And again: the 1619 Project is not history; it is ignorance. It claims that the American Revolution was staged to protect slavery, though it never once occurs to the Project to ask, in that case, why the British West Indies (which had a far larger and infinitely more malignant slave system than the 13 American colonies) never joined us in that revolution. It claims that the Constitution’s three-fifths clause was designed by the Founders as the keystone that would keep the slave states in power, though the 1619 Project seems not to have noticed that at the time of the Constitutional Convention, all of the states were slave states (save only Massachusetts), so that the three-fifths clause could not have been intended to confer such a mysterious power on slavery unless the Founders had come to the Convention equipped with crystal balls. It behaves as though the Civil War never happened, that the slaves somehow freed themselves, and that a white president never put weapons into the hands of black men and bid them kill rebels who had taken up arms in defense of bondage. The 1619 Project forgets, in other words, that there was an 1863 Project, and that its name was emancipation.
Allen C. Guelzo, Preaching a Conspiracy Theory
Somewhere in Hell Walter Duranty is laughing. From 2003:
After more than six months of study and deliberation, the Pulitzer Prize Board has decided it will not revoke the foreign reporting prize awarded in 1932 to Walter Duranty of The New York Times.
In recent months, much attention has been paid to Mr. Duranty’s dispatches regarding the famine in the Soviet Union in 1932-1933, which have been criticized as gravely defective. However, a Pulitzer Prize for reporting is awarded not for the author’s body of work or for the author’s character but for the specific pieces entered in the competition. Therefore, the board focused its attention on the 13 articles that actually won the prize, articles written and published during 1931. [A complete list of the articles, with dates and headlines, is below.]
In its review of the 13 articles, the Board determined that Mr. Duranty’s 1931 work, measured by today’s standards for foreign reporting, falls seriously short. In that regard, the Board’s view is similar to that of The New York Times itself and of some scholars who have examined his 1931 reports. However, the board concluded that there was not clear and convincing evidence of deliberate deception, the relevant standard in this case. Revoking a prize 71 years after it was awarded under different circumstances, when all principals are dead and unable to respond, would be a momentous step and therefore would have to rise to that threshold.
The famine of 1932-1933 was horrific and has not received the international attention it deserves. By its decision, the board in no way wishes to diminish the gravity of that loss. The Board extends its sympathy to Ukrainians and others in the United States and throughout the world who still mourn the suffering and deaths brought on by Josef Stalin.
Go here to read the rest. When it comes to the Pulitzer Prize, politically convenient lies beat out mere facts every time. New York Times unofficial slogan: all the news that fits our world view, or can be made to fit our world view.
Stunning. I guess the Pulitzer Prize now matters as much as the Nobel Peace Prize. .
“. . .that a white president never put weapons into the hands of black men and bid them kill rebels who had taken up arms in defense of bondage.” So all those farm boys from the Southern States, who owned no slaves, were out there fighting for the right of the “rich folks” to keep their slaves . . . and that’s why the War was fought . . . .
As Jefferson Davis noted in his first address to the Confederate Congress, the Confederacy was created to defend slavery:
The climate and soil of the Northern States soon proved unpropitious to the continuance of slave labor, whilst the converse was the case at the South. Under the unrestricted free intercourse between the two sections, the Northern States consulted their own interests by selling their slaves to the South and prohibiting slavery within their limits. The South were willing purchasers of a property suitable to their wants, and paid the price of acquisition without harboring a suspicion that their quiet possession was to be disturbed by those who were inhibited not only by want of constitutional authority, but by good faith as vendors, from disquieting a title emanating from themselves. As soon, however, as the Northern States that prohibited African slavery within their limits had reached a number sufficient to give their representation a controlling voice in Congress, a persistent and organized system of hostile measures against the rights of the owners of slaves in the Southern States was inaugurated and gradually extended. A continuous series of measures was devised and prosecuted for the purpose of rendering insecure the tenure of property in slaves. Fanatical organizations, supplied with money by voluntary subscriptions, were assiduously engaged in exciting amongst the slaves a spirit of discontent and revolt; means were furnished for their escape from their owners, and agents secretly employed to entice them to abscond; the constitutional provisions for their rendition to their owners was first evaded, then openly denounced as a violation of conscientious obligation and religious duty; men were taught that it was a merit to elude, disobey, and violently oppose the execution of the laws enacted to secure the performance of the promise contained in the constitutional compact; owners of slaves were mobbed and even murdered in open day solely for applying to a magistrate for the arrest of a fugitive slave; the dogmas of these voluntary organizations soon obtained control of the Legislatures of many of the Northern States, and laws were passed providing for the punishment, by ruinous fines and long-continued imprisonment in jails and penitentiaries, of citizens of the Southern States who should dare to ask aid of the officers of the law for the recovery of their property. Emboldened by success, the theater of agitation and aggression against the clearly expressed constitutional rights of the Southern States was transferred to the Congress; Senators and Representatives were sent to the common councils of the nation, whose chief title to this distinction consisted in the display of a spirit of ultra fanaticism, and whose business was not “to promote the general welfare or insure domestic tranquillity,” but to awaken the bitterest hatred against the citizens of sister States by violent denunciation of their institutions; the transaction of public affairs was impeded by repeated efforts to usurp powers not delegated by the Constitution, for the purpose of impairing the security of property in slaves, and reducing those States which held slaves to a condition of inferiority. Finally a great party was organized for the purpose of obtaining the administration of the Government, with the avowed object of using its power for the total exclusion of the slave States from all participation in the benefits of the public domain acquired by all the States in common, whether by conquest or purchase; of surrounding them entirely by States in which slavery should be prohibited; of thus rendering the property in slaves so insecure as to be comparatively worthless, and thereby annihilating in effect property worth thousands of millions of dollars. This party, thus organized, succeeded in the month of November last in the election of its candidate for the Presidency of the United States.
