In the post-war era, US history was defined as a series of emancipatory milestones that vindicated domestic order and global leadership.
Recent years have seen growing detractors from this consensus.
The New York Times’ 1619 Project offered an account of a “new founding,” arguing that the Revolutionary War was primarily motivated by preserving slavery.
Conservatives howled, and historians debated whether the nation’s birth was best understood through the heritage of slavery or anti-slavery.
But both sides largely overlooked that land hunger and westward expansion were major revolutionary impulses.
Emancipation and expansion are twin pillars of the American revolutionary narrative, closely bound to slavery, freedom, frontiers, and global reach.
Today, the idea of a virtuous expansionist-emancipatory dialectic has fallen on hard times, undone by wealth inequality, civil rights reversals, violent policing, and unpopular wars.
Historical Reckonings and the Fourth of July
Frederick Douglass asked in 1852, “What to the Slave is the Fourth of July?”
At that time, the Fugitive Slave Act meant free states could no longer offer sanctuary.
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The Dred Scott decision in 1857 answered that Africans and their descendants could never be citizens.
It took a bloody civil war to achieve an affirmative answer for slavery’s descendants, and another century for substantive political and civil rights—ambivalence that persists.
The 1619 Project demonstrated that the established synthesis of nationalist and progressive history is broken. The meaning of the American founding is now firmly up for grabs.
