Fortress Monroe certainly wasn't a "freedom fortress" for poor Jeff Davis.
J South
In a message dated 10/23/2008 1:48:32 P.M. Eastern Daylight Time,
[log in to unmask] writes:
Henry Wiencek wrote (and here I have ruthlessly excerpted):
> It seems to me that the cry of "Presentism! --
> Watch your mouth!" is bellowed only when the
> subject of slavery comes up. ... But if you
> bring up slavery (or H*m*ings), the rafters
> resound with "dirty Presentist, you must hate
> America." It seems that slavery is the only
> subject on which the present is not allowed
> to express a judgement on the past ...
Thanks, and two comments for Henry plus a third for Anne Pemberton (all
expressing agreement with them):
1. Andrew Levy speaks this very afternoon at Monticello on his research
and writing on Robert Carter, the slaveholding TJ contemporary whose
large-scale manumission example Levy says shows at least two things:
manumission by TJ would not have been as difficult as is often claimed,
and there's something wrong with a historical tradition that overlooks
Carter's example to the extent and for the length of time ours did. Levy's
American Scholar article in 2001 persuaded me that Levy is right, by the
way. In sum: I believe it's perfectly tenable for the present to hold TJ
accountable for unnecessary continuation of slaveholding. Call that
presentism if you like. I don't believe it.
2. Everything about the fate of Fort Monroe depends on Americans'
willingness -- not just historians' willingness, but Americans'
willingness -- to think as constructive revisionists concerning the
slavery era. At a shallow level, this implies presentism, but it's not
presentism, in my view. The actual hate-America crowd may well turn out to
be those who refuse to see that we still have plenty to learn about the
history of liberty itself. And we can only do that by understanding the
past in terms of what we have learned in the interim.
3. I too have long thought that what we may need in a self-sustaining,
revenue-generating, innovatively structured national park akin to San
Francisco's Presidio is not a Fort Monroe National Park, but a Freedom's
Fortress National Park. Thanks for that encouragement, Anne, and I hope
you keep saying what you're saying.
Steve Corneliussen
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