In the meantime, under the mild and genial climate of the Southern States and the increasing care and attention for the well-being and comfort of the laboring class, dictated alike by interest and humanity, the African slaves had augmented in number from about 600,000, at the date of the adoption of the constitutional compact, to upward of 4,000,000. In moral and social condition they had been elevated from brutal savages into docile, intelligent, and civilized agricultural laborers, and supplied not only with bodily comforts but with careful religious instruction. Under the supervision of a superior race their labor had been so directed as not only to allow a gradual and marked amelioration of their own condition, but to convert hundreds of thousands of square miles of wilderness into cultivated lands covered with a prosperous people; towns and cities had sprung into existence, and had rapidly increased in wealth and population under the social system of the South; the white population of the Southern slaveholding States had augmented form about 1,250,000 at the date of the adoption of the Constitution to more than 8,500,000 in 1860; and the productions of the South in cotton, rice, sugar, and tobacco, for the full development and continuance of which the labor of African slaves was and is indispensable, had swollen to an amount which formed nearly three-fourths of the exports of the whole United States and had become absolutely necessary to the wants of civilized man. With interests of such overwhelming magnitude imperiled, the people of the Southern States were driven by the conduct of the North to the adoption of some course of action to avert the danger with which they were openly menaced. With this view the Legislatures of the several States invited the people to select delegates to conventions to be held for the purpose of determining for themselves what measures were best adapted to meet so alarming a crisis in their history. Here it may be proper to observe that from a period as early as 1798 there had existed in all of the States of the Union a party almost uniterruptedly in the majority based upon the creed that each State was, in the last resort, the sole judge as well of its wrongs as of the mode and measure of redress. Indeed, it is obvious that under the law of nations this principle is an axiom as applied to the relations of independent sovereign States, such as those which had united themselves under the constitutional compact. The Democratic party of the United States repeated, in its successful canvass in 1856, the declaration made in numerous previous political contests, that it would “faithfully abide by and uphold the principles laid down in the Kentucky and Virginia resolutions of 1798, and in the report of Mr. Madison to the Virginia Legislature in 1799; and that it adopts those principles as constituting one of the main foundations of its political creed.” The principles thus emphatically announced embrace that to which I have already averted– the right of each State to judge of and redress the wrongs of which it complains. These principles were maintained by overwhelming majorities of the people in all the States of the Union at different elections, especially in the elections of Mr. Jefferson in 1805, Mr. Madison in 1809, and Mr. Pierce in 1852. In the exercise of a right so ancient, so well-established, and so necessary for self-preservation, the people of the Confederate States, in their conventions, determined that the wrongs which they had suffered and the evils with which they were menaced required that they should revoke the delegation of powers to the Federal Government which they had ratified in their several conventions. They consequently passed ordinances resuming all their rights as sovereign and independent States and dissolved their connection with the other States of the Union.
As to the average Confederate soldier, I doubt if he was fighting for slavery. He was fighting for the independence of his country.
We need to understand the Civil War much less through a 1960s lens, much more through an 1860s and/or 1770s/80s lens. We see in the Federalist and Antifederalist papers how prominent leaders argued over giving degrees of power to the Federal and State governments. Though ratified, the Constitution did not pass unanimously; most who voted against had great concern for Federal tyranny to oppress an individual State. Davis’ comments then don’t reflect intent to defend slavery per se; they reflect the aim for each State to be allowed it’s own choice. Notice the Kansas-Nebraska Act had passed some years earlier with precisely that intent. Most Southerners, politicians included, thus fought to defend their rights as they saw them.
