Designed to Distract, Divide, Yoke, and Disempower — Beware Charlatans’ Coloring of History

The Times of New York — a rag that contributed to the slaughter, maiming and birth defects of millions of Iraqis and millions more in U.S. aggression across the Middle East — has published and distributed to impressionable school children a pack of lies, twisted facts, and self-serving drivel drafted by sycophantic messengers. And it needs to be countered.

 

A

uthentic Repository

Valley City, North Dakota-born James M. “Jim” McPherson is an American Civil War historian, and is the George Henry Davis ‘86 Professor Emeritus of United States History at Princeton University. His Bachelor of Arts was taken at Gustavus Adolphus College (St. Peter, Minnesota) and his PhD at Johns Hopkins University. His major awards include the Pulitzer Prize, Lincoln Prize, and Pritzker Military Library Literature Award.

His major published works include The Struggle for Equality; Battle Cry of Freedom; Abraham Lincoln and the Second American Revolution; For Cause and Comrades: Why Men Fought in the Civil War; Crossroads of Freedom: Antietam 1862; Fields of Fury: a history of the American Civil War for children; This Mighty Scourge.

Attributed

“There are all kinds of myths that a people has about itself, some positive, some negative, some healthy and some not healthy. I think that one job of the historian is to try to cut through some of those myths and get closer to some kind of reality. So that people can face their current situation realistically, rather than mythically. I guess that's my sense of what a historian ought to do”— James M. McPherson, An exchange with a Civil War historian

Cutting through Deliberate Misinformation

S

ober Well-informed thoughts Worthy of Pondering

Professor James McPherson in interview with World Socialist Web Site on “Project 1619”

The account is

• Disturbingly narrow;
• “Unbalanced, one-sided,” and
• Lacking in “context and perspective on the complexity of slavery, which (any serious student of history knows) was clearly (and) obviously not an exclusively American institution.”

Question: “You are one of the leading historians of the Civil War and slavery” and “the Times did not approach you?”

Professor McPherson: No, they didn’t. (Emphasis added)

A

uthoritative sources uninvited

WSWS: We’ve spoken to a lot of historians, leading scholars in the fields of slavery, the Civil War, the American Revolution, and we’re finding that none of them were approached. Although the Times doesn’t list its sources, what do you think, in terms of scholarship, this 1619 Project is basing itself on?

Professor McPherson: I don’t really know. One of the people they approached is Kevin Kruse, who wrote about Atlanta. He’s a colleague, a professor here at Princeton. He doesn’t quite fit the mold of the other writers. But I don’t know who advised them, and what motivated them to choose the people they did choose.

Dubious DNA charge: Project 1619’s leader and lead writer anchors the tome on the thesis that “anti-black racism runs in the very DNA of this country” (America).

Professor McPherson: It does not make very much sense to me.[Emphasis added]

I suppose she’s using DNA metaphorically. She argues that racism is the central theme of American history. It is certainly part of the history. But again, I think it lacks context, lacks perspective on the entire course of slavery and how slavery began and how slavery in the United States was hardly unique. And racial convictions, or “anti-other” convictions, have been central to many societies.

“But the idea that racism is a permanent condition …, that’s just not true. And it also doesn’t account for the countervailing tendencies in American history as well— because opposition to slavery, and opposition to racism, has also been an important theme in American history.”

R

oots in America’s First Revolution

Abolitionists “viewed the Declaration of Independence as sacred scripture…

Professor McPherson: So did Lincoln. It was basic to the Republican Party. [emphasis added]

Professor McPherson: The American Revolution was first and foremost a war for independence. But there was also a more social dimension to the American Revolution, and a movement toward greater democracy, though they didn’t like to use that term. And it coincided with, and partially caused, the abolition of slavery in half of the states, the northern states, as well as a manumission movement among Virginia slaveholders.

It was not a revolution in the sense of the French Revolution, which followed it by a decade, or the Soviet Revolution of 1917, but that doesn’t mean it didn’t accomplish anything.

The accomplishments were more political than social and economic, but nevertheless there were some social and economic dimensions — progressive dimensions, I would say.

Out of the Revolution came an anti-slavery ethos, which never disappeared, even though the period from the 1790s to the 1830s was a quiet period in the antislavery movement—though there was the Missouri Compromise of 1820.

Nevertheless, the anti-slavery ethos that did come out of the Revolution was a subterranean movement that erupted in the 1830s and shaped American political discourse.

