1619, 1776 and the United States of America
Many political and social progressives are eager to redefine America as starting not in 1776, which is truly and literally when the very title “United States of America” began, but in the year 1619, before Plymouth Rock and before John Winthrop and the Arbella arrived upon our shores. They instead want to define the nation by slavery and racism. So much so that The New York Times’ 1619 Project dates the United States that way, defining the country’s start by the year 1619, with the arrival of the first enslaved Africans in Virginia that year.
Americans should look back at their founding as based on the principles of 1776 — that uniquely great achievement for life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness that was the Declaration of Independence. That’s the heart of America. Those were principles for all of humanity, though they would indeed take decades to fully implement for all Americans, both Black and white. Their full achievement would lead to nothing less than a Civil War.
Mobs today target statues of everyone from George Washington and Thomas Jefferson to (curiously) Union generals like Ulysses S. Grant, who defeated the Confederacy before battling the KKK, and even Abraham Lincoln and (most bizarrely of all) Frederick Douglass, the great abolitionist. Very often, the mob engages in bad history, targeting actual saints who sought to protect natives from persecution, such as St. Junípero Serra, whose statues are being torn down throughout California. Here is a saint — canonized by Pope Francis — that has been canceled. And St. Junípero is far from alone, with the likes of St. Louis IX and even the Blessed Virgin Mary targeted. And don’t even get started on Christopher Columbus.
But let us not argue with this historical reality: The United States of America, as our founders conceived it, started in 1776.
What about those same founders and the undeniable evil of slavery? Well, that is a subject that’s indeed far more troubling and complicated.
A full accounting must acknowledge first what the American founders said about slavery, and what they did. Consider these testimonies:
“Slavery is such an atrocious debasement of human nature,” said Benjamin Franklin in a November 1789 speech demanding its “very extirpation.”
