Sitting U.S. Senator Tom Cotton Thinks Slavery Was a “Necessary Evil”

Earlier this summer, Senator Tom Cotton published an op-ed in the New York Times advocating for Donald Trump to “send in the troops” and deploy federal forces to Democratic-led cities to quell protests against racist police killings. That essay was so awful it led to the resignation of the editor who ran it but Cotton seems determined to come up with an even worse take. He’s succeeded.

In an interview with the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, Cotton called slavery a “necessary evil” in the development of the United States.

Cotton was specifically taking issue with the Times’ “1619 Project,” a collection of work that seeks to reframe the narrative of American history with slavery at its center and as its birth. After the project was published last August, a companion curriculum was developed to teach the material in schools. Cotton has introduced a bill prohibiting federal funds from being used to teach it.

Cotton’s bill, titled the “Saving American History Act of 2020,” claims that the 1619 Project has the power to and the purpose of undermining our entire country. “The 1619 Project is a racially divisive and revisionist account of history that threatens the integrity of the Union by denying the true principles on which it was founded,” it reads.

Cotton told the Democrat-Gazette that, “Instead of portraying America as ‘an irredeemably corrupt, rotten and racist country,’ the nation should be viewed ‘as an imperfect and flawed land, but the greatest and noblest country in the history of mankind.'”

The 1619 Project, named for the date the first slave ships arrived in America, isn’t just about reframing history—it’s about acknowledging how that history has shaped the development of the nation and how “nearly everything that has truly made America exceptional” has grown out of slavery.

“The goal of The 1619 Project is to reframe American history by considering what it would mean to regard 1619 as our nation’s birth year,” reads the Times’ intro to the project. “Doing so requires us to place the consequences of slavery and the contributions of black Americans at the very center of the story we tell ourselves about who we are as a country.”

How exactly does that threaten the integrity of the Union?

Nikole Hannah-Jones, who won a Pulitzer for her direction of the project, called Cotton out on Twitter for trying to justify the institution of slavery.

Cotton takes issue with the idea that the foundation of the country is inextricable from slavery. Yet he himself acknowledges that it was a critical part of the country’s development—that’s where that “necessary evil” comment came up.

“We have to study the history of slavery and its role and impact on the development of our country because otherwise we can’t understand our country,” Cotton said. “As the Founding Fathers said, it was the necessary evil upon which the union was built, but the union was built in a way, as Lincoln said, to put slavery on the course to its ultimate extinction.”

So basically, the version of history Cotton thinks he needs to “save” is that slavery was essential to developing the country but the founding fathers were good guys who didn’t want slavery to last, and after abolition, the legacy of slavery had no bearing on the country whatsoever. Talk about revisionist history.

Cotton tried to defend himself on Twitter, claiming that he was expressing the founding fathers’ views, not his own. But his quote reads, “As the Founding Fathers said …” which is not how you cite someone you disagree with.

According to a 2018 report form the Southern Poverty Law Center, only 8% of high school seniors know that slavery was the central cause of the Civil War, two-thirds don’t know that a constitutional amendment was required to end slavery, and less that one quarter can identify how the constitution as written protected slavery and benefitted slaveholders. 58% of teachers say their textbooks are inadequate.

Clearly our history curricula—the ones Cotton says he’s “saving”—aren’t getting the job done.

Tom Cotton, who is generally thought to be a top prospect for the Republican presidential candidate in 2024, is also up for reelection in Arkansas this November. Just as a heads up.

(image: ANDREW HARNIK/POOL/AFP via Getty Images)

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Vivian Kane

Vivian Kane (she/her) is the Senior News Editor at The Mary Sue, where she's been writing about politics and entertainment (and all the ways in which the two overlap) since the dark days of late 2016. Born in San Francisco and radicalized in Los Angeles, she now lives in Kansas City, Missouri, where she gets to put her MFA to use covering the local theatre scene. She is the co-owner of The Pitch, Kansas City’s alt news and culture magazine, alongside her husband, Brock Wilbur, with whom she also shares many cats.

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