The 1620 Project

The 1619 Project and the Re-centering of American History

The 1620 Project, Puritanism and the Ideological Founding of America, a tribute on the 400th anniversary of Plymouth Plantation. In August 2019, the New York Times set out to revolutionize American history by re-centering the origin of the nation not on the Declaration of Independence signed in 1776, but with the arrival of the first African slaves in Virginia in 1619.

They boldly proclaimed that they, quote, aimed to reframe the country's history by placing the consequences of slavery and the contributions of black Americans at the very center of our national narrative, unquote.

1619 was not just a landmark in American history, but they declared, quote, the country's very origin, unquote. They've since tried to tone down the audacity of these declarations by editing out many of the boldest claims in October 2020, but that was the original claim.

The starting place and center of the USA was, they said, 1619. Is that a center that can hold? Immediately, those with even a superficial knowledge of American history should notice some problems. 1619 is 12 years after the founding of Jamestown.

The colony, though not exactly thriving, was established and surviving for a dozen years without slaves. But more to the point, why is it that Virginia gets to be the defining colony for America? Sure, they were chronologically first, but until it is proven that the other colonies were derived from Jamestown, that fact of history is inconsequential.

In 986, Norsemen settled Greenland, technically in North America, and Bjarne Herjolfsson sighted mainland North America. But it would be ridiculous to start a 986 project and argue based on that that the United States' real founding is from the Norse.

It's not who did something first, it's who sets off the chain of events, political or ideological, that results in the end product. They are the founders. So who founded America? Remember the hoopla surrounding the 400th anniversary of Plymouth Plantations last year?

Me neither. I had been hoping the quarter-centennial of the first Puritan colony in America would provoke American Christians to launch a 1620 project. One organization, National Association of Scholars, did indeed do that.

Besides that modest effort, I've been underwhelmed. Thanks to the 1619 project, many Americans now know the date of the first slaves arriving in Jamestown, but thanks to the nearly complete omission of any celebration of the founding of the first Plymouth colony, they still don't know what project was begun in 1620.

The failure to launch a 1620 project has left many of us still in the dark about the project that was begun in 1620. Scholarship for the New England Puritans occupies a weird place in history. There are many specialists writing fine history, but almost no one describes what was derived from those Puritans, as though they founded nothing that outlived their movement.

There is almost no integration of Puritan New England history with the rest of American history or church history. For example, the lively Lion Handbook, the history of Christianity, has absolutely nothing about the New England Puritans.

Similarly, many Americans have almost no understanding of the colonial period of a century and a half of history that transpired in America before 1776. We can understand, then, why many failed to see that the 1619 project is right about one thing.

The true founding of America, or at least of a major strand of America, isn't 1776, but they were off by one year. It's 1620. Now, in the new nihilism exemplified by the 1619 project, in the wake of a closed American mind that's fostered nearly a generation of political correctness in a cancel culture that's trained many Americans what can and cannot be said, frequently we're faced with an inability to cultivate in skeptics even an ambiguous respect for the contributions of religion to our heritage.

Religion ruins everything, some scream, perhaps on campuses of universities like Harvard and Yale, founded by the Puritans who began to arrive in 1620. Karl Marx, for example, sat in the British library and wrote, quote, religion is the opiate of the masses, unquote.

If he had only bothered to pick up a volume on 17th century English history, he would have learned what a nonsensical proposition that is. As we cross unceremoniously the quarter centennial of the Puritans founding their first colony in what was to become the United States, we need to examine again the foundations they laid even while various brands of supposedly postmodern philosophy obscure the ability of Western intelligentsia to understand the American founding.

Though Marx's economic prescriptions are largely discredited, the general attitude of the Western Academy is still deeply, if ambiguously, influenced by his dismissal of religion. Vestiges of Marxist, or something like it, suspicion of religion now produce what some call, perhaps clumsily, cultural Marxism.