A

bolition, Abolitionists 1700s on

Professor McPherson:  From the Quakers in the 18th century, on through the abolitionists in the antebellum, to the radical Republicans in the Civil War and Reconstruction, to the NAACP which was an interracial organization founded in 1909, down through the Civil Rights movement in the 1950s and 1960s — there have been a lot of whites who have fought against slavery and racial discrimination, and against racism. This has been true “almost from the beginning of American history.” And this is what is “missing from this [Project 1619] perspective.”

Slaveholders, Non-slaveholders

Professor McPherson: In the parts of the South where slavery was a minimal factor—in the Appalachian Mountain chain; for example in western Virginia and in eastern Tennessee where there are very few slaves and very few slaveholders, a lot of the whites did not want to fight for the Confederacy, to risk their lives for what they saw as a slaveholders’ war.

There were “strong currents of unionism in those parts of the South. In fact, West Virginia becomes a union state—one-third of the state of Virginia—in the Civil War.

A

 Counterrevolution

Professor McPherson on “counterrevolution of 1861”: The slaveholders saw the triumph of the Republicans in 1860 as a potential revolution that would abolish slavery. That’s how the Republicans got votes in 1860. They saw Abraham Lincoln and his Republican Party as just as bad as the abolitionists.

[Throughout the 1850s and through their domination of the Democratic Party …, slaveholders in the United States controlled the government. … In fact, the principal reason for secession in 1861 was their loss of control of the United States government, for the first time ever.]

“In order to preempt (the) revolution that would have overthrown slavery in the South, they (slaveholders) undertook … a ‘preemptive counterrevolution,’ which was secession.

“But secession, ironically, brought on the very revolution that it attempted to preempt, through the war: the abolition of slavery.”

T

he War

Professor McPherson: “while the official motivation was preservation of the Union; that increasingly became merged with the destruction of slavery, which had launched the attack on the flag in the first place. (You cannot) really separate those two motives.

While the emphasis originally was on fighting for the Union, fighting for the United States, fighting to defend the flag, increasingly that became bound up with a conviction that the only way the North was going to win the war, preserve the Union, and prevent further, future rebellions against the Union, was to destroy slavery, which had brought the war on in the first place.

Professor McPherson: The Civil War accomplished three things.

• First, it preserved the United States as one nation.

• Second, it abolished the institution of slavery. Those two were, in effect, permanent achievements. The United States is still a single nation. Slavery doesn’t exist anymore.

• Third …, the Civil War accomplished “a potential, and partial, transformation, in the status of the freed slaves, who with the 14th and 15th amendments achieved, on paper at least, civil and political equality.

…The struggle ever since 1870, when the 15th amendment was ratified, has been how to transform this achievement on paper into real achievement in the society.”

L

incoln and Emancipation

Professor McPherson: Lincoln became increasingly convinced, as many of the Union soldiers did, that the Union could not be preserved if that disturbing factor—slavery—remained.

By the summer of 1862 Lincoln had become convinced … that he could never achieve his primary goal—the preservation of the Union—without getting rid of slavery. And this was the first step toward doing that.

“He had already drafted the Emancipation Proclamation, and he was preparing the way for it. …”

In what turned out to be Lincoln’s final speech, “he came out in favor of qualified suffrage for freed slaves, those who could pass a literacy test and those who were veterans of the Union army.”

“

Knowledge will forever govern ignorance; and a people who mean to be their own governors must arm themselves with the power which knowledge gives.”

attributed to

“Father of the Constitution” (for his critical role in drafting and promotion the U.S. Constitution and Bill of Rights)

Co-author of “The Federalist Papers”

Co-founder of the Democratic-Republican Party

Fifth United States Secretary of State (1801-1809)

Fourth President of the United States

James Madison Jr.

(Virginia Democratic-Republican, 1809–1817)

Sources

Wikipedia

James M. McPherson https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_M._McPherson

World Socialist Web Site “Opposition to slavery has also been an important theme in American history”: An interview with historian James McPherson on the New York Times’ 1619 Project

By Tom Mackaman November 14, 2019: The World Socialist Web Site spoke with James McPherson, professor emeritus of history at Princeton University, on the New York Times’ 1619 Project. McPherson is the author of dozens of books and articles, including the Pulitzer Prize-winning Battle Cry of Freedom, widely regarded as the authoritative account of the Civil War. https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2019/11/14/mcph-n14.html

James Madison https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Madison

Brainy Quote https://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/james_madison_135446

Insight Beyond Today’s News, CLB - © All Rights Reserved