1619 VS 1776

 The 1619 Project was launched by professor Nicole Hannah-Jones in 2019 to commemorate the 400th anniversary of slaves landing on this continent at Jamestown Virginia. It was strongly promoted by the New York Times and won the Pulitzer Prize for commentary in 2020. Like everything else the left, and satan, the father of all lies promotes, it is based on a lie. It's thesis is that the United States was founded in 1619 when the first slaves were brought to America. The only problem with this view of things is that Jamestown was an English colony. The United States wasn't created until July 4th 1776 when we declared our independence from England. According to the 1619 Project the only reason that we rebelled against England was to protect slavery from being abolished. Hannah-Jones claims everything that is wrong with America is tied to our original sin of slavery. From segregation to traffic jams. I am not joking. She believes traffic jams are racist. Unfortunately her thesis is being taught in some American secondary schools as well as in higher education. In her view racism is not just a part of the American experience. It is the American experience. The following are three of the 1619 Project claims. 

Nicole Hannah-Jones

1. PRESERVING SLAVERY WAS THE REAL CAUSE OF THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION: The founders, if asked why they rebelled, would have given you a long list of reasons. One would be taxation without representation. Whenever the English levied a tax on it's American colony there were no American colonists sitting in the English parliament with the ability to cast a vote for or against a new tax. We had no representatives able to even debate the subject in Parliament. England felt that America should help pay for the debts incurred by England while fighting the French and Indian War, or the Seven Years War as it was also called. The Colonists had helped England fight this war but they felt that they had more than pulled their weight. They provided men and material to help fight it along with many American lives. The military actions of George Washington had actually started the war. England levied a series of unpopular taxes from 1763, when the Treaty of Paris was signed ending the war until the onset of the American Revolution in 1775. Eventually the tax on tea would be the straw that broke the camels back. This tax would lead to the Boston Tea Party where a mob of patriots dressed like Indians threw a shipload of English  tea into Boston Harbor. In retaliation Parliament passed what came to called the Intolerable Acts designed to punish Boston and the Massachusetts colony. Their harbor was closed to trade. This harsh treatment of Boston and Massachusetts helped to unite the colonies and would eventually lead to our fight for independence. Another reason that the founders would have given to justify the American Revolution, which is also tied to taxation without representation is the English mercantile system. As a colony we were only allowed to have legal trade with those nations that England approved of. This led to an American illegal trade system, or smuggling with countries England did not like. We were not allowed to choose our own enemies or trading partners. If England went to war with France or Spain for example, we would required to support England's war effort whether we wanted to or not. England was what is known as a have not nation. Japan would fall into the same category. Both are island nations that have few natural resources. England developed a strong navy and army so they could conquer or colonize other areas of the world such as North America, India and Africa for example. They in turn would use the natural resources and wealth from these areas to sustain their nation and empire. This is the reason that Japan built a strong navy and army in the early 20th century and attacked Pearl Harbor. They would need the oil, rubber and natural resources of the conquered areas of Malaysia, Korea, the Phillipines, China, Vietnam, and islands in the South Pacific to support their war effort. There were other reasons but these are primarily the main reasons that we rebelled against England.