Puritanism, Marxism, and the Moral Origins of Abolition

The result is that religion, or perhaps one's personally disliked form of religion, is blamed for slavery and racism. Anthony Bradley, professor of religion at King's College, tweeted on September 10th, 2020, quote, if 17th and 18th century Puritans were in the US in 2020, they'd be the leaders of the alt-right Aryan nation white supremacist Christian organizations, unquote.

Quite a claim. He's apparently unaware or simply refuses to accept the fact that the abolition movement and movements toward egalitarianism were birthed by Puritans or their spiritual children. Robert W. Fogel discovered that.

Fogel was nurtured in the best of America's elite universities, first as an active communist and then a professor of economics. He was my boss at the University of Chicago. When he began his work, he expected to confirm what had been the assumption ever since Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations, that slavery was economically inefficient, doomed to self-destruction, and the pursuit of indolent pseudo-aristocrats who loved lording over their fellow man.

To his surprise, he uncovered the opposite. Fogel discovered that the morally reprehensible institution was fantastically profitable and efficient. It frequently provided slaves with a higher standard of living than the average free white farmer while demanding less labor.

It gave slaves a longer lifespan than most European or American city dwellers at the same time. Fogel concluded that it was not economic forces that brought about the end of slavery, but a revolution in moral sentiment with its roots in Puritanism.

In his Nobel Prize-winning work, he chronicled how devoutly religious people campaigned to end an oppressive practice that mere economics would not have. He confessed to me his great surprise at this discovery.

He recalled that he, like much of his generation, had absorbed Marxist cynicism for religion. He was, in his 50s he said, a leading scholar at some of America's elite universities, and yet he had never known what put an end to the greatest assault on liberty ever devised.

Slavery. The pilgrims and their Puritan brothers did not create New England just to be a haven from religious tyranny in their homeland. The freedom strand may belong to Pennsylvania. Rather, in 1620 they crossed the rude waves to be free to live out their own faith to its fullest.

The pilgrims were separatists persecuted in England for splitting off from the established Church of England, fleeing to New England to be free to have their separate churches. The mainstream Puritans came to New England so that they could be free not to separate.

Arriving with a great migration beginning in 1630, they believed in the same theology, but sought to reform the Church of England from within. They too were persecuted and came to New England to be free to establish their pure, hence Puritan, churches.

When they arrived, they had before them the model of the separatists at Plymouth, the pilgrims of Thanksgiving fame. They adopted the separatist polity without imbibing the separatist spirit. Over time, especially after the Restoration in 1660, the two groups realized that their different opinions about separating from the established church were irrelevant now that they were both separated from merry old England by the Atlantic Ocean.

They merged and hence the 1620 founding can, rightly, in retrospect, be seen as the beginning of Puritanism in America. John Winthrop, somewhere between Boston, England and what was to become Boston, Massachusetts, told his fellow Puritans in a sermon entitled A Model of Christian Charity in 1630 that they were going to plant a city upon a hill.

Drawing on Matthew 5, verse 14, a city upon a hill, like a lamp, cannot be hid. A city upon a hill is prominent for all to see. Like salt, it's meant to preserve and season all it comes into contact with.

Winthrop was reminding the migrants of Jesus' call to let your light so shine before men that they may see your good works and glorify your Father which is in heaven. The New England Puritans were not refugees retreating to a haven to be left alone.

They were missionaries intent on setting up a light to the nations. Winthrop told them the eyes of all people are upon us. Too often their motivations are thought of as only the one-dimensional quest to be free from religion when actually they long to be free for religion.

Increase. Mather, the leading Puritan of the second generation of New England, wrote reverently, quote,. It was a great and high undertaking of our fathers when they ventured themselves and their little ones upon the rude waves of the vast ocean that so they might follow the Lord into his land.

A parallel instance not to be given except that our father Abraham from Ur of the Chaldees or that of his seed from the land of Egypt. It was in respect to some worldly accommodation that other plantations were erected but religion and not the world was that which our fathers came hither for.

