"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."Slaves had been running away from their masters for a couple centuries.  I don't get the importance (and dramatic flair) of your post.
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> Date: Tue, 8 May 2012 09:27:25 -0400
> From: [log in to unmask]
> Subject: Re: The Peculiar Institution's End Without The Intervention Of The Civil War
> To: [log in to unmask]
> 
> > 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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