Students in All 50 States Being Taught Revolutionary War Was Fought To Promote Slavery

The New York Times’ 1619 Project — a curriculum that makes the fantastical claim that a primary cause of the Revolutionary War was the colonists’ desire to protect slavery — has been adopted in 3,500 classrooms across all 50 states. For this reason, some of the nation’s most renowned historians have called for The Times to correct this and other factual errors. The Pulitzer Center, which is partnering with The Times to promote 

The 1619 Project, recounted in its 2019 annual report, “Good journalism, innovative educational resources, and deep community engagement are absolutely essential to bridging the divisions that threaten to rip our democracy apart. It is this belief that has driven the Pulitzer Center for the last 14 years.” 

Nikole Hannah-Jones, The Times’ lead writer on the project, argued in her introductory essay to it, “The United States is a nation founded on both an ideal and a lie. Our Declaration of Independence, approved on July 4, 1776, proclaims that ‘all men are created equal’ and ‘endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights.’ “But the white men who drafted those words did not believe them to be true for the hundreds of thousands of black people in their midst.” 

Hannah-Jones went on to contend “that the year 1619 is as important to the American story as 1776.” That was the year, she explained, that British colonists in Jamestown purchased 20 to 30 enslaved Africans. 

“Conveniently left out of our founding mythology is the fact 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,” Hannah-Jones wrote. 

The reporter is honest enough to admit that slavery in America predated the nation’s founding by over 150 years. Completing this poll entitles you to our news updates free of charge. You may opt out at anytime. You also agree to our Privacy Policy and Terms of Use. However, she alleges by 1776, Britain “had grown deeply conflicted over its role in the barbaric institution.” There were calls to abolish slavery, which “would have upended the economy of the colonies, in both the North and the South,” Hannah-Jones wrote. 

Slavery was abolished in Great Britain in 1833 — over a half-century after the founding of the United States. Also working completely against Hannah-Jones’ narrative is the fact that almost all the states north of the Mason-Dixon Line had voted to abolish slavery by the end of the Revolutionary War in 1783.

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