The 1619 Project Myth, Phillip W. Magness, Independent Institute, 2025, pp. 184, $17.00 hardcover.
The historian Phillip Magness has a new edition of his critique of the New York Times’s 1619 Project. One of the project’s most striking features is that its editor, Nikole Hannah-Jones, appeared to prioritize ideological perspective over academic expertise when selecting contributors. The most telling example was the decision to have the sociologist Matthew Desmond write the central chapter on the effect of slavery on the enslaved and the national economy. Desmond’s professional writings have been exclusively on the black experience post-WWII.
This pattern was continued when the project was extended to book form with added essays. Nikita Stewart wrote an essay on how slavery is taught in American schools despite lacking professional expertise in either the history of slavery or educational pedagogy. She relied heavily on a study written by the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), recently indicted for funneling money to the KKK, including payments to organize the infamous Charlottesville (VA) “Unite the Right” demonstration. She was also sued for discriminatory practices for excluding a highly qualified applicant for an associate editor position in the real estate section of the New York Times and, instead, hiring an affirmative action applicant with no experience in real estate.
This reliance on individuals who lack academic expertise was noted by the president of the American Historical Society, James Sweet. In 2022, in an open letter to the membership he wrote: “As journalism, the project is powerful and effective, but is it history?” An immediate and hostile response appeared on Twitter.
The New School’s Claire Porter claimed “big chunks of it were written by professional, award-winning historians” despite the fact that “only 2 of the 12 featured essays were written by historians, neither of them specialized in the crucial period between 1776 and 1865 when slavery was at its peak.” (106) University of Virginian historian David Austin Walsh “took issue with historians offering any public criticism of the 1619 Project’s flaws — no matter how valid — because these criticisms are going to be weaponized by the right.” (106)
Magness focuses on contentious claims made by Nicole Hannah-Jones, who wrote that her introductory essay “aims to reframe our country’s history, understanding 1619 as its true founding, and placing the consequences of slavery and the contributions of black Americans at the center of our national narrative.” For the first few months after its publication, she continued to claim the year 1619 as “our true founding,” but after pushback, she and the New York Timesretreated. The paper expunged all references to 1619, replacing 1776, and Hannah-Jones now claimed she never meant to replace 1776 as the country’s founding.
Hannah-Jones did not, however, back away from her other contentious claim that the late 1775 proclamation by the British governor of Virginia Lord Dunmore to free all slaves that were willing to fight against the rebels was an important reason why the Revolutionary War was fought. Prepublication, the New York Times enlisted historian Leslie Harris to assess this claim. However, when she cautioned Hannah-Jones not to make it, she was rebuffed. (119) After publication, this claim was strongly criticized by five history professors, all of whom were experts on the revolutionary period. According to Magness, Hannah-Jones and her supporters castigated them as old white men, accusing them of “excluding non-white and non-male scholars from their assessments of the material involved.” (67)
In a Hulu series based on the essays, Woody Holton appears to support the importance of Dunmore’s decree in winning white Virginians to the rebel cause. Pointing his finger to the Governor’s Palace in Williamsburg, Holton claimed that “the guy inhabiting that building [through his proclamation] has turned things upside down and is leading blacks against whites.” (127) Hannah-Jones then placed the decree in the context of a growing British anti-slave movement.
In his subsequent book, Holton tells a different story. He noted that Dunmore had not set foot in Williamsburg for five months, and British forces had been driven out of Virginia. He issued the declaration from a ship offshore, making it impossible for the enslaved to join the British army. Holton also stated that Hannah-Jones “vastly exaggerated the size and strength of the British abolitionist movement.” (129)
Magness notes that when the British abolitionist leader William Wilberforce sought to legislate a cessation of the slave trade in 1787, it failed; only passing in 1806, two years before the U.S. legislated its ending of the importation of slaves. Magness also notes that Dunmore, as governor of the Bahamas, was brutal in his use of enslaved labor in construction projects, including a “famous 66-step staircase that they had carved from solid rock under the threat of whippings and torture.” (26)
Magness reserves his strongest criticism for Desmond’s politically driven, highly inaccurate chapter on the slave economy. Desmond relied heavily on the unsupported claims made by Cornell historian Ed Baptiste, one of the leaders of the New Historians of Capitalism (NHC). He relies on Baptiste to claim that cotton production was the driving force of the U.S. economy as it reflected half its production. This figure is based on double- and triple-counting of cotton production inputs. An accurate accounting places cotton production at only 5 percent of U.S. annual output.
