No one expected the blowup over slavery, history, and American origins in 2019, much less for it to take the strange shape it did. Even professional specialists in early American history expressed shock—and sometimes dismay. After all, The 1619 Project made an exposé out of a chestnut that early Americanists had picked over for half a century.
Historians long debated when the first Africans arrived in Virginia, whether or not they were enslaved for life, and—most controversially—whether anti-Black racism preceded and caused slavery’s rise or could be better characterized as its result. This earlier iteration of the “Origins Debate” had fallen out of style by the early 2010s, if not sooner. The 1619 Project predictably sidestepped the nuances of the historiography, not to mention the ambiguities in the record, in declaring the first slaving ship to arrive in Virginia to be the real Mayflower. Yet in book form, the episodic narrative became a “new origins story.” That subtitle may have been more precise and on point, if paradoxical, than the 2021 book’s editors or most reviewers realized. The 1619 Project as a work of history, and the subsequent very public debate about it, redeveloped key aspects of the earlier origins debate, including its weighty implications.
The original Origins Debate was an argument between postwar liberals and their critics, much as the 1619 controversy of 2019–2021 initially took the form of a contest among liberal and left historians and liberal and left journalists. Beginning in the late 1950s and for a few decades afterwards, the historians who participated in the Origins Debate all believed that it was time to grapple with the importance of slavery in U.S. history, and that the answers might have political implications. 1 (During the late twentieth century, right wingers ignored the entire thing for the most part.) Oscar and Mary Handlin began the conversation by pointing to the relatively slow development of the laws of racial slavery in the Old Dominion. The implications—that slavery was made, and later racialized, by Virginian settlers and their government, not merely inherited—suggested that, like any other “institution,” it could be unmade by social change, by politics, and by changing minds. If race came to be Black slavery’s ultimate support, then attacking racism as “prejudice” could solve the race relations conundrums of a still-segregated United States.
History would uncover myths that informed politics. These historians may have inhabited a “consensus” school, or been personally disillusioned about the Left, but they were also the only partly rebellious intellectual children of the Progressive historians, still optimistic about how facts could dispel propaganda. In that sense, what the Handlins did paralleled the efforts of historians like Kenneth Stampp and C. Vann Woodward for later periods of U.S. history. They countered myths of racial innocence and tried to put slavery and Black people into American history as their own teachers had failed to do.2
