Amen to Brent Tarter's reminder that revisionism is healthy if it proposes improved fact-grounded understanding. What follows below the dashed line is a Virginia-centered argument for constructive revisionism that I think the public realm needs concerning the Civil War and slavery. Because I'm working on the topic--which I think rises above the history wars and 1619 Project squabbling--I'd be grateful for thoughts, if the moderator will allow.
Steven T. Corneliussen(Possibly remembered by some here as a Fort Monroe activist)
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Amen as well to the general proposition that the Civil War sesquicentennial improved fact-grounded understanding following the nearly slavery-oblivious centennial--that I recall from my early teenage years--with its celebrations of battles and generals and valor.
But I think something crucial from emancipation days remains omitted not so much from historical understanding, but from national civic memory--something calling out for healthy revisionism. It seems to me inevitable that Americans will eventually esteem the Civil War's multitudes of freedom-striving slavery escapees who figured in emancipation's political evolution. I think progress on that is needed for the 2026 commemorations.
Scholars can debate how much or how little those escapees figured in emancipation's political and legal evolution.
Were there really hundreds of thousands, as Sean Wilentz and Vincent Harding have contended? A full half million, as numbered by Brent Leggs, the National Trust for Historic Preservation's African American heritage director?
Is the term "self-emancipation" legit? Allen C. Guelzo, with his three Lincoln Prizes, is more than skeptical, but David Williams's Cambridge University Press book I Freed Myself carries the term in its subtitle.
Let scholars debate. My point is that it's a story for almost any side in the history wars--a story that's healthy not just for professional historical understanding, where it's not new, but for national memory, where it's little known.
On Juneteenth 2020, Jamelle Bouie's New York Times column declared, "Who freed the slaves? The slaves freed the slaves." He cited Ira Berlin's 1992 Washington Post op-ed "How the Slaves Freed Themselves."
A week later, a National Review rebuttal appeared under the headline "Yes, Lincoln and the Union Freed the Slaves." Online, the subheadline charged, "Jamelle Bouie mounts a dishonest effort to rewrite history."
Like Professor Guelzo, the critic, Dan McLaughlin, interprets the story as an attack on President Lincoln's place in history. (It seems to me that it's actually a validation of the proposition that he masterfully juggled colossal complexity.) McLaughlin ends by charging "revisionism"--as if any revision of received understanding is automatically deficient.
In my view as a layman history activist--and as an ardent revisionist about this--Bouie did overstate, and should have focused more on the most important point. It's the hiding-in-plain-sight main, glorious thing, about which McLaughlin and Guelzo are almost completely oblivious: those escapees' vote-with-their-feet devastation of American slavery's depraved racial assumptions--their historic affirmation of the founding principles' universality.
Fort Monroe in 1861, on the Point Comfort land where British North American slavery began in 1619, became what I see as the preeminent historic landscape for national memory of those multitudes of freedom-striving slavery escapees. That's why, in Tidewater, we have finally overcome the thoughtless racism of attributing the Fort Monroe freedom story of 1861 only to General Benjamin Butler. We almost always nowadays recognize that it all started with the brave, enterprising slavery escapees Frank Baker, Shepard Mallory, and James Townsend, whose names until recently were usually simply omitted. (They were just "slaves," don't you see. Not actual Americans, don't you see.)
Healthy revisionism on all of this has changed historical understanding and community memory here. I think it ought also to do so for national understanding and memory. I write a nonpaywalled Substack--_The Self-Emancipator_--to advocate the needed esteem for the multitudes of escapees acting with agency, and to monitor the progress of that recognition.
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