"The United States very literally paid an atoning sacrifice for the sin of slavery," writes
Erick Erickson
in a Resurgent article titled
The Atoning Sacrifice of the Union Soldiers Means Nothing to the New York Times’ 1619 Project: "… the Civil War … was divine wrath poured out on the nation for
enslaving a population. While the New York Times may get there, its
revisionist, reframing exercise right now totally misses all of that. In
fact, the progressive rhetoric of the day and calls for reparations
from Democrat politicians are poured out into a void of
willful
ignorance as they ignore the body count of mostly white Union soldiers
who died that slavery might end. They paid reparations with their lives,
The nation lost 2% of its male population."
Remember that as many Americans died during four years in the 1860s as in all wars during the 20th century combined. So I would tend to agree with all that
Erick Erickson writes (which is why I reference his Resurgent article below), but something that doesn't always seem to be pointed out lately, in regards to the
1619 Project, is that the South's numerous dead — one Southern man of fighting age in four lost his life during the conflict — also means that the South was punished for slavery.
So the dead from the North and the dead from the South are two sides of the same coin: Why are reparations necessary 150 years (!) after slavery ended when hundreds of thousands of Northern fathers had to bury their sons for atoning for slavery while hundreds of thousands of Southern fathers and mothers had to bury their sons for being punished for slavery?
… Through Christ shedding blood, God can overlook our sins because they were placed on Christ.
This is a concept Abraham Lincoln knew well and it is one he applied to the Civil War. In his second inaugural, Lincoln said,
Both
read the same Bible and pray to the same God, and each invokes His aid
against the other. It may seem strange that any men should dare to ask a
just God’s assistance in wringing their bread from the sweat of other
men’s faces, but let us judge not, that we be not judged. The prayers of
both could not be answered. That of neither has been answered fully.
The Almighty has His own purposes. “Woe unto the world because of
offenses; for it must needs be that offenses come, but woe to that man
by whom the offense cometh.” If we shall suppose that American slavery
is one of those offenses which, in the providence of God, must needs
come, but which, having continued through His appointed time, He now
wills to remove, and that He gives to both North and South this terrible
war as the woe due to those by whom the offense came, shall we discern
therein any departure from those divine attributes which the believers
in a living God always ascribe to Him? Fondly do we hope, fervently do
we pray, that this mighty scourge of war may speedily pass away. Yet, if
God wills that it continue until all the wealth piled by the bondsman’s
two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until
every drop of blood drawn with the lash shall be paid by another drawn
with the sword, as was said three thousand years ago, so still it must
be said “the judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether.”
It
gets to the idea of the blood being shed on the battlefield being an
atoning sacrifice for the nation’s original sin. The Union soldiers were
the propitiation for our national sin. The Battle Hymn of the Republic
quite exquisitely wraps around the whole idea of the War being about
atonement, propitiation, and making right with God.
620,000 Americans lost their lives in the Civil War.
On the Union side, 596,670 soldiers were killed, wounded, captured, or
went missing in action. 490,309 Confederate soldiers were killed,
wounded, captured, or went missing in action.
Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord;
He is trampling out the vintage where the grapes of wrath are stored;
He hath loosed the fateful lightning of His terrible swift sword:
His truth is marching on.
The
United States very literally paid an atoning sacrifice for the sin of
slavery. Union preachers of the day and the President of the United
States came to see the war in that light. Prior to the Civil War, more
and more prominent Americans began discussing it in that light. The war
was divine wrath poured out on the nation for enslaving a population.
I have seen Him in the watch-fires of a hundred circling camps,
They have builded Him an altar in the evening dews and damps;
I can read His righteous sentence by the dim and flaring lamps:
His day is marching on.
While
the New York Times may get there, its revisionist, reframing exercise
right now totally misses all of that. In fact, the progressive rhetoric
of the day and calls for reparations from Democrat politicians are
poured out into a void of willful ignorance as they ignore the body
count of mostly white Union soldiers who died that slavery might end.
