1619: A Different View

“Every record has been destroyed or falsified, every book rewritten, every picture has been repainted, every statue and street building has been renamed, every date has been altered. And the process is continuing day by day and minute by minute. History has stopped. Nothing exists except an endless present in which the Party is always right.” George Orwell, 1984. This is the goal of the unhinged liberal socialist left. This is step by step, word for word, action for action, exactly what occurred in 1920’s-1940’s Germany as the National Socialist Workers Party, the Nazis, took over until getting stomped by the Allies. Please read:

In 2019, the leftist leaning rag NY Times began pushing a revisionist program view of American History titled, “The 1619 Project.” The goal was the re-examination  of the legacy of slavery in the United States and was timed for the 400th anniversary of the arrival in America of the first enslaved people from West Africa. Yes, Africans did arrive in the American colonies in 1619, but not as slaves. 

As a longtime retired educator as a teacher and as an administrator on the elementary level, it was my goal to teach the truth, especially regarding American History. Now with the woke generation of the unhinged, radical, liberal left wanting to destroy our history, and indoctrinating students to hate the country, my face would be on the cover of ultra-liberal publications, while the dregs of the bootlicking, cosmopolitan biased, cultural supremacist mainstream media would rake me over the coals. Sometimes the truth is very hard to swallow.

As a case in point, the unhinged left placed a target on the back of General Robert Edward Lee, Commanding the Army of Northern Virginia during the Civil War. For those of you who are unaware, the Army of N. Virginia fought for the Confederate States of America. Senator Joe Biden (D-DEL) voted to restore the Confederate general’s citizenship early in his Senate career. In 1975, Biden joined a unanimous Senate vote to restore citizenship to Lee, 110 years after the Virginian surrendered his Army of Northern Virginia to the Union Lt. General and future President Ulysses S. Grant. There were ten nays in the House of Representatives, which came after a discovery in the National Archives that Lee’s post-Civil War Oath of Allegiance, a necessary condition for his citizenship, had never reached President Andrew Johnson. Lee’s 1865 request for citizenship was approved by Grant, but it did not include the oath of allegiance to the U.S., which was necessary for a pardon and his citizenship. During the Civil War, the citizenship of Confederates had been revoked.

By the way, since the United States Military Academy at West Point was organized in 1802, General Lee, Class of 1829, did not receive a single demerit during his four years as a cadet. During the Mexican-American War, Lee was a lieutenant in the engineers, which means he was in construction and located mines for removal. He was promoted to captain. Lee was also the commandant at West Point for two years. He upgraded the curriculum and the dormitories, which until then only have stoves for heat. When the Civil War broke out, President Abraham Lincoln offered Lee command of the Federal Army. Lee unhappily declined, stating that he had to fight for his country, Virginia. In prior times if you asked someone what country they were from, they would say the state. Lee was also against slavery.

As for the question of slavery, in 1619, approximately 19 Africans arrived in Jamestown, Virginia. They were transported by representatives of the Dutch East India Company, who had seized them from a Spanish slave ship. While under Spanish control, African slaves were usually Baptized under orders from the Crown. During that time period, it was an English custom to acknowledge that Baptized Christians were exempt from slavery. Therefore, the colonies treated these Africans as indentured servants. They joined about 1,000 English indentured servants already in the colony.

In 1664, the Dutch brought the first slaves to what became French Guyana. The French regained control of Guyana in 1674. It is generally believed the first group of African slaves was brought by Dutch settlers who migrated from Tobago from as early as the mid-17th century, which is about the same time Irish political prisoners were sent to the American Colonies. By the 1660s, the enslaved population numbered about 2,500. During auctions, slaves were supposed to jump and wave their arms and legs. They shamelessly treated as dumb animals. As plantations expanded on the coast of Guyana, more enslaved Africans were brought from West Africa in ships owned by the West India Company. Africans who worked the fields were considered the lowest group, even though some of them had special skills. There were the factory workers who worked in the sugar-boiling process. Higher up were the artisan people, such as blacksmiths, carpenters and masons, who were often hired out by the planters. And the caste system further divided the slaves by the color tone of their skin. The Caribbean islands became immensely valuable with the development of sugar as a cash crop, as opposed to the South’s “King Cotton.” Sugar was produced on extraordinarily brutal plantations using slave labor. Their working conditions were brutal. Harsh conditions, dangerous animals, little medical care, brutal guards, and backbreaking labor led many to die in them. If someone in the mill was grinding sugar and their arm got caught under the gristwheel, their arms were chopped off, in order to prevent the wheel from jamming. The mortality rate was high, and the dismal conditions led to more than half a dozen slave rebellions. So, in the mid 17th Century it appears that slavery possibly did not burst onto the American Colonies. Furthermore, slaves in the United States had a walk through the park compared to the people in Guyana.