If the Pulitzer Committee can’t see fit to admit such things, well, I rarely expect journalists to be anything besides politically correct.
Notice the Kansas-Nebraska Act had passed some years earlier with precisely that intent.
And a blood bath ensued. The Dred Scot decision took away from Congress any control over slavery in the territories, an authority that Congress had exercised since the Founding Fathers.
don’t reflect intent to defend slavery per se; they reflect the aim for each State to be allowed it’s own choice.
Quite the contrary. The Confederate constitution prevented the states of the Confederacy from abolishing slavery within a state:
“The citizens of each State shall be entitled to all the privileges and immunities of citizens in the several States; and shall have the right of transit and sojourn in any State of this Confederacy, with their slaves and other property; and the right of property in said slaves shall not be thereby impaired.”
The Confederate Constitution also made sure that any territories of the Confederacy must allow slavery:
“The Confederate States may acquire new territory; and Congress shall have power to legislate and provide governments for the inhabitants of all territory belonging to the Confederate States, lying without the limits of the several States; and may permit them, at such times, and in such manner as it may by law provide, to form States to be admitted into the Confederacy. In all such territory the institution of negro slavery, as it now exists in the Confederate States, shall be recognized and protected by Congress and by the Territorial government; and the inhabitants of the several Confederate States and Territories shall have the right to take to such Territory any slaves lawfully held by them in any of the States or Territories of the Confederate States.”
Fake History. The 1619 project wasn’t about history. It was about pushing an anti-American narrative. It’s best understood as a propaganda operation aimed at demoralizing the enemy, in this case ordinary, American people.
To be concise, everything spewing out of the left is fake.
FYI America was born in April 1775 at Lexington and Concord.
Elizabeth Alexander, President, Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, New York, NY
Nancy Barnes, Senior Vice President of News and Editorial Director, National Public Radio
Robert Blau, Executive Editor of Projects and Investigations, Bloomberg News, Washington, DC
Lee C. Bollinger, President, Columbia University
Katherine Boo author and journalist, Washington, DC
Neil Brown, President, Poynter Institute for Media Studies, St. Petersburg, FL
Dana Canedy, Administrator, The Pulitzer Prizes, Columbia University
Nicole Carroll, Editor in Chief, USA Today, McLean, VA
Steve Coll, Dean, Graduate School of Journalism, Columbia University
Gail Collins, Op-Ed Columnist, The New York Times
John Daniszewski, Vice President and Editor at Large for Standards, Associated Press, New York, NY
Stephen Engelberg, Editor-in-Chief, ProPublica, New York, NY
Steven Hahn, Professor of History, New York University
Carlos Lozada, Associate Editor and Nonfiction Book Critic, The Washington Post
Aminda Marqués Gonzalez, President, Publisher and Executive Editor, Miami Herald
Emily Ramshaw, Co-Founder and CEO, The 19th
David Remnick, Editor and Staff Writer, The New Yorker
Tommie Shelby, Caldwell Titcomb Professor of African and African American Studies and of Philosophy, Harvard University
These are the responsible parties. Anyone who voted no is welcome to identify themselves. I’m not even seeing a Kurt-Vonnegut-style malicious prankster on the list. One reason we’re in trouble in this country is that our establishment is godawful.
shakes head So much for walking a mile in another man’s shoes.
Many had feared Federal tyranny. Action to forbid slavery–or other practices–would be viewed as violations of their citizen’s rights. Remember, some of the Northern States had allowed slavery initially too.
These documents mostly reflect the Confederate view we might expect. They forbid general government from acting against any State; they forbid any State from acting against current citizens. In other words, each State and citizen would make their own choice. Note though, they don’t require every State and citizen to allow for slavery everywhere forever. Other evidence indicates that many Southern leaders–including Davis–knew slavery had begun to recede. Never forget, importing slaves had been forbidden by 1808. No evidence suggests anyone aimed to repeal this law. They still objected to what they saw as tyranny in the Federal action.
“In other words, each State and citizen would make their own choice.”
Incorrect. States could not abolish slavery, neither could Confederate territories and neither could the Confederate government. It is all down there in black and white in the Confederate Constitution. You could have any view on slavery you pleased in the Confederacy about slavery as long as the view was that you were for it.