Just as egregious was how Baptiste explained the fourfold increase in the labor productivity of enslaved field workers. For him, it was continuously intensified exploitation, coining the phrase “calibrated torture.” Desmond embraces this vision, claiming that “the bottom gear was torture.” And he amplifies this view by including the iconic picture of the back of a slave with massive welts from whippings.
The continuous intensification of labor exploitation through physical abuse was even rejected by Karl Marx. What Desmond and Baptiste ignored was that the standard explanation for the fourfold increase was primarily the evolution of the cotton seed and the expansion of labor specialization through the reorganization of working procedures.
Besides presenting the history of slavery, the 1619 Project aspired to demonstrate its contemporary relevance. Relying on other NHC historians who believe “slavery is integral, rather than oppositional, to capitalism,” (54) Desmond claimed the brutality of the slave system evolved into the brutality of the capitalist system.
This thesis would be news to the antebellum supporters of slavery. In the 1840s, John C. Calhoun viewed Northern industrial capitalism as destructive. He argued that enslaved labor prevented the class warfare and labor exploitation inherent in the free-market, wage-labor systems of the North. Magness focuses on the 1850s writings of George Fitzhugh, who also believed slave societies were at war with capitalism. According to Magness, Fitzhugh claimed slavery “could step in and fill the gap through the paternalistic provisions of necessities for the enslaved allegedly removing the ‘greed’ of wage exploitation from the process.” (11) Thus, the claim that the slave economy was the beginnings of capitalist exploitation of labor is highly problematic.
Magness clearly documents deceptions, misrepresentations, and fundamental errors. However, there is one flaw in his effort. The American public cares little about whether or not some southern slavers supported the rebels in the belief it would protect slavery, they care little if slavery was or was not a form of capitalism, and they care little if the brutal treatment of enslaved workers was responsible for the fourfold growth of labor productivity. These questions have importance to the historical record but don’t affect the general public whose central issue is the level of brutality the enslaved experienced.
Unfortunately, Magness accepts the NHC school’s characterization of slavery’s brutality. While he chastises them for completely ignoring the work of Eugene Genovese and Robert Fogel, Magness never mentions that these works present a counter to claims that slavery was extremely brutal to the enslaved. Nor does Magness mention Herbert Gutman’s pioneering work on the slave family.
The centrality of this brutality was apparent at the Philadelphia Presidential House exhibit, when, in 2025, the National Parks Department took it down and replaced it with a revised set of panels. All of the criticism of this government action centered on how the new exhibit substantially soften the criticism of Washington’s actions toward enslaved servants he brought to Philadelphia during his presidency.
Little was said about the original exhibit’s panel that claimed rape and breeding were important reasons for the dramatic growth of the enslaved population after importation was disallowed, years after the capital had moved from Philadelphia. This inclusion was in line with the NHC narrative on the viciousness of slavery.
Rape was a feature of the antebellum period, but recent claims by Shannon Eaves that there was a widespread rape culture are unfounded.1 Robert Fogel found that overseers were employed on only one-sixth of moderate-sized plantations with 16 to 50 slaves, and on one-quarter of larger ones. On three-quarters of plantations with no white overseers, there was only one white adult male; an environment that could not develop a rape culture.2 Moreover, historian Eugene Genovese found that rape was limited to unattached, young women, for he noted, “Many escaped because the whites knew that they had black men who would rather die than stand idly by.”3 So strong was the resistance that it curbed “white sexual aggression” against married women.