Due to the fact that the Africans were considered indentured servants, they were freed after a prescribed period, given the use of land and supplies by their former masters. No mention of this by the unhinged, orthodox, extremist liberal left demanding reparations. For example, Anthony Johnson (1600-1670) arrived in Virginia in 1621 from Angola as an indentured servant. He became free and a property owner, eventually buying and owning slaves himself. The shift of Africans from indentured servitude to slaves did not happen overnight.

In the mid 17th century, there were no laws regarding slavery in Virginia’s history. But, in 1640, a Virginia court sentenced African John Punch to slavery after he attempted to flee his indentured service. The two whites with whom he attempted to flee with were sentenced to an additional year of their indentured servitude, and three years’ service to the colony. This marked the first court sanctioning of legalized slavery in the English colonies and was one of the first legal distinctions made between Europeans and Africans.

What is overlooked is that the first true slaves in the American colonies were children from Ireland in 1619. Additionally, the Irish slave trade truly began when King James II sold 30,000 Irish political prisoners as slaves to the New World. His Proclamation of 1625 required Irish political prisoners be sent overseas and sold to English settlers in the West Indies. By the mid 1600s, the Irish were the main slaves sold to Antigua and Montserrat. At that time, 70% of the total population of Montserrat were Irish slaves. Additional Irish slaves were sent by Oliver Cromwell and King Charles I, totaling over 500K. It seems that Irish slaves were less expensive than African slaves and were treated more harshly at that time.

By 1830, there were approximately 319,599 free blacks in the United States. Approximately 13.7 per cent of the total black population was free. A significant number of these free blacks were the owners of slaves themselves. The 1830 US Census lists 3,775 free Blacks who owned a total of 12,760 slaves.

One of the less well known aspects of the history of slavery is how many and how often non-whites owned and traded slaves in early America. Free black slave holders could be found at one time or another “in each of the thirteen original states and later in every state that countenanced slavery,” historian R. Halliburton Jr. observed. Black people bought and sold other Black people.William Ellison (April 1790 – December 5, 1861) was a very wealthy Black plantation owner and cotton gin manufacturer who lived in South Carolina. According to the 1860 census (in which his surname was listed as “Ellerson”), he owned 63 Black slaves, making him the largest of the 171 Black slaveholders in South Carolina, but far from the largest overall slave holder in the state.

According to historian Tiya Miles, a professor at Michigan, the number of enslaved people held by Cherokees was around 600 at the start of the 19th century and around 1,500 at the time of westward removal in 1838-9. Furthermore, Creeks, Choctaws, and Chickasaws, held around 3,500 slaves, across the three nations, as the 19th century began. Slavery inched its way slowly into the American way of life. I wonder if Elizabeth Warren was aware of this historical tidbit of her “people!”

Moreover, the American History that is being taught in American schools today portrays anyone who lived in the South during the Antebellum Period, which was from the late 18th century until the start of the Civil War in April, 1861, and was marked by the economic growth of the South through an agricultural industry, as a slave owner . The schools are saying that everyone owned at least one slave, which is absolutely incorrect. It was expensive to own one slave, while most of the land owners were poor dirt, barefoot farmers. Less than one-tenth of Southerners owned at least one slave, while half of that 1/10 owned more than one. From a pure economic standpoint, it was expensive to feed, clothe, house and provide medical care for another person.

