Pop quiz: Who tweeted this?
“The American Revolution was about leaving Britain. If America’s founders questioned slavery there would not have been the heinous “3/5 compromise” in the US Constitution, which was drafted and enacted AFTER the American Revolution. This is basic history.”
Give up? Well, it was none other than Randi Weingarten, President of the American Federation of Teachers, attempting without success to score a point against Ron DeSantis. The Florida governor had opined that the American Revolution caused people to question slavery, which is undoubtedly true. In fact, abolitionist sentiment predated the Revolution, whose outbreak gave it a significant boost, not least in the form of the Declaration of Independence. Thomas Jefferson’s broadside laid out a moral and political case against slavery that echoed down the decades to 1860 and beyond. And if you won’t take my word for it, here’s Abraham Lincoln, speaking at Independence Hall, Philadelphia, on February 22, 1861:
I have never had a feeling politically that did not spring from the sentiments embodied in the Declaration of Independence. I have often pondered over the dangers which were incurred by the men who assembled here and adopted that Declaration of Independence—I have pondered over the toils that were endured by the officers and soldiers of the army, who achieved that independence. I have often inquired of myself, what great principle or idea it was that kept this Confederacy so long together. It was not the mere matter of the separation of the colonies from the mother land; but something in that Declaration giving liberty, not alone to the people of this country, but hope to the world for all future time. It was that which gave promise that in due time the weights should be lifted from the shoulders of all men, and that all should have an equal chance. This is the sentiment embodied in that Declaration of Independence.
In fairness let it be noted that Weingarten got one thing right at least: The American Revolution was about securing independence from Britain. But not independence alone, as Lincoln’s words remind us. Weingarten skips over that aspect of the Revolution, however, hurrying on to misconstrue the United States Constitution’s Three-Fifths Compromise, which despite her heavy breathing had nothing directly to do with the status of slaves.
The point at issue that produced that compromise was whether slaves should be included in the constitutionally mandated decennial census to determine how many members each state would send to the House of Representatives. Those states with large numbers of slaves naturally wanted them all to be counted; those with few slaves wanted them totally excluded from the count. Counting all slaves was, therefore, the pro-slavery position, in that it would give the slave states more power in the House, while not counting them at all was the anti-slavery position. In the end a compromise was struck, specifying that three-fifths of each state’s slave population would be included in the census figures. In short, the Three-Fifths Compromise had nothing to do with the status of slaves: Whether they were fully counted, not counted or partially counted, they remained enslaved.
Even before the Constitution was adopted, the Congress sitting under the Articles of Confederation had given evidence of anti-slavery sentiment. The Northwest Ordinance, passed in 1787, banned slavery (but not indentured servitude) in the Northwest Territory, which encompassed all or part of the future states of Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Michigan, Wisconsin and Minnesota.
So Weingarten got the history wrong. But she also committed a thought crime. For the one true thing in her tweet, that “the American Revolution was about leaving Britain,” contradicts the 1619 Project and all similar revisionist history, which holds as an article of faith that slavery was at the very core of the American founding, all other factors being secondary.
In line with this cockeyed notion, progressives denounce the men who framed the Constitution on the grounds that they did not abolish slavery and, indeed, drew up a scheme of government that gave slavery formal protection. The former complaint is fanciful, since any attempt by the Constitutional Convention to abolish slavery would have meant no federal union, a breakup of the United States and an independent slaveholding confederation appearing in 1790 instead of 1860—a terrible counterfactual to contemplate. The second complaint suffers from a lack of supporting evidence. Nowhere in the Constitution of the United States is slavery accorded formal status or protection. If such protection had existed, then presumably the leaders of the slave states would not have felt compelled to secede from the union in 1860. But they did feel compelled to secede, for they knew that nothing in the Constitution of the United States protected their “peculiar institution.” And when they set up the Confederate States of America, they gave it a constitution that explicitly protected slavery. That, to steal Weingarten’s phrase, is basic history.
Randi Weingarten & Co. claim sole power over American public education, as Virginia gubernatorial candidate Terry McAullife revealed in 2021 when he said that parents should have no say concerning what their children are taught. But as we discovered during the COVID-19 pandemic, what progressive educators call education is really a form of left-wing political activism. It’s no wonder that they tried so hard to hide what they were doing from parents and the public. And when they were caught out, teachers, administrators and school boards simply lied. It may be true that Critical Race Theory per se is not being taught in America’s public schools. But junk history and dubious social science derived from CRT is being taught. When people complain about this, Weingarten & Co. just slap down the race card, claiming that “extreme right-wingers” and similar villains don’t want the history of slavery to be taught at all.
All this matters. The American people have a right to their history—its glories and its sins in their due proportions. But the education establishment has evolved into a destructive force that seeks to replace that history with fables derived from their own ideological obsessions and fancies. This is a strange and sinister interpretation of the teacher’s mission: education as political indoctrination. It’s an intellectual pollutant at every level of the system, from preschool to graduate school. And where history is concerned, its baneful consequences have crossed the line from ideological bias to outright falsification.