Princeton’s Sean Wilentz is one of five historians who sent a letter to the NY Times last month requesting that the paper address factual errors in the 1619 Project. In response, the NY Times published the letter along with a lengthy response denying that any corrections were necessary. Today, Wilentz has written a piece for the Atlantic in which he addresses three false claims in the 1619 Project in more detail. He begins with the claim by lead-author Nikole Hannah-Jones 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.” Not so, says Wilentz. In fact, he argues convincingly that British efforts to stop the international slave were inspired by prior colonial efforts:

“By 1776, Britain had grown deeply conflicted over its role in the barbaric institution that had reshaped the Western Hemisphere,” Hannah-Jones wrote. But apart from the activity of the pioneering abolitionist Granville Sharp, Britain was hardly conflicted at all in 1776 over its involvement in the slave system. Sharp played a key role in securing the 1772 Somerset v. Stewart ruling, which declared that chattel slavery was not recognized in English common law. That ruling did little, however, to reverse Britain’s devotion to human bondage, which lay almost entirely in its colonial slavery and its heavy involvement in the Atlantic slave trade. Nor did it generate a movement inside Britain in opposition to either slavery or the slave trade. As the historian Christopher Leslie Brown writes in his authoritative study of British abolitionism, Moral Capital, Sharp “worked tirelessly against the institution of slavery everywhere within the British Empire after 1772, but for many years in England he would stand nearly alone.” What Hannah-Jones described as a perceptible British threat to American slavery in 1776 in fact did not exist.

“In London, there were growing calls to abolish the slave trade,” Hannah-Jones continued. But the movement in London to abolish the slave trade formed only in 1787, largely inspired, as Brown demonstrates in great detail, by American antislavery opinion that had arisen in the 1760s and ’70s. There were no “growing calls” in London to abolish the trade as early as 1776.

“This would have upended the economy of the colonies, in both the North and the South,” Hannah-Jones wrote. But the colonists had themselves taken decisive steps to end the Atlantic slave trade from 1769 to 1774. During that time, Maryland, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Connecticut, and Rhode Island either outlawed the trade or imposed prohibitive duties on it. Measures to abolish the trade also won approval in Massachusetts, Delaware, New York, and Virginia, but were denied by royal officials. The colonials’ motives were not always humanitarian: Virginia, for example, had more enslaved black people than it needed to sustain its economy and saw the further importation of Africans as a threat to social order. But the Americans who attempted to end the trade did not believe that they were committing economic suicide.

Assertions that a primary reason the Revolution was fought was to protect slavery are as inaccurate as the assertions, still current, that southern secession and the Civil War had nothing to do with slavery.

There’s much more to this section dealing with the Times’ response to this criticism, all of which is worth a look. Next, Wilentz moves on the Hannah-Jones’ claims about Lincoln. Again, this section is long so I’ll just consider a portion of his response to one specific claim from the 1619 Project:

“Like many white Americans,” she wrote, Lincoln “opposed slavery as a cruel system at odds with American ideals, but he also opposed black equality.” This elides the crucial difference between Lincoln and the white supremacists who opposed him. Lincoln asserted on many occasions, most notably during his famous debates with the racist Stephen A. Douglas in 1858, that the Declaration of Independence’s famous precept that “all men are created equal” was a human universal that applied to black people as well as white people. Like the majority of white Americans of his time, including many radical abolitionists, Lincoln harbored the belief that white people were socially superior to black people. He insisted, however, that “in the right to eat the bread without the leave of anybody else, which his own hand earns, [the Negro] is my equal, and the equal of Judge Douglas, and the equal of every other man.” To state flatly, as Hannah-Jones’s essay does, that Lincoln “opposed black equality” is to deny the very basis of his opposition to slavery.

Nor was Lincoln, who had close relations with the free black people of Springfield, Illinois, and represented a number of them as clients, known to treat black people as inferior. After meeting with Lincoln at the White House, Sojourner Truth, the black abolitionist, said that he “showed as much respect and kindness to the coloured persons present as to the white,” and that she “never was treated by any one with more kindness and cordiality” than “by that great and good man.”

Wilentz writes, “particularly with regard to the ideas and actions of Abraham Lincoln, Hannah-Jones’s argument is built on partial truths and misstatements of the facts, which combine to impart a fundamentally misleading impression.”

Near the end of the piece Wilentz reaffirms his own liberal bona fides and fondness for the NY Times:

The New York Times has taken a lead in combatting the degradation of truth and assault on a free press propagated by Donald Trump’s White House, aided and abetted by Vladimir Putin’s Russia, and spun by the far right on social media. American democracy is in a perilous condition, and the Times can report on that danger only by upholding its standards “without fear or favor.” That is why it is so important that lapses such as those pointed out in our letter receive attention and timely correction. When describing history, more is at stake than the past.