The founders had no fear of England ending slavery in the colonies. Britain did not outlaw the foreign slave trade until 1807 which was only two years before the United States ended it in 1809. Slavery was not outlawed in their colonies until 1833. All thirteen American colonies had legal slavery in 1776 but by the time England abolished slavery in 1833 most Northern states had also abolished slavery. There is evidence to make a strong case that many of the founders considered slavery to be a dying institution. Abolitionists like John Adams, Benjamin Franklin, Dr. Benjamin Rush and others only compromised with the slaveholders in the Southern colonies in order to form a new nation. It would take a United effort to defeat England and it would take the help of all the colonies. The left doesn't have a problem with the U.S. allying itself with the mass murderer Stalin to win WW2 but it has a problem with our compromise with slavery in order to secure our independence. There were even Southerners like Thomas Jefferson who would be considered gradual abolitionists. Jefferson copied John Locke word for word from his Second Treatise of Government that was written in 1690 when he wrote the preamble to the Declaration of Independence. In the preamble Jefferson changed one word, however. Locke wrote We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and Property. Locke did not include chattel slaves when he said all men are created equal. Slaves were considered property when Locke wrote these words. Jefferson, on the other hand was including slaves when he said all men are equal. Proof of this is the fact that he changed life, liberty, and property to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. Yes, Jefferson was a slaveowner but he was able to envision a future society without slavery. He was looking at it pragmatically because he knew that it wouldn't be in his lifetime. He was also a racist by the standards of today. His description of black people in his Notes On The State Of Virginia were used by a later generation of Democrats to justify slavery and segregation. Jefferson was fearful that slavery might be the issue, as Lincoln feared that would tear this nation apart. In a letter to John Holmes discussing the Missouri Compromise in 1820 Jefferson described slavery this way. "But, as it is, we have the wolf by the ear, and we can neither hold him, nor safely let him go. Justice is in one scale, and self-preservation in the other".

More evidence that Jefferson was able to see the evil of slavery is his deleted passage from the original draft of the Declaration of Independence. He wrote, "He [King George] has waged cruel war against human nature itself, violating its most sacred rights of life and liberty in the persons of a distant people who never offended him, captivating & carrying them into slavery in another hemisphere or to incur miserable death in their transportation thither. This piratical warfare, the opprobrium of infidel powers, is the warfare of the Christian King of Great Britain. Determined to keep open a market where Men should be bought & sold, he has prostituted his negative for suppressing every legislative attempt to prohibit or restrain this execrable commerce. And that this assemblage of horrors might want no fact of distinguished die, he is now exciting those very people to rise in arms among us, and to purchase that liberty of which he has deprived them, by murdering the people on whom he has obtruded them: thus paying off former crimes committed again the Liberties of one people, with crimes which he urges them to commit against the lives of another". These lines were deleted by others on the Declaration committee because they were afraid that it would cause a problem with Southern slaveholders possibly endangering the coalition of colonies united against England. George Washington, who was a Southern slaveholder, was greatly influenced by his young French abolitionist friend the Marquis de Lafayette. Washington would free his slaves upon his death and he made arrangements in his will to free his wife Martha's slaves upon her death. 

 After the Revolution was won America's first constitution was called the Articles of Confederation. Our first legislature voted to create the Northwest territory in 1787 from the land which was ceded to us from England as a result of the Treaty of Paris ending the Revolutionary War. This territory would eventually become the states of Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Michigan, Wisconsin and the northeastern part of Minnesota. Congress voted to ban slavery in the new territory. During the Constitutional Convention, which would eventually create the U.S. Constitution, a compromise was reached called the Three-FifthsCompromise. (Article I, Section 2, of the U.S. Constitution of 1787) declared that for purposes of representation in Congress, enslaved blacks in a state would be counted as three-fifths of the number of white inhabitants of that state. This has been misinterpreted by many, especially people on the left, as racist clause. To be honest I misinterpreted it myself for years because that is what I was taught in school. I thought that the Founding Fathers were saying that slaves were not equal to whites and that slaves were only considered to be three-fifths of a human being. Actually, this was an attempt by the  Founding Fathers who were opposed to slavery to limit the power of the slave states in Congress. The number of representatives in the House of Representatives was based on the population of a state. The slave states would have been even more powerful if they had been able to count their slaves the same as the free population. More evidence that the Founders looked at slavery as a dying institution was the fact that they put a clause in the Constitution banning the slave trade twenty years from it's ratification.  Article 1, Section 9, Clause 1 says The Migration or Importation of such Persons as any of the States now existing shall think proper to admit, shall not be prohibited by the Congress prior to the Year one thousand eight hundred and eight, but a Tax or duty may be imposed on such Importation, not exceeding ten dollars for each Person. Congress honored their promise and passed an act banning the international slave trade in 1808. 

