Thursday, January 6, 2022

Do you know when the Civil War started?


 

Nikole Hannah Jones forgot when the Civil War started, claiming it began in 1865 rather than 1860.

This might be considered an honest mistake except that her Project 1619 is riddled such mistakes, many of them deliberate – such as the actual number of Africans transported to the United States during the slave trade years.

Most of the mistakes seem calculated to enhance the questionable validity of project itself.

Project 1619 incorporates every fringe radical wacko Theory from the last two centuries that it is a surprise that it gets any facts right – as it rarely does.

This of course has translated into critical race Theory and so that is equally a barbaric Distortion of History.

Slavery did not start in 1619 in what was to become the United States, nor did 12 million blacks get shipped to the United States from when it did start until end of the Civil War – which started in 1860. Estimates suggest around one million came to the United States through the International Slave Trade before the United States and Great Britain outlawed it in 1808 – contrary to the claims made by the writers of Project 1619.

Although Washington and Jefferson were slave owners, they advocated that the international slave trade be halted at the time of United States Independence but negotiated for a firm date in 1908 – defying the lie told in the 1619 Project that the United States feared intervention of the British. Both nations outlawed the trade at the same time.

There were just shy of five million slaves in 1985, most of whom had been born in the United States. Most of the blacks brought west went to Central and South America.

White Europeans didn’t start slavery nor were they the worst offenders. Black kings in Africa were selling their brothers and sisters to the Arabs for centuries prior the Europeans getting wind of it and continued long after the Europeans stopped.

These black kings in Africa were actually outraged when Western Europe and the United States banned the trade, since the economy of Africa did not just depend on selling black people but thrived because of it. Once the west outlawed the trade, whole nations went into massive economic decline. While the South in America had cotton as its biggest export. Africa exported black people.

Although abolitionists spurred the nation for a violent overthrow of Southern slavery, very few actually did anything positive after it was accomplished, largely abandoning freed slaves to their own resource, many of whom returned to their former Southern masters.

Project 1619 claims north and south benefited economically from the slave trade – which is not exactly true. The north resented the free labor slaves gave the south and forced the south to sell its cotton to northern mills. Britain, France and Spain ached to get southern cotton directly – which might have happened during the war had not the north blocked shipping out of the south.

Most of the U.S. federal budget was based on these exorbitant tariffs, but few in the north profited significantly – which was one of the motives for enticing the south into the war. The south’s poor farming practices required them to find new farm land, pushing them to expand slavery outside the south – which Lincoln and the north resisted and eventually stopped – another reason for the war.

Despite heavy propaganda from the Abolitionists – and inaccurate books such as Uncle Toms Cabin, most slaves in the south refused to rise up, as the murderous John Brown wanted them to. Very few uprisings occurred in the south, and nearly all of those that did happen failed.

This came about largely for the same reasons workers even today do not leave jobs they had. Regardless of how inadequate, slaves were fed, housed, clothing and taken care of medically, and were reluctant to lose these things.

Brutality did occur in the south, but it was not as rampant as the Abolitionists then and now claim. If for no other reason, slaves were expensive to obtain and maintain, and most masters could ill afford to mistreat them – the way most would not mistreat a horse.

Some masters did not house or feed their slaves well. The majority did – for the same reasons they were reluctant to abuse them. Contrary to the fiction of Project 1619, most slaves tended to live in better conditions than their counterparts of wage labor in the north. Many returned to their former plantations to work after the war, even continued to take care of their former masters.

Conditions and treatment varied from master to master. Except for the relatively few major plantations that had 50 or more slaves, masters and slaves generally lived with the same conditions. Most farmers couldn’t afford slaves, and those that did as few as three or four, many masters worked side by side on small farms with their slaves. Many lived in the same house – defying the myth of poor housing and starvation diets that Project 1619 and others claim. There were plantations in which this happened. But for the most part masters and slaves – on the majority of southern farms lived with the same conditions and ate the same food.

Yes, slavery was morally wrong – and more than a little hypocritical in a nation that professed all people to be equal. Yes, racism did exist, not just in the deep south, but in the north as well. Yes, it needed to end, and would not have ended unless the north intervened – regardless of the fact that slave system was deteriorating well before the war put an end to it.

Yet for all the advocates of black revisionist history, it was Western tradition that brought about the end of slavery. Liberal thinking that Jefferson and Madison proposed in the United States and had come to them through a tradition of Western European reforms made up the foundation upon which liberation of slavery was built.

While some great black leaders helped guide Lincoln and others, and some former slaves fought side by side with union soldier, it was white blood – many immigrant Irish and German – that brought about the eventual collapse of slavery.

The theories we get from Project 1619 that have appeared in the pages of the New York Times are as outlandish and unsupported by fact as the whacko theories about CIA brainwashing and UFO annal probes.

Jones, the main author of this bag of trash not only doesn't document her stuff but she completely distorts history in order to make her case. She just doesn’t just mix up facts as to when the war starts, but she and her cohorts misrepresent facts in order to recreate history entirely. Fortunately, there are still enough surviving scholars to refute almost everything in this pathetic effort at revisionism.

The danger of course is that such documents published by a so-called reputable New York Times gives the whacko Theory validity they don't deserve.

 

 

 


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