Pure religion and ordinances without the mixture of human inventions was that which the first fathers of this colony designed in their coming hither. We are the children of the good old nonconformist.

Notice the Puritans came with their children not just to work but to start a new society. They came not for worldly reasons like business as Virginia was committed to but for Puritan churches. It's true that some among them were merely coming for land, commerce, to start over, whatever crass motivation.

Just as many among the Jamestown settlers were devout Christians, some with Puritan opinions. There were individual exceptions in both strands but the question is what was the colony as a whole committed to?

Let our public schools leave no doubt that the city upon a hill, the plantation of religion, was to be built brick by brick on the principles of Puritanism. The cynics still ask were these claims true or merely religious rhetoric to cover what was just as much a commercial enterprise as Jamestown?

Was 1620 really a great and high undertaking? The initial immigration pattern suggests that it was. Not only could Mather claim a generation later that they brought their children with them unlike in Jamestown, records of ships to the two colonies demonstrate that the colonists heading to Virginia were almost entirely males of the prime working ages of 16 to 32 while colonists heading to New England were from across the demographic ranges of age and sex.

In other words, whole families came to the Bible commonwealths of New England while Jamestown, even by 1635, was still essentially a business venture. From raw data in John Demos' Remarkable Providences, we see that the Virginia-bound ships had a male-to-female ratio of 4 .18 to 1 while the New England-bound one was near parity, 1 .32 males to 1 female.

Comparing age differentials of the two groups of colonists also highlights the predominance of families in New England. The Virginia-bound colonists were largely in the prime working ages. 89 .5 were between 16 and 32, while only 4 were over 40 years old.

There was only one child in the two Virginia-bound ships, indicating a nearly complete absence of families heading to the plantation of trade. In stark contrast, the Puritan family ethic drew a much more age-diverse group of colonists.

Only 32 were in that prime working age of 16 to 32. This reality would have enormous implications on which colony, Virginia in 1607 or Massachusetts in 1620, would be able to people the latter United States.

The colony that produces the most descendants is more likely to shape the country both projects, the 1607 and the 1620, share. The presence of women, besides the obvious advantage of enabling reproduction, especially improved nutrition for children and men.

Better nutrition results in lower mortality. New England had exceptionally low mortality rates and high birth rates throughout the colonial period. In Europe, only about half of all children reached childbearing age, while in Andover and Plymouth, Massachusetts, during the 17th century, 90 of children survived to be parents.

Because of the Puritan family ethic, Puritan settlers hit the ground running with whole families to support them. Meanwhile, in Virginia, the lack of children also meant a lack of free labor, which provided the demand met by the arrival of the first slave ship in 1619.

New England, while it would make some room for slaves, never had nearly the demand for them as did the southern colonies, founded for commerce. Intact families gave Puritan New England two qualities that would make their strand in the American tapestry the dominant one.

First, the habits of domesticity, including the passing down of religious values, could be carried on without interruption. One can draw a straight line between the zeal of English Puritanism and the shaping of American culture coming out of New England.

Second, the New England family made possible what was to be one of Puritanism's most powerful cultural weapons, a population bomb. Although immigration to New England fell off rapidly after the calling of the Long Parliament in 1640, the population in New England remained relatively high.

Of the four regions of British North America, New England, the Middle Colonies, the Upper South, including the 16 projects of Virginia, and the Lower South, New England had the largest free white population.

This demographic dominance was a fruit of New England's very fruitful families. This population explosion, based on the original Puritan stock, set in motion the later Yankee Diaspora, which populated the upper tier of the United States.

William N. Parker estimates that 90 of New Englanders in 1790 were descendants of the original Puritan stock. Fogel estimates that by 1820, 80 of the population north of the 80th parallel in the United States was Yankee, that is, derived from New England.

Puritans in New England were not just its religious residents, with their faith separated from politics, education, culture, and practical matters of law, economics, and policy. They were in control, and their theology was in control of them.

