take; but as for me, give me liberty or give me death!
Henry’s resolution to raise a militia passed, with the support of Washington and Jefferson, among others. His militia would drive Dunmore out of the capital within months, triggering Dunmore’s retaliatory proclamation — a measure that Dunmore had threatened if he was driven from Williamsburg, but only if royal authority was overthrown.
The Dunmore Proclamation may well have brought some Virginia planters off the fence, especially those who were not that engaged in the politics of the Revolution until then. But leaders of the Revolution, such as Washington and Jefferson, had already committed themselves beyond the point of no return. (James Madison was 23 years old, so not a leader at that stage, but already serving with his father on a revolutionary Committee of Safety). Thorough histories can detail many other steps they took along that path, ranging from Britain’s denial of land in the Ohio territory to Washington and other French and Indian War veterans to the 1774 Fairfax Resolves drafted by Washington and George Mason — but even a simple understanding of the timeline of military action is sufficient to illustrate the inversion of cause and effect.
Hannah-Jones has acted throughout this controversy more like a political-opposition researcher than like a historian. Her approach to the Revolution is entirely bereft of empathy or context. She cannot put herself in the shoes of the men who made it in order to understand what drove them. Instead, she consistently dismisses any evidence of their actions or motivations that would not fit in a 30-second attack ad by their enemies. But even by that standard, we can safely conclude that George Washington did not have a time machine in July 1775 when he drew his sword before the assembled citizen-soldiers in Cambridge and pledged himself to what he called “our Cause.”