Historians Trash DeSantis' Understanding of U.S. History—'Beyond Ignorance'

Ron DeSantis has been accused of mixing "fact and fiction" by leading historians over his comments about early U.S. history.

Speaking on Tuesday the Florida Governor claimed it was the "American revolution that caused people to question slavery."

He added: "Nobody had questioned it before we decided as Americans that we are endowered by our creator with inalienable rights and that we are all created equal. Then that birthed abolition movements."

DeSantis posted a nearly two-minute clip of his address on Twitter which was widely shared, attracting more than 900,000 views.

However, speaking to Newsweek four prominent American historians rejected his argument, with one branding it "completely incorrect."

Reacting to DeSantis's comments Professor Karin Wulf, who specializes in eighteenth-century British America at Brown University, said: "On at least three levels this is wrong.

"The idea of natural rights didn't originate with the American revolutionaries; they were reflecting ideas that were widespread among political thinkers, perhaps most obviously the 17th century English political philosopher John Locke. The United States as a government did not act against slavery in any form until 1807 (prohibition of the Atlantic slave trade) and acted in key ways to protect it right up to the Civil War (the fugitive slave act).

"Most egregiously, the idea that 'no one' questioned slavery erases enslaved people themselves who were active in resisting slavery both as individuals and collectively and in refusing the logic and legality of their enslavement."

Seth Rockman, an associate professor at Brown who has written extensively about the economics of slavery, accused DeSantis of ignoring Black Americans as part of a strategy linked with white nationalism.

He commented: "DeSantis clearly has not done the reading for class, but his error here goes beyond ignorance of the last several decades of research on anti-slavery thinking and organizing over the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. What DeSantis does here is more pernicious because it places Black people outside the category of 'we' and 'Americans'— a move that can only be understood as part of DeSantis's strategy to ride white nationalism to higher office.

"This statement is yet another deliberate DeSantis move to 'trigger' or 'own the libs,' but let's think about the implications of DeSantis's statement here: When DeSantis says 'no one' he pretends that enslaved African and African-descended people aren't worth taking seriously as people whose opinions about slavery might matter, then or now.

"The slaves who staged massive revolts in New York, South Carolina, and other mainland colonies throughout the colonial era, were they not questioning slavery?"

Johns Hopkins University Professor Sarah Pearsall, who has worked extensively on the "colonial and revolutionary periods" of U.S. history, also disagreed.

She said: "The claim by DeSantis is completely incorrect. Plenty of people had questioned slavery before the American Revolution. Of course enslaved people had resisted the system since its inception, but there were also tracts by colonists, such as Samuel Sewell's The Selling of Joseph, published in Boston in 1700, which argued that the institution was unacceptable.

"Early abolitionists on both sides of the Atlantic included Quakers; their efforts in some cases predated the outbreak of the American Revolution. Since DeSantis also states of history that 'It's gotta be accurate,' he might want to practice what he preaches."

In his address DeSantis also challenged the 1619 Project, a New York Times Magazine enterprise arguing the role of Black Americans and persistency of racism has been underplayed in most historic accounts, which has influenced some school curriculums.

DeSantis branded the 1619 Project a "CRT version of history" claiming "they want to teach our kids that the American revolution was fought to protect slavery and that's false."

Professor Rebecca McLennan, who teaches at UC Berkeley, agreed with some of DeSantis's criticism of the 1619 Project, but accused him of promoting "a different fiction."

She said: "Most professional historians, regardless of their politics, would concur with DeSantis that the 1619 Project's claim that the American revolution was fought to preserve slavery is at best an interpretive error and at worst a flat-out fallacy.

"And while DeSantis gets some crucial things right about the American Revolution—its radically liberatory idea that all human beings are endowed with certain unalienable rights—he perpetrates a different fiction, inadvertently or otherwise: that it was only during or after the Revolution that 'people' came to question slavery.

"Putting the egalitarian stirring of antislavery in the evangelical Great Awakening of the 1730s and 1740s aside, those millions of people who were enslaved on American soil in the 17th and 18th centuries had done far more than simply 'question slavery'—and they had done so from the beginning.

"Enslaved people—almost one in four Americans in the 1770s—didn't need abolitionists to make them question the institution or to tell them that chattel slavery was fundamentally wrong."

A recent poll found DeSantis had taken the lead against Donald Trump amongst Florida voters if there is a contest between the two for the 2024 Republican Party presidential nomination.

And earlier this week DeSantis received an election endorsement from David Kerner, the Democratic Palm Beach County Commissioner.

Newsweek has contacted Governor DeSantis for comment.

Update 9/25/22, 7:05 a.m. ET: This story has been updated to note that Professor Sarah Pearsall teaches at Johns Hopkins University.

Correction 9/27/22, 4:04 a.m. ET: This article has been updated to correct the spelling of UC Berkeley.