by William Trollinger

Below is an excerpt of an essay of mine that was published in the Summer, 2025 issue of New Directions for Adult and Continuing Education, an issue which is devoted to white Christian nationalism and education. A link to the complete article can be found at the end of the blog post. 

With the 2025 executive order, “Ending Radical Indoctrination in K-12 Schooling,” the Trump administration reestablished the 1776 Commission, which produced The 1776 Report. This report . . . reveals how White Christian Nationalists wish to mandate that a hyper-patriotic American history be taught (at the K-12 level and beyond). 

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It is crucial to note, as many commentators have, that the 1776 Report was designed to be a direct rebuttal of the 1619 Project. Developed by journalist Nikole Hannah-Jones and other writers, this Pulitzer Prize-winning New York Times Magazine project “aims to reframe the country’s history by placing the consequences of slavery and the contributions of black Americans at the very center of our national narrative.” So, it is not surprising that questions of race and slavery are at the center of the 1776 Report. According to the authors, historical revisionism of the sort found in the 1619 Project “tramples honest scholarship and historical truth, shames Americans by highlighting only the sins of their ancestors, and teaches claims of systemic racism that can only be eliminated by more discrimination.” This “deliberately destructive scholarship shatters the civic bonds that unite all Americans … silencing the discourse essential to a free society by breeding division, distrust, and hatred.” More than this, it “is the intellectual force behind so much of the violence in our cities, suppression of free speech in our universities, and defamation of our treasured national statues and symbols.” 

What violence are the authors referring to? Certainly not the attack on the US Capitol, which took place 2 weeks before the 1776 Report appeared. And “defamation of our treasured national statues?” The authors are clearly lamenting the fact that some Confederate monuments have been torn down or defaced. Not surprisingly, seeing the realities and effects of slavery—including family separation, rape, torture, and much more—has led some Americans to not understand Confederate statues as “treasured national statues,” but, instead, as monuments celebrating those who fought to keep the enslaved, enslaved (and as memorials designed to keep blacks, who had no say over the creation of these monuments, in their place). 

But for the authors of the 1776 Report, too many 21st-century Americans understand slavery as a sin unique to the United States: although “it is very hard for people brought up in the comforts of modern America … to imagine the cruelties and enormities that were endemic in earlier times,” the “unfortunate fact is that the institution of slavery has been more the rule than the exception throughout human history.” But as evinced by the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, the founding fathers contributed to an emerging “dramatic sea change in moral sensibilities” that culminated in “the Western world’s repudiation of slavery.” 

In this regard, the 1776 Report is most animated in its effort to rescue the Founders from what it sees as dishonest slander regarding slavery: “The most common charge leveled against the founders” is that “they were hypocrites who,” in creating a Constitution that protected the institution of slavery, “didn’t believe in their stated principles.” This “charge is untrue, and has done enormous damage, especially in recent years, with a devastating effect on our civic unity and social fabric.” 

As the authors see it, what is dividing and harming 21st-century America is not the long shadow of slavery and the resultant racism—individual and institutional—that is still with us today. Instead, what is dividing and harming America is seeing and talking about the enormous gap between the founders’ ideals and the realities of slavery, realities that are conveniently elided in the 1776 Report.

Of course, the authors have to deal with the bothersome fact that the Constitution incorporated provisions that protected slavery in America. They respond that although the founders knew slavery was wrong, at the Constitutional Convention they agreed to compromises that were designed to allow the creation of a United States of America while continuing to hold their firm conviction that all men are created equal. According to the 1776 Report, the 3/5 clause was designed “to prevent the South from counting their slaves as whole persons for purposes of increasing their congressional representation,” a claim that conveniently ignores how this clause gave Southern states much more power—including greater representation in the House of Representatives—than if their slaves (who had no more rights than oxen) had not been counted at all.