Importantly, extensive raping of enslaved women was in opposition to the need to provide positive incentives for unsupervised enslaved workers to perform effectively, especially in their administrative and skilled craft roles. On many plantations, enslaved workers who performed well were awarded private plots of land on which they could farm and sell their surplus. Fogel estimated that “income of top field hands was 2.5 times basic income; of top craftsmen, probably four or five, and in some exceptional cases, as much as 10 times basic income.” The early twentieth-century researcher Charles Wesley claimed that at emancipation, black workers made up over 80 percent of the artisan class in the South.4
The sociologist Aisha Djelid approvingly noted, “Twentieth-century scholars such as Robert Fogel, Stanley Engerman, and John Boles dismissed forced reproduction as an abolitionist trope.”5 Instead, she believed that promoting marriage was the main way that planters encouraged slave births. Indeed, often planters held marriage ceremonies. As a result, stable family structure typified enslaved households where the vast majority of children were raised in long-lasting, two-parent households. Historian Heather Williams reported, “[Herbert] Gutman found that at the end of the Civil War, in Virginia … most families of former slaves had two parents, and most older couples had lived together for a long time.”6
Whatever physical abuse the enslaved endured, Robert Fogel documented that by almost any measure—diet, housing, health, and life expectancy—enslaved blacks fared better than English industrial workers. Rather than having teenage women die of tuberculosis, slave owners often hired Irish immigrants to do dangerous work, as the lives of enslaved workers were too valuable to risk. However, this evidence is suppressed. Instead, stressing the vicious treatment the enslaved endured is necessary because anything less would reflect an apologist stance.
Finally, the exaggeration of the physical abuse the enslaved endured has sometimes worsened the situation of contemporary black Americans. In response to pre-WWII books that pictured slavery as a relatively benign institution, Stanley Elkins and Kenneth Stampp emphasized how owners used their unrestrained power to brutalize the enslaved. In Slavery, Elkins claimed that the institution was so brutal that it created child-like behaviors, underpinning the “Black Sambo” image that was widely accepted at the time.7
In The Peculiar Institution, Stampp claimed that to counter the harsh oppressive regime, many enslaved blacks “feigned childlike behavior to sabotage production: shirking their duties, feigning illness, injuring the crops, and disrupting the routine.” For Stampp, terror and brutalization destroyed the strictly regulated family life and rigid moral code that had prevailed in Africa, so that sexual promiscuity was widespread.8
For those holding these views, slavery was so brutal that the enslaved had no agency and, as a result, hopelessness bred poor work habits, widespread promiscuity, and no stable family structure. The perceived persistence of these behaviors led Daniel Patrick Moynihan and other liberals to believe that a legacy of slavery explained the poor employment and high out-of-wedlock birth rate of black Americans. Fogel lamented, “What bitter irony it is that the false stereotype of black labor, a stereotype which still plagues blacks today, was fashioned not primarily by the oppressors … but by the most ardent opponents of slavery, by those who worked most diligently to destroy the chains of bondage.”
Hopefully, Magness’ book will further undermine the standing of the 1619 Project, and reduce the possibilities that it will be used in high schools to miseducate students. However, the continued largely uncritically accepted notion of a thoroughly brutal slave system remains, as it provides the origins of white-skin privilege and strengthens the justification for reparations. This false narrative also feeds into the victimization thesis that continues to limit looking seriously at both the strengths and weaknesses of contemporary black culture; inquiries that are necessary to enable more black individuals to have successful lives.
Robert Cherry is a retired professor of economics at Brooklyn College and an American Enterprise Institute affiliate. His most recent book is Arab Citizens of Israel: How Far Have They Come? (Wicked Son, 2026).
1 Shannon Eaves, Sexual Violence and American Slavery: The Making of a Rape Culture in the Antebellum South (University of North Carolina Press, 2024).
2 Robert William Fogel, Without Consent or Contract: The Rise and Fall of American Slavery (W.W. Norton, 1989).
3 Eugene Genovese, Roll, Jordan, Roll: The World the Slaves Made (Vintage, 1976).
4 Charles H. Wesley, Negro Labor in the United States 1850-1925 (Vanguard, 1927).
5 Aisha Djelid, “The master whished to reproduce”: slavery, forced intimacy, and enslavers’ interference in sexual relationships in the antebellum South, 1808–1861,” American Nineteenth Century History, 25, no. 1 (2024).
6 Heather Andrea Williams, “How Slavery Affected: African American Families,” Freedom’s Story: Teaching African American Literature and History, National Humanities Center, accessed June 10, 2026, https://nationalhumanitiescenter.org/tserve/freedom/1609-1865/essays/aafamilies.htm.
7 Stanley M. Elkins, Slavery: A Problem in American Institutional and Intellectual Life (University of Chicago Press, 1976).
8 Kenneth M. Stampp, The Peculiar Institution (Vintage, 1956).
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