 The debate about whether or not this country was based on slavery or liberty is not new. White abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison called the the Constitution a "covenant with death" and "an agreement with Hell," because the Founding Fathers compromised with the evil of slavery in order to form a new nation. Former escaped slave, abolitionist and author Frederick Douglass disagreed with Garrison and would have disagreed with Hannah-Jones. He did not look at the Constitution as a pro-slavery compact. Douglass was well aware of racism in this country but he called the Constitution a "glorious liberty document" He believed that both the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution stated powerful principles of freedom that we simply needed to live up to. Habeas Corpus, the due process of law, the right to keep and bear arms. The right to a speedy trial by a jury of your peers, the right not to incriminate yourself, the right of free speech and religion. In his view if we lived up to these principles slavery could not stand and he repeatedly stressed this point during his life. Douglass was a classical liberal who believed in individual rights and economic freedom. He even extended these rights to include women. Douglass believed in self ownership which is what this country was founded on. All of the great civil rights leaders like Harriet Tubman, Ida Wells, Booker T. Washington and Martin Luther King agreed with Douglass. They knew that the Constitution was a glorious liberty document that America just needed to live up to. These were the words of Martin Luther King from his "I Have A Dream Speech". "In a sense we've come to our nation's capital to cash a check. When the architects of our republic wrote the magnificent words of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence, they were signing a promissory note to which every American was to fall heir. This note was a promise that all men - yes, black men as well as white men - would be guaranteed the unalienable rights of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness...America has given the Negro people a bad check, a check which has come back marked 'insufficient funds'. 

William Lloyd Garrison

 Another opponents of  the idea that all men were created equal was George Fitzhugh who argued in his 1854 book Sociology For The South Or The Failure Of Free Society defended slavery by repudiating the idea that America was founded on the principles of liberty for everyone. Ironically Fitzhugh, a Democrat, was defending the institution of slavery by saying the same thing Hannah-Jones and the 1619 Project is saying. Fitzhugh would even argue that slavery was a positive good. Confederate Vice President, and Democrat Alexander Stephens on the other hand  knew that the Founders included the slave when they said all men were created equal and endowed by their creator with unalienable rights. The right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. The goal of the new Confederate government was change all that and insure the perpetual enslavement of black people. He said the following in his Cornerstone speech on March 21, 1861. "But not to be tedious in enumerating the numerous changes for the better, allow me to allude to one other though last, not least. The new constitution has put at rest, forever, all the agitating questions relating to our peculiar institution African slavery as it exists amongst us the proper status of the negro in our form of civilization. This was the immediate cause of the late rupture and present revolution. Jefferson in his forecast, had anticipated this, as the "rock upon which the old Union would split." He was right. What was conjecture with him, is now a realized fact. But whether he fully comprehended the great truth upon which that rock stood and stands, may be doubted. The prevailing ideas entertained by him and most of the leading statesmen at the time of the formation of the old constitution, were that the enslavement of the African was in violation of the laws of nature; that it was wrong in principle, socially, morally, and politically. It was an evil they knew not well how to deal with, but the general opinion of the men of that day was that, somehow or other in the order of Providence, the institution would be evanescent and pass away. This idea, though not incorporated in the constitution, was the prevailing idea at that time. The constitution, it is true, secured every essential guarantee to the institution while it should last, and hence no argument can be justly urged against the constitutional guarantees thus secured, because of the common sentiment of the day. Those ideas, however, were fundamentally wrong. They rested upon the assumption of the equality of races. This was an error. It was a sandy foundation, and the government built upon it fell when the "storm came and the wind blew."  Stephens also argued that the new Confederate government was based upon “the great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man.”