Then there was the slave trade: “the Constitution forbade any restriction” of it “for twenty years after ratification—at which time Congress immediately outlawed it.” The 1776 Report does not mention that not only did the United States government not make great efforts to enforce this provision, but there is no mention here of what became a burgeoning domestic slave trade.  Finally, there was the fugitive slave clause. According to the authors, while this was “perhaps the most hated protection of all,” what we need to keep in mind is that although this provision “accommodated pro-slavery delegates,” it “did not sanction slavery in the states where it existed.” This banal statement does not elaborate on what exactly this “accommodation” meant for black people desperately trying to escape the horrors of their condition, nor is there any reference to the particularly odious 1850 Fugitive Slave Act.

The 1776 Report goes to great lengths to argue that the death of slavery was planted in the country’s origins: the “Declaration’s unqualified proclamation of human equality flatly contradicted the existence of human bondage and, along with the Constitution’s compromises understood in light of that proposition, set the stage for abolition.” Of course, if this were the case, if the nation’s founders were committed to the notion that slavery was wrong, if slavery’s end was built into the founding documents, then what happened? Why did slavery not die out? Why was the Civil War necessary to kill it? 

According to the 1776 Report, over the first half of the 19th century increasing numbers of Americans came to reject the idea that all men are created equal. This idea was best articulated in the 1850s by South Carolina’s John C. Calhoun, who “rejected the Declaration’s principle of equality” as a “self-evident lie,” rights “inhere not in every individual by ‘the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God,’” but, instead, “in groups or races according to historical evolution. This new theory was developed to protect slavery—Calhoun claimed it was a ‘positive good.’”

The logical implication of this historical claim in the 1776 Report is that, at the beginning of the 19th century, most white Americans held to the idea that each human being had inherent rights as an individual. That is, most Americans—presumably including most white Southerners, presumably including most slaveholders—understood that slaves had inherent rights as individuals, even while these slaves were forcefully and violently denied the opportunity to live out their “inherent rights.” Given the “logic” of this argument, this meant that at some point, white Americans would live out the truth of the Constitution and conclude that slavery had to be abolished. But according to the authors, with the advent of the notion of “group rights,” white Americans—particularly white Southerners—abandoned the inevitability of abolition that was built into the Constitution. As a result, it took a war to eliminate the institution of slavery.

Not surprisingly, there is no evidence provided here that at some pre-Civil War moment in time—1830, perhaps?—some significant percentage of whites (North and South) were committed to racial equality. And pointing to the Declaration of Independence is not evidence for this claim. However, this gap highlights the historical lacunae in this report (and as will be noted later, and despite what the 1776 Report claims, “history” is actually not the point here). We are presented with the founders and the founding documents as part of an effort by the authors to rebut the charge that they and their Constitution benefited or bolstered the institution of slavery. But there is no discussion of the slave South, no discussion of the slave economy that benefitted both North and South, no discussion of the realities—of the horrors—of slavery. Regarding the Civil War, there is but one single sentence: “This conflict”—a conflict (according to the authors) between Calhoun’s group rights and the Declaration’s individual rights—“was resolved, but at a cost of more than 600,000 lives.” That is it. Note the passive voice. Note also the failure to observe that the Confederates adamantly maintained they were the ones fighting on behalf of the principles contained in America’s founding documents (a point their latter-day defenders continue to make in arguing that Southerners went to war on behalf of “state’s rights”).

When it comes to Reconstruction and its aftermath, to which the 1776 Report devotes but one paragraph, the authors assert that “despite the determined efforts of the postwar Reconstruction Congress to establish civil equality for freed slaves, the postbellum South ended up devolving into a system that was hardly better than slavery.” Once again, note the passive voice. But the postbellum South did not “devolve”; instead, white Southerners aggressively worked to re-establish their supremacy (in their words, to “redeem” the South). Interestingly, and to their credit, in this instance the authors undermine their own passive voice, acknowledging “the violence of vigilante groups like the Ku Klux Klan” that prevented blacks “from exercising their civil rights, particularly the right to vote.” There is also reference to the establishment of Jim Crow laws, although not a word about how the Supreme Court—supposedly devoted to upholding the Constitution—made possible the creation of a Jim Crow South, no reference to the active willingness of white Northerners to go along with this (and in some places establish and enforce their own Jim Crow laws), and—most important here—no discussion of how supporters of Jim Crow used the founding documents (and the Bible) to make their case.