They paid reparations with their lives, The nation lost 2% of its male population.
I have read a fiery gospel writ in burnished rows of steel:
“As ye deal with my contemners, so with you my grace shall deal”;
Let the Hero, born of woman, crush the serpent with his heel,
Since God is marching on.
The
New York Times and progressives have no concept of grace. Secular progressivism has, in fact, become a religion of its own. It has
its own sacraments in the form of abortion and activism. It has its own
tenets accepted not by fact or science, but by faith, including that
boys can become girls. It has its own ecclesiology in how it conducts
protest and activism. It has its own priests in the form of Planned
Parenthood and other celebrities. It has its own eschatology in how the
world will end — always badly in climate change. It has its own plan of
salvation in that the saved cannot be saved unless those who dissent
from the religion are silenced as deniers, haters, bigots, or the like.
Unlike Christianity wherein the destruction of the wicked happens, but
is not necessary for the salvation of any one person, the wicked must
always perish for the righteous to be saved in progressivism. This is
why leftwing totalitarian regimes always end in mass murder, by the way.
What progressivism lacks are two things. It lacks a sense of history.
To have one would be to root progressivism, but an ideology always on
the move, even against itself, cannot be rooted. It also, like all
religions outside Christianity, lacks a concept of grace.
Secular
progressives show no grace and very little mercy to those inside and
outside their religion. One must always convert to new levels of
wokeness or be exposed as a heretic.
He has sounded forth the trumpet that shall never call retreat;
He is sifting out the hearts of men before His judgment-seat;
Oh, be swift, my soul, to answer Him! Be jubilant, my feet!
Our God is marching on.
Into
this, the 1619 Project of the New York Times is an exercise in
religious indoctrination. It is a systematic theology for wokeness. It
is also a confession of faith by which heretics can be determined,
outed, and marginalized.
Should one take any issue with the claims
made, no matter how fictitious or devoid of historic accuracy, that
person can be labeled a white supremacist, or an other destined to be cast out of the conversation.
Should one agree with the revisionist reframing, but disagree on the
solutions, that person too can be cast out for not doing their fair
share to make a heaven on earth.
To accomplish all of this, what
the left and the Times must do is ignore, downplay, or rewrite the
history of 1861 to 1865. They must minimize, downplay, or ignore the
deaths of 620,000 men, the majority of whom died, as the “Battle Hymn of
the Republic” declares, “to make men free.”
In the beauty of the lilies Christ was born across the sea,
With a glory in His bosom that transfigures you and me.
As He died to make men holy, let us die to make men free,
While God is marching on.
Glory, glory, hallelujah!
Glory, glory, hallelujah!
Glory, glory, hallelujah!
Our God is marching on
RELATED:
1619, Mao, & 9-11: History According to the NYT — Plus, a Remarkable Issue of National Geographic Reveals the Leftists' "Blame America First" Approach to History
• Wilfred Reilly on 1619:
quite a few contemporary Black problems have very little to do with slavery
NO MAINSTREAM HISTORIAN CONTACTED FOR THE 1619 PROJECT
• "Out of the Revolution came an anti-slavery ethos, which never
disappeared": Pulitzer Prize Winner James McPherson Confirms that
No Mainstream Historian Was Contacted by the NYT for Its 1619 History Project
• Gordon Wood: "The Revolution unleashed antislavery sentiments that led to the
first abolition movements in the history of the world" —
another Pulitzer-Winning Historian Had No Warning about the NYT's 1619 Project
• A Black Political Scientist "didn’t know about the 1619 Project until it came out";
"These people are kind of just making it up as they go"
• Clayborne Carson: Another Black Historian
Kept in the Dark About 1619
• If historians did not hear of the NYT's history (sic) plan,
chances are great that the 1619 Project was being deliberately kept a tight secret
• Oxford Historian Richard Carwardine: 1619 is
“a preposterous and one-dimensional reading of the American past”
• World Socialists:
"the 1619 Project is a politically motivated falsification of history" by the New York Times, aka "the mouthpiece of the Democratic Party"
THE NEW YORK TIMES OR THE NEW "WOKE" TIMES?