 By the time the Democrat party was created by Andrew Jackson in the 1820's certain changes had already occurred that made slavery much more profitable and more deeply intrenched in American society. In 1794 American inventor Eli Whitney patented the cotton gin. This greatly lowered the cost of cotton production. President Thomas Jefferson added 828,000 square miles to the United States with the Louisiana Purchase in 1803. The future slave states of Louisiana, Missouri, Arkansas, and Texas would be formed from this territory. Andrew Jackson conquered the Creek Indians and added more territory to the United States during the War of 1812. The deep South states of Alabama and Mississippi would be formed from this territory. In 1819 Jackson would conquer Florida which added another slave state. This territory opened up a vast amount of land suitable for growing cotton. Slavery became very profitable. The Democrat party became the slaveocracy's main advocate and defender. The Mexican War would secure Texas in the Union along with some, or all of the U.S. states of Arizona, California, Colorado, Nevada, New Mexico, Utah, and Wyoming. The Civil War would eventually happen because the Democrat party wanted to expand slavery into these new territories and the Republican party opposed the expansion of slavery. After slavery made so many Democrats wealthy the "peculiar institution" was no longer considered to be dying. The Democrats were determined to preserve it. Many even tried to argue that blacks were not human or that they had no soul. Only a human that has a soul can be endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights. Buckner Harrison Payne, born in 1799 and died in 1889 was a so-called man of the cloth who was a pamphleteer using the pseudonym of Ariel. Unfortunately Payne was from Nashville. He wrote a racist pamphlet called Ariel or the Ethnological Origin of the Negro in 1867. The following is from that book. The Negro: What is His Ethnological Status? Is He the Progeny of Ham? ...Descendant of Adam and Eve? Has He a Soul? ...is He a Beast in God's Nomenclature? ...His Status as Fixed by God in Creation? ...His Relation to White Race? Payne believed that Blacks were not descended from Ham and therefore were not from Adam and Eve. In his view Blacks were descended from animals and had no soul. This created a stir even among White supremacists who believed in the curse of Ham. He was falsely accused of murder in 1868 and would be committed to an asylum in Davidson County in 1879. Payne died indigent in 1899 and was buried at Mt. Olivet cemetery in a cheap coffin. His pre - Adamite ideas influenced another racist author named Charles Carroll who wrote two books entitled The Negro Beast and the Temper of Eve. This philosophy is a perfect example of how people are prepared for subjugation and murder by being dehumanized. Blacks are easier to kill and enslave when they are relegated to the status of animals with no soul. Hitler paved the way for the destruction of the Jews by comparing them to rats, cock roaches, disease, vermin and murderers in his Nazi propaganda. Indians were called savages and Asian people were called gooks. Unborn babies are called fetuses. It is easier to kill a fetus than a baby. Unfortunately the dehumanizing philosophy of people like Buckner Payne has been all too prevalent in the world and responsible for the death and enslavement of millions.

