Hulu's 1619 Project Docuseries Peddles False HistoryThe first episode paints an enslaver, plantation master, and Royalist autocrat as a leading and even celebrated agent of emancipation.
PHILLIP W. MAGNESS
1.31.2023
The New York Times' 1619 Project selected Colonial Williamsburg, Virginia, as a filming location for its new Hulu docuseries. In doing so, creator Nikole Hannah-Jones sought to bolster her project's most troublesome claim—the assertion that British overtures toward emancipation impelled the American colonists into revolution, ultimately securing an independent United States.
In the past three years, the Times has grappled with the fallout from Hannah-Jones' assertion, including the revelation that it ignored its own fact-checker's warnings against printing the charge. The Times tempered its language to apply to "some of" the colonists, only to see it reasserted by Hannah-Jones in her public commentaries. Later, a related line about the Project's goal of replacing 1776 with a "true founding" of 1619 disappeared without notice from the Times' website. The newspaper found itself in a balancing act between its writer's uncompromising positions and the need to preserve credibility as it made a Pulitzer Prize bid with the series. But Hannah-Jones was not ready to abandon the claim at the center of her lead essay, and the first episode of the Hulu series makes that abundantly clear.
The scene opens in Williamsburg on the grounds of its reconstructed colonial Governor's Palace, where Hannah-Jones joins University of South Carolina professor Woody Holton—one of a handful of heterodox historians who defended the 1619 Project's original narrative. As the cameras pan across streets filled with historical re-enactors and tourists in front of restored colonial buildings, the pair take another stab at resurrecting the 1619 Project's narrative about the American Revolution. The evidence that a British threat to slavery impelled Virginians—or perhaps "the colonists" at large, in Hannah-Jones' imprecise phrasing—to revolt may be found in the November 1775 decree of John Murray, fourth earl of Dunmore, Virginia's last Royalist governor. Facing the collapse of British rule, Dunmore announced that any enslaved male from a household in rebellion would be granted freedom in exchange for military service on the British side.
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The scene is an authoritatively delivered pronouncement set to stunning cinematography, but it's also false history.
At the time of his decree, the real Dunmore had not set foot in Williamsburg in almost five months. His order, decreeing martial law in the colony and calling on slaves to enlist in a Royalist militia, came not from the governor's residence but from a position of exile aboard the HMS William, a naval ship anchored off the coast of Norfolk, Virginia.
Dunmore abandoned the Governor's Palace on June 8, 1775, amid signs that patriot militiamen were converging on Williamsburg to defend the House of Burgesses from a threatened power grab by the crown. The trouble began a few weeks earlier with a botched attempt by Dunmore to seize the colony's gunpowder stores as a preemptive strike against revolutionary grumblings.
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As the events around Williamsburg revealed, Dunmore's order was a reaction to—not a cause of—a revolution already in full swing. The road to American independence began in Massachusetts over a decade earlier with men such as James Otis (incidentally, an early abolitionist) rallying against the crown under the banner of "no taxation without representation." Virginia expressed solidarity with this cause long before Dunmore's order.
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Source:
https://reason.com/2023/01/31/hulus-1619-project-docuseries-peddles-false-history/