• Dan Gainor on 1619 and rewriting history: "To the Left elite like the NY Times,
there’s no narrative they want to destroy more than American exceptionalism"
• Utterly preposterous claims: The 1619 project is a cynical political ploy,
aimed at piercing the heart of the American understanding of justice
•
From Washington to Grant, not a single American deserves an iota of gratitude, or even understanding, from Nikole
Hannah-Jones; however, modern autocrats, if leftist and foreign, aren't "all bad"
• One of the Main Sources for the NYT's 1619 Project Is
a Career Communist Propagandist who Defends Stalinism
• A Pulitzer Prize?! Among the 1619 Defenders Is
"a Fringe Academic" with "a Fetish for Authoritarian Terror" and "a Soft Spot" for Mugabe, Castro, and Even Stalin
• Influenced by Farrakhan's Nation of Islam?!
1619 Project's History "Expert" Believes the Aztecs' Pyramids Were Built with Help from Africans Who Crossed the Atlantic Prior to the "Barbaric Devils" of Columbus (Whom She Likens to Hitler)
•
1793, 1776, or 1619: Is the New York Times Distinguishable from Teen Vogue? Is It Living in a Parallel Universe? Or Is It
Simply Losing Its Mind in an Industry-Wide Nervous Breakdown?
• No longer America's "newspaper of record,"
the "New Woke Times" is now but a college campus paper, where kids like 1619 writer Nikole Hannah-Jones run the asylum and determine what news is fit to print
• The Departure of Bari Weiss:
"Propagandists", Ethical Collapse, and the
"New McCarthyism" — "The radical left are running" the New York Times, "and no dissent is tolerated"
• "Full of left-wing sophomoric drivel": The New York Times —
already
drowning in a fantasy-land of alternately running pro-Soviet Union
apologia and their anti-American founding “1619 Project” series — promises to narrow what they view as acceptable opinion even more
• "Deeply Ashamed" of the… New York Times (!),
An Oblivious Founder of the Error-Ridden 1619 Project Uses Words that Have to Be Seen to Be Believed ("We as a News Organization Should Not Be Running Something That Is Offering Misinformation to the Public, Unchecked")
• Allen C Guelzo: The New York Times offers bitterness, fragility, and intellectual corruption—
The 1619 Project is not history; it is conspiracy theory
• The 1619 Project is an exercise in religious indoctrination:
Ignoring,
downplaying, or rewriting the history of 1861 to 1865, the Left and the
NYT must minimize, downplay, or ignore the deaths of 620,000 Americans
• 1619: It takes
an absurdly blind fanaticism to insist that today’s free and prosperous America is rotten and institutionally oppressive
• The MSM newsrooms and their public shaming terror campaigns — the "bullying campus Marxism" is
closer to cult religion than politics: Unceasingly searching out thoughtcrime, the American left has lost its mind
•
Fake But Accurate: The People Behind the NYT's 1619 Project Make a
"Small" Clarification, But Only Begrudgingly and Half-Heartedly, Because
Said Mistake Actually Undermines The 1619 Project's Entire Premise
THE REVOLUTION OF THE 1770s
• The Collapse of the Fourth Estate by Peter Wood: No
one has been able to identify a single leader, soldier, or supporter of
the Revolution who wanted to protect his right to hold slaves (A declaration that
slavery is the founding institution of America and the center of
everything important in our history is a ground-breaking claim, of the
same type as claims that America condones rape culture, that 9/11 was an
inside job, that vaccinations cause autism, that the Moon landing was a
hoax, or that ancient astronauts built the pyramids)
• Mary Beth Norton: In 1774, a year before Dunmore's proclamation, Americans had already in fact become independent
• Most of the founders, including Thomas Jefferson, opposed slavery’s continued existence, writes Rick Atkinson, despite the fact that many of them owned slaves
• Leslie Harris: Far
