Nikole Hannah-Jones and Andrew Roberts don’t have much in common. The former is an American journalist who is principally engaged in leftist polemics about race. The latter is a leading British historian and scourge of woke revisionists seeking to trash the legacy of Winston Churchill, about whom he has written a book that is widely considered the greatest single-volume biography.
Yet Hannah-Jones, the principal figure of the New York Times’s controversial “1619 Project,” and Roberts, who has been justly acclaimed as one of his generation’s leading historians, are both engaged in the business of debunking some of America’s founding myths. And the comparison is useful, because it gives the lie to progressive activists’ framing of historical criticism as a binary choice between unquestioning jingoism and tinfoil-hatted conspiracism.
Professional historians, including many left-leaning scholars, subjected 1619, which claims the arrival of the first African slaves in European settlements in North America to be the true founding of the American republic, to scathing criticism. Its distortions about the American Revolution as well as other depictions of the United States as having been founded in racism and remaining an irredeemably racist nation ever since have made it a touchstone of debate. But in spite of that, or perhaps because of its skewed vision of America’s founding myths, the “1619 Project” not only won the Pulitzer Prize for Commentary in April 2020 but was seen as helping to mainstream the Black Lives Matter movement, especially after the death of George Floyd later that year. Indeed, Hannah-Jones said “it would be an honor” if, as one conservative critic noted, the hundreds of “mostly peaceful” convulsions of violence and looting that took place that summer in American cities were called the “1619 riots.”
Of equal significance is the way the project, which has recently been released in book form — The 1619 Project: A New Origin Story — has helped spearhead efforts both to promote revisionist notions about American history and inject ideas about race essentialism into elementary and secondary school curricula.
Roberts’s agenda is far more modest but in one sense congruent with Hannah-Jones’s offensive against the Founding Fathers. His new biography — The Last King of America: The Misunderstood Reign of George III — seeks to challenge popular myths about the monarch. Following the lead of Thomas Jefferson’s attacks on the king in the Declaration of Independence, traditional Whig histories of the Revolutionary War (as well as Lin-Manuel Miranda’s popular musical Hamilton) have depicted George as a brutal tyrant, whose barbarous conduct and abuses of the rights of his American subjects justified their rebellion.
But Roberts, employing the same flair for original research and ability to convey historical context and vivid prose that he used in previous books about more popular subjects such as Napoleon and Churchill, thoroughly debunks all the assumptions most people have about the king. That includes the claim, popularized in the play and the 1994 film The Madness of King George, that he later suffered from the liver disorder porphyria rather than, as Roberts proves, mental illness.
More importantly, Roberts shows that the king was, like his great-great-great-great granddaughter Queen Elizabeth II, a conscientiously constitutional monarch and no tyrant, either by the standards of the 18th century or our own. The historian dissects the 28-count indictment of George in Jefferson’s Declaration and makes it clear that 26 of the accusations in the document were mendacious or skewed “war propaganda.”
Roberts extols the preamble to the Declaration as having been written in language that is “worthy of Shakespeare” in its justification for the rebellion. That opening section makes the argument for “self government and the rights of man” in terms that became “the foundational principle for the United States and went on to inspire millions of people all over the globe for two and a half centuries” and was “one of the greatest documents of the Enlightenment.”
But the last two-thirds of the text of the Declaration is taken up with what Roberts derides as a “series of ad hominem accusations against the King” that are almost devoid of merit, reeking of hypocrisy, hyperbole, and twisted interpretations of the facts.
The book’s detailed presentation of the king’s life illustrates that he was, so long as he was in possession of his faculties, a devoted and faithful family man as well as a highly educated, deeply cultured, and hard-working, albeit stubborn and self-righteous, monarch who was dedicated to the English constitution and to defending the rights of his subjects. Moreover, the policies that alienated the Americans were the work of George’s ministers, though the king did support them. And had he overridden Parliament’s decrees, as the Americans demanded, he would have been guilty of being exactly the kind of unconstitutional tyrant that Jefferson falsely accused him of being.
Yet the significance of Roberts’s evisceration of the Declaration in the current context might be to bolster a willingness to take pieces like the “1619 Project” seriously rather than to dismiss it as woke propaganda masquerading as history. At a moment when the conversation about American history is so fraught with politics, there could be more to a revival of George III’s reputation than a case of belated justice for the monarch.
Roberts concedes that the only two of the indictments of George in the Declaration that stand up to scrutiny — the imposition of taxes without the consent of the colonists and the rejection of the right of the Westminster Parliament to govern North American colonies that already all had popularly elected legislatures (with a far more inclusive franchise than that which then existed in Britain) even before independence — “justified the whole of the rebellion on their own.”
Still, he does not go easy on the founders with respect to the issue that motivates Hannah-Jones’s attack on them: slavery.
