(I changed the subject line from "The Peculiar Institution's End Without The
Intervention Of The Civil War" and retained, below the dashed line, what
started this diverging thread.)
From: Finkelman, Paul
> abolition may not have been an official war aim before
> Sept. 1862 but slaves were being freed by May 1861 and
> the first confiscation act (July 1861) authorized freeing
> some slaves. The Fortress Monroe argument is strong --
> Ben Butler begins emancipation early on and set the
> stage for the EP.
Here's what I don't understand, especially from so staunch a respecter as
Professor Finkelman of the individual personhood and dignity -- and the
individual agency -- of the enslaved: Why does so much residue of the the
language and logic, such as it was, of the slavery era still taint the
telling of the Fort Monroe Freedom Story and all that ensued?
"Slaves were being freed" by May 1861?
On May 23, 1861, Frank Baker, Sheppard Mallory and James Townsend made the
risky, enterprising, imaginative, and above all _active_ decision to escape
enslavement and seek freedom at the Union's profoundly symbolic bastion in
Confederate Virginia, Fort Monroe. No politician had whispered anything into
their ears about "emancipation." Those people, and tens of thousands like
them, even despite centuries of oppression and enforced illiteracy,
recognized in their own hearts that something about America might just
promise something to them. So they stood up and reached for it, despite the
risks. Does the phrase "being freed" really do justice to that? Or is it
just what we say out of thoughtless, unintentional acceptance of
centuries-old presumptions of black inferiority? Is it just what we say out
of unconscious retention of old misconceptions that after all, the "slaves"
were just a feckless, nameless mass of helpless victims needing
two-centuries-tardy beneficence from dat ol' massa? Here's a loaded, trick
question that I like to ask because it makes a point: If you got only one
word to describe those first three seekers when they arrived at Fort Monroe,
would you call them slaves, or would you call them men? Would you call them
slaves, or would you call them Americans?
"Ben Butler begins emancipation early on and set the stage for" the
Emancipation Proclamation?
On May 24, 1861 -- a day after the active decisions in this story -- General
Butler made his astute, clever, constructive but not entirely indispensable
decision. And it was reactive, not active. And it was second, not first. Yet
it retains history's spotlight because we still readily confer legitimacy on
the whole filthy legal edifice of slavery, and because we still
unconsciously accept the 1861 view of the subhumanity of the enslaved. It is
true that the general could have sent the men back to their enslavers -- to
their "rightful owners," as some still put it, even after all these years of
understanding that filthy legality doesn't mean moral legitimacy. It is also
true that other Union officers had already sent people back in earlier
cases. It's therefore objected, including by the National Park Service, that
though the actions of the three men merit clear remembering, it was the
political effects of the general's famous decision that mattered most. But
in fact the inevitability of what was happening shows that indeed his
astute, clever, constructive decision was not entirely indispensable, for
nothing was more certainly written in the book of fate than that those
people were to be free. The Fort Monroe Freedom Story is still told within
the squalid, sordid context of the slavery laws as if we had to accept that
context. Yes, the general -- stuck in that context -- cleverly combined
those filthy laws with the grim laws of war to come up with his "contraband"
decision. Good man. I'm glad he did it. But his reactive decision followed
active ones by those self-emancipating Americans. And whether or not they
did so consciously, the self-emancipators too were invoking laws. In this
case, though, the laws were neither filthy nor grim, but beautiful: the laws
of nature and of nature's god. Those men, and tens of thousands like them,
did _more_, not less, for emancipation than the general did.
"Fortress Monroe"?
And while I'm at it, I believe historians' tendency to say "Fortress Monroe"
contributes to their overall snookering when it comes to the injustice that
is right now being cemented for the ages at post-Army Fort Monroe. About a
fifth of Fort Monroe, a national historic landmark for a half-century,
contains the moated stone "fortress." But treating that citadel as if it
were the entire national treasure -- as many historians do, and as the
National Trust for Historic Preservation does grimly, resolutely and
shamefully -- is as unwise as would be saving only the house at Monticello
but not the setting. When the first captive Africans stopped at this
strategically Gibraltarlike sand spit in 1619 en route to Jamestown, the
land had been fortified for a decade, and was still two centuries away from
containing any moated citadel. I've long suspected that conflation of
fortress and fort underlies at least some of the disappointing and costly
credulousness that America's leading Civil War historians have shown about
letting Big Money get away with theft. (Again, you can the geography in a
flash; it's illuminated by the red spot added to the park service map at
http://www.fortmonroenationalpark.org/ .)
At Fort Monroe later this month, politicians will pat themselves on their
backs for creating a national monument at Fort Monroe. They'll ignore
cautions from Tidewater's leading daily, the Virginian-Pilot, that this
national monument/park will remain "degraded" unless it's made whole through
unification of its two unconnected parts. They'll certainly spurn the
widespread but unmoneyed charge that a degraded national park is a fake one.
The National Trust for Historic Preservation will surely be there, repeating
the Orwellian falsehood that an NTHP official included in an op-ed in our
other local daily just last week: that President Obama made Fort Monroe into
a national monument. In fact he only saved parts from overdevelopment. And
by the way, even with unification, much of Fort Monroe would still be
developed. The politicians will do this celebrating not on May 23, the day
when the greatest moment in American history actually started, but on May
24, the day that we misremember thanks to the unconsidered, tainting residue
of the language and logic, such as it was, of the slavery era.
In my mind the mistaken choice of date connects directly with the unwise
sacrifice of the sense of place of this national treasure with international
importance in the history of liberty itself.
I apologize that I cannot make this case more briefly.
Steven T. Corneliussen
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
> ... abolition didn't become a war objective for the North until
> well into the war with the Emancipation Proclamation.
But wait -- aren't historians like Adam Goodheart and Edward L. Ayers right
to say that we need a better understanding of how black people themselves
pushed the transformation of the conflict into a war for freedom?
I enter the conversation with my usual Fort-Monroe-preservation bias, of
course. I agree with President Ayers that the greatest moment in American
history took place at Fort Monroe in May 1861 -- which was shortly after
Fort Sumter and long before the Emancipation Proclamation. In that moment,
self-liberating escapees from enslavement pressed first General Butler, but
ultimately President Lincoln and history itself, toward that proclamation --
which it seems to me could also be called the Declaration of Merely Partial
Cessation of America's Quarter-Millennium National Crime. Isn't it
excessively Gone-With-the-Windish to imagine that that proclamation did
anything more than belatedly, shakily semi-affirm in mere words what
self-emancipators -- and Yankee soldiers -- had already been robustly
affirming for some time in actual fact? It's a question offered in the
spirit of the constructive reconsideration of the slavery era that the Civil
War sesquicentennial seems to call for. Thanks.
P.S.: The new national monument at Fort Monroe omits the
sense-of-place-defining bayfront hundred acres indicated by red that's been
added to a National Park Service map at
http://www.fortmonroenationalpark.org/ . If you agree that this omission is
as self-evidently preposterous as would be, say, planning for subdivisions
on the hillsides at Monticello, I'm sorry to report to you that things look
grimmer than ever -- in part thanks to those snookered historians, including
even Goodheart and Ayers, that I still need to answer Jurretta Heckscher
about.
Steven T. Corneliussen
Poquoson, Virginia
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