Forgive me, but I changed the subject line, and forgive me, but this 
simply must be addressed candidly. Mr. Dixon, echoing an earlier 
contributor, wrote:

 > I have also wondered why historians writing about slaves
 > or free Negroes in the early American period now refer
 > to them as "African-Americans." They were not "Americans,"
 > at least in a legal or constitutional sense.

Not Americans? People who helped build America, and who contributed the 
spirituals and much else to America's culture, and who endured America's 
worst injustices for most of a quarter of a millennium, and who 
naturally stood up in countless cases for America's first principles 
during the Civil War, and who handed down American descendants 
possessing the wisdom to bend history's arc toward justice in gentle, 
constructive ways -- can you actually and truly believe, Mr. Dixon, that 
in any merely decent sense whatsoever those people were not Americans?

Of course the law and the Constitution deemed them noncitizens and 
worse. So what? What claim does any of that perversion and grotesqueness 
have on the actual truth, then or now, under the Laws of Nature and of 
Nature's God? Were squalidness and obscenity somehow justified merely by 
being temporarily codified?

As a merely legal matter, those Americans' "owners" were "rightful" 
owners. But in discussing history we're talking about more than mere 
legality. If we weren't, some would also find ways to lend 
unjustifiable, preposterous legitimacy to the notion that some women 
were witches, or to the practice of human sacrifice. As a matter of 
legitimacy -- a permanent criterion, as opposed to the impermanent 
despicable legality of former times -- no "owner" of another human was 
ever rightful, in Virginia or anywhere else. And Mr. Dixon, if you seek 
to refute that, please also refute all that Mr. Jefferson declared about it.

In my view we have here a distillation of the interpretation precisely 
opposite to the one that I've brought up and inquired about from time to 
time in this forum. I think that this is all fundamentally linked to 
Virginia's -- and Virginia's historians' -- hesitant unreadiness to look 
at what Fort Monroe actually means in the history not only of the 
commonwealth and the country, but of liberty itself.

If we really understood who all of the Americans were in those past days 
-- that is, if we didn't, just a little bit in most cases, still think 
of some past Americans as somehow partly subhuman because the revered 
unenslaved enslaved them -- then we'd see that it is not General Butler 
and his revered "decision" that confer on Fort Monroe its special place 
in human history, but is instead the intuitively taken, brave initiative 
of Frank Baker, James Townsend and Sheppard Mallory, and of the tens of 
thousands of Americans who followed them out of slavery, all across the 
South.

It seems to me that it all boils down to whether or not we completely -- 
not just partially -- reject the language and therefore also the logic, 
such as it was, of the slavery era. In my view, we're still saddled by 
that, and this discussion shows it.

Thanks for the chance to comment.

I remain,
An American proud of _all_ ethnicities of our fellow Americans going all 
the way back, regardless of the conditions to which some of them were 
subjected, and regardless of evanescent and deplorable legal 
classifications,
Steven T. Corneliussen
Poquoson, Virginia


>

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