from being fought to preserve slavery, the Revolutionary War became a
primary disrupter of slavery in the North American Colonies (even
the NYT's fact-checker on the 1619 Project disagrees with its
"conclusions": "It took 60 more years for the British government to
finally
end slavery in its Caribbean colonies")
• Sean Wilentz on 1619: the
movement in London to abolish the slave trade formed only in 1787,
largely inspired by… American (!) antislavery opinion that had arisen in
the 1760s and 1770s
• 1619 & Slavery's Fatal Lie: it is more accurate to say that what makes America unique isn't slavery but the effort to abolish it
• 1619 & 1772: Most of
the founders, including Jefferson, opposed slavery’s continued
existence, despite many of them owning slaves; And Britain would remain the world's foremost slave-trading nation into the nineteenth century
• Wilfred Reilly on 1619: Slavery was legal in Britain in 1776, and it remained so in all overseas British colonies until 1833
• Not 1619 but 1641: In Fact, the American Revolution of 1776 Sought to Avoid the Excesses of the English Revolution Over a Century Earlier
• James Oakes on 1619: "Slavery made the slaveholders rich; But it made the South poor; And it didn’t make the North rich — So the legacy of slavery is poverty, not wealth"
• One of the steps of defeating truth is to destroy evidence of the truth, says Bob Woodson; Because
the North's Civil War statues — as well as American history itself —
are evidence of America's redemption from slavery, it's important for
the Left to remove evidence of the truth
TEACHING GENERATIONS OF KIDS FALSEHOODS ABOUT THE U.S.
• 1619: No wonder this place is crawling with young socialists and America-haters — the utter failure of the U.S. educational system to teach the history of America’s founding
• 1619: Invariably Taking the Progressive Side — The Ratio of Democratic
to Republican Voter Registration in History Departments is More than 33 to 1
• Denying the grandeur of the nation’s founding—Wilfred McClay on 1619: "Most of my students are shocked to learn that that slavery is not uniquely American"
• Inciting Hate Already in Kindergarten:
1619 "Education" Is Part of Far-Left Indoctrination by People Who Hate
America to Kids in College, in School, and Even in Elementary Classes
• "Distortions, half-truths, and outright falsehoods": Where does the 1619 project state that Africans themselves were central players in the slave trade? That's right: Nowhere
• John Podhoretz on 1619: the idea of reducing US history to the fact that some people owned slaves is a reductio ad absurdum and the definition of bad faith
• The 1619 Africans in Virginia were not ‘enslaved’, a black historian points out; they were indentured servants — just like the majority of European whites were
• "Two thirds of the people, white as well as black, who crossed the Atlantic in the first 200 years are indentured servants" notes Dolores Janiewski; "The poor people, black and white, share common interests"
LAST BUT NOT LEAST…
• Wondering Why Slavery Persisted for Almost 75 Years After the Founding
of the USA? According to Lincoln, the Democrat Party's "Principled"
Opposition to "Hate Speech"
• Victoria Bynum on 1619 and a NYT writer's "ignorance of history": "As dehumanizing and brutal as slavery was, the institution was not a giant concentration camp"
• Dennis Prager: The Left Couldn't Care Less About Blacks
• The Secret About the Black Lives Matter Outfit; In Fact, Its Name Ought to Be BSD or BAD
• The Real Reason Why Aunt Jemima, Uncle Ben, and the Land O'Lakes Maid Must Vanish
• The Confederate Flag: Another Brick in the Leftwing Activists' (Self-Serving) Demonization of America and Rewriting of History
• Who, Exactly, Is It
Who Should Apologize for Slavery and Make Reparations? America? The
South? The Descendants of the Planters? …
• Anti-Americanism in the Age of the Coronavirus, the NBA, and 1619
