(I changed the subject line from "The Peculiar Institution's End Without The 
Intervention Of The Civil War" and retained, below the dashed line, what 
started this diverging thread.)

From: Finkelman, Paul
> abolition may not have been an official war aim before
> Sept. 1862 but slaves were being freed by May 1861 and
> the first confiscation act (July 1861) authorized freeing
> some slaves. The Fortress Monroe argument is strong -- 
> Ben Butler begins emancipation early on and set the
> stage for the EP.

Here's what I don't understand, especially from so staunch a respecter as 
Professor Finkelman of the individual personhood and dignity -- and the 
individual agency -- of the enslaved: Why does so much residue of the the 
language and logic, such as it was, of the slavery era still taint the 
telling of the Fort Monroe Freedom Story and all that ensued?

"Slaves were being freed" by May 1861?

On May 23, 1861, Frank Baker, Sheppard Mallory and James Townsend made the 
risky, enterprising, imaginative, and above all _active_ decision to escape 
enslavement and seek freedom at the Union's profoundly symbolic bastion in 
Confederate Virginia, Fort Monroe. No politician had whispered anything into 
their ears about "emancipation." Those people, and tens of thousands like 
them, even despite centuries of oppression and enforced illiteracy, 
recognized in their own hearts that something about America might just 
promise something to them. So they stood up and reached for it, despite the 
risks. Does the phrase "being freed" really do justice to that? Or is it 
just what we say out of thoughtless, unintentional acceptance of 
centuries-old presumptions of black inferiority? Is it just what we say out 
of unconscious retention of old misconceptions that after all, the "slaves" 
were just a feckless, nameless mass of helpless victims needing 
two-centuries-tardy beneficence from dat ol' massa? Here's a loaded, trick 
question that I like to ask because it makes a point: If you got only one 
word to describe those first three seekers when they arrived at Fort Monroe, 
would you call them slaves, or would you call them men? Would you call them 
slaves, or would you call them Americans?

"Ben Butler begins emancipation early on and set the stage for" the 
Emancipation Proclamation?

On May 24, 1861 -- a day after the active decisions in this story -- General 
Butler made his astute, clever, constructive but not entirely indispensable 
decision. And it was reactive, not active. And it was second, not first. Yet 
it retains history's spotlight because we still readily confer legitimacy on 
the whole filthy legal edifice of slavery, and because we still 
unconsciously accept the 1861 view of the subhumanity of the enslaved. It is 
true that the general could have sent the men back to their enslavers -- to 
their "rightful owners," as some still put it, even after all these years of 
understanding that filthy legality doesn't mean moral legitimacy. It is also 
true that other Union officers had already sent people back in earlier 
cases. It's therefore objected, including by the National Park Service, that 
though the actions of the three men merit clear remembering, it was the 
political effects of the general's famous decision that mattered most.  But 
in fact the inevitability of what was happening shows that indeed his 
astute, clever, constructive decision was not entirely indispensable, for 
nothing was more certainly written in the book of fate than that those 
people were to be free. The Fort Monroe Freedom Story is still told within 
the squalid, sordid context of the slavery laws as if we had to accept that 
context. Yes, the general -- stuck in that context -- cleverly combined 
those filthy laws with the grim laws of war to come up with his "contraband" 
decision. Good man. I'm glad he did it. But his reactive decision followed 
active ones by those self-emancipating Americans. And whether or not they 
did so consciously, the self-emancipators too were invoking laws. In this 
case, though, the laws were neither filthy nor grim, but beautiful: the laws 
of nature and of nature's god. Those men, and tens of thousands like them, 
did _more_, not less, for emancipation than the general did.

"Fortress Monroe"?

And while I'm at it, I believe historians' tendency to say "Fortress Monroe" 
contributes to their overall snookering when it comes to the injustice that 
is right now being cemented for the ages at post-Army Fort Monroe. About a 
fifth of Fort Monroe, a national historic landmark for a half-century, 
contains the moated stone "fortress." But treating that citadel as if it 
were the entire national treasure -- as many historians do, and as the 
National Trust for Historic Preservation does grimly, resolutely and 
shamefully -- is as unwise as would be saving only the house at Monticello 
but not the setting. When the first captive Africans stopped at this 
strategically Gibraltarlike sand spit in 1619 en route to Jamestown, the 
land had been fortified for a decade, and was still two centuries away from 
containing any moated citadel. I've long suspected that conflation of 
fortress and fort underlies at least some of the disappointing and costly 
credulousness that America's leading Civil War historians have shown about 
letting Big Money get away with theft. (Again, you can the geography in a 
flash; it's illuminated by the red spot added to the park service map at 
http://www.fortmonroenationalpark.org/ .)

At Fort Monroe later this month, politicians will pat themselves on their 
backs for creating a national monument at Fort Monroe. They'll ignore 
cautions from Tidewater's leading daily, the Virginian-Pilot, that this 
national monument/park will remain "degraded" unless it's made whole through 
unification of its two unconnected parts. They'll certainly spurn the 
widespread but unmoneyed charge that a degraded national park is a fake one. 
The National Trust for Historic Preservation will surely be there, repeating 
the Orwellian falsehood that an NTHP official included in an op-ed in our 
other local daily just last week: that President Obama made Fort Monroe into 
a national monument. In fact he only saved parts from overdevelopment. And 
by the way, even with unification, much of Fort Monroe would still be 
developed. The politicians will do this celebrating not on May 23, the day 
when the greatest moment in American history actually started, but on May 
24, the day that we misremember thanks to the unconsidered, tainting residue 
of the language and logic, such as it was, of the slavery era.

In my mind the mistaken choice of date connects directly with the unwise 
sacrifice of the sense of place of this national treasure with international 
importance in the history of liberty itself.

I apologize that I cannot make this case more briefly.

Steven T. Corneliussen

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

> ... 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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