Many of the laws of the Puritan colonies were borrowed from the Bible. The statutes for capital crimes were copied verbatim from Leviticus. Not only was the Puritan church established with tax money, church attendance was required.

Elections, meetings of the legislature, and executions were prefaced with sermons. The holy days, besides the enforced weekly Sabbath, were Thanksgiving days and fast days for repentance and listening to Jeremiah ads.

Both called spontaneously in response to Providence, the latter occurring about four times more often as Thanksgiving days. Under the original charter of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, only church members could vote.

The historian Perry Miller called Massachusetts a Bible Commonwealth. Puritan New England was a Protestant Christendom. Even all this, however, isn't convincing to some modern people. So accustomed are they to compartmentalized religion in our secular day.

Some point to the fact that only 20 of New Englanders were church members in the 17th century, compared to nearly two-thirds by the 1970s, and conclude that the rise in church membership shows that Americans actually became more devout since Puritan days.

Roger Fink and Rodney Stark announced with a barely suppressed eureka, quote, in the Puritan Commonwealth of Massachusetts, religious adherence never exceeded 22%. I dealt with this in other cycles of decline and progress.

In the Fourth Great Awakening or apostasy, is American evangelicalism cycling upwards or spiraling downwards? My answer was no. Like many others who try to prove rising religious influence on the basis of raw numbers, they make the basic mistake of assuming the meaning of membership has remained the same.

It hasn't. Standards for church membership in 17th century Puritan churches were exceedingly high. Besides agreeing to Puritan doctrine and living a scrupulous life, in view of the prying eyes of other members, one had to give a public account of an experience of salvation.

Standards became so prohibitive that many of the second generation of New England Puritans, though orthodox and moral, were not able to qualify for membership, and the halfway covenant had to be created.

And it must be emphasized, nearly all the people were churchgoers. The drift toward promiscuous church admissions became extensive during the crest of the 19th century's so-called Second Great Awakening.

Today, even in most conservative evangelical churches, membership is easily obtained through simply asking for it. Therefore, the 20 in 17th century New England represents a hard core of Puritan stalwarts, while the 1970s two-thirds includes many, if not mostly, nominal adherents.

The Great Awakening and the Spread of Puritan Influence

So the Puritans dominated New England, except for Rhode Island, and were founded on a hard core of committed devotees, then revived and spread through the Great Awakening, breaking out about a generation before the American Revolution, when Nehemiah Walter, the successor to the original Puritan missionary John Eliot, and husband of one of Increase Mather's daughters, heard the harbinger of the Great Awakening, George Whitefield, he declared, No less a keen observer and participant than Jonathan Edwards, insisted that the Awakening was the same in kind as the revivals of his Puritan forebears.

It is, quote, unquote. Edwards believed he was witnessing in the Great Awakening the Puritan piety of New England's founders revived. 1620, Redivivus. Church membership records prove the Awakening deserved the honorific great, that the impact was numeric as well as spiritual.

In Connecticut, for example, over the course of the Awakening, most churches added more new members than in any other recorded five-year period. In many cases, churches ballooned with new converts, some gaining over 100 members in less than a year.

Baptists were the big winners, and answer the question of the modern skeptic, if the 1620 project was so big and successful and then revived prior to the Revolution, where are they now? They're Baptists.

Certainly not all of them became Baptists, and not all Baptists are derived from them, but there was a flood of Baptist churches triggered by the tsunami of the Great Awakening. In 1740, there were no more than five Calvinistic Baptist churches in all of New England.

Before the end of the century, the Baptists could count 325 Baptist churches, of which the overwhelming majority were Calvinist. By that time, Isaac Bacchus, himself a convert from Congregationalism, insisted that Baptists were good Puritans, only differing on the meaning and mode of Baptism and the role of the state vis-a-vis the church.

