I think the 1619 project makes some really important points, so please don’t misconstrue this as a broadside attack on the publication. But the article on capitalism was a hit piece motivated mainly by the author’s (a guy named Ed Baptist) own political views:
https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-1619-project-tells-a-false-....
The article tries to stain American capitalism by claiming that it originated in plantation slavery and provided the capital that made America rich. The article rests on a superficial and fallacious parallelism that tries to equate slave owners lashing slaves to work harder with capitalists pursing ever increasing efficiency. And the author, being a sociologist and not an economist, commits massive math errors, overstating the economic significance of slavery by a magnitude: https://www.thecollegefix.com/cornell-scholar-cited-in-nyts-...; https://www.aier.org/article/the-statistical-errors-of-the-r...
> Coates’s numbers come from Cornell University historian Ed Baptist’s 2014 book The Half Has Never Been Told. In a key passage in the book, Baptist purports to add up the total value of economic activity that derived from cotton production, which at $77 million made up about 5 percent of the estimated gross domestic product (GDP) of the United States in 1836. Baptist then committed a fundamental accounting error. He proceeded to double and even triple count intermediate transactions involved in cotton production — things like land purchases for plantations, tools used for cotton production, transportation, insurance, and credit instruments used in each. Eventually that $77 million became $600 million in Baptist’s accounting, or almost half of the entire antebellum economy of the United States.
See also: https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/08/1619-project-new-york...
In fact, slavery kept the south poor (as economic theory would predict—you can’t make a society richer by enslaving labor; that makes the society poorer even if it enriches a minority of slave owners). Productivity and ultimately industrialization took off dramatically in the south after slavery was ended: https://www.econlib.org/archives/2014/09/ending_slavery.html