This morning at DailyPress.com, the Web site of the Newport News Daily 
Press, you can read a front-page, above-the-fold headline article reporting 
that William and Mary is creating "a long-term [slavery-era] research 
project to chronicle the life and history of blacks at the university and 
greater Williamsburg."

This very brief article highlights the involvement of my friend the 
historian Robert F. Engs, who is retiring from Penn. Bob is the author of 
_Freedom's First Generation_, which tells of Fort Monroe's self-emancipating 
Contrabands and events during and after the Civil War in Hampton, when 
Reconstruction and what followed might have become something marvelous 
instead of gradually, across the South, being undermined by un-American race 
hate and race terrorism. Bob has lifelong Virginia connections, having 
family here, and having lived here himself.

I hope that William and Mary doesn't share the newspaper's master-story 
bias, the view that this research project is mainly an exercise in feckless 
slavery apology. That framing will of course accelerate the inevitable 
objecting by those who are already going to cry political correctness, 
presentism, revisionism. I hold that hope because constructive revisionism, 
in my view, is precisely what's needed concerning American slavery, a hugely 
important dimension of the history of liberty itself, with implications 
extending well beyond Virginia and the country. William and Mary's research 
effort has a local focus, of course, though that won't stop it from 
contributing to a wider view of the history of liberty.

Maybe this new research effort can even contribute to helping us all agree, 
finally, that despite the low and obscene exclusion of antebellum African 
Americans from merely legal citizenship status, on a higher level, 
_everyone_ who toiled and suffered and created and procreated and built the 
wealth of Virginia and the South and the nation over generations was truly 
and profoundly an American.

Thanks very much.

Steven T. Corneliussen
Citizens for a Fort Monroe National Park (CFMNP.org)
Advocating a self-sustaining, revenue-generating, innovatively structured 
national park at Old Point Comfort 

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