Was America Founded in 1619 or 1776 and What the Historical Record Shows

Every country has a birthday, and the argument over which birthday is correct is never just about the calendar. Choose 1776 and you are saying the nation began with an idea: that all men are created equal and endowed with unalienable rights. Choose 1619 and you are saying it began with a crime: the arrival of the first enslaved Africans in Virginia, with everything after built on that foundation. Both dates are real. The question is which one explains the founding of the United States, and I think the record gives a clear answer.

Let me do this the right way. I will define the terms, state the opposing claim in the form its best defenders would accept, and then answer it in numbered points, with evidence a skeptical reader can check. No sneering. The 1619 argument deserves a serious answer because it raises a serious question, and the answer says something good about the country.

Defining the terms

Three terms matter, and the whole debate turns on keeping them apart.

The founding. In this post, "the founding" means the decision of thirteen British colonies to declare independence in 1776, fight a war to secure it, and then form a government under the Constitution in 1787 to 1789. It is not the whole history of European settlement, which began earlier.

Slavery in America. It began in the colonies before the founding. The year 1619 is the date the first Africans are recorded arriving at Point Comfort in the Virginia colony. Slavery was legal in all thirteen colonies in 1776, though it was far more important to the economy in the South than in the North. That is a fact, and it is a grievous one.

A cause of independence. To say something was "a primary reason" the colonists declared independence is a claim about motive: that the people who made the decision did it, in significant part, in order to protect slavery. That is a different claim from saying slavery existed in America, or that the Founders failed to abolish it, or that the nation benefited from it. Motive is a claim about causation, and causation is a claim a historian can test with documents.

The claim at its strongest

Here is the opposing case as its defenders would want it stated.

The 1619 Project, published by the New York Times Magazine in August 2019, argued that the year 1619, the arrival of enslaved Africans in Virginia, should be regarded as the nation's true founding, and that the legacy of slavery shapes American institutions to this day. In the project's lead essay, the writer Nikole Hannah-Jones said that one of the primary reasons the colonists declared their independence from Britain was to protect the institution of slavery.

The strongest version of the argument has real material. It says: look at the timing. In 1772 a case in London, Somerset v. Stewart, held that a slaveholder could not force an enslaved man out of England. Colonists in the South saw the writing on the wall. In November 1775, Lord Dunmore, the royal governor of Virginia, issued a proclamation offering freedom to enslaved people who left rebel masters and joined the British. Slaveholders in Virginia and elsewhere were enraged. Many of the men who led the Revolution held slaves, and many of the leading rebel colonies were slave societies. Moreover, the Declaration's famous language about equality was written by a man who held many human beings in bondage. Put these facts together, the argument runs, and you can see why slavery was a motive: Britain was becoming an obstacle to slavery, and independence would remove the obstacle.

This is a real argument, with real facts in it, and its defenders are right about the facts. So the question is whether the conclusion follows. It does not.

The answer, in six numbered points

One. The historians who study this period said the claim was wrong, and they said so in public. In December 2019, five prominent historians, Gordon Wood, James McPherson, Sean Wilentz, Victoria Bynum and James Oakes, wrote a joint letter to the Times calling the project a praiseworthy and urgent public service but expressing strong reservations and asking for factual corrections. Among the claims they challenged was the assertion that protecting slavery was a primary motive for the Revolution. These are scholars of the American founding, the Civil War and slavery. When people with that background say the evidence is not there, that tells you something about where the evidence is.

Two. The Times itself changed the sentence. The newspaper's editor defended the project but, in March 2020, the online text of the essay was changed. Where it had said "the colonists" declared independence to protect slavery, it now said "some of the colonists." That one-word edit is an admission that the sweeping claim could not stand as written. A claim about "some of the colonists" is a very different claim. Of course some colonists defended slavery, and of course some had an interest in it. The question is whether that explains the Revolution, and a claim about some does not.

