Thanks for those three links to remembrances. I was privileged to know and
learn from Bob Engs, mostly but not only concerning matters related to the
struggle to save Fort Monroe from culturally and financially
counterproductive overdevelopment. Once he even visited my house for lunch,
after which he and I for a long time discussed Fort Monroe while sittin' on
my dock of a bay--the same Chesapeake Bay that further south gives Fort
Monroe its intrinsic, and now almost certainly doomed, sense of place.
After the Army's Fort Monroe departure decision in 2005, it quickly became
clear that Virginia intended to do the wrong thing with that place. Pretty
soon it also became clear that public understanding--for that matter, my own
understanding--involved little general awareness of that place's deep
historical importance in the history of liberty.
That is, people knew about, for example, the construction contributions of
Lt. Robert E. Lee, the brief presence of Edgar Allan Poe, and the
incarceration of Jefferson Davis. Yet in 2006, the first iteration of the
evolving official planning for post-Army Fort Monroe contained only a few
lines about history. In my view today, there were two fundamental problems.
One was simply that Fort Monroe had for so long been an Army post that
people mainly just thought of it that way. The other, though, was the
problem that I believe and hope the Lemon Project engages. It's the problem
that Annette Gordon-Reed often cites, and that the Smithsonian exhibition on
Monticello's inhabitants combated: the problem of general unawareness that
far from being a mass of nameless victims, the enslaved were individual
Americans with individual agency--with individual lives, stories, and
exertions, not to speak of contributions to the country's growing wealth and
culture.
So in 2006 it became imperative for Fort Monroe's defenders themselves to
get better educated. This we tried to do. We turned to Bob Engs. We became
Engs disciples. Next to me on my desk as I write is my much-written-in and
heavily sticky-noted copy of "Freedom's First Generation." We promoted an
Engs-wisdom-based broadening of general understanding of the stakes at Fort
Monroe.
By 2007, the authorities were forced to look up, or at least act like they
were looking up, from their overdevelopment obsession. They felt forced to
convene a panel of national and local historians, though of course they
intended only PR cover and plausible deniability. Here's a paragraph from
something I submitted in this forum after that symposium of January 2, 2008:
QUOTE
Inspired initially by Professor Engs, we have been talking like this for two
years. In early January, we saw these lines of constructive revisionism
validated and affirmed at a Fort Monroe symposium that included not only
Professor Engs but William Alexander, Ed Ayers, Ira Berlin, Tommy L. Bogger,
Jack Davis, Ervin L. Jordan, Cassandra Newby-Alexander, John Quarstein,
Joseph Reidy, Carol Sheriff, and Lauranett Lee.
UNQUOTE
Unconscionably but unsurprisingly, the symposium moderator--a public
official, not a scholar--literally and publicly forbade discussion of that
constructive revisionism's implications for recalibrating the importance of
the historic landscape, and for fully understanding the sense of place.
Though almost all of that landscape--that is, not just the moated stone
citadel--had been designated a national historic landmark a half-century
earlier, Hampton's and Virginia's leaders grimly intended, then as now, to
overdevelop much of it. So their agent, the symposium moderator, unethically
headed off any potential for the panelists' stature to be lent to land on
which her bosses, the politicians, wanted condos. The dishonesty reminded me
of the Challenger disaster commission's leaders' efforts to suppress what
the physicist Richard Feynman, armed with a glass of ice water and a shred
of material, revealed about what happens to the shuttle's O-rings if you
chill them.
But Bob Engs chaired that Fort Monroe symposium panel, and Bob Engs wrote
that report. And Bob Engs undermined the moderator's Potemkin imposition. He
inserted prominently a line making plain that the panel knew that Fort
Monroe's post-Army stakes involve the whole landscape, not just the stone
fortress within it--and that in their judgment, the overall landscape
mattered.
The report was buried, of course. The symposium's PR value had already been
extracted and exploited. And who needed anything implying big importance in
a landscape that merely saw both the beginning of the start and the start of
the end of American slavery? Today if you search "Engs" or "symposium" on
the Fort Monroe Authority's Web site, you get no hits.
But I don't need a computer search to remember what I learned from Bob Engs,
or what a friend and encourager Bob Engs was, or what Bob Engs stood for, or
what, both before and after that symposium, Bob Engs did for Fort Monroe.
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