What, to the New York Times, Is the Fourth of July?

The editors and journalists at the New York Times plan to celebrate the Fourth of July with the rest of us. One has to wonder why. 

After all, the far-left newspaper has declared, through its sponsorship of the 1619 Project, that July 4 is a bogus holiday and the Declaration of Independence was (and is) a fraud. The real “founding” of the country occurred, not on July 4, 1776, with the separation from Great Britain and the publication of the Declaration, but in 1619 when the first slaves arrived on American shores. While most Americans will celebrate the nation’s independence on July 4, there is little reason for the Times to do so. 

In 2019, the New York Times Magazine devoted an entire issue to the 1619 Project, organized and edited by Nikole Hannah-Jones and published in commemoration of the 400th anniversary of the arrival of the first slaves to the British colonies in North America. This date is significant, according to Ms. Hannah-Jones and her colleagues, because it marked the true origins of the United States of America (though it did not occur to anyone at the time that the British colonies might be united into a new nation).

The essays published in that issue asserted several controversial propositions: for, example, that the American Revolution was fought mainly to defend the institution of slavery; that slavery was the original source of American wealth and the cornerstone for the development of American capitalism; and that, for these reasons, the “real” founding of the United States occurred in 1619 and not in 1776. 

The project was quickly packaged into a book, a television series, and a history curriculum for high school students. Hannah-Jones received a Pulitzer Prize for her introductory essay and her work in organizing the project.

The Project has come in for harsh criticism from prominent historians who point out that these claims are false or wildly exaggerated, and not backed up by evidence. In a letter to the Times in 2019, Gordon Wood, James McPherson, and several other distinguished historians pointed to several errors in the essays and asked the Times to consider correcting some of the project’s more extreme propositions. They highlighted in particular the assertion that the Revolution had been fought to maintain the institution of slavery, and suggested that the Times was promoting leftist ideology at the expense of historical accuracy.  

Others have pointed to another obvious flaw in the project’s argument: It was the spread of capitalism, and with it the ideals of free labor and individual rights, that spurred the anti-slavery movement and eventually doomed the institution of slavery. It is obvious in retrospect that market capitalism was based upon ideals that could never be reconciled with human bondage. These ideals were inscribed in the Declaration of Independence, which served as a banner for critics of slavery. If the words of the Declaration are true, they said, then it follows that slavery must be wrong. 

It is ironic that the 1619 Project now advances arguments about the Revolution and the Declaration of Independence that were originally advanced in the 19th century in defense of slavery. Slaveholders in that era, like Hannah-Jones and her colleagues today, understood that they had to discredit the Declaration of Independence in order to defend their cause. In this way, the claims of the 1619 Project are not at all novel. 

In the debates over slavery during the 1840s and 1850s, many southerners pointed out (much like Nikole Hannah-Jones) that the authors of the Declaration could not have meant what they said because Thomas Jefferson and other signers owned slaves at the time. From that point of view, the words of the Declaration (“All men are created equal!”) were merely “eyewash” and not meant to be taken seriously.

Senator John C. Calhoun went further when he declared that there was “not a word of truth” in the claim that “all men are created equal.” A colleague said that this “self-evident truth” was in fact a “self-evident lie,” much in keeping with the claims of the 1619 Project. The Supreme Court, re-packaging these claims, held in the Dred Scott decision (1857) that the words of the Declaration were not meant to apply to African Americans — another contention advanced in the 1619 Project. 

Others argued that the principles set forth in the Declaration were never meant to have universal application, but served only to justify the separation of the American colonies from Great Britain. This idea reappears in the 1619 Project in order to “reconstruct” the American Revolution as an event carried out to protect economic interests (including slavery) rather than a noble campaign to advance the causes of liberty, equality, and representative government. This in turn leads back to the central idea of the 1619 Project – that the “real” founding of the United States occurred in 1619, not 1776.

