The ideals gaining force during the Revolutionary era also inspired Northern states from Vermont to Pennsylvania to pass laws gradually ending slavery. These laws did not prescribe full and immediate emancipation: They freed the children of enslaved mothers only after the children served their mothers’ enslavers through their early 20s. Nor did they promise racial equality or full citizenship for African Americans—far from it. But black activism during the Revolutionary War and this era of emancipation led to the end of slavery earlier than prescribed in such laws. Enslaved black people negotiated with their owners to purchase their freedom, or simply ran away in the confused aftermath of war. And most Northern enslavers freed slaves ahead of the time mandated by law.

Among Northern—and even some Southern—white people, the push to end slavery during this time was real. The new nation almost faltered over the degree to which the Constitution supported the institution. In the end, Northern Colonies conceded a number of points to the protection of slavery on the federal level, even as the Constitution also pledged to end the trans-Atlantic slave trade by 1807—all without once using the word “slave.” The degree to which the document was intended to provide for the protection or the destruction of slavery was hotly contested in the antebellum era. While Frederick Douglass may have seen the Constitution as an anti-slavery document, both radical abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison and pro-slavery ideologue John C. Calhoun saw it as written to support slavery. Abraham Lincoln was unable to use the Constitution as written to end slavery, either during his time in Congress or after his election to the presidency. The argument was settled through the Civil War, and by rewriting the Constitution with the 13th, 14th and 15th amendments.

Frederick Douglass, right, may have seen the Constitution as an anti-slavery document, while fellow abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison, left, saw it as written to support slavery. | National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution; Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture

The 1619 Project, in its claim that the Revolution was fought primarily to preserve slavery, doesn’t do justice to this history. Nor, however, does the five historians’ critical letter. In fact, the historians are just as misleading in simply asserting that Lincoln and Douglass agreed that the Constitution was a “glorious liberty document” without addressing how few other Americans agreed that the Constitution’s protections should be shared with African Americans. Gradual emancipation laws, as well as a range of state and local laws across the antebellum nation limiting black suffrage, property ownership, access to education and even residency in places like Ohio, Washington and California, together demonstrate that legally, the struggle for black equality almost always took a back seat to the oppressive imperatives of white supremacy. And racial violence against black people and against those few white people who supported ending slavery and supported black citizenship undergirded these inequalities—a pattern that continued well into the 20th century.

The five historians’ letter says it “applauds all efforts to address the enduring centrality of slavery and racism to our history.” The best-known of those letter-writers, however, built their careers on an older style of American history—one that largely ignored the new currents that had begun to bubble up among their contemporaries. By the time Gordon Wood and Sean Wilentz were publishing their first, highly acclaimed books on pre-Civil War America, in the early 1970s and mid-1980s, respectively, academic historians had begun, finally, to acknowledge African American history and slavery as a critical theme in American history. But Wood and Wilentz paid little attention to such matters in their first works on early America.

In Wood’s exhaustive and foundational The Creation of the American Republic (1969), which details the development of republican ideology in the new nation, there is only one index listing for “Negroes,” and none for slavery. In his first book, Chants Democratic (1984), Wilentz sought to explain how New York’s antebellum-era working class took up republican ideals, which had been used by some Founding Fathers to limit citizenship, and rewrote the tenets to include themselves as full-fledged citizens. Yet Wilentz’s work largely ignored issues of race and black workers, even though New York had the largest population of enslaved black people in the Colonial North, the second-largest population of free black people in the antebellum urban North, and was the site of the most violent race riots of the 19th century. As I wrote in my own 2003 book, Wilentz created “a white hegemony more powerful than that which existed” during the era he was studying.

In their subsequent works, Wilentz and Wood have continued to fall prey to the same either/or interpretation of the nation’s history: Either the nation is a radical instigator of freedom and liberty, or it is not. (The truth, obviously, is somewhere in between.) In The Radicalism of the American Revolution (1991), Wood acknowledges the new nation’s failure to end slavery, and even the brutality of some Founding Fathers who held people as property. But the facts of slave-owning are not presented as central to that time. While he discusses the Founders’ ability to eliminate other forms of hierarchy, Wood has no explanation for why they were unable to eliminate slavery; nor does he discuss how or why Northern states did so. Further, black people as historical actors shaping the ideas and lives of the Founders have no place in his work.

Wilentz has struggled publicly over how to understand the centrality of slavery to the nation’s founding era. In a 2015 op-ed, and more fully in his 2018 book No Property in Man, he argues that the Constitutional Convention specifically kept support for slavery defined as “property in man” out of the Constitution, a key distinction that the Founders believed would eventually allow for ending slavery in the nation. Such an argument obscures the degree to which many Founding Fathers returned to a support of Southern slavery as the revolutionary fervor waned; by the early 19th century, as only one example, Thomas Jefferson established the University of Virginia in part as a pro-slavery bulwark against Northern anti-slavery ideologies.

Fortunately, the works of Wood and Wilentz and others who underrepresent the centrality of slavery and African Americans to America’s history are only one strand of a vibrant scholarship on early America. Beginning in the last quarter of the 20th century, historians like Gary Nash, Ira Berlin and Alfred Young built on the earlier work of Carter G. Woodson, Benjamin Quarles, John Hope Franklin and others, writing histories of the Colonial and Revolutionary eras that included African Americans, slavery and race. A standout from this time is Edmund Morgan’s American Slavery, American Freedom, which addresses explicitly how the intertwined histories of Native American, African American and English residents of Virginia are foundational to understanding the ideas of freedom we still struggle with today. These works have much to teach us about history, and about how to study and present it in a way that is inclusive of our historical and present-day diversity as a nation. Just as importantly, these scholars and many others fostered new scholarship by mentoring a diverse group of thinkers within and beyond academia.