I want to add support to George Will's column in The Roanoke Times on Dec. 19, attacking The 1619 Project's idea that Americans fought in their revolution against Great Britain to protect slavery.
When the last Royal Governor of Virginia, Lord Dunmore, issued his proclamation that any slave joining him in the struggle against the rebellious colonials would be free, he did so from the safety of a British battleship to which he and his family had fled.
The peace between the Virginia colony and the mother country had disappeared. The British sloop of war Otter had attacked Hampton with cannons, and British regulars killed seven Virginians in a skirmish in Prince Anne County.
Dunmore saw the Virginians as military adversaries and would do anything he could do to disrupt the enemy's economy and add to the ranks of his army. Dunmore's proclamation did not come from abolitionist sentiment.
The idea that some great abolitionist movement in 18th century England existed is inconsistent with the facts. The systemic racism that planted itself in this country originated in England, where the notion that "all men are created equal" did not exist in their rigid social class structure.
Books asserting that white people were intellectually superior to black people and thus had the right to rule over them were abundant in the bookstores of London.
The Empire benefited from the colonial economy with its slavery. It wanted to hang onto those valuable sources of raw material, including the tobacco produced with slave labor. Nothing indicates that had the British suppressed the colonial rebellion, they would have emancipated the slaves. The fact that slavery remained in the British-held Caribbean Islands for another 59 years shows the opposite. By then, the abolition movement was picking up steam on both sides of the Atlantic.
Unfortunately, it looks like The New York Times has gone from a newspaper of record to a tabloid of political appeasement.
Steve Bailey,
Richmond