Three. The stated reasons for independence were about British government, and the documents are public. Read what the colonists said when they explained themselves. The grievances of the 1760s and 1770s were taxes imposed by a Parliament in which the colonists had no representatives: the Stamp Act of 1765, the Townshend duties, the tea tax. They were about the quartering of troops, the closing of the port of Boston and the alteration of Massachusetts's charter in 1774, and the denial of colonial legislatures' authority. The Declaration lists its grievances against the King at length, and nearly all of them concern government: taxes, courts, troops, legislatures, trade. One line, that the King "has excited domestic insurrections amongst us," is widely read as a reference to Dunmore's offer, and I will take that up in point five. But a single line, set inside a document that states its case at length, is not the primary reason for the case. The Declaration of the Causes and Necessity of Taking Up Arms, written in 1775, rests on the same grounds of British misgovernment. The men who wanted to protect slavery had every incentive to say so, and the great weight of what they wrote says something else.

Four. Somerset v. Stewart did not threaten slavery in the colonies. In 1772 Lord Mansfield, the Chief Justice of the King's Bench, ruled that James Somerset, who had been brought to England from Virginia by his master, could not be forcibly taken out of the country. Mansfield held that slavery was so odious that it could be supported only by "positive law," and that no such law existed in England. The ruling was narrow. It applied to England. It did not abolish slavery in the colonies, which had their own slave codes, and it did not change the legal status of enslaved people in Virginia or South Carolina. The notion that it made independence urgent is a modern inference. It is not in the colonists' own words.

Five. The Dunmore proclamation is the best evidence for the 1619 side, and it cuts the other way too. I said the strongest case has real material, and this is it. In November 1775, Dunmore offered freedom to enslaved people and indentured servants belonging to rebels who would fight for the Crown. Many slaveholders were furious, and the proclamation did harden opinion in Virginia. But look at the sequence. The war had already begun at Lexington and Concord in April 1775. Dunmore acted in response to the rebellion; it did not cause it. And his offer was a wartime tactic aimed at rebel owners, not a Crown policy of abolition. Loyalists who held slaves were left alone. Britain remained a slaveholding empire, and slavery persisted across its Caribbean colonies for decades afterward; Parliament did not abolish it in most of the empire until 1833. A Britain that was about to menace slavery in the colonies is a Britain that never existed in 1776.

Six. The Revolution made the antislavery argument available, and the first antislavery laws followed it. Within a few years of 1776 the northern states began to act. Vermont's constitution of 1777 prohibited adult slavery. Pennsylvania passed a gradual abolition law in 1780 that became a model for other states. Massachusetts adopted a constitution in 1780 that declared all men "born free and equal," and in the Quock Walker case of 1783 its Chief Justice told a jury that slavery was inconsistent with it. Connecticut and Rhode Island passed gradual emancipation laws in 1784; New York followed in 1799 and New Jersey in 1804. In 1787 the Confederation Congress passed the Northwest Ordinance, banning slavery from the territory north of the Ohio River, as described in The Northwest Ordinance Banned Slavery From a Territory Bigger Than France. If the Revolution had been fought to protect slavery, this is a bizarre way for it to turn out.

What the Founders said in their own words

Now let me add what the men themselves wrote, because it fills in the picture.

In October 1774 the First Continental Congress adopted the Continental Association, a pact of economic resistance. One of its provisions committed the colonies to stop importing enslaved people and to end the slave trade. That is two years before independence, and it is a commitment against the slave trade that was agreed to by delegates from the South.

In 1776 Thomas Jefferson's draft of the Declaration contained a long passage attacking the King for the slave trade. It said the King "has waged cruel war against human nature itself, violating its most sacred rights of life and liberty in the persons of a distant people who never offended him." The passage was struck by Congress, in part, according to Jefferson's own later account, because delegates from South Carolina and Georgia objected, and in part because some Northern merchants had a stake in the trade. This is a moving and a painful fact. It shows that the argument over slavery was inside the Congress from the beginning, and it shows that antislavery language was available, was written down, and was removed under pressure from slaveholders. It does not show that slavery was the cause of independence. It shows that slavery was a drag on the Revolution's ideals.

