Steve--

Thank you so much for your clarification.  And yes, you and I are in fundamental agreement about the important stuff, even if we disagree in other places.

It sounds to me very much as if the story line being proposed by some in the Fortress Monroe debate is derived from the "new social history" of the 1970s.  This history is, in an important way, expressive of the best virtues of the American character.  (I think there is such a thing as a singular American character, and I think it is meaningful to speak of it because that character is derivative from the common, core public values inherent to the story of liberty that you and I both agree constitutes American public identity.)  The "new social history" places its emphasis on the notion that the lives of all people matter, and that all people contribute to the unfolding of history.  It is quintessentially democratic.  This is admirable!

It also, to my eye, distorts history, at least to the degree that it fails to attend to the institutional and cultural structures that empower some people, and dis-empower others.  At its worst, the new social history offers a mono-focus on the victims of power, without accounting for the processes that allowed some people to wield power to the detriment of others.  While I would agree with the new social historians that the human dignity of all persons is equal, I would not agree that all human stories are of equal significance (at least if the questions we are posing and trying to answer are about political processes, and especially about political processes in the past).  Some people are situationally empowered, others are not.  If, as historians, we wish to attend to questions involving why things worked out the way they did, we will need to concede that the actions of some people matter a whole lot more than the actions of others.  That is what it *means* to be empowered,!
!
 or dis-empowered.

The error of the 1970s-era "new social history" then was to fail to distinguish between the insight that, on the one hand all human lives possess equal dignity and deserve equal respect; and on the other hand the political reality that some people are lots more powerful than others, and thus their decisions are more wide ranging and politically significant.

An example of this, it seems to me, is the Holocaust museum in Washington DC.  That museum encourages empathy with the victims of the holocaust--a good thing.  But it fails to teach any political lesson about the present.  Indeed, to the extent that it dehumanizes the evil of the Holocaust, by elevating that evil to satanic, and trans-human, heights, it fails to drive home the fact that the Holocaust was the product of human processes and human powers.  And to the extent that it does that, it fails to drive home the critical point that it is entirely possible, and thinkable, for a Holocaust to occur in the United States; and that the central lesson to draw from the Holocaust is not merely that it was an evil thing, but rather that given the right ideological and institutional and political arrangements, it could happen again. To the extent then that the museum's pedagogy succeeds--that is, to the extent that it encourages identification with the victims of power, without atten!
!
ding to the political processes that allowed some people to misuse power for unjust ends--the Holocaust museum is actually a failure.  The evil it illuminates is so awful that my students disassociate it with human choices at all.  Hitler becomes a satanic, trans-human force, with no civic lessons to teach us in the present.

When we talk about the application and distribution of power in society, we are talking about politics, broadly construed.  The new social history sheds powerful light on the way in which structures of power can very often create injustice.  It pays less attention, too often anyway, to the political processes that allow that injustice to happen in the first place, or to continue in the present.  

In the Fortress Monroe story, any telling of it *has* to acknowledge the place of self-emancipators--the men and women who emancipated themselves from slavery.  But that is not the full story, nor is it in my view the most important part of the story.  To my mind, our understanding of the great political processes playing out *must* also acknowledge the critically important participation of the politically empowered actors who drove them forward.  These actors were to some degree responding to the actions of the people on the receiving end of the injustice that was slavery.  But they were also responding to a much larger political conversation and argument about the ends and purposes of American liberty--and that conversation is only partly accounted for by the actions of the enslaved.  Indeed, the very ability of the self-emancipators to influence public events depended to some large degree on the willingness of politically empowered, free actors to publicize their stories an!
!
d use them for their own political ends.

The generations of scholars who have written since the 1970s have retained the best features of the "new social history" while also addressing the politics that created and shaped social institutions.  In the case of Fortress Monroe, to my view that means a proper acknowledgment of the role of the politically empowered white men who made emancipation a reality.  To the extent that those men wielded more power, I'd argue that there decisions are more important.

My points above are hardly new, of course, and have been articulated by others smarter and more articulate than I.  My thinking on this issue has especially been shaped by an essay written by Tony Judt, I think, called "A Clown in Regal Purple," sometime in the 1980s.  I don't suppose anyone here remembers the citation for that essay?

I look forward to the commentary here of my colleagues, especially Henry Wiecek, Jon Kukla, and Paul Finkelman, who I hope will offer their usual insightful thoughts to what I take to be a fundamentally important topic of conversation.  After all, at its most expansive, we are talking about the moral basis of public history, and the purposes for which we, as a people, appropriate and spend public money to sustain it.

Thank you again, Steve, for initiating this topic and for promoting it with your usual good sense.

