Sen. Tom Cotton is facing pushback following comments he made about the history of slavery in the United States. However, the Arkansas Republican says his critics are taking the remarks out of context.
Several media outlets, citing a story in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, quoted Cotton as saying slavery was a “necessary evil” in the U.S. as the colonies created their own government and economy in the late 1700s.
During an interview with the newspaper, Cotton said slavery is an important part of American history that citizens should be educated on.
“We have to study the history of slavery and its role and impact on the development of our country because, otherwise, we can’t understand our country,” Cotton said. “As the Founding Fathers said, it was the necessary evil upon which the Union was built, but the Union was built in a way, as Lincoln said, to put slavery on the course to its ultimate extinction.”
Cotton last week introduced the Saving American History Act of 2020, which would punish public schools that have flirted with the idea of incorporating findings from the New York Times’s “1619 Project” into educational curriculum.
The “1619 Project” is based on the fundamental premise that America is a systemically racist nation because the colonists wished to own slaves.
Cotton called the piece, which won this year’s Pulitzer Prize, “left-wing propaganda.”
“It’s revisionist history at its worst,” Cotton said.
A number of media outlets and political commentators framed Cotton’s remarks as defending the merits of slavery.
Nikole Hannah-Jones, the lead journalist on the “1619 Project,” said Cotton’s bill and comments about her piece prove the point it was trying to drive home.
“If chattel slavery — heritable, generational, permanent, race-based slavery where it was legal to rape, torture, and sell human beings for profit — were a ‘necessary evil’ as @TomCottonAR says, it’s hard to imagine what cannot be justified if it is a means to an end,” she said. “So, was slavery foundational to the Union on which it was built, or nah? You heard it from @TomCottonAR himself.”
If chattel slavery — heritable, generational, permanent, race-based slavery where it was legal to rape, torture, and sell human beings for profit — were a “necessary evil” as @TomCottonAR says, it’s hard to imagine what cannot be justified if it is a means to an end. https://t.co/yScNxPq6ds
— Ida Bae Wells (@nhannahjones) July 26, 2020
Wait, if Cotton thinks slavery was essential in creating American society, the sine qua non without which America would not be America, then isn’t he agreeing with the 1619 project? https://t.co/YglaKIDG9K
— Jeet Heer (@HeerJeet) July 26, 2020
If I wrote the screenplay for a political satire in which a politician named “Tom Cotton” called slavery a “necessary evil,” it would be blasted (by me, among others) as shallow lefty claptrap. And yet here we are.
— Christopher Orr (@OrrChris) July 26, 2020
Cotton called what he characterized as a left-wing spin on his comments “the definition of fake news.”
This is the definition of fake news.
I said that *the Founders viewed slavery as a necessary evil* and described how they put the evil institution on the path to extinction, a point frequently made by Lincoln. https://t.co/SaWTTlMO7w
— Tom Cotton (@TomCottonAR) July 26, 2020
“More lies from the debunked 1619 Project. Describing the *views of the Founders* and how they put the evil institution on a path to extinction, a point frequently made by Lincoln, is not endorsing or justifying slavery,” Cotton said. “No surprise that the 1619 Project can’t get facts right.”
