> From: Melinda Skinner
> Having made some corrections on Wikipedia pages in the past,
> I would be interested in hearing what edits might be made by
> this group on Wikipedia's Fort Monroe entry.
That entry (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fort_Monroe) has always been a
mess. I've been wishing for years that I could find the time to contribute
edits.
The two most egregious problems at the moment are a matter of fact
(promulgation of the Big Lie that all of Fort Monroe is a national monument)
and a matter of interpretation (countenancing of the standard, dehumanizing,
inadvertently white supremacist but nevertheless widespread version of the
Fort Monroe Freedom Story of 1861).
The entry opens by suggesting a falsehood. The first words are, "Fort Monroe
(also known as the Fort Monroe National Monument) ... ." Later it
unambiguously asserts that falsehood: "On November 1, 2011, President Barack
Obama signed a proclamation to designate Fort Monroe as a National
Monument." As I have reported in this forum, to see how this is false, all
you have to do is glance at the tan, green and red parts of the illustration
at http://www.fortmonroenationalpark.org/ .
To understand how the entry is a textbook case of the Big Lie requires
familiarity with the seven-plus years of the politics of post-Army Fort
Monroe. But I'll compress it into one long sentence: If you can make people
think that all of Fort Monroe is already a national monument/park, you don't
even have to bother to try to persuade them to let you build condos on the
sense-of-place-defining bayfront of that four-century-old historic
landscape, which reaches back to before the first captive Africans landed
there in 1619 en route to Jamestown.
The national monument's actual footprint on the Fort Monroe landscape is a
simple matter of fact. But misreporting about that fact is made outright
appalling if I'm even close to right about the Wikipedia entry's more
complicated problem of interpretation.
My view is that Ed Ayers is right to have called Fort Monroe the site of the
greatest moment in American history. (Source: final paragraph at
http://chronicle.com/article/U-of-Richmond-Chief-Stirs/127879/ ) If he's
close to right, then the following analysis is probably valid.
In a November letter in the New York Times, Eric Foner asserted, “[F|rom the
beginning of the Civil War, by escaping to Union lines, blacks forced the
fate of slavery onto the national political agenda.”
(http://www.nytimes.com/2012/11/27/opinion/lincolns-use-of-politics-for-noble-ends.html)
Please note who did that agenda-forcing, in Foner's judgment. It was not a
white general. That decision, though clever and constructive, was merely
reactive. The precipitating decisions were active, and came from Blacks.
Also last month in the Times, Kate Masur's online op-ed "In Spielberg’s
‘Lincoln,’ Passive Black Characters"
(http://www.nytimes.com/2012/11/13/opinion/in-spielbergs-lincoln-passive-black-characters.html)
made much the same point. She charged that “it’s disappointing that in a
movie devoted to explaining the abolition of slavery in the United States,
African-American characters do almost nothing but passively wait for white
men to liberate them,” even though for “some 30 years, historians have been
demonstrating that slaves were crucial agents in their emancipation.”
Historians call the scanted principle Black agency.
Masur never mentioned Fort Monroe, but she obviously could have. As shown in
the Wikipedia entry, this same kind of unintentional presumption of Black
passive fecklessness still pervades public understanding of the freedom
movement that began there shortly after Fort Sumter and spread throughout
the South. The presumption tends to grant the dignity of being named only to
the white general who reacted on May 24 to actions decisively taken on May
23 by the Black self-emancipators Frank Baker, Sheppard Mallory and James
Townsend.
(Yes, they were not the first to try, and yes, that fact is part of why
people glorify Gen. Butler instead. I hope this gets discussed in this
forum.)
You can see the presumption’s pervasiveness in Virginia’s insistence on
celebrating May 24 as that Freedom Story’s anniversary, rather than May 23,
the day when Black people actually began the story. And you can see it in
the Wikipedia Fort Monroe entry -- and in that entry's reference to a
similarly deficient Encyclopedia Virginia entry
(http://encyclopediavirginia.org/Fort_Monroe_During_the_Civil_War).
Sesquicentennial discussions are too slowly, in my view, revealing for
public consideration the active part that Black people played in forcing
emancipation. Too often, it seems, enslaved Americans are remembered as this
Wikipedia entry and the Encyclopedia Virginia entry remember them: as a mass
of nameless, passive victims, rather than as individual humans with
individual dignity, names and contributions both to the building up of the
country and to the very meaning of the Civil War.
It's true that President Lincoln -- enthralled by race fallacy like
Jefferson over four score years earlier, and trapped by political and social
grotesqueness -- spoke of “giving freedom to the slave,” not of belatedly
ceasing evil against human multitudes. Nevertheless it was to some
substantial extent a Black-initiated movement that made a civil war into a
struggle to affirm self-evident truths claimed over four score years earlier
as founding principles. So 150 years on, must we continue distorting the
national crime’s ending as entirely a gift that the powerful deigned
belatedly to confer on passive, feckless, nameless victims? And if we should
do better, should we not also do better with the historic landscape at Fort
Monroe?
The new national monument/park was bizarrely bifurcated to privilege private
interests. Norfolk’s Virginian-Pilot warns that the split will keep that
national treasure “degraded” unless it’s unified for public profit and civic
memory. What happened in 1861 at this Union bastion in Confederate Virginia
is, or anyway should be, foundational for deciding the historic landscape's
fate.
But like many elsewhere and in journalism -- and also in the history
profession, by silence and nonfeasance -- Wikipedia contributes little to
clear understanding of what happened there and then, or to understanding of
the implications for a national treasure. As I have seen directly and at
first hand, even two of the prominent American historians who best
understand -- Adam Goodheart and Ed Ayers -- passively countenance that
precious landscape's impending American cultural disaster.
Steven T. Corneliussen
Poquoson, Virginia
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