Mr. Constitution, Douglas V. Gibbs

When the New York Times’ 1619 Project first emerged I paid it little attention.  The pro-constitution community I spend most of my time in reacted to the Critical Race Theory companion immediately with disdain.  I was told about the 1619 Project’s inaccuracies and its conflicted messaging, and without really digging into it I figured the reaction by my contemporaries was likely on target.  Considering its original source, the New York Times, I viewed it as a likely carefully organized, coordinated, and calculated attack on America’s Founding.  Desconstruction of America’s History is a key component in the schemes of Cultural Marxism.  The strategies are designed to convince the inhabitants of this great land that the birthing process of the United States of America is so flawed that somehow that means that all that followed is flawed.  If America began with a great lie, then the whole thing is just one big stinking lie. 

The whole claim by Nikole Hannah-Jones (originator of the 1619 Project) to having an intellectual exchange about the history of slavery in the United States is not only a lie, but it has, as likely hoped for by Hannah-Jones, committed lingering harms to the social fabric of the United States.  In other words, it is doing as it was intended to do.  However, while the harms exist, the reality is that the false narrative has also awakened a sleeping giant.  America’s Christian Community, and those who may or may not share that Christian Faith but believe in the true story of America’s Origin, have rejected the 1619 Project lock, stock, and barrel.

The unfortunate truth of the matter is that Christian public opinion doesn’t matter to these people.  The launch of the New York Times’ 1619 Project magazine feature and sizable advertising budget was not aiming to pierce the Christian community.  It was aimed at sparking outrage in a segment of the population searching for an excuse for outrage, and it gave the progressive leftists in the education industry exactly the hammer they had been waiting for to pound anti-Americanism into the skulls of the younger generations of America’s Youth, many of whom would then rebel against their Christian and patriotic parents with their new found nuggets of alleged truth.

The year, 1619, was chosen carefully.  There is no truth to its claim.  The continent’s first slaves arrived long before 1619, and America’s first slaves began to arrive on the Atlantic Coast in what would become the Thirteen Original Colonies in 1645, not 1619.  The number of African slaves lagged behind the much larger number of European and other indentured servants well into the 18th Century.  But, most folks associate America’s Christian Founding with the arrival of the Pilgrims at Plymouth Rock in 1620.  From the point of view of most Americans who are not neck-deep into American History as would be somebody like me, as far as they are concerned the first Christians arrived in North America, fleeing from religious persecution, in 1620.  So, 1619 was chosen to make it look like slaves were really the reason for America’s founding, not Christianity, because 1619 comes before 1620.  The true year of 1645 was not spectacular enough, nor early enough, to slam home the anti-American agenda that tries to reduce our complex history of slavery into sweeping generalizations and false narratives.

Rather than a composition of history and knowledge, the 1619 Project is nothing more than a series of untruths geared towards progressive activism that aims to alter the education system into a direction that is more in line with their Critical Race Theory commentary.

The 1607 Project: America’s Christian Founding, while designed to correct the narrative we are being fed by the 1619 Project, began as a project simply aiming to educate my readers about the foundational truths regarding America’s Faith in The Creator from the very start.  In fact, when the idea first popped into my head I was aware of the 1619 Project’s existence, but I was relatively unaware of it beyond what I had read by other authors and commentators in my pro-constitution circle.  Then, I came across a database considered to be the “Gold Standard” in the study of slavery according to Henry Louis Gates, Jr., of PBS.⁶  The numbers I was experiencing as I manipulated the slavevoyages.org database⁷ revealed to me a handful of things, including confirming for me the reality that the English Colonies and the United States were actually minor players in the overall scheme of the Atlantic Slave Trade.  Accounts claiming that America’s role was anything larger than what I was seeing were simply false.  I, then, wrote an article titled “Slavery Sleight of Hand” on my blog⁸, and later submitted it to a few of the outlets I write for.  The interest portrayed by the public readership in what I wrote was fascinating.

I wrote:

“https://www.statista.com/chart/19068/trans-atlantic-slave-trade-by-country-region/ shows how many slaves were sent to each region in the New World and Europe during the time period of 1514-1866, this time showing a number 307,000 going to the U.S. (which contradicts the 377,613 number from the previous chart). Something I took notice of on this particular page is that the article opens with the 1619 Project claim that in August of 1619 the first ship with enslaved Africans arrived in what was then the colony of Virginia. Curious, I decided to go to the database Gates at PBS mentioned, which turns out to also be the source for Katharina Buchholz, the author of the statista pieces, to see if I could find out how many slaves was estimated to have arrived in the New World in 1619 as we are being told.  Using the https://www.slavevoyages.org/assessment/estimates part of the slave trade database I left only the U.S. box check-marked, then set the years from 1501 to 1625.  According to the database there were zero slave arrivals in the U.S. portion of North America during that time period.  Kind of contradicts the 1619 Project claim, doesn't it?”

I spent two weeks mulling over what I had learned.  I knew we were being lied to, but even a database used by folks who don’t necessarily agree with me politically provided a big, fat goose egg when it came to the year 1619.

I woke up in the middle of the night on January 16, 2022 and changed the name of my book from “America’s Christian Founding” to “The 1607 Project – America’s Christian Founding.”  The lies perpetuated by Hannah-Jones and the New York Times needed to be addressed directly.  I, then, ordered the book, “The 1619 Project” and decided my book would be more than a simple lesson regarding America’s founding.  We were going to take on the 1619 Project head on.

Whether or not with this book we put to rest the false claims in what has become a mainstream discussion, I ask that the reader use something that the education system has been attempting to dull for quite a while; your critical thinking skills.  As you consume my information simply assess for yourself what seems to be more likely.  The 1607 Project was not designed to teach you what to think, but to encourage the reader to navigate the waters of America’s History, both in terms of its Christian Founding and its brush with slavery.  The aim is to add to the conversation, and to provide some context that may help the reader recognize that much of what we are being taught is simply not true.  America truly was founded on Christian Principles, and the Founding Fathers truly were intellectual and enlightened individuals who saw the slaves in America as being a part of a worldwide tragedy, and saw the Atlantic Slave Trade, and Slavery in America, as something they needed to work towards ending as soon as could logically be done.  In fact, one of the reasons for the American Revolution was to ultimately put a death nail in the coffin of slavery.  After all, when it came to abolition, it was the Americans who led the way in the New World.  America was not only not founded on the sin of slavery, but it was America who led the charge to ending the institution of slavery in The West.

Douglas V. Gibbs