And then there is the principle in the second paragraph, which the Founders voted for and the nation has been trying to live up to ever since: "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness." You can argue the Founders did not mean it fully. You cannot argue that the sentence does not say it. That sentence was the lever. Abolitionists quoted it. Lincoln built his politics on it. Frederick Douglass appealed to it, as in What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July and Why Douglass Kept the Constitution.

The Constitution's own clause on the slave trade, Article I, Section 9, said that Congress could not prohibit "the Migration or Importation of such Persons as any of the States now existing shall think proper to admit" before 1808. The Framers avoided the words "slave" and "slavery." Congress banned the importation of enslaved people in an act signed by Jefferson in March 1807, effective on the first day of 1808, the earliest date the Constitution allowed.

The objection that remains

A fair critic will say: you have shown that slavery was not the stated cause of the Revolution. But isn't it still true that many Founders were slaveholders, that the Constitution compromised with slavery, and that the new nation's prosperity depended on slave labor? Doesn't that make slavery foundational anyway?

The answer is that the question has shifted. That is a different and a better question, and the answer to it is yes and no.

Yes: slavery was embedded in the economy and politics of the early republic, and the Constitution gave it protections, including the three-fifths clause in Article I, Section 2 and the fugitive slave clause in Article IV, Section 2. A clear-eyed account has to say so, and it should not be softened.

But no: it does not follow that slavery was the founding's purpose or that the founding was a fraud. The better description is that the nation was born with a contradiction between its principle and its practice, and that the principle was strong enough to condemn the practice. The Founders, as How to Judge the Founders Fairly Without Excusing Slavery or Erasing Them argues, can be held to their own standard. And the nation spent four years and some six hundred thousand lives, a toll discussed in What Caused the Civil War, Who Won It and Why, Answered From the Record, and three constitutional amendments to close the gap. That history makes sense only if 1776 is the date on which the standard was set. If America were founded on slavery alone, there would be no standard against which to condemn it.

This is also where the policy question lives. The fight over the 1619 Project is not just academic, because the project was turned into curriculum materials for schools. Whether state boards, local boards and parents should accept a lesson plan that says X is a legitimate question of public education, and it belongs with the people who elect those boards. I think parents have every right to ask to see the lesson, ask for the sources, and ask that a claim contested by leading historians be presented as contested.

Why the birthday matters

Return to the two dates. The reason I say 1776 is not that it is more comfortable. It is that it explains more. The nation that declared independence in 1776 was the nation that, within two generations, produced the abolitionists who argued from the Declaration, and within a century wrote the Thirteenth Amendment. You can trace that line directly. The 1619 story is an essential part of the history, because slavery was real and its victims are owed the truth, but it is the history of a wrong, not the history of a founding. The two stories are not rivals. One is the problem, and the other is the principle that eventually solved it.

There is more to read if you want to follow the thread: the case of men who broke an unjust law is in The Underground Railroad and the Quakers Who Broke an Unjust Law in the Open, and the case of Africans who won their freedom in a court under the Constitution is in The Amistad Captives Won Their Freedom at the Supreme Court in 1841. The Founders page collects primary sources for checking every quotation here against the text.

The case in brief

1. The claim that protecting slavery was a primary reason the colonists declared independence is a claim about motive, and the documents do not support it.
2. Five leading historians objected to it in December 2019, and in March 2020 the online text was changed from "the colonists" to "some of the colonists."
3. The Declaration's grievances, the Continental Association of 1774, Somerset v. Stewart, and the Dunmore proclamation do not show a Revolution fought for slavery.
4. The Revolution's principles fueled the first antislavery laws, beginning with Vermont in 1777 and Pennsylvania in 1780, and the Northwest Ordinance in 1787.
5. America was born with a contradiction, and the principle of 1776 was the standard that condemned the practice and finally ended it.

What you can do: ask your child's school or school board for the sources behind any lesson on the founding, and read the Declaration's full list of grievances yourself.