These documents show in black and white the Southern view of the Constitution’s proscription. That is, whether State or Confederate Federal, government may not ACT against a State or Citizen regarding slavery. That’s very different from requiring that all persons must support slavery.
All other comes from modern-day prejudice.
That’s very different from requiring that all persons must support slavery.
Not as a practical matter. The Confederacy was set up to make the abolition of slavery a legal impossibility, without an amendment to the Confederate Constitution,
shakes head You’re still seeing through modern eyes too much. They feared tyranny as they saw it. They wouldn’t aim to forbid a practice which had already begun dying out.
The “tyranny” slave owners feared was that somebody would forcibly end the tyranny which they exercised over other human being under the guise of “property rights.” This is unavoidable and inescapable.
Shelby Foote may be the greatest narrative historian this country ever produced, but he clearly comes out on the short end of the exchange of view points with the black woman historian (I can’t remember her name and I don’t have access to the documentary at the moment –I suppose I could look for it on youtube) in the first episode of The Civil War. And that not solely because Ken Burns wanted him to come up short.
Actually Shelby Foote was opposed to the segregationist governors of his day as he made clear in the second volume of his epic three volume history which was published in 1963. The black historian was Barbara Fields who I found very unimpressive.
Here is what Foote wrote in his bibliographical note:
“I am obligated to the governors of my native state and the adjoining states of Arkansas and Alabama for helping to lessen my sectional bias by reproducing, in their actions during several of the years that went into the writing of this volume, much that was least admirable in the position my forebears occupied when they stood up to Lincoln.”
“I suppose, or in any case fervently hope, it is true that history never repeats itself, but I know from watching these three gentlemen [Barnett, Faubus, and Wallace] that it can be terrifying in its approximations.”
It’s unavoidable and inescapable that minority voices demand we view the world as they wish, regardless of the truth. I heard the usual view of evil South growing up. As I grew older, I discovered much of it had been…not exactly true. I don’t expect a lady black historian would be anything but scathing about the Southerners. She wouldn’t want to admit her own people have been…intolerant.
I need to head to work in a sec, yet I’ll leave with one last thought: Suppose Pres Trump would suddenly declare that he intends to forbid abortion for good. All we need to do is…surrender the Constitution, make him hereditary king.
I have to think we’d all object strenuously to that, even if we profess pro-life ideals. Let’s say he would choose to enforce that idea by imposing martial law. He’d thus use the Army, Air Force, Marines, Navy, and all the Guard and Reserve. If we didn’t wish to abide by that idea, …we’d have a civil war on our hands.
Such an idea might well reflect how many Southerners viewed Lincoln’s election in 1860. He hadn’t demanded coronation as king, yet he had been quite clear about his intent to stomp on slavery as much as possible. Especially when he suspended habeus corpus, many Southerners would’ve felt ample cause to rebel.
Don, in that case maybe Burns had his thumb on the scale more than I thought.
What I had in mind was Foote talking about the failure of Americans to live up to what is our real genius, the ability to compromise.
Honestly, I don’t see where there’s a compromise on the issue treating human beings like chattels. So Fields “won” that point/counterpoint as I remember. Thanks for reminding me of her name.
Suppose Pres Trump would suddenly declare that he intends to forbid abortion for good. All we need to do is…surrender the Constitution, make him hereditary king.
That’s a stupid comparison of apples and
orangesbowling balls and I think you know that.Honestly, I don’t see where there’s a compromise on the issue treating human beings like chattels.
Compensated emancipation comes to mind, or setting a date by which all new born black slaves born thereafter would be free once they turned eighteen. Similar mechanisms were used in some of the northern states when they gave up slavery. Lincoln of course was always in favor of compensated emancipation, even in the last year of the war. Any challenge to slavery, other than some efforts at transplanting blacks to Liberia, was a dead issue in the South, and too many abolitionists often seemed to hate the slave master more than they loved the slave. There is much for contemporary Americans to learn from that sad chapter, but all the wrong lessons of hate and racial animosity seem to be the only ones being taught these days.
All good points Don. Thank you.
I don’t think the comparison at all stupid. I rather think it quite pertinent. In essence, We fought the Civil War over who would define “personhood”, the Federal or State government. Abortion mostly deals with…who defines “personhood”, Federal or State government. Abolitionists and pro-lifers aim for all human beings to be recognized as persons, thus worthy of being free and alive. “Pro-slavers” and “pro-choicers” aim to define human beings as persons only if they were white or emancipated blacks, or if they have/had been born.
While we haven’t (yet) suffered a Civil War over the fight, we HAVE seen blood shed by legally recognized persons. I think the parallels quite distinct.