That the authors spend so little time on the Civil War, Reconstruction, and the decades of Jim Crow America (the latter topic also gets but one sentence) reveals that the authors of the 1776 Report are in a rush to get to the “horrors” of the 1960s (and beyond). As the authors see it, the decade started very well with Martin Luther King, Jr. and the Civil Rights movement. King (at least, the King of the 1963 “I Have a Dream” speech) gets a lot of play in this report:

When the architects of our republic wrote the magnificent words of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence, they were signing a promissory note to which every American was to fall heir. This note was a promise that all men, yes, black men as well as white men, would be guaranteed the unalienable rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

According to the report, the Civil Rights movement—“a national movement composed of people from different races, ethnicities, nationalities, and religions”—secured legislative reforms regarding segregation, housing rights, and voting. More than this, the movement “presented itself, and was understood by the American people, as consistent with the principles of the founding.” 

This latter claim has no basis in historical reality. In 1963, only 35% of white Americans had a favorable view of King, a number that had dropped to 25% by his assassination in April 1968. I know this to be true from personal experience: the Denver, Colorado evangelical church of my youth hated King and his movement, as did my family (my father exploded when, the night after King was shot, I innocently said at the dinner table that a great American had been killed). More than this, and as Kevin Kruse has observed, these angry opponents of civil rights asserted that—and I also heard this in home and church—their opposition was rooted in their commitment to America’s founding principles: “When Sen. Strom Thurmond of South Carolina filibustered the Civil Rights of 1957, for instance, he pointedly recited the entire Declaration of Independence to link his act of defiance to the colonists’ acts.” 

According to the 1776 Report’s historical narrative, the Civil Rights movement very quickly began pushing for programs antithetical to King and his articulation of the principles found in the Declaration of Independence. Driven by the conviction that “past discrimination requires present effort, or affirmative action, in the form of preferential treatment to overcome long-accrued inequalities,” these programs, which involved the “abandonment of nondiscrimination and equal opportunity in favor of ‘group rights,’” were similar to those “advanced by Calhoun and his followers.” 

Again, the authors have strayed far from historical reality. Although they presume (in keeping with many white conservatives) that all we need to know about King is his “I Have a Dream” speech, the fact is that King strongly supported affirmative action as necessary in response to the 350 years of slavery and Jim Crow oppression. And to quote Kruse again, “drawing a straight line from the South Carolina politician Calhoun, one of the most infamous defenders of Black enslavement, to the African Americans who advocated affirmative action as a remedy for that very enslavement is, to say the least, an incredible stretch.”

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What we have in the 1776 Report is ideology, a Far-Right ideology, and definitely not history. And for all the claims that what we have now in K-12 and higher education is “indoctrination,” for all the calls that “states and school districts should reject any curriculum that promotes one-sided partisan opinions,” this is precisely what we get in the 1776 Report. The goal is not an open, “honest” educational system. The goal is an illiberal educational system that indoctrinates its students with a patently false history. In this regard, the American Historical Association has it exactly right in pointing out that Donald Trump’s executive order, “Ending Radical Indoctrination in K-12 Schooling,” provides

A blueprint for widespread historical illiteracy. It requires teachers to rely on discredited conclusions that lack professional credibility or even to ignore the work of historians entirely. This includes the notorious 1776 Report, whose factual deficiencies render it little more than ideological polemic.

The reality is that we need more, not less, scholarship that frankly and truthfully addresses the past and present of racism in American life. We need more, not fewer, efforts in public history that frankly and truthfully addresses “the long shadow of slavery” in the United States.5 Instead of adhering to the false history and ideological strictures of the 1776 Report, we would be much better off if we heeded the wise words of W. E. B. DuBois from his monumental 1935 work, Black Reconstruction:

Nations reel and stagger on their way; they make hideous mistakes; they commit frightful wrongs; they do great and beautiful things … And shall we not best guide humanity by telling the truth about all this, so far as the truth is ascertainable? (p. 714).

The complete article,  “Crime Against History: Slavery, Race, and the 1776 Report,” can be found here.