NYTimes Charles Blow Opinion

[Rob Wick]

Quote:How'd this conversation change course so wildly?

Steve,

I am perfectly willing to accept some of the responsibility for this because David often feels it necessary to protect Lincoln from the wicked Hannah Nikole-Jones and the NYT's 1619 project. I think his viewpoint is fatally flawed. Even though my initial point was that even historically inaccurate books can be bestsellers, David seems to think that since the 1619 Project won the Pulitzer Prize, every anti-Lincoln troll in America will successfully remove Lincoln from the public sphere. Without checking, I argue that no one can even name who won a Pulitzer Prize for a particular year, so it is generally irrelevant except as a marketing tool.

David, as for your quotation from Team of Rivals, which is not fatally flawed but also not the last word on Lincoln's administration, you engage in selective editing. Show me in the historical record where any of the five meeting with Lincoln worked to further the proposal. You can search all you want, but you'll never find it. When they wrote Lincoln, they were being polite. In an article in Phylon in 1965, James McPherson wrote:

"Soon...the delegation of Negroes to which Lincoln had spoken on August 14 issued their formal reply to the President's proposal. They deemed it 'inexpedient, inauspicious and impolitic to agitate the subject of emigration of the colored people of this country anywhere.... We judge it unauthorized and unjust for us to compromise the interests of over four and a half millions of our race by precipitate action on our part.'
The Boston Commonwealth, an abolitionist weekly, commented dryly: 'The colored people do not seem to appreciate the advantages of the coal mine speculation recommended to them.'"

Finally, a furious Frederick Douglass wrote, "It expresses merely the desire to get rid of them, and reminds one of the politeness with which a man might try to bow out of his house some troublesome creditor or the witness of some old guilt."

Sorry, David, but again, you are wrong.

Best
Rob