The “1619 Project”, Six Years On

Commentators from across the political spectrum have long looked to the American Founding not for its historical insights, but as a political weapon to be wielded in the present day. Unfortunately, politicized accounts of the Founding not only neglect historical accuracy, but also cultivate alternative political narratives about the past, often intentionally so.

This was the stated purpose of the New York Times’s 1619 Project. When it launched exactly 6 years ago today on August 14, 2019, the newspaper boldly declared that the Project “[aimed] to reframe the country’s history, understanding 1619 as our true founding” in the place of 1776 by constructing a new “national narrative” about a country allegedly founded on slavery. This line proved a bit too candid for the newspaper’s readers and immediately attracted backlash. The Times’s editors later stealth-edited it off their website to dampen the criticism, but the argument has remained a central theme of the 1619 Project ever since. Drawing upon this theme, 1619 Project creator Nikole Hannah-Jones doubled down on her political aims in the present day: a crusade against American capitalism, rooted in calls for income redistribution and a $13 trillion slavery reparations program.

Hannah-Jones framed her argument by attempting to recast the American Revolution as a struggle between an anti-slavery British Empire and pro-slavery Colonists in North America. She opened her case by declaring “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.” The impetus for this separation allegedly arose from economics. “By 1776, Britain had grown deeply conflicted over its role in the barbaric institution,” she continued, with “growing calls to abolish the slave trade” coming from London. “This would have upended the economy of the colonies, in both the North and the South,” Hannah-Jones concluded. Indeed, it was the “wealth of slavery” and its “dizzying profits” that allegedly “empowered” the Americans to challenge the British Empire.

Slavery certainly intersected with the American Founding, just not as Hannah-Jones described. Instead, the institution cut across both sides of the conflict. The American Revolutionaries included several prominent anti-slavery men among their ranks, among them Benjamin Franklin, James Otis, and Thomas Paine. Drawing upon the philosophical principles of the Revolution and slavery’s contradictions with the same ideals, almost every northern colony abolished the institution by the end of the 18th century. So did the new state of Vermont, by constitutional decree in 1777, as well as the future states of the Midwest under the Northwest Ordinance of 1787.

It is true that the Founders also included slaveowners, among them leading figures such as George Washington and Thomas Jefferson. Yet both men spoke out against the slave trade by declaring it a barbarous imposition on the New World from the Old—a direct contradiction of Hannah-Jones’s claims. We can still examine the inconsistencies and hypocrisies over slavery in Washington and Jefferson’s lives, but there is no evidence that an economic defense of this hideous institution motivated them to the Revolutionary cause, as Hannah-Jones claimed. Indeed, Jefferson drafted a protest against Britain in 1774 that stated the exact opposite: “The abolition of domestic slavery is the great object of desire in those colonies, where it was unhappily introduced in their infant state.” That same year, Washington petitioned the Crown for “an entire Stop for ever put to such a wicked cruel and unnatural Trade” in slaves.

British forces split on the issue as well. Sir Guy Carleton, the British commander who led the withdrawal of the Crown’s forces from New York City in 1783, gave cover for more than 3,000 slaves by transporting them to freedom in Nova Scotia. One would be hard pressed to reconcile other British officials to Hannah-Jones’s narrative, though, and she tripped more than once while trying to do so. Attempting to salvage her narrative from criticism, she made a hero out of Lord Dunmore, the last Colonial governor of Virginia who, in November 1775, made a last-ditch effort to reclaim the colony for the Crown by offering freedom to the slaves of rebellious plantation owners in exchange for joining his militia. Hannah-Jones omitted the fact that Dunmore exempted loyalist slaveowners from his decree—as well as the fact that Dunmore himself owned a large plantation outside of the capital of Williamsburg. In a further complication to her original argument, Hannah-Jones attempted to claim that George Washington only converted to the Revolutionary cause after taking umbrage at Dunmore’s order. In reality, Washington was appointed commander of the Continental Army some five months earlier on June 15, 1775.