All warm regards,
Kevin

---- Original message ----
>Date: Mon, 9 Feb 2009 11:22:51 -0500
>From: "Steven T. Corneliussen" <[log in to unmask]>  
>Subject: Re: Ft Monroe self-emancipators, cont.  
>To: [log in to unmask]
>
>Kevin, I'm certain that you and I agree on everything that's important 
>here. Locating the fullest meaning of American history in the unfolding 
>of liberty? Amen! The term "liberty" central to understanding the public 
>identity of Americans? Amen! Slavery and darkness in benighted foreign 
>lands lacking liberty? Amen!
>
>In fact, I intended what I wrote this morning to highlight those very 
>truths. You and I apparently see them the same way. And I'll bet if you 
>were here in Tidewater, you'd see that those truths are being scanted in 
>the planning for post-Army Fort Monroe. So I apologize that I've 
>obviously botched this bit of writing -- and I thank you for alerting me 
>and giving me another chance.
>
>In my view we tell the Fort Monroe Contraband story in the wrong way -- 
>in a way that will be discarded in the future, when we finally get 
>completely over the logic (such as it was) and the language of the 
>slavery era.
>
>Today's front-page news article -- in the paper that's local to Fort 
>Monroe -- shows progress in that direction, I agree. That's why I began 
>by thanking the paper and the reporter for highlighting the Fort Monroe 
>freedom story, and by noting that with the Fort Monroe Authority 
>planning Fort Monroe's future on behalf of a powerful handful of 
>Hamptonians plus Governor Kaine's administration -- but not on behalf of 
>Fort Monroe's true owners, all Americans -- the freedom story is all the 
>more vital to discuss.
>
>But indeed it is also important, as I wrote, to recall that in January 
>2008, when leading historians -- both black and white -- came to town to 
>discuss Fort Monroe's history during planning for Fort Monroe's future, 
>they declared the freedom story not an African American story, but an 
>American one. And Kevin, that's not how the article plays it. (It's also 
>not how the Fort Monroe Authority plays it.)
>
>True, the article does do what historians, journalists and others have 
>often not done: it confers on Sheppard Mallory, Frank Baker, and James 
>Townsend the simple dignity of being named. In the usual telling, 
>they're treated as nameless ciphers among feckless, helpless souls 
>waiting passively for white politicians to deign, belatedly, to confer 
>what should not have been denied in the first place: liberty.
>
>But the Daily Press article still treats the episode as part of a 
>historical process energized by the actions of powerful whites, when in 
>fact the original energy for liberty came not from any Union general, 
>but from those three Americans -- Baker, Mallory, and Townsend. What 
>they did re-illustrated important principles that you and I, Kevin, hold 
>to be self-evident.
>
>True, Gen. Butler could temporarily have delayed the tsunami of 
>self-emancipation that the three men started, and true, it's good that 
>he didn't. But Gen. Butler was only invoking the laws of war -- the 
>contraband-of-war principle -- plus the grotesque, perverted civil laws 
>of the day, the ones that legally but illegitimately framed some 
>American humans as the property of other American humans. Baker, 
>Mallory, and Townsend, on the other hand, were invoking the Laws of 
>Nature and of Nature's God.
>
>Which laws were the more beautiful in this story? Which the most 
>timeless? Which the most connected to the fullest meaning of America?
>
>And Kevin, I ask you or anyone else: what do you make of this sentence 
>from the Daily Press article? "Their owner, Col. Charles K. Mallory, 
>demanded their rightful return."
>
>Rightful return?
>
>Those who will inevitably be accusing me of "political correctness" for 
>criticizing that sentence will have to ignore this self-evident truth: 
>even if Virginia and the U.S. perverted justice and decency enough to 
>make an "owner" of humans "rightful" under the law, the sentence is 
>still about rightfulness in terms of legitimacy -- and legitimacy is a 
>lot bigger thing than mere legality.
>
>And this is not presentism either. Would any abolitionist have spoken of 
>a "rightful" return of those Americans to Col. Mallory? The answer is 
>self-evident.
>
>I think part of the miscommunication problem that I caused this morning 
>might have been that the headnote I added specifically for this forum 
>was misleading. But yes, I do think that we're still today entrapped, to 
>some degree anyway, by residual slavery-era language that inherently 
>involves unconscious acceptance of odious assumptions. I usually add, 
>but did not add it this morning, that it seems to me that the language 
>of the slavery era also to some extent re-perpetrates the logic -- such 
>as it was -- of that era.
>
>"Rightfulness" is the clearest example from today's news article, in my 
>view. My favorite earlier example, not from today's article but 
>discussed in this forum before, was a supposed distinction between 
>"legitimate" and "illegitimate" slave-catchers. I ask you again: When in 
>human history was _any_ slave-catcher "legitimate"?
>
>In any case I say again what I've said before in this forum: Fort Monroe 
>is by far the most important history question facing Virginia today. 
>Even if I'm misinterpreting the history-of-liberty dimension -- even if 
>my revisionism should later be shown to have been faulty -- I assert 
>that in 2009 no thoughtful person can say that we understand the slavery 
>era as well as we ought to. And meanwhile, countenanced by Governor 
>Kaine, this precious national treasure -- with what I believe is 
>international significance in the history of liberty itself -- is under 
>threat by a combination of people. A few of them almost viscerally hate 
>all criticism of slavery-era logic, such as it was. Most of them, 
>though, are simply development-minded leaders whose underestimation of 
>history (and of the vanishing charm of Tidewater's increasingly 
>congested shoreline) stops them from speaking out against what threatens 
>Fort Monroe.
>
>And I will toss this in again too: It seems to me that in both the Fort 
>Monroe freedom story and the Hemings-Jefferson paternity discussion, 
>many well-intentioned people seek to accord retrospectively as much 
>dignity as possible to those from whom, long ago, dignity was withheld. 
>Sally Hemings's retrospectively accordable dignity is important, but 
>Fort Monroe still exists and is under threat right now. Where are 
>Virginia's historians?
>
>Steve Corneliussen
>
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Kevin R. Hardwick, Ph.D.
Department of History
James Madison University

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