Baptists would then spread their Puritanism across the new country. Fogel believed that the Awakening was the first in a cycle of advances in egalitarianism recurring in American history. Many historians, such as Harvard's Alan Hebert, have seen that this Puritan revival was pivotal to prepare the ground for a successful revolution.

First in New England, then throughout America, the values, ethics, and worldview of Puritanism, which sometime in its growth can be called Evangelicalism, was the dominant cultural force. The skeptical, deistic flavor of the European Enlightenment was overwhelmed in America by the 1620 Project.

Although it wasn't ruling over a theocratic New England anymore, it hadn't disappeared, but spiritually reawakened to reassert itself throughout the 19th century and into the 20th. Further, the spread of the Puritan ethic did not stop with the end of the Bible commonwealths and their semi-theocracy.

The descendants of Puritans assumed a role for government in the new United States, especially on the state and local level, for preserving public morals and encouraging religion generally. For example, Lyman Beecher, a famous New England revivalist of the early 19th century, at first lamented the disestablishment of Connecticut's Congregational Church in 1818, but as he mastered the voluntary society, he saw the possibilities for influence.

Beecher was determined these societies, like abolitionist, missionist, or evangelistic ones, would bring to bear the same influence once exerted by the old establishment. Eventually he came to confess that disestablishment was the best thing that ever happened to the state of Connecticut and that the ministers had gained influence.

While the Puritan quasi-theocracy dissolved from the Glorious Revolution to the American one, Puritan values were spread further and deeper into American culture by what George Marsden calls quote, culturally aggressive New England Yankees, unquote.

Both Fogel and Marsden sketch a complicated, reflexive confluence of movements in the first half of the 19th century in which Northern Protestants eventually coalesced, joining Northern Baptists and Methodists and the new Republican Party.

The result, says Marsden, was that the Republican Party had a strong Puritan evangelical component. Its mission was to bend society to Christian principles. The mitigation and eventual abolition of slavery was their first great goal.

The war that became necessary to achieve that goal is largely responsible for forging the American identity of a nation of the people, by the people, for the people that it projects to the world today.

That terrible war was the collision between the 1619 strand of America and the 1620 strand. Slavery was undone by the 1620 project. Although Puritan solidarity was fractured in his homeland, Puritanism spread to the new nation.

The evangelicalism that resulted began to look something like the Protestantism of the 19th century that would teach a new nation the work ethic, the value of community and family, and lead the fight against slavery.

The heralds of the awakening carried with their Calvinism messages that approached modern egalitarianism. Andrew Croswell, one of the most important itinerants to torch Boston with the Lord's truth in the spring and summer of 1742, the height of the Great Awakening, attracted huge crowds across the river from Boston and Charleston.

An advocate for the weak, Croswell decried the cruel treatment of prisoners and denounced slavery. Jonathan Edwards, often condemned for owning slaves, inspired disciples like Samuel Hopkins, who, shaken by the brutal reality of the slave trade, helped light the fuse that led to emancipation.

Edwards' own son, Jonathan Edwards the Younger, on September 15, 1791, gave an impassioned sermon based on Jesus' golden rule condemning slavery. The theological movement birthed by Edwards in the Great Awakening, rekindling the 1620 Project, inspired ministers who denounced slavery in their evangelistic preaching.

The result is that they turned the hearts and minds of much of the new country, particularly the northern half, against slavery. The revived 1620 Project changed the new nation, the 1676 Project, that originally tolerated slavery in all 13 states, so decisively against slavery that less than four score and seven years after the founding, they were willing to vote for a, moderately, anti-slavery president, provoking the South, the 1619 Project, to fight for and lose its slaves.

As Robert W. Fogel proved, slavery didn't end because of economics, European humanism, or the arc of history inevitably bending toward justice. Slavery was ended because the population in Britain and America were bent toward justice by Christians.

To be precise, it was Puritanism that propelled nonconformists across the Atlantic, caused them to flourish in North America, and to produce a culture and a movement of churches that would shape a nation and inspire the abolition movement.