In a further complication to Hannah-Jones’s claims, the main anti-slavery voices in British Parliament, including Charles James Fox and Edmund Burke, sided with the rebellious American Colonists. After losing the war, Banastre Tarleton, Lord Cornwallis’s famous and feared cavalry commander, took a seat in Parliament as a leading pro-slavery voice and successfully blocked Fox’s bill to abolish the slave trade. History is complicated, and in her zeal to weaponize the past for her own political ends, Hannah-Jones missed basic facts that undermined her story.

This isn’t to say that the political right is immune to misrepresenting and misusing the American Founding for their own pet causes. While these redistributionist causes have a different character focus than slavery reparations, their emphasis is also economic in nature. The “National Conservative” movement of recent years has appointed itself the intellectual champion of tariffs and trade protectionism, coinciding with an aggressive push for these policies by the Trump administration. To bolster their claims, leading “NatCon” figures have crafted a new narrative of their own about the American Founding.

NatCons usually begin their narrative by appealing to the protectionist economic philosophy of Alexander Hamilton, the Federalist Papers co-author and Secretary of the Treasury under President Washington. According to NatCon author Patrick Deneen in his 2023 book Regime Change, “[s]trenuous efforts to encourage and support manufacturing industries should once again be a central and vigorous role of the federal government.” He justifies this position by invoking the legacy of Hamilton, who, he contends, “has been forgotten especially by today’s libertarian cheerleaders of free-market globalism who claim to revere ‘the Founders.’” Deneen’s own historiography is embarrassingly shallow, given the long record of critical engagement with Hamilton by the very same libertarian scholars he dismisses. Many NatCon works begin with the same common refrain. They purport to have rediscovered a “lost” tradition from the American Founding—one that allegedly supports their economic policy agenda today.

In characteristic fashion, a new book edited by arch-protectionist attorney Oren Cass attempts to depict the American Founding as an economic break from the allegedly-British system of free trade. In The New Conservatives, Cass and his co-authors attempt to attach the imprimatur of the Founding Fathers onto Trump’s tariff agenda by alleging that protectionism was hard-baked into our constitutional system. As their story goes, the United States rose to industrial greatness in the 18th and 19th centuries under a new “American System” of economics wherein the government took a proactive role in planning the economy through a package of tariffs, industrial subsidies, and infrastructure projects. The United States allegedly lost its way in the mid-20th century, though, and embraced the British model of free trade. Trump, in their telling, is therefore leading American conservatism back to its founding roots.

Cass and his co-authors have been peddling this narrative for a while; much of what appears in The New Conservatives is recycled material from blog posts and political commentaries on the website of their think tank, American Compass. Their story may be compelling to protectionist politicians such as J.D. Vance and Josh Hawley, but it fails the test of historical accuracy. An illustrative example appears in the work of one of Cass’s chapter authors, Wells King, who asserts that “the very framing of the Constitution emphasized the limited but positive role for government in the American economy.” He presents our founding document as a triumph of Alexander Hamilton’s vision for a proactive industrial policy and claims that early skeptics of these policies, including Jefferson and James Madison, later came around to seeing the economic wisdom of the “American System” approach and the supposed folly of free trade.

In Cass’s other writings, he alleges that early American political figures recognized “the case for free trade emanating from Britain as self-serving ideology, not a universal principle.” In the book, he goes on to portray the “American System” of tariffs as a lost and suppressed historical wisdom that has only been “rediscovered” in the present day. The “New Conservatives,” in this telling, are not breaking from tradition, but rather righting the ship and reasserting the Hamiltonian legacy of the Founding.

As with the 1619 Project, The New Conservatives’s narrative is built on kernels of historical fact. Hamilton was indeed a protectionist of some degree, having articulated these theories in his 1791 Report on Manufactures. Only when Cass et al. push ahead with a modern-day tariff agenda, ignoring complicating historical facts along the way, does it go off the rails. Unmentioned is the fact that Hamilton was also the only major figure among the Founders who adhered to these doctrines. Benjamin Franklin wrote a lengthy defense of free trade, noting, “No nation was ever ruined by trade, even seemingly the most disadvantageous,” and calling trade deficit alarmism a “specious doctrine” of the protectionists. Jefferson, Madison, John Jay, and other leading Founders articulated similar positions.