The authors of the 1619 Project try to weasel out of the implications of their claims by asserting that the words of the Declaration were not true at the time they were written or for generations afterwards, but are being “made true” today in various campaigns for civil rights and equality. 

The argument is false. The ideals of the Declaration of Independence are being “made true” today, as they have been in the past, because they are in fact true — were true in 1776, and in 1857 and 1861, in 1964 when the Civil Rights Act was passed, and are true today. If they were false in the past, then neither the New York Times nor Nikole Hannah-Jones possess the power to make them true today. 

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Abraham Lincoln refuted the attacks on the Declaration better than anyone in the years leading up to the Civil War, and with words that apply with equal force to the misrepresentations of the 1619 Project. The ideals expressed in that “notable instrument,” Lincoln said, are the basic principles of a free society, and must serve as the foundations for such a system. 

Lincoln declared in response to the Dred Scott decision and in his debates with Sen. Stephen Douglas in 1858 that the authors of the Declaration:

meant to set up a standard maxim for free society which should be familiar to all; constantly looked to, constantly labored for, and even though never perfectly attained, constantly approximated, and thereby constantly spreading and deepening its influence and augmenting the happiness and value of life to all people, of all colors, everywhere.

They meant, as he said, to set up liberty as a standard to apply to all people at all times, such that it might be realized in practice as circumstances admit.  

Frederick Douglass agreed with Lincoln on these broad points. As a former slave, Douglass might easily have brushed off the Declaration as an exercise in hypocrisy. Instead, he declared that the ideals contained in that document were true and valid at all times and places. 

Without the Declaration of Independence, and the truths contained in it, Douglass and his allies would have had a difficult time in making their case against slavery.  Slavery was wrong because it was in conflict with the self-evident truth that “all men are created equal, and are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights.”  Douglass and his allies understood that by rejecting the Declaration they would wind up in the same moral camp as those defending slavery.  

If this had not been so, if Lincoln and others did not believe the words of the Declaration to be true, then the Civil War may not have occurred, slavery would not have ended as it did, various civil rights acts would not have been approved — and the United States would have developed as just another state in a world of states, without distinctive ideals to guide and animate it. 

The United States is an exceptional nation, and is widely believed to be an exceptional nation, in large part because of the Declaration of Independence. In this sense, those critics have a point: By discrediting the Declaration of Independence, they also discredit the idea of American exceptionalism, and the foundations of the American system of constitutional government. 

Despite Lincoln’s words, Nikole Hannah-Jones and her colleagues have said that Lincoln was in fact a bigot because at various points in his career he questioned the idea of racial equality, and supported the colonization of newly freed slaves back to Africa. There is no doubt that he harbored doubts that the races could live in harmony with one another, mainly because of the indignities suffered by blacks under slavery. But, as Lincoln scholar Allen Guelzo points out, colonization was part and parcel of the campaign to bring slavery to a peaceful end by freeing the slaves and giving them a new home. The idea, however, was forcefully rejected by the slave-owing class. Lincoln, moreover, never did anything to pursue that idea, eventually dismissing it as a “hideous and barbarous humbug.” 

But, in addition to those statements about the Declaration of Independence, Lincoln did much more in practice both to end slavery and to assert the equal rights of all Americans. He rejected slavery from an early age. He denounced the Dred Scott decision and called for it to be overturned. He said that Congress must restrict the export of slaves into the western territories.

As president, Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation. He armed black soldiers and sent them into battle, declaring later that by doing so they had earned the rights of full citizenship. He said that slavery was the cause of the Civil War. In his Second Inaugural Address, he said that the war must continue until slavery was extinguished. He rallied support for ratification of the 13^th Amendment banning slavery in the United States. He declared, in the Gettysburg Address, that the United States was founded in 1776 on the basis of the Declaration of Independence. The nation was dedicated, he said, “to the proposition that all men are created equal.”

Sojourner Truth, after meeting with Lincoln, declared that he was “a great and good man.” Frederick Douglass said that he was “emphatically the black man’s president.” These deeds, combined with the judgments of African Americans at the time, should absolve Lincoln of the tortured accusations advanced by the New York Times and the propagandists associated with the 1619 Project. 