Slavery, Consumerism, and the Competing American Strands

It may be that 1619 is the beginning of a strand of American identity that we are still reckoning with today, but it was 1620 that brought another strand, brought on another ship, the Mayflower, that was on a collision course with the 1620 strand.

1619's horrible injection into the American experiment was undone by the project begun in 1620. While it's true that early Puritans did not necessarily object to the odd household slave, they based this peculiar institution on economic necessity, not racism.

An African slave may be one of the elect. They could be admitted as church members. In 1698, Cotton Mather baptized two African adult slaves and two African children. On the other hand, Charles I, King of England, may be so reprobate as to deserve decapitation.

A theology which teaches that slaves may be elect and kings may be reprobate is not a theology that becomes the opiate of the masses. Ultimately joined by the Quakers, the left wing of Puritanism in Pennsylvania, they worked out the implications of their faith and turned against slavery, starting abolition.

The age-old peculiar institution was ended not by humanistic ideas of European enlightenment, but by a movement that waded ashore in 1620. Timothy Dwight, grandson of American Puritanism's greatest theologian, Jonathan Edwards, believed the Puritan era was quote, a normative era during which the American character and nation were formed.

When a society is shaped by these values, even those who are not particularly devout or orthodox, like Benjamin Franklin or Abraham Lincoln, may be said to have been broadly shaped by them. Puritan theology exerted a steady influence on the early American mind, like the Colorado River running through Arizona.

Puritanism carved into the American mind is attitudes and ethics. Puritan beliefs were pressed into the culture persistently for over 200 years following the founding of Plymouth Plantation, the 1620 Project.

It would be easy to dismiss the 1619 Project out of hand as fraudulent, as fiction, not history. Yes, to say that America's true founding is 1619 because... because... why exactly is not clear, except that it suits a particular agenda.

To say that 1619 is America's true founding is, frankly, absurd. But on the other hand, to pretend something poisonous wasn't injected into the American bloodstream with the introduction of slavery is also absurd.

Jamestown, growing to Virginia, was a major strand of American identity, beginning with being founded as a plantation of trade, which in a dozen years readily bought human beings. As though they could be bought.

Such a nation grows to profess that the business of America is business, to champion an ethics of pragmatism, and measure their precedence with the slogan it's the economy, stupid. It is still alive in the passionate intensity of flame among the worst today, that everything from government to churches to medical science exists for what we now call the consumer, the new king.

Even the plain facts of biology have to be dismissed at the whims of the new monarch. That's the new center that cannot hold. 1619 brought the consumer who assumes that even if we have to enslave others or now lock them down, close their churches, or even kill them in the womb or elsewhere to secure my comfort, well, that's our right.

My property, my slave, my body, my choice. The rationale today, ironically, shouted most loudly by those who tend to parrot the 1619 project is exactly the same as that created by the earlier incarnation of the 1619 project.

Some human beings are arbitrarily classified as non-persons, whether first to enslave them or now to abort them. They've only changed which human beings they'll strip of humanity. The question now is whether and how the 1620 strand of America can and will meet this challenge.

We're aflame with crisis because once again the 1619 strand of America consumed with consumerism and the sensate self is full of a passionate intensity while the 1620 strand has, in our day, largely lacked all conviction.

The center cannot hold because we don't know which founding is the center. These two strands were interwoven in 1776. Yes, the United States was founded in 1776 and deserves to be celebrated on July 4th but America preexisted the United States by over a century and a half.

It had several foundings, several strands, several centers. Even if we concede, which I don't, that the 1619 project was a founding, there is still 1620. Those who claim 1619 is America's founding conclude that America is therefore inherently corrupt systemically racist and needs to be founded again, re-centered.

But rather than boldly go to brave new worlds that promise, without providing, new heights of egalitarianism and justice, America would do better to re-center on the founding 400 years ago.