Frederick Douglass

2. SLAVERY MADE AMERICA RICH : Slavery made some people very rich. Eli Yale founded Yale University and donated the land it is on from the sale of slaves. Adelicia Acklen from Nashville was one of the richest women in the world prior to the Civil War. She owned plantations in Louisiana which the land eventually became a prison called Angola. She also owned Fairvue plantation in Gallatin and had a summer plantation at Belmont in Nashville which became Belmont University. Acklen would be married three times. Her first two husbands died early and they left their wealth to Acklen making her a very rich woman. She owned hundreds of slaves and is buried with her first two husbands at Mount Olivet cemetery in Nashville. She and her third husband could not get along and she would end up leaving him. Slavery did not make America rich. It slowed the economic development of half the country. In 1860 the South only had one sixth of the factories that were in the North. Ninety percent of the skilled labor was in the North. Railroads, banking, and manufacturing was concentrated in the North. It took billions of dollars which came close bankrupting the Northern treasury to end slavery along with the lives of almost 400,000 Union troops in the Civil War. For every ten slaves that were freed it cost the life of one Union soldier. Since slavery ended our population has grown by 900% and our GDP has increased by 12,000 percent. Until I was in my 20's the South was always an economically depressed part of the country. I believe that was because of the legacy of slavery and later segregation. I remember the shacks and outhouses that surrounded Tennessee's capital hill and my fathers drugstore in North Nashville. Then there was the poverty in the rural areas of Tennessee. Martin Luther King said that when the Black man received his freedom the white man would receive his. Everyone knows about the Democrat economic oppression of blacks in the South but we don't talk about the economic plight of many whites living in the South. I have seen MLK's prophecy come true. Since the passage of the 1964 and 65 Civil Rights Acts I have seen the South change from an economic backwater to the most prosperous part of the country. In Middle Tennessee we have had many large corporations like Nissan, Bridgestone, Dell Computer and many more move into this area. Because of racism and the lack of economic opportunity there would be a massive migration of blacks moving to the large Northern cities around the time of WW1. After WW2 there would be a migration of poor whites moving to Northern cities from out of the South looking for work. People were leaving the oppressive poverty and corruption of the Democrat Southern states. Since the late 1970's people have been migrating here not only from the North but all over the country looking not only for economic freedom but less government interference in their daily lives. Lately they have been escaping the oppression, mismanagement, corruption and crime of Democrat cities and states returning to the mostly Republican managed South. Wherever there is a Democrat government in charge of things it is not a place that normal Americans want to live. 

3. RACISM IS AN UNCHANGEABLE PART OF AMERICA:  This concept is the foundation of the 1619 Project. It says that racism can never be overcome in America. This is a verifiable lie. America is the most successful multi racial society in the world. It is the only majority white country in the world that has elected a black leader not once but twice. Comparing America's racial attitudes to 1950 or 1619 is ridiculous. For me personally when people quit walking across our borders by the millions or quit risking their lives to get here then I might believe that America is the kind of country that the 1619 Project promotes. If we are so racist, and I will throw in homophobic, transphobic, Islamophobic, and Xenophobic as the left says we are, then why in the heck would anyone want to live here? Over two million black African's have legally immigrated to America over the last 50 years and they have become some of our most successful citizens. People all over the world still realize that we are the land of opportunity. They are seeking the American Dream. Funny, but I have never heard of a Saudi Arabian dream, an Iranian dream, a Cuban dream, a North Korean dream, a Russian dream or a Chinese dream. It is more like a nightmare to live in these countries.  Nobody is trying to move to these countries, they are only trying to escape. Blacks have struggled in America since 1776 to be free and to achieve their Constitutional rights but they have done it shoulder to shoulder with decent white people and could not have achieved freedom without their help. The Congress that passed the 13th Amendment that ended slavery, the 14th Amendment that was intended to grant blacks civil rights, and the 15th Amendment which granted blacks the right to vote were mostly white Republicans. Abraham Lincoln was assassinated because he wanted to grant the right to vote to black soldiers and educated black men. A very progressive attitude for his day. White judges led by a Republican Chief Justice Earl Warren ruled to end school segregation in 1954. A White Republican Federal judge, and Alabama native, Frank Johnson, made very important decisions that supported the civil rights movement in the 1950's and 60's. The senate that passed the 1964 Civil Rights Act was made up of 98 whites and two Asians. It passed by a vote of 73 yes votes against 27 no votes. The Democrats led a 60 day filibuster against the bill. I could list many examples of how decent whites have fought alongside black people in their struggle for freedom. Many whites died or were severely injured in that fight. Shortly after the 1619 Project was published a group of mostly leftist historians even condemned Hannah-Jones conclusions. They called it a "displacement of of historical understanding by ideology". Fortunately Hannah-Jones was denied tenure at the University of North Carolina. Regardless, as I have shown, this argument is not new but because the Democrat party is supported by ignorant people this idea is being pushed in our schools, in the media, Hollywood, and social media. Unfortunately far too many conservatives don't know the true history of our country. It is my goal to change as many minds as I can with the facts before God calls me home. 

I HAVE A DREAM