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In many ways, the 1619 Project was but another step in the march of folly set in motion by new leftists in the 1960s who hoped to discredit the United States as a functioning polity and international power. They disliked everything about the United States: its European heritage; its great wealth and power; most of all, its market economy and respect for property rights. From this standpoint, the 1619 Project appears as one more hoax perpetrated by new leftists who have now achieved power at the New York Times and other prominent institutions (academe and government). 

One source of the 1619 Project may have been a manifesto published in 1974 by the leaders of Weathermen Faction of the Students for a Democratic Society, among them Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn (former terrorists, now retired university professors). Titled Prairie Fire (a reference to Mao’s aphorism that “a single spark can ignite a prairie fire”), the book called upon radicals to adopt a two-pronged strategy involving the march through the institutions along with occasional acts of targeted violence in the form of riots, strikes, and demonstrations in order to rally allies and weaken the overall system. 

In that manifesto, the authors did not give up their revolutionary goal of overthrowing the American system, but argued that new approaches were needed in a new era after the movement’s leaders were driven underground when they conspired to bomb government buildings and commit other acts of terror. The new strategy called upon radicals to ditch New Left fashions (beards, blue jeans, Castro’s combat fatigues) in favor of middle-class styles, then to pursue careers in academe, government, and activist organizations in order to put themselves in positions to discredit the system from the inside. The SDS manifesto, though not well known, has had surprisingly wide influence in circulating radical doctrines and inserting them into mainstream institutions.

Prairie Fire anticipated the key idea behind the Times’s project when it identified 1619 as the year the first slaves landed on North American shores, labelling that event as the original source of racism and white supremacy in the United States. As the SDS authors wrote: 

The US invented a new kind of racism and a more horrible form of slavery. The institutionalizing of white supremacy created a structure to divide the white worker and small farmer from the Black slave. Coupled with the economic bribe of white privilege, it is the corner-stone of US history, the rock upon which capitalism and imperialism have been erected.

These were two of the key claims made both in the 1619 Project and in the SDS manifesto: that slavery was the cornerstone of American history, and the original foundation for American capitalism because it was based on the buying and selling of human beings for profit. 

The key themes in the 1619 Project were plainly anticipated fifty years ago by the SDS radicals. It is not much of a stretch to conclude that the authors of that project lifted these ideas from that New Left manifesto. After many decades, the Times appears to be circulating ideas into the mainstream that were first articulated by terrorists in the 1960s and 1970s, very much according to the plan set forth in Prairie Fire.

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All of which brings us back to the question raised at the beginning of this essay: Why should the Times, the authors and promoters of the 1619 Project, and the paper’s editors and journalists, bother with celebrating the Fourth of July in view of what they have said about the Declaration of Independence and the origins of the United States?  From their point of view, July 4 should be marked as “just another day” on the calendar.

Abraham Lincoln raised this question in his response to critics of the Declaration of Independence: As he said:

I understand you are preparing to celebrate the “Fourth,” tomorrow of next week. What for? The doings of that day had no reference to the present; and quite half of you were not even descendants of those who were referred to on that day.

If the critics of the Declaration were correct, then there was little point in continuing to celebrate the date on which it was released to the world. But, as he said, the critics were wrong. Lincoln called on his listeners to reject arguments that would turn the Declaration of Independence into “an interesting memorial of the dead past, shorn of its vitality and practical value, and left without the germ or suggestion of the individual rights of man.” That document expressed, as he said, the “standard maxims of a free society.” Without them, there was little hope that such a society could endure. 

Next year, in 2026, Americans will celebrate the 250^th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, and the nation’s founding as a free and independent nation. One hopes that these celebrations will embarrass the editors and journalists at the New York Times, and will encourage them to understand the misguided goals of its 1619 Project, so that they will have renewed reason once again to celebrate the Fourth of July.

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