Despite this, many on the left clearly see these criticisms as a revanchist attempt to undo progressive gains in the retelling of American history. I posted this example previously:

Less influential publications that would never have thought of such a project on their own are desperate to bring down/steal shine from #the1619Project – and to reassert the traditional status quo.

— Brent Staples (@BrentNYT) January 7, 2020

I don’t think the critics are trying to “bring down” the 1619 Project. Every one of them, including Wilentz, has said they think the Project is a worthy goal. One side of this ongoing argument (the critics) are trying to talk about a handful of specific facts while the other side (the NY Times) is trying to spin a grand narrative. At the moment, the narrative seems to be winning out over the inconvenient facts. Hopefully that won’t always be the case.

Update: I asked Nikole Hannah-Jones if she planned to respond to Wilentz’ criticism:

Granted this is the same critic, but his argument rebutting your claim about the causes of the Revolutionary War seems fairly clear cut and convincing. Isn't some equally detailed response to his points needed at some point?

— John Sexton (@verumserum) January 22, 2020

To her credit, she replied (but has since deleted, here’s a screenshot):

Nicholas Guyatt is a professor of American history at Cambridge. He has written a lengthy thread replying to the piece. I won’t include all of it but I will refer to the portions that are responsive to the criticisms I quoted above (you can click on any tweet and read the whole thing):

In my professional (!) opinion, none of these assertions is marred by factual error. They are each plausible historical arguments which can be grounded in evidence and existing scholarship. Disagree with them if you wish, but “serious inaccuracies”? Let’s take a look.

— Nicholas Guyatt (@NicholasGuyatt) January 22, 2020

In Wilentz’s view, the decision of Lord Mansfield in 1772 to free James Somerset had little impact in the colonies and less in Britain. Beyond Granville Sharp, he thinks there wasn’t much antislavery sentiment in GB before _American_ abolitionists got going in the 1780s.

— Nicholas Guyatt (@NicholasGuyatt) January 22, 2020

The paths of transmission of these ideas — & of Somerset itself — require a greater & more careful analysis than keyword searching of newspaper databases. I hope to have something to share on this before too long, and would love to hear from others working in this area.

— Nicholas Guyatt (@NicholasGuyatt) January 22, 2020

(See also Katherine Paugh’s fascinating work on the Mary Hylas case for a sense of how parallel legal decisions regarding gender and marriage freaked out planters in the colonies.) pic.twitter.com/vXyPkc6J1K

— Nicholas Guyatt (@NicholasGuyatt) January 22, 2020

It’s impossible to say how many enslaved people already knew about Somerset; based on the work of Julius Scott & esp. Graham Hodges (below), we can conclude that Black maritime networks had already seeded the idea among African Americans that Britain was a liberating force. pic.twitter.com/whhto05JrR

— Nicholas Guyatt (@NicholasGuyatt) January 22, 2020

This GB offer of freedom panicked and stiffened the spines of Patriots – including those in northern states who were told that the British were unleashing Black and Native violence on white people. Rob Parkinson thinks this racial ‘othering’ was the glue of the Revolution. pic.twitter.com/14Km1wGiVZ

— Nicholas Guyatt (@NicholasGuyatt) January 22, 2020

Lincoln’s views on colonization & Black citizenship surely evolved; & as I’ve argued elsewhere colonization failed partly because Black people themselves refused to play the role they’d been offered by those ‘liberal’ whites who wanted them out of the U.S. https://t.co/NX65Vl2O8S

— Nicholas Guyatt (@NicholasGuyatt) January 22, 2020

We can debate and respectfully disagree about this stuff — that’s what historians do. What we _don’t_ do is tell someone else that their interpretation contains “serious inaccuracies” just because they don’t arrange the evidence in the same way we might.

— Nicholas Guyatt (@NicholasGuyatt) January 22, 2020

1619’s power is to shatter the complacency behind the freedom narrative and to invite us — especially those of us who are white – to consider how these historical experiences look from the perspectives of those who were treated most harshly by America.

— Nicholas Guyatt (@NicholasGuyatt) January 22, 2020

This doesn’t strike me as a definitive rebuttal of Wilentz so much as a plea for further discussion. Guyatt seems to admit that Hannah-Jones hasn’t really substantiated it’s claim, it’s just that he believes it could do so given time and space. That’s fair enough I guess but it’s a lot less cut and dried than the flat claims (about the Revolutionary War, about Lincoln) made in the 1619 Project. It’s one thing to say ‘there might be an alternative way to look at this which has validity.’ It’s something else to state in America’s leading newspaper “one of the primary reasons the colonists decided to declare their independence from Britain was because they wanted to protect the institution of slavery.” That does sound like a claim about undeniable facts rather than a point open to vigorous debate.