What’s interesting is that any Democrat worth their salt should look up these following Democratic people: Edward Rutledge, Preston Brooks, Roger Taney, Fernando Wood, Nathan Bedford Forrest, Woodrow Wilson, Franklin Roosevelt, Robert Byrd, Lyndon Baines Johnson and George Wallace. It’s easy to make the guess that the aforementioned names are people who were Democrat. What is more interesting is that one person signed the Declaration of Independence. Another was a pro-slavery Democrat from South Carolina who nearly caned to death an abolitionist Republican Senator from Massachusetts. You have a Supreme Court Chief Justice, three Presidents and a Governor from Alabama, who stated, “Segregation now, segregation forever.” The Senator from West Virginia who mentored Bubba and Hillary Clinton, was a Klansman. And speaking of the KKK, the first Wizard is listed here. The Klan, with support of Southern Democrats, suppressed voting rights of Blacks and Republicans in the South through violence and intimidation during the elections of 1868. And included in this group is a former Mayor of NYC who threatened that New York would succeed from the Union if the 13th Amendment was ratified when he was a member of The Congress.

Additionally, during the tenure of President Wilson, the country saw a rebirth of the Klan after Wilson endorsed the 1915 film “Birth of a Nation,” to go along with the enforcement of the Jim Crow laws in Washington, DC. And speaking of the Klan, let’s not forget about the 1924 Democratic Convention at NYC’s Madison Square Garden, called “The Klanbake,” as they marched down Broadway. Let’s not forget FDR’s internment camps, such as Manzanar, for American citizens of Japanese descent during WWII. Furthermore, Pelosi’s father, Thomas Ludwig John D’Alesandro Jr., as the Mayor of Baltimore, dedicated many statues celebrating the Confederacy throughout the city. There is further evidence of the Democrat deceit and skullduggery about being the party for minorities.

Since the unhinged radical extremists of the socialist, liberal left are demanding reparations for something they never had to experience, the descendants of the alleged slave owners cannot be held responsible for the sins of the past. 

The last thing to consider is that no one alive today either was a slave or slave owner. What will be the determining factors as to whom gets paid by whom, how much and where does the reparations come from? One person who should be asked is CNN’s own Anderson Cooper. His great, great, great grandfather, tycoon Corneilus Vanderbilt, owned a plantation in Alabama with a plethora of slaves; including former FLOTUS Michelle Obama’s great, great, great grandfather. Obviously, Cooper wasn’t alive as Vanderbilt owned slaves. Is he responsible for what occurred? No! A person from 150 years ago cannot be judged by today’s standards. Their accomplishments cannot be forgotten.

If there are to be reparations, the families of the 450,000 Union soldiers who gave their lives for the abolition of slavery should be first in line. Second in line should be the Union soldiers who received wounds, which resulted in amputations that affected the remainder of their lives. Third in line should be the Union soldiers who were psychologically damaged, or PTSD before it was identified, for the remainder of their lives. Next, the Federal Government should be reimbursed for the execution of the war. Lastly, the descendants of President Abraham Lincoln should also receive reparations for the assassination of the President. Then take on additional reparations for the affects of the Civil War on Mary Todd Lincoln and her children. Finally, Robert Lincoln should receive reparations for all the horrors he experienced in his life.

I mentioned that I was an elementary school teacher. I taught fourth grade for ten years. The history curriculum was about New York City. The book was 100 pages dripping wet. Nevertheless, I stretched it out until the chapter regarding the 1863 NYC Draft Riots presented me an opportunity to teach The Civil War during Black History Month. I gave out reports by drawing papers from a hat. One of my kids picked Jefferson Davis. The kid had no idea who he was. Well his mother did and I got called to the office the following morning to meet with the principal and the parent. That mother called me all kinds of names, including a “southern racist.” I told her that I was from south Queens, ten minutes from the school. That didn’t sit very well. I explained how Davis was picked and she yelled more saying it was rigged. The principal, who was tough, fair and whom I respected, told the parent that her son will do the report on Davis. End of story.

By the way, the school was 99.9% Black. The parent was Black. The principal was Black. Fair is fair. Remember, you cannot pick and choose your history. History cannot be erased, because it already happened. History cannot be dismissed, because it already happened. History can be a great objective teaching tool, because it already happened.