This was no accident because, unmentioned by Cass et al., freedom from Britain’s mercantilist trade restrictions provided a central impetus for the cause of Independence. Britain’s longstanding Navigation Acts forced the Americans to carry their traded goods on British ships, forced them to pass goods through English ports, and, on some staple products from the Colonies, even restricted their sale to foreign countries. As tensions with the Crown worsened in the 1760s, Britain responded with more aggressive enforcement of these measures and by overlaying them with new and more expansive taxes on traded goods, such as the Sugar Act of 1764 and the Stamp Act of 1765.

These punitive restrictions did not just incense the Colonists—they fostered one of the earliest political articulations of free trade against the protectionist British system, or exactly the opposite of Cass’s narrative. In Jefferson’s 1774 protest against these measures, he declared that “the exercise of a free trade with all parts of the world” was “possessed by the American colonists, as of natural right,” and denounced the mercantilist encroachments of Parliament on the North American trade. An abridged version of these grievances even made their way into the Declaration of Independence, which denounced King George “For cutting off our Trade with all parts of the world” and “For imposing Taxes on us without our Consent.”

Even Hamilton’s protectionist rhetoric from the Report on Manufactures diverged from the policies he implemented through subsequent legislation. His recommended tariff rates to Congress were kept intentionally low, in order to generate revenue rather than to insulate American industries. And his industrial subsidy system of “bounties” failed in Congress.

It is true that many of the Founders were not always faithful to these principles in their political careers. Jefferson imposed an embargo on British goods during his presidency, albeit for military reasons, and Madison signed a tariff bill into law in 1816. But neither did they become protectionists in the vein that Cass et al. suggest. In 1824, US Senator from Kentucky Henry Clay proposed a new protectionist tariff, paired with other federal economic spending measures of the type that National Conservatives now champion as the “true” American vision. Long retired from politics, Madison penned a letter to Clay voicing his opposition to the senator’s “American System” agenda. Jefferson went even further. In one of his last political acts before he died in 1826, the author of the Declaration of Independence drafted a resolution for a friend in the Virginia House of Delegates. It denounced Clay’s tariff system as an unconstitutional usurpation of power, which “we do protest as null and void, and never to be quoted as precedents of right.” His language hearkened back to 1774, when he similarly denounced the Navigation Acts: “[T]he true ground on which we declare these acts void is, that the British parliament has no right to exercise authority over us.”

After botching his history of the Founding era, Cass’s narrative drifts even further into error. He and his coauthors attempt to credit 19th-century economic growth to the protective tariff system. It’s a strange economic argument with more than a few passing similarities to the 1619 Project, which makes similar monocausal attributions of 19th-century growth to the alleged proceeds of plantation-grown cotton. Cass celebrates his claimed cause as a model for tariffs today, whereas Hannah-Jones invokes it as a justification for reparations. In truth, both have badly misread the underlying empirical evidence. Cotton accounted for roughly 6 percent of the United States’s GDP before the Civil War—a sizable sector among many, but nowhere near sufficient to serve as the singular engine of national economic growth. In Cass’s case, he neglects a large academic literature that shows that tariff-responsive industries grew slower than non-traded sectors in the late 19th century. If his assumptions about tariffs were correct, we should find the opposite.

Viewed in light of this record, free trade emerges not as a foreign British doctrine, as Cass et al. claim, but a quintessentially American principle—a principle from which the later generation of Henry Clay departed in his attempt to install a protectionist regime in the United States. It is also no small irony that the central economic issue of the Founding era was free trade in goods—a history omitted by Cass in pursuit of his tariff program today, and supplanted with slavery by Hannah-Jones in pursuit of her reparations proposal. As the 250th anniversary of the Founding approaches, we have much to declutter from the intrusions of 21st-century political agendas into our understanding of the past.