In Nikole Hannah-Jones’s essay from the 1619 project “America Wasn’t a Democracy, Until Black People Made it One,” Jones claims 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,” and in defending that claim she brought up how there were “growing calls” in London for the abolishment of slavery which. If that was true that would have been very detrimental to the economy of the colonies, but Gordon Wood rejects this claim. He does not necessarily claim that there is anything wrong with the factual claims that were presented like the ideas of the United States being founded on a “slavocracy” rather than a democracy, but he does disprove one of her main points on the basis of how the American Revolution had started. He disproves her point by one talking about the chronological order in which the American Revolution had started. Of course the Declaration of Independence is usually looked at as the “start” of the war, but there was talks about independence much before starting with the Stamp Act in 1765. The Dunmore proclamation may have been a tipping point for the war, but in fact the idea of war had already partaken.
It was not of Wood’s intent to disprove the entire essay as seen by his introduction where he wants to help the authors because with false information being provided it might unintentionally bring more damage than harm. This is very true especially today because acts of changing how history is interpreted, it must be entirely factual. In order to teach how slavery had an impact especially before the American Revolution, one must provide information that is not often looked at in todays schools. The 1619 Project continues to be a very large stepping stone for how America looks at race at a historical level. I thought it was very interesting on how Wood provided the information because of this point. He did not want to invalidate the entirety of the 1619 project rather he wanted it to be historically correct in order for it to have maximum impact.
Excellent post. You’re thinking historically by focusing on the chronological order of events, which Wood points out but doesn’t make as explicit as you do here. If Wood is right about the embryonic state of British abolition and the lack of hard evidence, i.e., slaveholders coming out and saying they wanted independence to preserve slavery, is there any evidence to support Hannah-Jones’s larger point about the role of slavery in the American Revolution as a whole?