In July, Woody Holton—his work has been very important to mine, as has his support for my most recent book, which relied in part on his stuff—published a compelling and learned op-ed in the Washington Post on various crucial contributions by free and enslaved black people to declaring and achieving American independence. Part of that essay focused on the 1775 proclamation by Lord Dunmore, the royal governor of Virginia, emancipating anyone enslaved by the rebellious colonials of that province and willing to fight their former owners on behalf of British government. It’s an especially controversial claim of the 1619 Project that this Dunmore proclamation played a key role in triggering the colonists to adopt the cause of American independence (later revised by the Times Magazine, under pressure of criticism, to an irrefutable “some of the colonists”). The Dunmore claim forms a part of the project’s larger insistence that Americans essentially declared independence in response to an overall perception that Britain was threatening the institution of slavery in America, which is part of its even larger framing of the black experience in America as the essential experience.
I’ve noted elsewhere my skepticism about impressions of the past fostered by that kind of working-backward, Russian-doll proof of grand, essentialist, monocausal historical framings, as carried out in this case for the edification and titillation of the Times-Magazine-reading liberal bourgeoisie. But still. In The Washington Post, Woody Holton came down on the side of the 1619 Project. And he knows a lot, putting it mildly.
And then! Just the other week! On September 1! Holton amped the social-media-fisticuffs into the stratosphere by announcing on Twitter that to celebrate the upcoming release, 76 days from then, not of his own book but of the 1619 Project’s book, he would roll out 76 separate pieces of primary-source evidence—76!—one per day, a preponderance proving conclusively that it was indeed white rage, in response to what Holton calls the Anglo-African alliance, that caused a countrywide shift in 1775 to pro-independence sentiment. Taking on all comers, his Twitter presence volubly happy-warrior and super-energized, now slashing, now parrying, now goofing, now tagging in the Twitter account of Nikole Hannah-Jones, creator of the 1619 Project, as a comrade-in-arms (I think she’s remained pretty quiet during all this), Holton was already causing quite a stir in certain circles when . . . Bam!
As if intending to add fuel to a fire giving off more heat than light, on September 7, six mainly emeritus/a scholars came directly at Holton. Their critique took the form of yet another of those open letters of high-minded dismay (like the historians’ letter to the Times Magazine on the 1619 Project and the “Persuasion” crew’s Harpers letter), this one in response to Holton’s July Washington Post op-ed.
And Holton of course fired off a rejoinder. Sock! Biff! Pow. And on and on we’ve gone in a perfect storm of . . . public promotion? Promotion of issues. Promotion of individual historians. Promotion of the importance of the profession.
I think the letter by the six—they include Carol Berkin and usual-suspect Gordon Wood—engaged in some very adroit disingenuousness of the kind I’ve elsewhere criticized in Sean Wilentz’s anti-1619-Project argumentation.
And yet amid all of this discussion, if that’s the word I want, an old theme has emerged, which has always fascinated me. It has to do with something as seemingly non-controversial and comparatively dry as whether the Continental Congress’s famously declaring independence, in July of 1776, was really the decisive event in turning American struggles against Britain into a war of independence, thus beginning the process that would lead to the national founding of the United States.