> From: Tarter, Brent (LVA)
> Three cheers...for hosting the very
> successful 2015 Virginia Forum...
Thanks. A question about the 2015 forum, and I apologize for not being able
to make it short:
An announcement for the forum carried the headline "Anniversaries" and said,
among other things, "This year’s forum invites papers on how anniversaries
in Virginia have been created, observed, recorded, and contested in
non-fiction, fiction, other literary and historical forms, the visual arts,
and historic and monumental sites."
It seems to me--and I admit a bias that at least some in this online
Virginia history forum will immediately recognize--that for civic memory and
maybe also for scholarship, an important but contested anniversary is the
one that Edward L. Ayers once called "the greatest moment in American
history." He meant events that Black self-emancipators set in motion by
taking action--by exercising agency--on May 23, 1861, at the Union bastion
in Confederate Virginia, Fort Monroe.
In Tidewater, those events not only have been, but often still are,
remembered not in terms of Black **action** on May 23 but in terms of a
white general's **reaction** the next day, May 24. In the usual telling, the
cleverly and constructively reacting general is given the dignity of his
name, Benjamin Butler. But in the usual telling, now thankfully less
frequently heard, the three formerly enslaved Americans who first actually
stood up and acted--Frank Baker, Sheppard Mallory and James Townsend--are
not granted that dignity.
It's said--for example, by U. Richmond President Ayers himself--that the
now-concluding Civil War sesquicentennial has, unlike the centennial when I
was a kid, recalled and considered not just battles and valor, but
emancipation.
And it's asserted--for example, by Eric Foner--that it was self-emancipators
whose actions first pressed transformation of the war into a struggle for
the proclaimed but long-scanted first principles of America's founding.
To me that sounds plenty important enough to link to Virginia anniversaries.
So I ask: Did "the greatest moment in American history" come up at the 2015
forum? Did anyone contrast May 23 with May 24?
I do see on the program this entry: "Fort Monroe National Monument: Eola
Dance, National Underground Railroad Network to Freedom, Northeast Region."
(Ms. Dance is a National Park Service official at Fort Monroe; I might query
her too.)
Grateful for any information on this question. Thanks.
Steven T. Corneliussen
Poquoson, Virginia
______________________________________
To subscribe, change options, or unsubscribe please see the instructions at
http://listlva.lib.va.us/archives/va-hist.html
|