"America’s Founding was not defined by slavery and white supremacy—quite the contrary."

Arthur Milikh writes in City Journal,

For decades, much of academia, the liberal activist class, and the public school system have operated on the premise that America is fundamentally racist. The latest manifestation of this outlook is the 1619 Project, rolled out last month by the New York Times. Claiming that “anti-black racism runs in the very DNA of this country,” it “aims to reframe the country’s history” by making 1619—the year slavery was first introduced by the British to Virginia—the year of “our true founding.”

This narrative is akin to the Jacobins’ alteration of the calendar to make their revolution the decisive turning point in human history. Just as they would save France from the monarchy, so, too, will the Times save America from white supremacy. The Times encourages public schools to adopt an accompanying curriculum that spreads the 1619 Project’s message to young Americans. Its goal is to brand our founding documents—the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution—as immoral and thus unworthy of our allegiance.

To make America’s Founding contemptible, one must hide, ignore, and distort the Founders’ writings and thoughts. Irresponsibly omitted from this narrative is the fact that not a single major Founder endorsed slavery. On the contrary, the Founders unambiguously saw slavery as evil. George Washington said, “there is not a man living who wishes more sincerely than I do, to see a plan adopted for the abolition of it,” and Thomas Jefferson’s original draft of the Declaration of Independence calls the slave trade an “execrable commerce” and an affront “against human nature itself.” Gouverneur Morris called slavery a “nefarious institution” and “the curse of heaven,” and John Jay said, “It is much to be wished that slavery may be abolished. . . . To contend for our own liberty, and to deny that blessing to others, involves an inconsistency not to be excused.”

Franklin, Madison, Adams, and Hamilton spoke strongly against the institution of slavery, too. One could argue that these are merely hypocritical statements that the Founders did not believe, but they faced no pressure to dissimulate, whether in their private or public writing. Nor do any statements exist from the Founders elaborating a defense of human inequality or arguing that natural rights are based on race. Slavery was a prerevolutionary inheritance that the principles of the American Revolution unequivocally condemned. The Founders were self-consciously creating a nation based on natural human equality, a foundation intended to overturn the old world’s supremacist theories—both feudalism and monarchy. The Revolution’s equality principle, they hoped, formed the basis on which America would eventually abolish slavery.

...Ample evidence shows that the Founders wished for an end to slavery, contrary to the Times’s assertion that “neither Jefferson nor most of the founders intended to abolish slavery.” John Adams argued, “every measure of prudence, therefore, ought to be assumed for the eventual total extirpation of slavery from the United States.” He hoped that the inequalities of the Old World would eventually disappear. In 1778, Jefferson introduced a bill in the Virginia legislature banning the importation of slavery, which he hoped would lead to the institution’s “final eradication.”

Not only are the Founders evil, the narrative goes—so, too, is their major achievement, the Constitution. As the Times writes, “The framers carefully constructed a document that preserved and protected slavery without ever using the word.” Yet the facts point to the contrary. The Founders laid the constitutional ground for abolishing slavery. One example is Article I, Section 9, Clause 1, which states that Congress could prohibit importation of slaves starting in 1808. On the first day that this clause became operative, Congress passed, and President Thomas Jefferson signed, this prohibition into law. Congress took additional steps to restrict slavery. It passed the Northwest Ordinance of 1787, which outlawed slavery in the Northwest Territories. Seven years later, Congress made it illegal to build ships for the purpose of the slave trade.

...Black Americans have been treated in a grossly unjust fashion throughout our history. But the Declaration and the Constitution themselves, according to the Founders’ intentions, contain the principles through which justice would come, as Fredrick Douglass and, later, Martin Luther King, Jr. believed. These countervailing facts and statements, should produce a more balanced view of America’s Founding. Why, then, are they so thoroughly and carefully avoided by today’s narrative-creators, who intend to persuade through distortion?

Rather than indulge in recrimination, we should follow Lincoln in seeking “to bind up the nation’s wounds” and “to achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace, among ourselves.” Manipulating the next generation to disdain the American Founding will not accomplish this.

Read more here.