> From: Finkelman, Paul
> There may be non-professional historians who ... live with the fantasy
> of hundreds of thousands of slaves fighting for the Confederacy, or
> that masters (like Mr. Jefferson) did not have sex with their slaves.
> But don't confuse those people with serious historians.

Please let a student of history try again to press Professor Finkelman, or 
any other serious professional historian, or anyone else, about a 
Gone-With-the-Windish fantasy concerning enslaved Americans just after Fort 
Sumter. This fantasy holds that they were merely a feckless, 
undifferentiated mass of nameless victims passively awaiting belated 
"emancipation" from deigning white politicians, as opposed to being
* individual Americans who may have lacked citizenship but who nevertheless 
had names, identities, stories, families, feelings, records of contributions 
to the country's wealth and culture, and inherent human rights, and also as 
opposed to being
* individual Americans with capacities to choose to stand up and, in effect, 
challenge politicians, generals, countrymen and history itself concerning 
their unjust status.

"Agency," I believe, is a word that serious professional historians use when 
they do stop to recognize and respect, retrospectively, the active 
capacities of the individual enslaved. And it seems to me that agency was 
Edward L. Ayers's topic in November 2010 when he wrote in a Washington Post 
online forum 
(http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/discussion/2010/10/29/DI2010102904641.html) 
that "African Americans began freeing themselves at the first opportunity, 
which was indeed at Fort Monroe, where they went to offer their aid to 
Benjamin Butler and the Union Army." President Ayers added, "We will need to 
broaden our understanding of the war to include the determination of black 
people to become free from the first moments of the conflict."

In the May 8 Virginia History forum message "Self-emancipation vs. 
proclamation; May 23 vs. May 24," I said, in effect, that it seemed to me 
that Professor Finkelman himself had implicitly denied or at least scanted 
the individual agency of the enslaved by misframing what some people call 
the Fort Monroe "contraband" story, but what I believe is better called the 
Fort Monroe Freedom Story. He had mentioned that "slaves were being freed by 
May 1861" and that General Butler at Fort Monroe began "emancipation early 
on and set the  stage for" the Emancipation Proclamation. It seems to me 
that this framing counterfactually denies agency and disrespects inherent 
individuality, and is itself therefore yet another fantasy.

It's true that General Butler could have balked from the opportunity with 
which self-actualized, self-emancipating black Americans confronted him. 
It's true that his famous "Contraband Decision" was clever and constructive. 
But it's also true that nothing was more certainly written in the book of 
fate than that those people were to be free. It seems to me that there's a 
direct connection between that certainty and the agency that I believe 
serious professional historians have too often scanted when it comes to 
public discussion of post-Army Fort Monroe. General Butler's decision was 
clever, constructive, but merely reactive. The key decisions, the active 
decisions, were those made by self-emancipators.

Some in this forum may have read about the vitriolic recent dispute in the 
Chronicle of Higher Education and the Wall Street Journal about a CHE 
blogger's criticisms of the discipline of black studies. Within that 
controversy, three angered black-studies scholars wrote:
QUOTE
Our work is not about victimization; it is about liberation.  Liberating the 
history, culture and politics of our people from the contortions and 
distortions of a white supremacist framework that has historically denied 
our agency and subjectivity as active participants in the making of the 
world we live in.
UNQUOTE

When I read that, I thought of what President Ayers called the "need to 
broaden our understanding of the [Civil War] to include the determination of 
black people to become free from the first moments of the conflict." At this 
moment Big Money, abetted by politicians of both parties, is cementing theft 
of the Chesapeake Bayfront heart of what he called the site of the greatest 
moment in American history -- Fort Monroe. Ayers himself, though a 
participant in the post-Army Fort Monroe discussion, has abstained from the 
land-use dimension. Adam Goodheart has written clearly, and in my view 
wisely, about the Freedom Story, but has outright supported the 
overdevelopment-empowering notion that the overall sense of place at Fort 
Monroe doesn't matter. Now, I'm no serious professional historian, but I 
understand what's going on. And I'm disappointed when historians scant the 
history that should be making Fort Monroe into a possible World Heritage 
Site, instead of into the fake national monument that is described visually 
in the pair of pictures atop the home page at 
http://www.fortmonroenationalpark.org/ -- and that would be implicitly much 
more acceptable if the events that took place there in 1861 actually had the 
character connoted by Professor Finkelman's fantasy framing.

Annette Gordon-Reed is right: we don't yet properly, sensibly or factually 
remember the enslaved.

Steven T. Corneliussen
Poquoson, Virginia

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