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> From: Ron Roizen
> ... 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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