> 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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