The majority of the signers of the Declaration were slave owners. By contrast, George not only never owned slaves or invested any of his great wealth in slave-owning businesses but was also personally opposed to it. An essay he wrote as a teenager (which Roberts’s book is the first to publish since he found it in the Georgian archives only recently opened to scholars by the current British monarch) testifies to this. George also signed the act that abolished the slave trade in the British Empire in 1807. Roberts points out that the 1772 decision in Somerset v. Stewart, the first case that chipped away at the legality of slavery in the British Empire, did help incline some Southern slave owners to be more open to rebellion. Many Patriots also regarded the willingness of the British to offer freedom to escaped slaves who helped their cause during the war with the same horror they viewed efforts to similarly employ Native American tribes to attack them. As the lexicographer Samuel Johnson, who was supported and admired by George, famously noted in a pamphlet for which he was paid by the British government to write to attack the Declaration, “How is it that we hear the loudest yelps for liberty among the drivers of negroes?”
While the “1619 Project” remains error-ridden (though some of the more egregious ones in the original published version are amended in the book version), there is no doubt about the authenticity of Roberts’s account.
But the question to ask about this honesty about the faults of the founders is not so much about whether this should cause us to rethink our devotion to them but rather what is at stake in the debate about America’s origin story that Hannah-Jones is so eager to initiate and in which Roberts has little interest.
The report of the 1776 Commission, initiated by former President Donald Trump to answer Hannah-Jones’s screed, has been much abused by liberal critics. But it did not seek to whitewash the legacy of slavery or racial prejudice. Rather, it sought to assert that the arc of American history has always pointed toward greater liberty. The story of America is not one of pervasive institutional racism dominating every phase of development to our present day but one of a consistent and ultimately successful fight for the principles to which the founders pledged “our lives, our fortunes and our sacred honor,” even if their personal conduct and wartime execrations of King George didn’t match the Declaration’s sublime prose.
Perhaps the best summation of the importance of the debate about the Revolution was made by an earlier British historian who was no more impressed with the Patriots’ arguments than is Roberts. In his The British Overseas: Exploits of a Nation of Shopkeepers, first published in 1950 by Cambridge University Press, C.E. Carrington took note of the fact that “the revolutionary myth” had already been thoroughly debunked by American historians. Yet “the people of America will continue to be nourished upon the anti-British tirades of the Declaration” about a “glorious escape” from a “tyrant King.” That this was so was not, he said, a “sentimental trifle.” It was instead “the foundation of the American national character.”
He went on to state that even if “the legend of the downtrodden colonists and the wicked king” is a fable, that “is a matter of very slight importance.” According to Carrington, “What matters is that Americans believe themselves to have come into existence fighting for liberty, no unworthy faith, and in that faith, stand for liberty today.”
He wrote those words only a few years after 1.5 million Americans had crossed the Atlantic Ocean to defend the liberty of Britain and the existence of Western civilization against Nazi barbarism during the Second World War. At that point, there was a since-vanished general consensus in the United States that did not question the connection between the founding myths of the nation and the obligation to defeat the fascist and communist totalitarianism that threatened the world in the 20th century.
What is often lost in the debates about the historicity of the “1619 Project” is its goal. At stake in this conversation is not so much the flaws in Hannah-Jones’s polemic but rather the ultimate purpose: to recast American history as a story of a racist and oppressive patriarchy that must be overthrown. In its place, modern progressive activists seek to promote a new vision infused by woke ideas about national values rooted in “white fragility,” “white privilege,” and “equity” rather than those about the rule of law and equal opportunity that the founders extolled if not always faithfully practiced.
Carrington presciently wrote more than 70 years ago that America’s founding myth “will never be destroyed until some more compelling political event is inflated by a new political artist into a myth of greater power.” That is the significance of the attempt to elevate the death of Floyd and ideas about police shootings of African Americans, untethered from the actual facts about such incidents, into a new revealed truth about a country in need of radical change.
Americans need not fear learning the facts about slavery or any other blot on their country’s reputation any more than they should be dismayed about learning from Roberts that the caricature of George to be found in Jefferson’s Declaration and Lin-Manuel Miranda’s play is false.
But they should be deeply worried about efforts to use historical revisionism, especially arguments largely divorced from the truth and stripped of context such as those employed by Hannah-Jones’s polemic, that ask them to look at their country in a different light. A nation that no longer believes itself to have been born fighting for liberty against tyrants is far less likely to conduct such battles elsewhere or venerate the aspirations of the founders. As has been evident in the past two years of widespread acceptance of pandemic-related restrictions of individual liberty, it is also unlikely to be zealous about defending freedom at home.
Jonathan S. Tobin is editor-in-chief of JNS.org and a columnist for the New York Post. Follow him on Twitter at: @jonathans_tobin.
